Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  The festival was declared a success, and would be recalled by some as the day on which the Scottish folk revival became real to many people, connecting Edinburgh to the Highlands and the distant islands of Scotland. Alan documented as much of it as he could, dragging equipment through the streets, struggling to get everything on tape until the last note was sung, and it became part of the twenty-five hours of recordings that he donated to the university. He encouraged the academics to continue his work and suggested that they hire Hamish as their collector. The faculty was suitably impressed, so much so that, as Hamish said, they “disregarded my suspect politics at long last and offered me a job.”

  Not all the Scots scholars appreciated Lomax’s work, however. John Lorne Campbell, the collector who produced Highland Songs of the Forty-Five and other folk songbooks, especially, found his collecting an encroachment on Scots specialists. He let it be known that he thought Alan should have sought them out for help, and implied that Lomax planned to benefit financially from the recordings he had made. Alan responded to Campbell that he was sorry he was not able to do the collecting with him, but that he did not know who all the Scots collectors were when he started, and Campbell had not offered him any guidance on how to carry out the project in Scotland. And it was the BBC who had supported him financially so that they could put the songs on the air. He had not copyrighted any of the music, and since the songs were deposited in the library, no one else could either. But, he wrote, “As you know, however, it’s possible for any one at any time to copyright his own arrangement of any part of folklore. That’s bound to happen, and if the publication of folklore is a good thing, it might even be considered not so bad a thing in this strange world in which we live.” None of the singers he recorded had asked to be paid, he said, but all those used on the BBC were paid by them; and those used on the albums that were produced would be paid for their contribution. “All others will be written and thanked for their contributions to folklore.” Even the BBC people could find something negative to say about Alan. One executive in Scotland called him the Harry Lime of folk song.

  Hamish Henderson, on the other hand, later recalled Alan’s work in Scotland as being of the highest quality:

  He brought to the task a ruthless readiness to do things with his bare hands that most orthodox folklorists would not have handled with two thicknesses of kid gloves. For example, when in Northeast Scotland, he got to grips with the social and political set-up, did his best to explore the often grisly reality of hardship and oppression which lay behind the songs, and thus came in conflict with safety-first BBC producers who like to trail a wreath of late roses over the stark cadaver of the old system. Alan did not regard folksong as something “on the side”; he viewed it as an integral part of the life of the community involved, and he enlisted wide reading and lively intellectual curiosity towards the exploring of all its various ramifications. His ruthlessness and intolerance of anything smacking of humbug earned him enemies; he was frequently dubbed a predator and a jungle-cat egotist. Others alleged that he was an oversized humbug himself, and an assiduous organizer of his own legend. However my own feeling is that Alan is, in his own way, a man of genius.

  Despite attracting small audiences, the radio programs from Lomax’s trip to Scotland had considerable influence in drawing attention to the cultural links between Scotland and Ireland, and to some of the smaller and lesser-known areas of both lands. Once they saw the result of Lomax’s collecting, the BBC created a folk music project under the direction of Peter Kennedy and Seamus Ennis. Alan’s Scots radio programs also caught the imagination of artists, one of whom was the photographer Paul Strand, another American escaping the Red Scare. Strand arrived in England just before Lomax’s radio comments on South Uist, a group of islands in the Outer Hebrides, which suggested to Strand that it might be possible to treat the people on a group of scattered islands in such a way as to represent an entire culture. Shortly afterwards he set to work photographing the people of South Uist, and the results appeared in a book he pubished with Basil Davidson, Tir a’Mhurain: Outer Hebrides, a major contribution to the Scottish folk revival.

  While he was still in Scotland, Alan learned that Big Bill Broonzy would be performing on September 22 in London at Kingsway Hall, his first appearance in England. Lomax rushed down to London and announced that he would interview Broonzy onstage—a surprise to the bookers and the club—as he knew that there was much the English would not understand about Broonzy and the blues. Though the crowd was not large, it put Alan in touch with London’s jazz zealots and musicians, especially Humphrey Lyttleton, a revivalist Dixieland trumpet player who had graduated from Eton, been commissioned at Sandhurst military college, distinguished himself in World War II, and attended art school.

  Alan was determined to get Lyttleton into one of his folk productions, and his chance came when he decided to write another ballad opera, this time with a more modern feel to it, set in London and aimed at TV. Eel’s Foot: A Modern Folk Musical featured dialogue by Ewan MacColl and Alan, who described the setting as “a pub that doesn’t exist, but ought to, somewhere along the South Bank of the Thames with a view of St. Paul’s. A place where all the folk singers of the world might drop by.” The cast would include Lyttleton, playing the role of Pinetop, an Oxford graduate who sleeps on the bar after closing time, and a group of folksingers playing themselves. Alan had in mind creating an updated version of the Eel’s Foot, a pub in the tiny village of Eastbridge in East Anglia, where in the 1930s local people gathered one night a week to take turns singing. A historian who lived nearby invited A. L. Lloyd to visit there in 1939, and Lloyd was so impressed by the songs he heard that he convinced the BBC that they merited a program, “Saturday Night at the Eel’s Foot,” which in turn led to several commercial recordings being made on the spot, and the pub’s becoming the kernel of English folk song activities and recordings in the 1940s and 1950s. Alan’s reimagining it as a cosmopolitan gathering place cast it as what he called “a musical United Nations, where music, dancing, and ideas would freely be expressed.” Though the opera was never produced, he kept promoting it for years, still hoping as late as the 1960s that someone in New York television would be interested.

