Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  It was the first BBC television program to present the music of rural people. “It was also, so far as I know, the first time beer was drunk on television, and the spirit of ‘lower class’ life from many sections of Britain was given so thorough and free a play. I remember an 82-year-old man from Sussex who had lived on cider and cheese all his life holding up his cider glass, winking every time the camera was on him, and later singing an unbowdlerized version of ‘Foggy, Foggy Dew.’ ” Following early TV practice, the singers were seated stiffly in a half circle, so there would not be much camera movement. Alan was so annoyed by this staging that a third of the way through the second show he “jumped to his feet and led the entire company in a mad procession around the studio, in and out between the two cameras and the sound booms and the lighting stands.” The director and camera operators were forced to follow them, and thereafter other shows became more animated.

  The Spanish recordings were finally broadcast on BBC Radio’s Third Programme production of The Folk Music of Spain, a show formatted to closely follow Lomax’s own collecting trip through Spain. Then came Spanish Folk Music, a six-part series written by Eduardo Torner and based on Alan’s recordings. Getting the Spanish material on the air meant that he would be paid, but by then much of that money had already been advanced to him.

  The Columbia World Library project was stalled, the money was running out, and he knew he would never be able to finish it without help. One day in the spring of 1954 a package arrived from India containing the tapes for India, volume 13 of the Columbia series. It had been assembled by Alain Danielou, a professor of music at the University of Benares, and came with photos, English translations, and transcriptions of scales, melodies, and rhythms. Though it made no attempt to include samples of the vast amounts of music from India Alan had asked for, and settled for the regions of Benares and Madras only, it featured recordings from Indian composers and some of the country’s finest musicians. “Unlike several of the other collections I’d received in various states of incompletion and unevenness, there was nothing for me to do with the Indian material but lean back and listen. The music was absolutely beautiful. I cried for an hour. All the torment had been worthwhile, all the nightmare of work.”

  He then threw himself back into the project, and in December, Columbia was able to announce that the first fourteen volumes had been completed and were for sale: England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Canada, Spain, French Africa, Bantu music from British East Africa, Australia, New Guinea, Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Japan (including the Ryukyus, Formosa, and Korea), and India. (Northern and central Italy, southern Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania were released later.) The albums all received positive reviews, though one reviewer, unaware of the small budget that Lomax was given to produce the series, said that “it is a pity that—in view of the tremendous sums lavished on this project—a few more dollars could have been spent for better pictures, competent make-up and a little careful proof-reading.”

  Finally having some time to think about writing, Alan sketched out ideas for three books: a journal of his most recent trip to be called A Summer in Spain with the best of what he recorded there; Bonny Bunch of Roses, a book about the British Isles; and My Heart Struck Sorrow, his still unfinished book revisiting the Fisk/ Library of Congress project. He wrote for advice to Lewis Jones, the one person in the project he thought understood what it should be about. It would examine the South in the period in which the blues developed in the Delta, one of the areas where the music reached its highest plane. It would begin with ex-slave reminiscences and move to the stories of the bluesmen—“the main theme is the same as in Jelly Roll—rejection, the individual absolutely alone against a hostile world, with his community unable to support and protect him, and disappearing under his feet.”

  ’Oss, ’Oss, Wee ’Oss had just been completed, and Alan now hoped that BBC-TV would find it interesting enough to offer him a chance to create a series of such films. But the odds were slim, and he was becoming aware that he was not likely to make anything more on what he had done in Europe. His best chance for the future was to return to the United States where his European work might create new employment possibilities for him. He wrote his brother, John Jr., for the first time in a year and explained what he had been doing, and that all his savings were gone, but he also expressed the hope that someday they’d be proud of what he had accomplished. He ended by asking him to forward a $90 royalty check that had arrived for him in Texas.

