by John Szwed
After traveling for eight months Alan was surviving on a bank loan, dinners from friends, and the occasional royalty check. He was out of tape and film, and the loss of nearly all of his notebooks was a blow from which he never recovered, as he would now be unable to write the detailed book comparing Spain and Italy that he had hoped would be a step toward developing a science of folklore. He took solace in the sheer fact of having driven twenty-five thousand miles and filled sixty miles of tape—enough material to develop the BBC and RAI broadcasts, two LPs for Columbia, and Music and Song of Italy for Tradition Records. What gave him the heart to go forward, however, was that the vague ideas he had been pondering for years were beginning to take shape, and the evidence to support them was falling into place. In a letter home just before Christmas, 1954, he laid out the project that would occupy him for the rest of his life:
Music for most people, not professional musicians, is more than melody, rhythm, and words—it’s what kind of voice the singer uses, the way he holds his body, and it’s when and how and where the song is sung. All this is learned and transmitted from generation to generation.
The primary function of music is to remind the listener that he belongs to one certain part of the human race, comes from a certain region, belongs to a certain generation. The music of your place stands for everything that has ever happened to you when you were a kid, reminds you of what your family was like, what it was like when you fell in love—in fact is a quick and immediate symbol for all the deepest emotions the people of your part of the world share. (This explains why the saddest songs, like the blues, make the members of that musical family laugh with pleasure. Hearing that sad music gives the members of that group a complete sense of being home again, in the family again.)
So far as I can tell there are between [eight] and a dozen main musical families in the world—styles or ways of making music, I mean. Each of these styles is characterized by a way of placing the voice, a way of moving the body, a relation of the song to the dance, an attitude toward music, a kind of melody, etc.—Each of these families is very widely distributed across the earth. Each is very, very old. In fact, it seems that musical style changes less than any other aspect of human culture—such as religion, language, etc.
Since, as I have pointed out, the primary function of music is to set up a certain atmosphere which corresponds to certain deep patterns of feeling, this means that there are between eight and a dozen main emotional families in the world, each of these families [are] very old, each having had much to do with the coloring and shaping of all culture and all experience.
Naturally the musical style is only the outward manifestation of the deep river of feeling that produces it. This is shown by [the] fact that musical style tends not to alter because of musical reasons, but because of important changes in the lives of people who make the music. So far as I can determine from the music that I have worked with myself, the determining factors seem to be:
—the sexual pattern in the society, especially the position of women, and this is interesting since women tend to be the rememberers of songs, the main song audience, even though the singers are men
—how children are raised
—other sources of security, that vary from culture to culture
Lately I have been thinking about a method of research that would be practical, would make it possible to quickly test these ideas against the available facts. I believe I have found out a pretty good method of study which anyone interested could use. And I’m ready to put it all down on paper as soon as I get settled down.
This means that all this gathering of folksongs, besides putting a lot of good tunes back into circulation, will serve in increasing man’s knowledge of himself. It would work like this—if you found musical style A in a community, you would know that a certain family of perhaps deeply hidden emotions was at play in the emotional and aesthetic life of the entire society . . . or in reconstructing the past, you would feel sure that if you discovered style B in the folklore of the community, that aesthetic B had been perhaps operative in the life of the ancient people of that area—in other words, folk music can become a historical touchstone like the radioactive substances studied by geologists. But also folksong can become an index as to what is aesthetically wrong or right about a certain branch of the human family, or even with an individual.... This idea has another interesting side to it, too, that it relates music to bodily tensions:
—bodily tensions to inner emotional tensions
—inner emotional tensions to social tensions
therefore it can serve in constructing a proper history of art. Art has always seemed to have a history of its own, dependent but related to the history of the society that produced it. I think my theory explains why. Therefore out of this could grow a proper way of relating art to society, or deciding what kind of art you wanted to have in what kind of world.
In January 1955, Elizabeth, Herbert Sturz, Anne, and Alan all moved to Rome, where Lomax planned to wind up his research in Italy. Alan felt at home among the intellectuals of Rome, people like Alberto Moravia and the American painter Beverley Pepper, freer to speak to them about his ideas than he had been in the United States. His gregariousness and conversation charmed them, and he was welcomed as a different kind of American. But when his Roman friends finally understood what he’d been talking about by listening to what he’d been recording, they were horrified: “That music isn’t Italian, it’s the barbarous sound of Africa or some such place. Play us the blues!” The political left of Italy, like the right, believed that the masses should be lifted out of their ignorance, enabling them to leave their dialects and folklore far behind. Those attitudes would change later, when Giorgio Nataletti and Alan played folk music and discussed its history on the radio. Soon that same music would appear on film soundtracks, such as Vittorio De Seta’s documentaries Lu tempu di li pisci spata in 1954 and Sulfatera in 1955, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1971 Il Decameron (though the Pasolini film did not credit Lomax).
