by John Szwed
The eleven LPs of Spanish music he had worked on in England were issued by Westminster Records in late 1959, in the midst of a flamenco craze in the United States, with singers and dancers turning up in nightclubs, dance concerts, and on TV variety programs like The Ed Sullivan Show. But Lomax’s was the most complete survey of Spanish music that anyone had heard, and it went far beyond the cante flamenco that attracted so many. He divided the albums into the music of Cities of Andalusia; Cities of Majorca and Ibiza; Jerez and Seville; Popular Dances of Majorca and the Jota of Aragon; Gypsies of Grenada and Seville; The Spanish Basques; Eastern Spain and Valencia; Galicia; Asturias and Santander; Castile; and Leon and Extremadura. Though there were too many records in the collection to reach a broad audience, some of the selections from this set and the earlier Spanish album in the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series became influential far beyond folk music circles.
Just as these recordings appeared Alan was asked by RCA Victor to help with the planning of an album of pioneer songs to be called How the West Was Won. In April 1959, Life magazine had run a series of articles on the history of the West, to which Bing Crosby bought the rights to use to frame a set of records on which he, Rosemary Clooney, and a choir would sing. The project grew larger when Alan suggested that they add Jimmie Driftwood, Texas folksinger Sam Hinton, and some writings by Carl Sandburg to be spoken by Crosby. Lomax prepared a song list and bibliography that would have surprised many Americans had it been used—topics such as drifters after the Civil War, women desperadoes, Indian warfare, and the Mormons. What was used was unusual only in the mix of singers: rough voices and church choirs, Bing crooning cowboy songs and speaking introductory lines that seem to have been written by Alan, all of it capped by a “Farmer’s Daughter” photo of Rosemary Clooney pouting against a single bale of hay in a photographer’s studio. The concept became further diluted when Crosby convinced MGM to produce a motion picture that would cover the same subject, with leading actors and singers like Debbie Reynolds brought in to sing the songs.
At the same time Alan was also beginning work on several albums for Caedmon Records, a company specializing in poetry and fiction read by their authors. Shirley Collins and he, by overseas mail, assembled two collections of Child ballads from recordings that he and Peter Kennedy had made in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and with the words of the ballads and notes about them provided, these were the most scholarly collection of these classics on record. There followed Songs of Seduction, an unbowdlerized collection of love songs and ballads, the kind of naughty recording that was popular in some circles then, but also one of the first to reveal the degree to which songs of such an open sexual nature existed in Britain. The series continued until they completed ten albums of British songs.
When Alan learned that Elizabeth had married Herbert Sturz, the door closed on that part of his life, and he began to think about another field trip, this time back to the South. He now regretted having left Shirley behind in England. In the spring he asked her to join him for the trip and a series of singing performances for the two of them, and he sent her a boat ticket.
He was living in a fifth-floor walk-up in the Village at 121 West Third Street over a pizza shop, three rooms in which he and Anne were surrounded by his usual hoard of books, tapes, recordings, and sound equipment. Shirley arrived in April, and by late June they set off for Chicago in a used Buick he bought for $250. Eighteen hours later they arrived at Studs Terkel’s apartment, had breakfast, appeared on his radio show, and left on a train for California, where Alan was directing the Berkeley Folk Music Festival that year and appearing with Pete Seeger, Jesse Fuller, Sam Hinton, and Jimmie Driftwood. As he introduced the singers, Alan repeated his plea for citybillies to learn the original style of folksingers, but folkniks by then had become a tough and case-hardened crowd and were having none of it.
They flew back to Chicago, picked up the car, and drove to Kalamazoo, where they performed and taught classes at the Circle Pines Center, the center of the Finnish Cooperative Movement and home to various political groups, where Anne was enrolled in summer camp. Five days after their stay at the camp ended, Alan was due in Newport, Rhode Island.
The sudden popularity of folk music caught the entertainment industry by surprise. What had been to most people a light amusement had moved into coffeehouses, then nightclubs and concert halls, and onto popular records. Even if it was not always clear to most what exactly a folk song was, it was recognized, like skiffle in England, as being music of simple melodies and harmonies, homespun imagery, and unamplified string instruments. It was a genre that everyone thought they knew something about. That spring a folk festival was launched at Newport, Rhode Island, by George Wein, a Boston nightclub owner, who a few years earlier had created the Newport Jazz Festival, the most successful outdoor musical event of its time. Wein’s idea had been to move jazz out of the confines of the nightclubs that specialized in only one or two styles of jazz, to make all forms of the music available in a single venue, and to build a bigger audience in the process. He had already featured a few folksingers in his clubs, and was just then in the process of staging a folk afternoon at the jazz festival, when, together with promoter Albert Grossman, he decided to expand it to a full-sized festival modeled on the jazz event.
