by John Szwed
The Library of Congress had not had any contact with John Lomax since he had been appointed to his new honorary position four months earlier, nor had they been able to find him, as he had rented out his house in Austin, arranged for his mail to be delivered in care of the university post office, and had shared his travel plans with no one. When they heard of these offers of funding, the librarians became concerned that he was freelancing in their name and might be accepting multiple grants for the same projects. But as it turned out, both the library and Lomax were too optimistic. When the actual offers came in, Rockefeller’s was only a disappointing $350, while Carnegie’s was $3,000. Both grants were awarded through the Library of Congress, the smaller one paying for an upgrading of recording equipment and the modifications of the new car to carry it, and the larger one covering their travel and living expenses for a year. Despite the modesty of the grants, John was buoyed by them and the successes he had had over the last six months, and began writing to numerous prisons and reformatories—those for men or women, and boys or girls—across the United States asking about songs among their populations, explaining what kind of material he was seeking. But the replies were discouraging, most of them indicating that their prisoners only knew the kind of songs that glee clubs sang.
Now that he was at least semi-officially a part of the Archive of American Folk Song, John felt that he should expand the range of his collecting. In early February 1934, he and Alan headed into southwest Texas in search of songs in Spanish by Mexican Americans. The first stop was San Antonio, where they were looking for Los Pastores, the songs and narrations of the Nativity, with the help of rancher Richard Dobie, brother of Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie. Alan had the idea of recording the vaqueros on the King Ranch, but getting permission to enter the 800,000-acre estate proved to be more difficult than entering a country without a passport, and they finally gave up. To salvage the trip, they went on to Port Arkansas on San Jose Island, hoping to record sea chanteys from fishermen, but with no success, and drove back to San Antonio and then on to Austin. Three weeks had gotten them only a few songs for religious occasions, a few others used for children’s games, and a couple of vaquero songs.
A lecture tour was set up to carry them into spring, but much of it was canceled when John had to be hospitalized for hemorrhoids at Baylor Hospital. Alan had surgery on his nasal passages at the same time, stayed close to his father in the hospital, and corrected the galleys for the book. When they both recovered, they drove to Chicago and managed to complete the last part of the speaking tour. John had made $750 ($10,160 in today’s dollars) on ten public lectures between November and March, enough that he could now promise Carl Engel at the Library of Congress that they would be back on the collecting trail for the rest of the year. Ruby Terrill and John Lomax announced their engagement at an elaborate luncheon at the University of Texas on March 31, and two days later he and Alan were traveling again, this time to Clemmons Prison Farm outside Brazoria and the state penitentiaries at Huntsville and Richmond.
Macmillan began to pressure them to complete their proofreading. The book’s publication had already been postponed because of John’s delay in correcting the musical proofs, and by then it had been discovered that the transcriber they had hired, a music teacher in Washington, had not been adequate to the job.
But they stayed on the road, and by June they were traveling to the Cajun and Creole areas of south Louisiana. Though it might have seemed like another sidetrack from their original plan, the French Creole-speaking black peoples of rural Louisiana were scarcely known outside the state, and Alan especially was excited by what they might find there. Commercial companies had managed to record some of the singers from that area at the same time that they were recording in other rural areas of the South, and for much the same reason—they were also in the business of selling gramophones, and they wanted to build interest in recorded music by producing records that appealed to each distinctive area of the country. Leo Soileau, Amédé Ardoin, and Cléoma Falcon were among the first French-language musicians to make commercial recordings in the late 1920s in the early style of Cajun and Creole music. But by the mid-1930s many musicians in south Louisiana were already drifting toward country music and western swing, the kinds of music that could be heard in local dance halls. When the Lomaxes heard these records coming out of the jukeboxes and store radios of the area, they knew that they would have to go to homes and worksites to find the older styles they were after. This was to be mainly Alan’s project, as his father was now working on his next book, a memoir of his travels and collecting, and Alan knew a little French. With the help of Irène Thérèse Whitfield, a graduate student at Louisiana State University who was herself collecting songs that would be part of her M.A. thesis (published as Louisiana French Folk Songs in 1939), they were introduced to singers in their homes and at weddings, with Alan doing the recording and Whitfield transcribing the words. When she was not around, John and Alan went to bars and drinking parties to gather a different type of song.
