Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Since Alan’s army pay was only fifty dollars a month, and they had to hire help with the baby while they were both at work, they were not as financially stable as his letter to his father suggested. He felt he had to do more to help with family expenses, and wrote Ben Botkin at the archive to send him copies of all of the Jelly Roll Morton material, because he wanted to turn it into a book. He also picked up a job as a part-time radio scriptwriter for CBS. Now Elizabeth and he were both working six days a week, Alan for the army by day and CBS by night, turning out script after script for his two employers.

  The first scripts he worked on for the AFRS were for a series called Singing America, morale-building dramatic episodes in American history involving little-known figures in heroic endeavors. “Clipper Ship Sailors,” for instance, reenacted the record-breaking voyage of the sailing ship Flying Cloud from New York around Cape Horn to San Francisco in eighty-nine days and twenty-one hours. If Alan’s previous scripts were small skits written as pretexts to showcase songs, now the songs were often fading back to incidental music.

  Then he received notice that he was being transferred, and at the end of July was sent off to Camp Lee, in Petersburg, Virginia, a training school for quartermasters and other odds and ends of military life. “I am in a basic training company, along with a mass of other guys from all over the country.... I will be sent to Special Service Training—which I have been trying to avoid since long before I got in the army. Special Service is the entertainment branch of the service—the hide out of all the vaudeville acts, the jazz musicians, the second rate writers, the neurotics, etc., in the army. The generals do not see any point in entertainment. The officers and men are not respected by the fighting branches of the army and their assignment is not taken seriously. Special Service people regard their assignment as a gravy train, the goof-off job in the service.”

  Once there, however, he got to know the men, and came to see both them and himself in a different light:

  There is much less to do here than at Crowder. Discipline is a good deal more relaxed. The food is better. There is a nice swimming pool. Last night I went to a soldier’s round table on “The British Election.” The boys, the soldiers are, as always, tougher and more cynical and more knowing than the underworld characters in Villon, in Victor Hugo, in Dos Passos, in Hemingway. In fact the more I listen to the conversation of my fellow-man, the more thoroughly I am convinced that no one has written any realistic literature, with the possible exception of Gorki. In my barracks there is every vice and depravity known to mankind, and a few more that have not been recorded; there is a lack of belief in anything; there is more corruption and conflict per square inch than any writer has ever recorded—and yet these are the best boys in the world. Christians, gentlemen, smart, rugged, full of vitality, witty, kind-hearted, friendly, naively loving and full of laughter. It’s something terribly hard to describe or explain. And I am convinced that every ship’s forecastle, cow camp, prison block, union meeting, pirate gang, and primitive Christian assembly has been just like this—with the small and superficial differences due to the year, the language, the nationality, the historical background of the groups. Here is something eternal, which I feel and appreciate, but do not understand well enough to really write about.

  Homesickness soon set in, however, and he again felt lazy and hapless and began living for weekend passes. With the end of the war with Japan in sight, basic training seemed more and more absurd each day, and Alan spent most of his time practicing on his guitar. When he heard that Ben Botkin had resigned from the archive, he suddenly saw a postwar role for himself, and imagined a boom in field recording ahead. He told his father that

  in between and underneath and through everything else I think about these things—a) What I’ll do after I get out—I’m still not sure—but I shall and must work up my own mind this time instead of having a job thrust on me or handed to me. b) How I can get out—appears to be at least a year more of it ahead, unless I can pull some strings. c) What is going to happen in Annie’s generation—the Negro problem—equal opportunity—democracy for the weak & oppressed peoples of Africa, Asia, etc.—establishing the four freedoms—keeping the world peaceful. And all around me I hear voices in disagreement—I feel the lines of the conflict already forming—and I begin to decide how I shall be involved, where I’ll be most useful. Actually, I struggle hard all day every day to establish some sort of disciplined personal life which will prepare me for the problems of civilian life. And I worry about how & where to begin.

  In the long days of waiting at the camp, he wrote many letters to his father, summing up his life to him, expressing his fears about his future, thanking him for what he had given him but also attempting to explain the principles that drove him forward:

  All my concern for the “hoi-polloi” came directly from living with you and hearing about your boyhood in Bosque and the struggles you had and then meeting the “hoi-polloi” in your company and discovering that their songs and stories and their strength were more wonderful and inspiring than anything I had hitherto bumped into. Otherwise my poor intellectual notions would have withered on the vine, long ere this, like those of so many people who once believed in the cause of the common man. I’m still very much for [Henry] Wallace [former vice president and then secretary of commerce] and for freedom of opportunity and against poverty and misery and oppression of racial and class and religious minorities. These beliefs I owe, like so much else in my life, not to listening to what you say so much as by watching you and getting to understand what kind of person you are. And I could no more give up those beliefs and feelings now than I could life, itself. Without them my life would completely lose its meaning and I would turn into a lump of shapeless and purposeless clay like so many people have and do every day. After the war is over I shall, if I have the strength and fortitude, concern myself much more directly than I have ever done in my life with the problems and concerns of the common man in this world. At this point I am working, much against my own inclination and with the greatest pain in the world, to make some sort of a writer of myself. If it turns out that I am to be only a mediocre and tepid writer, as I am afraid it will, at least I’ll have one tool a bit sharpened for the days of my life that lie ahead—and I know they will be grim days, but at least I’m going to go ahead and do what I think is right.

