Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Alan and Pip talked to everyone, from scholars and police to farmers, priests, prostitutes, children, tourists, and intellectuals, making notes on what they said and how they lived. Pip interviewed the women, asking them about matters that Alan didn’t dare raise. He critiqued his own notes as he wrote, examining himself like a psychoanalyst for underlying messages and hidden motivations. At the end of a passage describing the people and land of Formentera, for example, he rethought what he had just written:

  Only a few sheep manage to live here. The people work hard piling up their miles of fences, pulverizing the thin soil . . . fine neat little houses in the midst of their rocky fields. It is a battle for water, for food, for life.

  The women show in their faces their proud bearing and their somber dress that they are proud that their men and themselves have won the battle.

  (I am continually falling back in these sentimental thoughts because it is so easy to say them in Spanish and hard to say the simple thoughtful things.)

  The work in Spain was carried out under the worst of conditions. Alan was short of money and recording tape and had little background in Spanish history and ethnography, as well as having only fair ability in the language. Following mountain trails and back roads that led to villages without electricity and water, or wandering through market squares in Spain’s winter, Alan encountered the objections of the curas, the parish priests, who were suspicious of his recording, and suffered the constant presence of the military police, the Guardia Civil, who under General Franco kept a firm grip on the country towns and rural areas of Spain. “The black-hatted and dreadful Guardia Civil had me on their lists—I will never know why, for they never arrested me. But apparently they always knew where I was. No matter in what God-forsaken, unlikely spot in the mountains I would set up my gear, they would appear like so many black buzzards carrying with them the stink of fear.” He was of special concern to the police because he was a foreigner interested in rural customs and music, some of which—like those of the Galicians, Catalonians, and the Basques, districts that had sought independence from the central government before the Spanish civil war—had been repressed for years as threats to national unity.

  Folklore was of particular interest to the Franco government because it was perceived as a means of fostering nationalism. Efforts were under way to eliminate non-Spanish languages and to standardize and rewrite local traditions and songs by the Sección Femenina of the Falange, the fascist party that sent teachers to the rural areas to save folklore by reforming it and teaching the proper versions. The authorities had also noted that Alan was traveling in Spain with a young English-woman, an assistant, but whom he also registered as his wife at their lodgings along the way. (The U.S. embassy in Madrid diligently noted in their records that she was “a slender woman with a British passport, green eyes, 30, blond.”) Most of all, the police were interested in Lomax because, unbeknownst to him, the FBI had notified the Spanish authorities that he was a potential threat. Things became even more complicated when the photo provided to the U.S. legal attaché in Madrid was not of Lomax.

  Harassment by the police began shortly after they arrived when Alan was stopped and interrogated because they thought the recording machine in the trunk of his car was a radio transmitter. The police in Madrid went through the mail that was being held for them and shared what they found with the U.S. embassy. The aggravation continued everywhere they went, especially when an excuse could be found, as in Granada, where the police rousted them while they were recording Gypsy songs in a hotel room.

  Long before the recording in Spain was completed, Alan had begun to revise the map of Spain with which he had started, now seeing broad and very old musical zones rather than political divisions:

  The Spanish musical landscape is divided into three parts. One, monody [solo, unaccompanied singing], south of the Sierra Madre, where the Oriental connection is close. Two, in the middle—familiar to us—the middle-voiced love songs and such which we regard as Spanish music. Three, up the slope, the Catalonian voice, more open and mostly solo—and then, on the high slopes, a natural polyphony. In the pubs in Galicia and the Basque country, the people sing in chorus. The voice drops in pitch, the shape of the song is for singing and dancing in groups. What I found there reinforces an old theory of mine—that European music is naturally polyphonic, and that the usual high-voiced ornamented “folk song” results from contact with the Orient.

  As he took note of these variations in musical style, he also saw that there were differences in posture and the physical behavior associated with music, especially the various facial expressions and degrees of tension in the throat. Singers seemed to be acting out strong emotions, sometimes even when the words of the song did not suggest them.

  Before he left England, Alan had bought a small Leica camera, and when he reached Spain he began photographing not only singers and musicians, but everything that interested him—empty streets, old buildings, and country roads. His approach to taking pictures was similar to his ideas about recording: he was making records of the past, of ways of life that were still alive but in danger of disappearing. On the back of each of the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music albums of European music there was a note that read, “The folk songs of rural Europe and America are linked with the musics of older civilizations and these again with the chants of primitive man. And with every step it becomes clearer that musical style is, perhaps, the oldest, the most unchanging of mankind’s creations.” Yet now all these musics “are threatened to be engulfed by the roar of our powerful society with its loudspeakers all turned in one direction.” Much of Alan’s photography was informed by these same concerns, and concentrated on images of peasant farmers and beggars, the people he called “untouched,” presumably by the twentieth century. But he also brought to these photos a concern for form and composition that went beyond the ethnographic to the artistic.