One big difference between the two festivals was that audiences for folk were not as well acquainted with the range of regional and ethnic folk musics as fans of jazz were with its different styles. It was not even clear if a large group would know how to behave at a folk concert. On July 11 a very diverse audience gathered before a mix of New York- and Boston-based revivalist and nightclub folkniks and a scattering of country performers in the very genteel town of Newport. The last group of the evening was the Kingston Trio, a polished act that had developed an ironic distance from the folk material they so carefully arranged, but whose youthful energy and sophisticated patter made them hard to resist. To guarantee that younger audiences would be there to hear them, Wein at the last minute decided to move the trio forward in the evening’s schedule. When they came on, they were the success that was expected—so much so, in fact, that when they finished the audience demanded that they keep singing, which they did for so long that the next group, banjoist Earl Scruggs and his bluegrass band, were delayed.
From that moment on, it was clear that a clash between the logic of show business and the low key performance style of many folk musicians would be played out again and again. A Sunday morning panel discussion of collectors and folklorists found Lomax complaining that America had no interest in preserving regional styles of music and dismissing the festival as “a publicity stunt.” The festival had established a nonprofit Newport Foundation to give grants to various folk groups across the country, but to Alan it was the same kind of thing he had seen years ago at the National Folk Festival and that he had sought to avoid in the World’s Fair events: city singers polishing their country personae, with a few real folksingers presented in such a way that they inevitably seemed like amateurs who were out of place.
Alan convinced Columbia Records to fund a trip south to record two LPs for the company’s planned History of Jazz series, and while he waited to hear if the project was approved, he began exploring the possibility of starting his own festival. By August he was proposing to the administrators of Sterling Forest in Orange County, New York, that he present a group of “authentic” performers. To locate them, he asked for $1,000 for a scouting expedition to be carried on while he was in the South for Columbia Records.
Columbia, meanwhile, was insisting that Alan take a recording engineer with him, a demand that he felt interfered with the way he worked, so he refused, and the contract was canceled. He turned for help to Atlantic Records’ Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, who were flush with money from their hits that summer by the Drifters, Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, the Coasters, LaVern Baker, and Clyde McPhatter. Atlantic had just begun recording in stereo a few months earlier, making
it one of the first companies to do so. Both Ertegun brothers were longtime fans of early jazz, so Alan’s proposal to find some of the finest musicians and those that influenced them and record them with portable stereo equipment was a project that engaged them personally.
Like all of his field trips, this one often proved to be stressful, but this time it faced the additional burden of not being clearly focused. Was Alan trying to determine if folk song was still alive and developing? Was the trip primarily motivated by the new stereo technology? Or was he doing the one thing he was sure he could do to survive?
He and Shirley left on August 21, and their first stop south was Washington, D.C., to pick up a 601-2 Ampex stereo portable recorder. Passing through Virginia they offered a ride to a hitchhiker, a young black man who declared himself just the performer they were looking for and launched into some painfully sung spirituals. With the car full of equipment, the three of them rode in the front seat, Shirley in the middle with her feet on the gearbox. When she complained that it was becoming too hot to bear, Alan realized that he had been driving in first gear for the last twenty miles.
There was trouble with the new tape recorder before they even could use it, which held them up in Washington for a day, and they didn’t reach Norfolk until after dark. Alan headed directly for the black neighborhoods, leaving Shirley in the car while he went into a bar and looked for people who knew sea chanteys and dockworkers’ songs.
Their travels took them to Suffolk, Virginia, on a Sunday, where they were guided by a local music booker to a number of church services, and though they were not always welcome, they made plans to return near the end of their trip. Five hours of driving got them to Salem, near Roanoke, to see Texas Gladden and her brothers, Hobart and Preston Smith, for a recording session that lasted for two days and included ballads, dance melodies, and guitar, piano, and fiddle tunes, all interspersed with talk about romance and elopement and an occasional poem. Down in Galax, near the North Carolina border, they recorded Uncle Wade Ward, the banjo-playing son of two singers whom Alan and his father had recorded in 1939. In nearby Hillsville they found the Mountain Ramblers, a bluegrass band with particular strength in spirituals shaped by black barbershop singers.
Continuing along the state’s southern border they came to their last stop in Virginia, the home of Estil C. Ball, whom the Lomaxes had recorded several times over the previous two decades. Alan was slowly discovering the changes that had been occurring in the styles and repertoires of such singers. Ball, for example, had been a balladeer when the Lomaxes previously recorded him, and since then he had formed a bluegrass band but now was concentrating on spirituals and playing only in churches.
After recording sermons and singing at several other churches in Kentucky, they went to the tiny town of Fyffe in the northeastern corner of Alabama, to the United Sacred Harp Musical Association convention, and on to Parchman Farm. Though he had the Mississippi Prison Board’s permission to enter the prison, there was always the fear that came with entering another world. On their way Alan shaved off his beard.
He was still awed by the power of work songs, and the virtue of stereo recording was that it was now possible to hear each singer’s part with clarity, and to understand the weaving and reticulation of the polyphonic vocal lines. Though he found far fewer work song melodies and song leaders than there had been fourteen years before, and less grandeur to the actual performances, they were still deeply moving. On the song “Eighteen Hammers,” the leader, Johnny Lee Moore, called his work gang together, Alan said, as though he were “summoning a heavenly group”:
Eighteen hammers stand there in a line . . .
Ring like silver and shine like gold.
