Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  In Eatonville they recorded a few ballads, spirituals, a sermon, and some game songs, and Zora found a singer named Gabriel Brown who they thought was the best they had ever heard, even if he lacked the passion and fire of a Lead Belly. They could scarcely claim to have discovered Brown, for just the year before he had won the National Folk Festival in St. Louis as best guitarist and singer. Nor could he be claimed to be just one of the folk, as he was a graduate of Florida A&M, where he had acted and sung in Hurston’s musical All De Live Long Day just six months earlier. But after they recorded him, all three of them worked to get him known more widely, and by the next year he was acting and playing in Orson Welles’s Federal Arts Theater productions in New York City, making commercial recordings, and appearing on radio, and was later slated to be one of the leads in Hurston’s own 1944 play Polk County.

  Alan wrote his father from Eatonville on June 22 that they were leaving for Lake Okeechobee and the towns of Belle Glade and Chosen, where Zora promised to gather Bahamian dancers for them to photograph. They also hoped to ask the commissioner for the Seminole to help them find singers among the Indians. Belle Glade was a new community built on a tract of drained swampland, an area rich in bean and cabbage production, and when the season was right it was filled with thousands of farm workers who lived in shacks, rooming houses, or their cars, who worked in the fields all day in the semi-tropical humidity and crowded the town at night looking for ways to spend their daily earnings. Farther out in the country, the migrant workers from the Bahamas camped together and nightly danced and celebrated to their own songs and drums.

  Hurston would recall that summer in Belle Glade when she described a Florida town in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God:

  Day by day now the hordes of workers poured in. Some came limping in with their shoes and sore feet from walking.... They came in wagons from way up in Georgia and they came in truck loads from east, west, north, and south. Permanent transients with no attachments and tired looking men with their families and dog flivers. All night, all day hurrying to pick beans. Skillets, beds, patched-up spare inner-tubes, all hanging and dangling from ancient cars on the outside, and hopeful humanity, herded and hovering on the inside, chugging on to the muck. People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

  The three of them stayed in a tourist camp, recording day and night or looking for subjects. It was the sort of town that encouraged secularism, and they recorded several harmonica players, a jook band, some blues, hollers, ballads, and only a single religious song.

  Living expenses turned out to be greater than imagined, and Lomax and Hurston quickly ran out of money. Alan had to write his father and complain that he shouldn’t have been expected to venture out on a major project such as this with only $117, and that if it weren’t for Barnicle using four months of her own salary to support them all, they would have had to quit long before. Hurston tried to eke out a little funding by writing Professor Ruth Benedict at Columbia to ask if the Department of Anthropology would be willing to pay for copies of the records for their archive.

  Throughout the trip, Alan felt himself drawn closer to Zora. Her energy, her love of the beauty of the everyday, and her refusal to surrender to racism were irresistible. By now, however, Hurston and Barnicle were clashing over racial ideology and perhaps also the politics of their relationships with young Alan. (Barnicle, at least according to Hurston, was drawn to him, whom she called her “dear boy.”) Emotional tensions were underscored by political differences between the two women, and Alan found himself acting as a buffer between them. “Miss Hurston ... is ambitious, argumentative, and definite,” he wrote his father. “She and Miss Barnicle could not understand each other and their continual silent conflict would have been amusing if it had not been so tragic in its implications.”

  Miss B. and Miss H. were raging so that I never knew from one minute to the next what was going to happen, what with Miss B. determining hourly to leave for N.Y. and Miss Zora for parts unknown. I finally decided that it was no use trying to hold the expedition together and that B. was the best bet in the long run.

  The breaking point came when Zora objected to Barnicle’s taking a picture of a black child eating a watermelon. Alan sided with Barnicle and told Zora that she was being unreasonable. Once they reached Miami for a rest, Zora pulled out of the last leg of the trip, the Bahamas, even though it was she who had suggested they go there. Zora was acting capriciously, Alan thought, but he was still devoted to her. In a letter to the Library of Congress about the work they had just completed in the Southeast, he said that “Miss Hurston, who had been, so to speak, our guide and interpreter in Georgia and Florida, who had led us into fields we might never have found alone, who had generously helped us to record songs and singers she had herself discovered, could not, for various reasons, come with us to Nassau; but we felt that until the time she left us, she had been almost entirely responsible for the great success of our trip and for our going into the Bahamas.”

