by John Szwed
Alan returned to the Folklore Institute at Indiana University in midsummer 1946 to lecture on “Certain Directions in Folklore Studies” and “Techniques of Field Recording,” this time with Svatava Jakobson, with whom he was now having an affair, and who joined him in giving the lectures. In New York he returned to producing concerts with a new urgency, raising money, scripting, staging, doing nearly all the work himself. He aimed to present the performers under the best circumstances he could manage and, if at all possible, in support of some cause that he favored. Nothing daunted him, not even the high ground of Carnegie Hall. And why not Carnegie, which from its beginnings had been made available for all kinds of benevolent and partisan causes? Duke Ellington’s 1943 premiere of Black, Brown and Beige, for example, was staged on behalf of Russian War Relief, a group created to help with the famines that drove many Eastern Europeans into Russia, and one that would be labeled a Communist front organization before the year was up. That spring, Alan organized a People’s Songs concert for Russian War Relief, with sponsors such as Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, former New York governor Herbert Lehman, John Hammond, and actress Helen Hayes. Alan was the concert’s master of ceremonies, or “narrator,” as the radio generation dubbed him.
The success of the concert was such that when he heard that Town Hall could be rented cheaply after the regular repertory was finished for the evening, Alan proposed to People’s Songs that they back him for a series of midnight shows built around musical themes. It was a risk, but he was counting on the public’s willingness to come out for late Saturday night concerts of musics to which New York had not yet been exposed. He would call the series “The Midnight Special,” “the train that would bring folk singers of every race and nationality to New York City.” He knew how to pitch these performances to the press with the passion of an Aimee Semple McPherson and the shrewdness of a P. T. Barnum:
We plan to cover the whole field of American folk music systematically in these concerts. Most of the people in the first few programs have been heard in New York before, but as quickly as possible we’re going to bring in unknown, unrecorded people who sing folk songs naturally just because they like to.... Right from the start these concerts are going to be different from anything that’s been heard in New York so far.... They’re going to be sort of conversation pieces. I’ll do the narration and explain the songs and the singers will tell stories and their life histories. And they’ll say the damndest things in the world on the stage. I know them. They’ve had experiences in the lost regions of American life. When the audience leaves they’ll know these people as human beings.
On November 9, a full house of fifteen hundred people had gathered in Town Hall when the stage lights went up at 11:30 for “Blues at Midnight,” the first of the concerts. The performers were Sidney Bechet on clarinet, Big Bill Broonzy, Pete Johnson, Sonny Terry, Billy Taylor on bass, Brownie McGhee, playing with his brother Stick, Roscoe Harris with a washtub bass, Jimmy Braswell on washboard (“with fifty-two attachments, mostly kitchen and garage oddments,” according to Alan), and pioneering New Orleans jazz bass player Pops Foster. The musicians played in different configurations throughout the evening, ending with an ensemble version of “Bye Bye Baby.”
The New York Times reviewer complained that “the adjective ‘great’ the narrator bestowed so liberally was not justified” by what he had heard that evening. But when composer Virgil Thomson reviewed the show for the New York Herald Tribune under the heading of “Differentiated Counterpoint,” he was so ecstatic over the performance of the trio of Sidney Bechet, Pete Johnson, and Billy Taylor that he devoted his entire review to just one piece of music, “Saturday Night Blues.”
Nine concerts followed over the next few months, mostly on alternate Saturdays, and included “Ballads at Midnight” on November 23, with Susan Reed and Alan Lomax singing, and “Strings at Midnight” on December 7, a wild matchup of flamenco guitarist Carlos Montoya with Pete Seeger playing banjo tunes in alternate sets. Alan wanted to contrast what he called the most distinctive stringed instrument technique in America with the most unusual guitar style that Europe had developed.
The concerts were remarkably successful, and gave audiences the intimate sense of being at smart nightclubs or Greenwich Village coffeehouses. But Alan wanted to push the borders of music even farther beyond the city, and on December 21 he presented “Calypso at Midnight.” Calypsos were not entirely new to New Yorkers, as the music had occasionally appeared on radio in the mid-1930s, and the Village Vanguard and even some clubs in midtown Manhattan were booking calypsonians by 1939. Because he wanted to communicate the sense of a Harlem West Indian social club rather than a downtown nightclub on the stage, Alan recruited singers and musicians—the Duke of Iron, Lord Invader, Macbeth the Great, and the orchestra of Gerald Clark—who had been performing in Harlem for years and had adapted the calypso somewhat to American tastes.
He made an effort to fill the stage behind him with an audience from Harlem who knew the music, the jokes, and the political references in the songs, so that their reactions would clue the audience how to respond and when to sing along. What the concertgoers heard that night were some of the calypsos that had already been turned into pop records (such as “Stone Cold Dead in the Market Place” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan from earlier that year, and the Andrews Sisters’ hit recording of Lord Invader’s “Rum and Coca-Cola”) and songs based on well-known historical events, like “Edward VIII,” about the Prince of Wales’s abdication of the English throne in 1936. Together, singers and narrator guided the audience into the complexities of the history of Trinidad and the musical forms that led to calypso, such as the group work songs, music of the Spiritual Baptists, “Bongo” songs (for waking the dead), hand drumming, and the battles of improvising singers that took place in the Trinidadian Carnival tents. There was even a staged stick fight with accompanying call-and-response music, and a calypso drama in full costume, something never seen outside of Trinidad. At the end of the evening the program was running overtime, but the audience urged the performers to stay.
