Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  In Haiti it is not a good policy to grow weak and helpless and to be broke. My formerly effective arguments could bring no singers before the microphone. I had just enough money to buy a little rum for the crowds that gathered each night at the house to listen to records being made, but not enough to make them all respectful or considerate. Invited into my house they took possession of it. They camped on all the chairs and refused to be moved. They laughed and talked while the records were being made and no threats or wheedling reasons could stop their mouths. Occasionally the gendarmes would descend from the bouque and pretend to clear the house, but it was only to occupy the chairs themselves and add more undiscipline to the already boisterous audience. And Revolie grew disaffected, too. Neither he nor they could understand Elizabeth and myself. When a Haitian peasant gets sick he retires into a corner like a dog and is silent. Neither the peasants nor Revolie could see much to sympathize over in the contemplation of a spectral and irritable pair of blancs who spoke laughable Creole and tried to give thunderous orders in voices that now bore no trace of authority.

  By March Alan had completely run out of funds when his check from the Library of Congress was held up in the mail. He attempted to borrow twenty dollars from the American consulate in Port-au-Prince, but was turned down by the consul, who caustically suggested he surely could find credit somewhere else, since “you make friends so easily with the natives.”

  In their last week in Haiti, Alan and Elizabeth tried to crowd in everything they had to complete before they left. When the day for departure came, they delivered their luggage and packages to the boat in the morning, then rode by bus for several hours to Cap-Haïtien in the north to visit the Citadel, built after the Haitian Revolution by Henri Christophe to withstand European invaders. But they misjudged the distance, and by the time they got back to the wharves of Port-au-Prince the boat was pulling out. The owner of an American yacht anchored in the harbor was just arriving in his motorboat and, seeing their situation, offered to take them to the ship. When they caught up with the steamer, they jumped from the deck to a ladder on the side of the boat. The ship’s officers didn’t speak to them for the rest of the voyage.

  Once they reached Washington on April 23, Alan wrote letters of thanks to Doc Reiser, to Revolie, and to others who had helped them, sending them copies of recordings, promising gifts as soon as he could afford to, and encouraging others to give Revolie a job equal to his abilities. He then set to work organizing his field notes and recordings, all the while managing to keep John and Elizabeth at a distance from each other.

  The Haitian materials he had collected proved to be overwhelming. Alan returned from Haiti with more than fifteen hundred recordings—some fifty hours of recorded sound—including the music associated with Vodou, Mardi Gras, Catholicism, old French romance ballads, the work songs of the collective labor groups (the konbits), as well as folktales, children’s game songs, bands of all sorts, jazz and classical music, and three songs sung by Zora Neale Hurston that had nothing to do with Haiti. Everything was accompanied by notes, drawings, logs, transcriptions, and translations. There was also 350 feet of remarkably fine 8mm color motion picture film by Elizabeth Lomax that showed the making of drums, dances, work, domestic life, and religion. Alan wrote short essays on how drums were made and baptized, interviewed drummers and houngans, made notes on the songs and dances of Vodou and Mardi Gras, on the pantheon of deities in the Plaisance area, and on Vodou rituals and beliefs. Because the library wanted a final report on the trip, Alan got help in translating the folk songs he had collected from the Haitian scholar Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, author of Le Créole Haïtien, and wrote the anthropologist/choreographer Katherine Dunham asking for a Haitian bibliography, but he was never able to complete the full report. In the end, he gave up on his Haitian writing and instead helped his father prepare a new edition of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Later he would say, “It was characteristic of me then to let my father’s work come first. That way I could avoid my own needs and problems.”

  If the library had conceived of this trip along the lines of another straighforward ballad-collecting venture, they would have been surprised at the results. The links between music, culture, and social structure that Alan had rapidly grasped in his fieldwork in the United States by a mixture of insider knowledge, shrewd judgment, and a keen sense of observation were not enough to carry him in Haiti. Nor was four months sufficient time to learn what he needed to know about Haitian peasant life. At one point he wrote in his notebooks that Haitian culture was best left to experts. In fact, no one has even yet produced an outsider’s account of Haitian culture that is entirely satisfactory. The doubleness of European and African culture affects every institution and cultural domain in Haiti: two languages, two religions, two medicines, and so on, and yet both of them interpenetrating and operating together by means that are inherently deceptive—as deceptive as a slave needed to be to survive. Such knowledge is not easily learned from the outside.

  While Alan was in Haiti, John had written him with a number of suggestions for jobs that might interest him when he returned to the United States, and had become annoyed when Alan failed to respond to any of them. In early April John tried again with another possibility that he thought Alan would not be able to turn down: he had asked Vice President John Vance and others in Washington to have a line added to the library’s budget for a clerk to index the folk song materials in the archive, and the House had passed the allocation. Vance had already recommended Alan as the perfect candidate for the job. His temporary job was extended two months, and in June Alan was made assistant-in-charge of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. His father would still be “honorary consultant” and technically his boss, but Alan was to deal directly with Harold Spivacke, the new chief of the Music Division. Spivacke was a musicologist who had been assistant to the classical music critic of the New York Times, Olin Downes, and had been serving as assistant to the chief. During Spivacke’s tenure the library would expand its chamber music concerts in the Coolidge Auditorium and greatly increase its classical holdings. But he was also a man of wide and adventuresome tastes who had encouraged John Lomax, and had even done field recording in a prison with him.

