Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  It’s easy in retrospect to dismiss these crude efforts at what was thought of as presenting “authenticity,” especially as similar attempts at identity-building were already being manipulated more professionally by the executives of recording companies on what they were now calling hillbilly singers. But there was a deep sense of urgency and sincerity about these folklorists’ efforts to present America to itself that set them apart from the commercial calculations of those who aimed only to make money from their creations. Thirty-some years later Charles Seeger would reflect on this moment of innocence among folklorists:

  Put any good “authentic,” traditional singer before a microphone or on a platform before an audience not of its own kind, and soon the peculiar requirements of the situation produce the typical traits of exhibitionism. To my personal observation, it took Molly Jackson only a few months after her expulsion from Harlan County, Kentucky, to convert herself, when expedient, from a traditional singer, who seemed never to have given any particular thought to whether anyone liked or disliked her singing, into a shrewd observer of audience reaction, fixing individual listeners one after another with her gaze, smiling ingratiatingly, gesturing, dramatizing “by” words in her songs. Lead Belly was already an astute handler of the nonfolk by the time I met him (about the time he left John Lomax).... Since each [the folk and the nonfolk] has now exploited the other for a couple of decades in the large frame of the United States, there must exist few, if any, persons left ratable as 100 percent either folk or nonfolk. The vast population lies between these limits, each individual made up of varying proportions of inhibited or released folkness or nonfolkness.

  Barnicle and Alan set about recording Aunt Molly’s autobiography, creating a memoir that would include traditional songs, along with comments on their meaning to the singer and the community from which she came. Aunt Molly later asked to be paid for the recordings she had made, even though the Library of Congress at that time did not recompense anyone for recording sessions. When Alan wrote her for permission to use some of her stories and songs in his and his father’s 1941 book Our Singing Country, she replied that she was writing a book of her own and warned him against using any of them. When they later did reach an agreement, he paid her himself, and her recorded comments were threaded throughout the published book. Yet she continued to try to get more money from him, as she did from others, especially those who had befriended her.

  Alan began an ambitious plan for what would have to be done next if folk song was to be taken seriously and he was to survive along with it. Having learned that the Library of Congress wanted to move the Archive of American Folk Song out of the dark and dusty corner in which it sat and open it up to the public, he proposed to his father that the archive could build up its collection by exchanging recordings and song texts with other libraries and then become a distribution center to which all institutions could have access. Records could be distributed to schools at cost, for example, a scheme that would also draw the attention of foundations and government to help with further funding and research. A list of commercial studio recordings of folk songs could be developed, and those recordings would then be added to the library and the public encouraged to hear them. Since John had recently been ill, Alan offered himself for the job: “If you aren’t well enough for a while, I could stay on for a couple of months in Washington and proceed in the way you and your superiors thought best.” His last year in college could wait. He ended his letter with a reminder of what he could do on his own: “225 records for this summer and if we hadn’t been delayed by everything possible at least four hundred.”

  At one of Barnicle’s parties where city folksingers gathered, Lomax met Herbert Halpert, one of her favorite students. Halpert had just graduated from New York University and had taken a job as a recreation worker for the new federally created Works Progress Administration on the Lower East Side, where he was collecting children’s rhymes. When he heard the records that Alan and Barnicle had brought back from their southern trip, he was excited by the possibilities that recording offered, of being able to hear a living tradition rather than simply read about it, and he began discussing another trip to the Bahamas with Barnicle and Lomax. Alan, however, was much more interested in learning about the WPA’s folklore programs and how he might use their musicians, technicians, and stenographers in his own work. He quickly wrote up a proposal and took it to the New York City office of the WPA, where he sang for the office staff. His plan was to create and coordinate a class in folk music led by a distinguished musicologist such as George Herzog, who would teach musicians how to notate folk music correctly. By working from recordings that had already been made, a body of transcribed music could be put into print. Finally, Alan would create a clearinghouse for the collection and housing of folk songs from everywhere in the country. If the WPA would agree to fund it for a year, he would then send the project on to the Library of Congress to see if they would take it on permanently.

  He was about to leave for Washington to pitch his idea to the national office of the WPA when a letter from his father arrived urging him to return to school. He answered by ignoring his father’s concerns and instead showing how industrious he had been since he had returned to New York City, giving him the details of his proposal, and gently taking the lead in their relationship:

  I’m going to disobey you straight out and go to Washington where on Monday morning I will expect to hear from you, either by wire or by airmail, special delivery. You and I now have the chance to do something really big, something of lasting value in all sorts of ways both to ourselves, for this country and for folk-songs. The money is crying to be spent. I would suggest that you come on to Washington so that we can march in on the WPA together next week. I have already been invited to see the head of it and I think I can put over the first part of the project by myself, provided that the Library (you) will let me make copies of all its records so that they can be worked up by this group of musicians in the Library. I have a chance to get a good job and, although that doesn’t seem really as attractive to me as a quiet, lazy year in Austin, still, if in a year I can get the ball rolling fast in the right direction in the field of American folk-songs, I will be glad to spare that year.

