Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Once their fevers had broken, they left New Orleans and headed for Jackson, Mississippi. While Alan drove, John kept busy taking notes for a book about his folk song adventures that he planned on writing at some point, or compiling lists of prisoners’ nicknames to send back to Harvard to Professor Kittredge, who was interested in naming practices. The Mississippi State Prison Farm in Oakley was the next stop, where they began recording spirituals and hymns at a Sunday service as soon as they arrived. Both men were deeply moved by what they heard: John wrote, “Were it possible for the world to listen to such a group singing, with no vestige of self-consciousness or artificiality, the songs that seem to have sprung full-panoplied with beauty and power from the emotional experiences of a people—I say the world would stop and listen.” This was not the music that America had heard from genteel African American traveling religious groups such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers: these were songs that awakened the eschatology stored in the inner ear, and engaged the whole body. This was ritual music with the power to transform both singer and listener. The songs were powerfully choral without being rehearsed, and sung without a leader, and when individual voices rose up from the group, each was unique and well-etched.

  So powerful was this music that the machine was not up to recording it, and instead Alan picked out small groups of singers to record separately. Blank record discs were expensive, and before they wasted any of them he auditioned each singer, away from his father’s hearing wherever possible, where he could also listen to their stories and their pleas of innocence.

  Eighteen hammers fallin’, get on line,

  There ain’t no hammer here ring like mine ...

  Parchman Farm. The name said it all: a sweatbox of a prison, and, like Angola, once the site of a plantation. Prisoners at Parchman were all too aware of its history of slavery. They were still being run into the fields by white men on horses to pick cotton shortly after 4 a.m., and the offspring of the same bloodhounds and German shepherds that once tracked down escaped slaves were ever present to menace and worry them. Yet being situated in the Yazoo Delta, Parchman was also firmly in blues country, perhaps the deepest and richest site of African American folk music in the United States. The Lomaxes reached the farm on August 8 and set up camp. That evening the warden assembled some of the prisoners to perform for them. As Alan later recalled, “When the men finished with work, they were brought out to sing for us, and I heard extraordinarily exciting singers—men like Long Henry, Bat Eye and Tough Eye. They stood in the light of a kerosene lamp with shotguns poking them in the back and sang like mockingbirds.”

  The Lomaxes’ work at Parchman was especially unpleasant, as the exhausted prisoners were resistant to singing during the only times they were allowed to record them—their brief rest at noon, or in the free time they had between supper and lights-out at nine o’clock. Some were suspicious and diffident, others simply regarded the music as amusement for white folks, and in either case they refused to perform. John and Alan worked as if they were under surveillance themselves, which indeed they were, and by the end of the day they were soaked in sweat. Like the inmates, they lay down and drank lemonade to gather strength for the rest of the evening.

  It was at Parchman that they first heard “The Midnight Special,” sung by a man they knew only as “Lifetime.”

  If you ever go to Houston,

  You know you better walk right.

  You know you better not stagger,

  You know you better not fight.

  Because the sheriff will just arrest you,

  You know he’ll carry you down.

  And you can bet your bottom dollar,

  Oh Lord, you’re penitentiary bound.

  The black folk songs that they had heard until now had always been a certain kind of sacred music, or someone’s singing to himself while he worked or walked the streets or sat on a corner curbstone. This was something altogether different. These songs were approached at a deeply personal level, the singers enacting them, inhabiting them, assuming the song’s persona through the ever-present “I”:

  Wake up, dead man, and help me drive my row,

  Wake up, dead man, and help me drive my row.

  Some in the building, and some on the farm,

  Some in the graveyard, some going home.

  I looked at Old Hannah, and she’s turning red,

  I looked at my pardner, and he’s almost dead.

  The pain and raw humanity of these songs showed the marks of years, or decades, of after-work contemplation of the weight of time. This was as close as twentieth-century people were going to come to the sound of slavery.

  Ask my cap’n, how could he stand to see me cry,

  He said you low down nigger, I can stand to see you die.

  These were not the otherworldly, distanced, impersonal songs of the white balladeers, set deep in the past, but performances that asked the audience to link the singer with the song, to understand it as a naturalism that demanded that the singers draw on their own experiences, use their bodies and their faces to register meaning and sincerity. Alan was powerfully affected by what he heard and saw, and it would be a reference point for the world’s music for the rest of his life:

  The people who sang for us were in stripes and there were guards there with shotguns. They were singing there under the red hot sun of Texas, people obviously in enormous trouble. But when they opened their mouths, out came this flame of beauty. This sound which matched anything I’d ever heard from Beethoven, Brahms, or Dvor̆ak. They sang with beautiful harmony, with enormous volume, with total affection. And this was the second stage of my conversion to my profession. I had to face that here were the people that everyone else regarded as the dregs of society, dangerous human beings, brutalized, and from them came the music which I thought was the finest thing I’d ever hear come out of my country. They made Walt Whitman look like a child; they made Carl Sandburg, who sang these songs, look like a bloody amateur. These people were poetic and musical and they had something terribly important to say. “Go down old Hannah / Don’t you rise no more / If you rise in the mornin’ / set the world on fire.” I mean, “Volga Boatman” was down the stream from that. So I had found my folks. I had found the people that I wanted to represent, that I wanted to be with. After that I could never have enough and still to this day, I can’t have enough of finding and making more avenues.

