Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  By the time the festival closed, the talk was all about Bob Dylan’s turn to amplified, pop-oriented music, but the key event may actually have been the Friday afternoon workshop called “Blues: Origins and Offshoots,” featuring Ed and Lonnie Young’s fife and drum quartet from Mississippi, a Texas prison work song group, blues singers Son House, Josh White, and Mance Lipscomb, the McGhee Brothers, Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, and Chicago’s Willie Dixon and Memphis Slim representing city blues and boogie-woogie. The daytime workshops had typically never drawn big crowds, but the recent rediscoveries of blues musicians from the 1920s and 1930s assured a large turnout for this one. Alan saw it as a chance both to celebrate the blues as homegrown American art song form in its own right and to place it in the context of the world of folk song that he had discovered outside the United States. But the crowds of young people who had only recently discovered the blues were far more interested in a few of the singers just up from the South and in hearing Mississippi John Hurt sing the naughty “Candy Man” than they were in comparative musicology. Robert Shelton of the New York Times reflected the impatience of this nouveau-blues crowd when he described Alan’s role in the workshop as an “articulate, illuminating, fluent, but sometimes maddeningly pedantic host-narrator. Likening the blues to the Italian stornella, the Spanish copla, and the Mexican corrido, Mr. Lomax described the Afro-American blues and its variations as ‘our most pervasive popular musical form.’ ”

  Yet it was the conclusion of the workshop that received the most attention. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a group of Chicago black bluesmen and young whites, all of whom played amplified instruments, had been late additions to the festival roster, and Alan was not happy with their taking part in this workshop. As they began setting up amps and mikes, he introduced them by musing about whether they would be able to play the blues with all that equipment. When Alan came off the stage, their manager, Albert Grossman, told him that he had given them “a real chicken-shit introduction.” Shoves and pushes followed, leading to a rolling-in-the-dirt confrontation between the two big men, who had to be separated by an even bigger man, Sam Lay, the drummer for the band. Later that day the festival board was called into emergency session and voted to ban Grossman from the grounds. It was only when George Wein warned them that if Grossman was ousted the performers he managed—Dylan; Odetta; Peter, Paul, and Mary; the Kweskin Jug Band—might leave, too, that the board backed off their decision.

  Bob Dylan’s fabled breakthrough into electronics two nights later was not as dramatic as legend would have it, and although some catcalls were mixed with the cheers from the audience, it hardly constituted the makings of an aesthetic riot. Among the older board members—Seeger, Bikel, and Lomax—it was the volume that was objectionable, as it was possibly the loudest sound that they and most of the audience had ever experienced. The story of Pete Seeger’s anger reaching the point at which he threatened to cut the cables to the sound system with an axe was apocryphal. That legend may have started when real threats were made against the sound system that afternoon. Alan had asked Texas folklorist Mack McCormick to find a Texas prison gang to bring up to Newport to sing work songs, but the Texas attorney general would not allow it, so McCormick rounded up a group of ex-convicts. Since they had never performed together in front of an audience, much less a microphone, McCormick wanted time to get them used to the stage before the concert. But Bob Dylan’s electric band had been rehearsing for some time and refused to leave. “I was trying to tell Dylan, we need the stage,” McCormick said. “He continued to ignore me. So I went over to the junction box and pulled out the cords. Then he listened.”

  For Alan, it was not just the volume of the Dylan band that disturbed him. It was more that, beginning at Newport, Dylan had captured the audience for folk music and then taken it away from the folk. Later Alan would say that Dylan wanted to create a folk music for the urban middle class, which wasn’t a bad idea, but just seemed boring to him.

  If there were those in the festival who had dreamed of an alternate musical universe, a folk utopia, it had almost reached its end: the country was now awash in the early stages of folk-rock, as it would now be called, and the world of the festival was splintering again, back to those who would ride the pop wave and those who would now learn to survive in coffeehouses and church basements, or just return home to anonymity once again. Some of the performers’ salaries were climbing to the breaking point, with administrative costs for a large festival trailing close behind, and what was left for the foundation to spend on grants was slipping away.

  After Dylan’s shift to pop the festival board once again pledged to draw back from its focus on spectaculars to reaffirm a belief in a program that would treat all the musicians and performers equally. Ralph Rinzler and the Seeger brothers made certain that a 1966 festival would not be limited to music, but would also display the material culture of the folk—crafts, furniture, toys and clothing, anything that brought the daily lives of rural singers to the audience. Dance workshops, a Sunday morning religious program, and food preparation all now contributed to the new meaning of a folk festival.

