Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  It was all this that led John to take these songs with him when he went to Harvard to study. That roll of cowboy songs he had burned up as a young man back in Texas, and that he had reconstructed to take with him, was part of the romance. The South was suffused with the spirit of Walter Scott, and when Lomax considered giving his ballad book the title of Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Border, he was bringing notice to the parallels between the culture of the vaqueros and the life of the Scots reivers who robbed and stole on the Scottish border.

  When the Lomaxes moved back to Austin, they lived closer to campus, but still kept chickens, turkeys, cows, and a pony, and raised a full garden of vegetables, with Bess cooking on a woodstove. John worked as hard as always, developing an alumni magazine, expanding the involvement of ex-students in the affairs of the school, attending and taking notes at every departmental and university meeting, and fund-raising for scholarships. Still, he made time for lectures, and in 1911 he launched the biggest tour yet, across the country to the East Coast and then up as far as Vermont, speaking at important schools and professional organizations and picking up songs from the libraries and the audiences as he went along. In 1912 he repeated the tour, this time focusing on black music, and even engaging a theatrical agent to coordinate his appearances. In a time before motion pictures with sound, before sound recordings were available in every home, even before serious radio programming, John was taking the lives of cowboys, blacks, and workers of all types into American universities and spreading the message of folklore. Though he was becoming well known on these tours, he fretted that they were often not as good as they should be, and feared that he was becoming a cheap theatrical hustler. Yet he persevered, eventually himself becoming part of the many Chautauquas that were springing up across the country.

  The Lomaxes’ second son, Alan James, was born on January 31, 1915, at home in Austin. Shirley was now ten and John Jr. eight, and both were handsome, increasingly healthy children and a source of pride. Alan’s health, however, was a constant concern, as he was afflicted with asthma and then sinus infections and earaches. He developed slowly and remained underweight for many years. Alan recalled his childhood in that house, where his father attempted to re-create his own childhood home:

  Our house was a two-story building made of soft sandstone that weathered into all kinds of colors. A beautiful red river runs through the town. There are hills with wild wolves, occasional rattlesnakes, and mountain lions. Way back in the hills are sure enough mountain people whom I didn’t get to know until later. Right back of our house was a creek with water moccasins and catfish. It was a tremendous place for a boy to venture in with swimming, fishing and camping a hundred yards away. My father always built on the edge of town so there was always plenty of country to run in.

  In 1917, two years after Alan was born, the new governor of Texas, James Ferguson, became locked in combat with the university, demanding the resignation of its new president, R. E. Vinson; when that attempt failed, he insisted that Vinson fire seven faculty members whom the governor viewed as disloyal—John Lomax among them. (In his public talks, Ferguson had occasionally singled out Lomax’s cowboy song collecting as a symptom of the university’s wasteful and frivolous ways.) Then, after threatening to veto the budget of the entire school, Ferguson fired the regents of the university and appointed a new board that was willing to dismiss the president and the marked faculty members who still remained on campus. Throughout this affair, Lomax spent part of what had become his annual lecture tour looking for a job elsewhere. Professor Wendell at Harvard put him in touch with his son, a Boston banker, who managed to have Lomax offered a job as a bond salesman in the Illinois office of his banking firm. John, though he knew almost nothing about banking and was unhappy to be forced into it, moved his family to a house in Highland Park, along the North Shore of Chicago, and got to work.

  He turned out to be a good salesman, and with his statewide contacts in Texas and the improving economy at the start of the First World War he was an immediate success. Amid his many sales trips to Texas he found time to do a bit of folk song collecting, even among businessmen he met. Though he was not especially happy in Chicago, it did offer him the opportunity to meet new people, and he found his way into the local journalists’ world, where he met a number of writers, including Carl Sandburg, who had just published his first poems and was collecting folk songs for his own book. The two men were on opposite sides of the political divide—Sandburg being sympathetic to various socialist causes, and Lomax a social conservative—but they were brought together by their common populist and literary passions and became lifelong friends.

