Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  While he was recording, a blizzard struck the farm, and the men stood in the woodyard in six inches of snow “while their axe blades glittered blue in the wintry light, and they bawled out their ironic complaint” to “Rosie,” in an old Parchman song led by S.B.:

  Be my woman, gal, I’ll be your man.

  Be my woman, gal, I’ll be your man.

  Be my woman, gal, I’ll be your man.

  Every day is Sunday’s dollar in your hand.

  In your hand, Lordy, in your hand.

  Every day is Sunday’s dollar in your hand.

  The leader’s words were responded to by the group singing the last words of each of his lines so that they overlapped with him, with the syncopation shifting throughout and the strong beats—where the hoes or hammers or axes struck—always in the same place. The result was a feeling of urgency, forward motion (some might say “swing”), a powerful oneness in the task, all this within a song about a girl who promised loyalty but failed to wait until a prisoner was set free:

  O Rosie,

  O lawd gal.

  Stick to the promise that you made me.

  Wasn gonna marry till I go free.

  Choppin in the bottom with a hundred years,

  Tree fall on me, I don bit mo care.

  O Rosie,

  O lawd gal.

  Lomax knew that the only way these verses could be appreciated was by hearing them performed, if “performance” was the word for the emotional expression of men sweating their lives away in the fields. Knowing it might be years before they were issued on recordings, he struggled to make his readers grasp their power and significance in print:

  Here is poetry that rings like a hammer on an anvil, that bites the heart, that trills like a bird. Nowhere else in earlier African-American or American folk tradition does one find such disciplined and poignant rhymed couplets. When I transcribe them from field recordings, I am always reminded of the Greek Anthology. Indeed, the fire of the Mediterranean copla and stornello stand in the background of this workman’s poesy. And this spare and plangent worksong verse is plainly the main source of the poetry of the blues.

  Alan attempted to write up some of the horrors he had seen in the southern prisons and learned about from the inmates in an article called “Burning Hell,” but wasn’t able to find a magazine to publish it, and it was not until 1993 when he published The Land Where the Blues Began that he was able to make these observations public.

  John Lomax turned eighty-nine just as he published his autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, and was invited by an old friend to speak in Greenville, Mississippi, in January 1948. He had not been well, and initially resisted accepting, but finally agreed to it if they could talk Alan, whom he had not seen in over a year, into coming. Alan had already planned to squeeze in more Mississippi fieldwork before his fellowship ran out in January, so it was settled that there would be two days of dinners, talks, and performances on January 23-24. The second day was declared “John Lomax Day” by the mayor of Greenville. The governor would attend, along with local luminaries such as Hodding Carter, the publisher of the Delta Democrat Times.

  John was met at the train by a local crowd of well-wishers, who took him to his hotel where Alan, local journalists, and old friends were waiting. It turned into a homecoming party and informal press conference, with John talking, drinking, and singing a few songs, when he suddenly fell to the floor with a heart attack and never regained consciousness. The dinner was canceled, but Alan gave the program that he and his father had been scheduled to do together. John died two days later.

  The year before Alan had began to undergo what he called “strenuous” psychoanalysis. He had found an analyst, Peter Neubauer, willing to take him on for virtually nothing, and he quickly became a believer in the process and language of analysis. He felt spirited, free from his past, and certain that his work would be better as a result. His conversion was so striking that he urged others, especially folklorists, to undergo analysis to better understand the psychodynamics of the arts of the poor and the marginal. But perhaps the single most important issue he worked on was his relationship with his father, and he hoped that he was at last becoming his own man and taking the study of folk song somewhere his father had never considered.

  And yet now here he was, standing in for his father, playing his role. In this moment of crisis, he went back to what he had always done—set off into the field looking for songs. Only a few days later he was sitting in the Rose Hill Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi, recording black sermons, hymns, and spirituals. As he worked his way into Texas, he recorded again at the Friendly Will Baptist Church in Austin. When he reached Dallas, it was the True Light Baptist Church. He only ceased to record when he entered the church for his father’s funeral.

  With his fellowship having run its course, Alan began looking for a job, and in March he briefly became involved with John Steinbeck’s film company, World Video, to provide arts programming for television, which was beginning to look like a serious medium. Elia Kazan was contracted to do theater projects with Actors Studio, Ilka Chase would do tours through Paris’s haute cuisine, and Lomax would develop folk song projects. Nothing ever came of the company, but on his own Alan tried to convince a television company to give him a series based on folk songs and folksingers. Again there were no takers.

  At a time when celebrity disc jockeys were being hired by the networks (bandleaders Paul Whiteman, Duke Ellington, and Tommy Dorsey among them), Alan joined Mutual Broadcasting as the first folk song DJ on a program called Your Ballad Man. Mutual gave him a contract for a year, paying $200 a program if they could not find a sponsor and $500 if they were able to sell commercial spots. The best experience he’d ever had in radio is how he described it. He’d walk in off the street with a pile of records and improvise his comments for a half hour. “I have been able to talk about race relations, psychological problems and the oneness of the human family, as well as purely folkloristic matters.” Being a DJ was “not nearly as bad as it sounds.”

