Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  CHAPTER 6

  Doctor Jazz

  It might seem odd today, a time when departments of folklore have been dismantled to save a few dollars and the treasures of American vernacular culture are stored in the basements of university libraries, when folk music is the fodder of alternative bands from Seattle to Brooklyn, that a serious person could become an intellectual on the basis of the songs of the forgotten people of modernity, the music of those at the bottom of the greased pole of life. Even stranger that a young Washington bureaucrat could identify with Brer Rabbit, invert the values of the humanities, of government itself, and still become a personage in the capital, welcome in the homes of the country’s leaders, even in the White House. Alan had grasped a cultural theme that was running through the times and traced it doggedly, obsessively to its end. He had gone out into the country, followed the road when it turned from tar to gravel, crossed regional, class, and racial lines, and lived among those “real Americans.” Like his father, he could spin a homely country ballad or a tired field holler into a chapter of history or a sign of things to come, and there was no audience too marginal or elevated for him to address.

  In February 1938, Alan began teaching a short course on folk songs for the Federal Workers School, an after-work program sponsored by the United Federal Workers of America. Every Wednesday at five o’clock he played to the class recordings that he had made in the United States, Haiti, and the Bahamas and discussed their political and social meanings. He encouraged the students to bring their own instruments and sing and play along. A few weeks later, he did a condensed version of his course at one of the union’s evening musicales, never blinking as he followed another teacher who enthused about Haydn’s Symphony no. 6 and Schubert’s Symphony no. 8.

  Though such one-shot lecturing opportunities were as close as Alan would ever come to being an academic, he never showed deference to those in the universities. At the end of 1938, for instance, he reviewed Folk Songs of Mississippi and Their Backgrounds by the much-revered University of North Carolina professor of English Arthur Palmer Hudson, and went far beyond the scope of the usual reviews of folklore books. As if addressing the Harvard professors who had taught his father, himself, and Professor Hudson, he began by noting that there were now thousands of pages of folk song manuscript piling up in libraries across the country, but little attention was being paid to interpreting their social context and the role they played in the lives of their singers. Hudson had set out to do just that, but when he declared that because Mississippi was dominated by plantation owners of the “same stock,” their folk songs had no room for class envy or the “vocabulary of hate,” Lomax was aghast. Hudson went on to argue that the unifying principle of southern life was an incipient feudalism in which the “privileges of a superior order were more or less conceded,” something one could see reflected in the aristocratic tone and lordly manners of traditional ballads. Alan had grown up hearing all sorts of southern justifications for the evils of human exploitation, but when its folk songs were thrown into a pastoral rationale, it was too much for him to bear. Were “poor white trash” and “rednecks” not part of the vocabulary of hate? What was the proof that the songs were the property of the rich instead of the poor? The professor had told us nothing of the poverty of those singers from whom he had surely collected the ballads. If the ballads were models of life under feudalism, were they not also class weapons, like many other institutions of the South? Why did Hudson’s collection stop with the oldest songs, with no sign that song traditions were still alive and developing? Where were the newer songs of the “fiery Holiness minister and his guitar-picking wife, the Negro blues singer, that traveling band of ‘hill-billy’ musicians, the indigenous union organizer,” the “mouths through which American folksong is growing?” And why were there no songs from blacks, or any sign that southern music was the result of the mutual influence of white and Negro folk songs?

  A month later Alan headed off to Indiana University, a school then emerging as the new center of folklore study outside of Harvard. In Bloomington in late March, Elizabeth and he stayed with Professor Stith Thompson, another student of George Lyman Kittredge at Harvard, who had also roomed in Alan’s parents’ house when he first began teaching at Texas, and who, along with John Lomax, was one of the founders of the Texas Folklore Society. Thompson was the premier academic folklorist in the United States, and Alan had interested him in a plan to develop a National Folklore Archive in the Library of Congress, an archive that would go well beyond folk songs to collecting folktales, legends, autobiographies, and other forms of folk art and knowledge. Alan was there to announce his new position in Washington in grand style, by presenting his plan at the first meeting of the newly formed Hoosier Folk Lore Society. Then, with the help of local folklorists and WPA workers, Elizabeth and he spent several weeks in Indiana, visiting towns like Deuchars, Evansville, New Harmony, and Princeton. They focused on collecting Amish and American songs and English ballads, and then looking for survivals of French music in Vincennes, a town that was once an eighteenth-century French fur-trading post.