  The surveillance of Alan’s life was expanding rapidly, but still without his knowledge. The FBI office in New York was again asking for information about him, and the old reports were being recycled, though now in increasingly garbled form, with his name still misspelled in the agents’ files. When he asked to have his passport renewed in 1953 so that he could return to Spain and Italy as part of his work for the BBC, the American embassy asked him to sign a statement that he had never been a member of the Communist Party in the United States.

  By July, the Metropolitan Police of London had determined that Alan “appeared” to be a Communist, because of the folk song shows he had written for the BBC, and because some of his associates, especially A. L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, the people in the Theatre Workshop, and his American friends, such as Joseph Losey and Donald Ogden Stewart (an American actor and screenwriter who had written the script for The Philadelphia Story) were already under surveillance. Singers and actors often gathered at Theodore Bikel’s house in St. John’s Wood, some of whom had been blacklisted in London for their politics, but to Alan it was less a political refuge than a place where he could meet younger folksingers and encourage them to drop what he called their veneer and sing in more authentic styles. He sometimes brought Margaret Barry along to show them how it was done.

  The London police had also begun to monitor his radio programs and check on his guests. The conditions for his employment were changed, now requiring him to get permission not only from the Ministry of Labor but also from the U.S. secretary of state, and limiting his stay in the UK to the rest of the year.

  Once the BBC agreed to help underwrite his programs, Alan went to Italy and remained there from April 1954 through February 1955. It was a country he would come to think of as “a 20th century museum, not only of art and architecture, but of musical antiquities as well—of important trends that have affected the folk music of Europe for the last 2,000 years.” Musically it was “the least spoiled, most vigorous and most varied of all Western Europe.”

  Italy also offered an opportunity for him to see Anne and Elizabeth again, and in March the three of them met in Paris and stayed for a few weeks. Alan spent his mornings with Gilbert Rouget at the Musée de l’Homme listening to recordings from Asia and Africa. They paid special attention to the music of the Pygmies and the Bushmen of Africa, maybe the oldest peoples in the world, and heard many similarities in their respective musics. Since they had little or no historical contact with each other, Alan speculated that the explanation lay in the parallels between the two cultures’ social structure and economic life.

  For the Italian trip Alan had replaced the worn-out Citroën with a used VW bus that was also badly in need of repairs, and in mid-April the Lomaxes drove to Italy, heading down the Ligurian coast toward Rome. As they traveled, Alan advised his daughter to keep a diary, to make drawings and maps, and to write down her dreams as soon as she woke up. That was precisely what he was doing, as he intended this to be the best documented of all his collecting trips, as well as the most scientific.

  When they reached Rome, he met again with Giorgio Nataletti, who helped him map out the peoples and areas that most needed documentation: the music and song traditions of peasants, shepherds, fishermen, and artisans in over a hundred localities from Sicily to the Alps. An itinerary was developed for him, and letters were written and phone calls made to local officials and important individuls that he should meet before he began recording in each town and district. Since Alan needed help in translation and understa
nding the different areas and traditions, he agreed to hire Diego Carpitella, a young ethnomusicologist who was an assistant at the Centro, who would accompany him for the first three months of the trip. Carpitella would also coedit the two Columbia LPs that would result from these recordings: southern Italy and the islands, and northern and central Italy and the Albanians of Calabria. This would not only be the first full survey of Italian folk music, but was also intended as a test of his theory that Italy had roughly the same song style orientation as Spain—“a Mediterranean tense-voiced South—a middle ground (near the administrative center) text-oriented song, and an open-voiced choralizing North. It seemed clear from talking to my friend [Alberto] Moravia—that the sexual mores of Italy varied along the same axis—from a South of purdah to a North where sex before marriage was mildly sanctioned if at all.”

  Alan settled Elizabeth and Anne in two rooms in Positano, a medieval fishing village on the Amalfi Coast in Campania that was then beginning to be discovered by artists and tourists. Here Elizabeth could write, Anne would go to school, and Alan would head off to collect songs. Over the next nine months they would see him only two or three times.