  The show gave him the opportunity to draw on everything he’d learned about American music, and every week he strung together an unpredictable set of songs over which he riffed with a fan’s passion. On July 24, for example, he played Red Foley’s “Freight Train Boogie,” Milton Estes’s “When the Fire Comes Down,” Leroy Carr’s “Papa’s on the Housetop,” the Sons of the Pioneers’ “Cool Water,” the Selah Jubilee Singers’ “It’s Cool Down Yonder by the Chilly Jordan,” Richard Dyer-Bennet’s “Three Ravens,” Jo Stafford’s “The Nightingale,” the Jubilaires’ “Jube’s Blues,” and Sidney Bechet’s “Saturday Night Blues.”

  If there were some who still thought of Lomax as a folk purist, his programming should have disabused them. Burl Ives and Woody Guthrie were weekly favorites, but so were the jazz bands of Woody Herman and Bob Crosby, and also Jo Stafford, the most popular female vocalist of her time. Just as Alan took on the show, she stepped away from pop music and jazz and recorded American Folk Songs, becoming the singer that Alan played more than any other. Sometimes he worked the latest trends or recent films into the show, as he did with Robert Mitchum’s “Oh He Oh Hi Oh Ho,” which Mitchum had sung in that year’s film Rachel and the Stranger.

  Alan continued to seize every opportunity to make appearances, give talks, and organize concerts where he might get across his message of popularizing folk music. When he heard that there was an “Annual Festival of Contemporary American Music” at Columbia University’s McMillan Theater, with four days of what they were billing the best music the country had produced, performed by the CBS Symphony Orchestra, the Juilliard String Quartet, and others, he convinced the concert organizers that folk music was part of American music too. They gave him the evening of May 15, 1948, for a program titled “Ballads, Hoe-Downs, Spirituals (White and Negro), and Blues.” To get the full variety of American folk song, he brought in Texas Gladden and her brother, Hobart Smith, from Virginia; from Alabama, singer Vera
Hall; Jean Ritchie, a young woman from Viper, Kentucky, whom he had met at the Henry Street Settlement School in New York; and Pete Seeger, Brownie McGhee, and Dan Burley. Alan later said it was the most successful concert he’d ever done, even though some of the performers had never been in a concert before: “The audience was academic, young and liberal, refused to leave the theater, they wanted to stay with these people forever.... The guards had to clear the place.” While the singers were in New York, Alan recorded Gladden and Hobart and introduced them to Moe Asch, who produced albums by each of them for his Disc Record Company, with Alan writing the notes.

  In order to draw the press’s attention to People’s Songs, which was continuing to have financial difficulties, Alan assembled an honorary group of sponsors, though the board thought the idea clashed with the populist ideals of the project. But even with names as luminous as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Dorothy Parker, John Hammond, and Oscar Hammerstein II, their financial problems were not to be solved easily. One of their biggest and most expensive projects, The People’s Song Book, was also struggling. Packed with union and political songs, the songs of American slaves, bitter ballads from poor southern whites, and even songs of freedom from other parts of the world, the book had little relation to what most people understood folk songs to be. In his foreword, Alan made his politics clear:

  At first I did not understand how these songs related to the traditional folk songs, such as those you will sing in the section called Songs That Helped Build America. I began to realize that here was an emerging tradition that represented a new kind of human being, a new folk community composed of progressives and anti-fascists and union members. These folk, heritors of the democratic tradition of folklore, were creating for themselves a folk-culture of high moral and political content. These home-made songs of protest and affirmation shared the permanence of the people’s tradition, but were most positive and more sharply critical than the familiar ballads.

  He had one idea left to save People’s Songs: the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. Wallace was an Iowan who had served as secretary of agriculture, one of the two Republicans President Roosevelt appointed to his cabinet. A hardworking, dedicated advocate of conservation and modern farming, he was also a believer in civil rights, had created food stamps and lunch programs for poor children, and had attempted to negotiate foreign trade agreements that assured fair pay and safe working conditions. When Roosevelt began planning for his third campaign, he picked Wallace to be his running mate over the objections of many in the Democratic Party. Once Wallace became vice president, he spoke out on his own more and more, drawing the notice of people of every political persuasion and eventually overstepping his role and creating a series of controversies and public feuds within the government. When Roosevelt ran for a fourth term, he chose Harry S. Truman as vice president and made Wallace secretary of commerce, a position he held for barely a year before Truman, now president, replaced him. Four years later, when Truman ran against Thomas E. Dewey for president, Wallace decided to run as a candidate for the Progressive Party, a loose alliance of trade unionists, liberals, veterans, African Americans, socialists, and Communists.

  Alan was an early backer of Wallace, having learned of his ideas as they filtered through the Department of Agriculture and the WPA. When word got out that Wallace was thinking of a run for the presidency in 1948, Alan was asked by Lew Frank Jr., Wallace’s speechwriter, to plan the music for the campaign. Alan agreed to do so without pay if they would consent to People’s Songs’ creating a campaign songbook and planning events, to having a song sung for every speech given, and to Pete Seeger accompanying Wallace on his speaking tours.

