Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  In a remarkable passage deep into Mister Jelly Roll, Lomax attempted to sum up the meaning of jazz in America and its relation to New Orleans and the Creole community:

  Jazz became many things—frenetic, destructive, hysterical, decadent, venal, alcoholic, saccharine, Lombardish, vapid—it has enriched stuffed bellies; it has corrupted the innocent; it has betrayed and it has traduced; but everywhere and in all its forms, something jazz acquired at the moment of its origin has profoundly touched all its hearers. What was this thing that set folks dancing and smiling from the slums of New Orleans to all the capitals of the earth?

  “We had all nations in New Orleans,” said Jelly Roll; “But with the music we could creep in close to other people,” adds Dr. Bechet. . . . Jazz was the hybrid of hybrids and so it appealed to a nation of lonely immigrants. In a divided world struggling blindly toward unity, it became a cosmopolitan musical argot. This new musical language owes its emotional power to the human triumph accomplished at the moment of its origin in New Orleans—a moment of cultural ecstasy. Two neighborhoods, disjoined by all the sordid fears of our time, were forced to make a common cause. This musical union demanded that there be not merely acceptance and understanding, but respect and love on both sides. In this moment of ecstasy an interracial marriage was consummated, and the child of this union still jumps for joy wherever jazz is hot. Perhaps it is so wherever people share their treasures and a truly fresh stream of culture begins to flow. Such moments of cultural ecstasy may occur prior to all great cultural movements just as seeding precedes birth.

  These lines may tell more about Lomax than they do about Morton, as they focus on his desire to put art at the center of humanity and return us to the magic of creation. In doing so, he also joined Morton in making New Orleans a magical city and a metaphor for what America might yet become.

  The reception of the Morton book confirmed Alan’s belief that he could write in the voices of ordinary people that would capture their intelligence and the artfulness of their speech without condescension. Fired up by the reviews, he planned a series of books to follow. One would be a collection of short autobiographies to be called From a Great Dark River, which would include a washerwoman, a preacher, a convict, a race record artist, and “an entire county” of the South. He would edit the spoken prose that he had recorded in interviews, piecing it together so as not to lose the stream: “I believe that this is the beginning of a technique which will make novel writing and biography a profoundly democratic thing. This washerwoman, for example, she speaks of love and it’s as glorious as anything I’ve ever read on love. The convict tells his tale with the passion of a Dostoevsky. It’s thorny prose, very thorny, but it has lots of levels. I believe it will help transform writing, which has reached a kind of dead-end.”

  He also planned to collaborate on a project with Jean Ritchie. The youngest of fourteen children of a Kentucky family with a rich repertoire of stories and songs, Ritchie had a voice as pure Appalachian as any folklorist could dream of, as well as being a guitarist and dulcimer player, a songwriter, collector, and writer. She had grown up in what most Americans would think of as isolation, but her family maintained contact with the outside world, traveled, owned a phonograph and radio, and saw to it that their children received a good education. Jean graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1946 and came to New York City to work at the Henry Street Settlement School, where she met Alan, who would record her songs and stories between 1949 and 1952. Their literary collaboration was her 1955 autobiography Singing Family of the Cumberlands, perhaps the best account of Appalachian life and folklore that had been written up to that time. He would also later write a foreword to Folk Songs of the U.S. Appalachians as Sung by Jean Ritchie [1965], and their lives would be intertwined for years to come.

  But the first book he wanted to write was to be based on the Fisk University/ Library of Congress project, a different one than what had originally been planned, to be called My Heart Struck Sorrow (And the Tears Came Rollin’ Down). “I felt that without knowing more about the inner emotional lives of the singers, the objective data on social aesthetics would be of slight value,” he wrote the Guggenheim Foundation in hopes of getting a second fellowship. “Therefore I recorded long life histories of a singing sister in the Baptist church, a rural preacher, a wandering blues singer, and a convict. These Southern folk poets tell in the most vivid and moving way, and in a style that approaches that of the greatest writers—why they sing and what they’re singing about. They make clear the nature of the floodtide of emotion that spilled out of the South and spread across the whole world.... I propose now to integrate this material (all of which has been edited and written up)—into [the book]—as the first part of my fellowship plan.”

