Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  The time and effort that had gone into the trip to Ireland made Alan realize that he would not be able to manage all of the United Kingdom, and that Peter Kennedy was the right choice to put together the record for England, as he had already assembled a wide range of recordings from his own collecting and knew the BBC library and what commercial recordings had been issued. They needed nothing more than a few songs from the north of England and from the cities, so Peter directed Alan to several people he could record from Newcastle and Northumberland and recommended Ewan MacColl and A. L. (Bert) Lloyd for industrial and city songs.

  Both men were leftists, Lloyd a sailor, translator (he had translated García Lorca’s Blood Wedding), amateur folklorist, singer, and journalist whose media connections occasionally got him and folk songs on the BBC, and Ewan MacColl (the pen name of Jimmy Miller) an actor, singer, and playwright who had been praised by George Bernard Shaw as the best in England (other than GBS himself). Lloyd and MacColl had not met until Alan introduced them when he asked them both to sing for the album. MacColl recalled his first encounter with Alan at the BBC studios. “He was at the microphone singing ‘Barbara Allen’ and filling the room with his own particular kind of excitement”:

  I stayed on at the studio until after the broadcast and recorded songs for him until close to midnight. He was the best audience I had ever sung to. Afterwards, in the elevator on the way down to the street, he closed his eyes and appeared to fall asleep. His companion told me that he had been awake for the past thirty-six hours. This was the picture I was to have of him for the next few years: a man given to furious bursts of prolonged activity which only ceased when he was on the verge of collapse. I did not see him again for a couple of months, and then one day he turned up in the heart of the Durham coal-belt where I was on tour with the Theatre Workshop. After the show that night we sat and listened to him sing and talk for some eight hours and felt ourselves catch fire as a new world was opened to us. Up to his time, folk music had been for most of us a pleasant medium of relaxation, but after that night we all became confirmed addicts; in the jargon of the time we were “committed.”

  MacColl was then part of the Theatre Workshop he had created with his wife, director and actress Joan Littlewood. Together, their travels to small communities, schools, and labor unions with experimental theater and agitprop drama had earned them critical fame and several arrests for disturbing the peace. Alan joined with Ewan to take folk songs to the unions, and for several weeks they went to Executive Committee meetings of the National Union of Railwaymen, making their plea for the union to start an archive of railroad songs. But they had little success with practical people who had a hard time seeing how songs could help their cause. They also worked together on plans to create a Worker’s Dance Group that would use Stanislavsky’s acting exercises, the movement techniques of dance scholar Rudolf Laban, and the rhythms and actions of laborers to build a new form of modern dance to be used with work songs that Alan would help them collect.

  In the spring of 1951 Jean Ritchie came to England with her husband, George Pickow, on a Fulbright Grant to collect folk songs that were the source of her family’s Appalachian repertoire. Pickow had brought along a spring-driven Bolex camera to film some folk performances, and when he met up with Alan and Peter Kennedy, Peter suggested they go to the fishing village of Padstow on the Cornish coast to film their May Day festival. On the drive there Peter described the festivities they were going to see while Alan sat in the backseat listening and thinking about how the film could be structured. The documentaries of the time were similar to slide shows with a lecturer, but by the time Peter finished talking, Alan had devised a rough script and had a sense of how the celebration should be filmed. He had done a bit of silent motion picture photography in the southern United States and in Haiti, but only to have a record of pieces of dances, drumming, games, and religious rituals. He had never before had to consider how a film could be made that fit together different images and points of view, how to manage the passing of time or the development of a theme, nor had he ever recorded sound synched to a film. Pickow too had no experience with more complex filmmaking.

  The camera crew recorded interviews in which townsfolk described the festival and their reactions to it, which in turn became the basis for the final script. They had arrived with color film, but discovered that some of the most important moments took place in the pub before the celebrations began. This meant they would have to shoot in black and white because of the lack of light, and at the last minute they found two rolls of black-and-white film and a floodlight in a local store. Despite having been shot with a single camera, and at virtually a 1:1 film stock to finished film ratio, the movie was filled with daring angles, quick cuts, and changing perspectives deep within the crowds.

  Later there was trouble in synching up sound and image, but Alan solved the problem by using a conversational voice-over added in a London studio, with a “tourist” from London asking a Padstow resident questions about what it all meant. The final cost of the film was $1,000, with none of the crew taking money for their work.

  Though they stuck close to the people’s view of the festival, the film was not entirely accurate, because local disagreements did not allow them to show that the village was split into two competing factions, with parades in different parts of the town. Nevertheless, ’Oss, ’Oss, Wee ’Oss, as the film was titled when it was finished in 1953, became something of a milestone in documentary filmmaking, and though it was screened across England for several years and later was presented on television, it was seldom seen for the next fifty years.

  After their divorce, Elizabeth and Alan continued to write to each other often. Their letters were open, sometimes confessional, and very affectionate. (Elizabeth called them their “love letters.”) They swapped stories from their analysis sessions, discussed Anne (she was not going to school regularly because she was bored, and Elizabeth was looking forward to living in the country, where a better school might be found), and their current lovers. They wrote about Elizabeth’s visiting him in England, or Alan’s coming home, with each of them urging the other. If he returned to New York, she said, they could again work together on “the great poets of the world,” meaning singers such as Reverend Gary Davis. Alan meanwhile promised to show her poetry to British publishers.