They started in New Iberia, and stayed overnight at Avery Island, home of McIlhenny’s Tabasco Sauce, as guests of E. A. McIlhenny, the owner, and something of a folk song collector himself, as he had gathered Negro spirituals and claimed to know the songs of the Eskimos. Over the next few weeks they would wander through Delcambre, Erath, Kaplan, Indian Bayou, Morse, Crowley, Jennings, and White Oak recording track-lining songs, string bands, accordion-driven waltzes, and songs of failed courtships and lovers who ran away. The appeal of the Cajun area to the Lomaxes was its relative cultural and linguistic isolation from the rest of the country. But among the recordings they made were Anglo-American songs that had been translated into French Creole, jazz tunes, and some African American songs that seemed only a step short of becoming blues.
They did record some very old songs by both black and white singers, and the biggest discovery was juré, a song form that Alan first heard from singers in Jennings, Louisiana. The Lomaxes had wondered if there would be songs in French Creole that would be similar to those of African Americans sung in English across the United States. Would there be spirituals or the blues in Creole? In the juré Alan witnessed a music similar to the shouts he would later hear on the southeastern coast, especially in the Georgia Sea Islands. A lead singer improvised a line at a fast pace, while the others overlapped him or her with fixed responses that were close to hocketing (individual notes of the melody being alternated among several singers), and the rest of those gathered clapped in polyrhythm (more than one rhythm at the same time). Those who danced to it—whether in church or out—danced in pairs, shuffling across the floor, but carefully avoiding any crossing of the feet, as that was considered the mark of secular dance. Alan grasped immediately that these dances were not European in origin, and once he saw them in other parts of the country he would connect them to common African sources. “These jurés are performed in rapid tempo, with powerful accents and syncopations, and with so much overlap between the lead vocal and accompanying parts that polyrhythm is constant. Voices here are played like so many African aerophones [wind instruments], with singers emitting raspy growls and high-pitched trumpet notes in counterpoint against one another. The leader’s part is short: the chorus is almost always on the air, creating a canon-like hocketing effect that links these songs to the ancient turn-taking choruses of the African Bushmen and Pygmies.”
To see these dances in a small country church was an experience that expanded Alan’s sense of what music could achieve, the social forces it could muster, the spiritual realms it could reach. Dances such as these appeared in northern cities in strictly secular form by the 1920s, and music was written for them by jazz pianists such as James P. Johnson. Juré would also later turn out to be a part of the beginnings of zydeco, the raucous, scratchy dance music that emerged in the 1950s.
Given the amount of driving they had been doing over the last year, the awful condition of the roads, and the intense weather they had encountered, t
he Lomaxes had been rather lucky. Every bump in the road threatened the recording equipment, as well as the car. They wore one car out, had a second one stolen (and then returned) in Chicago, and now, as they were nearing the end of their Louisiana stay, this car overturned, spilling battery acid on their clothes and damaging the recording machine, but leaving the two of them unhurt.
