Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Sandburg developed real respect and affection for Alan, and he proposed that Alan become even more involved in helping get him speaking engagements in the South, for which he’d pay him a 20 percent commission, more if the fees were higher than usual. But there was the wink of the idealist/con man behind the scheme: “I am sure that you and I can never be American business men with straight faces.” When Alan taunted him that capitalism had obviously corrupted him, Sandburg responded:

  Of course capitalism has tainted me. So has feudalism and when I am meanest and lowest of all it goes back to systems and isms preceding the alphabet and recorded annals.... Unless you need a degree for teaching why do you want more university training? I was going to say that you already carry a miniature university under your hat and what you need is a target rather than more javelins.

  Alan did find bookings for him and was paid his commissions. A few months later Sandburg wrote him that they should plan to meet someplace where they could “talk about business, poetry, the higher life, and whether the New Deal can possibly mean revolution.”

  With Lead Belly at the wheel, John traveled to Arkansas, back to Sugar Land, then to Louisiana and Alabama, stopping at as many prisons as they could. Lead Belly’s powerful voice, his knowledge of songs, and his own prison credibility served to inspire the prisoners they met. On occasion he even passed his hat and made a little money. Together they recorded over a hundred records. After the day’s work, Lead Belly went wherever he wanted, and John, like a worried parent, fretted when he failed to return that night or the next morning. It had become a strange trip, filled with quibbling, recriminations, apologies, reunions, and grudging respect, and Lead Belly was increasingly unhappy: he was anxious about being back behind prison walls, even for short stretches; he missed his girlfriend Martha Promise; and he wanted to drive the car into Shreveport, where he could see old friends. Lomax acquiesced to the latter, and in late October they drove to Louisiana, from where John returned to Austin to await the publication of American Ballads and Folk Songs.

  The book ultimately contained much more than folk songs gathered from fields and homesteads and obscure sources. There were also songs that most Americans already knew from childhood, like “Yankee Doodle,” “Dixie,” “Shortenin’ Bread,” “Down in the Valley,” “Amazing Grace,” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” Some of the texts and melodies came from other collections, the radio, commercial recordings, newspapers and magazines, John Lomax’s own family’s recollections, and literary sources such as Robert Frost, Willa Cather, and Carl Sandburg. American Ballads and Folk Songs appeared just at the point in America’s history when its citizens had begun to think seriously about the culture they had developed, and about where they stood among the nations of the world. John’s vision of America meant that ballads from England were excluded as not being native, and songs sung in Spanish were left out because of “lack of space,” as he said in the introduction. The absence of Native American songs was also noted, but not explained. The Lomaxes placed songs into categories that illustrated their sources (“Songs from the Mountains,” “The Great Lakes”), their uses (“Working on the Railroad,” “Breakdowns and Play Parties”), their form (“Blues”), and their subject matter (“Cocaine and Whisky,” “White Desperadoes”). The selections reflected John Lomax’s view that American ballads largely centered on miners, lumber-men, sailors, soldiers, railroad men, blacks, and the down-and-outs—the hobos, convicts, bad girls, and “dope fiends.” There was a male roughness, a focus on work and the outdoors that had never been seen in the songbooks that emerged from the collectors who toiled in the parlors of the local nobility and church rectories in Britain. Lomax aimed to show that not only did America have folk songs, it had even more of them and a greater variety than England.

  When the book appeared, folklorists complained that some of the songs were not “real” songs but composite versions, folk songs put together from versions by several singers or from other books, and not what had been sung by individuals. In fact, by using only what they thought of as the best stanzas from the best versions, the Lomaxes had merged songs that seemed similar but which no one had ever sung in quite the way they were presented. It was in part an editor’s book, in that what they had produced was a somewhat literary product. The Lomaxes would argue that the distillation and refinement of the songs they had gathered in their field trips was justifiable, because the originals were stored intact on recordings at the Library of Congress and available for study. They did not feel that purity was necessary for the kind of book they were creating. Other folk song collectors also drew on different versions when they sang the songs. In fact, there was a long tradition of texts being edited together, one that ran from Bishop Percy to Sir Walter Scott and to the Brothers Grimm, the very collectors who made folklore popular for a literate audience.