  From Indiana, Alan and Elizabeth crossed over to Ohio for some quick collecting trips in Hamilton and Akron, and to record some of the performers in the Ohio Folk Festival in Cincinnati run by Bascom Lamar Lunsford. But Alan thought the event was of poor quality, “a very sloppily run and stupid hill-billy show masquerading under the title ‘folk festival.’ ” He hoped that Lunsford would direct him to the better performers in the show, but Bascom left before Lomax had a chance to ask him: “He gave me not one scrap of information about who was [a] folk-singer out of the huge drove of yodeling, crooning, Alabama-mooning Kentuckians he had assembled. I was able, however, in the course of the most horrible exhibition of Anglo-American, blond, blue-eyed sentimentalism and musical gaucherie that I have ever endured to single out a few genuine informants.”

  Part of his misgivings came from having seen the real thing in its natural setting, and resenting its commercialized dislocation. He had himself been part of the staging of smaller events in Washington and knew that better casting and production values were needed for them to be effective. The most successful of these presentations was Sarah Gertrude Knott’s National Folk Festival, a four-day production that had moved from St. Louis to Chicago, and was the first to gather together folk and near-folk artists in one place to perform for national audiences. In 1938 the festival moved again to Washington, D.C., under the sponsorship of the Washington Post, and it was held there for the next five years in Constitution Hall, owned and operated by the Daughters of the American Revolution. They were eagerly attended by Eleanor Roosevelt, herself a member of the DAR.

  In May, Alan attended the festival in Washington and wrote his father:

  It was the usual uncritical hash of everything you can think of and Miss Knott played her ordinary dumb but beautiful role, sweeping across the stage in a long white dress and pushing folk singers around like a professional checker player. All the folklorists, from Miss [Martha] Beckwith on down, spent their time in the lobby wishing that folk festivals had never been heard of; there is a move afoot to attempt to depose or at least demote Miss Knott.

  The force behind these early folk festivals was an odd and wonderful Appalachian trio. Sarah Gertrude Knott was a regional actress from a small Kentucky town who had miraculously put together a board of directors that included every major folklorist except the Lomaxes, and had found backers that ranged from major newspapers to state governments. She even managed to enlist President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sing the festival’s praises. Bascom Lamar Lunsford was a folk musician from North Carolina, and the real thing as far as folklorists were concerned. (His 1927 “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” is one of the most influential and iconic recordings of folk and “old-time” music.) But he was also a lawyer and a politician, an educated man who had turned the Asheville, North Carolina, Chamber of Commerce’s rhododendron festival into the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in 19
28, and since then managed to largely regulate and control who would be certified as a folk performer from the Appalachians. (Blacks, for example were excluded from the Asheville festival.) Jean Thomas had started her professional life as a court stenographer, worked her way into management in professional baseball, had been Cecil B. DeMille’s script girl, and was in the nightclub business in New York City before she returned to Kentucky to collect folk songs and organize the Asheville (Kentucky) Folk Festival. Alan crossed paths with all three many times—Lunsford at one point worked for Charles Seeger in the WPA; Knott had ties to dramatists, folklorists, and governmental leaders; Thomas seemed to have already been there wherever Alan went in the southern mountains. The folk festivals, like the recording companies that sent expeditions into the woods looking for hillbillies and blues singers, were potential threats to Alan’s vision of turning folklore into national art. And yet he learned from them, and sometimes needed their help.

