Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  They buried Grandpa Joad by the side of the road,

  Grandma on the California side.

  When the recordings appeared in the summer of 1940, the New York Times classical music critic, Howard Taubman, wrote of them, “These albums are not a summer sedative. They make you think, they may even make you uncomfortable.... The albums show that the phonograph is broadening its perspective, and that life as some of our unfortunates know it can be mirrored in the glistening discs.”

  At the same time as Alan was producing Woody’s records, he promoted two other sessions with RCA for Lead Belly. The songs were to be some that Lead Belly already knew, plus others that the Lomaxes had collected in prisons. The first was titled The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs, and it, like Woody’s album, would become one of the first concept albums—songs grouped together around a single subject or theme. Alan also had wanted the Library of Congress to issue its prison field recordings to the public through RCA, but since the library was still leery of competing with commercial companies he decided that a studio recording would be the next best thing. To get the feel of a prisoner singing to other prisoners, Lomax suggested that Lead Belly be recorded with the Golden Gate Quartet. Wetherald discussed it with the Gates after a performance at Café Society, who told him that they knew nothing at all about prison songs—their repertoire was largely based on what they had sung in church. Even though they crossed into popular and blues territory in their club appearances, Wetherald worried that their singing was too polished and formal to be convincing in folk songs. Lomax’s answer was that Lead Belly would teach them how to sing it. The Golden Gates, Alan later wrote, “learned these songs from Lead Belly by rote and after the first rehearsal or so were already forcing him to sing his best to keep the lead. The result is not complete authenticity, but I believe the nearest thing to it that could be achieved away from the prison farms themselves. There is a growling, surly, unison-based strength in these discs that I have not heard in other records.” Lomax’s job as producer was to rehearse the singers, supervise the recordings, teach Lead Belly songs (such as “Take This Hammer”), and prepare notes to go with the records, for which he was to be paid a two-cent royalty for each two-sided record they sold. These records were issued on RCA Victor, RCA’s principal record label, rather than the cheaper Bluebird, because Alan was able to convince the company that it had a chance for sales to whites.

  The second set of songs by Lead Belly, a solo album, was issued on Bluebird, but neither set sold well. It was clear that Lead Belly would never become a widely popular performer, but he remained a favorite for left wing fund-raisers and theater productions. He would be invited to Roosevelt’s inauguration, play the Village Vanguard with Josh White, and sometimes turn up in august company, as when the following year he performed at the American Music Festival at Hunter College with Benny Goodman, Roy Harris, Tommy Dorsey, Aaron Copland, and Hazel Scott. But he was still barely making a living.

  For much of March and April, Alan was sick with throat infections, but he managed to get through his broadcasts and even become involved in another media project, the formation of a small film company with three of the most socially conscious filmmakers of the time, all of whom were destined to be important figures in the history of cinema—Joris Ivens, Joseph Losey, and Nicholas Ray. They proposed to begin by making three ten-minute films under the Library of Congress’s sponsorship, one by each of the directors, with Alan writing the scripts. Ivens was already much acclaimed as a documentary filmmaker in Europe, a master at integrating film and music, and in the United States had made the antifascist film The Spanish Earth, and had directed Power and the Land for the Department of the Interior. The other two were just finding their ways into the movies, Losey going on to direct such feature films as Accident, a remake of M, Modesty Blaise, and Mr. Klein, while Ray would be the director of Rebel Without a Cause, They Live by Night, In a Lonely Place, and many others. The four of them planned to make films about the Holiness Church, spirituals, railroad songs, and music of the Southwest, each of which would be aimed at theatrical release, with their earnings going back into a fund at the library to make future films. They hoped to get the Rockefeller Foundation to give the library a grant for the projects, or the Pan American Union, but after a year of trying they were never successful in raising funds.

  Herbert Putnam retired as Librarian of Congress in the fall, and Archibald MacLeish was almost immediately appointed by President Roosevelt to succeed him. MacLeish had been many things: a poet, a lawyer, a playwright, an editor of the New Republic and Fortune magazine, and he had distinguished himself in all of those roles. He had even done a bit of folk song collecting in Arkansas. Yet the American Library Association raised objections to his appointment because he was not a trained librarian, and some members of Congress objected to his embrace of leftist causes. (The term “fellow traveler” was coined to apply to MacLeish himself.) But President Roosevelt ignored their complaints, since what he wanted was someone he could count on to support his policies and help him reach out to the public.

  MacLeish already knew Alan’s work before he became head of the library, and he gave him complete support in his activities in and out of the archive. Having written radio plays himself, he was especially interested in Alan’s work in that medium. When Lomax was offered a second year of The American School of the Air—now under his own subtitle, “Wellsprings of Music,” to be broadcast three times a week to what CBS projected to be an audience of fifteen million listeners—MacLeish enthusiastically approved it. These new programs were so successful that the National Association of Music Educators adopted folk songs as a focus for public school teaching, and one program, with Woody Guthrie, won an award as best Music Education Program of 1941. Alan had grown comfortable enough with the program that he even managed to slip his sister Bess in for duets with him when he could get the dean at Bryn Mawr to allow her to miss classes. For its part CBS was so pleased with Alan’s work that they offered him a chance to create a second folk song program to run in the same season. This one would be aimed at adults, and would need more sophisticated scripting, so Nick Ray was brought in to write and coproduce, and Clifton Fadiman, a well-known editor, literary critic, and host of a popular radio show, Information Please, would be the master of ceremonies—a compromise, as far as Lomax was concerned—to make the show “a commercial possibility.” Not all of the guests on the new show could read, so the script and many of the songs would sometimes have to be taught orally—like folklore.

  Nick and Alan next worked up a pilot titled “Back Where I Come From” to try out on the CBS summer series Forecast on August 19, 1940. “We wrote a script about the weather with all the members of our cast,” Lomax recalled. “We had Adam, we had Noah, we had the busboy, we had all the American folklore of the weather in this one show, and it had an all-star cast of the greatest singers in the US.” Josh White did a sermon on Noah, Burl Ives did “Foggy, Foggy Dew,” and Woody Guthrie sang about the Dust Bowl.

  WOODY: Hear you fellas talk ... you’d think that all the great storms of American history, by George, happened way back yonder. That ain’t true. You know, storms’ve hurt people, they drive people out of their homes and they take their livin’ away from ’em—and that very thing’s a-happenin’ right today, back in the dust bowl where I come from.

  CLIFTON FADIMAN: What about this dust bowl, Woody Guthrie?

  WOODY: Well, I come from Okemah, Oklahoma ... now, out in that country ain’t nothin’ in the world to stop that north wind but a barbed-wire fence ...

  (WIND SOUND EFFECTS)

  That dust bowl hit, and it hit like thunder,

  And it dusted us over, an’ it dusted us under,

  Blocked out the traffic, covered the sun,

  And straight for home all the people did run,

  Singin’:

  Chorus (entire cast):

  So long, it’s been good to know yuh ...

  CBS was encouraged by the pilo
t to offer Alan a contract for a program three times a week, even though they had not been able to find a sponsor. The new series began in August, in prime time, with coast-to-coast broadcasts, featuring many of the performers from his other programs, plus some new ones, like jazz musicians Sidney Bechet and Bunk Johnson. The programs opened with an announcer setting up the topic: “Back where I come from we always say ...” Then the cast came in with what they might have been saying in their different communities about the subject of the day—travel, for instance:

  JOSH WHITE: When a woman’s blue she hangs her little head and cries.

  WOODY: And when we got mad and slam the door in her face,

  We holler back, I’m going so far it’ll take a dollar to send me a postcard.

  WILLIE JOHNSON (of the Golden Gate Quartet): I’m gonna buy me a ticket just as long as I am tall.

  WOODY: Sometimes that ol’ road gets littler and littler until it just naturally runs up a tree.

  GOLDEN GATES (sing):

  Look down. Look down, that lonesome road,

  Before you travel on.

  From there the cast went on to sing the songs from which each of those lines came, and in between the singers joked and sometimes argued among themselves as they moved from one part of the country to another through radio’s magic. The subject might be anything: “ Who knows a song about ... animals, food, workers and bosses, traveling?” Alan would weave a great variety of songs with a certain amount of spoken continuity, and “Nick was behind the glass window telling us to speed it up or slow it down, pointing up cues.”

  Taking direction was not something for which everyone in the cast was ready, however. Woody especially felt intimidated by Nick’s giving him cues, and told him he froze whenever he pointed to him. Nor did he like the idea of anyone having control over what the performers said. So when Nick suggested that Alan drop Lead Belly from the show because listeners would have trouble understanding his southern accent, Woody was furious and quit the show. Alan managed to talk Nick into a compromise of letting Josh White speak Lead Belly’s lines in a different voice, while Lead Belly continued to sing on the show, but it was too late—Woody was gone.

  The individual programs were now reaching ten million students in two hundred thousand classrooms. CBS had expanded into international broadcasting, adding stations in Canada, Hawaii, and Alaska, and in 1941 began to provide translators to reach twenty-six other nations. To launch worldwide programming, CBS would sponsor in Mexico a global conference of a thousand broadcasters in February 1941, where Alan spoke and gave a demonstration of his program along with talks by Nelson Rockefeller from the Pan American Union, the president of the American Museum of Natural History, and the Mexican ambassador. Alan’s reputation had grown to the point that a lecture bureau was acting as his agent for talks and folk song performances. He chatted with Sam Goldwyn about film possibilities, and Mrs. Roosevelt invited him to an evening at Hyde Park. But despite this success and high visibility, Back Where I Come From never picked up a commercial sponsor. The program ran for only twenty-one weeks more before it was suddenly canceled in February, 1941. Alan put the blame on CBS president William Paley, who he claimed “hated all that hillbilly music on his network.”

  CHAPTER 8

  A Bourgeois Town

  By late summer of 1940 all the talk in Washington was of war. It had moved from possibility to inevitability, and the government was increasing orders for armament and setting up mechanisms for rationing goods essential to combat, while Congress was debating the draft. Thinking that the Library of Congress would soon be ordered to change its priorities, Alan wrote a series of memos to Spivacke with suggestions for the role the archive might play in wartime. He still believed that the American people needed a national discussion on American identity, or what it was supposed to be, and he thought that folk song had already done some of that work for them. All that was needed was to make those songs better known to the public, and the military bases where large groups of men might soon be gathered by the draft would be the places to begin:

  I need not overstress my opinion that “God Bless America” and Kate Smith are both extremely dull and mediocre. They have both been elevated to an artificially astronomical position by the power of mass advertising and the star system. One of our contributions to the integration of the people and, specifically, of the conscripts would be to find and help encourage all sorts of poetry, songs, and talent of all sorts among the conscripts and give it publication or a place to be heard. We can work through the NYA, the WPA Arts Program or whatever other agency will be concerned with the recreational activities of the men to encourage and foster the poets and singers of the camps.

  The plan he developed would have the library sending out recording trucks to the military camps to find the talent and record it, and then send the music back out to the camps by record and radio. Word was that Roosevelt would be instituting the draft any day (in fact, he signed the Selective Service Act a few weeks later, in September), and Alan wanted to move quickly to make up songbooks that would be used to ease the transition from civilian life for the new draftees. There would be different books for the West (West of the Mississippi), South (Down in the Valley), North (From Maine to Washington), and, given the segregation of the armed forces, African Americans (John Henry), with each containing twenty-one songs arranged by Charles Seeger for group singing, and chosen for their appeal to men. Each book would feature a different folk hero—Pecos Bill, Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, and John Henry—with illustrations drawn from the Index of American Design, the WPA’s book of regional art styles. But this would only be a first step: why not also have these songs arranged so they could be played by string orchestras or marching bands, and used for radio music and film scores? And why not have them recorded by pop singers like Maxine Sullivan and Frances Langford so that they “would be more useful than they now are in Cecil Sharp’s ten dollar treatise on ‘English’ folk songs of the Southern Appalachians”?

  Another proposal from Alan would have Nick Ray and himself produce radio programs for the library in which a roving reporter would travel across the country, stopping along the way and visiting homes where the people struck up a song or told a tale. Or maybe they could send an American reporter to visit a Latin American country and connect the two continents through song and story? Archibald MacLeish loved the idea, and joined in by spinning out his own variations on the theme—foreign reporters could visit American homes and discover what it meant to be American; or members of Congress could tell stories about themselves and the people in their districts and states.

  Just before Christmas the Library of Congress announced “A Festival of Music Commemorating the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Proclamation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States,” a four-day celebration of the abolishment of slavery that included paintings, manuscripts, book exhibits, and music by African Americans. The music committee for the event was made up of some of the country’s leading black intellectuals and composers—Henry T. Burleigh, Lulu B. Childers, Alain Locke, William Grant Still, and R. Nathaniel Dett—and what they developed was four nights of performances that boldly declared the richness and depth of African American musical culture. The Budapest String Quartet played works by black composers, and two opera singers included spirituals and works by black composers in their recitals. The third night, December 20, was announced as “A Program of Negro Folk Song with Commentary,” and the concert was held in Coolidge Auditorium, a hall that Lomax never tired of reminding people had been built for string quartets and the music that America had inherited from Europe. The significance of the venue was even greater because only the year before the Daughters of the American Revolution had prevented contralto Marian Anderson from performing in their building, Constitution Hall.

  The evening’s music was deeply moving, with the audience both in tears and in jubilation, sometimes joining in on the songs. But there were also didactic moments when the songs w
ere interspersed with recordings from the archive and talks by Alain Locke, Sterling Brown of Howard University, and Lomax, the one white participant, now being publicly acknowledged as an authority on black folk culture. All of them saw what they were doing as both a cultural event and a political act, since integrated audiences and performances were hard to find in D.C., or anywhere in America. But to break the social codes and to present African American cultural accomplishments “in a dignified manner,” as Professor Brown put it, was a milestone.