Racing against radio schedules, Alan wrote and recorded programs for RAI and BBC, and got the recordings of The Folk Music of Italy off to England in time for their first broadcast in March. He gave a set of the field recordings to RAI and copied his records for the library of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, his collection more than doubling its holdings. Anne accompanied Elizabeth and Herbert to Spain, where the two of them were to write Reapers of the Storm, an account of life under Franco, fictionalized to protect their sources. In August Anne returned to Italy, and she, Alan, and Susan Mills took a boat from Naples and together spent a month on the island of Ponza. It was there he told Susan he would not be marrying her. He then sent Anne back to Spain to her mother and returned to England.
Ewan MacColl threw a party in his flat to celebrate Alan’s return, and invited London’s inner circle of folksingers. The newest face was Shirley Collins, a young singer from Hastings on the south coast of Britain, who had just returned from a music festival in Moscow. Collins was born into a family that Alan described as working-class intellectuals: her grandparents were folksingers, her mother had run for local office as a Labor Party candidate, and other relatives were painters and writers who celebrated the life of the southern English in their art. She had grown up listening to Alan’s programs on the BBC, learned hundreds of songs from Cecil Sharp’s books, and had come to London in 1953 for the opportunity to sing and use the song collections at the English Folk Dance and Song Society. By adapting her five-string banjo playing to pieces that were traditionally unaccompanied, she brought a new spirit to the songs she’d grown up with. But it was her pure, “young girl singing alone in the house or the garden, dreaming of love” quality that attracted Alan’s attention—that, and his fantasy of her aging into the maturity of an Aunt Molly Jackson.
To Collins, Alan was a broadcasting star, and an authentic singer in his own right, a Texan with size and speech to match, which made him hard to resist when he asked her to move in
with him at his new place in Highgate and be his assistant. It was an awkward situation for her, unmarried and twenty years younger than he, but she went to work on the Columbia world folk music series and the manuscript of a new book, The Folk Songs of North America, despite a constant flow of visitors passing through.
On Shirley’s twenty-first birthday he arranged a party for her and then failed to show up for it. When he appeared the next day, he told her that he had spent the night with Robin Roberts, who was back visiting in London. Shirley returned home to Hastings, but later forgave him when he asked her to join him on a trip to Paris to work on the world music records and then go on to Mallorca for a vacation, where they would visit Robert Graves and his family.
Alan’s struggles to stay afloat in London continued, forcing him to live on tea and cake, as he would say. Without regular work at the BBC, he spent most of his time as a freelance writer, dreaming up ideas and pitching them to media people. He was approached to write a television play for children by the man who owned the drama rights to Superman, and with the help of Yola Miller Sigerson, a writer who had worked with Yip Harburg and Joris Ivens, he created a folk play with songs by Woody Guthrie and others. The play was never bought, but at Christmastime 1955, Joan Littleton staged an expanded version of it, called The Big Rock Candy Mountain, for Theatre Royal at Stratford East. It was what he called a “new American folk musical,” though the British audience must have thought of it more as a Christmas pantomime. The play only ran for a week, but the critic at the Times of London favorably compared the two lead characters with the two tramps of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
The children’s script’s success led him to write a musically illustrated book for children, Harriet and Her Harmonium, published in London in 1955, which Alan said he wrote for Anne. In it a twelve-year-old girl travels alone across America with her harmonium to meet her fiddle-playing father in San Francisco. On the way she encounters cowboys, sailors on the Mississippi, and Irish travelers, and has various adventures, all while learning American folk songs (with words and music included in the book). Alan also served as an adviser for the folk music used in the Adventures of Robin Hood TV series on ITV in Britain (1955-59), produced by Hannah Weinstein, an expatriate leftist journalist who hired blacklisted American writers such as Ring Lardner Jr. whenever she could.
CHAPTER 13
Skiffle: From Folk to Pop
Beyond the music hall ditties, Cockney songs, crooners, and other prewar fare, there was little that was musically unique to the postwar British experience of the early 1950s. Plays and movies were subject to censorship on social and political issues, and BBC Radio regularly barred certain pop and jazz recordings for any number of reasons: the mention of commercial products or God in song lyrics, arrangements of classical melodies for dancing, rhythms that were too “infectious” and threatened workers’ daytime routines, songs that implied sexual behavior or drug use. Music from outside the country was seldom heard, as the Musicians Union limited foreign musicians from performing in Britain unless arrangements had been made to send an equal number of British musicians in exchange.
Yet one form of jazz and pop had slipped in and taken hold in certain circles: trad jazz—traditional jazz, in the form of New Orleans or Dixieland music, which had been imported from the United States before the war, following the revival of New Orleans music that occurred about the time Lomax recorded Jelly Roll Morton. By the 1950s this music, which was by then a quaint relic in the United States, was suddenly taken up by labor unions, intellectuals, and student groups in the UK as the art of amateurs and improvisers, and as music for those with disdain for the establishment’s arts. So it was that when the Tory government announced in 1956 that it would allow the United States to build a nuclear base at Holy Loch—the same year the UK began to battle with Egypt over the Suez Canal—no one was surprised when trad was the music heard from street bands in Ban the Bomb marches and war resistance parades.
