Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  In the last two weeks before his departure, his anxiety became overwhelming. He not only was leaving everyone he knew and cared for, and the country in which he had invested everything, but was giving up his weekly sessions of psychoanalysis, which he counted on to keep him focused. But as the ship pulled out into the East River he proudly declared himself in his notebook “a comrade of the world, longing to be everywhere.” He jotted down bits of poetry as they slid out to sea, recalling the sweetness of his daughter’s good-byes, realizing that he was the only one on board with flowers, because Anne had given them to him. He noted the cold grayness of the river and the strawberry sun winking through the smog. Looking back to the pier, he spotted a cook from a place where he often had breakfast—the man had come to see a friend off, but now was waving a last good-bye to Alan “out of the universal love that humans have.” “And I was proud of my only friend, even if he always burns the bacon. Like meeting your birth doctor at your wake.”

  Alan wrote Anne a letter as they sailed, filling it with cartoon sketches of the ship, waves, the wind, and himself. He made a note to himself that most of his earthly possessions were on that boat: a trunk, a suitcase, a typewriter, a backpack, an amplifier, tape recorder, guitar, and boxes of tapes. His last New York note, in a Whitmanesque echo, declared, “Farewell Manhattoes / Anne, Anne, Farewell / No more fear now for me.”

  In Europe, Alan went from Belgium to Rome, where Robin Roberts was staying. The two took a train to Florence and from there went on to Paris. He had been invited to base his project in the Musée de l’Homme by Gilbert Rouget, the director of ethnomusicology, and was granted access to the Phonothèque Nationale to look for recordings. Rouget had heard about Lomax from Claude Lévi-Strauss, the preeminent anthropologist of France; they had met when Lévi-Strauss was at the New School in New York. When Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris, he told Rouget that Lomax was a genius and that he should get to know him.

  Yet after only a few days of sitting in his office in the Palais de Chaillot on the hill of the Trocadéro in the 16th arrondissement, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, Alan found the charm of Paris to be less than he expected. The October weather had turned grim, he had picked up some form of traveler’s indigestion, and instead of strolling the streets of Paris as the flâneur he had imagined, he found himself looking for the shortest way to walk from the office back to his room in the Hôtel l’Universe. He had been granted a place in an institution that many considered the center of world folklore and a position that demanded respect, and had been welcomed into Parisian intellectual circles, but it bothered him to think that he needed those outward signs of honor, and he fought against them. Soon he worked only in his hotel room, writing letter after letter to the collectors and musicologists of the world, and coming in to the office only to get his mail.

  Robin was singing folk songs at a club called L’Abbaye, run by two black American expatriates, and Alan was appalled that she enjoyed Parisian nightlife so much. He had doubts about the depth of her feelings for him, which increased the longer they stayed together. When he became ill with the flu and nausea, followed by a sinus infection and an earache, he took to his bed, lying there in resentment of every moment she spent away from him. A doctor was finally summoned. Alan received penicillin and morphine, but then developed facial paralysis, and had difficulty controlling his speech and facial movements. He was hospitalized and operated on for pressure on a nerve, and a mastoidectomy was performed on his ear. Sinking deep into depression, he wrote, “I am a passionate pilgrim and must live at the edge of death and hell.”

  But he slowly recovered, and then moved to a cheaper room at another hotel, the St. Paul. For the first time in weeks, he felt strong enough to go out to a party given by Alfred Métraux, an anthropologist who had just become a member of UNESCO’s Department of Social Science. It was an opportunity for Alan to meet all of the distinguished anthropologists of France. Yet the next day he wrote that “like all anthropologist parties, it was like the gathering of enemy clans at a country funeral. Bad food and liquor, everyone stiff and angular, no conversation.... Christ, what a distorted evening.”

