Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  The folklorist’s job was to describe and define the system of values in the people’s lore, and to show how those values relate to the cultural environments in which they exist. The task was to understand how those values operate in the work and lives of individual carriers and creators of folklore. Folklorists should be interpreters to the world outside the folk communities, but they should also champion these peoples who are subject to the control of the modern world. Besides, there was something that the larger world could learn from these people and their art: folklore was democratic in its content, and in the social relationships expressed in its narratives. It could only survive with a vote of approval from its audience. And the fact that it had diffused across boundary lines meant that it had the character of international democracy and was in many ways ahead of those with more advanced means of communication.

  Folklore may prove to be, not a romantic and colorful ragbag of the discarded and outworn ideas of humanity, but one of the great well springs of the democratic attitudes that have in the past two centuries begun to make for a more equitable life for all mankind upon this planet.

  Folklorists had explored the transmission of British folk songs to the United States and studied the differences between the two traditions. Now Alan was ready to undertake a study of the exchange of stylistic features across southern race lines in folktales, melodies, and dance patterns. This multiracial performance style was the chief characteristic of southern folklore, and something quite unique in the country as a whole. Understanding it might, he thought, put “a quietus, once and for all, upon the absurd notion of ‘pure’ folklore.” Lomax was proposing to turn what had been an antiquarian and literary study into a subject for social scientists (what Zora Neale Hurston called “Literary Science”), and he would do this by showing the degree to which whites and blacks shared a common culture, an idea that was by no means welcomed by most white Americans.

  Alan was released from the army with the rank of corporal on March 2. With the help of strong letters of recommendation from Harold Spivacke, Charles Seeger, Harold Thompson, Stith Thompson, and Ben Botkin, he was awarded a twelve-month Guggenheim Fellowship of $3,000 a year, to begin immediately. As soon as he heard he wrote the foundation to ask them to allow him to accept it while he held a part-time job at Decca, and also to delay the award until June, when he would be through with other work that he was still finishing. When June came he delayed it again until September, and then yet again until February 1, 1947.

  During this time he was helping finish To Hear Your Banjo Play, a twenty-two-minute film history of American folk music that he began writing and doing the narration for while he was still in the OWI. Alan worked with a crew that included three of the most important documentary filmmakers of the time: Irving Lerner, Willard Van Dyke, and a young Ricky Leacock. The film was set in landscapes that suggested WPA films or even Robert Flaherty’s, and featured Woody, Pete Seeger, Texas Gladden, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Margot Mayo’s square dancers.

  At the same time, John Lomax asked Alan to help him with a book to be called The 44 Best Ballads that would be made up of the cream of what he and Alan had collected. Ruth and Charles Seeger would again assist with the music and the arrangements, and he hoped it would sell better than Our Singing Country. But as soon as they began work on it, Alan made it clear that even though his father had collected most of the best songs, he wanted this book to be mostly his own: he would write the notes, and Negro spirituals would be the heart of it, since he considered them the best songs that America had produced. Their arguments began as they went forward with the project, and continued to grow with the number of songs selected, from forty-four to fifty-two, then to ninety-nine.

  John, who needed the money, knew that America had difficulty ignoring “best of” lists; Alan, on the other hand, saw this as an opportunity to create the first canon of strictly American folk songs. He avoided the ballads identified with England, left out children’s game songs and songs in languages other than English, but included political and labor songs, those he called “topical and progressive,” none of which would qualify as folk songs among most folklorists for any number of reasons. The methodology was simple: the songs were chosen by the extended Lomax family, and sometimes alternate versions were included where no clear “best” could be agreed upon, or composites of what they thought were the best of different versions. By the time the book that was now supposed to be called 99 Best Ballads appeared in print in April 1947, it had grown to 111 songs and was entitled Folk Song U.S.A. It was later reissued as Best Loved American Folk Songs, and again as Folk Song U.S.A.: 111 Best-Loved American Ballads. It was intended as a popular book, meant for singing, and the Seegers set aside their skills as accurate transcribers to present the tunes in straightforward arrangements for the average piano player. But it was also unquestionably Alan’s book, as the introduction made clear: “This is not calendar art, not escape literature (although there is much fantasy), or yet propaganda put out by some boost-America group advertising ours as the best of all possible lands and our people as generous and gay, well fed and genteel. Folk song, like any serious art, deals with realities—with poor boys a long way from home, with workers killed on the job, with bloody-handed murderers, with children dancing and fighting in the back yards.”

