by John Szwed
While Elizabeth was away on a trip to Mexico, Alan stayed with Nick Ray and his wife, Jean Evans, in their house in Alexandria, Virginia, and when she returned the Lomaxes moved in with the Rays, sharing expenses. The house quickly turned into a performing space and hostel, their guests frequently including the folksingers that Alan brought to town to work in the library or for some other function. They often spent nights in group singing, or in trying on new identities by attempting to sing in the style of one or another folk hero of theirs. But beyond the world of folk song, houseguests included the theater people who regularly visited Nick and Jean, including Joseph Losey and Elia Kazan. Losey, like Nick, had attended La Crosse High School in Wisconsin and had worked with him in theater in New York City. He directed Gods of the Lightning, the play about Sacco and Vanzetti that Maxwell Anderson had written with Harold Hickerson, and had become part of the Federal Theatre Living Newspaper productions in New York, producing political cabaret shows in the city. Kazan was a director and actor in the Group Theatre in New York, and had gone south with Nick on one of his trips, running into Lead Belly on the way. Alan also became close to John Hammond, the wealthy heir of the Vanderbilt family who was deep into Harlem nightlife and the jazz world as promoter and fan. Roosevelt’s administration urged cooperation between the different New Deal programs, and there developed unusually high synergy and agreement on their various goals. The Library of Congress archive was expected to reach out to every other governmental group and agency that had overlapping interests in collecting folk songs, especially the Farm Security Administration of the Department of Agriculture, the Writers’ Project, the Folk Arts Committee, the Music Project of the WPA, and the Department of the Interior, whose Radio Broadcasting Division freely furnished labor and equipment to make copies of these groups’ recordings to go into the archive.
When John Lomax was offered the job with the Works Progress Administration that summer for $3,200 a year, he accepted it immediately. He had always hoped for a full-time job in the archive, but neither he nor Alan had received a salary for the last five years, and since his family had been living on his savings, the rent from their home, and the meager royalties from his books, he could hardly turn it down. He moved his wife and daughter Bess to Washington, where he had found an apartment on Capitol Hill, close to the Library of Congress. Now, with Alan and himself in the same town, and with Bess to help, they could pay more attention to the second volume of American Ballads and Folk Songs that he and Alan were preparing, which would ultimately be published under the title of Our Singing Country. Alan and Bess found a spot to work on it up in the library’s attic, where the sound of the endless replaying of records would not disturb anyone. Huddled together like artistes in America’s garret, they shuddered against the winter winds that blew through the cracks, and sweated through the heat of D.C. under the eaves in the summer. Each week Alan and John met with the two people they had asked to be their music editors, Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, and with whom they argued over every aspect of the book: what songs should be included, how they should be transcribed, and who the songs were for—teachers, folklorists, musicians, singers, the average American? And how would people use them? What was certain was that the Lomaxes wanted this book to be received as favorably by the academic community as American Ballads and Folk Songs had been by the public, and that meant providing more scholarly notes and more accurate transcriptions. As time went on, John and Charles had less of a role, distracted by other duties, and the main work was left to Alan and Ruth, with Bess as messenger, carrying copies of records and the manuscript back and forth on the bus between Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington.
Ruth Seeger was not a folklorist, nor even a collector or a fieldworker, but a classically trained musician and a brilliant composer, the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition. But somewhere between her political commitments and her devotion to her young children, she was drawn to folk song, and largely abandoned her ambitions as a composer. She had been a student of Charles Seeger’s, who left his wife to marry her in 1932, and they rapidly had three children to raise, and sometimes even Pete, Charles’s youngest son from his previous marriage, who occasionally stayed with them. Ruth approached folk music with the zeal of the convert, driven to bring everything she knew about music theory to bear on what most people thought were rather plain melodies. Like Béla Bartók, who found that Hungarian folk songs resisted easy transcription using standard Western notation, she saw that the singers seemed to bring something special to their performances, something that oddly paralleled modernist classical music in its hard-won quality and its resistance to immediate understanding.
Ruth’s job on the book was to transcribe the tunes from the records, and she was deadly serious about the task. If traditional methods of music notation were not up to accurately capturing what was on the recordings, then what was to be done? Previous folklorists had elevated the words of the song to the higher position, with music always subservient, but those who believed in the power of recording were confident that the process had captured all the critical information about a particular song—not what the singer intended to sing, not how he would have sounded if he knew the song better, or was younger, or of a different race or class, or came from a town where the song was better known, or knew a better version. The problem, then, was what was on the record? What was that word? Was that note a C or a B-flat? Did the singer sigh, or was it a musical note? Was it twelve bars long, or twelve and a half? Ruth pledged herself to find a way to accurately represent on paper what she heard, even if it meant listening to a recording eighty-five or ninety times and wearing it out in the process.