These British bands, like the New Orleans groups of the 1920s that they emulated, had wide repertoires, including hymns, marches, blues, and old pop songs. Though most groups played without vocalists, the Chris Barber Band featured a few songs sung by their guitarist-banjoist, Lonnie Donegan (who had taken his first name from the African American blues guitarist and singer Lonnie Johnson). In 1953 Donegan began to sing Lead Belly songs for his feature spot with the group, sticking close to the original recording, and even repeating Lead Belly’s spoken introductions. One of those songs, a sped-up version of “Rock Island Line,” was recorded in London on July 13, 1954 (just a week after Elvis Presley recorded a faster version of blues singer Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s Alright, Mama” in the Sun Record Studios in Memphis), and suggested a parallel to the working-class youth music that was developing in the United States under the name of rockabilly. Donegan sang with just a guitar, bass, and washboard in a scratchy, shuffling, energetic style that was both primitive and new to English ears; “Rock Island Line” became a number one seller in England, and was also the first British recording to reach the American top ten list.
Black American blues singers and folksingers such as Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, and Muddy Waters had been to the UK in the early 1950s, bringing a vocal style new to most, and making the guitar a centerpiece of their performances. This was a music that British youth would call skiffle, borrowing the name from recordings of early African American performers such as Dan Burley and His Skiffle Boys (a band that included Brownie McGhee), or Jimmy O’Bryant and His Chicago Skifflers. Whatever “skiffle” meant in the United States, in Britain it meant a guitarist or banjo player, usually one who sang, accompanied by a variety of other instruments—bass or clarinet and homemade instruments such as the washboard or a one-string broomstick-handle-and-washtub bass. Suddenly, guitars, not at all a common instrument in the UK, were everywhere. For some, skiffle meant singing Lead Belly songs or blues; for others it was the songs of Woody Guthrie, though some soon became interested in finding songs from their own heritage: Margaret Barry, who was singing at a pub in Camden Town, was a skifflers’ source for Irish travelers’ songs. Skiffle clubs sprang up, declaring themselves anticommercial, and the music was danced to by Teddy Boys, the Edwardian-dressed gangs, some of whom were also drawn to bluegrass or calypso or jazz.
Alan saw skiffle in broader terms than just the new fad of a new generation. For him, the Scots-Irish-English song tradition, as he called it, took on a particular shape in the United States, where “the melting pot of the American frontier” brought its various threads together and, with the help of African Americans, developed accompaniment for the songs with guitars and banjos and brought new rhythmic sensibilities to these songs and others from the black traditions. Now skiffle was bringing back home local songs of the British Isles, encouraging amateurs to play and sing, something that “Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the British schools were unable to do.” (Alan’s only fear was that the instrumentalists would “learn too much” and be influenced by “a lot of sophisticated chord progressions from the jazz boys.”)
He and Ewan MacColl found skiffle hard to resist, and they formed their own group, the Rounders, with Shirley Collins and others, and performed on Granada TV for fourteen one-hour programs. They then reformed as the Manchester Ramblers, a group they hoped would become the Weavers of Britain. Under the name of Alan Lomax and the Ramblers, in 1956 they made an extended-play single record backed by washboard, bass, guitar, banjo, and jazz clarinet. Their repertoire included black work songs like “O Lula” and “Railroad Man”; MacColl’s own compositions such as the Dartmoor prison-inspired “Hard Case,” and “Dirty Old Town,” a theme he had written for a BBC documentary on Manchester; Scots tunes such as “Rothesay-O” and “Carlton Weaver”; and American songs like “The Water Is Wide.” All were collected in a songbook called The Skiffle Album, Featuring Skiffle and Folk Songs Popularized by Alan Lomax and the Ramblers.
Skiffle had
led Alan into the world of pop music as a performer, but it also drew him into the morass of copyright. Copyright law had not been well understood in the 1930s and 1940s. Few, if any, law schools offered courses on it, and lawyers often depended on the Library of Congress for help on specific cases. The copyright law of 1908 was already out of date, because those who wrote it did not anticipate that the crudely made recordings that began appearing around the turn of the century would ever need protection, given their minimal value. Once the laws were extended to cover recordings a flurry of new questions arose: Could an album of songs have the same kind of copyright protection as a book of songs? Did music have to be published to be protected? Folk songs presented their own special problems. If folk songs were passed from person to person by oral tradition, the individuals who created them were likely to have been forgotten, and even if they could be identified, it would be difficult to prove a song was definitively theirs. In the 1940s even the performance of a folk song was not always granted copyright protection. Colonel Clement Bouvé, then the head of the copyright office, declared that “a folksinger could not claim to be an interpretive performer in the same sense that [pop music] performers had made such claims,” and the library was thus not obligated to obtain releases from folksingers when records made in the field were issued for sale by the library.