  The next journey—to Harlan, Kentucky—was more of a side trip, a break, where they stayed with Harvey H. Fuson, a lawyer and local collector whom John knew from his 1931 book Ballads of the Kentucky Highlands. Fuson took them to visit a blind white farmer named James Howard, who sat in a rocking chair under a tree, singing of life and love in the mountains, accompanying himself on the fiddle. Alan explored the town, looking into the miners’ lives and their struggles with the union. Unaware of all of his son’s wanderings, John was amused that Alan had gone off with a young girl he spotted standing in front of a cabin—“starry blue eyes, very fair, with wavy hair, neatly dressed, seventeen, a mountain rose just emerging from the bud.” Later, Alan wanted to help pay for the girl’s education, and wrote Harlan High School about her and received from the principal a copy of her record and a letter that welcomed any aid and help he could give to Pauline Vowell, “a superior student.”

  Once again they pulled off the collecting trail and tried to focus on the book they were writing, one they planned to call American Ballads and Folk Songs. They drove to North Carolina and dug their suits out of the back of the car to consult with four professors at Duke University and the University of North Carolina: Howard W. Odum, Guy Johnson, Arthur Palmer Hudson, and Newman I. White. Their visit was a courtesy call, an acknowledgment that they were venturing onto local folklorists’ turf, but they were also seeking the advice and support of academics who were the principal figures in southern folklore. The four men were very different in their understanding of folk song. White and Palmer were literary scholars, students of Professor Kittredge at Harvard, a
nd the songs they had were largely collected by their students. Odum and Johnson were social scientists who viewed the texts, which they themselves had gathered, as part of an overall cultural pattern, a particular way of life. But they also sought to use the texts to argue for a liberal social perspective within the limits of the divided racial cultures of the South. Odum was especially interesting to Alan, as he was the founder of the first sociology department in the South, a political liberal, and an outspoken opponent of lynching. At that moment he was in the process of writing Southern Regions of the United States, the book that launched the “new regionalism,” the idea that a progressive South could be linked to the rest of the country while remaining culturally unique. He had also just completed writing the Black Ulysses trilogy of novels, which was based on the life of a folksinger named John Wesley “Left Wing” Gordon, from whom he had collected a number of songs.

  On the way to Washington to finish their book the Lomaxes also arranged a visit with the governor of Tennessee to get his approval for their work in his state, and then squeezed in short stops at the Memphis Work House and the Nashville State Penitentiary. In Nashville, a prisoner called Black Sampson refused to sing any secular songs, even “an innocently worded levee camp-song,” until the warden ordered him to do so. Even then, he first apologized to the Lord as the recording machine turned: “It’s ha’d times when a po’ man, member o’ de chu’ch, has to sing a sinful song. But, oh, Lawd, make it all right fo’ me to sing dis.”

  They reached Washington on August 23, and found rooms in a boardinghouse near the Library of Congress. The recordings they had just made were left with the library, and they settled down to work in an unused cellar room with a small table and some empty shelves. Two weeks later Carl Engel arranged for Alan to discuss their travels in a lecture-and-record performance for the scholars and heads of departments of the library in Coolidge Auditorium. The idea of giving a lecture based on recordings was unprecedented, but to use records to argue that folk songs were deserving of serious study was even more radical. “So, for the first time,” Alan said, “America could hear itself, because up to then, no one had ever heard these people singing. There had been poems about it, but ours was the first time contact had been made. Well, the Library of Congress gave us a standing ovation.” The talk was so successful that Alan was asked to repeat it later. His father was beginning to see Alan’s success with folk songs as a means of steering him away from the politics of his friends: instead of returning to the University of Texas the next fall, he could go back to the Calloway ranch to regain his health, and as he wrote Ruby Terrill, he would be away from the “extreme radicals and rebels against society” with whom he had been associating.

  After being in Washington a few days John offered himself to the Library of Congress as a consultant who would serve without compensation. Head librarian Herbert Putnam agreed, and appointed him “Honorary Conservator of our Archive of American Folk-Song, incidentally continuing, with our machine, at your own expense, to record and collect material in the field, and while in Washington, assisting in the response to inquiries involving the Archive itself.” For this, John would be paid only one dollar a month, but would be able to publish whatever work he did and maintain control over his own recordings. He would have to pay for his own blank discs, however, and the library would have the right to copy any records he had made before his appointment and afterwards. It was much the same arrangement that had been made with Gordon, and if it was a bargain for the taxpayers, it provided no real source of income for him. Still, for a man of John’s background and limited finances it was an honor that might with a little luck offer him great possibilities.