That summer in Louisiana was critical for Alan: “I had my first glass of wine, my first shrimp creole, my first full-blown love affair and made my first independent field recordings.” The love he was referring to was not a Cajun or Creole, but Becky Machanofsky, five years older than himself, Russian-born, Jewish, a social worker and an avowed Communist from Brooklyn, New York, whom he had met in Austin that summer. She called herself “the ghetto girl,” was proud of her urban roots and her radicalism, and missed no opportunity at shocking the bourgeoisie. Walter Goldschmidt said that she claimed to be able to read palms, and she was scathing when some faculty wife would agree to have her fortune told. Alan’s relationship with Becky was intense, its fire fed by the passion of shared political ideals, and by a mutual curiosity about the lives of working-class people of the world. They had long discussions about the differences between Cubans, West Indians, and rural and urban African Americans. She shared her dream of returning to Russia after she had gained some useful skill—maybe a medical degree—and they compared their experiences among the poor in cities and countryside. With plans to meet in Mexico the following summer, they continued to write each other once she returned home to Brooklyn, both professing the depth of their love even as their ideological and family interests rapidly diverged. She urged him to break with his father and join her in New York:
Why do you isolate yourself in the hinterlands to learn what life is? Open your eyes, my love, look around you. Here is work and sweat and labor and laughter, and movement, and love and creation. Look out your window, don’t cloister yourself to an old man who wants to make money to marry an intellectualized old maid.
Becky split her time between labor organizing and social work, and was deep in the hothouse of Depression-era New York City politics, but she nonetheless proposed that they have a child without the bourgeois fetters of marriage. Once he was done with his father, his family even, she said, they would be free to work together for a greater cause. Why should he continue on with the pointless enterprise of folk song collecting, the gathering of the shards of dead cultures, when together they could make the songs of a future world? His dream of finding ever more isolated cultural preserves was a fool’s errand: the poor were the poor wherever they were to be found, with the same forms of expression.
Her analysis stung him, since he already had doubts about what he was doing, how much of it was what his father wanted rather than his own choice. He’d later say that when he “started to sing Negro worksongs, all techniques of concealed protest and hidden hostility—[he’d] always sung in front of or at the behest of my daddy and so was almost consciously ridiculing and defying him, at the same time as I was publically helping him and publically doing what my mother would have done or would have wished me to do.” Still, there was something important about what his father was doing, even if the gap between the two of them was growing wider.
Meanwhile, Alan’s letters became fewer and fewer, and Becky had begun to be promoted up the supervisory ladder in the world of social work. By the time summer arrived she had made her own vacation plans without him.
CHAPTER 3
The Saga of Lead Belly
Leadbelly was a river, was a tree. His 12-string guitar rang like a piano in a church basement. The Rosetta stone for much of what was to follow.
—Tom Waits, in the Guardian (UK), March 20, 2005
The disc recording machine required major adjustments, but once he heard the sound of the improved machine filling the room, John knew the pinched, thin recordings they had done belonged to the past—they seemed like ruins of a dead civilization. He began to regret that they could not rerecord all of the singers they had met. Lead Belly’s voice, above all, would have to be recaptured. He promptly wrote the warden and found out that Lead Belly was indeed still in Angola, and John and Alan returned to see him on July 1, 1934. In the meantime, Lead Belly had composed a new song that was addressed to the one man in Louisiana he felt might pardon him, if only he could find a way for him to hear it: Governor O. K. Allen.
In nineteen and hundred and thirty-two,
Honorable Governor O. K. Allen, I’m appealing to you....
Had you, Governor O. K. Allen, like you had me,
I would wake up in the morning, let you out on reprieve.
When the Lomaxes left the prison, they left a copy of the recorded plea with the governor’s secretary, as Lead Belly had requested.
A month later, Lead Belly was released from prison, but it was not a song that had gained him his freedom, nor was he pardoned. He was freed under Louisiana’s “good-time laws,” having satisfactorily served four years, five months, and five days of his six- to ten-year sentence. Alan and his father may nonetheless have felt that they had had something to do with his release, as they continued to refer to their role in his discharge. Lead Belly himself also seemed to believe that his singing and the Lomaxes’ help had freed him from jail. Years later he told film director Gordon Parks that “one day [the Lomaxes] took [my records] to old Governor O. K. Allen and played them for him. And what do you know? I’m out of prison again.” It was a good story, a very old and maybe even universal story—the victim who saves his life by keeping his captor amused by telling a tale, or riddling, or singing, and it brought attention from the press. Lead Belly came to be seen as having powers denied to men of color, much less one who was a convict. The legend of Lead Belly, if that’s what it could be called, was powerfully appealing, and turned up again and again over the years: in a 1936 poem in the New Yorker by William Rose Benét, in Tennessee Williams’s 1957 play Orpheus Descending, and in Leadbelly, the biopic directed by Gordon Parks in 1976. And Lead Belly had, in fact, earlier been released from another prison stay, when Texas governor Pat Neff freed him. Audiences who saw him perform later came to know the story of his pardon in Louisiana, or confused it with his release in Texas, and it became the center of the narrative surrounding him.
