Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Having articulated the foundations of a theory that treated song as a cultural universal, perhaps even a cultural imperative, and that conceived of singing as essentially a social phenomenon, he bravely applied for a grant to the University of London for a study of “The Psychological Patterns of Folk Songs”:

  The purpose of this study is to establish the psychological and physiological bases of song. Since song is one of the universal traits of human society, since song is the product of unconscious feeling and subconscious muscular behavior, and since ways of singing are among the most conservative of culture traits, it is hoped that this study will lead toward a science of aesthetics.

  The development of modern recording machines and their use by researchers in many parts of the planet have indicated the existence of a number of styles of song in the world; these song style families are very old, very slow to change and are continental in their extension. Under the term song style one includes not only melody, rhythm, harmony, etc—the formal musical characteristics—but the tone of voice, the motor behavior, the social organization, the audience response and the inherent emotions that produce the musical whole.

  Drawing on the spirit of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German musicologists, Alan foresaw a means of moving the study of folklore out of the doldrums of nostalgia and kitsch (and worse, pop culture) by drawing on scientific technology and theories that had never been used the way he intended to employ them.

  Lomax wanted to put together a research team that would include an experimental psychologist to study the psychological and physiological bases of song; a cultural anthropologist to identify the cultural patterns associated with the traits of the songs; a psychoanalyst to study the song texts and the anthropologist’s data and “seek the main fantasy patterns of culture through interviews”; a musicologist to map the traits of each song style family; a folklorist to choose the people and songs to be studied; along with technicians, cinematographers, and office personnel. It was an ambitious plan that moved far beyond what was known as folklore and took art into the laboratory: devices and instruments would be used to measure different types of vocalizing, patterns of muscular tension in the body during singing, patterns of breathing in songs, variations in electrical current on the skin and in the brain, heart rate. To gather the data they would need music-writing machines, and film and audio recording equipment. The study would take five years, and would all be done at the School of Phonetics at the University of London. And when they were done, they would have “the first mapping of the musical styles of mankind. A scientific method for folk music will be established. New roads will be opened for the history of music. Considerable advances toward a science of aesthetics will certainly have been made.”

  One can only imagine what the linguists and psychologists at the university thought of this proposal coming from a radio personality. It was an idea that found few advocates, and the reason for the lack of enthusiasm was a familiar one: the methodology was too scientific for the folklorists and the musicologists, and the subject was too humanistic for the scientists. Plus, Alan lacked the proper academic credentials for what he was attempting. Margaret Mead addressed his problem bluntly when she said, “Folklore has always seemed to me a strangely dead field. Alan may animate it with this theory, which makes sense to me. I know Alan tried for a long time to get a foundation grant for further research on the theory, but after all, we mainly give grants to M.A.s and Ph.D.s. We hardly ever give grants to people; we usually give them to degrees.”

  When the first fourteen of the Columbia recordings of world music were issued, Charles Seeger reviewed them somewhat coolly, hedging faint praise with cautionary remarks: Alan had little experience outside of the United States; the notes were better than those from other collections, but too brief; too many selections were edited for length; the sequencing of selections was too crowded on the record; the record jackets were too flimsy; the editing of the notes was sloppy. Alan was hurt, and wrote Seeger defending his work and accusing him of disloyalty. He feared that Seeger’s criticism would mean the end of the series if Columbia ever saw his review, and couldn’t believe that Seeger could not appreciate the new ideas and discoveries within it. Although he remained proud that the “richest and most powerful record company in the world” had backed him, he now had to doubt Seeger’s friendship. This was more than a scholarly dispute, as Alan had always regarded Seeger as a second father, the father he never had and had always wished for—literate, scholarly, northeastern, radical.

  J. Edgar Hoover’s office once again requested the New York FBI to prepare an extensive report on Alan, the information to be submitted in better form so that it could be sent out to all the Bureau’s offices. This time Hoover was looking for additional assistance from the Boston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, New Haven, San Antonio, and St. Louis offices. He also asked for help from the Central Intelligence Agency. By June 5, 1956, the sixty-eight-page report was completed—a long, repetitive narrative, still dotted with errors (Alan’s name was spelled wrong throughout, and the correct spelling was treated as an alias), incomplete information, hearsay (the Bureau’s own word for it), and erroneous and contradictory statements. It reached to connect Alan to the Communists, even going so far as to note that Columbia Record Company president Goddard Lieberson had once published a poem in the New Masses. Apparently frustrated with the results, Hoover turned to Louis F. Budenz, a former party member who had become a star anti-Communist by naming many of the individuals singled out by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Yet even he was unable to provide evidence that Alan was a member, though he did recall having “heard” that he was a Communist.

  Seven months and a hundred pages of documentation later, the assistant attorney general of the United States declared that given the quality of the evidence against Lomax, it “fail[ed] to disclose sufficient available evidence to warrant prosecution.” One office of the FBI after another closed its files on Alan James Lomax, and he remained unaware of the Bureau’s interest in him.