  Engel’s advice to John Lomax before he left Washington was something he scarcely needed to be cautioned about in collecting folk songs, but it at least showed that the librarians were getting the point: “Don’t take any musicians along with you ... what the Library wants is the machine’s record of Negro singing and not some musician’s interpretation of it; nor do we wish any musician about, to tell the Negroes how they ought to sing.”

  Within six weeks the songs were assembled for American Ballads and Folk Songs, the notes and the introduction written and a foreword by Professor Kittredge added, and the Lomaxes delivered the manuscript to the publisher in New York in October. Macmillan considered it a potentially important work and made its delivery into something of a formal ceremony, inviting Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell, both of whom they hoped would read the manuscript and approve it. Seeger was a precocious composer and scholar who had conducted the Cologne Opera at age twenty-four and become the chairman of the Department of Music at the University of California at Berkeley when he was twenty-six, only to lose the job over his opposition to the First World War. Now he was teaching in New York City at the Institute of Musical Art (which later became Juilliard). Henry Cowell was Seeger’s student, who at a very early age had become one of the most important composers in the group known as the ultra-modernists; his composing had been supported financially by Charles Ives, and he had just completed a stint as a Guggenheim Fellow, during which he had gone to Germany to study the folk musics of the world with the comparative musicologist Erich von Hornbostel. But the Lomaxes viewed them as academic musicologists who were likely to misunderstand and meddle with their work. Seeger recalled that “part of the ceremonies was a presentation to us of the material by John and Alan, who was a young man and extremely belligerent once he saw these two highbrow musicians who were going to pass on something they knew nothing about.” But as it turned out, Seeger and Cowell were excited by the manuscript and enthusiastically supported its publication.

  Macmillan feted the Lomaxes with a cocktail party and a formal dinner, after which Charles A. Beard, the doyen of American progressive historians, introduced them around among the scholarly crowd, and later in the evening they wound up playing their field recordings at the home of George Brett Jr., assistant to the president of Macmillan. Brett was so enthused that he wrote a letter to the Carnegie Foundation suggesting that their work was deserving of financial support.

  To promote the forthcoming book and earn some money, John scheduled a tour of colleges and civic groups beginning in November that would stretch across Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan, with stops in between to visit other folklorists and to rummage through libraries in search of songs, all timed to get them back to New York City by Thanksgiving. It was an ambitious travel plan, but John had a publicist’s sense of what it took to get attention. He talked and told stories, and Alan sang. Before it was over, Alan thought, he’d become a “singing lobbyist.”

  Everywhere they went they stirred readers’ interests by playing the songs that were about to appear in print. Alan, meanwhile, was getting an education in how to pursue an idea relentlessly and survive on the edge of academia. In Michigan they stayed with Carl Sandburg and his family, and Carl and Alan talked together for hours. Sandburg was fond of young Alan and his father, though he often teased John about his conservative ways, sometimes signing his letters to him as “Carl the Red.”

  Sandburg had done his own share of hoboing and wandering across the country picking up folk songs and swapping tales. As a reporter, he had documented the lives and poverty of black people in Chicago, and developed a distinctively American leftist brand of political thinking. Alan saw him as a model of what one man could accomplish while not losing his soul. Six years before they met, Sandburg had assembled The American Songbag (1927), a collection of folk and folklike songs gathered from people, books, and newspapers and edited and reassembled in his own performances over ten years of heavily attended lectures across the country. He had also recorded some of these songs for RCA Victor, and his publisher, Harcourt Brace, had rushed out a shorter, limited edition of the Songbag so that he could copyright the songs he had put on record. The book was geared to the popular reader, with the songs divided into categories such as “The Big Brutal Ci
ty,” and “Road to Heaven.” Some reviewers were skeptical and dismissive (Abbe Niles’s review was the briefest: “The American Songbag is another book by that American songbug, Carl Sandburg.”) But it was enormously successful and proved that the country was hungry for a vision of itself in song. The book’s organization was an influence on the shape the Lomaxes’ American Ballads and Folk Songs would finally take.

  John Lomax had continued his long-distance and rather quiet courtship of Dean Ruby Terrill back in Austin, and as December came on, he and Alan left for Texas. A very short visit to Miss Terrill resulted in a secret agreement that they would be married if his children approved, and with that, Alan and his father left for Lubbock to spend Christmas with Shirley’s family and Bess.

  Just after Christmas John was to address the Modern Language Association in St. Louis on the topic of “Songs from Negro Convict Camps.” John could be riveting when the audience was with him, what with that resonant voice, the measured phrases, his imposing Texas girth and swagger, the Stetson that he never removed from his head (except when he swept it off in the presence of a lady), his cheap cigars, and his I-alone-have-returned-to-tell-the-tale narrative. Several influential people in the audience became convinced that the work he was doing deserved immediate support. The director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation implied that they might underwrite the whole project. Representatives of the American Council of Learned Societies had also heard him speak, and a few days later they recommended to the officers of the Carnegie Foundation that they financially support the rest of the trip. Carnegie then offered him money, hinting that it might be long-term support that he could channel through a university, say, Texas or Harvard. And all of this came about just as John’s money was running out.