After Lead Belly left jail he found it difficult to get work and drifted through several towns. Before being freed he had written John Lomax telling him of his upcoming release and again asking him for employment. And now, after seeing nothing promising, he wrote him again at the start of September. Two weeks after John and Alan had returned from Louisiana, Ruby Terrill and John were married, and they left on a five-week honeymoon trip across the country; Lead Belly’s letter arrived while they were gone: “If you get there [Dallas] before I do I will be in Kilgo [Kilgore] Texas. But I am looking for you I am going to work for you, your Servan, Huddie Ledbetter.” When he didn’t hear back, he wrote twice more. Lomax found these letters on his return to Austin and tried to reply, but again they missed each other. When they finally did connect, Lomax wired him on September 22. “Come prepared to travel. Bring guitar.” Two days later they met in a hotel in Marshall, Texas, where they agreed that Lead Belly would drive the car and be John’s field assistant for two months, and immediately set off for Little Rock.
In the fall of 1934 Alan was at his sister Shirley’s in Lubbock, recovering from a prostate infection that turned out to be gonorrhea. With Chris Mansell, his physician brother-in-law, tending to him, he tried to keep it from his father, but he confided in Lead Belly, who had no use for doctors and had his own cure that involved turpentine and other nasty-smelling fluids. Alan wanted desperately for Lead Belly to be his friend, but Lead Belly always kept a certain distance. (Much to Alan’s distress, Lead Belly called John “Big Boss” and Alan “Little Boss.”) If anything, Lead Belly favored John over Alan, since the two of them were closer in age and each knew exactly where he stood with the other.
Though his affliction kept h
im from traveling or returning to school, Alan kept busy proofreading the galleys for American Ballads and Folk Songs and setting to work on his first piece of writing on folk songs, “ ‘Sinful’ Songs of the Southern Negro,” an article that he published later that year in Southwest Review, the principal southern literary journal of the time. Oddly, his father was also working on an article with the same title, published that same year in Musical Quarterly. Although both articles covered the same territory—the adventures of their previous summer’s recording of secular songs in prisons—their point of view was quite different, and neither one repeated any of the examples of the other. John Lomax’s article stressed the “naturalness” and “simple beauty” of the “real” black folk songs, while Alan’s focused on the circumstances of their recording, and so created a more dramatic narrative. (His article also contained song texts that were considered objectionable to the editors and were cut out.)
During the long late fall days at his sister’s, Alan spent his time learning to read music, playing guitar, reading, studying French, and writing letters to find lectures and performances in Texas and Louisiana for his father, Lead Belly, and Carl Sandburg. Sandburg was still traveling from town to town, singing and telling tales. Though not quite a folksinger, he set the songs in historical and social frameworks that made them more understandable to his audiences.
It was Sandburg who first encouraged John to join the lecture circuit, and now he also suggested that Alan might think of doing the same rather than going back to school. Opera singers like Tito Schipa, John McCormack, and Feodor Chaliapin, he said, were getting up to “five grand per night.” “It is malicious mischief for me to say I would rather hear you sing Po Lazus than anything Schipa or McCormack have in their whole repertoire or that your father’s performance in the present hour is more momentous to America than Rosa Ponselle or John Charles Thomas at two grand per.” Sandburg went on to detail what he was being paid by the Redpath Lyceum Bureau to speak and sing on the Chautauqua circuit that was now being staged in ten thousand American communities.