Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  The agreement he made with the university provided that he pay singers and musicians a day’s wages for recording. Alan listened to each of the prospective contributors for a minute or two and decided whether to record them or not, but they were paid even if they were not chosen. His idea was that all the recordings would be deposited at the university, which would also handle the rights to the songs. Each recorded performer was given a contract turning over his or her West Indian radio and archive rights but promising an advance plus royalties if the recordings were ever used commercially. The university’s policy was to allow the performer, the collector, and the university each a third of any royalties. Vanguard Records had showed interest in issuing four records from the project, and Alan had promised them an opportunity to review the tapes. In addition, he sought out other collectors who had worked in the West Indies, urging them to place their tapes in the university’s archive as well and to agree to a similar sharing arrangement, in hopes that the archive would earn enough money to begin its own collecting activities.

  Despite all efforts to make the arrangements clear, some confusion over money arose almost as soon as the recording began. A few performers had taken it for granted that their recordings would be sold, and soon began to wonder where their royalty advances where. The Rockefeller Foundation was upset to learn that its money might be used for private gain, even if it was the singers who would benefit. Juggling the interests of all the parties involved became part of every recording project.

  Two days after Alan and Toni arrived in Trinidad on April 23 they began to record, and continued for three weeks. Alan often worked eighteen-hour days in the summer heat of the tropics. To enable people to hear their own performances as quickly as possible, he brought along two large speakers so that they could be set up outdoors, and these had to be dragged from car to beach, through rain forests, and city streets, along with a heavy tape recorder, several mikes, mixer, amplifier, and even batteries, since some of the smaller islands’ electricity was unstable and not always available. With so much talent and such a variety of styles and cultures to be covered, and working on such a tight deadline in locations where he had never been, he was forced to resort to the old folklorists’ practice of counting on local people to find suitable singers and have them ready when he arrived. In Trinidad and Tobago he relied on J. D. Elder, a man of remarkable abilities who had been a grade school teacher in his youth, and later became a community development officer who organized violent boys’ gangs in Port of Spain into steel band players in the early post-World War II days of the oil drum’s rise to the status of musical instrument. When these bands became supporters and unofficial bodyguards of Dr. Eric Williams, who was running to be Trinidad’s first president following colonial rule, Elder’s fame as a politically savvy folklorist and scholar spread and enabled him to organize communities and help develop local cultural events and festivals that raised awareness of the island’s history.

  Lomax would arrive in a village or small town to see a line of performers whom Elder had found waiting for him. Noise was a problem for recording anywhere in Trinidad, with tropical birds, roosters, and dogs ever present, and any kind of music would instantly draw a crowd. Most of the music of the Caribbean was normally performed for social occasions, and because the etiquette of West Indian music allowed for maximum audience participation, whether supportive or combative, keeping audiences quiet during recording was a constant worry. The sessions were held in dance halls, rum shops, and school buildings, but only where there was neither air conditioning nor fans to interfere. The heat was devastating to both the crew and the performers.

  Trinidad at times felt like New York City, at others like Calcutta, Hong Kong, or Lagos, but like the creolized English spoken there, one cultural tradition flowed into the other, often unpredictably. With a population drawn from the Carib Indians, Sephardic Jews, Africa, India, Lebanon, Syria, China, and Europe, cultural interchanges and creolization were standard operating procedure, as the shop signs gave witness: the Bonny Lassie Chinese Restaurant, the Philadelphia Occult Book Store, Blackman, the Bespoke Tailor. Walking down the streets of Port of Spain one might see three men on some steps singing a calypso while one of them kept rhythm with a spoon on a beer bottle. Up the street a steel band could be rehearsing, the leader sporting an RAF flyer’s mustache, his back straight, walking between them as they played an aria from Carmen, saying nothing but occasionally pointing to the correct note on an errant player’s pan.

  Alan had already learned a great deal about calypso from Trinidadians in New York, but now he was being led to older people who could connect him to the song’s history—to stick fighters, those who were once considered part of the criminal world, who years ago had songs called kalindas sung about their feats, while women’s choral songs were sung between the fights called carisos, the closest form to the modern calypso. Jacob Elder knew the history of Trinidadian music and the politics that it reflected, and he was aware that behind seemingly carefree songs was a record of slavery and that every song sung publicly was a cry of victory. There were bands and songs of every variety—tamboo-bamboo groups who played tubes of bamboo of different lengths by tapping them on the ground; Spanish string bands influenced by Venezuela and other islands of Spanish heritage; calypsos, with rhythms and melodies similar to the son of Cuba; Carnival parade bands; bongo songs for wakes, dancing, and working; and Hosain drummers of East Indian background. And then there was the music of the many religious groups—the songs and rhythms of Shango, derived from West Africa, the trancelike foursquare rhythms of Spiritual Baptists, and the hymns of Christian churches that were much like those in the United States.