The “Midnight” series squeezed two more concerts in before the end of the year with Burl Ives and Josh White, and continued in 1947 with “Spirituals at Midnight” and “Mountain Frolic at Midnight.” But the biggest success was “Honkytonk Blues at Midnight” on February 15, for which Alan called on performers who represented distinctly different approaches to the genre. One was Big Bill (William Lee Conley) Broonzy, born in Mississippi and raised in Arkansas, a farmer, miner, and redcap whose move to Chicago in 1920 led him to become a singer-songwriter popular among black audiences. Another was Memphis Slim (Peter Chatman), a pianist who found work in the heydays of Beale Street, drifted into rhythm and blues, later moved abroad, and became one of the most influential blues performers in Europe. The third, Sonny Boy (John Lee Curtis) Williamson, also from Tennessee, had traveled to Chicago in the 1930s to become the first widely known blues harmonica player and an important figure in the development of Chicago blues. There were few in the audience that night in New York City who had ever seen working blues musicians, much less those who worked the black club and dance circuits the way these three men did, and their performances were a revelation.
The three musicians stayed with Elizabeth and Alan, and after their Town Hall performance Alan took them to his office at Decca Records to record what started out to be a discussion on the blues, not intended for commercial issue, and not even recorded on studio equipment. (Alan used a Presto, much as he would in the field, a portable recording machine with a single microphone.) Memphis Slim started them off by singing “Life Is Like That,” a song about the ironies and trials of life, and for the next several hours the three men conversed while Alan listened. Talk about the blues turned to the causes of the blues, problems of love and work, the tribulations, humiliations, and absurdities of black life in the South, of chain gangs, murderers, lynchings, being tracked by dogs, but also of the pleasures and violence of jukes and b
arrelhouses, and of the blues as a medium of stories, a record of a way of life, a source of joy and an escape from pain. When they finished, they had produced an unprecedented collective autobiography and a document about the consequences of racism in America in the voices of those who had suffered from it. When Alan played the records back for them, even they were shocked by what they heard themselves saying and asked him to destroy them. After some urging, they finally relented and let him save the documents because of their historic value, but asked him never to reveal who had recorded them, for fear of what might happen to their families who were still in the South.
Alan knew that when Lawrence Gellert published texts of black songs of protest, some folklorists and political activists accused him of having fabricated them—the proletariat could not be that class-conscious, they argued. Even years later, when Gellert’s recordings were made public, there were still doubts about their authenticity. But Alan attempted once again to bridge the gap between the culture of working-class blacks and that of all middle-class Americans in a piece he wrote the following year for Common Ground based on this recording session, “I Got the Blues.” He fictionalized the session, placing it instead in a juke joint in Arkansas, with three musicians under the pseudonyms of Leroy, Sib, and Natchez. The article closely followed the accounts on the recording, but whether for verisimilitude or as a dramatic framing device, Alan inserted himself into the narrative asking questions that portrayed him as completely naïve about black life. In 1957 he produced an LP for United Artists entitled Blues in the Mississippi Night, which used fragments of the original recording while still maintaining the speakers’ anonymity. The full recording was finally issued in 1990, after all three men were dead and the civil rights movement had opened up the subject of race in America for public discussion.
On the day his Guggenheim Fellowship began, in February 1947, Alan wrote Henry Allan Moe, the president of the foundation, to give him a report on his activities since learning that he had been awarded a fellowship. Promise of the foundation’s financial support had liberated him, he explained, to do things he might not otherwise have attempted. By May he had decided to add a recording trip to his schedule, going back to Parchman Farm to determine what changes had occurred in the songs over the last twelve years, and perhaps also to see what he could accomplish alone, free of his father. A reasonably portable paper-backed tape recording machine had just been produced by Magnecord, and he thought that with its greater sensitivity and higher-quality sound he would be able to record the complex layerings in the work songs, and also be the first person to use a tape recorder in the field. With a longer-running recording medium he would be able to interview the prisoners to learn more of the meaning of work songs in their lives.