  Diego and Alan started out in Sciacca, Sicily, on July 2, recording on the tuna barges off the coast, where very old, very salacious sea chanteys were sung at full force. They later moved on to a puppet theater for children in a park in Palermo, where the Chanson de Roland was being recited nearby at epic length. From there they moved north, tracking down harvesting songs, courting serenades, Calabrian canzoni, shepherds’ songs, bagpipes and polyphonic women’s choirs in Abruzzi, folk operatic texts in Umbria, Tuscan marble-cutting songs, Roman stornelli and panpipe orchestras from the Piemonte, and the canonic counterpoint of Genoese longshoremen and of tiny Ligurian mountain villages.

  In the mountains above San Remo I recorded French medieval ballads, sung as I believe ballads originally were, in counterpoint and in a rhythm which showed they were once choral dances. In a Genoese waterfront bar I heard the longshoremen troll their five-part tralaleros—in the most complex polyphonic choral folk style west of the Caucasus—one completely scorned by the respectable citizens of the rich Italian port. In Venice I found still in use the pile-driving chants that once accompanied the work of the battipali, who long ago had sunk millions of oak logs into the mud and thus laid the foundation of the most beautiful city in Europe. High in the Apennines I watched villagers perform a three-hour folk opera based on Carolingian legends and called maggi (May plays)—all this in a style that was fashionable in Florence before the rise of the opera there. These players sang in a kind of folk bel canto which led me to suppose that the roots of this kind of vocalizing as we know it in the opera house may well have had their origin somewhere in old Tuscany. Along the Neapolitan coast I discovered communities whose music was North African in feeling—a folk tradition dating back to the Moorish domination of Naples in the ninth century. Then a few miles away in the hills, I heard a troupe of small town artisans, close kin to Shakespeare’s Snug and Bottom, wobble through a hilarious musical lark straight out of the commedia del’ arte.

  Diego and Alan quickly established a mutually comfortable work pattern: they traveled late at night, with Alan driving, reaching their destinations early in the morning, usually sleeping in the van. They depended primarily on their intuition, not paying attention to the authorities to whom the letters and calls had gone out, spending an hour or two in one location, three days in another, talking to people sitting on walls, working in the fields, sweeping the steps, or drinking and gambling, sometimes stopping to speak to people walking along the roads. The authorities, in fact, were shocked by some of the subjects they recorded, and often interrupted to object. But between the two of them, as different as they were, they invariably seemed to find good sources. Diego was short and quiet, with a wry wit, and he thought of Lomax as the professional, the one who knew how to get people to perform and record. Being a foreigner might even be an advantage. But Alan needed Diego to ask “suspicious Sicilian and Calabrian peasants certain rather intimate things I wanted to know about their sex lives, their childhood emotions and their vocal cords,” and when he refused they quarreled “violently”:

  He told me that he didn’t personally care whether Italian peasants made music through their throats, out their ears or blew it out their backsides—he just liked the music. So I have had to give up all but the superficial bagging songs, checking off province by province.

  Yet despite their disagreements, their travels together made them lifelong friends, and Alan inluded Diego among the small circle of Ewan MacColl, Peter Kennedy, Nick Ray, and Johnny Faulk as those he could count on.

  On their way to Puglie, Diego and Alan stopped back in Positano. Alan had been writing and sending money to Elizabeth regularly, but this was the first time he had seen her and Anne in several months. The work had been intense and exhausting, and complicating things further, Susan Mills, an English girlfriend of Alan’s, had come to Italy to visit him. In the letters that went back and forth between him and Elizabeth it became clear they would never remarry: disagreements, Alan’s constant work and travel, and the fact that neither of them had prospects for enough money to live on finally put to rest their dreams of a new start together. He stayed in Positano for only a few days, some of which were spent recording the songs of the porters and mule drivers from Monte Pertusi and the fishermen’s music down on the beach. He told Anne he would be back in September, but when the fall came he was in Friuli. Elizabeth had meanwhile met Herbert Sturz, a young writer who was freelancing for New York newspapers, and began seeing him. Anne felt abandoned. Alan did return at Christmastime but left again before Christmas Day to record the bagpipers in Abruzzo. Elizabeth was furious with him, and when he returned he took Anne with him to Capri for the New Year’s ceremonies. A few days into the new year he again departed, alone, this time for Naples and southern Italy.