  His application to Guggenheim was supported strongly by Geoffrey Bridson and Melville Herskovits, but Goddard Lieberson and Harold Spivacke wrote stressing that Alan was not a scholar, since he approached his work from an “emotional” perspective, and so should be considered a creative writer. Carl Sandburg praised Alan’s work, but added that “at one time he had Communist affiliations, whether a party member I don’t know.” The one folklorist Alan asked to recommend him was Archer Taylor, who criticized him for not displaying knowledge of the German research in musicology, and viewed the proposal as guided by Communists. The application was turned down.

  With the publicity behind Mister Jelly Roll, Alan’s agent easily put together a speaking tour in the Midwest that would earn Alan $1,200. On the long train rides through the countryside he sketched out notes for plays or a musical he might write, short stories or books yet to be published. Robin Roberts was constantly in his thoughts, even as he was tormented by the unbearable idea that Elizabeth might remarry and not come back to him. His dreams were vivid and scrupulously recorded in notebooks, and central to them all was the fear that whatever he did he might end up completely alone. In one of them he announced to an audience that this was to be his last lecture, that a large university had hired him to do more important work.

  At Columbia Records the long-playing record had just been perfected, first in a ten-inch version and then a twelve-inch form that allowed some twenty to twenty-five minutes of music to be contained on each side. Though it had been developed to record classical music—no one in the industry believed that ten or twelve pop songs could be sold as an album—Alan thought that the LP would be the perfect means of packaging a folk song collection: one long-playing record could hold as much music as was usually printed in an academic monograph. In those days recordings of ethnic music were hard to find outside of specialty shops, most of which were limited to music of a single language, nationality, or ethnic group. When Alan spoke at the Midcentury International Folklore Conference at Indiana University at the end of July 1950, he proposed that the scholars gathered there form a committee to produce LP records with booklets of notes that would cover the folk songs of all the world’s peoples. There had been earlier attempts at such a project—the German ethnomusicologist Erich von Hornbostel’s Musik des Orients, the Ethnic Series of Folkways Records, and UNESCO’s World Collection of Recorded Folk Music—but they were either random and unrepresentative in their selections or their creators had abandoned their projects after only a few records were issued. What Alan was proposing was to ask expert musicologists to pick the selections and provide background materials for the countries whose music they knew, to create definitive collections:

  What more people need are just good sets of examples from most of the culture areas. Every folklore center would like to have such samples. If we could agree on some kind of plan for the use of either tape or long-playing records—probably long-playing records—we could make a beginning at this meeting of an international exchange of folksongs between countries. I know that it is possible to get about fifty minutes of music from one record at the cost of about three dollars and a half. With two or three records you could get a very great deal of music from Turkey or Pakistan or any particula
r part of the world. And it could be quite within the realm of possibilities to establish an international exchange on this basis.

  For the first time, all the music in the world could be made available to listeners. But there was little interest among the scholars at the conference, and only Charles Seeger supported him. “They made me so mad,” he said, “I decided to do it myself.”

  It was a huge project, and one that an individual would hardly consider undertaking, especially one without money or institutional backing. But something had happened at those meetings in Indiana that led him to risk everything. He had always been frightened by public speaking, and not able to participate in discussions and meetings without anger, impatience, and excess emotion. During his folklore lectures he found “a peculiar sort of outlet”:

  At first I started to sing Negro folksongs, all techniques of concealed protest and hidden hostility—always sung in front or at behest of my daddy, and so was almost consciously ridiculing him and defying him, at the same time as I was publicly doing what my mother would have done or would have wished me to do. It was after I lost interest in this particular group of songs (having to do with murder, criminals, mean bosses, etc) and also lost interest in a group of songs that defied and ridiculed Elizabeth that I began to lose interest in singing.... My visit to Bloomington was actually like my taking my stand at a rostrum in a public place against all warnings of my father not to be an intellectual, not to care about issues.