If he feared that the old-style singing would be on its way out, he was right—at least as a normal practice. But he did find a few exceptional singers who seemed to draw on even older African American traditions than those he and his father had heard in the thirties. “Early in the Mornin’,” a song that accompanied woodcutting, had all the elements—choral call and response, polyphony, a backbeat, a passionate, breathless call from “22,” the leader (Lomax published only the prisoners’ nicknames). Four men stood around a tree with axes, one pair at a time striking from opposite sides of the tree, their efforts timed by the weaving together of their parts (the blows of the axes are marked by slashes [ / ] below):
/Well, it’s early in the mo/r—in the mornin’,/
Baby, when I r/ise, Lordy, mama./
Well, it’s early every mo/r—in the mornin’,/
A-baby, when I r/ise, well-a./
Well-a, it’s early every mo/r, in the mornin’,/
Baby, when I r/ise, Lordy, baby,/
When Alan attempted to get these prison recordings produced in the late 1940s, there was no interest, possibly because every paragraph of the album’s notes that he had written mentioned the brutality of prison life and the need for radical reform. It was not until 1957 that he was able to get Tradition Records to release Negro Prison Songs from the Mississippi State Penitentiary and an English edition in the same year from Pye Records, called Murderer’s Home. The songs were all copyrighted in the names of the performers.
The lives of the people he recorded continued to intersect with his own, sometimes for the rest of their lives. He continued to find work for Lead Belly, though Huddie had not been well and wasn’t always able to work. Even though Jelly Roll died in 1941, he was still alive to Alan and many others who valued his contribution to the development of jazz. Art historian and jazz writer Rudi Blesh’s boutique record company, Circle, began negotiating with the Morton estate to bring out a limited number of sets of the recordings he had made with Lomax. According to Blesh, Morton had left instructions that certain of the big recording companies were not to have access to his interview with Lomax. An agreement was reached for Circle to issue a “dignified set of all useable sides”: “dignified” because some of the recordings were said to be pornographic, others repetitious. Lomax was not in favor of issuing the rougher songs, not so much because of their obscene content but because of their violence.
The Library of Congress resisted selling or giving away any of its recordings to recording companies, but continued public interest in those unheard master recordings led Spivacke to urge Alan to publish something about the Morton interviews to satisfy curiosity. Meanwhile, Circle Records got a court order instructing the library to make the recordings available, and finally in 1947 Circle began pressing some two hundred sets of forty-five twelve-inch 78 rpm recordings culled from the May and June Lomax-Morton sessions only and selling them by subscription under the title The Saga of Mr. Jelly Lord. There was no noise reduction or speed correction on the discs, which seemed to have been copied at too slow a speed, and they were edited to shorten and rearrange the spoken sections. Alan then asked the Library of Congress for a copy of his complete typed manuscript of the Jelly Roll Morton interviews so that he could begin work on a book about Morton.
He was still convinced that Woody Guthrie was one of the greatest writers of his time, and figured all Guthrie needed was a few breaks. Woody’s first novel, Bound for Glory, had appeared in 1943 and had done well enough for him to win the Rosenwald Fellowship for which Alan had nominated him, and now he was to begin work on another novel, House of Earth, a mini-epic about life in the Texas Panhandle. The first chapter confirmed for Alan the high praise he had given to Woody’s writing. “There was a moment in my life ... when I considered dropping everything I was doing, and just helping get Woody published. It was, quite simply, the best material I’d ever seen written about that section of the country.” But, as was often the case with Woody, he soon dropped the novel and went off in another direction.
When Alan wrote up a proposal for a new radio show, Hootenanny on the Air, a “folksong variety show,” he put Woody Guthrie and his Oklahoma friend Cisco Houston at its center, with Lomax’s old Texas friend John Henry Faulk as host. With the William Morris Agency representing them, they took his idea to CBS. The format was similar to that of Back Where I Come From, a jokey, casual exchange of musical ideas, but now with a wider range of music, and this time with Alan behind the scenes as writer and producer.
Alan shopped another show around at the same time, this one with the possible title of The Daily News, or Daily Ballad, or Singing the News. Only four singers would be heard on the program: guitarists Woody Guthrie and Big Bill Broonzy; pianist Lou Kleinman, a singer of smart cabaret songs; and the Duke of Iron, the calypsonian who also played a mutant instrument called the banjo-ukulele. Each had composed hundreds of songs, and all were quick to improvise lyrics on any subject. The show would simply be the four of them interpreting the news of the day:
This program will bring these masters of ballad making together into a network office at one o’clock in the afternoon. They will come with ideas and suggestions already developed out of the headlines and the human interest stories in that day
’s papers. Working with the writer-producer of the program, they will pick out the four or five song ideas for that day’s show, and they will develop and polish these ideas. By five o’clock the script will be typed and sent to the script editor’s desk. With a break for dinner the performance will be ready to go on the air with DAILY BALLAD by six-thirty or seven.
This was a tough sell: a collectively developed, virtually spontaneous script by performers who had a history of political ideas far from the mainstream, with no time for rehearsal or changes, put on the air live every day? Even Orson Welles’s freewheeling Mercury Theatre players would not be trusted with this format.
In December Alan again traveled to Parchman Farm, this time with permission to follow the men into the fields and record them where they accompanied their work with songs, and he was even able to interview some of them away from the other prisoners and the guards. He was again confirmed in his belief that the work songs were beginning to disappear with the coming of a new generation of inmates who considered them “old fogyisms,” but a few of the younger prisoners did still sing them, and several of the songs were among the most powerful and complex he had ever heard.