  Neither the gaiety of Neapolitan song nor the tarantella can conceal for long the sorrowful voice of Southern Italy, which has been the prey of Rome and Naples for a score of centuries. You will understand this if you allow this razor-edged voice to cut at your heart—a woman, her throat clenched, with the sorrows of a lifetime of oppression and possessive, jealous love, her face a mask of sorrow, rocks back and forth in a straight legged chair and sings a lullaby to her child.... Out of the shining olive-groves that overlook the blue Gulf of Salerno comes an answering sound—the drone of the oriental jaw’s harp and the voices of two of the men singing what seems to us a lament but is, in fact, a love song—but a love song in the manner of this Saracen colony, lost here in the hills near Naples for 1000 years.... Once I had penetrated below its smiling Neapolitan masque, I found in Campania the most varied music of any part of Italy. The culture changes literally from village to village—Saracen to Greek, Greek to Lucanian, Lucanian to Slav. Listen to these folk harvesting chestnuts on the hills near Avellino. Were their ancestors Croats, Bulgars? . . . At the next stopping place in Campania I found a complete contrast. Whereas these Italian-Slavs had rolled up a roar of deep voices, the girls almost singing in baritone, the young women of Lettino made a filigree of pinched silvery tones, singing roundinellas about love.... But the true voice of the mysterious hills of Campania is the bagpipe, and its companion, the Moorish oboe, or cirimia. . . . I saw enormous pipes with chanters nine feet long emitting a great baa like a veritable Ram of Derby, and, beyond these, small-size pipes, on down to parlor sets with small, sweet voices. In the Christmas season bands of these pipers invade every town in southern Italy, playing the tunes from house to house, questing for wine and bread and a few lire for their hungry families back in the hills.... One cold Christmas afternoon I set up my microphone on the muddy streets of an old Norman fortress town, a band of shepherds in sheepskin trousers and sandals and with two bagpipes, one single and one double oboe come barrel-organing down the street.... The shepherd oboe player signals the lady of the house to open her doors, wishes h
er a happy new year, and then asks permission to play.... Meanwhile the shepherds pursue their quest for Christmas money over the next hill.

  Postwar Italy faced many problems, some of which Alan had experienced directly. An American entering rural Italy, where poverty and despair persisted after the nation’s devastating defeat and occupation, was met with suspicion. When he first came into the country all his clothes were stolen, his camera disappeared, and most of his clothes were taken yet a second time. All of his notebooks were stolen out of the van. He feared being robbed of the money he had to keep on hand to pay singers and musicians, and kept records of each payment for the BBC. In the town of Caggiano, in Campania, husbands were sometimes so jealous that Alan had to obtain orders from the provincial government for permission to record women, whom the local mayors had to assemble in their offices for recording. On one occasion, a husband burst into the session and dragged his wife out. Sometimes a town official, knowing Alan would be recording there, would announce it to the whole town, and four or five hundred people would turn up, beating on the doors to have their turn. Once when he was recording under a bridge to avoid crowds, local mafiosi threatened to kill him.

  Folklore in Italy made him newly aware of the power of tradition to create the character of a people. American folklorists were accustomed to thinking of history in terms of two or three hundred years and describing changes in terms of decades. To encounter cultures that required a two-thousand-year perspective was both exhilarating and overwhelming:

  The regions or localities which did not conform to the south to north pattern . . . were precisely those in which some group of invaders or immigrants, usually coming from the east, had settled down and held to their musical culture. Perhaps the major ethnological find of my trip was to discover that Italian folk song has been subjected to steady influences from across the Adriatic for hundreds of years, for I encountered pockets of Slavic or Greek polyphony from the Carnian Alps all the way down the boot into the northern hills of Calabria.