  Alan was the designated writer for many of the scripts for the programs, as well as a producer, and those roles allowed him to bring to the festival the best of the performers he knew from his fieldwork, and also to create a context for the music to help the audience understand the role that music played in their lives. One of his key ideas was to present the musicians in competition with one another, in the belief that it would bring the best out of them. When this idea worked, it worked extraordinarily well, as when the Swan Silvertones met the Dixie Hummingbirds in a battle of gospel quartets, something they had done in Sunday afternoon church challenges across the country. The concept ground to a halt, however, with the “blues contest,” its awkward “judges” seated at the side of the stage. The contestants were Son House, Bukka White, and Skip James, three great singers who could not have been more different from one another. Son House resisted engaging in a competition by drinking himself into a semi-stupor, singing one song, getting up, and seating himself at the side of the stage facing away from the audience. The judges carefully avoided declaring any of the three as the winner.

  The board permitted Alan to film some parts this festival, including behind-the-scenes activities in some of the festival buildings, and in a simulated “juke joint”—an informal, intimate performance space improvised by Lomax, where he wanted artists to feel at ease so that the music would flow more naturally. Two of these filmed sessions, titled Devil Got My Woman: Blues at Newport 1966, and Delta Blues/Cajun Two-Step, featured older African American musicians, as well as Cajuns. A third film, Billy in the Lowlands: Old Time Music from the Newport Folk Festival, 1966, focused on older white performers, people like fiddler Clark Kissinger, Kilby Snow, Jimmie Driftwood, the Coon Creek Girls, Tex Logan, and others who were known only to the musicians who brought them along for the trip.

  At the end of 1966 Alan and Ralph Rinzler began to object to what they saw as George Wein’s dominance in planning the festival. While Wein knew jazz and how to organize a large-scale event, they pointed out, folk music was something new to him and was his limitation. So when a deficit turned up for the year 1966, Ralph and Alan called for an outside audit of the finances, a move that Wein took to be an accusation that he had misspent the money. The outside audit cleared Wein, but Alan’s interest in the festival also began to wane as he realized that it would never be what he had imagined it could, and he moved on to other projects.

  To those who knew him casually, Alan might have seemed to be prospering, what with research grants, public lectures, and an expanding series of films and recordings. But he was in fact often operating without money. In February 1965, he and Joan moved to an apartment at 207 West 98th Street, where the landlord threatened to force him to leave for using the premises for what the owner asserted was a full-time business. Alan went to court and through a series of charges and countercharges won th
e right to continue living there. They moved shortly afterwards to 820 West End Avenue, but Alan fell behind several months in rent, for which his landlord had a dispossession notice served. Once again he challenged a landlord in court, and this time it turned out that he had been charged more than the city allowed under rent control laws and he was granted a delay in being evicted. He meanwhile moved his office into an apartment at 215 West 98th Street.

  The long-overdue book he and Pete Seeger had put together with Woody Guthrie years before was finally published under the title Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People. But the two volumes of English and American folk songs he had promised Holt, Rinehart and Winston five years before were never finished. He did, however, manage to finish Folk Song Style and Culture that year, the first full presentation of the findings of the cantometrics research, a collection and expansion of the talks given at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s meetings two years earlier when he took the staff of the cantometrics project there to present a daylong report entitled “Frontiers of Anthropology: Cantometrics and Culture.” Alan had been under pressure to get a major publication out to satisfy those who had funded the research and convince them that the projects were worthy of continued support, and this book was published before he was completely ready. Priced at seventeen dollars, it was too expensive to reach a wide readership, but it did serve as a good introduction to what Alan and his colleagues had accomplished thus far.

  When he wrote a proposal to the National Institute of Mental Health for another four years of research support, he explained the importance of the book and showed the directions he next wanted to take the research: to adapt his methods to the study of virtually all the arts, and to make them of practical value.

  The first period of cross-cultural style research showed that: (1) patterns of song and dance behavior vary in orderly ways cross-culturally (2) produced a taxonomy of culture with both evolutionary and historical implications (3) song and dance patterns are correlated with basic features of social structure. These results were summarized in Folk Song Style and Culture.... In the next phase of research, we will define the main culture style areas of the world in terms of performance variables and social structure variables. We aim toward a minimum set of style factors that will be diagnostic for any given cultural situation. The culture style hypothesis will be tested in studies of two other communication systems: speaking and the visual arts. A crosscultural library of “speaking style” will be studied by a psycholinguist to produce a cross-cultural typology. The choreometrics team, in collaboration with a scholar of the arts, will attempt a first rating system for the visual arts. Computer techniques will test similarity of cross-cultural variation of dance, song, speaking and design in relation to the variation of culture. The summative and normative patterns of culture style, thus derived, can contribute to an ethology of human culture....

