Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  But People’s Songs was now even more deeply in debt, its funds exhausted by the Wallace campaign. In a last-ditch effort Alan raised the money for a concert at Carnegie Hall on March 4, 1949, “New York: A Musical Tapestry,” an audacious production aimed at reaching every level of New York society. The performers were Oscar Brand, Pete Seeger, jazz musician Pee Wee Russell, the Artie Shaw Orchestra with Strings, the Latin band of Miguelito Valdés, and the multi-octave Peruvian singer Yma Sumac. Despite a near-full house, they failed to break even because they had not charged enough for the tickets, and People’s Songs went bankrupt a few days later.

  Still, Pete would not give up. The world could be changed through song if only he could find an audience big enough to start with. He and several others had been experimenting with Almanacs-type groups, hoping to find a modicum of commercial success. He thought he had found it in a quartet of Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, Ronnie Gilbert, and himself, who sang a wide repertoire of songs with piercing voices and spirited rhythmic arrangements. They called themselves the Weavers, after the striking workers in a Gerhardt Hauptmann play, a name with some political integrity but one that would not get them in trouble, they hoped, with a government that did not know late-nineteenth-century German theater. But now, after a year of struggle, virtually no one knew their name. “Unions were in disarray,” Pete said. “Big unions were taking over the left-leaning weaker ones, and none of them wanted singing groups.” Pete had sung at the Village Vanguard, so he asked club owner Max Gordon if the Weavers could appear there for the same money that he had received, plus hamburgers. Just before Christmas they began a two-week run. Alan brought Carl Sandburg in to see them, and when the poet expressed his enthusiasm for them in print, the crowds began to arrive. Gordon Jenkins, the music director of Decca Records, also came, undoubtedly encouraged by Alan, and returned every night afterward, talking to them about recording for him. Jenkins swore that he’d record them even if he had to pay for it himself.

  Jenkins did record them in 1950, under both his name and the Weavers’, using his arrangements and a large orchestra. Their first two songs were “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” an Israeli army song, and “Goodnight Irene,” one of the songs that Lead Belly sang, but with slightly different words that Pete said he found in a Scots songbook. Both songs went straight up to the top of the charts, and the Weavers were soon rather sheepishly buying tuxedos and evening gowns and playing supper clubs and hotels.

  Lomax had been slowly piecing together a book on Jelly Roll Morton based on his interviews. “I later spent five years trying to make my audience and my readers hear him as he talked. It took about five years to polish Mr. Jelly Roll from the records into book form.” Among other things, this meant finding Morton’s relatives, who were spread across the country, then going to New Orleans for several weeks in April 1949 to track down whatever key musical figures remained who could fill in the details of the picture that Morton had given him.

  Alan was familiar with the names of New Orleans’s jazz musicians, the city’s clubs and bordellos, even the names of the madams. What he wanted to know more about was the lives of the musicians; he asked about the origins and meaning of “hot music”; what was the first blues they’d ever heard; who was the first clarinet or trombone or bass player to play hot? He asked about their heroes, especially the unrecorded legendary father of New Orleans jazz, trumpeter Buddy Bolden; or the variety of what they played—mazurkas, schottisches, waltzes, marches, and the blues. He asked for their definitions of syncopation; about songs in French; how the musicians dressed; the difference between those who read music and those who didn’t; and about Jim Crow, and how they could tell a Creole from a black person.

  Alan began writing the Jelly Roll book in his own words, but increasingly felt that the only way it could be done convincingly was to put the story into the words in which Morton and his contemporaries told it. Finally he settled on a middle ground that suggests both oral autobiography and written biography and subtly manages to bridge his and Morton’s roles in the book. The tone of the book would be further defined by the black-and-white line illustrations of David Stone Martin, the former art director of the Tennessee Valley Authority and assistant to Ben Shahn in the Works Progress Administration, whose spidery calligraphic lines were to initiate the stark, noirish look of jazz iconography in the 1940s and 1950s.