  In December 1951, the Metropolitan Police of London began making discreet inquiries about Lomax at the BBC, having been warned about him by the FBI. It noted that he had been in touch with the Hungarian press attaché in the United Kingdom, but did not see any “sinister significance” to that contact as yet. The American embassy informed the police that Elizabeth and Anne might soon be joining Alan in the UK, as Elizabeth had given that visit as a reason for applying for a passport in New York City, and warned that Alan might be a member of the Communist Party. From then on, his activities in Britain were noted in a file and shared by the American embassy and the London police.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Grand Tour

  Returning to Paris in March 1952, and once again behind his desk in the Musée de l’Homme, Alan thought that he had accomplished very little in the past two years. He was back where he started, only now without Robin, who, despite his pleas, had gone back to the United States. It was supposed to have taken only a year or less to produce the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, but it now seemed years away from completion. The lack of record archives in some countries and the poor quality of the recordings in those that did have them were bad enough. But the failure of some important musicologists to cooperate in the project left him disheartened. A few were loath to let others hear their recordings before their own work on the music was published; others, especially those who were on the staffs of national museums, were slow to respond because of various restrictions on the use of government property. Still others demanded fees before they would even discuss what they could offer. The Soviet authorities never responded to any of his letters. And there were those who just didn’t understand what he meant by folk music and sent him recordings of opera singers’ interpretations of folk son
gs. Meanwhile, a pile of disappointing letters had accumulated on his desk informing him in one way or another that the only way he would ever know what was available would be to visit some of the countries himself.

  As he was making travel plans, his wallet was stolen or lost, and then he remembered that his passport was running out. He was issued a new one on April 1, good for six months, but this time it barred him from traveling in Eastern Europe, Korea, China, or any militarily occupied areas. Without his being aware of it, the U.S. embassy in Paris had been instructed by Washington to keep track of his movements. The FBI was beginning to cover the same ground at home again, asking for new information, but misspelling his name, getting his age wrong several times (by ten or twelve years), misidentifying his father as a wealthy man still living on an estate near Dallas, and quoting an anonymous source who acknowledged he’d never seen him but remembered his name appearing in a newspaper article along with Burl Ives, who had “admitted his associations” [with Communists].

  When Big Bill Broonzy turned up in Paris, Alan set up his equipment in Broonzy’s room in the Hôtel Paris on May 13, and for two hours recorded him singing and discussing problems of race in the United States. They covered some of the same subjects that were in the Blues in the Mississippi Night recordings, but this time, with only Alan present, Broonzy spoke more directly and less guardedly about his own experiences with white women, and about the failure of American blacks to work together for their own interests. He spoke of his fondness for the French (“the best people I’ve met in my life.... The people of France are just like the Negro of America—they’ve been pushed around all their lives, they’ve been in sorrow, they’ve been in the shape of the blues all their lives”), and how the recording industry had changed the blues to sell it to whites: “I got to forget what I know, and try to do what he [the producer] tells me.” Being recorded with bands put an extra strain on players like Broonzy because the musicians were more sophisticated harmonically than many singers. “I got to sing that, or either starve to death in New York or Chicago.”

  That spring Elizabeth and Anne visited Alan, and the Lomaxes drove south to Lyon, Marseille, and Nice, spending time together on the coast of Corsica, testing their relationship, seeing if they could feel their way toward becoming a family. Back in Paris, they parted with tentative plans for the future, all of which were shadowed by a lack of money and no realistic way of supporting themselves.

  Alan made several short trips to Holland and Belgium in the hope of finding musicologists who could be editors for their countries in his survey of the world’s music. Spain was a particular problem. He had no luck in finding anyone who could assemble a selection of Spanish music for him, and he had no desire to visit Spain on his own while Franco was in power. But Columbia was insisting on a Spanish volume for the series, since Spanish guitar and flamenco (along with bullfighting posters) were enjoying something of a craze in the United States. Beyond Alan’s objections to the political situation in Spain, he could not afford to go there and spend the time needed to locate all of the country’s rich musical traditions. It was then that he heard that the BBC was planning a series of programs on Spanish civilization, and he quickly offered to provide them with recordings from every part of that country for their broadcasts if they would help finance the trip and an assistant, Jeannette “Pip” Bell, his girlfriend, to travel with him. They agreed, but would not pay him until they heard the recordings and approved them. He also asked Columbia to give him an advance for the trip, which they provided but asked to be repaid as soon as he returned.