  For some, what was more troubling than editing to create the best versions was that when John defended this practice for African American songs, he added the justification that they often contained “jumbled and disconnected stanzas.” And when he regularized African American dialect in the songs so that it would more easily be understood by non-black readers, he was moving beyond the editor’s function to that of the translator’s.

  In a remarkably open comment in the introduction, John Lomax became one of the first to raise questions about ownership and creativity, and about the role of print and literacy in oral tradition, that were to continue to plague folklorists over the years:

  Although much of the material [in this book] represents actual fieldwork, a considerable portion we “went and took” from indulgent and generous correspondents and, by permission, from collections already in print. The previous collectors in turn picked up the songs somewhere. The real author or authors remain unknown.... Worse than thieves are ballad collectors, for when they capture and imprison in cold type a folk song, at the same time they kill it.

  While most reviews of the book were positive, praising its scope and the full sense of America it evoked, a few did pull at what they considered loose threads. In the Nation Mark Van Doren suggested that it was hardly an American collection, as it lacked the very English ballads and songs of Spanish speakers and American Indians that Lomax had noted were absent. And when John said in his introduction that during his visits to prisons “no case of cruelty was noted,” he irritated reviewers who could not accept such a characterization in an era of calls for prison reform. Alan certainly did not accept it—nor in fact did John, who on several occasions sent letters to state governors protesting the conditions in their prisons. But he was not ready to publicly state his opposition to white southern tradition, especially while still needing to stay on the good side of southern prison wardens.

  During Christmas vacation in 1934 Alan traveled to Shreveport to meet his father and Lead Belly, to join them in visiting prisons in Texas, Georgia, and North and South Carolina. But Alan came down with the flu and was sick for most of the trip. He stopped to get injections and massages from doctors along the way during the long drive, but he was running a high fever and was so weak that one night Lead Belly had to carry him home in his arms. John had by now learned of Alan’s sexually contracted disease. “For Father I continue to be a source of disappointment,” Alan wrote his brother-in-law. “Try as he may, he can’t help often expressing his respectable resentment of my condition. This, as you can imagine, is not a particularly happy relationship.”

  On Christmas Eve, Alan, John, and Lead Belly checked into the YMCA in Washington, where they were joined by John Jr. That night Lead Belly and John Sr. performed for the guests of Major Isaac Spalding, a collector of military songs who worked in the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army. On Christmas morning Lead Belly also performed for journalists, and for the first time was described as a prisoner who had sung his way to freedom. Afterwards, he and the Lomaxes celebrated Christmas together with a small tree and gifts.

  John was scheduled to perform once again for the meet
ings of the Modern Language Association, this time in Philadelphia. Lead Belly asked to go along, and since a few of the songs he sang were included in American Ballads and Folk Songs, John thought having him sing would give life to the book. Reporters were there to meet them, and Lead Belly gave his first interview with the black press, the Philadelphia Independent, which published it under the headline of “Two Time Dixie Murderer Sings Way to Freedom.” Their MLA appearance took place on December 28 at a dinner and “smoker” at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel Crystal Ballroom, where they followed the singing of “Elizabethan Ayres to the Virginals” with a sing-along of sea chanteys before a thousand scholars dressed in evening clothes. Lead Belly passed his hat among the crowd and walked out with a great deal of money. “Smacked of sensationalism,” John Lomax sighed, but they were reaching the audience he most wanted to know his work. He took that idea one step further on December 30 when the two of them performed at a Bryn Mawr College tea for Philadelphia’s literati, where the hat-passing offended the college’s president.