  Governor Ferguson was eventually impeached for financial irregularities, and in 1919 the Texas Exes—the alumni group John Lomax had spearheaded—asked him to return to Austin to become the secretary of the Ex-Students Association and to help recruit new students to the university. He accepted the post and the family returned to Austin, settling back into their old life of urban mini-farming, John continuing to work for the Chicago firm “on the side” with Bess as his business partner, editor, and financial adviser. “In addition to being a talent scout for the university,” Alan recalled, “my father was also a really great teacher. He felt English literature to be more important than folklore, and for years, he read Kipling, Tennyson, Mark Twain and O. Henry to the kids out of the backwoods. He’d often visit his ex-students on his rides around the country, and they all seemed delighted to have him. They’d take him into their libraries and say, ‘Look, John, this is what you did for me.’ Soon he was behind a big cigar and a glass of whiskey, telling stories.”

  On January 21, 1922, Bess gave birth to her fourth child, a girl, whom they named Bess, and often called Bess Brown Jr. Whatever schools their children might be attending—and they attended some of the best available—Bess and John saw themselves as their true teachers. John, always the late starter, was determined that they would never suffer his fate of having to piece together an education. Bess knew how to teach young children, and her commitment to the task was reinforced when Maria Montessori visited the United States promoting a new approach to children’s learning. Since several of the Lomax children were often sickly, they were kept home much of the time, and the line between education and home was never rigidly drawn: chores, play, all the day’s activities were the makings of some kind of lesson or other. A drive in the car could be turned into a songfest or a light opera of their father’s spontaneous creation, its libretto semi-improvised and the roles assigned to the children. Evenings were set aside for singing, spelling, math, and reading, and visitors to the house were commandeered into audiences for the children’s latest memorized recitations. The children were made to compete with each other, with records kept of who did what first at a certain age. Alan was started on reading as soon as possible, and before his fifth birthday his father had drawn up a diploma stating that he had “successfully completed a course of study in The Primer in which is featured the wonderful story of ‘The Little Red Hen.’ ” The diploma declared that Alan was now a member of the “Society of the Primum Primerians.” “I was given an absurd notion of my capacities,” Alan insisted. “I don’t know how I survived. Maybe that’s why I still antagonize people. I was pushed ahead of my class although I wasn’t brighter than anyone else.”

  I’ve always had an oppressive sense of not living up to family expectations and standards. We were expected to have nothing less than across-the-board, perfect moral conduct. I really never told a lie of any kind until I was over twenty-one. When I was a little boy, I never said good-bye because I knew it meant God Bless You, and I was an atheist. I left all churches when I was seven. I was so bored I couldn’t stand it any more, but all of us children were sent to Sunday school.

  Once he entered elementary school in Austin, Alan’s grades never fell below A’s (except in physical education and penmanship), and his report cards glowed with praise from his teachers. He did miss many days of classes when he was sick
with tonsillitis, asthma, nasal problems, and earaches. (His infected ears were often lanced without anesthesia, which eventually led to near deafness in one ear by the time he turned thirty-five.) Alan recalled going to elementary school for only two full years: “I’ve always been afraid of being rejected, and I guess I took it as a rejection that my mother sent me, and so I became too sick to go.”

  In 1923 John became the focus of a number of controversies involving Texas politics and campus life, particularly for his criticism of the money spent on college athletics. Letters critical of him appeared in the alumni magazine, especially focused on his concern with alumni issues at the expense of undergraduate affairs. When he was replaced as editor in 1925, he quit altogether, at age fifty-eight. But once again he was rescued by the child of an academic—this time by Leslie Waggener Jr., the son of a former president of the University of Texas, who hired him to run the bond department as a vice president of the Republic National Bank of Dallas. His new salary was such that John had an architect design them a nine-room house in Forest Hills, “the house in the woods,” miles outside Dallas.