  Alan sent money for Elizabeth and Anne to join him in Italy for Christmas, but they were not able to make the trip. When Elizabeth’s analysis was completed, she considered taking Anne to visit Texas and the Southwest of her own childhood. The gap between Elizabeth and Alan of time and geography led to much fretting and doubt, but seven months later she ended a relationship she had been involved in and wrote Alan that he was still the only one; if he asked her, she would come to Europe. They planned to meet in England the following Christmas of 1951, but the trip was canceled at the last minute because of passport and other problems and was rescheduled for February.

  In his letters to Elizabeth, Alan tried to insist to her that their problem was effectively his problem: a clash of ambitions, his desire to go beyond family life to the world, a need for a kind of love that could never be requited. In a letter he wrote to Woody Guthrie after he heard that Guthrie was sick and had parted from his wife, Margie, he spoke of these problems:

  Ever since I left home . . . I’ve thought about writing to you. In fact I think of you a hell of a lot. . . . People tell me you’ve been sick a lot and that you and Margie aren’t living together any more. The sick part is bad. What is the matter and why in hell don’t the doctors cure you. . . . Write and tell me. The Margie part is worse. I reckon it’s just not possible for two people to get as close as you and Margie and me and Elizabeth got without separation just about splitting you in two. Maybe our modern system of love—loving the outside—loving the soul—loving the mind—loving the political opinions—loving to be with—loving to have babies by—loving to make love to—all of that may be more kinds of loving than it’s safe to have wit
h one person. Here in Spain and in France and in England and in old fashioned countries and out in the country in America and I suspect in old Russia, the people don’t expect or get much from love. But in America where love has built up into the thing that will console you for losing your job and losing your roots and having to leave your home town and selling all your friends for money—LOVE, LOVE, LOVE—we’re all kind of weakened down and victimized by something that may be impossible anyway. It’s happened to me now twice—then I discovered that the beautiful women on whom I had focused all this, never wanted it at all, and ran off looking for something a lot simpler from someone else.

  In the midst of his finishing the English folk song disc for Columbia, old doubts returned about the value of the work he was doing, and gloom set in. He was losing interest in folk song and longing to become the serious artist that he had once imagined he could become. In his field notebook he wrote:

  I know it’s worth it, but I wonder more and more if I really should be doing this. I really should be writing before I get too old.... Why am I traveling? It’s all work and anxiety. I see nothing of the countries. Take no pleasure in anything—and I’m lonesome—Today I realized that travel like this of mine is an affectation. To have no roots and no love is to be dead—lonely as a gull.... The work I do prevents me, at least in London, from talking to ordinary people about ordinary things. My own interests in folklore are now so specialized that I hardly ever have time to follow them out—my sense of reaction to songs is so dulled by the stream that has poured through me these years that I never enjoy anything anywhere—and time is always the shadow of old man John A., to rise and confound any impression I might have that I am doing well something on my own. I keep on and on because it is difficult to stop....

  Under the aegis of Bridson and Gillian [of the BBC] I’m beginning a series of ballad operas for April, May, and June which may save my soul. And redeem me from Father, Mother, Elizabeth, Robin, and them all.

  Yesterday GD told me the program had been commissioned at 400 pounds. This leaves me free to do other work. Why I’m in radio I don’t know—I guess I want to be wanted, to be identified with a big institution. Here in my only year of freedom, instead of wandering and seeing what I can, I’m spending my time in old ways.

  When the album was finally completed, Alan wrote that “the vigor and charm of these living English folk songs may surprise most listeners, perhaps most of all the British.” Surprise, perhaps, because many assumed there was not much left of folk culture in the first industrialized nation. Alan’s and Peter Kennedy’s collection may also have been surprising by its very breadth, as it included ballads, sea chanteys, mummers’ plays, children’s songs, Christmas folk performances, instrumental music from bands, pipes, and concertina, and featured singers they had found in the streets of London, in the archives, and in the theater. Some might have quibbled that the collection defined folk song a bit too freely by casting some professional singers and singing actors. But Alan was hell-bent on making the records he produced be competitive in quality with those produced for pop culture, and if some of the songs could not be presented any other way than by having trained singers perform them, he had no compunction about using them. (He was also fully aware that one of the characteristics of compiling an anthology was that, if carefully done, it could make everyone on the same record seem relatively equal as artists.)

  The Stone of Tory: A Ballad Opera from the West of Ireland was the first of several operas that Alan was planning to write using folk songs he had collected in Ireland and Britain, and he and Robin returned to Dublin in the middle of May to record it for BBC. It was planned as a full-scale production with rural Irish singers and a cast from the Abbey Theatre, and would tell the story of how the attempts of a land agent to collect rent by gunboat on the island of Tory had been stopped by magic. Alan worked diligently on the script for the next three weeks, but felt put upon by everyone around him. Robin and he continued what were now long discussions of their future, or lack of one; and he had come to believe that the BBC crew doing the recording were resentful of his “absorption” in her. And indeed, much of the time Alan was fretting over Robin, who was now planning to return to the United States.