  After two months in Paris with so little accomplished, the money disappearing faster than he’d expected, receiving few promising responses from scholars he had hoped would cooperate with him and discovering that the few archives of folk song he could locate were far from complete, he decided that he would have to do some of the collecting himself. “He told me he was recording the whole world of folk music,” Robin recalled. “Where did I want to start? I said, let’s go to Ireland.” A few years earlier Alan had fallen under the spell of a recording of Marie O’Sullivan singing “The Airy Girl,” and thought that it was the kind of voice he had heard about but never actually heard in America. There was “a delicacy of musical line and subtlety in singing we couldn’t match in the States.”

  While he was happy to start with Ireland, he nonetheless knew that he would need help in being introduced to Irish culture and finding the right songs and singers. Since he was still short of money, London would offer the prospect of finding work with the BBC, given the good relations he had developed through his wartime radio shows. If anything, he thought the British appreciated his work more than the Americans, and Geoffrey Bridson, the BBC producer, had often suggested that they work together again. So it was to England that Alan and Robin went on a Cunard boat one cold December night.

  The pall of war had not left London. Rationing was still in effect, the skeletons of buildings destroyed by bombing dotted many neighborhoods, travel was difficult, wages were low, nightlife was muted, phonograph records were few, and the city looked back nostalgically to its prewar past instead of developing a popular culture that reflected its times. “Austerity” was what they called it, but the city had the feel of a shabby, underfunded museum. The beginnings of a folk music revival were in the air, but it too looked only backward and was the work of a few scattered individuals who sang in a pub or two, or the occasional workers’ group. Yet it was also a time in which West Indian and West African immigration was increasing, bringing with it new cultural elements that would both threaten and energize the country. It was a situation in which Alan imagined that people such as himself might be welcome as cultural brokers who knew the past but could also serve as a link to the future, and might be able to reconnect the country’s various regions and traditions and introduce the new citizens moving among them.

  Alan’s first stop was the BBC, where he laid out his collecting plans for Bridson and explained how the records he would make in Ireland, England, and Scotland could also be used as the basis for radio programs. The BBC had not done much with folk music aside from presenting the folk-music-as-art-song efforts of composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams, or featuring folk songs as fillers on talk shows aimed at farmers, but they nonetheless had a growing archive of recordings. That night at the White Stag pub, Bridson introduced Lomax to Brian George, head of BBC’s Central Program Operations, who in 1947 had made a song-collecting trip to Ireland and with Seamus Ennis of Radio Éireann had recorded local singers for a program they called Songs from the Four Provinces . George was at the moment lobbying the BBC to fund an expansion of their activities, and he saw in Alan a potential ally. By the end of the evening the three of them agreed to go through the BBC’s Irish recordings to see what was usable. But Alan still had the urge to experience Ireland himself, “in spite of the fact that very good recordings already existed and there was no great necessity for my repeating the performance.”

  Bridson encouraged Alan to apply for a labor permit so that he could be hired immediately to work on his own program, but also to appear on a short series of programs already in development called Traditional Ballads that would be aired on the Third Programme, the high-arts broadcast unit of the BBC. Alan appeared on the second of the ballad programs on February 12, 1951, and on the following day his own three-part series, Adventures in Folk Song, began to be broadcast on the Home Ser
vice, the recently upgraded domestic radio network. The programs were built around the story of his Library of Congress travels, with Robin and him singing songs and playing a few of his field recordings that they found in the BBC library.

  A compulsory stop for any folk song collector in London was the English Folk Dance and Song Society, and it was there that Alan met Douglas Kennedy, the man who had replaced Cecil Sharp as its director. Kennedy introduced him to his son Peter, who worked for BBC West Region and at that moment was recording singers in Somerset, Devon, and Dorset for the program Village Barn Dance, using his own band to accompany them. Peter shared Alan’s belief in the importance of field recording and using the best equipment, and he too had a driven, single-minded vision of his own role in documenting folk music everywhere in England and making the music popular across the country.