  In the first nine days of August the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and by August 15 the war was over. The word was that men of Alan’s age and at his stage of service might be kept in the service for another six months, maybe a year. Elizabeth’s job would be coming to an end now, so they had to find some source of income for the family. Alan wrote Harold Spivacke at the library and asked if he might be requisitioned for a job while he was still in the service, maybe as a song or documentary record specialist. But all that Spivacke would offer was a promise that he would “bear the matter in mind and if anything turns up let you know at once.” The first day he had off, Alan made appointments with several people in Washington, the most important of whom was Luther Evans, Archibald MacLeish’s replacement as Librarian of Congress. He reminded Evans that by law he was guaranteed his old job after leaving the service, and wondered if the whole process might be hastened by having the library request him from the military. Evans gave him some encouragement, and he went back to Camp Lee to wait.

  When no letter came from the library, Alan called Evans and found out that they had decided that he had voided his tenure when he took the job with CBS, and Spivacke already had someone else in mind for the job. All they could offer Alan was a recording trip of six months, or maybe a trip to Russia to study Russian folklore methods. A month later the library announced that they were now issuing albums of selected folk recordings from the archive for sale to the public. Since most of the recordings had been done by John and Alan, all the attendant publicity mentioned the two of them. In an interview for Time, Alan described the recordings as “plain and unadulterated folk song, usu
ally about death, sweat, hard work, love. No fancy-pants stuff like Oklahoma! Miserable people make the most exciting music I ever heard.”

  With his plans for the archive dashed, he began looking for an advance on a book, and considered taking the six-month recording offer from the library and then seeing if he could make a living as a writer on the South. Elizabeth had just learned that her job would be secure at least until June, and CBS was now offering her work as writer for an episode of the Helen Hayes radio show.

  Alan was ultimately transferred to an army public relations office in New York City in November to wait out the last four months before his discharge. Meanwhile, after years of neglect and little income, his father had completed his book on his work as a folk song collector, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, and Paramount had bought film rights to it; gossip columnists speculated that it would star Bing Crosby as John. Alan also found some work with the movies, as he, Elizabeth, and Nick Ray were offered $2,500 for advising on the music for a film version of Wilbur Daniel Steele’s novel That Girl from Memphis, a boy-meets-girl story set in the silver boom. The film was never made, nor was the one about his father’s life, but their names were now afloat in Hollywood, and RKO approached Alan and Elizabeth about writing some scripts.

  Most of this Hollywood buzz was tentative, so as soon as Alan was back in New York he went to Decca Records with a proposal. Decca was headed by Jack Kapp, whom Alan had met while searching out folk songs on commercial recordings. Kapp had created an American branch of the British recording company Decca in the mid-1930s, a period in which many record companies were going out of business. He had shrewdly built up his new company quickly by signing top artists such as Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers, and the Dorsey Brothers, and at the same time cutting the price of Decca records to thirty-five cents—less than half the cost of the other companies’ records. He also created several rural music sublines, and sent his brother Dave to record folk and country artists in what was the record companies’ equivalent of a field recording—hotel rooms in southern cities. Alan pointed out to Kapp that Decca and its family of labels—Brunswick, Vocalion, Gennett, and General—owned the rights to a collection of records aimed at country audiences that was second only to the Library of Congress’s, and if they hired him he could help them sell folk music not just to rural enclaves but to the entire country. Kapp sensed that the time seemed right to market country recordings on a bigger scale, and gave Alan a part-time job as editor of the Folk Music Series, for which he was paid $300 a month beginning on November 20, 1945. He was to search through the catalogs of their country recordings to find records that they could reissue, but also bring Decca into the contemporary folk song field by producing recordings for folksingers such as Carl Sandburg and Burl Ives.

  As Alan’s reputation as a folklorist grew and he sensed success close to hand, his old ambivalence about what he was doing grew with it. Was being a folklorist enough? What of his dream of being a writer? Was he forever to walk in his father’s shadow? This new job in the recording business forced him to ponder these questions, and he wrote a lengthy answer to himself. He had become a folklorist because his father had been a folklorist, and he had poured himself into the work:

  There was a cold frenzy in the way I worked. In the field collecting I was never satisfied with what I had found that day—no singer could make me feel that I had gone far enough. No schedule of driving and interviewing and recording, begun no matter how early and continued no matter how late, was enough to make me feel satisfied with the day’s work.... In the office of the Library, the same thing was true. It seemed to me impossible to quit at the end of the day. When I did get home, I slunk home, with a mountain of worries and anxieties about things undone on my shoulders.

  This cloud of anxiety hung so darkly over everything I did, that the work itself suffered. In the field, no matter how hard I tried, I could never keep a systematic notebook. In the office I could never seem to get around to cataloguing or classifying the songs. So behind me year by year, there accumulated an ever-growing black mountain of unfinished and unorganized work.... I never had time somehow to look into the books and articles that lay all around me in the Library. I skimmed them, glanced at them, hurried through them or overlooked them with a casual, contemptuous and anxious glance. So, when at CBS they called me a folklore expert, and even today when here at Decca they refer to me as the foremost authority on American folksongs, I get an inward feeling of nausea, due to guilt and what else?