  Alan’s work as a DJ had caught the attention of a number of people in the media. When Dwight D. Eisenhower, then president of Columbia University, announced in 1948 that the university would be cooperating with the Public Health Service to spread the word about the new penicillin drugs for syphilis and gonorrhea, it was decided that public service radio announcements would be the preferred method of communication. Alan’s old boss from OWI, Erik Barnouw, now a professor at Columbia, had been picked to develop the programs, and, recalling Alan’s proposals for communicating to minorities that had never been acted upon, he brought in Alan to help produce the messages. What Lomax came up with were a series of short radio “ballad dramas” with titles such as “The Lonesome Traveler,” “The Worst Enemy,” “The Prodigal Son,” “Born on a Friday,” and “Born to Lose,” aimed at persuading people who might be infected to go to local clinics for blood tests. What was extraordinary was the list of people whom Alan convinced to introduce these programs, no easy task in the sexual climate of the times: the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Maddox Brothers, Bill Monroe, Eddy Arnold, the Hall Johnson Choir, the Dixieaires, Woody Guthrie, the Coon Creek Girls, Cisco Houston, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

  The first program was written for Roy Acuff, one of the biggest names in country music. When Lomax went to see him, he said:

  Acuff told me that he couldn’t say the word “syphilis” on the air because he’d lose his entire audience forever. He told me how he felt about syphilis and in the process told me how his whole southern rural folk audience felt about the subject. So it was very easy for me to go back and write a little story using Roy’s principal hillbilly songs. When this program was broadcast, the people came in by the hundreds. They were saying, “Roy said it was all right, so I guess I should come in,” or—this program was called “Looking for Lester”; Roy was supposed to be looking for a friend who was lost with the disease germ and was going to die—they would come and say, “Wonder what’s happened to poor old Lester,” and offer their arm for a blood test.

  The programs were completely successful, and brought results for years. Erik Barnouw said that it was the first time that a government campaign had enlisted folk figures. “Lomax had some problems with the producers of the shows and with the people who controlled the budgets, but never with the singers themselves.”

  The hunger for novelty among the rich of New York City provided the impetus behind some odd cultural events in the city. Often in need of money, Alan would sometimes find himself squarely in the midst of some absurd performances. In one instance, he was recruited by Elsa Maxwell to help organize an event announcing the newly redecorated Park Sheraton Hotel. Maxwell was one of those New Yorkers who seemed to come out of nowhere or the Midwest, and she somehow ended up as a kind of professional hostess for royalty and high society, even though her real job was as a gossip columnist. On May 11, a select list of guests were invited to the hotel for an evening of ballroom dancing, a champagne supper, a display of synchronized swimming, a fashion show, Burl Ives singing in the lounge, and, as the invitations said, “Miss Margaret [sic] Mayo and Mr. Allan [sic] Lomax present American Square Dancing with Eddie Smith & his North Carolina Ramblers and the American Square Dance group.” Also included in the show were Ralph Teffyteller, a Tennessee dance caller, Pete Seeger (“the slickest five string banjo picker in the country”), Fred Hellerman on bass, and Eddie Smith on fiddle.

  Libby Holman, a torch singer and Broadway actress whose life was more scandalous and tragic than anything she ever sang about, heard about Alan’s work through her former cabaret costar Josh White and went down to the Archive of Americ
an Folklore at the Library of Congress for two weeks in 1950 to listen to the recordings. “Nobody carried a torch in the early American songs,” said Holman, “they didn’t feel sorry for themselves.” She worked some of them up into a revue called “Blues, Ballads, and Sin-Songs” and took them to Europe.