  But it turned out that there was no job for him in the WPA, and by late September he was back at school in Austin with a schedule heavy in courses in anthropology and philosophy. The book that John had hoped would bring him some income, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, was published in 1936 and sold poorly. Lead Belly himself, meanwhile, had attempted a New York comeback, managed now by a Shreveport gas station owner, but his performances were sparsely attended and were given short shrift by the New York papers.

  Alan turned twenty-one in the spring term at Texas in 1936 and sailed through his courses, even as he continued to do some fieldwork close to home. On one weekend venture he recorded the Soul Stirrers, a popular gospel quartet from Trinity, Texas, when they appeared in Austin. As up to date and innovative as they seemed, he heard something much older in their singing. Their lead, R. H. Harris, sang in a falsetto that was a novelty in gospel quartets, but Alan sensed it had origins in Africa. The quartet was in the process of developing a new style, one that used switch leads, two singers taking turns, passing the solo part back and forth like the horn players in the older New Orleans jazz bands. The Soul Stirrers could fall behind the beat and then accelerate back up to tempo, improvising lyrics as they sang. Or they riffed behind the lead singer, rhythmically repeating words or phrases, something that black sexteto singers were also doing in Cuba at the time. (Harris would leave the group in 1950 and be replaced by Sam Cooke, a singer who would take them up to the edge of pop music and then leave them to cross over into it as a star.)

  It was that spring that Alan met Elizabeth Harold Goodman, an eighteen-year-old freshman from Dallas, a brilliant, beautiful political radical with a cool assuredness and grace that set her apart from other southern women. She was a poet, deep into literar
y tradition, but driven to change the world and unafraid of the price that the South could extract from a woman like her. Her maternal grandfather was Judge H. T. Lyttleton, a liberal, who had been declared an enemy by the Ku Klux Klan. Her mother had married Michael Harold, who was institutionalized when he was still young after fatally assaulting his brother, leaving his wife and her children—Elizabeth, Michael Jr., and Anne—destitute. While Elizabeth was in high school she had a child, but the father’s family adopted the baby and raised it, and Elizabeth left for college.

  Alan fell in love with her and declared that he wanted her with him forever. But John Lomax disliked her from their first meeting, and when he found out that they were planning to be married he was strongly opposed to it, even telling Alan’s friends of his disapproval. Alan made sure the two of them did not meet again.

  In May Alan was awarded a B.A. in philosophy, summa cum laude, and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. His plan now was to get a fellowship and earn enough money to enter graduate school at the University of Chicago and study anthropology. Meanwhile, he went to Dallas, where preparations for the Texas Centennial were under way, thinking that he could create a barrelhouse where visitors could experience the music and rough life of workers’ barrooms, or maybe set up a tamale concession. When he learned that no one was willing to back him for either business, he took off for Saltillo, then the center of intellectual activity in Mexico, ostensibly to study Spanish and do research on Mexican folklore. Elizabeth may have been with him at least part of the time, as he talked about her in letters he wrote to friends, but he never mentioned her when writing his family.

  He had no plans, his money was running out, and his attempt to sit in on classes in a local high school to learn Spanish taught him little. He spent most of his time wandering the streets, living on fruit, watching a performance of Los Pastores, and practicing on the new guitar his father had given him for graduation. “It is much the nicest gift I ever had,” he wrote his father. “It will make me completely free of society and I can wander through the world like a troubadour and care for no man.” John suggested that he might be able to help him get work in Washington, but Alan insisted he had to make his way without him: “After all we had been together for three years almost constantly,” he wrote him, “and during that time had spent ourselves in numerous fits of unbearable anger and hurt. It seemed to me time to go.... I simply had to make some sort of gesture of independence because for months I had been miserably scared of what might happen to me when I stepped out from under the parental roof. I hope you understand.”

  But by September it was clear that he was going nowhere. He wrote his father from Mexico that all his plans had fallen through, and he wondered if there might still be something for him at the Library of Congress—handling mail, maybe, or filing and arranging the records? “But I’m going to need more money, I’m afraid, than my guitar would be able to give me next year at the University of Chicago.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Honeymoon in Haiti

  Haiti in 1936 was no island paradise, no romantic retreat. Tourists were so scarce that any non-Haitian who showed up on a boat was regarded with suspicion by officials. A nineteen-year-long American occupation by the marines had ended in 1934, the United States having been a latecomer to a long list of invaders of Hispaniola, the island that also includes the Dominican Republic. The country was now a shambles of a civil society, whose model for almost two decades had been dictatorship, with forced work gangs, a debased educational system, and legitimized violence from the top.