  In Spain Alan also developed a new approach to recording, bringing the recordist’s affect into play with the performer’s:

  Recording folk songs works like a candid cameraman. I hold the mike, use my hand for shading, volume. It’s a big problem in Spain because there’s so much emotional excitement, noise all around. Empathy is most important in field work. It’s necessary to be able to put your hand on the artist while he sings. They have to react to you. Even if they’re mad at you, it’s better than nothing.

  Add to this a young English dancer swirling to the music and jumping back and forth to the recording machine as she adjusts the controls, and what a scene they must have created along those Spanish roads.

  Despite the constraints and limitations that he faced over the seven months he spent in Spain, Lomax managed to keep copious notes, take hundreds of photographs, track payments to the singers and musicians, file reports to the BBC, and write letters of thanks to all those who performed for him or helped him. A hundred hours of tape were recorded, containing over three thousand items from most of the regions of Spain. There were songs of the Gypsies, shepherds, mule drivers, farm workers, stonemasons, longshoremen, peasants, professional singers in the cafés, mothers’ lullabies, children’s play songs, national epics, and the private pleas and confessions of love songs. The musical instruments recorded covered the whole of European history: bagpipes, guitars, flutes, pipes, tambourines, tabors, brass mortars rhythmically rattled with pestles, sheep’s bells, and Moorish instruments such as the rabel (a fiddle), the dulzaina, a small oboe, and the ximbomba (a friction drum). This music was largely unknown outside of Spain, though not for long: when Columbia Records producer George Avakian gave jazz arranger Gil Evans a copy of the album, Miles Davis and Evans were struck by the beauty of pieces such as the “Saeta,” recorded in Seville, and a panpiper’s tune (“Alborda de Vigo”) from Galicia, and worked both of them into Davis’s 1960 album Sketches of Spain.

  By this point, virtually everything Alan wrote in the field, from letters to diaries to notebooks, made for compelling reading. He
seemed to have reached that point where a freelance writer knows the value of every word, and wastes none. Here are Alan’s notes for the music from a spring ritual in Galicia:

  Los Mayos . . . sung by a group of 6 ten year old boys.

  Some of the most interesting records of the trip were made in Pontevedra, the handsomest and most aristocratic city in the Province. Here every spring bands of school boys go through the streets singing special new topical songs composed by themselves. Their leader walks in the center of the group a conical canopy of straw garlanded held over his body by his five companions. When they find the likeliest street corner he sits down, they lower the little straw tent to the sidewalk and picking up their staves walk round and round him while he sings the song. Then they pass the hat among the passers by.... The group of boys that sang for me had made three thousand pesetas in three days in the previous fiesta.

  In his notebooks there was also an account of the circumstances under which he came to hear that song:

  [We had been told that] it was absolutely essential for us to record the Mayos. I peered out at the rain, wondering exactly what the Mayos were, and along came the bright-eyed young men fresh from a session at the Juvenile Court and we set the machine inside an electrical shop while the roar of the rain outside subsided to a steady sound like a cement mixer. By this time I had become a complete master at taking over other people’s establishments. All the work stopped while I plugged my connections into the one and only light socket, two girls gave up their chairs to me and the recorder, and all equipment was turned off and activity ceased in that plant. The proprietor stood off in one corner looking rather frightened and when anyone stirred he put his fingers to his lips and said “B.B.C.”

  In the centre of the room five little school boys of about 11 marched in single file round and round their leader, who stood in the middle singing the Mayo. As they marched they rapped smartly on the floor in time to the tune with broomsticks. I don’t remember ever hearing such a dreadful tune, and my young Fascist judge assured me that all the Mayos’ poems are equally as bad.

  Actually they are so bad they are good, and this has probably helped to keep alive this relic of pagan spring.

  Just before Christmas 1952, Alan wrote Elizabeth from Pontevedra, in Galicia, and enclosed his monthly check to her, along with another small check for her to buy presents. He apologized for not having more money for gifts, and for not being able to come home for Christmas or to bring Anne and her to Spain, but things were looking up: residuals from some of the BBC programs were going to pay him $420, which would last them through December, and then he would get $1,500 from the BBC for the Spanish recordings, which would carry them through April or May (“if I’m careful”). He explained that he hadn’t written her as often as before because the work had been so intense. He told her about Pip (“my assistant and companion”), whom he said he should have sent home because she was exhausted, but admitted that he didn’t want her to leave “for fear of the lonely miles of cold mountains stretching out ahead of me.”

  Two days later he wrote Woody Guthrie—who he heard had become seriously ill, though Alan did not yet know it was Huntington’s disease, the degenerative nerve condition—complaining that the weather, the constant surveillance by the police, and the enormous scope of what he had chosen to do were all weighing him down. “At the front of the town there is a little harbor. Outside is the Atlantic. From there it’s a straight shoot to New York. But tomorrow I’m heading the other way. My heart kinda aches about that because in twenty days it’ll be my second Christmas away from home and I’ve been homesick for a long time. But I’m bound and determined not to come back to the States until I’ve got something to show for my long stay.”