  Popular events and public recognition such as these kept Alan financially afloat and in front of the public, but he was tiring of them. The success of the public service announcements gave him the courage to reconsider what he felt his real vocation should be. In a letter to Yip Harburg he spelled out the differences between Yip’s and his approaches to the folk:

  I have been out trying to learn all I could from the people—the only people in our culture who are relatively free from the corrupting cultural influences of big industry art. I’ve been a big ear for fifteen years. The result is I know something about how to use certain of their forms.... If only we had a really functional culture in America, I would have a big job in helping to communicate the feelings of the people to the administrators and in helping the people to understand the rapidly changing world in which they live.

  So I look at myself as a good deal more than a source of information. I have been an apprentice to the people for fifteen years and now I shall more and more show what can be done creatively with the rich treasures of the people’s speech.

  Woody and Lead Belly were both struggling with health problems and lack of money. As Guthrie’s health and drinking worsened, he wrote sexually charged letters to a woman in California and enclosed news clippings of gruesome murders such as the Black Dahlia slaying. When she took them to the police in Los Angeles, Woody was arrested for sending obscenity through the U.S. Mail, and Alan worked to get his case dismissed by federal attorneys. Through a plea bargain, Woody entered into psychiatric counseling. Though he failed to finish the required number of sessions and was sentenced to six months in prison, his lawyer got him released in a little over a week. Later, while Alan was letting Woody drive his car, he crashed it into a limousine.

  Work had become hard to find for Lead Belly in his later years. His fame as both a political singer and a folksinger were fading, but Alan still called him for big concerts and promoted him at smaller folk clubs like the Village Vanguard. Some of the jazz people, especially the traditionalists, accepted him as one of their own, and he was sometimes awkwardly booked in concerts with sophisticated jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, or with Bunk Johnson’s New Orleans band at Stuyvesant Casino in New York. Lead Belly’s health had been failing for several years, and in 1948 he was diagnosed as having Lou Gehrig’s disease. After a tour of Europe in May, he grew much worse and died of a stroke in Bellevue Hospital on December 6.

  On January 28, 1950, “Take This Hammer,” a large memorial concert for Lead Belly, was organized by Alan to benefit his wife, Martha. When the audience entered the theater, the first thing they saw was Lead Belly’s twelve-string guitar dramatically suspended in the soft glow of a spotlight against a gray curtain at the rear of the stage. Lomax introduced a long list of performers that included Woody Guthrie, the calypsonian Lord Invader, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Dan Burley, W. C. Handy, Jean Ritchie, street singer Reverend Gary Davis, song collector Frank Warner, the Weavers, jazz musicians Count Basie, Sidney Bechet, Billy Taylor, Sammy Price, and Hot Lips Page, ragtime pianist Eubie Blake, folklorist Harold Thompson, poet David McAdoo, a New Jersey gospel group called the Varieteers, Bill Robinson, and others. The capacity audience included folk fans, intellectuals, and even bebop musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie. “He had come because he heard that a brother musician had died,” Alan said. “Burl Ives and Josh White refused to come, it being the McCarthy era,” Alan said later, recalling two of the folk musicians who, while under investigation themselves, had cooperated with federal agents pursuing Communists in the entertainment business.

  Alan wrote the script for the evening, and he opened by saying, “Lead Belly came before all the rest of us—busting down the doors for us all with his clarion voice, his tiger stride, his merry heart, and his booming twelve string guitar. And what we balladeers thought of him, we will show you in an evening of singing.” Toward the end of the night a filmstrip of photos of Lead Belly’s life and career was projected on a large screen with a recording of him speaking and singing, followed by an introduction of his family and a sing-along of “Take This Hammer.” So ended the first public memorial to an American folksinger.

  Elizabeth’s and Alan’s careers had been overlapping for the last few years, though her fame as a writer independent of him was spreading and her income rising. She was particularly sought out by radio for her adaptations of long novels like Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River (1947). Her 1946 script for John Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven was widely praised, as was her radio play based on Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, which was picked for Joseph Liss’s Radio’s Best Plays in 1947. Her poetry was also regularly published by the Saturday Review of Literature, and in 1948 she completed a libretto for Henry Cowell’s opera O’Higgins of Chile and received a Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship for a novel she was working on.