  The archive had no real budget and only a shadow staff before it received the small appropriation from Congress in July, a cautious if somewhat grudging recognition that there was a unique American culture, one that was alive and flourishing even at the bottom of the social ladder. But even with Alan’s appointment, it was recognition on the cheap: his salary was $1,620 a year, a bit more than a day laborer’s pay, his father was still making only a dollar a month, and the office was still a dusty cubbyhole under the library.

  Yet Alan scarcely seemed to notice any of this. With the imprimatur of the Library of Congress, he began moving fast. Before the end of the year he had given a talk on folk song at the prestigious Cosmos Club of Washington and had sung at parties for senators and their spouses. He had given interviews, written short articles on folklore for newspapers, and made plans to gather folk songs from sailors, miners, and lumberjacks in Michigan as a first step in a plan to collect folklore in every state in the country. He spent his days classifying records, listening to songs and typing out their words, and answering a stream of letters asking for bibliographies, recordings, the sources for this or that song, or for suggestions of folk songs that could be harmonized for use in school concerts. He advised parents on how to help their children to have careers as singers, and responded to letters asking for “good airs” to turn into an elementary school alma mater song. There were also letters from sculptors looking for inspiration in folk art, from pageant directors in search of songs, and from Hollywood moguls wanting to hear field recordings for possible movie scores. He also spoke at the annual meetings of the American Library Association and the Progressive Education Association, and at dozens of other educational, entertainment, and folklore-boosting groups whenever he was aske
d.

  Alan invited Lead Belly and his wife to come to Washington in June to record more songs for the library, and to meet some people who might be able to find him work. They drove down to D.C. with Barnicle and her friend Kip Kilmer, son of the poet Joyce Kilmer. The Ledbetters were to have stayed with the Lomaxes in their apartment, but when the landlord got word that they had Negroes as guests he threatened to call the police and, under Washington’s segregationist housing laws, have them all put out of the building. The next day was then spent driving around town, trying to find a black hotel or rooming house that would take the Ledbetters in, and a place where they could all eat together, but when the Ledbetters arrived with white people they were turned away again. Lead Belly wrote a song about it, “Bourgeois Blues,” to which Alan later added new words (when Alan sang it, it sometimes came out as “Bush-wah Town”):

  Tell all the colored folks to listen to me,

  Don’t try to buy no home in Washington, D.C.

  Chorus:

  (Lord) It’s a bourgeois town, it’s a bourgeois town,

  Got the bourgeois blues, gonna spread the news all around.

  Me an’ my wife run all over town,

  Everywhere we go, the people turn us down.

  The Depression may have flattened the country economically, but not spiritually or ideologically. America at its lowest was rich with ideas, each with the immediacy of potentiality. Every institution, from church to family, school to factory, was put into question, and everyone had an analysis. Some reached back for answers to the beginnings of the country, to a time when democracy had the feel of divine predestination. Others looked abroad, to the upheavals of Europe and the wide-eyed array of revolutionary and utopian ideas being played out against a background of rising fascism. If there was an orthodoxy in America, it was about making one’s life count for something, of personal experimentation, of turning social upheaval into a vision of saving a dream. Some, like Ernest Hemingway, thought that the world was worth fighting for, while others thought that it was worth singing for.

  When Alan moved to Washington, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration’s first efforts to channel social cataclysm into progress were beginning to be felt. New offices, programs, and initiatives were popping up everywhere, and existing departments were being redefined, subdivided, and redirected to new purposes and projects. The first goal was to get every person on relief back to work until the Depression was over, and most of the efforts went toward giving the average worker a job building roads, bridges, post offices, dams, levees, hospitals, and schools. But there was work for the visual artists as well, in raising the spirit of America, and in offering the country a vision of greatness and a future they could glimpse in a poster. Shopgirls, postal workers, riveters, and farmers began to appear in photos and on murals, inspired by similar tributes to Mexican workers portrayed by Diego Rivera. Images of people and the land were used to introduce one part of America to another, and to make the everyday iconic. The artists and visionaries put to work by the government developed their own democratic ideology, such as their notion that the people had a right to the best that had ever been written, danced, painted, or sung—it was a matter of “cultural rights.” But just as the high arts would be made available to the folk, the folk arts would be introduced to the cultural elite. Folklore as an activity, as a subject, as a calling rather than an academic study, developed quickly under the New Deal, gripping the imagination of a people becoming aware of how deep and multifaceted their own culture might be. New strands were revealed within the country that were exotic and aesthetically new, but also very old, and they formed a baseline of America that all the artist-workers were discovering. “Everything local and native had been treated as non-art up until this period,” Alan said, “or at best inferior to urban and European. Suddenly we opened up the flood-gates. The creativity of ordinary people, engaged in living in ordinary places, came into focus.”