  Alan, meanwhile, busied himself with new projects. He was back in touch with Zora Neale Hurston, who was now the librarian at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, where guided missiles were tested, and was writing A Life of Herod the Great. Alan asked her permission to publish “O Lula,” a railroad workers’ song for which they had rewritten the words together. She approved, and suggested that they could work on a few other songs together and perhaps go collecting together again.

  He sent Tradition Records the tapes of his 1947 prison recordings, which were issued as Negro Prison Songs and in England as Murderers’ Home in 1958 on Nixa. Texas Folk Songs was also issued on Tradition; a version of Blues in the Mississippi Night appeared the same year on Nixa. His own singing appeared in 1958 on an HMV recoding, Alan Lomax Sings Great American Ballads, accompanied by banjoist Guy Carawan, a young singer who was passing through London on his way to the World Youth Festival in Moscow and then on to China, and Nick Wheatstraw, the pseudonym of guitarist Alexis Korner, one of the founders of British blues and rock. It was Alan’s first commercial solo recording, and it included sailing songs, a spiritual, and ballads, almost half of them African American. Also in 1958, American Song Train was recorded for Nixa, a collection of railroad songs that included the singing of Peggy Seeger and Guy Carawan, with jazz bassist Sammy Stokes and mouth harpist John Cole.

  Alan also approached director Roberto Rossellini about producing a film on Italian or American folk song. He sent him five script ideas, all regionally based, taking advantage of local landscapes and customs. In one script, four different tales of love are spun out from Calabria, Tuscany, Piedmont, and Sardinia, contrasting different styles of courtship and love songs. Rossellini seemed doubtful that these feature films could be made cheaply and with the small crews that Alan had proposed, and turned him down.

  With the Metropolitan Police and the Ministry of Labor still listening in on his broadcasts, Alan’s freedom to suggest subjects for BBC b
roadcasts was given closer scrutiny. Although his friends at the BBC cleared the way for him to do a new six-part series for Third Programme, the producer assigned to the series, Ian Grimble, objected to Lomax’s theories about song, at first pointing out exceptions to his song family characterization, then insisting that his script compare his findings with those of other ethnomusicologists, and finally asking to see the first script before they went any further. Grimble concluded that Lomax’s work was not up to “the standard that this subject requires,” and if the programs went forward his scripts would have to be edited to eliminate his use of “potted Marxism” and his “association of ‘sexual permissiveness’ with happiness and the Christian attitude toward sex with sorrow and suffering.” Lomax’s programs would also have to be limited to those areas that he knew best—Italy, Spain, and parts of America.

  Grimble was ultimately successful in killing the original idea, and Alan was told to write a much narrower series to be titled Reminiscences of a Folk Song Collector . When the programs were broadcast in January and February 1957 they were retitled as Memories of a Folk Collector, and were another series of audio travelogues with accounts of people and songs he met along the way. Still, Alan knew how to slip in surprises. A newspaper announcement of the first broadcast was headlined to suggest a small scandal in the works: “Rock ’n’ Roll on Third Programme.” “Listeners,” it said, “will be regaled by one of the first rock-’n’-rollers to hit this country; ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ ” It would be offered as an example of “a white hill-billy combination doing its very best to imitate the barrel-house blues popular among Negroes about 20 years ago and reproducing an urbanized folk style.” The series went well, and was rebroadcast the following year.

  One of the last major radio projects that Alan undertook for the BBC was eight programs for the Home Service called A Ballad Hunter Looks at Britain, which was broadcast from October to December 1958. “It took me four months,” Alan told journalist Nat Hentoff, “and after summarizing everything that had been done in the field, I tried to set up an image of the main folksong regions of Britain.” It was a sweeping survey of recordings from Britain, many of them originally done for BBC’s Folk Music and Dialect project, a collecting venture that had lost its funding, and there were some at BBC who hoped that this series might revitalize it. Alan used the best recordings he could find, while also attempting a style survey of Britain similar to those he had done for Spain and Italy.

  The very last radio production by Alan appeared at Christmas 1957. Midlands BBC producer Charles Parker, a folk song fan himself, proposed that they prepare a live Christmas morning program on the Home Service that would follow the queen’s Christmas address and reach all across the kingdom, presenting folk music from every part of the country. Its theme of Christmas cheer and nostalgia staged on a national platform was hard to resist, and it also presented a daring challenge to eight producers to hook up seven regions of the country, bring in folk musicians—some of whom were not accustomed to performing on tight schedules—and then broadcast the whole program live. But come December 25, all of Britain tuned in to “Sing Christmas and the Turn of the Year” and heard a Texas voice from Birmingham cry out over the air to his colleagues in Wales, Plymouth, Castleton, Scotland, Belfast, and London, each answering back with season’s greetings in his own language and dialect.

  What followed were choirs, pub orchestras, carol singers, a brass band, children’s groups, a Bible reading, poetry recitals, pipers, a flute band, mummers’ plays, sword dances, and—when he called on London to perform—a skiffle band, a highlife group from West Africa, Dixieland, and calypso. Even though a few reliables like MacColl and Peter Kennedy appeared, none of it was the standard commercial Christmas fare, and even favorite carols were given older treatments. Alan held it all together from the center, not at all shy about his own singing of American songs, and sharing his memories of Christmas Day in Texas. There were a few gaps in timing, and some things had to be changed in the script as they were broadcasting; when Peggy Seeger failed to appear, having been jailed by immigration authorities in Dover as she returned from the Soviet Union, they replaced her with one of her recordings.