Alan had recorded many of these songs, sitting with people on their porches, or in farm fields, bars, or churches, and he knew what they looked like and how they might have struggled to get the song right. He knew the aesthetic and the tradition that underlay what was recorded, as well as the pain and joy that the singers experienced as they sang. Like a Proust of the folk, he wanted to get all that into the transcription so that it would evoke the experience of recording it. A line was soon drawn between Alan and Ruth, each of them defending his or her perspective, and they argued endlessly over the details and over what they thought the singer might have intended, or whether it mattered. Bess recalled Alan complaining about Ruth’s scrupulous transcription: “You tell Ruth that no blues singer God ever made would sing ‘redder than rouge’—it’s ‘redder that ru(by)’ with a voice break in the middle—that’s why she doesn’t hear it right.” “Now, Bess,” Ruth would reply, “you go back and tell Alan and your father that I have listened to this song exactly 78 times all the way through [she kept a tally sheet], not mentioning single verses. How many times have they listened to it? Get them to figure it out.”
Meanwhile, time was running out with the publisher, and the book was getting larger: Ruth wanted Alan to print multiple versions of the melodies they heard on different recordings, even when the song text was the same; she also insisted on including an eighty-page essay, “The Music of American Folk Song.” By 1940, three years into her part of the project, Macmillan began to hold Ruth responsible for the delay in publication, demanding that work on it stop and refusing to print her essay.
It was quickly becoming clear that the archive could not record everything or everywhere in the United States, and that it would have to plan to get as representative a sample of the country’s music as it could manage within its resources. This meant continuing to count on collectors to donate their materials. The plan the Music Division settled on was to send Alan out to selected strategic points in the country to collect, and to create a model that could be used to encourage others to do so. Eastern Kentucky was the area that Alan suggested they start with that summer, as the archive had only twenty-two records from the entire state. Just as his request was being considered, the Music Division heard from Harvey H. Fuson, a local collector, asking that someone from the library be sent to record
songs that he wasn’t able to include in his book Ballads of the Kentucky Highlands. A few weeks later a letter arrived from another Appalachian collector, Jean Thomas, looking for the loan of a recording machine to collect songs in the Ashland, Kentucky, area. This local interest and potential support solidified the idea, and the library proposed a two-month excursion into Kentucky, with phonographic and recording supplies, a gas allowance, and five dollars a day for housing, food, and personal expenses.
As he was preparing to go, Alan explained to his employers that the state of Kentucky was geographically and culturally complex and divided into distinct zones, the most interesting of which from a folk song point of view was likely to be the mountain region. On his second trip to eastern Kentucky he would look for singers by means of his new contacts, Thomas and Fuson, but also through Barnicle, who knew the area from previous excursions and would meet Elizabeth and him there. Alan also wrote for help from the state’s senators and representatives, the teachers who worked in schools that had been set up by northern philanthropists, and Mary Breckenridge, who pioneered nursing services for the mountain folk. He laid out a plan based on his travels and what he had been reading:
The shortest and best road to Harlan enters the Shenandoah Valley at New Market, Virginia, runs straightaway southwest through Staunton and Roanoke to Bristol. Then one heads up into the mountains through Gate City to Pennington Gap, and on country roads over the Big Black Mountains into Harlan. There one is in the heart of the mountains that have protected for generations a rich heritage of Elizabethan song, manner and speech, and at the same time have hidden the veins of coal that are leading to the disappearance of this tradition. And so one finds in Harlan and nearby communities the mountaineer—the so-called mountain eagle—and the miner—a modern workingman. Both types have produced folk songs, and Omie Wise [a tragic heroine from a Kentucky ballad of the same name] flows naturally into The Hard-Working miner. Here the mountains have formed culture eddies where one can find the music of the American pioneer, in all degrees of purity, in some isolated spots little affected by nearly a hundred years of change in the “outland,” in others acquiring new vitality in the mouths of the miners. From Harlan, Bell, Clay, and Knox, the coal-mining mountains North into Pike and Breathitt, I shall be journeying backward in time and adding to the Archive materials essential to the understanding of the development of American folk-music, material that at present it particularly needs.
Barnicle would join them in September and lead them to the people she had met in the coal camps in Harlan, Pine, and Bell counties over the three or four summers she had spent in Kentucky. The local collectors that the library had urged on him turned out not to be as helpful as they’d hoped, and Alan was concerned that he was not finding enough to justify his trip. The coal camps were disappointments to Barnicle and himself, and when she left for New York to start the fall semester, Alan began to worry. He told Spivacke that he was on his own now and establishing his own contacts, and had made thirty-two recordings of ballads, Baptist and Holiness hymns, feud songs, banjo and fiddle tunes, sentimental hillbilly songs, and United Mine Workers’ ballads. Traveling with the five volumes of Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads and Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians as guides, he knew what they expected of him back in Washington. But how was he going to do this alone?