  What were my own purposes in living this way? What are my reasons for continuing to immerse myself deeper and deeper in this quagmire of folklore? I know objectively that it is a world of beauty and wonder and that within it lie truths and beauties and discoveries about the soul of man that will help this world and the life of man upon it [be] a greener and less sorrowful thing. And yet, unless I meet folk-lore in terms of a living voice—on a record or in a person—something which I can control, I really have no interest in it. I think about only how to use to my own advantage, to the advantage of my friends....

  What are my own purposes, then? What do I like? What do I think about? What do I want? Why am I born? What path shall my feet follow? All the paths that have opened up before me so far have been the paths of other people—my father, Dr. Spivacke, Charley Seeger.... It’s not that I don’t know where I stand in my own field of folklore. I stand very much alone, very much in my own place making my own direction, carving a new direction for others to follow. But I am too uncertain of myself to feel strong in this. My convictions are strong—there are an earnest of my years of study in college, my firm political emotions, and the confidence that comes from months and months of actual collecting in the field. I know the kind of intellectual, moral and emotional structure that can be made out of folklore. It is a lack of personal conviction that is my problem.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Century of the Common Man

  The days crawled by in the army public relations office in New York as Alan waited to be discharged, and he filled the hours with daydreams of making a fresh start and working for himself. He applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in early 1946, when “post-Service” fellowships were made available to the flood of enlisted people who would be leaving the military. On his application his research plans specified “critical and creative writing in the field of American Folklore,” which included “the preparation of a volume titled Salt of the Earth and composed of folk biography and folk tales from the recordings of the Library of Congress,” and “a series of essays describing and defining the ‘functional’ approach to American Folklore.”

  He had already sent off a proposal for Salt of the Earth to several publishers, which he envisioned as a large book of around half a million words. It would be in the spirit of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but even more ambitious in scope and free of its pathos and tortured reflexivity. With it Alan would stake his claim as a leading voice of the South by “evaluating a region in a new way—in terms of the creative potentialities of the common people who have made its folk culture”:

  I propose to make a book out of these lives, out of the fire that burns in the hearts of these artists of the common man. This book will be, not alone a study of how folk-lore is born, how it grows and changes, but an evaluation of the creative potential, the best seed one can find in the South. The rest is decay, corruption, terror and blind prejudice.

  The people who vote for Bilbo, who are swayed by Pappy O’ Daniels—the lynchers and the lynched—the Jeeter Lesters and the Porgys—these are the ballad makers, the yarn-spinners, the blues-moaners, the square dancers, the yodelers, the creators of the spirituals and of jazz. Their language and their character gave force and substance to Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath, Look Homeward Angel, The People, Yes, Uncle Remus. Their sweat and their conviction have transformed the used-up Tennessee Valley into exhibit number one of our American democracy.

  “No dialect,” he said, “no folksy prose reconstructe
d from notebooks. But the full-blown prose of the great folk talker. Prose that at times is very close to the best writing of the great novelists. Prose, transcribed and edited for sense and for beauty directly from recordings.”

  The first section (“White Oak”) would contain a series of portraits: Elmer Smith, a Blue Ridge Mountain balladeer and fiddler, and an inheritor of English and Scots ballads and church songs; Roy Acuff, the hillbilly star; and the life story of a Holiness Church preacher. There would be autobiographies of Woody Guthrie and “Kentucky Fireball” Aunt Molly Jackson. He’d tell the story of the “Lintheads,” the land-starved mountain people who work in southern mill towns; the epic of the Okies as reflected in their ballads and interviews; and the saga of the TVA and the changes it brought to the people along the Tennessee River. “Black Oak,” the second part, would begin with the life of an African American levee camp worker and lead into the story of the blues and Big Bill Broonzy’s autobiography. Jelly Roll Morton’s portrait of the city of New Orleans and the birth of jazz would be included, and railroad workers’ labor and music, the life and poetry of the penitentiaries, and the work of the cotton industry in Coahoma County, Mississippi. There would be accounts of the black Holiness people and of a black Baptist preacher, along with texts of his sermons. The final section (“White Oak and Black”) would tell the story of the new industries of the South, where “Negroes and whites are working together and joining unions side by side. This chapter will be the story of unity in the growing labor unions of the South, shown against a background of Ku Klux prejudice.”

  The other book he planned to write, a collection of essays on folklore, was aimed at “fellow social scientists” and would cover the literature of the nonliterate population of Europe, which was until only recently the lore of the agricultural classes and was the common heritage that crossed national and linguistic borders. Whether the people had created it themselves or merely preserved it from the past, it was a reflection of their values—their problems, ideals, hopes, dreams, and fears—and their acceptance of these values was evident from repetition and re-creation of those stories and songs, even where, he noted, “the neurotic and anti-social patterns of folklore represent part of the adjustment of an oppressed group.”