  In addition to the weight of Haiti’s history of occupation and struggle, there was also Vodou, the nation’s peasant religion, a syncretic lamination of Catholicism and West African and Kongo religions. In the 1930s some elements of Vodou became a focus of titillating excitement and fearful obsession among Americans and Europeans and entered the public consciousness through tabloids, pulp fiction, comic books, films, and stage plays. In the movies, a kind of Vodou hysteria peaked between 1932 and 1936 with White Zombie, Voodo, The Emperor Jones, Drums O’ Vodou, Ouanga (or Crime of Vodou), and Revolt of the Zombies. But it was a 1929 book by William Seabrook, The Magic Island, that made Haiti a permanent part of American and Western European popular culture. Seabrook, a journalist, traveler, sadist, alcoholic, and friend of the photographer Man Ray and the mystic Aleister Crowley, wrote a scandalous book on Haiti under American occupation that drew on old images of blacks under slavery and white fear of blacks. It was a gaudy, sensationalistic account of outrageous practices of savagery that he claimed to have witnessed.

  The zombie emerged at the center of this grim fixation: the visage of the living dead, represented in images and descriptions of tall black men raised from the dead by manipulative priests and sent out against their masters’ enemies. For Westerners there were already fragments of this figure in the Greek daimon, in black magic, and in the widespread belief in ghosts. But the image of the zombie was far more graphic, with its collective nighttime rituals that involved music and dancing, possession, burial alive, and a vengeful resurrection.

  Haiti was of particular interest to a handful of anthropologists, such as Melville J. Herskovits. He had entered the country just as the troops were leaving and picked a small rural community in order to study its economics, religion, and culture, which resulted in the 1937 book Life in a Haitian Valley. That work was part of Herskovits’s larger plan to understand the adaptation of African peoples to life in the Americas. For his part, Alan Lomax viewed Haiti as a grand site of unrecorded song, the product of a people who were culturally closer to Africa than any others in the New World, and also less marked by the effects of mass communication. He asked the Library of Congress to underwrite a trip there to collect recordings of Haitian music, a genre the archive lacked completely.

  By November 1936, the library had approved his trip and appointed him temporary assistant to the archive for a period of five months at a salary of thirty dollars a month, even though he was only twenty-one and had never conducted a research project by himself. Financially, they risked very little: his travel expenses, a recording machine, a motion picture camera, film, blank recording discs, and five dollars a day for living expenses. Nonetheless, they wanted to keep track of him, and asked for regular progress reports. Because relations between the United States and Haiti were still tense, the library also insisted on having a number of letters of introduction prepared for Alan—to the lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Marine Corps, the secretary of state, the American minister and American consul in Haiti, General Calixte and Colonel André of the Garde d’Haiti, and the minister from Haiti in Washington. The letters to the Haitians stressed that he was associated with Zora Neale Hurston, who was already in Haiti and known by local intellectuals and officials of the government. Hurston had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935 with a plan to study obeah and magic in the West Indies, extending the work she had done on hoodoo in New Orleans, but this time for a popular book: she wanted to research the role of Moses in West Indian magical practices and build a novel around it. She had applied for a Guggenheim once before, in 1934, but was turned down after receiving negative reports from anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas. When she applied the second time she no longer listed herself as being in anthropology but in “literary science.” This time she received the fellowship, becoming the first black woman to be awarded one of America’s highest honors. After she left for the West Indies she wrote Alan from Kingston, Jamaica, inviting him to bring his recording machine with him and to meet her in the highlands of Jamaica—Maroon country, the home of escaped slaves from the seventeenth century—from where they would proceed to Haiti. Because he was unable to leave then, they made plans to meet in Haiti.

  Arriving in Haiti in late September, Hurston spent much of her time finishing Their Eyes Were Watching God. By November she wrote Alan to warn him off mentioning Vodou or anything that even suggested William Seabrook’s book when he came to Haiti, since the country’s u
pper class was still angry with what he had written. She offered him clues as to what to look for in songs and, incidentally, asked him to buy her some stockings (“color light, golden tan, size 10”).

  Each of the anthropologists, dancers, and researchers who visited Haiti had used the same guides to lead them into the bush to experience Haitian folk culture. (In those days, the “bush” was only a few hundred yards from the main streets of Port-au-Prince.) “Doc” R. H. Reiser, a former navy pharmacist’s Mate then supervising the National Insane Asylum, lived with a local woman, had been initiated into Vodou and become accepted among the ranks of the priests of Vodou as a psychic, and acted as a cultural middleman for journalists and social scientists alike. It was he, along with Faustin Wirkus (a marine sergeant left in charge of the island of Gonâve who had proclaimed himself a king, as well as directed Voodo, a faked part-documentary, part-fiction film) and a small group of self-selected experts, who were on call for visitors, usually taking them to the same places, sometimes with unpleasant results. Zora Neale Hurston, for example, had been led to a particular houngan, or Vodou priest, hoping to learn enough to be initiated as a believer. While she was dancing in a ceremony, she was furious to find that Professor Herskovits’s graduate assistant George E. Simpson and novelist and travel writer Harold Courlander had both been guided by a bellboy at their hotel to the same service where she was dancing and intruded into her research. She did not speak to either one of them for the rest of their stay.