  The purpose of our research into cultural style has been to provide a means by which the cultural situation of any human group; can be quickly evaluated. Many governments have been concerned about the future of minority cultures and have attempted to initiate programs in relation to them. Most of these programs have failed because little or nothing was known about the relation of communication style to culture and its function in social change. The problem of cultural equality now stands alongside health, peace, social welfare and political justice, as one of the principal concerns of all people everywhere. The developing nations and the minority cultures within large national frameworks now want to grow in a cultural sense.... The human ethology technique will enable scholars, experts and administrators, we hope, to make fruitful plans for the development of this multi-cultural world. Much more importantly, however, we hope that the general dissemination of our methods of analysis of dance, song, speaking style and graphic arts will put these tools into the hands of people everywhere so that they can better evaluate their own social and cultural needs.

  Lomax’s decision to move into social science was as daring as it was risky. The work he had done with folk and popular music had attracted much attention from anthropologists, who up to that point had little professional interest in this music, so to use social science methodology on that material was bound to seem strange or anachronistic. In retrospect, his interest in the body was years ahead of its rediscovery in the 1980s, and the use of microcultural theory was not yet understood by most social scientists. But at that time comparative analysis had just fallen out of fashion: folklorists were then devoting themselves to single singers or communities, and social scientists were turning to a more radical form of cultural relativism.

  Several of the reviews of his work were scathing, and at times seemed to be reviewing Lomax himself. The criticism challenged nearly every aspect of the research: The writing was too romantic for science. The coding process was too subjective, and experts were needed to bring their knowledge to bear on every culture area of the world. The samples were too small. Some countries or territories were not represented at all. The dance films were not representative enough, and new films needed to be made. Yet hidden behind these critiques was the unspoken understanding that there was no folklorist or anthropologist who was willing or able to undertake such projects.

  A few of the harshest reviewers admitted that despite their misgivings about methodology, they were nonetheless intrigued by the whole idea. But they, like most others, failed to address the theory that lay behind it. By redirecting the study of music back to culture, Lomax had shown that song could tell us more than we thought about ourselves and others. He had also used the methods of comparative study in a field in which few had ever been interested in comparison before.

  Alan wanted to have his work accepted, wanted to be identified with the work and admired for what he had accomplished. The severe and dismissive criticism he received drove him into withdrawal, sometimes retreating to bed for long stretches. But there was no way he could have finessed the work into wider acceptance, for there was no social scientist like Lomax. He could never stay hidden behind the language of positivism and objectivity or the trappings of methodology. Though he often referred to himself as a scientist and declared the scientific method sacrosanct, what he thought and believed were always transparent.

  Alan would go on expanding the number of samples used in the study and using new technologies and more sophisticated means of analysis to improve the work and to present their findings in full multimedia form. He also set out to line up support from those he thought would be sympathetic and sent them sets of training tapes, but was often disappointed. When Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl said they were too busy to teach the method to others, Alan replied, “Singers are a dime a dozen, but there’s only a few working on cantometrics.” He thought Pete Seeger was lukewarm to his work after Pete replied that he didn’t understand it well enough but would keep at it. Pete added that his father thought Alan hadn’t followed scientific procedures. This was just the beginning of years of effort to explain his work to whoever would listen.

  Joan Halifax and Alan had now been together for almost four years. They went to conferences and meetings, wrote articles together, and in 1967 did brief fieldwork in the Dominican Republic and Sint Eustatius, two islands that Alan had missed on his Caribbean project in 1962. Later that year they traveled to Morocco for more recordings for cantometrics. When they returned they made plans to be married in Florida, where Joan had grown up and where her family still lived, but Alan never appeared for the wedding. Their relationship ended shortly thereafter.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Culture War

  The violence and public clashes over the Vietnam War and civil rights reached such a pitch in 1967 and 1968 that to Alan it seemed that the country had the same incendiary feel as the early 1930s, only this time the lives lost and the destruction of property made daily life seem far more volatile and precarious. Riots (or mutinies, depending on who was speaking) broke out in over a hundred American cities, with buildings in flame
s and police and troops occupying black neighborhoods. Martin Luther King was perceived by the CIA as losing control of the movement he had created as ideology began to shift toward Black Power, and planning for full-scale insurrection and mass arrests was under way. To talk about cultural issues in this climate seemed frivolous to some, but Alan persisted. Early in 1968 he wrote his agent with an idea about how the footage he had shot at Newport could be reworked into new films on different topics. Some of the same documentary ideas he had already developed on various aspects of black culture might now reach a national audience through television and film, and in some way could serve the cause of the movement.

  The more I think about it I am sure that I am right about the validity and timeliness for a black heritage program which would be devoted to the whole range of Negro culture, from the African pygmies to the best modern poets on which you would use film inserts liberally and imaginatively. We could have the commenting done by a range of people from the leading Negro entertainers and intellectuals to professionals in African culture, like yours truly....

  The guys in the integration movement tell me that a loss of identity, a need to have a clear-cut history, is the problem of the Negro and is the source of more anger than economic conditions. If I can get the SCLC to say that they want to do this, perhaps we could go after Ford money to put the program immediately at work on NET. What I mean is that I think we may have a most direct way to go after tension problems with this series that will win support from many places.