Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Alan’s work made it possible to grasp something of the history of American vernacular music, especially since the few writers who had attempted to approach it had neither the sheet music nor the recordings on which to build such a history. The rough and powerful origins of white American Protestant music were audible on these recordings, some of which still had traces of eighteenth-century elements. You could hear the mutual influence of black music and white. You could discover instruments and musical techniques derived from Africa, such as gourd banjos, quills, homemade drums, and polyrhythmic clapping, and perhaps understand the influences on jazz and rock and roll; or just experience how witty and complex children’s songs and games could be. Alan was particularly proud of the children’s anthology, insisting that its tunes and game songs were far warmer and wittier than the Little Golden Books and the confections on children’s TV. (“The People’s Mother Goose is good and golden, and the Mother Goose of Madison Avenue is, by contrast, vapid and lifeless.)

  The reviewers agreed that the recordings were important documents of American history. The New York Times marveled at the depth of the collection and the speed with which it had been completed, praising the documentation of African-derived music in America and the quality of the written notes (and suggesting that Lomax had avoided the “social determinism” with which he had interpreted Best Loved American Folk Songs). Charles Edward Smith in the Saturday Review was equally impressed, but complained about the use of words like “African” (which he seemed to feel was out of place) and “primitive” (a word then still being debated by anthropologists, some of whom, like Alan, were attempting to transvalue it into a positive). Smith also decried “stereotyped descriptions” such as Lomax’s use of the term “cooperative labor” within a prison setting.

  Despite the breadth of the Atlantic series, there were piles of unused tapes from the trip south, and Alan took them to several companies, most of which did not want what they suspected were Atlantic’s leftovers. But they did interest Prestige Records, a shoestring operation built on jazz and famous for its bebop recordings. In recent years the label had been releasing folk song recordings at low cost, produced by Kenneth Goldstein, a young folklorist who saw the value of making folk music available to the public in its original form. Prestige finally settled on a set of twelve albums to be called Southern Journey, which would contain more of the music as on the Atlantic set, but would go deeper into the tradition, often recording the neighbors of the “stars” of the previous albums.

  During the work on the second installment of records, Alan came down with another ear infection, this time in his good ear, and he was fearful of losing most of his hearing. He recovered, but was still without money. Westminster Records was going out of business, and he tried to get back the Italian tapes that he had hoped they would bring out. The women to whom he’d sublet his apartment had not paid all the rent, and the landlord was demanding it from Alan. Then one night he and Shirley came home to find that a fire in the pizza shop downstairs had spread through the building and was creeping upwards toward their apartment. But the firemen stopped the flames at the fourth floor, and Alan was able to move everything out and stay with friends until the building was restored after Christmas.

  For the second time, he decided that he should end his relationship with Shirley, and he asked her to return home to England in late January. He attempted to soften the blow by giving her a letter that made her his agent to sell the idea of a series of programs for the BBC based on the southern recordings, for which she would receive 10 percent and the artists would receive their fees. (Every song from that trip was copyrighted in the name of the artists singing it.) Shirley was also authorized to use the tapes for any radio shows or lectures of her own.

  On his return to New York Alan had attempted to resume analysis with the psychiatrist he had been seeing eight years before, but after a few sessions he was encouraged to stand on his own, and he began a period of self-analysis, keeping copious notes on his dreams and thoughts, sometimes mailing them to his analyst in hopes that he would read them and perhaps agree to see him again. Many of these notes were taken up with ruminations about Shirley, for he was once again having second thoughts. Worrying that it was he who felt rejected by Shirley, he wrote that under analysis he had worked his way through what he had previously thought was hatred for his father, to confronting what he now understood was rejection by his mother, a rejection he had relived through a series of relationships with women who sooner or later rejected him. He was haunted by fear of being inadequate to the tasks he set for himself. Whenever he began new enterprises, such as putting the first words to paper when writing, he said he was frozen by fear of the responses of critics. Finding a new woman to be with seemed to him an “emotionally valid” way of escaping these problems, though he confessed to himself that he had been too hasty and anxious in the relationships he had sought.

  When he discovered documentary writing, where he used the words of other people, he felt himself freed of these concerns. “Everything I have written or transcribed has been for me a successful ruse for containing and transmitting my hostility and anger and rebellious feeling. I am always surprised when my enemies don’t attack me and blast me harder.... I took to folklore with relief and floated on the vast wild Mississippi of American folk fantasy, so much of it loaded with anger and death wish and defiance of authority.” Because there were so few folklorists when he began, he said, folklore had given him a sense of freedom from criticism.

  But now he was writing page after page in an attempt to prove to himself that Shirley was his perfect mate and that he had been a fool to leave her; they were followed by an equal number of pages refuting himself. When he heard Shirley was to be married, he traveled back to London and asked her to marry him instead, but she turned him down.