  The work seemed endless, and when Alan began to realize that the recording in Trinidad alone would take at least a month and a half to complete, he knew he would have to work faster and harder. The accelerated pace sometimes left singers grumbling that these sessions were not the social events at which they were used to performing, but rather a form of work. Nor was this the romance of folklore collecting that Toni had likely anticipated, and she, along with the crew working with Alan, had to take orders and keep up the pace that he set. He would later say that he had never wanted her to come on the trip.

  While they were still in Trinidad, CBS Television called to tell Alan that they were developing a new show called Accent, in which the host, poet John Ciardi, would roam across the United States in search of interesting locations and ideas that would enable him to explore local culture. One of the first episodes was to have as its subject the St. Simons Colored Chanters, a singing group from the Sea Islands that included Bessie Jones. Alan was asked to serve as music coordinator and an onscreen commentator. The pay was good, and it would require only one week of work, so he left an angry Toni in Trinidad and headed for New York and Georgia. The episode in which he appeared aired on June 14, 1962, and he presented the people of the Sea Islands as having the purest folk culture to be found anywhere in the South.

  In New York he learned that a review committee from the National Institute of Mental Health, to which he had applied for major funding, wanted to come to the city to talk to him and his working group on June 11. After six hours of questioning he was certain that they would reject his grant proposal, and he caught a plane to meet Toni in Martinique, the next stop in the Caribbean project.

  Guadeloupe and Martinique, with their long history of French colonialism, their status as overseas departments of France, and their language of French Créole, were almost as complex and rich with song as Trinidad, and Alan managed to collect a wide sample of Martinique’s music in only three days. He recorded the songs that accompanied danmyé (or ladja), the local form of martial arts that was similar to capoeira in Brazil and mani in Cuba, songs of collective work groups, and the tales and songs used at wakes and funerals. But dance music ruled on these islands, and two eighteenth-century dances, the bèlé and the kwadril (both of which had creolized from French court dances and African dances and musi
c), were still performed in the countryside. In Fort-de-France, Martinique’s capital, the biguine, a local creation, and the mazouk and the valse Créole, two nineteenth-century dances with European elements, were popular. The dances were fascinating revelations to those interested in the evolution of black dance in the Americas, but it was the music of the biguine that was the real surprise. With its instrumentation of clarinet, trombone, violin (and sometimes trumpet), and rhythm section, and its improvised weave of polyphonic melody lines, it bore a striking resemblance to Creole jazz in New Orleans, especially as played by bands like those of Kid Ory, Albert Nicholas, and Paul Barbarin. Since boat connections between Martinique and New Orleans ended in 1903 after the Mt. Pelée volcano erupted, the two forms of jazz would have developed independently, which confirmed Alan’s view that it was the Caribbean qualities of New Orleans—the mix of African and European cultures, the Catholic calendar with its festivals and parades, the rich bar and gambling life, and the social organizations that underlay Creole life—that enabled the creation of its particular form of jazz in the southern United States.

  Most of the rest of June was spent in Dominica, an island with two creolized languages, French and English, but also with a strong Carib Indian tradition. In July he spent a day in Guadeloupe, where he recorded East Indian music, as he had also done in Trinidad. At that time anthropologists and folklorists paid little attention to the East Indian presence, and were seemingly unaware that their population was growing rapidly. St. Kitts, Anguilla, and St. Bartholomew were covered in six days, and then they headed to Nevis, which despite its small size—eight miles by five—had a collective repertoire of music and verbal art without equal anywhere in the Caribbean. They allotted a week to record there with the help of Roger Abrahams, a folklorist who was staying on the island at the time.

  As Toni was leaving for New York in July to return for fall graduate study, Anna (Anne was now calling herself Anna) joined her father and the two of them went on to St. Lucia and Carriacou. On tiny Carriacou they experienced a tradition that once again confirmed Alan’s belief that the lesser-known islands possessed great musical traditions. There, among a population of only a few thousand, could be found songs that reflected the history of the island and that of the people who came there. The most remarkable part of Carriacou’s cultural repertoire was the Big Drum Dance, a ritual practiced by families and fishermen’s groups that celebrated and reaffirmed their history, lineage, and relationships by keeping alive songs and dances associated with nine African nations. When Lomax and Anna first came to the island, a fête was arranged for them, and they, too, were integrated into Carriacou life. After spending a week in Grenada, they returned to Trinidad in mid-August to complete arrangements for the storage of the recordings. Alan and Toni were not divorced until 1967, but their marriage was effectively over by the end of 1962.

  Everywhere he went in the West Indies, Alan paid special attention to children’s games, in part because they played a key role in introducing children to their culture’s sense of social life, but also because of the creativity with which they managed to draw elements from various cultures and reassemble the parts in fresh configurations. In a book that came out of this work, Brown Girl in the Ring: An Anthology of Song Games from the Eastern Caribbean, Alan noted that the words to girls’ game songs provided them lessons for life: they were sung in a language closer to standard English than to the local dialect (what was often called patois on most islands), giving the girls the basis for social mobility; they also served as preparation for what they needed to know for courtship to come.