  Alan seemed at times to be everywhere in the UK. A cartoon appeared in the July 24, 1957, issue of the British humor magazine Punch that captured how a sizable part of the public viewed him. In it a raggedy farmer sitting on the steps of his country shack sings, “I’ve got those Alan-Lomax-ain’t-been-round-to-record-me blues.” Yet despite his appearances on the BBC and Granada Television and his book royalties, his income after expenses that year was only £836 ($24,000 U.S. in today’s money), which he viewed as a sign that it was time for him to return home. For eight years he had devoted himself to European culture. “In a sense I became more intensely American every year I stayed in Europe, but I was beginning to lose my sense of reality as an American writer. I needed more contact with the sources of my work and myself.” His friend John Faulk, who had been blacklisted, left without work in New York, and was now in the midst of what would be a successful lawsuit against CBS, wrote to Alan that the country had changed and McCarthyism was on the run. It was time to come back.

  As he began thinking about returning, he decided not to ask Shirley to join him. He would return alone with Anne, as he had been promising to do for years. Just before he informed Shirley he was leaving, he and Peter Kennedy set up a two-day session for her, recording the thirty-seven songs that would make up the first two albums recorded under her name, Sweet England and False True Lovers, for Argo Records, a subsidiary of Decca. In spite of Shirley’s being only twenty-four at the time, Alan took the occasion of writing the notes for the American issue of the second record on Folkways to reflect on the role of maturity in the making of a folksinger, using Peggy Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Muddy Waters, and Jean Ritchie as examples. The first two had started by learning from others’ recordings, and later developed a deeper feeling for the style, while Ritchie and Waters were born into their styles of singing, losing none of it in the city but developing ever further. Muddy Waters’s voice, Alan said, “had coarsened, he has ‘improved’ his accent and this has erased some of his early subtlety; he has also learned to work with a band so that his phrasing and his vocalizing are more cut and dried than formerly; yet on the whole he has gained as a singer. He is in complete command of the blues today, and can do whatever he chooses to do in coloring the melodic line to match the flow of the text.”

  The idea of returning to the United States was almost as frightening to him as had been his departure from it eight years earlier. He had been thinking of entering graduate school again with the support of a Rockefeller Grant, but his anxiety over going back to school was overtaking him:

  I have to pick my way from task to task during this daylight, like an Eskimo leaping from cake to cake in an ice flow [sic]. Everything is what I ought to do, not what I want to do. God, when will it be—want to do, have to do, driven to do. Must I always be a schoolboy to my own school master?

  I don’t really want to apply for more money from Rockefeller. The thought of a long, complex piece of research, the thought of working hard repels me. I am split between the image of myself as a writer and as a researcher. Afraid to discover I am not the first, not willing to settle for the second. The academics are for me terrible poeky [sic] and sissy. The campus, the buildings, the gyms, the students with books remind me of my childhood at UT and I swear I became as shy as a girl. All my fears of missing class, of not being prepared, all the whole damn complex is aroused to bite me again.

  Even before he left Britain, Newsweek had announced his imminent return, stressing that Alan had sought the authentic everywhere and recorded it, in an act of the purest preservation. With Anne, who would now be living with him, he departed by boat on June 29, landing on July 2, 1958. While traveling he had already begun planning a talk on song and sexual repression for the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association at the invitation o
f Margaret Mead. A reporter from Time was there to greet him on his arrival in New York, and tossed him directly into current controversies by quoting him declaring his newfound enthusiasm for rock and roll, the “furthest intrusion of Negro folksong into U.S. pop music.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The American Campaign Resumed

  Despite what his friends had written him about how much America had changed while he had been gone, many things seemed the same to Alan when he returned home in 1958. Some people were still looking for a way into full citizenship, and others were trying to lock them out. The business of the thirties lay unfinished, as he saw it, with new players on the stage in old roles: now an even younger generation was trying to define the nation, and it was still speaking of finding roots, and of justice and freedom.

  Some things were new: television had found the heart of American popular culture, distracting people from their usual routines and keeping them home. The movies fought back with every weapon of spectacle they could find—wide screens, 3-D, Jell-O-colored pictures, anything bigger than that small screen at home. There was a counterreaction as well, a return to the principles of what film could do that no other medium had managed, “small movies” conceived in realism, even filmed in black and white, and Alan’s old friends Elia Kazan, Nick Ray, and Joseph Losey had been building new audiences for their gritty, Method-based visions of America.

  In radioland, DJs of every stripe ruled what people listened to, finding ways to elevate singers like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, who only a decade before would have been unavailable to those of a different color and class. Even some of the singers that Alan had recorded in the field had dressed up and gone to the city: Sam Cooke and Ivory Joe Hunter, once called “folk,” were now rock and roll. High fidelity and stereo had ceased being the toys of the rich and become the symbols of a certain lifestyle, and like the earliest phonographs, they were now part of the furniture of the modern household.