  A Romanian musicologist friend, Constantine Brailoiu, had an invitation to speak at the Second International Folklore Competition being held that summer in Palma de Mallorca and needed some way to get there. Alan offered to drive him, thinking that he might find a Spanish scholar at the performances who could serve as editor of the Spanish record, and attending the event himself would also establish him as a serious scholar and allow him to record some of the invited performers. So the Citroën was loaded up with recording equipment, along with Brailoiu, a young Dutchman who specialized in Javanese gamelan music, Pip, and himself, and they set out for Spain.

  The first note in his diary of the Spanish trip tells of their arrival:

  Drove from Port Bou to Barcelona. Took pictures of this smoky, dusty, banking city and embarked at 9. In spite of B’s [Bell’s] constant chatter it was easy to see the poverty of the country—the preponderance of the horse-drawn vehicles, the ragged clothes, the drawn-nervous faces of the people. However, no beggars. The land from Port Bou to Barcelona is as barren as the Pecera country except in patches along the sea. I was still sick from the sun all day and felt nothing.... And everywhere are barracks—dusty unkempt—with the announcement over the doors—Todo Por La Patria. It is so nabbed that one wonders without pause “whose patria” and a look around the streets will convince you at once that it is not the patria of the extremely thin men, these truckers driving horses, these swarming lottery tickets salesmen. These damned Franco rules won’t work anyhow.

  The next day they reached Mallorca, where things went badly from the start. “Shook hands today with my first Fascist—the secretary to the mayor . . . the folklorists are as rude and uncordial as ever. One named [Garcia] Mato[s] lectured me for ordering eggs for breakfast—then at lunch asked B. and myself to move away from the central table.” Then Alan encountered Marius Schneider, the most important folklorist and musicologist in the country:

  At that time, I did not know that my Dutch traveling companion was the son of the man who had headed the underground in Holland during the German occupation ; but he was recognized at once by the professor who ran the conference. This man was a refugee Nazi, who had taken over the Berlin folk song archive after Hitler had removed its Jewish chief and who, after the war, had fled to Spain and was there placed in charge of folk music research at the Institute for Higher Studies in Madrid. When I told him about my project, he let me know that he personally would see to it that no Spanish musicologist would help me. He also suggested that I leave Spain.

  This Alan took as a challenge, and swore that he would do the Spanish recordings himself, no matter how long it took.

  The festival that followed the conference’s lectures every night was disappointing: the choral groups and dancers seemed coached; the performances took place in a bullring, the Plaza de Toros, to accentuate their Spanishness to visitors. But Alan recorded them anyway, without asking permission, which upset the organizers. Still, a few people he met encouraged him to stay and record as much as possible. Two were the poet and scholar Robert Graves and the writer Beryl Hodge, then living together in Deiâ, Mallorca, and with whom he struck up a long-lasting friendship. Another was Don Juan Ursa Riu, a Spanish ethnologist whose museum had just been closed by the Franco government, “which didn’t like him.” “He gave me a map of Spain . . . and on the basis of that map I did the series.”

  Once he left the official folklore of the festival and went out into the rural areas, Alan’s spirits began to soar:

  This is a great country. Day hot. The sea near. Figs, oranges, plums, pears ripening. The houses old and simple. The towns old and beautiful. The people the most pleasant I have ever met anywhere, I decide to settle for life in every town and marry every sweet young señorita I see. Words, movement, ambition are conquered in the Balearics by the sheer pleasure of living. And I would put my whole life off till tomorrow if a lot of people weren’t dependent on me. What I want to do is swim, sleep, stare, chat. And if there is anything more pleasant than chatting with a black-eyed girl on the Rambla, the shaded promenade in Palma, between 9 and 11:30 I never ran into it.

  For a month or so, I wandered erratically, sunstruck by the grave beauty of the land, faint and sick at the sight of this noble people, ground down by poverty and a police state. I saw that in Spain, folklore was not mere fantasy and entertainment. Each Spanish village was a self-contained cultural system with tradition penetrating e
very aspect of life; and it was in their inherited folklore that the peasant, the fishermen, the muleteers and the shepherds I met found their models for that noble behavior and sense of the beautiful which made them such satisfactory friends. It was never hard to find the best singers in Spain, because everyone in their neighbourhood knew them and understood how and why they were the finest stylists in their particular idiom. Nor, except in the hungry South, did people ask for money in exchange for their ballads. I was their guest, and more than that, a kindred spirit who appreciated the things they found beautiful. Thus, a folklorist in Spain finds more than song; he makes life-long friendships and renews his belief in mankind. The Spain that was richest in both music and fine people was not the hot-blooded gypsy South with its flamenco, but the quiet, somber plains of the west, the highlands of Northern Castile, and the green tangle of the Pyrenees where Spain faces the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay. I remember the night I spent in the straw hut of a shepherd on the moonlit plains of Extremadura. He played the one-string vihuela, the instrument of the medieval minstrels, and sang ballads of the wars of Charlemagne, while his two ancient cronies sighed over the woes of courtly lovers now five hundred years in the dust. I remember the head of the history department at the University of Oviedo who, when he heard my story, canceled all his engagements for a week so that he might guide me to the finest singers in his beloved mountain province.