Yet in the midst of such physical work, he could also express the deepest despair:
Choppin’ in the bottom with a hundred years . . .
If a tree fall on me, I don’t a bit mo’ care.
From the Delta to northern Mississippi they headed in search of Sid Hemphill, a fiddler and “quills” (panpipes) player from Panola County whom Alan had recorded years before. Now ninety-one, he was still active, and Alan recorded him, his daughter, and a guitar-playing friend. Hemphill played the quills in the normal way, blowing over the pipes to get sounds, but he also sang into them and leaned back from them to whoop and shout. It was a style of playing that anticipated early blues harmonica, and continued to be part of black music in the synthesizers of disco and funk of the 1970s and beyond.
At Sid’s suggestion, they went to nearby Como, Mississippi, to record Lonnie and Ed Young, who were musicians in a black fife and drum tradition that dated back at least to the late 1700s—living proof that not all drumming had been suppressed during slavery.
As the day was ending and the music winding down, a man in overalls came out of the woods carrying a guitar. Fred McDowell was a neighbor who had just come in from picking his cotton crop, and he had heard the music. He sat down, pulled a bottleneck from his pocket, slipped it over the third finger on his left hand, and began to sing with his guitar weaving in and out of his voice, sometimes with the slide on a string answering him like a chorus or speaking the words for him:
Lord, the 61 Highway,
Is the only road I know
She runs from New York City,
Right down by my baby’s door
When he listened to the playback of the recordings, Alan knew they were in the company of a great but almost unknown blues singer:
The blues, speaking through Fred, sounded like a deep-voiced herald of the loi [ancestral spirits or demigods in Haiti], a silver-voiced heavenly choir answering him from the treble strings. When we played his recording back to him, he stomped up and down on the porch, whooping and laughing and hugging his wife. He knew he had been heard and felt his fortune had been made.
For the next four days they recorded McDowell, sometimes with his wife, Annie Mae, or Sid Hemphill’s daughters singing, sometimes with their neighbor Miles Pratcher joining on guitar or Fred’s sister Fanny Davis blowing some old-time hokum with a comb-and-tissue-paper “horn.” In the years to come McDowell would make a number of commercial recordings and become a regular part of folk festivals.
Alan crossed into Arkansas for all-night recording sessions with Forrest City Joe Pugh and other cotton-gin town blues bands and returned to Memphis for sessions at Pentecostal church services and with barroom singers (the latter of which got Alan arrested again). Then back to Arkansas with Shirley for quick visits to Jimmie Driftwood’s Ozark home and Almeda “Granny” Riddle, the only ballad singer who Alan thought could approach Texas Gladden. She had collected songs for years, and he felt that her taste in folk song was as acute as that of a trained critic. She was also a master of songs for children, and when Alan put together his American Folk Songs for Children LP her performances made up almost half the album.
Returning east, with their money running out, they recorded Vera Hall again in Alabama, and stopped in St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, one of the places that Alan, Barnicle, and Hurston had visited twenty-four years earlier. At a party Alan threw for the community, he met Bessie Jones, an extraordinary singer, raconteur, and teacher who was not a Sea Islander but a mainlander who had married into the community and learned its traditions, and whom Alan would later work with and make known across the country.
A late-night session in Concord, North Carolina, with J. E. Mainer’s string band was their final stop in the South. With their last ten dollars, they had yet to travel eight hundred miles home. But after they’d driven only a few minutes on the mainland, the radiator hose burst, and then a rainstorm came up and the windshield wiper fell off. By the time they paid the turnpike toll, bought gas, and paid the Holland Tunnel toll into New York City, they were broke and had to borrow money because two hours later they had to drive to Boston where they were to take part in a concert with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
The excursion south had lasted two and a half months and eaten up most of the money Alan ha
d left, but it had all been worth it. He had gone south to find out if anything was left from the early days, and now he could declare that “folk music was flourishing wherever there was an institution to support it . . . wherever, that is, a local folk festival, religious group, dance style or broadcasting station gave it an outlet.... The South was still a rich area, rich in antiquities and still producing new sounds.”
The tapes from the trip still had to be edited, the notes prepared, and the albums sequenced. The stereo recordings were as good as Alan had hoped, capturing the full range of the music, giving the performers a presence and reality that no one had ever heard on a record before. It was folk music with “the bark on it,” he said, and the first time it had been treated with the same care that was accorded symphonic, jazz, and popular music. When Atlantic Records issued the records in 1960 and 1961 under the title of Southern Folk Heritage (“Recorded in the Field and edited by Alan Lomax, Assisted by Shirley Collins”) in seven albums—Sounds of the South, Blue Ridge Mountain Music, Roots of the Blues, White Spirituals, American Folk Songs for Children, Negro Church Music, and The Blues Roll On—it was the most complete survey of southern music ever recorded for sale. With a leading jazz and rhythm and blues recording company behind them, the albums were assured of getting distribution and attention, and they wound up in the homes of many listeners who might never have bought a recording from one of the smaller, more specialized companies such as Folkways and might never have given a thought to the people or the music they contained.