  Word of Lead Belly had reached New York City well ahead of them, and the Lomaxes were invited to a New Year’s Eve party at the Greenwich Village apartment of Margaret Conklin and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, where it was understood that Lead Belly would perform for a mix of New York tastemakers, Village intellectuals and artists, reporters, and faculty from Columbia and New York University. Conklin was a part of several East Coast literary circles, having been poet Sarah Teasdale’s lover for a number of years and her literary executor after her death. She had met John Lomax the year before at Macmillan, where she was now an editor, and was impressed with the art of the songs he had collected. It was she who introduced the Lomaxes to Barnicle (as she preferred to be called), a popular professor of English at NYU who was well known for her political activities. She had been a suffragette, was active in the labor movement, and had caused a stir when she distributed questionnaires on students’ sexual activities to her classes for the feminists Florence Britten and Dorothy Bromley. Barnicle taught folklore and medieval literature, and had just begun using American Ballads and Folk Songs in her classes. She had also introduced the book to popular New York singers such as Earl Spicer and J. Rosamond Johnson (the composer of the music to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and editor of a series of books on Negro folk songs with his brother, James Weldon Johnson).

  After Lead Belly left the party, much to John Lomax’s chagrin, he headed uptown to Harlem’s nightlife and wound up at the Rockland Palace, where Cab Calloway’s Orchestra was playing a New Year’s Eve breakfast dance. He was back in the Village the next morning, without sleep and hungover, just in time to be interviewed by a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune. Calloway, he claimed, had offered him a job with the band, but “I can beat Calloway singin’ every time.... He don’t know nothin’ ’bout singin’.”

  Lead Belly’s performance the night before and in the interviews he gave the next day brought out the tabloid mentality latent in even the best newspapers and magazines. The Brooklyn Eagle called him “a virtuoso of Knife and Guitar,” and Time dubbed him a “Murderous Minstrel.” But it was the Herald Tribune that set the tone for what was yet to come in the Lomax-Lead Belly adventure. It headlined its story LOMAX ARRIVES WITH LEAD BELLY, NEGRO MINSTREL, and tossed in some subheads: SWEET SINGER OF THE SWAMPLANDS HERE TO DO A FEW TUNES BETWEEN HOMICIDES; SNIFFS AT CAB CALLOWAY; and WHY, HE HIMSELF HAS SUNG TO 2 PRISON PARDONS. The Lomaxes were appalled by the media’s treatment, but Lead Belly liked “Sweet Singer of the Swamplands” and used it on his own stationery a few years later.

  John and Lead Belly’s intertwined careers as performers went spiraling upward quickly in the rush of publicity and public curiosity. Lead Belly auditioned (unsuccessfully) for the singer Rudy Vallee’s very popular radio show on NBC, The Fleischmann Hour. The CBS radio news program March of Time met with them to discuss a feature on Lead Belly that would center on a reenactment of the Lead Belly pardon story, and within three days they had written and rehearsed the show, which broadcast on January 11, 1935. Afterwards the show’s producer invited them all home to meet writers from Time magazine and the owner of Loew’s chain of theaters. Offers were now beginning to flow in, though few with money behind them, and John refused all of those in which Lead Belly was not allowed to ask for donations. More worrisome to John was that Lead Belly had begun to expand and modify his repertoire with pop and jazz songs. The sincerity and charm that he had seen in him when he was in prison was now slipping away and being replaced by showbiz conventions. Even worse, he felt that he too was becoming an entertainer. “Lead Belly,” John wrote his wife, “of this moment is the most famous [black man] in the world and I am the most infamous white man.”