  For the first time, a songbook included a list of recommended phonograph records that would enable readers to hear the songs performed in the styles of the singers from whom they were collected. Alan’s notes on the individual songs drew on a wealth of sources, making it the most interesting and erudite of all the songbooks of its time. When he turned to sacred songs, he accepted Professor George Pullen Jackson’s widely accepted claim that most Negro spirituals resemble early white spirituals, but then turned the question around and asked how black singers reshaped white spirituals, and spelled out the stylistic features that ultimately make black song different from that of whites. He then argued that a folklorists’ equation that pitted Europe plus white America against black America was unbalanced if not racist: Africa needed to be brought in to rebalance it. Finally, he no longer separated white from black in different chapters, treating all their contributions as American songs.

  In this project Alan was writing about folk songs for a public that had never known them as anything more than campfire amusement or local color in Hollywood movies but was beginning to encounter them in Broadway theaters, on the radio, in nightclubs and concert halls. In the Christmas issue of Vogue he wrote “The Best of the Ballads” as a shopping list for gifts, drawing up a selection that included recordings by “unsophisticated country singers,” “commercial hill-billies” “city-billy ballad singers,” and even “art singers” from opera. In “America Sings the Saga of America,” an article in the New York Times Magazine a year later, he noted that there was a new consciousness of folk song across the country brought about by singers like Burl Ives and Josh White, who were growing in popularity; best-selling books like Ben Botkin’s new Treasury of American Folklore; and the Walt Disney folklore-based films about Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, John Henry, and others that were in the works. He explained that the major areas of American folklore—tall talk and tales, the Negro spiritual, the survival of the British ballad, the American ballad, and the folklore of the minority groups—may all have had roots elsewhere, but each nevertheless demonstrated a unique adaptation to American life. Though folklore is performed by individuals, he said, it is also the expression of the larger social group. It has been “voted on,” approved, and so “inherently rejects all authoritarian notions. It allows for the creative rights of the individual at the same time that it is flexible in its response to community sentiment”:

  Folklore can show us that this dream [“of democratic and peaceful plenty”] is age-old and common to all mankind. It asks that we recognize the cultural rights of weaker people in sharing this dream, and it can make their adjustment to a world society an easier and more creative process.

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sp; In this same spirit of explaining folklore to America, Alan organized a conference with his friends on city folklore at the Elizabeth Irwin High School in New York on May 4, 1946. To most people folklore concerned the past, the nostalgic, the dead and the dying, and no American academic or folklorist had ever before seriously considered city life as a subject for folklore. Yet here were Herbert Halpert, Yiddish collector and singer Ruth Rubin, Ben Botkin, Margot Mayo, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Alan presenting the very vital lore of New York City—street cries, folk songs from Harlem, the work of sandhogs (urban miners who dug the tunnels and sewers) and taxi drivers, children’s rhymes, Yiddish folk songs, square dances, and other ethnic folklore.