  Later that summer in a coffee shop on Broadway he bumped into Goddard Lieberson, now the president of Columbia Records, and told him about this project. What if he traveled to Europe for a few months to find archives of folk music and then asked for help putting together forty-five or sixty collections that represented the best of each country? And what if he wrote booklets of notes to go with the albums, including photos and maps, and the whole thing could be done cheaply? Would Columbia back him for the project? The answer was yes, but only for thirty LPs, and the notes would have to be part of the covers, not separate books. The series would be called the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. The consulting experts would each be paid an honorarium, and royalties would be arranged for the collectors or archives involved. Lomax was free to negotiate these arrangements on his own, but he would have no advance with which to travel.

  Columbia provided a Magnecord tape recorder, tapes, and copying facilities wherever he went, but the rest of his expenses (which eventually amounted to some $20,000) would have to be borne by him. The Jelly Roll book had earned him only $250; he had received $600 for organizing and singing with Woody Guthrie, street singer Reverend Gary Davis, and Pete Seeger at Music Inn, a farmstead in Lenox, Massachusetts; and he had an inheritance of $4,000 from his father’s estate, but none of this added up to enough to finance the trip.

  Earlier the Weavers’ managers had approached Alan for clearance of the song “Goodnight Irene,” since it had been published in the Lead Belly book that he and his father had written. By then both John Lomax and Lead Belly were deceased, so Alan proposed an agreement splitting the royalties between the John Lomax and Lead Belly estates. The final agreement gave the song publishing company, World Wide, 50 percent, and the other 50 percent was split between the Weavers and the Ledbetter and Lomax estates. “Goodnight Irene” had been played 100,000 times in one month on radio and TV, and as it was also on most of the jukeboxes in the country, it was heard an estimated two million times a day. From the time of its release on July 3 to October, fifteen versions of it had been recorded, by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Red Foley, and more than two million of those singers’ records had also been sold. When Alan’s share of the royalties came in, he decided that if he was going to take money from folk song recordings it should only be used to support further research on folklore. The Lomax estate made $6,400 from its 16.7 percent share of the royalties; his stepmother Mrs. Ruby T. Lomax was due half of that. Out of such scraps of money Alan would finance the European trip, which he thought might only last for a year at most.

  If this arrangement seemed somewhat tenuous, it would nonetheless turn out to be the way he lived for the rest of his life. He would become a one-man foundation, operating without benefit of the usual academic credentials and support, stepping uneasily between the world of commerce and entertainment and the abstemious, hermetic life of scholars. Anthropologist Margaret Mead, an early admirer of Lomax’s, would later say, “One of the reasons that Alan has made enemies is that he has done most of his research on money that he’s made himself out of the folk field. That’s a fatal thing to do in this country. He not only made money, but he won some fame and prestige and delighted other people. That’s even worse.”

  Although folk songs might have been popular at the time, it was not a good era in which to be a folksinger. The previous December, a New York newspaper carried a story headlined “Red Convictions Scare ‘Travelers,’ ” which told of a dinner held by the Civil Rights Congress earlier that month at the Hotel Fifth Avenue to honor five lawyers who had defended people accused of being Communists. The dinner was sponsored by a number of people, including C. B. Baldwin, the former campaign manager for Henry Wallace, Olin Downes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alan Lomax. All of their names were listed in the article, and all were labeled members of Communist front groups. Then, in June 1950, Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television appeared, a seven-page pamphlet issued by a group of ex-FBI agents who edited the magazine Counterattack, and added 151 performers and entertainment figures to the Hollywood blacklist of alleged subversives that had emerged shortly after the end of World War II. The new group of the accused included Orson Welles, Leonard Bernstein, Lena Horne, Gypsy Rose Lee, Dorothy Parker, Aaron Copland, Oscar Brand, Norman Corwin, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Will Geer, Tom Glazer, Yip Harburg, Langston Hughes, Burl Ives, Millard Lampell, Arthur Miller, Earl Robinson, Pete Seeger, Josh White, and Alan Lomax.