  She and Alan had talked of returning south, of ending their exile in the North to renew their sense of the cadences and pitches of southern speech, recapture that verbal energy that came with living in a society marked by closely observed racial and social lines, a separate history carved away from the rest of the country. Alan continued to imagine himself as a writer. He had heard enough folklore to last him; he knew all those stories, proverbs, and jokes. Faulkner, Welty, the local colorists of the South, they all depended on black speech and lore to carry them to the written word. Like the white folks of the South who didn’t write, these southern writers quoted black folks to underscore the truth. Tennessee Williams even went further, saying that he always felt that he was a Negro. But Alan had also read the writers from Europe, especially Russia, with their feeling for the peasantry and the workers. He had read Dos Passos’s cinematic prose, the way he used headlines and newspaper clips to thread his way through the times, moving from one character to another, keeping their dialects, shaping their biographies, all toward the creation of a collective American self. Alan now felt he was ready to bring something new to southern modernism.

  Meanwhile, Alan become involved with Robin Roberts, an actress and folksinger who often worked in Village clubs and theaters. She had recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence and was now living in Paris. He was determined to see her, and left the country in September 1949 to travel to Europe for the first time. Over the next few weeks he went to Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. He avoided telling anyone where he was, wrote no letters, and carried no recording machine with him. But in his notebooks he wrote that all his weaknesses and problems were connected to women, and at that moment, Robin was the central point of everything.

  Elizabeth’s and Alan’s work schedules, his long absences, and his need for other women were already wearing their relationship thin. They both wanted to be writers, and they could not afford both writing at the same time. Their marriage had begun to deteriorate rapidly as Alan’s affairs piled up on their doorstep, and finally Elizabeth filed for divorce in Harris County, Texas.

  CHAPTER 11

  Living on the Black List

  When Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” was published in 1950, it received over a hundred reviews, all but one of them laudatory. The exception was Leonard Feather’s in Britain’s Melody Maker, which implied that Lomax had been duped by Morton’s flash and braggadocio. Louis Armstrong praised the book and Morton’s music in the New York Times, and promised to buy another copy. Carl Sandburg promoted it rather sensationally in the Chicago Sun-Times as “the life story of a wicked and powerful man who was mad about music, a tale interwoven of wild melody and riotous sex.” The British playwright and folksinger Ewan MacColl wrote him that Mister Jelly Roll was a revelation, a “collaboration with life, an
d the two of you together have produced a work of art. In short—you have ... produced the first great work of Socialist Realism.” The book sold well, almost reaching the best-seller list.

  But Alan was not completely satisfied with the book’s reception, as he had hoped it would also be perceived as an important social science document. Deeply hurt to discover that Charles Seeger did not like Mister Jelly Roll, he sent a copy to Robert Pehrson, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, and asked for his opinion. Pehrson replied that he and several of his colleages had read it, and all agreed that it was indeed a success as a “personal history document,” and perhaps even as an ethnography, precisely what Alan had hoped for.

  The title of the book was carefully crafted. To call Jelly Roll “Mister” was Lomax’s insistence on respect for Morton, contrary to the demeaning first-name address then mandatory in the South. “Fortunes” calls up the role of chance in Morton’s life, his circumstances and adventures, and the tradition of the picaresque novel. “New Orleans Creole” is a racial identifier, but one that in this case was used for a different purpose, as it called attention to a community of artists. “Inventor,” coming as it does after “Creole,” may signal that jazz came into being through creolization, the unique process through which historically unrelated cultures come into contact and form a new, emergent culture. By putting “Inventor of Jazz” in quotes, Lomax is not so much slighting Jelly Roll’s claim as he is quoting his business cards and posters and offering a nod to his skill at public relations. It is also part of Lomax’s effort to present Morton’s boasting and self-aggrandizement in a sympathetic light.