  At his job at Decca, Alan had been working on recordings with contemporary singers who he felt should be known by a wider audience, and whom he issued in what he called the Personality Series. Carl Sandburg was the first, recording Cowboy Songs and Negro Spirituals, which he followed with an album of poems, The People, Yes. Josh White’s Ballads and Blues was next, then Burl Ives’s Ballads and Folk Songs and Richard Dyer-Bennet’s Twentieth Century Minstrel. It was a commercial calculation, a foot in the doorway of American’s popular music. Alan intended to follow this series with recordings from the rural folks themselves, and he assumed that listeners would understand his logic. But he was deeply disappointed when Charles Seeger reviewed this first group of recordings without ever mentioning him, and treated the music as a symptom of the hybridization of folk art and fine art that Seeger said had already been under way in Europe for the last hundred years. Seeger pointed to the “prettiness” of the singing, the pretense and affectation of the stage performers, their lack of taste. The irony to Seeger was that these recordings were being released at the same time that contemporary fine art composition was “hybridizing” with folk music:

  During the past 100 years, Anglo-American folk music has been deliberately pushed aside, as “hick-stuff,” by protagonists of the fine art of music. The two idioms were technically and culturally opposed in many ways. The richly upholstered romanticism of cosmopolitan concert music could not tolerate the bare, unadorned, almost classic simplicity of folk art—and vice versa.

  Now, however, the vanguard of contemporary fine-art composition has come to prize certain factors in music above all others—the strong, bare, almost hard, melodic line, the austere harmonic and contrapuntal fabric, the steady tempo, the avoidance of sentimental dramatization of detail, in short, emphasis upon the very qualities that most distinguish the broad traditions of American folk song. It is not strange that this rapprochement is taking place at the present time. It is strange that it is so rarely recognized.

  But Alan continued on with his plan, and once the first “name” records were out, he turned to the project that had been in the planning at least from the time he assembled the RCA Smoky Mountain Ballads collection of hillbilly records for his father in 1940. In June and September he issued two anthologies of white country music, Listen to Our Story—A Panorama of American Balladry and Mountain Frolic, a selection of southern mountain string band tunes and square dances, both on the Brunswick label. Though Alan was limited by what was already available on Decca or the recording labels owned by them, and by what masters for those records still existed, he managed to include Blind Joe Taggart, Uncle Dave Macon, the Tennessee Ramblers, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Bradley Kincaid, the Crockett Family, the Reverend Edward W. Clayborn, Mother McCollum, Buell Kazee, Dock Boggs, and a whole array of American folksingers. In a bold move for record companies whose albums typically contained very little printed information on the cover, each of Alan’s albums came with a “Sing-Along-Book” containing the melodies and lyrics of the songs along with explanatory material.

  Seventy-five more albums were planned, including two anthologies already under way, Spirituals with Guitar and Careless Love, but sales were apparently not what the company expected, as no more reissues were completed. Alan did manage to get some rural singers their own albums, such as one for Cousin Emmy (Jo May Carver, the lady who preceded Bob Dylan onstage the day he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965), Kentucky Mountain Ballads, and he reissued two 1941 albums recorded by the Almanacs on Commodore Records, the new jazz recording company run by another Decca employee, Milt Gabler: Sod Buster Ballads: Folk Song of the Early West and Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads, both with notes by Alan. He was also obliged to produce albums of folk songs such as Roustabout Songs (based on a book of songs collected in the Ohio River Valley by Mary Wheeler) and Bayou Ballads, which were performed not in country style but in what Decca called “concert” versions, sung by Conrad Thibault, a popular radio and concert singer, with a full orchestra. Aiming at the current urban fascination with square dance, he produced three albums of dance music with calls: Quadrilles, Running Set, and Longways Dances. He also wrote the story for a Decca children’s record, Round Up Time in Texas, performed by Western movie character actor Andy Devine and the Cass County Boys.

  When he realized that this venture into mass culture was not turning out the way he had expected, he gave Decca’s music director, Gordon Jenkins, a copy of Folk Song U.S.A., hoping that a musician with so many years of production experience behind him would understand. Instead, Jenkins merely thumbed through it and handed it back, saying, “Mark the ones with commercial potential.”