  In January 1951, Robin and Alan loaded up an old Citroën with guitars, tapes, and the heavy Magnecord tape recorder, took the ferry from St. David to Rosslare, Ireland, and traveled on to Dublin the same day. In Jamestown, north of Dublin, they met with Seamus Ennis, the master singer and piper with whom Brian George had worked in Ireland. After a night of drinking and singing in the Ennis family kitchen the next day, Alan was convinced they could collaborate. There were still songs to be heard that had not been recorded, Seamus said, and he could find the people who were not known outside their own hamlets.

  At the Irish Folklore Commission, Alan met with their archivist, Sean O’Sullivan, hoping to get informal permission for collecting from the local folk establishment. “He was perfectly dressed and knew exactly what was worthy and what was not,” said Robin. “He showed us a lovely, green-bound collection of the oldest, grandest Irish airs, with translations from the Gaelic. One got the impression that there was very little left to collect. Alan would arrive in his office in unpressed pants, a shirt open at the neck, big smile and homeboy Texas accent. You could almost see O’Sullivan wince.”

  Before they set out, Alan tested his equipment by recording Seamus’s piping, and the tape recorder broke down on the first try. When they took the machine to Radio Éireann for repairs, there was trouble fixing it, and they ended up borrowing a large mobile recording unit and taking radio engineer Jimmy Mahon with them on their travels. On January 23 they motored in a van and two cars to Ballymakeery to look for Elizabeth Cronin, a woman who it was said knew the songs from the Cork area in both English and Irish. She turned out to be elderly and in poor health, but with an enormous repertoire of songs, so many that when singing tired her out they made plans to return to record more later.

  On they went, town to town, stopping and asking about this or that person, sometimes finding them, sometimes learning that they were deceased or had moved away. In Macroom they recorded two men who sang “conversation” songs, alternating lines back and forth, then joining together on the chorus; in the villages of Coolea and Ballylickey in County Cork they located several women singers, including Marie O’Sullivan, the one whose voice had so inspired Alan on record, and who sang in a light and fragile voice of fairies and couples who sought to be married against all odds.

  Several days were spent in a hotel lobby in Galway with two brothers, drinking, singing, eating, and recording beside a turf fireplace that popped and crackled so loud that it spoiled the record. Although they endured complaints from guests who said they could not sleep with such a racket going on, they got to hear songs so finely filigreed that they seemed almost Middle Eastern. The two singers were “drinking, talking about the devastation of Cromwell’s genocidal invasion of Ireland in the 15th century, as if he had been there only two weeks before.” When the pain of memory returned, one of the brothers said, “We must forget him now . . . must forget Cromwell.”

  Donegal was next, to hear fiddler Mickey Doherty, a Traveler (or Tinker), a member of an Irish nomadic group, and then Dundalk, where the “Queen of the Tinkers,” Margaret Barry, was selling baskets and singing and playing banjo for coins on a side street. She knew the most ancient of songs, commercially recorded versions of popular older songs like “She Moved Through the Fair,” and the latest hits from the United States, such as the Weavers’ “Goodnight Irene,” which she had heard over Radio Luxembourg, the first of the pirate radio stations. Sometimes recording became impossible without chasing away dogs and chickens, stopping grandfather clocks, or asking curious listeners to be quiet. When records were unusable or the singers were not as good as promised, Alan paid them anyway.

  By the end of February they had passed through enough towns and regions of Ireland to have a representative collection of recordings, and when added to those they had selected from other collectors and the BBC library there were more than enough to put together the album of Irish music. It was a remarkable piece of work to have completed in six weeks, especially considering that Lomax was not familiar with Irish culture or the Gaelic language, and the roads were often covered with ice or snow. Despite his freewheeling and improvisatory style, Lomax was sharply disciplined in his work. Perhaps too much so, according to Robin:

  Later, there were those who complained that Alan had roared through Ireland like Attila the Hun, had trod roughshod over other folklorists’ special territories. He had not spent enough time with the people to understand them properly, and he did not speak Irish. But he did have the imprimatur of Seamus Ennis, without whom he might easily have been led astray.