  One of the visitors to Alan’s apartment during this period was Guy Carawan, the folksinger who had stayed with him and recorded with him in London. He spent several nights with Alan talking about music and racial justice and his plans to carry on the cause of the People’s Songs by going south. He was moving to the Highlander Folk School that winter, a grassroots political and educational institution in Tennessee, modeled on the nineteenth-century Danish adult schools that built their curriculum on the culture and values of their rural students. Highlander had been founded during the height of the Depression, and at first was dedicated to unionization and the rights of workers in the South. But by the 1950s it had shifted its focus to organizing for desegregation and civil rights and had developed ties to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. (Rosa Parks was Highlander’s most famous student.) Throughout the school’s history it had been threatened, investigated, closed down, relocated, and reopened. Just as Guy was settling into life at the school, now newly married to his wife Candie whom he had met there, the school was raided again by the police, and they and dozens of other people were put in jail. It was the dark nights spent in a cell, hearing an old Negro spiritual coming from down the hall, that revealed to them the power of song in maintaining strength and discipline in nonviolent change. Guy knew then that the potential for song as an agent of change in racial relations was far greater than it was in moving the labor movement forward.

  The Carawans became documentarians of the civil rights struggle, connecting with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and recording hundreds of hours of demonstrations and speeches by Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and others. But they also researched the old spirituals and hymns, looking for expressions of the theme of freedom, and printed up songbooks. (Guy helped make “We Shall Overcome” into the most important song of the movement.) Once mass arrests began to be used to threaten the protestors, they turned to prisoners’ songs to give them courage. There was a hunger for connecting with the folkways of their ancestors and the struggle they shared, and Guy Carawan was accepted as someone who knew that tradition. When the police began destroying their recordings an
d songbooks, like the slaveholders had destroyed drums, they knew they were on the winning side.

  Recalling all the music that he had heard in black churches and prisons, Alan understood that this was the moment in which those powerful anthems of divine justice and human freedom could be revived by a new kind of folklorist. He kept up a correspondence with Guy throughout the early days of the movement, discussing what could be done to help in the struggle and urging him on. The Carawans were recording at Albany State College in Georgia in 1961-62, where a major confrontation was taking place between students of the black college and the white citizens of the town. Using Vanguard Records’ recording studio equipment, Alan edited the materials that they collected—preaching, narration, and songs—into an audio documentary, Freedom in the Air: A Documentary on Albany Georgia, 1961-63, issued by SNCC on its own label (as SNCC-101). Alan had written the Carawans a letter urging them on, which was printed on the cover of the recording:

  While I was squirreling round in the past, you were busy with the present, and how I envy you. It must be wonderful to be with those kids who are so courageously changing the South forever. I hope they feel proud of the cultural heritage of their forbears. It was a heritage of protest against oppression, of assertion against hopelessness, of joy in life against death. Tell them that they can search the world over, all the libraries, all the manuscripts, and they will never find a cultural heritage more vital, more noble, more flexible, more sophisticated, more wise, more full of love, more human or more beautiful. Tell them the whole world is shaken by hearing its faint echoes in jazz. Tell them that if they can walk into their free future with the great arts, the great laughter, the wit and the perceptiveness of life that their oppressed but always proud and life-ennobled ancestors possessed—and add to this their own sophistication, that the culture of the American Negro can become the wonder of the civilized world. Tell them that if they lose what is so close at hand, offered them by their fathers and mothers and grandmothers, that their children will have to turn back to it. If they can accept the folk of the South on their own terms, they will build not only an invincible political movement, but a bridge of beauty that all mankind will long to walk across.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Science of Folk Song

  When the American Anthropological Association was holding its annual meeting in 1959, Margaret Mead invited Alan to take several evenings to present his ideas on the relation of song to social organization as part of a series of sessions on the use of media in anthropology. By then folk music outside the United States had become the specialized subject of a new academic discipline called ethnomusicology. Its students aimed to merge the fields of musicology and anthropology to address the neglect of much of the world’s music by traditional musicologists, folklorists, and social scientists. In taking his own findings to anthropologists, Alan was declaring that music was too important to the scientific study of human-kind to be left to musicologists alone. Music was pan-human and, like language and kinship, one of the few behaviors found wherever humans have attempted to make a way of life. This approach had an appealing ring to anthropologists, who at midcentury had begun to see themselves as the serious students of humanity as a whole, and as true heirs of the Enlightenment.