  Whatever his disappointment with the project, the consequences of Alan’s work at Decca would turn out to be important for the folk revival that would begin in the 1950s. Dave Van Ronk, one of the key figures in that revival, recalled finding a copy of Listen to Our Story when he was first beginning to play guitar and sing. Then, twelve years after Alan’s Decca venture into reissuing country music, Harry Smith, another Greenwich Village dweller, would follow his example by creating a three-volume Anthology of American Folk Music for Folkways Records. Using Alan’s 1940 mimeographed “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records” and the reissued songs on Alan’s 1941 Smoky Mountain Ballads as a model, Smith created his own anthology on three long-playing records that helped revive older folk music. Smith’s reissues have been highly celebrated, and some commentators have used Lomax as his foil, arguing that Alan was opposed to commercial studio recordings, or that his own field recordings were never as interesting or important as the ones chosen by Smith. The first claim ignores his own bibliographies and commercial reissues, limited as they were to his adherence to copyright laws, and the second claim fails to see that in most cases Lomax intended his field recordings for very different purposes than Smith’s reissues.

  When Pete Seeger returned from the war he was on fire with ideas about changing the world through song. With the help of Alan, John Hammond, Oscar Brand, the remaining Almanacs, and representatives of the CIO, he created People’s Songs, Inc., a corporation designed to develop “tens of thousands” of union choruses for strikes, publicity, and as a means for increasing attendance at meetings. (“Just as every church has a choir, why not every union?”) “People” captured a certain feel of America at that particular moment. Echoing Marx, Emerson, and Whitman, it also reached back to the German Romantics, Alexander von Humboldt, and finally to the Constitution. The group as Pete conceived it, however, was far from romantic, but organized like a proper corporation, with an elected board and registered with the state of New York. Pete did most of the work of fund-raising, organizing meetings, making connections to unions and political groups, and running a small office in Times Square, and once Pete was in motion he was hard to resist. His energy and enthusiasm drew people in, and within a year there were write-ups in major papers and magazines, several thousand members signed up, fifteen thousand songs on file, and a four-person staff in the office. A monthly bulletin, People’s Songs, edited by Pete, contained traditional songs (often with new words), labor and topical songs, and news of members, some of whom wrote from jail, where they had wound up after supporting one strike or another. Pete and Earl Robinson set off around the country, singing on
picket lines, recruiting members, and opening up branch organizations of People’s Songs. They also launched a series of “Hootenannies” to raise money and attract new members. Time magazine sent a reporter to a hoot at Irving Place in New York, where he said there were two hundred onstage and a thousand in the audience, some of whom had brought along their guitars.

  Alan went up to Columbia University’s Teachers College to ask for help from the progressive educators there on getting people to sing, and found Professor Lilla Belle Pitts, famous for her belief in music as a force for change. Her goal was to create a musical culture of collective singing that would bring American communities together in greater tolerance and openness. Alan was quoted by Time as saying, “We’re going to put more into our songs than June moon croon spoon, and sing Senator Bilbo [the fiery segregationist senator from Mississippi] out of Congress.” With the success of this first New York City hoot, they scheduled two more for the following month in the larger Town Hall—a “Union Hoot” and a “Freedom Hoot.” Even with minimal publicity, the turnout for the Union concert was substantial, and the subsequent one was sold out.

  Their plans escalated into a proposed national cultural congress, a publishing company, radio programs, recordings. But the times were not with them. Some of the unions saw music as a necessary evil, especially when it was a style alien to their tastes; there was often open disappointment when the performers turned out to be singing hillbilly songs instead of jazz. Several unions dropped their ties to People’s Songs, included the CIO, whom they counted as their closest allies. Other radical political groups accused them of being out of date and out of touch. When People’s Songs held its first national convention in Chicago, only sixty people turned up, at least some of whom weren’t FBI agents. Alan recalled later that he “had the naïve impression that unions might be the best catalyst for creating a revival of American folk music. I tried to sell folk songs to unions as I did to Congress, music educators, and English teachers.”