  Alan could be impatient when he recorded, pushing the singers hard to keep going. If they had forgotten a verse along the way, he could draw them out, looking for complete ballads, sensing that they knew them and could be coached into remembering. Most singers viewed the recording sessions as a kind of social occasion, and wanted to eat and drink as they sang, but Alan tried to keep them focused on singing. A pattern of work developed in which they recorded, then perhaps had something to eat, and then spent the rest of the evening with each singing his own songs from different parts of the world. This song-swapping sometimes led to even more recording. Robin’s American versions of songs that were known by the Irish turned out to be a great aid, as they were often heard by her listeners as “wrong,” and the singers were then quick to sing the correct version as they knew it.

  When they returned to London, Alan and Robin went back to work for the BBC, recording two more three-part programs. In the first, Patterns in American Folk Song, songs were introduced by their functions and organized by the themes of “Love,” “Violence,” and “Work.” But it was in the second series of programs that Alan found his voice for an English audience. In The Art of the Negro, which included “Jelly Roll from New Orleans,” “Trumpets of the Lord,” and “Blues in the Mississippi Night,” he introduced some of the arts of the black working class in the American South, and at the same time put heavy stress on the conditions under which they were forced to struggle. By the second broadcast, a powerful entrée to the black church, Alan had found a way to weave his voice in and out of the music and other voices, with fades and segues that were the equal or better of film editing. His commentary was often edged with irony, as when he introduced the guitar-playing, jazzy crossover pop star/church singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe:

  Record: “Up Above My Head”

  LOMAX: “Up above my head, I hear music in the air,” that’s what Sister Rosetta Tharpe is singing. “Up above my head, I hear trouble in the air,” and the brown fingers tear a polyrhythmic accompaniment out of the mother-of-pearl inlaid guitar, and the spotlights glitter on the electric blue evening gown, and in the packed football stadium, the ecstatic Negro crowd yells its approval. For Sister Rosetta is their favorite artist. Marian Anderson and Duke Ellington are all right, in their way; but it takes Sister Rosetta Tharpe, with her sanctified singing to put everybody straight—spirituals with a blues lick, the red hot, but not a bit sacrilegious descendant of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” and “Go Down Moses.” They make Sister Rosetta Tharpe a trumpet of the Lord.

  To those who thought folk song was on the way out, Al
an would redefine the subject by portraying Sister Tharpe and other religious singers in “streamlined U.S.A.,” touring the country “in fast cars, playing to packed Churches, and providing religious entertainment.” To make the form of the songs familiar to his English listeners, he first offered a recorded example from his trip to the Hebrides that summer, a hymn in Gaelic lined out, stated by a song leader, and then followed by the congregation, singing the same thing. Then he played a similar way of singing from a black Mississippi church, but drawing attention to a fast pulse being kept by an elderly woman’s foot, “like a lead drum.” His intention was to show that there were multiple sources to black American music, some European, some African. With taped interviews of a preacher and a church singer, he illustrated how the black church had become the only source of community and sanctuary in a southern town, how the preacher’s sermon worked its rhetoric on the congregation, what the songs meant to the singers, and how injustice and terror reigned in the South of the United States.

  The last of the three programs was on the blues and used portions of Alan’s various trips in the South and some of the “Blues in the Mississippi Night” recordings that he had as yet not been able to make public in the United States. He demonstrated the difference between country blues, pop blues, and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and discussed vocal and guitar techniques, the structure of the songs, and their subject matter. Throughout, he developed a countertheme on the violence of everyday life and the role blues singers played in such a life. At times the series had more political content than the BBC was comfortable with, but it was a success with the public, and Alan received many fan letters for his brave programs. A letter from folksinger Ewan MacColl warned him that when he went back home there would be a committee waiting for him. “Who knows but that some future Librarian of Congress (Folk Song Dep’t.) may have the good fortune to visit a state farm or pen with his tape-machine and find prisoner Lomax there just begging to be recorded.”