  Reaching London on April 17, 1953, Alan was able to declare himself reborn, with fresh clarity of insight, and offered himself to Elizabeth as a new man emerging:

  I live in a tiny room, a pleasant place to work and unpleasant to sleep. I have only enough money now to keep my work going. I am waiting for BBC to pay me off for my records, and this may or may not come soon.... I live in a tiny room that swarms with plans, ambitious plans—for a ballet, for a play, for a book about Spain[,] for three television series, for my two books about America, for a book about England, for continuation of my series of records.... All the imaginative qualities that were repressed all my life are beginning to merge now for the first time. I can tackle literally anything I choose and understand its insides, not blindly, but somewhat thoughtfully.

  Alan went to Rome in September to meet Giorgio Nataletti, the director of the archives at the Centro Nazionale Studi di Musica Popolare in the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the oldest music conservatory in Europe. Nataletti was already at work on a long-term collecting project for Radio Audizione Italiane, the Italian radio and television agency, and he gave Alan access to its archives, where he discovered that there were not enough recordings representative of all areas of Italy for him to be able to put together the Italian record for the Columbia series. Once again he would do all the necessary collecting himself; he “would discover Italy in the spirit of an Italian discovering America.... To a Texan, used to driving 500 miles a day, always with the same landscape, Italy seemed small.” He approached RAI with the promise that his programs might inspire a folk song revival in Italy, and they agreed to partially support his work. When he returned to London he asked Geoffrey Bridson about the prospect of the BBC’s supporting him if he spent eight months to a year in Italy collecting songs, in exchange for which he would produce programs modeled on the Spanish broadcasts he had just done for them, and save them money by recording the shows for both countries in the Italian studios.

  Before the BBC would pay him for the Spanish recordings, however, they asked to have them approved by Eduardo Torner, a musicologist who had headed the Folklore Archive of Spain under the Loyalists and was writing some of the series of radio programs on Spain for the British radio network. “I was on the edge of nothing, living in a furnished room [in Chelsea],” Alan said. “Every morning at nine for two weeks, I went to Torner’s cold, bare room. He was even poorer than I was, dour, sick, and courteous. He existed mainly by giving Spanish lessons. He listened to the forty-five hours of tape in silence, making marks on a pad of paper. After the last tape was played, the silence was overwhelming. Finally Torner said, ‘Mr. Lomax, this is the finest piece of work ever done in the field of Spanish folk music. I will recommend that the BBC buy as much of it as they can afford.’ ” Alan was so excited by this acceptance of his work that he began making plans to coauthor a book with Torner titled Folk Music of Spain, which would be both an introduction to Spanish folk music and an anthology of songs. Torner would do the scholarly notes, and Alan would provide a narrative with “a documentary character.” A sizable portion of the manuscript was sent to Oxford University Press in London, but the book was never completed.

  Ewan MacColl joined with Alan to work on a series of Saturday morning radio programs called Ballads and Blues that were extensions of some club performances Ewan had been promoting. Six episodes were organized around themes of the sea, railroads, crime, work, soldiers, and city life, in each case attempting to reveal some of the roots of American jazz and blues in old English songs. The regular cast of the repertory company was Humphrey Lyttleton’s jazz band, A. L. Lloyd, Seamus Ennis, Jean Ritchie, and Isla Cameron, plus visiting guests such as Big Bill Broonzy when he was in town. The programs were intended as entertainment, but Alan also saw them as an opportunity to slip in what was at the time a somewhat radical theory of the connection of folk song to popular culture that crossed the Atlantic.

  He had returned to Britain just in time to take part in its early ventures into television, and was offered an eight-part series for BBC-TV Third Programme titled Song Hunter: Alan Lomax. The show’s producer, David Attenborough, had doubts about putting folk performers on live TV, but Alan enthusiastically suggested that they could mix folk and professional singers and
poets such as Ewan MacColl and Brendan Behan together to balance each other, and in the process achieve something never before attempted on television. True enough, the folksingers turned out not to be problems, but Brendan Behan, poet, playwright, and professional drunk, vomited straight into the camera on live TV. And just getting Ewan on the show was a problem as well, because he had been blacklisted by the BBC.

  As Attenborough envisioned the shows’ format, Alan was to be seated alone in the studio singing “Travelling Along” as it began, and then would introduce two or three guests from different parts of Britain. Without clearing his ideas for the first show with the BBC, however, Alan had already invited a group of women he had recorded in the Outer Hebrides to fly down to London to demonstrate their waulking songs (which Alan contended were as powerful as the blues). “In due course,” Attenborough recalled, “the ladies turned up, bringing a huge quantity of tweed with them and sang their songs in Gaelic to, I fear, a somewhat baffled audience.” The cost of their airfare alone used up the budget for the first three programs.