  When he reported to Spivacke on the trip to Indiana and Ohio, Lomax felt that what they had accomplished was “a partial idea of what happened to Anglo-American folk music in the Middle West. Both of these states, however, have been influenced more by currents of cultural migration from the South and less by the intrusion of foreign language groups and by the flow of migration from New England than other Lake States.” So before the archive went any farther west with their national collection project he thought it important to look at the Lake States—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—because they would give a very different picture from what they had seen so far. “In sounding folk-lore resources of this region, the Archive will be able to record what remains of their once vigorous lumber-jack culture, to explore the musical potentialities of the many foreign language groups of that area (Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Gaelic, French-Canadian, etc.) and to observe what have been the results of the moving of these cultures with the Anglo-American matrix.” He proposed to record in that area in July and August, since it was not completely accessible in the winter months.

  The amount of work he did and the plans he made were astonishing in their breadth and ambition, but at the cost of losing contact with friends and family, so that he often had to apologize to them or complain to them about his lot. To his brother John he once said that his “job, union duties, teaching, radio scripts, lectures, senators, visitors, and Spivacke kept me tighter than I am quite man enough for yet. I hope to God I can manage to ease up a little this summer and stick with something long enough to finish it. But what killed me was working like the devil all day and then having to play, sing, and talk somewhere at night.... For us life is complicated. Elizabeth and I certainly welcome the relative ease of the road when it comes.” Angry at his father, he said, “He makes me wish sometimes that I’d never gone into this folk-lore work, because I’ll always be called ungrateful and unnatural if I quarrel with him over matters that do not concern folk-lore.”

  In June, Alan was given an assistant and a raise to $1,800 a year. George Herzog and Charles Seeger were now consultants to the archive, which helped raised the importance of its work in the eyes of the library. But Alan reacted to the uptick in his fortunes by questioning if he was really worth it. He wrote his father, seemingly apologizing for his success or seeking some kind of reassurance: “The whole thing still seems a little bit churlish and certainly it has come my way too easily. I keep thinking that perhaps the best thing would be for me to let go with both hands and try something else that hadn’t been handed me on a silver platter.”

  From time to time, Alan got calls with suggestions for singers he should record. Nearly all of them turned out to be dead ends, coming as they did from people with no idea of what a folk song was, recommending an older relative or a neighbor for a place on the Library of Congress’s shelves. But occasionally he was led to the real thing: Justice Learned Hand, for instance, who collected songs when he was a child, happily recorded for Alan. Or a woman from Philadelphia, Kay Dealy Newman, who called about an extraordinary singer she knew, Jennie Devlin. What she told him sounded promising, and since Devlin had spent much of her life in New Jersey and there was very little in the archive from that state, he thought she could be an important addition. Once he heard her range of songs and listened to her life story, he saw her as a kind of indomitable protagonist from Moll Flanders or Samuel Pepys’s diaries, or a virtual Dickensian figure. Rejected by her mother as a child, she was cast into indentured servitude, spent most of her life as a domestic servant, and yet had survived and raised a family against all odds. She reminded him of Aunt Molly Jackson, or the Haitian women who were servitors at the Vodou temples, women who were not merely singers of old songs but had learned songs with powerful emotional and social significance in their lives and those of other women. Dealy recalled years later that as Alan was packing up his recording equipment that day, he told her, “Modern folksongs are as important as old ones. All folksongs should be sufficiently collected so that they may be studied, and this race to collect special gems and then tie up the records, etc., is silly. We must show social conditions, not just songs.” In the foreword to Katherine Dealy Newman’s 1995 Never Without a Song: The Years and Songs of Jennie Devlin, 1865-1972, Alan said that Devlin and other women he had recorded over the years belonged to a feminine mainstream that had kept the traditions alive across the centuries. “Indeed, in my lifelong experience in recording folksongs, it is the women who most stand out as the great rememberers.”

  Somehow the word got around among hardcore collectors of hot jazz recordings that Jelly Roll Morton was living in Washington, D.C. (“where the shows come to die,” as Alan would say), and you could see him perform there any night. Morton was the bartender, maître d’, entertainer, and part owner of a small lowceilinged second-floor club over a hamburger joint at 1211 U Street, D.C.’s black Broadway. Once called the Jungle Inn, later the Jungle Club, Morton’s place was at the moment known as the Music Box (though on the rare occasions that it was advertised it was also called the Blue Moon Night Club). He held court there, seated at a spinet piano in a room with a kitchen, a jukebox, chairs lined up along the walls, a few booths, and a small oil stove, amid tatters of primitif decoration left over from its days as the Jungle Inn—“All genuine bamboo,” he’d proclaim to first-time visitors.

  Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe was born in or around New Orleans in 1885, though many have questioned that date as five years too early to be consistent with the other facts of his life. (No birth certificate has ever been found.) His parents were both Creoles, the free people of color whose Haitian ancestors had come to Louisiana after the Haitian Revolution. His father left when Ferd was three, and when his mother remarried he took his stepfather’s name, Mouton, and later anglicized it to Morton. Rejecting the bricklaying trade for which he was destined, he began performing as a pianist in Storyville at the very moment when jazz is said to have begun, and there developed a distinct style of piano that drew on everything he had heard, from the folk to the concert hall. From 1907 to 1917 Morton traveled across the United States working in vaudeville as a pianist and singer; while he was in Chicago in 1915 his composition “The Jelly Roll Blues” became the first jazz tune to be published. He moved on to the West Coast, where he married Anita Gonzalez, a Creole woman he had known in New Orleans, and made Los Angeles and the West Coast his base of operations from 1917 to 1923. In 1923 he left, alone, for Chicago, where his band, the Red Hot Peppers, made some of his most popular records for RCA Victor between 1927 and 1928, and where his music was published by the Melrose Brothers Music Company. In 1930, as the Depression set in and the new swing bands gained in popularity, he lost his contract with RCA and cut his ties with the Melrose brothers, who he said had cheated him out of his money. That year he moved to New York City with his second wife, Mabel Bertrand, where they struggled to survive for the next five years.

  In desperation, Morton moved alone to Washington, D.C., in 1935 to try his hand at boxing promotion, but like so many other business ventures he had
undertaken outside music, it went nowhere. In 1936 he appeared on radio station WOL in Washington, where he hosted a program called The History of Jazz. Morton undoubtedly was seeking to promote his own music, but at the same time he had created what just may have been the first radio show on jazz in the United States.

  To most of those who stopped by the club in Washington, he was only an aging, failing musician who had run out of luck. But to cognoscenti, he was as close as they would ever come to a founding figure of jazz. Among his visitors was William Russell, an avant-garde composer and a percussionist for a Chinese puppet theater called the Red Gate Shadow Players. Russell, who would become one of the most important figures in the revival of New Orleans jazz in the 1940s, would continue to track Morton’s life for the rest of his own, and produce the mammoth “Oh, Mister Jelly”: A Jelly Roll Morton Scrapbook. Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, the Turkish ambassador’s sons, who were destined to be two of the most important figures in the history of the recording industry, dropped in from time to time. Murray Kempton, editor of the Johns Hopkins student newspaper and later one of America’s great journalists, was a regular, as was William Gottlieb, a writer for the Washington Post, who would later produce some of the most memorable photographic images of the jazz life. Alistair Cooke, a young British reporter breaking into broadcasting by borrowing American folk song recordings from the Library of Congress to use for his series of thirteen BBC programs I Hear America Singing, sat with Morton while getting tips on how to play the blues, which Jelly Roll delivered “in that billiard-ball baritone he rolled out for formal occasions.” “If you want to play the blues, boy, take it easy,” Morton told him. “Just chords, and cut out that picture-show right hand.” Finding Morton in such modest surroundings, Cooke said, “was like meeting the President at a shoe-shine parlor.”