  At the same time Congress was debating the McCarran Act on internal security, legislation that would require the registration and fingerprinting of all “subversives” in the United States. The House Un-American Activities Committee was given new life by the debate, and had begun to widen its hearings; rumor had it that the FBI was planning mass arrests.

  Alan renewed his passport, listing only his stepmother and Carl Sandburg as people to contact if he ran into trouble. In September he went to the office of his agent at the Charles L. Pearson Lecture Management Bureau in Rockefeller Center and canceled his upcoming speaking engagements, explaining that he was concerned about the Red Channels listing, that he felt sure the McCarran Act would pass and that he would be ruined. He was leaving for Europe, he said, and would be back in January “if things cleared up.” Yet right up to his departure from the United States, Alan kept up his criticism of the reactionary direction of American folklorists, even when he reviewed his friend Ben Botkin’s 1949 book A Treasury of Southern Folklore. He praised the breadth and scope of Botkin’s idea of folklore and his grasp of the distinctiveness of southern lore, but pointed out one dimension missing from the collection:

  He has, however, lost the main theme of the Southern story, which is the exploitation of one group by another, the White exclusion of the Negro from the human family, and the deep and abiding horror of this for both groups. There is no lynching of a Negro described in these pages, and this is and has been the culminating moment in the folk drama of the South. The feelings that produce these moments of terror and violence also motivate the blues, the extraordinary passion of the Southern revival meetings, the flowery concealing phrases of the Southern politician’s oratory, the endless aggressiveness that underlies the endless yarn-spinning, the preoccupation with death and whisky, the local pride that a four years’ war failed to diminish, and the muttering of that storm of anger which can be heard in all Negro folk creations and which the folklorist especially should perceive.

  As he suspected, the McCarran Act was passed in September, and by October the FBI was again i
nterviewing people who knew Alan, from whom they learned that he had left the country on September 24 on the steamer SS Mauretania, en route to Brussels. Elizabeth had tried to keep him from going, in part because it violated their arrangement for raising Anne. She knew that with Alan in Europe, the full weight of parenthood would fall upon her, and she doubted that he would have the hundred dollars a month in child support she had asked for in the divorce. They argued bitterly, with Elizabeth threatening dire consequences if he left. In the end, he offered to pay two hundred dollars a month in child support.

  Elizabeth still had a job, but was also working on a novel, writing poetry, and coediting a revision of the Lead Belly book with Alan that would include an interview she had conducted with Martha Ledbetter. She was also recording the life history of Reverend Gary Davis. Alan paid her $1,000 for her work with him, as well as for lengthy interviews she had done with Vera Hall, the Alabama singer, who was to be the subject of the largest portion of his book of autobiographies: “It will now be, because of Elizabeth’s contribution, the most moving section of the book. An indictment of the soul of the South from within its tenderest, most loving, and most loveable part.” Another of their joint projects was to release the BBC ballad operas The Chisholm Trail and The Martins and the Coys in the United States on Columbia Records. Alan had negotiated with Mitch Miller of Columbia for Elizabeth and himself to receive advances of $2,000 each to pay the singers and prepare the records, but when the Korean War began Columbia scrapped the project.

  Lomax never told his family exactly why he went to Europe, only that he was developing a library of world folk music for Columbia Records. Nor would he ever allow anyone to say that he was forced to leave. In a letter to the editor of the Record Mirror of London, he later took a writer to task for claiming that he was a “victim of ‘witch-hunting’ ” and insisted that he was in the UK only to work on the Columbia project.