  Alan continued on with Barnicle by plane to Nassau and then to the other islands by sloop in July. He contacted the newspapers about this part of the journey, and such was the fame of the Lomax name that his trip was reported in newspapers in New York City, Washington, and Austin, each of their articles stressing that he was now working without his father. In one account, Alan was quoted on the rationale for the trip: “Negro Songs there are probably as nearly like those in Africa as any you can find in the Western hemisphere.” The rest of the Western world may have thought of the Bahamian archipelago as a tropical paradise, a chain of dreamy green isles floating in a pellucid turquoise sea, but for Alan it offered the chance to view the culture of people of African descent as it might have been in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century.

  He was caught up in stories about obeah and other forms of African-derived magic in the Bahamas that he had heard from Hurston, but he and Barnicle never made full contact with the occult. What they recorded instead on Andros Island, in Nassau, and Cat Island were sea chanteys, anthems (the local equivalent of black American spirituals), songs that accompanied “rushing” dances (a sacred dance similar to the shout on the Sea Islands or the juré in rural Louisiana), jumping dances (where one dancer at a time performs his or her own steps inside of a ring of drummers and clapping spectators who are waiting their turn), ring dances (similar to jumping dances, except that one couple at a time performs longer and more elaborately inside the ring), and round dances. There were also locally adapted English ballads, folktales that were accompanied by songs, even some songs by Haitian workers, and a few melodies as remembered by an old woman whose mother was African. Alan discovered that some songs had parallels in earlier times in African American history: the anthems of the sponge fishermen were built on an overlapping call and response that was very different from European antiphony. One singer “based” the others with held bass tones in a manner similar to one described by American abolitionists when slaves were first being freed.

  Sailing out with the fishermen, he heard the rhythms of work and sea in the bob and pitch of the sailboat, the rattle of ropes on sails, the creak of mast and blocks. He watched as sudden shifts in weather demanded quick changes in styles and methods of work aboard ship. What he heard was different rhythms weaving among each other, some natural, some human-made, and the use of song among these fishermen to organize and reorganize what he called “energy patterns and social [work] roles primarily in terms of tempo, but also of dynamics and pitch. Increase in tempo, and multiple tempos, are the very heart of much of African music.”

  In spite of being a stranger on these islands, Alan felt liberated by the experience. The people there were open and expressive with him in a way he had never experienced among people of color before. “There were story sessions every night. Or fire dances or sessions of sea chanteys or something. It was just for me, heaven, for a Southerner to actually move freely past the color line which had always held me back.”

  By
the middle of July Alan was again writing his father for money, while Barnicle was asking NYU to support her research and to let her off from teaching in the fall. Alan talked about going on to Haiti, and said he might even stay on if Barnicle had to leave. Meanwhile, he and Barnicle were living day to day, and taking risks everywhere they went. They took a boat to Andros Island, for example, with no plans, no local connections, next to no provisions, and little money. All they knew was that it was the home of the sponge fishing industry and some of the best sailors in the world. They slept in the hold or on the deck, shared a can of pears and some crackers for dinner, and the next morning were dropped off on the beach with their luggage, where a crowd of excited locals gathered around them as if they were exotic flotsam. Hungry, without a place to stay, and with night coming on, they went to the home of the commissioner of the island, and after three hours of talk aimed at convincing him that they were not tourists hustling a cheap vacation, he invited them to dinner and helped them rent a tiny shack for their stay.