  The work was difficult, but he met the schedule. The project was the first time that professional singers and actors had joined forces with singers who had never performed for audiences other than their own families and neighbors, and it often required great skill to get them to appreciate and make room for each other’s very different senses of time, movement, and art. After two days of rehearsal they recorded the opera in the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

  Before he arrived in England, Alan had believed that the songs of Scotland could be represented by a small sample that could be included in the English volume of the series. He was not yet aware of the rich history and culture of Scotland, the mix of the very old and the recently invented that constituted its culture, or the split between lowland and highland peoples that dated back centuries. It was at a meeting set up by Ewan MacColl with Hamish Henderson in London in March that Alan was awakened to the complexities and contradictions of English nationhood. He was fascinated by Henderson, an educated Scotsman with a varied and somewhat secretive life, a published poet who had been a part of the “Soho set” of bohemians in London, yet also an expert on rural life; a Scots nationalist, but a socialist as well; a student of Gaelic as spoken by Scots folk, but also a translator of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Letters. When they first met, Hamish was employed as the secretary of the Workers’ Educational Association in Northern Ireland, but his passion was Scots folk song and poetry. A few hours’ discussion with Henderson made Alan realize that Scotland was far more than just another region of Britain, and filled him with the fire he needed not only to collect the songs of Scotland but also to write a Scots ballad opera:

  The conversation was extremely important.... Hamish feels that Scotland is the most interesting and important place on earth, with a real live people’s culture, now on the march, and I must say, he made me share his feeling. Presbyterians, impoverished Catholic chieftains, the evicted croppers, John McLean, the Scots labor history, the singing masses—all these came very much alive in his talk and, of course, the fact that he is a Marxist made him much more interesting.... He also made me sure that the ballad opera job was worth doing in Scotland, as a sort of declaration of Scots independence—giving Scotland the recognition it deserved.

  In the summer of 1951 Alan went to Scotland, again backed by the BBC, following the success of the Irish radio programs. His first stop was the newly established School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he met with collectors and scholars of Scots songs to gather their support for his project and to convince them that recordings were essential to scholarship. In exchange for their help, he promised to store copies of his recordings in the university library. He was given a quick course in Scots geography, history, culture, and language, where he learned just how much Scotland had never completely accepted defeat from the English, and discovered that it maintained different dialects of Gaelic and its own form of spoken English. Perhaps most surprising to a folklorist was the country’s high literacy rate, the manner in which “high” forms of poetry were known by the folk, and the degree to which the oral ballads and folk songs were a part of the culture of the learned and those in urban areas.

  Hamish offered to be his guide and corecorder for the northeast lowlands of Scotland, and Calum MacLean, another member of the School of Scottish Studies, along with his brother Sorley, themselves from the Hebrides island of Raasay, steered him through Gaelic-speaking west Scotland and wrote to singers they had worked with in the outer Hebrides to prepare them for Alan’s visit to those isolated islands.

  In the Isle of Lewis area, Alan went beyond collecting to ethnography, interviewing the singers as he recorded them, about their lives and work as summer cattle herders, or as weavers of woolen cloth. Working alone outside of the United
States, he now found himself free to listen more closely and without distraction to how they sang: “I felt suddenly at the roots of one major strain of European folk music . . . emotionally open and direct choral singing. I started the recording machine one night and the people around it looked like ordinary shopkeepers, but suddenly, everyone of them joined in on the phrase exactly at the right time. They all knew the emotional nuances of the songs, held back none of their feelings, and sang together as well as any Negro congregation I’ve ever heard.” When he recorded the songs that women sang to accompany their collective tweed waulking (the softening of the tweed by pulling and pounding the fabric to shrink the fibers to make it more waterproof and warmer) he heard call and response between leader and singers, with the leader improvising the words (some of which were teasingly at Alan’s expense). This was the closest he had come to hearing music with any similarity to the black work songs of the prisons of the southern United States.

  Later that summer Alan met with a group of labor unions, arts organizations, and the Communist Party, which had organized a People’s Festival in Edinburgh, the latest in a long series of responses to what many artists perceived as the elite nature of the famous Edinburgh Festival founded in the 1940s. MacColl, Henderson, Lomax, and Hugh MacDiarmid, Scotland’s leading modernist poet (and another provocative mixture of Scots nationalist and Communist), all discussed the rump festival that was being planned that year and saw it as a means of bringing Scotland’s culture back to working-class people. The festival they conceived featured choral performances, poetry readings, art exhibitions, and plays, and ended with a day-long ceilidh (a gathering for dancing, singing, and storytelling) in the Oddfellows Hall. No lines were drawn between the literate and nonliterate, and in fact some of the most “authentic” of the folksingers used prompts and notes to remind them of the words, coincidentally reminding their audience of the long literary history of Scotland. After the program ended, the singing and dancing continued informally down the street in another building late into the night.