  Once they had an agreement, Alan got Paul Robeson involved in the musical part of the campaign, and solicited the help of Woody, Lee Hays, and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, a popular songwriter most famous at the time for The Wizard of Oz and Finian’s Rainbow, to write songs and to edit the songbook. Harburg’s politics were in line with those of People’s Songs, and more importantly, his music was as well. (“Over the Rainbow” was understood by many of those on the left to be a song of liberation, if not of utopian aspirations.) Together they produced cheap paperdisc recordings of songs that could be slipped into booklets or mailed, or played from sound trucks driving through neighborhoods. The songs were spirited and simple—like Alan and Yip’s “I’ve Got a Ballot,” set to the tune of “I’ve Got Sixpence”—but to Woody these frankly agitprop pieces were agonizingly cheap and vulgar. Songs, for him, were not supposed to be speeches; they had to be interesting as well as singable. He wrote a letter to People’s Songs complaining, “How a man with such a long road of sensible travels behind him, Alan Lomax, could expect such a shallow jingly and insincere number as ‘I’ve Got a Ballot’ to touch the heartstrings and conscience of the hard-hit masses, is a problem beyond me. I never did hear a human being call his vote a ‘magic little ballot.’ People I have seen call their ballot a number of things, none of which are nearly as cutiepie, as highly polite, as flippant, as sissy nor effeminate as this song.” At the same time, Woody had failed to write the songs he could have, according to Pete Seeger.

  The Progressive Party’s nominating convention was held in Philadelphia in July 1948, and the country had never seen anything like it. The number of delegates was more than double that of any nominating convention previously held, and most of them had never been part of a political campaign. Some were famous or almost famous, film stars or Columbia professors, but most were just folks, a number of them too poor to afford housing and so slept in tents or cars.

  When the delegates arrived at Convention Hall on Friday the twenty-third, they were greeted by a string of folksingers who warmed up the crowd by teaching them songs written for the occasion, like Lomax and Seeger’s “We Are Building (a People’s Party)”:

  Every new day we grow stronger,

  We are black and white together,

  Every new man makes us stronger,

  Marching on with Henry Wallace.

  The crowd finished by singing the rollicking but jingly “Friendly Henry Wallace”:

  Everyone wants Wallace,

  Friendly Henry Wallace,

  Friendly Henry Wallace in the White House.

  On Saturday afternoon the nominations were completed, interspersed with songs, speeches, snake dancing, and chanting. That night, the whole convention moved up to North Philadelphia’s Sheib Park, the home of the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team. The ballpark was packed as Glen Taylor, the vice presidential nominee and a cowboy of sorts, fired up the crowd with his acceptance speech and then played banjo and serenaded the audience with “I Love You as I Never Loved Before.” The stadium then went dark and Wallace came out, lit by a single spotlight as he did a slow-walking victory lap.

  Even those among the press who opposed all that the Progressives stood for were moved by the singing, the music, and the staging, many describing it as a “revival service.” Alan and his friends had created the first of many party-nominating convention spectaculars, and maybe the grandest.

  In the last week of the campaign the radio networks offered each candidate a chance to speak on the air one last time before the voting, and ABC was chosen to carry Wallace’s program. Alan and Studs Terkel were the producers, and they decided that Wallace, Paul Robeson, and Woody Guthrie would be the only people on the broadcast. But Woody was too sick at the time to be on the show, so Wallace and Robeson went on, each discussing what concerned him most before they talked together informally. It was a daring choice, given the two men’s very different styles and priorities, and especially risky was giving that much exposure to Robeson, whose civil rights activities and Communist affiliations had made him a target of the right.

  In the end, Wallace was badly beaten, trailing even Strom Thurmond. Most of the Progressives were deeply discouraged, though Alan could still find something positive in the rubble of defeat. “It sure was a singing convention but that singing did not make votes. W
e did a good public relations job and incorporated into the campaign a friendly and merry element that most left wing movements being somber, do not have.” Alan even wrote a song for the next presidential election, “Keep-a Growin’”: “When Wallace is elected in ’52 / We’ll have a fair and happy land.”

  Together, Pete and Alan wrote up a statement on how the struggle should continue, how People’s Songs could get the allegiance often million young people who would be old enough to vote the next time around. Their plans were as daring as ever: since they couldn’t count on the media to let them get their message through nationally, they would take the fight to the local level. Like modern abolitionists, they would head again to the South, where they would bring working people together to fight Jim Crow. Instead of business meetings and speeches, they would go back to the idea of the Living Newspaper, with local folks reading from a “Report to the People,” its script written by highly visible backers of Wallace such as Norman Mailer or Leonard Bernstein. It would be sent out from the national office, but with room left in the script to include local voices and issues. They would build community centers filled with books, magazines, and records in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Richmond, turning them into the only places in town where whites and blacks could meet together on equal terms. People’s Songs would support the efforts of black civil rights leaders, especially those in the churches, and provide them with the means to get their message onto radio and records.