  They were ordinary people, certainly, but also the very people who were the hardest suffering. Art, for many, was now the basis of a crusade for justice and cultural equality. It was a thrilling moment to be alive, Lomax said:

  The New Deal was the time the American revolution began again. It wasn’t just dealing with the Depression, it was dealing with all the problems we had accumulated in the hundred years between the time of the American Revolution and then, through selfishness and greed and exploitation.... We knew what the problems were, we had been to school and this was our training ... there were tens of thousands of us in that city, all related to the problem and given a go-ahead signal, do something. It was made possible by the New Deal. We had the ear of the common man. All intellectuals were involved; everybody was in it. The Roosevelts were marvelous orchestraters. We unionized America, we set the base for integration, we set it free from European snobbery. It was a time of exhilaration, a dizzy feeling. By God! We Americans were pretty marvelous.

  The Works Progress Administration was one of the most important parts of this development, a massive corps of unemployed workers being put to work. Within its ranks folklorists were trained, created, and set to work in the various federal theater, writers, arts, and music projects. Even John Lomax himself would join them in 1936, becoming the director of the Folklore Studies Division of the Federal Writers’ Project, a group whose workers across the country contributed to the city, state, and regional guides that were being edited together for publication. They focused on the uniqueness and brilliance of the regional arts and cultures of America, did surveys of folklore in each state, interviewed garment workers, clockmakers, copper miners, and steelworkers, and then produced volumes of oral histories, such as those that came out of the large program of interviewing ex-slaves about their lives before emancipation. It helped that the president and his wife, Eleanor, themselves were interested in folk arts: Franklin liked a good fiddle tune and brought string bands in to entertain friends at his Warm Springs, Georgia, vacation spa. The First Lady was even more involved, inviting folk musicians to the White House and visiting folk festivals in the remotest of regions.

  The Resettlement Administration was another home for folklorists, this one within the Department of Agriculture. Its task was to restore health and income to farmers and farm workers who had been devastated by erosion and wind damage, falling prices, debt, and displacement. Much of the farm population was made up of migrant workers, hobos, and sharecroppers, all of them now struggling under the weight of a faltering economy. The Resettlement Administration attempted to deal with these problems by providing loans and debt relief, introducing widespread conservation practices, and the creation of new communities for displaced farmers that would emphasize cooperation and conservation and resist future depressions. Model communities such as Greenhills in Ohio or Jersey Homesteads (now Roosevelt) in New Jersey were set up in several states. “It was [Rexford] Tugwell’s idea,” Alan said, “that we should begin to build a new kind of community in America over the makeshift communities that had been run up in the factory towns and in shanty towns around the country. He invited artists to come down to help him give these new communities a living culture.”

  The Special Skills Division was a unit in the Resettlement Administration set up to help train farm people in the arts and crafts to strengthen community ties and to give them the possibility of making some extra income. The division drew together an extraordinary group of artists: filmmaker Pare Lorentz; photographers Roy Stryker, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans; painters Jackson and Charles Pollock and Ben Shahn (who would soon also become a photographer). There was also Charles Seeger, recently out of work, and director and playwright Nicholas Ray, back from stints of study with Frank Lloyd Wright in Taliesin West and John Houseman’s Group Theatre in New York. Seeger was in charge of music, and Ray was head of theater arts. They often worked together, with Nick traveling to a mining community or a farm town where he interviewed the residents, took notes on their livelihoods and problems, then sketched out a play
for them, staging it onsite. Seeger then joined him to create musical settings for some of the plays. Along the way each of them recorded folk songs, folktales, or fiddle tunes, some of which ended up in the archives at the Library of Congress.

  Alan met Nick Ray through Charles Seeger, and the two of them were drawn together by their common interests, but also by what each of them uniquely knew:

  When I met Nick in Washington in the 1930’s ... he was certainly one of the most splendid young men in the whole world. He seemed to be the person I’d always dreamed of being.... And I think I represented something equally splendid for him, the whole America that he didn’t know anything about and I had already explored by then, while he was just beginning, because he was in charge of starting theater in rural America. He was just starting to think what it was about and I had already been to all those places and knew what kinds of music there were. So we could talk immediately about common problems: where he was far ahead of me was in thinking that you could restore or support all of these many American working-class structures with the techniques and the dreams of sophisticated theater people.

  I was the only person who had been out there with the Blacks, the Mexicans, the Cajuns, and all the rest. And Nick was one of the people who came and listened and took it seriously. Very seriously, and in ways that I wasn’t aware were possible. His colleague Charles Seeger, who was a musicologist, added another level of seriousness in it for me, and we became a sort of trio of cultural workers in the city. So Nick and I were like Damien and Pythias, like brothers. He always understood without having to be told all I was experiencing; and he was feeding me back all the richness of a theatrical tradition and the sophistication of New York, which I didn’t have ... and Frank Lloyd Wright, this whole marvelous monument.