  Alan was by now enrolled in the Terrill School for Boys, the most prestigious private school in town, which had classes so small they were virtually tutorials. It was assumed that at graduation each of its students would head to Harvard or Yale. Alan was on the honor roll every month with A’s in every subject but Latin. His teachers wrote that he was “superior” in effort and deportment, a model student who won honors in English and finally even conquered Latin.

  But John Lomax sought more than the scholar in Alan, and made it clear that he wanted to build him up physically, give him character, teach him to be a man—a Texas man. Alan’s constant ear and nose infections left him thin and tired and underweight, yet he signed up for the school’s younger students’ football team, on which he played end. His father felt that he would also benefit from the same kind of outdoor work he himself had known as a child. So, beginning in the summer of his tenth year and for several years after, Alan was sent off to the Brazos to a ranch in the high hills near Comanche, Texas, owned by Oscar and Stella Calloway, old family friends. Through the hard-baked months of July and August he was to put in a full day’s work tending sheep and cattle, making hay, picking cotton, and repairing the roads on the ranch. In the evenings he was expected to read the books that his father sent him, mostly histories and biographies such as The Life of John Marshall, and then be quizzed about them in his letters.

  But on his arrival Alan became sick with an earache and was kept in bed for several days. Throughout his stay he suffered from hay fever, and he became convinced that his father believed he would never get well and would perhaps even die there. He faced the situation without complaint, hinting meekly in his letters that he hoped his sister Shirley might be allowed to come and visit him. When she failed to appear, he admitted that he missed his mother and wished she could come. His father wrote back that he should not become impatient or dissatisfied—they missed him too, but ranch life was good for him, and, incidentally, he should reread the letters he wrote home before he mailed them and correct the misspellings and mistakes. Alan bore it all as best he could, but it was a rough life for a boy, full of teasing by the hands and daily tests of endurance that left him miserable.

  When the end of August came and it was time for Alan to return to Dallas, his father wrote that he could come home only if he promised that he “would no longer swim without an inner tube and would cease diving altogether,” and that he should be willing to stay home from school that fall until they felt he was strong enough to return. His mother would teach him at home, and he would continue to do outdoor work and fish and hunt, all for his health. Otherwise, they would have to find him another ranch home where his duties would keep him healthy. “I decided not to die; getting sick hadn’t gotten me what I wanted from my mother.”

  Even at home, Alan was tested physically, and clashed with his older brother, John Lomax Jr. John was a handsome and likable boy, who, according to his sister Bess, should have been the prince of the family: “He was everything Father wanted—he was competitive, frugal, successful, and knew how to make money. He helped Father in endless ways, even becoming a folklorist himself, doing his own collecting, and then financing and producing films on blues singers Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Alan may have been puny as a child, but he was intelligent, and it was he who was Father’s favorite.” Yet he persisted on picking fights with his older brother, fights he could never win. John Jr. spared nothing for Alan’s size, and their mother made no effort to stop them, believing they’d work it out sooner or later.

  Alan called the first ten years of his life his “mauve decade”—the stifling and rigidly proper houses, with their dark, heavily furnished Texas interiors, blinds drawn exactly two-thirds the length of the windows (in the German fashion, as his father pointed out to him), hiding evil and hypocrisy. Life for Alan did not improve in high school. When Bess was thirteen and daunted by beginning high school herself, Alan wrote her and reflected on his own discontents at her age:

  At thirteen I was a junior at Terrill Prep School, that I went to the movies unattended after I first got a telephoned permission from mother, that we were living in Forest Hills, that I was somewhat vaguely in love with Mrs. Sharpe [a teacher], reading Virgil with a very pleasant and intelligent young man for a teacher and two not very much younger men for classmates who had a habit frequently of cribbing my translation, that I was half-heartedly writing for the school newspaper and annual, and quarter-heartedly participating in the activities of a slowly dying scout troop with a bunch of boys that I saw seldom [and] liked little, that I had lost interest for the time being in leading the school in grades since I had seen the year before that it was easy, that I was greatly interested in sports and pictured myself a football hero more often as I did anything else, that I was at the same time a very clumsy and gawky foot-ball player which may explain my utter contempt for athletes and athletic ideas now, that I did not understand how anyone could in any way be interested in girls or parties. That I wrote a long tedious essay on Poe ... and got the only A+ in class, that my teeth were being straightened and all the while I was called Chipmunk, that I was very much afraid of a good many boys, that I shrank from any physical pain.

  Only Harvard would do for Alan’s college education, and in order to ensure that he was accepted, John contacted several people on the faculty, who suggested that Alan apply to the Choate School in Connecticut for his senior year, 1929-30. While it was a considerable social leap for him to a school for the sons of millionaires and the elite—only a few years after Alan arrived, John F. Kennedy would begin his studies there—Alan was accepted, and even given a $2,600 scholarship, enough to cover his tuition and expenses.

  Once there, he worked hard and impressed his teachers. One wrote that he was a “very capable and mature person, not simply ‘a boy’ ”—this in spite of being a year younger than the youngest member of the senior class. His only problem was his preoccupation with grades: “He expresses real disappointment at anything less that 100%.” By the start of the second term his homesickness and the fear that he was not as good as the other boys in his studies left him deeply depressed, and he began skipping meals and staying in his room. The headmaster and his wife became so concerned that they brought him into their home and fed and comforted him. The faculty also encouraged him, especially with his writing, and he was put on the board of the Choate Literary Magazine. His only real difficulties came in physics and sports, but even there he was lauded for his unceasing effort and his persistent work in tennis, gymnastics, and football.

  Most of the students Alan met that year talked with the ease and sophistication of those raised in the life and culture of the Northeast; as aggressively as he had been schooled, his frontier manners often left him struggling. (He had to be instructed how to use a knife and fork after his first meal at Choate.) By the middle of the year he had developed an intense friendsh
ip with one of those students, Michael Bullard, built around long talks about literature, philosophy, and the meaning of life as seen from Wallingford, Connecticut. Over Easter vacation he stayed in Boston with Mike and his sister, a social worker in the tenements.

  Whenever he could, Alan spent weekends in New York City. After one of those trips he sent a postcard to his sister Bess describing his stay with some cousins, spending seventeen dollars to see three plays and hear the New York Philharmonic. His parents saw the card and wrote him that they could not afford such expenses. Alan apologized and promised not to spend so carelessly again, but within weeks he was asking for money to go to Boston to visit museums, hear the Boston Symphony, and see a girl from Switzerland, the first “date” he said he had ever had. His father was adamant: they couldn’t afford it, and in fact were even canceling a long-planned family trip to Europe that summer for lack of money. In any case, he was too young to be involved with a girl. His mother followed with her own thirteen-page letter that listed each of his cousins who had been a failure because of some girl or other, and contrasted them with those (primarily his brother John Jr.) who had succeeded because of their single-minded devotion to their work. It was his sister Shirley he resembled, his mother said—the flapper, the social butterfly, someone who was unable to control her emotions. Bess, on the other hand, might “perhaps have a better mind” than he. Furthermore, his father had changed his mind and did not want to join his mother and Bess for their planned visit to Choate that spring, “as the trip was ruined for him.” His mother concluded by asking him to refrain from using words like “hell” and “damn” in his letters. But Alan was not to be threatened, and wrote back challenging their judgment about him and those to whom they compared him, arguing that it was normal for boys his age to be interested in girls. He clinched his argument by threatening them that he had been “rapidly developing into a homosexual. My view of such matters was morbid and unhealthy.” But his new girlfriend had changed all of this. The problem, he said, was that they didn’t know him and he didn’t know them in any serious way, only superficially. And, by the way: