Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  On July 25, 1943, Elizabeth and Alan rented an apartment at 242 East 19th Street in New York City, and Alan commuted back and forth to Washington. With two apartments to maintain, they were now even more behind in rent. Elizabeth was working for the newly organized Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs on Madison Avenue, a government agency that was created to improve economic and cultural relations between the nations of the Americas, and was headed by Nelson Rockefeller. From the beginning it was a controversial agency, accused of being a haven of Communist operatives, and of funding wildly expensive and eccentric cultural projects such as Orson Welles’s doomed Latin American film spectacle It’s All True. They were said to be infiltrated by Soviet intelligence, and by 1946 the agency’s functions had been transferred to the Department of State and elsewhere and it was disbanded. But Elizabeth was still able to be hired by the OWI herself in its last days, at $3,600 a year, and according to Alan she quickly became one of their “top-flight script writers ... working on an equal basis with Louis Untermeyer & others.”

  By October, with his deferment ending in less than two months, Alan grew ambivalent about the service. One day his letters to his father might speak of the need to get into the army “and see what needs to be done,” and his urge to “kill fascists.” On a different day another letter might show a different person:

  And my private opinion is the world’s a pretty mad place. The killing is beginning to get under my skin. You can be very reasonable about it, I know, but it’s being reasonable about unreason. You were lucky in being mature and settled before the First World War hit humanity so hard. I can feel myself changing. I can feel the weariness and bitterness creeping up in everyone I meet. This thing is too much to be endured.

  He may have felt that war was the rationalization of the insane, but he was nonetheless resigned to it. He had had two small operations in these two months to have a sebaceous cyst removed from the base of his spine as required for his eligibility to be called to duty.

  Meanwhile, Transatlantic Call completely engulfed him. He was almost always traveling and away from home, with a schedule that had him working thirteen-hour days. He took to the discipline and the regularity of the production schedule, but over time he found himself living only for the program he was producing. He managed to handle minor disagreements with CBS until a script he wrote on the TVA was returned to him radically changed. “I put the show on in despair, flew back to New York, and found out that the head of public relations for the utilities had been responsible for most of the changes. I resigned and decided to have my draft deferment ... be cancelled.”

  His induction notice arrived in January 1944, and he began to fret over what he had not accomplished and might never accomplish. He had completed all of the planning for the projects he had proposed to the OWI, but whether any of them would ever be realized remained a question. “This is strange, selfish talk in the middle of a world where men are dying for liberty every second,” he wrote his father. “I realize I have lost a lot of illusions. I think I’ll get them back when I get closer to the thing itself. That’s only a few weeks away and I wish the time were shorter. I look at my face in the mirror, shaving these cold, smoky mornings—it is the face of a young man who will be crossing a cold, hostile ocean into a world of hate and terror soon. It is a strange face to me. I have sufficient imagination to be a bit scared and admit that.”

  A week or so later, he wrote John Lomax again:

  Sometimes I wonder what it is that gnaws at the bowels of you and me, makes us restless, discontented, trying to our friends, sad and gloomy. Here I am, with a busy life, lots of people who like me, several who love me, somewhat admired and looked up to by a few, and I am as discontented as if I were a poor bum on the street. Indeed, I really regard myself as a good deal worse off. I know that you sometimes suffer the same way. I wonder what sort of thing it is that bothers us fundamentally. I am really worried about it, and may take the trouble and expense of going to an analyst to find out.

  Alan entered the army on April 5, 1944, at Camp Upton, in Yaphank, Long Island, a World War I-era base that had been reopened (and three years later would be closed again and turned into the Brookhaven National Laboratory). Camp Upton was a reception center where inductees were given inoculations and clothing, sworn in, classified, and after a few weeks sent elsewhere for basic training. There was little for him to do there (“the first vacation I’d had in years”) but camp maintenance, and Alan volunteered for kitchen work the first week, then worked on the camp newsletter. Radio programs he had written were still on the air, and five days after he arrived at camp, sitting in his barracks, he heard his script “The First Commando” broadcast on The Cavalcade of America.

  Alan’s radio work in New York City in fact had not really ceased. His friendship with the BBC’s Douglas Bridson continued, and on weekend leaves from the camp Alan introduced him to folksingers and spent evenings with him in nightclubs in Manhattan. Bridson was fascinated by Lomax’s speech, his energy, brashness, optimism, and his principles:

  In Café Society one night I was eating peacefully with a party of friends and talking to Josh [White] over our steaks. Sitting next to me, Alan Lomax suddenly jumped to his feet, seized the man at the table next to me and knocked him clean across his supper. Waiters rushed over, but saying nothing to Alan, threw the body into the street. I asked, in some astonishment, what the hell was going on? “He annoyed me,” said Alan, sitting down again. Five minutes later, the man came lurching back, protesting that he wanted to apologize. With a vigilant waiter on either side, he approached our party again and held out his hand: Alan rose, prepared to shake it. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” said the man, “I only said that I didn’t want to sit at the next table to a goddam nigger.” Alan hit him again, before the waiters could drag him away.

  Bridson hoped to get Alan involved in more of the BBC’s projects, such as one from the year before in which he had commissioned Langston Hughes to write a radio play about a black Londoner in the army, The Man Who Went to War, with Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Canada Lee, Josh White, Brownie McGhee, and Sonny Terry. Bridson had conceived of it as a “ballad opera” in the eighteenth-century tradition of John Gay and Henry Carey’s dialogue and song operas about the working classes, and Alan and Elizabeth selected folk songs for the play, with Hughes writing some original pieces. (Lomax and Hughes may have thought of it as being more along the lines of Zora Neale Hurston’s folk-song-based The Great Day, which had been performed in New York in 1932.)

  Hughes’s radio play was so popular in Britain that before Bridson returned to England for a new assignment, he asked Alistair Cooke to see if Alan and Elizabeth were interested in doing another folk opera, this one based on the Martins and the Coys, two fictional southern mountaineer clans engaged in a feud, a humorous, hillbilly Romeo and Juliet. It was a legend that had worked its way through pop culture from a nineteenth-century real-life feud between the Hat-fields and the McCoys, two extended families in Kentucky, to a 1936 recording of “The Martins and the Coys” that reached the hit charts in both the United States and England. With a substantial budget and a good cast, Bridson felt that they could again draw a big audience, this time perhaps in both countries. Elizabeth (writing under the name of Elizabeth Lyttleton) and Alan agreed to do it, she writing the script, he choosing the music.

  The prologue (written for Alan to read) illustrates how she recast the popular story:

  Tonight we bring you a new play, The Martins and the Coys, a musical extravaganza, based on the tall stories and the ballads of the southern mountains. These mountains stretch along the Atlantic Coast about two hundred miles inland, and in North Carolina and Tennessee, they reach their full dramatic height in a range named by Indians the Great Smokeys, because of the veil of mist that often hangs over their ragged and heavily timbered heights. Here, in many a walled-in cove and wooded hollow, lives a hearty breed of mountaineers—true descendants of the early American frontiersmen�
�still clinging to the ways of their ancestors: blood feuding and bear hunting, handicraft making and ballad singing. Poetry and song are as natural to these folk as ordinary speech. Some of their songs have come down to them directly from the Scottish border wars, some were made since 1941. Our play does not attempt to present a factual picture of mountain life, but portrays in a fanciful way the spirit and traditions of the mountaineers, a fighting breed that has been in this war, heart and soul, since long before Pearl Harbor.

  Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie were the lead singers, and the rest of the musical cast included Will Geer, Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, and Alan, with a group of actors added from Broadway and radio to shore up the drama. In Elizabeth’s script an isolated mountain community was widened out to include blacks and whites, street singers and soap stars, actors and the acted upon, moving ever outward to hint at the clan wars of Scotland and the battle between fascism and democracy. The Martins and the Coys was recorded in the Decca studios in New York in May, broadcast in Britain in June, and then issued for sale in the United Kingdom as a five-disc BBC Records album. This was such a successful production that the BBC later commissioned another ballad opera from Alan and Elizabeth, The Chisholm Trail, which was broadcast in the UK in February in 1945.

  After the induction process was completed, Alan was sent by train to Camp Crowder, near Neosha, Missouri, southeast of Joplin, on the edge of the Ozarks. The rumor among the troops was that this meant that they were all headed for the Signal Corps. Almost immediately on arriving, Alan came down with a painful case of carbuncles, with boils all over his lower body, and was sent to the camp hospital for almost a week. Next he developed a bad cold and a fever that he thought would lead to pneumonia, but which no one else took seriously. Yet in spite of his health, the disruption in his life, a weak right eye that kept him from being classified as a marksman, partial deafness in one ear, and having been dropped into what most people might think of as nowhere, Alan loved it. The pointless tasks, the instructional films, the sleepy classes, living in absolute equality, listening to the talk of the men—all of it made sense to him. He was one of them, the people, and that was all right. Or so his letters home said. The rumors about the Signal Corps proved to be correct, and as the days of training dragged on he discovered that he was afraid to climb telephone poles and froze whenever he tried it, dooming him to be a telephone operator.

  He soon established himself on the base as “the music man.” At an evening of entertainment in the recreation hall, Alan sang “Sam Hall” to what he said was “a shocked GI audience”:

  Oh, my name it is Sam Hall, it is Sam Hall,

  Yes, my name it is Sam Hall, it is Sam Hall;

  Yes, my name it is Sam Hall, and I hate you one and all,

  Yes, I hate you one and all, God damn your eyes.

  Oh, I killed a man, they say, so they say,

  Yes, I killed a man, they say, so they say;

  I beat him on the head, and I left him there for dead,

  Yes I left him there for dead, God damn his eyes.

  Etc....

  “I was billed as the World’s Greatest Authority on American Folk Song. That was in a sense, an apology, which I let go by, because I knew they didn’t think I could sing so that had to excuse [me] somehow.”

  One day an officer asked him how they could get white soldiers to sing like black soldiers when they drilled. Apparently he had heard that Russian soldiers sang together, and that it made them better fighters. But Alan warned him that they’d never get white soldiers to sing as a group. Shortly afterward he heard black troops counting cadence by using syncopated chants during their drills, and, fascinated by this intrusion of creativity into military procedure, he interviewed a Sergeant Barker about what he called “swing cadence.” “We used to sing ‘We Gonna Raise a Ruckus Tonight,’ ” the sergeant said. “We used to drill out from camp, and the boys would put in a lot of mansize verses, and it didn’t matter ... there weren’t no ladies around. We’d go on night hikes and everybody be tired, and we begin to sing and hell, man, we’d knock the 27 miles off like anything!”

  Alan wanted to find a way to record these drills so that he could send copies back to Washington to the Library of Congress:

  I was at drill one day, the whole camp was being inspected by the general and he said, “I want Private Lomax” so I was pulled out in front of the whole god-damned camp. He said, “What’s this I hear about this song that we have here, Lomax?” I said, well sir, it’s one of the great songs of my life, and I’m a song collector and I hope it can be recorded for posterity. He turned to the Colonel and he said, “Take charge, get this song recorded.” The next day they had the regiment out and the recording machine and we recorded it right there and then. And the General liked the record so much that he wore it out playing it over the camp loud speaker system and it never got to Washington.

  This black chanting so enlivened marching that officers were encouraged to let white troops learn it.

  Despite his cheerful letters home from camp, Alan was increasingly intensely bored, and had written Harold Spivacke and asked if he knew anyone who could find a place for him in the army where he might be more useful; Harold said that he would ask about military radio broadcasting. Within a month his transfer had been requested to Astoria, Long Island, by Erik Barnouw of the Armed Forces Radio Service, who had worked with Alan and Norman Corwin on several programs in the Pursuit of Happiness series for CBS in 1939 and was now in uniform in the military’s radio division. Alan wrote his family that he would still like to go overseas and take a greater part in the war effort, but he had just learned that Elizabeth was pregnant, and the move back to New York now “sounded rosier than Homer’s rosiest dawn.”

  By late fall 1944 he was back in the Village with Elizabeth, living at 67 Perry Street, and on November 20, Elizabeth gave birth to a girl, Anne Lyttleton Lomax. Alan’s letter to his family radiated with the delirium of a new parent, his helpless joy in the glow of the moment. She was the perfect baby, even more so, and he boasted even about being able to boast. He found similarities between Anne’s features and character and those of various family members, and promised pictures by Christmas (they were at the moment “kinda broke”).

  The sweetness of the new baby was not enough to completely sustain him, however, for within a week or so, he wrote his father that he was “having real soul struggles at the moment”:

  Pretty depressed. I haven’t got much stimulus in the office. It’s sort of sleepy and the people at the top lack courage, imagination and drive. They’re just holding down jobs. So I’m lazing along and it really hurts me where I live. There’s so much to be done. And in most ways I’d be much happier over the ocean taking what comes with my brother Americans. Also, I’m having a very hard time learning to be a writer. Don’t know if I have the stuff. Don’t have my folk-lore crutch anymore and I’m worried as hell about that. Go around sick at my stomach half the time because I’m afraid I’m not as good as I thought I was. Bad condition.

  His father, meanwhile, was writing him letters that matched his with complaints about illnesses and fears of having reached the end of his life.

  Alan’s first job for the Armed Forces Radio Service was making network radio shows suitable for overseas rebroadcasting by editing the commercials out and replacing them with messages and short musical selections. “I’m a bit lazy for the first time in my life. I really want to do nothing at all but stay at home and laze around the house. Never felt like that before, but that’s what I want to do and it makes work difficult.” Elizabeth had gone back to work almost immediately after the baby was born.

  During the day I’m mostly bored and frustrated, but I am told by everyone who’s been overseas that I’m a fool for wanting to go. Thing is, my motives are different from those of most guys. Nevertheless I feel out of things and isolated and you know what special service is like. I should be learning to write, but the army life is so lazy and things are so slack I rea
lly do little else but sit on my can all day long. Sometimes I wonder whether I’ll ever work up energy to work very hard again. Elizabeth is the breadwinner and, I must say, a good deal better provider than I was most of the time. We have a maid and wonderful food and a house full of furniture for the first time in our lives, money in the bank and a steadily growing pile of war bonds. And E. is growing into one of the best writers on OWI payroll, turning out shows which are avidly snatched up by the overseas stations. Things are very nice for her, for the first time in her life and she really blossoms.

  “If it weren’t for Elizabeth,” he wrote his father, “I’d never be able to finish anything. She helps me in every sort of way, but principally by admiring everything I do, or pretending to, so that I have the impetus to go ahead and finish the job.”