  Here, on the white sands, near the clear water, with hundreds of brilliant birds singing in the trees, Alan and Barnicle set up their recording machine, and when night came the local folk crowded around to “tell old story with sing”—folktales of B’Rabby and B’Booky intercut with songs, DJ-like. “It was an evening out of long ago, out of the first full, free, simple days of mankind,” Alan wrote his father. But his idyll soon came to an abrupt end. In August Alan caught a cold, developed an ear infection, and was in bed for four days, unable to hear anything. The hurricane season had arrived, making every plan tentative. Then, when Alan and Barnicle were taking notes on the sponge fishing industry, the commissioner began to suspect that they were labor agitators, and on their return to Nassau they were ordered to leave the country.

  Hurston wrote John Lomax at the end of August that she knew that Alan planned to continue working in folklore after graduation the following June, so she had been pressing him to “see further than the surface of things” in black cultural life. “There has been too much loose talk and conclusions argued at without sufficient proof. So I tried to make him do and see clearly so that no one can come after him and refute him.” She said that he talked to her about his father all the time, and she was impressed that Alan respected his opinions. Then, in a thinly veiled reference to Barnicle’s influence, she said that he was turning his back “on all urgings to come to New York this fall.” What’s more, he had repudiated the Communist Party, saying, “It is as my father says. I couldn’t, wouldn’t hurt him ever again by refusing to accept his judgment in such matters.” In closing, she mentioned that Alan had tried to speak to Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology and her own mentor at Barnard College, but had found him cold. She promised his father to introduce Alan to Boas “in a way to catch his eye.”

  In September she wrote John again and bluntly warned him that “Miss Barnicle” was trying to separate him from his son, and to keep Alan from returning to school in Texas. In fact, she admitted that she too had once been part of Barnicle’s conspiracy:

  When she proposed that I go on this trip with them one of the things she earnestly urged upon me was that I must help her to get this lovely young man out of his stifling atmosphere. He had a backward father who was smothering Allan [sic] with fogy ideas both of mind and body.... I promised that I would help all I could to persuade him to that end. But Mr. Lomax when I met Allan and he told me his plans and talked about you in the way he did, I just could not find it in my heart to help destroy the boy.

  According to Hurston, Barnicle’s real interest was her wish to build a reputation as a folklorist on the Lomax name, as well as a certain attachment to “the boy.” Lead Belly was another object of Barnicle’s efforts, she added, because “she was attracted to him as a man by her own admission,” and because she wanted to free him from John Lomax and recruit him into the Communist Party. It was not those Negroes in Norwalk, Connecticut, who had been leading Lead Belly astray; it was Barnicle.

  It’s not clear how much of this John Lomax believed, for he was fond of Barnicle, but he was worried that Alan might be planning to stay on in New York City with Becky or some other woman. He wrote and reminded Alan that he expected him to go back to Austin for his senior year when the University of Texas fall term began, and warned him against the temptations of New York. And the temptations were many. Since coming back from the Bahamas, Alan had been staying at Barnicle and Conklin’s apartment in the Village, dutifully transcribing and cataloging the two-hundred-some records they had made, but he had also been discovering New York bohemia. Strolling the streets of the Village and visiting the bars, it was possible then to run into Dawn Powell, e. e. cummings (Estlin, as he was known there), Djuna Barnes, Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, John Dos Passos, and the infamous Joe Gould, who claimed to be writing the history of the world. Alan took to the bohemian life as if he were bred to it. Folk song was catching on with the younger Village dwellers, and the Lomaxes were already well known among them. His open-faced, brash style may have been off-putting to some New Yorkers who styled themselves as understated, aristocratic observers of a bourgeois world from their downtown haven, and his Texas accent signaled wisps of racism, anti-Semitism, and the South that represented the world beyond the Hudson. But Alan treated any rebuffs he faced in the city much as he did those in southern hamlets—as the mores of the folk, data to be observed and gathered by an anthropologist who understood cultural relativism. He was the true rootless cosmopolitan and saw beyond their provinciality.