  To John, their relationship was still the same as he had intended it when they started out. On collecting trips, Lead Belly would drive and handle the chores and equipment and talk to those people he wanted to record. John was still booking himself into colleges through people he knew, and when he lectured, he and Lead Belly both sang to illustrate and spark up the performance. John was growing even more uneasy about the attention from the media, since he was still doing scholarly work and was aiming primarily at educated and academic audiences. “Up to now this experiment has been a sort of nightmare,” he wrote his wife. “I hate the hard faces of the gold hunters. I despise the female cranks and celebrity hunters.” Despite his ambivalence, John had seen the offers being made to Lead Belly after some of their performances; he felt it was wise to suggest to him a contract that made himself his “exclusive manager, personal representative and adviser” for five years, for which Lomax would receive 50 percent of all his earnings. What he was offering was within the usual 40-50 percent range of agents’ fees at the time, and since Lomax was more than half of the performance they were doing, it was his contacts that got them work, and he was paying all of Lead Belly’s living expenses, he thought it was not an unreasonable proposal. Then, after thinking it over for a few weeks, and taking into account Alan’s role in recording the performances, editing the book, and performing with them, he added Alan to the contract as a partner, recalculating the shares so that each received a third. Lead Belly signed the contract.

  Four days later, with Margaret Conklin’s help, John signed a contract with Macmillan for a book on black American folk songs based on Lead Belly’s life and songs. He was given an advance of $250, half of it to be paid on signing. The deal granted the publisher the right to copyright the material in the book in either John Lomax’s name or the company’s to protect their rights to the material, so that others might not reprint the same songs in other books. It also stipulated that John would pay $250 to Lead Belly for the rights to use the songs. Lead Belly agreed to the arrangement.

  When they were in New York City the Lomaxes stayed with Conklin and Barnicle, while Lead Belly roomed at the YMCA in Harlem. Their contact was sporadic, though John expected to hear from him regularly. He worried about Lead Belly, fearing that he might be moving in bad company, drinking too much, or, worse, getting in trouble with the police. To escape the spotlight and get back to the work he thought most important, he accepted an offer for them all to stay rent-free in Martha Conklin’s summer home in Wilton, Connecticut, in an area of small farms where New York artists and intellectuals often retreated. There, in a house once owned by Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, surrounded by woods and overlooking a stream, without a telephone and the distractions of the city, he and Alan would work on the book, now to be called Negro Sinful Songs, with Huddie Ledbetter as artist in residence. But Alan had a different set of interests in mind:

  We retired to the country, and I had the tremendous pleasure and excitement of recording everything Lead Belly knew. Sat there with an old-time aluminum recorder that engraved its images on an aluminum record, and Lead Belly and I worked at what he knew for three or four months. He learned through the way that my father and I felt about his songs, his country songs, that they were great so
ngs. And then he went out and sang them for the audiences that we found, and he found a tremendous reaction to that. So Lead Belly, instead of going through the normal kind of commercial process of having to adapt his material to the standards of what somebody thought would sell, arrived in New York with his whole country background of music intact.

  Yet white audiences were not used to seeing real people of color on the stage, and they were unprepared for a folksinger who actually lived the life about which he sang. The songs were unfamiliar to them, and they often couldn’t understand what he was saying. Lead Belly’s repertoire included the full range of African American folk song, and some of the performances could startle and disorient those who were familiar with only a narrow spectrum of black emotion and dramatis personae. Alan and Lead Belly confronted these problems, the two of them working on ways to shape how he presented his material. Alan suggested that he talk to the audience the same way he talked to him when he was introducing and bridging the songs, and urged him to expand those explanations and autobiographical settings in his performances. This was no small effort, for he had to put at ease a concert audience and lead them into learning about work gangs and churches, pool halls and dance halls, children’s games and gamblers’ strategies. Lead Belly would draw on his entire repertoire, from drug songs like “Take a Whiff on Me” to western favorites such as “When I Was a Cowboy,” or “Rock Island Line,” which was originally a prison gang’s woodchopping song that he learned while collecting with John. “We went over Lead Belly’s repertory with him. And we helped him round it off into concert form so that when he got up in front of his audience, he sang ballads and work songs and lullabies and children’s games and square dance tunes, the whole thing.” Alan was attempting to steer Lead Belly toward introducing blacks as people with a culture and a tradition to white Americans, who more often than not saw them as ciphers. What emerged was more than performed songs: Lead Belly was presenting one-act dramas on country dances, work in the fields, and the struggles of men and women to survive.