  Although Alan’s work was already familiar to a few anthropologists, it was unusual for outsiders to the profession to be invited to their annual meetings, much less to be given several hours to present their work. Alan’s old University of Texas roommate Walter Goldschmidt was attending the meetings, and they ran into each other at a hotel bar. “He had come with a big manuscript, the first version of his cantometrics work. Alan oversold what his work could do,” Goldschmidt observed, but “that was something you expected of geniuses. His enthusiasm was charming if you liked him, annoying to those who didn’t know him well.” Goldschmidt was impressed enough by his research that, as editor of the American Anthropologist, he asked him to submit a version of his talk for publication, and “Folk Song Style: Musical Style and Social Context” was the result. Though it was anthropologically sophisticated enough to be accepted by the leading journal in the discipline, it was also written clearly, eloquently, and without academic jargon. Once it was published, Alan thought it might reach a bigger audience if given a chance and had it printed as a pamphlet to sell in Greenwich Village.

  A few months later Alan took that paper to the meeting of the American Folklore Society. The New York Times accurately summarized the most significant part of his talk as saying that his collecting in Europe showed that there were “ ‘folk-song style families’ throughout the world, families whose musical habit patterns ‘override the limits of geography, language, religion, culture, and of history itself.’ ” The folklorists, however, while respecting him for his long years of fieldwork and the importance of what he had collected, were put off by the scientific and anthropological cast to what they considered an art form, and sat there stunned and angry.

  The songbook Alan had been working on for the last year or so, The Folk Songs of North America, had also just appeared in print, and the folklorists were already saying that it was the biggest and most daring of his popular books. Although he himself called it an anthology of anthologies—a selection of the best that had been gathered—it was more than that: a songbook version of his “Folk Song Style” paper, a summary of his ideas at the moment, but limited to North America, and presented in popular terms. Most reviewers saw it merely as an excellent book for singing folk songs. The New York Times treated it as such, leading Margaret Mead to write the editor and complain about the reviewer’s “failure to recognize that Alan Lomax’s outstanding contribution—a genuine integration between cultural theory, geographical specificity and folklore style—is . . . on the growing edge of our knowledge.” The book’s endpapers were maps that showed important names and places in North American songs and identified five folk song groups in the United States and Canada (northern, southern, border state white styles, western style, and Negro style). Inside the book each song style was discussed in terms of its characteristic emotions and ethos. The notes Alan wrote for each song quoted freely from regional histories, novels, and poetry, and mentioned collectors, recordings, and scholarly articles and books. There were also psychosocial explanations that treated songs as projections of social life. An Anglo-American nursery song like “Cock Robin,” for example, with its detailed account of death and burial, was linked to early childhood training: “Oppressed, humiliated, denied, bullied and talked down to by a race of strong giants, [children’s] fantasies have naturally run to violence and death,” while their dreams and nightmares are sites for revenge and punishment for their “guilty thoughts.” His analysis was partly literary, partly anthropological and psychoanalytic, bringing together ideas that were seldom mentioned in the discussion of folk songs. What he had before only hinted at about American folk song was now laid out boldly. The erotics of British-derived folk song had been largely ignored under the Calvinism of North America, he said, and only the songs that fit its perspective were retained, especially those that dealt with sexual conflict as viewed through women’s eyes. The songs were typically sung solo without instrumental accompaniment, with anguish and a “pinched voice”:

  In the popular mind a gulf was fixed between pleasure and righteousness, thus inflaming the old wound of guilt and sexual anxiety which has so often characterized our civilization.... Their favorite ballads of love were shrouded in gloom, drowned in melancholy and poisoned by sadomasochism.

  Meanwhile, just across the tracks was the African American style, more likely than not collectively sung, accompanied by instruments or polyrhythmic hand-clapping, and “on the whole joyfully erotic, deeply tragic, allusive, playfully ironic.”

  In January 1960, Alan was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies grant of $6,000 for “Nine months of study and research in the field of folk song . . . aimed at refinement of hypotheses . . . about the importance of vocal style and of behavioral t
raits to the analysis and classification of folk songs.” His plan was to pursue “a study of folksong style, the act of singing being regarded as a whole—a complex of behavioral traits, including its social setting, its physiological and psychological aspects, as well as its aesthetic characteristics.”

  For several weeks he went looking for an institution that could serve as the base for his work and found encouragement from scholars at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Harvard, Wesleyan, and Columbia. He also sought out someone in medicine who might help him understand the psychological and physiological sources of vocal tension and the cultural patterning of vocal timbre. At the Hospital for Vocal Disorders in New York he was warned that he would need a great deal of money for a laboratory and the equipment for such a study, but the laryngologists he consulted there were nonetheless encouraging, explaining how the throat and the voice reacted to emotions, and how they worked when crying, laughing, shouting, whispering, and singing. Dr. Norman J. Moses, author of The Voice of Neurosis, told him about the psychology of vocal register, and how neurosis could determine how one sang. Lomax also located singing teachers who believed that vocal registers were a function of how one saw oneself.