  Fieldwork was something you could also do in the city. In early September, Alan and Barnicle began recording Aunt Molly Jackson, the self-proclaimed “pistol-packing Mama” of the coal miners’ struggle, in Barnicle’s apartment. Aunt Molly was one of the most vocal members of the miners’ community in Harlan, Kentucky. She had spoken to the committee that Theodore Dreiser had brought to Harlan in 1931 to investigate conditions, and so impressed them that they invited her to New York City. Threatened by both the police and the mine owners, she took them up on their invitation. (Alan said, however, that Harlan people had told him that “the neighbors had asked her to leave because she kept whiskey at her place and her Saturday night parties were ruining all the men in the territory.”)

  Though she was a midwife by vocation, it was her ability to move an audience with powerful speech, her colorful and salty language, the huge reservoir of traditional songs she could draw on, and most of all her saw-edged songs with new and politically charged words put to old folk melodies that stuck with those who saw her and led them to give money to her cause, the miners’ relief.

  I am a union woman, as brave as I can be,

  I do not like the bosses and the bosses don’t like me.

  From her apartment on the Lower East Side she found her way into the homes of the famous and the wealthy in New York City and traveled across the country with her message of the workers’ plight.

  At a time when most urban dwellers had never heard a singer of folk songs from America’s hinterlands, Aunt Molly was a revelation. One of the first groups to pay attention to her was the Composers Collective, a newly formed group on the left (with members such as Charles Seeger, Marc Blitzstein, Ruth Crawford, Earl Robinson, Elie Siegmeister, and Aaron Copland) that attempted to create music for the proletariat, who they assumed lacked an appropriate music for their political situation. Hans Eisler, a protégé of Arnold Schoenberg, had broken with modernist music and joined with Bertholt Brecht, and was something of a model for them. They thought workers’ songs, even those like “The Ballad of Joe Hill,” were bourgeois products of the past and only put workers to sleep, the way they had always done. “Modern life and its tension demand dissonance,” Eisler insisted. Songs like Eisler’s choral compositions and marches for workers were complex and hard to sing, however, and so were seldom heard outside of the Degeyter Club, another activist composers’ group with which the Composers Collective was associated, this one name
d for Pierre Degeyter, the French composer of “L’Internationale.” When Alan brought Aunt Molly to sing for the Collective, her stark, unadorned singing was tolerated, at best, by most of the members. But she found their music equally distasteful and retreated to a corner of the room. Charles Seeger had already been exposed to hillbilly music through Saturday night gatherings at the Eighth Street loft of painter Thomas Hart Benton, where Charles and his new wife Ruth Crawford browsed through records or heard amateurish country music played by Benton, composers Charles Ruggles and Henry Cowell, and Jackson Pollock on harmonica. (He’d already smashed his fiddle in frustration.) And now that Seeger heard the music live, it seemed to him even more vital and exciting. He rushed over to Aunt Molly to declare that she was on the right track and they were on the wrong. According to his son Pete, Charles Seeger was also inspired by hearing her say that composers ought to find their own country’s folk songs and then use them as a basis for developing an American classical music.

  On her first trip to the Northeast, Aunt Molly was quickly sanctified as something of a workers’ saint, but a saint who could also sing and compose her own songs. Intellectuals and novelists like John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, and Margaret Larkins wrote about her, unions held her up as a model, and newspapers tracked her closely. But she was soon to become a problem and a bore to many of her acolytes: she picked useless fights with would-be allies; she claimed as her own work songs that she had taken from folk song collections; and she invented incidents that would swell her fame. She was tough, vulgar, funny, bursting with energy, and at times turned her small apartment into a brothel. No surprise, then, that Barnicle saw her as a sister in the struggle and solicited her friendship. She worked to get her talks and performances at Sarah Lawrence and Bennington, and invited her to visit her classes at New York University so frequently that at one point she attempted to get the university to make Jackson her assistant. To raise public awareness of Aunt Molly, Barnicle bought some country-looking cloth and with the help of the theater department had a wrapper, apron, and sunbonnet made of it. She dressed her, gave her a corncob pipe, and invited the press to class. The next day, there was Aunt Molly’s picture in the New York Times over an article headed “Mountaineer Woman Sings Ballads Here” that described her (without quotation marks) as “a-singin’ and a-composin’ since she was a tyke of ten.”