  The result of the summer’s work was a collection of recordings that made the West Indies one of the best-documented areas in the world. Alan encouraged J. D. Elder to continue the work they had begun by entering graduate school in the Folklore Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Ph.D., then became a professor at Temple University, and went on to be elected a senator of Trinidad and Tobago.

  In 1962 Anna entered Bard College as a first-year student. She found herself unhappily in the midst of faculty and students who thought of themselves as bohemians, even though they often came from money. She had lived the bohemian life and wanted more stability, and returned to New York City several months later. Anna continued to live with her father and work in New York for the next seven years.

  That fall, Alan was given the title of Director of the Cantometrics and Choreometrics Research Project, and Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology and Center for the Social Sciences at Columbia University, a title he would hold for the next twenty-seven years. Impressive as it sounded, it was a job he had only as long as he could financially support his own research. This meant that he would have to spend much of his time fund-raising and would never have the leisure and security that a tenured academic enjoys to conduct and publish his research. He was never assured of having enough money from his grants to even make a living, and often had to return to lecturing and singing in colleges like his father.

  As the Rockefeller Grant was ending, he was still hoping that the National Institute of Mental Health would provide him the funds he needed to carry him several years into his project. What he wanted was a team consisting of a folklorist, an ethnologist, a musicologist, a linguist, a laryngologist, and a psychologist, all of whom would analyze a sample of about sixteen hundred tape-recorded songs from two hundred culture areas. Using the Human Relations Area Files (an anthropological database of ethnographies written on hundreds of different societies worldwide, with data on some seven hundred culture traits such as kinship terminology, forms of marriage, and type of economy), they would verify the hypothesis that “music was a simple communications technique which could give information about the emotional shape of a number of extremely important social psychological patterns in any given society.” The research group would first test this on smaller and economically less complex societies such as peasants and hunter-gatherers, and then move on to modern societies like the United States. “Indeed,” Alan wrote, hinting at future results, “the principal investigator has already made certain experiments in listening to popular songs over the radio. They indicate that singers such as Frank Sinatra, who generally portray love as a source of sadness and frustration, favor the mid-to-high front vowel parameters, whereas Negro rock-and-roll singers prefer a much lower, back-oriented parameter.... The indication is that the material is picking the singers and, through them, the audiences. It is planned, during the research period, to apply this technique to the Hit Parade itself, to see whether statistically verifiable traits can be predicted, thus making the vowel and consonant preference pattern indicator into a thoroughly scientific tool.”

  He also proposed making serious use of the data folklorists had collected. “The great achievement of folklore up to the present has been the assemblage of an enormous mass of texts, of tunes and tales of folk and primitive sources. Up until the present, very little use has been made of this material for scientific study simply because no set of spinal hypotheses have been available.” In Folk Songs of North America he had made a start by dividing North American folk music into regions in thematic terms (which translated into stylistic ones—for example the “solo, strident-voiced, high-pitched, tension-filled” singing of the Calvinist backwoods of the South).

  Cantometrics would make cross-cultural comparison possible, but “far more significant . . . is the possibility that this objective system will make it possible for musicians and cultural administrators from all over the world to assess the strong and the weak points of their own musical systems in a fairly objective fashion. This should affect the development of educational systems and the patterning of communications systems as far as music is concerned in any given area. Not only that, but it should make it possible for Western European nations to relate their entire cultural framework more positively to the cultural systems they encountered in the non-industrial areas of the world. For these native cultures themselves, the presentatio
n of the objective characteristics of their indigenous music should provide a cultural keel for future planning and development.”

  There was such boldness and daring in these proposals that some scientists must have thought he was overreaching. But Alan was working like a dynamo, he had early successes to point to, and he presented his work in a hot but eloquent style that suggested he was the next big thing. Plus, he was using advanced statistical methods like multivariant analysis to understand art, something no one had seen before. He was, in other words, the sort of researcher who could waken bored NIMH grant administrators from their muggy Bethesda afternoon drowsiness.

  Though Alan was never bashful about what he saw as his successes, he also never ducked criticism from those he trusted, and even sought it out. In a discussion he had with Margaret Mead in October 1963, for example, she bracingly predicted the kind of criticisms to which his study would be subjected: the samples were too small; there were exceptions to the statistical portraits he would be developing; and they had chosen the wrong parameters of music to consider. She suggested that he anticipate them by working in smaller areas, with greater help from specialists in those areas. But it was too late, he explained: he had already decided to go for the whole world, and that meant that he would never have a large sample of musics from everywhere—he would have to count on finding ways to use the samples he had in such a way that they would be truly representative.