Elizabeth was sick, he had the flu, the batteries were wearing out faster than he expected, and he was running out of needles. There were government forms and vouchers to fill out and mail, weekly shipments of the records he’d made, and his checks for expenses were not arriving on time. He’d been dragging equipment up hills and into creek beds. Recordings had been made in hotel lobbies, on front porches, and out of the trunk of the car. He’d fended off noisy bullies threatening the sessions and a jealous sixty-year-old husband with a knife. The rutted country roads were breaking the blank glass discs and shaking the car apart. And local manners demanded that “one has to make friends of the people everywhere one goes and that takes time. They simply won’t sing for you until they feel that you are friendly or that you are friends of friends of theirs.” What should he do? he asked Spivacke. Move faster, to be able to get something out of every county? Or take his time and cover whatever places he did visit more thoroughly? Spivacke’s reply did not make things easier:
Try to remember ... that this trip is supposed to be the beginning of a nationwide survey. Please don’t prove such a survey impossible by your own actions. Your visit was also supposed to have propagandistic value and bring in more material from others. This might indicate moving about a bit. Remember also our aim to get 300 records by this trip. I realize, of course, that the first two weeks are the hardest and that your rate of production should increase.
Alan’s response was to redouble his efforts and to move deeper into the more isolated parts of Kentucky, places like Leslie County, where until two years before there were no paved roads into its county seat, Hyden. He spent two days driving through the road dust, stopping to talk to everyone he saw:
The young people were so shy that it was hard to find out what their names were, but the oldsters, as soon as they had been made to understand several times that my name was such and such and my station thus and so were very willing to help. From them I learned the name of singers up and down the road—Betsy Napper, a seventy year old banjo picker and buck dancer; Singin’ John Caldwell, ballad singer; Old Jim Bolan, the oldest Baptist preacher in the region; Farmer Collett, who lives on Jacks Creek near Roark’s store and whose multifarious musical activity extends through harmonica blowing to fiddling; old Granny Space, 87, from whom Sharpe collected thirty-five of his best Kentucky ballads and who in years gone by was at the same time the county’s best ballad singer and its gay lady.
At the end of October, Alan told the library that they were ready to come home. Elizabeth had been ill for weeks and had spent most of her time in the hotel, and even Alan admitted that the rural food was getting to him. But Harold Spivacke asked if they might stop by Akron on their way back and record Pearl R. Nye, a former canal boat captain who had already recorded a small portion of his songs for John Lomax four months before. Sick as they were, and tired (and “tired of making records”), they drove north to Akron and for two days recorded the captain’s songs, many of them clear-voiced and finely articulated Child ballads. When they reached thirty-nine songs they were all three exhausted, and Alan and Elizabeth left to drive on to Washington. Though it was hit-and-run collecting, and he never returned to record the rest of the six hundred or so songs that Nye claimed to know, Alan arranged appearances for him at the National Folk Festival in 1938 and 1942, and the two of them wrote each other regularly for the next seven years.
At the end of each fiscal year the archive was expected to report to the library on its activities, which the library in turn reported to Congress. There was a standard bureaucratic format for this sort of thing, and Alan always bowed to it in his opening paragraph. In the year ending June 30, 1938, the archive had recorded 1,502 discs, with 143 added as gifts from other folklorists, and so more than doubled the 1,313 records that the archive had already acquired in the previous ten years. But even apart from the quantifiable facts, Alan’s annual reports could have been published and read just as they were, as cultural criticism:
The mountains have always been poor but, so long as that poverty also meant comparative isolation, the tradition of homemade music could survive more or less unchanged. In the last decades, rural music and the mores associated with poverty have found difficulty in resisting the competition of metropolitan intrusions backed by wealth and prestige. This condition is most marked in coal-mining areas. The miners only shook their heads when the titles of the old ballads were suggested, and the ballads recorded were largely fragmentary or sung by the aged or the infirm. In the purely agricultural counties, however, the story was somewhat different. There, where cultural competition was not so extreme and
poverty not so marked, it was easier to find banjo pickers and ballad singers. From this point of view, it is interesting to compare the material collected in McGoffin, Morgan and Leslie counties with that from Harlan, Clay and Perry.
The tenacity of homemade music even in the mining area, however, is evidenced in three ways: in the use of traditional tunes by union-conscious mountaineers in the composition of strike songs and ballads, in the tremendous vogue of “hillbilly” and cowboy music and in the resurgence of song-writing in the Holiness and Gospel churches. In Hazard, county seat of Perry County, two blue-jacketed miners walked into our hotel room one afternoon and asked if we weren’t “the fellers who were catching mountain music,” and then sang two narrative songs that they had made up about the union. In Harlan, Clay, Bell and Johnson counties yet other union songs native to this region were heard.
The “hillbilly” musicians on the air have furnished another outlet for the homemade music of the mountains. Many of them come from rural backgrounds and their hopeful imitators in the hills of Kentucky are legion. The tempos of their square dance tunes have grown faster and their concern with the “mammy” song and the sickly sentimental love song greater, but they also sing some of the indigenous mountain ballads and “blues” and their production of songs is large. They have been chosen by the producers of commercial programs, to the neglect of many interesting musicians, since the producers look for those who perform in the style of already successful radio artists; but there is a gradual trend toward the absorption of more of the traditional styles into the “hillbilly” broadcasts and this may be one of the important channels through which the homemade music of the mountains can reassert itself.