Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Folk song revivals had always been centered in the Northeast, but in the early 1970s Washington, D.C., became the gathering place for those interested in folklore. The arts and humanities endowments were formed in 1965, and though both supported folk arts, it was with little sense of direction. Then in 1967 the Smithsonian began presenting a large folk festival every summer. Alan entered into the spirit of a new national recognition of the vernacular arts when he came to town to arrange “An American Folk Concert,” with the help of the Division of Performing Arts of the Smithsonian Institution to accompany the 9th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences on September 1 and 2, 1973. Later his sister Bess came to Washington from her teaching job in California to work on the summer 1975 Smithsonian Folk Festival, and was asked to become deputy director of presentations with Ralph Rinzler for the giant 1976 Bicentennial Festival. She stayed at the Smithsonian until she moved to the National Endowment for the Arts in 1977, as director of the Folk and Traditional Arts Program, a job she virtually created and then held until 1992.

  Though Alan had no position in the government, with Bess’s D.C. connections and the contacts he made through his various contributions to the Smithsonian festivals he gained some leverage in shaping the national cultural policies that were beginning to emerge. When David Rockefeller Jr. and a committee of the National Endowment for the Arts’s Music Policy Conference proposed that a National Institute of Musical Literacy be created to teach everyone to read music and to learn high musical standards, Alan wrote a letter to the Washington Post pointing out that the bulk of the world did not read music and yet remained creative. He further claimed that music notation actually restrained creativity because it was intended to serve only a certain kind of music. The Rockefeller proposal was an example of why the endowments needed to be turned away from spending money only on the music that they considered high art.

  When he became a consultant to the Smithsonian folk festivals, Alan wrote a fourteen-page report to the festival’s organizers in 1975 accusing then of fatal compromises, bad taste, bad food, and lack of seriousness. He especially criticized them for having given in to low-level politics from some of the employees at the Smithsonian:

  I continually find the black diaspora presentations extremely disappointing. It’s as if the people in charge were limiting us, the audience, to the things that they themselves approve of and leaving out all the rest of it. We don’t have the dancers, the hollers, we don’t have the work songs, we don’t have the choral spirituals, we don’t have the folk tales, we don’t have the street corner conversations, we don’t have the genuine rituals. When you get through saying all that, what we don’t have is the greatest of all American musical traditions, which is the Afro-American creation here. Instead of splendor, we have some bits and pieces. Instead of a program which reaches out and involves the audience in a spirit of passionate joy and outbursts of great emotion, both tragic and life-giving, we have a rather timid and in-turned overall presentation. It’s as if the blacks had their backs to us, and that’s not African culture, African culture is outgoing and group-involving. There seems to be a wall of censorship here which must be broken down.... Because there is political and social tension now between blacks and whites is no possible reason that the Smithsonian Folk Festival, taking the long view and presenting the finest aspects of all the tradition it touches upon, should be affected by this. The persons in charge of this aspect of the Festival must be either replaced or come to take a new view of their work.... Here it seems to me, you should become ferocious impresarios, like the people who run the Met and Lincoln Center, perfectly capable of throwing anyone out of your offices and downstairs who proposes that you do anything that violates the sacred purpose of your Festival and who is willing to impose upon you anything less than the best.

  He also wanted to have the festival recorded and filmed by the best cinematographers and archived, but also aired on National Public Radio and PBS, reaching beyond the tourists and Washington residents to the entire country, especially to show those in small towns and distant regions that their people had performed at the highest level of America. In a proposal he circulated to filmmakers and heads of various agencies, he wrote:

  One of the central problems of our culture, a source of sickness and of anomie in our culture and in all the world, is that everything these days happens at the center and is broadcast out from the center to the periphery, to the small places. This makes everyone who is not from megalopolis a hick by inference: he is always cocking his eye on the tube or his ear on the speaker to stay in touch. We have to make culture again grow on the periphery—where culture has always grown. Now that we have artificially brought in the whole American periphery to a national festival, we must show the whole country that our biggest festival was created by the folk from the periphery. Otherwise we can do damage with the festival, instead of using it to right the imbalance that centralized communication and education systems continually bring about.

  After many congressional hearings and much infighting among the two endowments, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution, Congress passed the American Folklife Preservation Act on January 2, 1976, which created the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. Alan had been at the hearings, talking to representatives in Congress and giving testimony before congressional committees, arguing that making such an institution the center for folklore would give Americans an additional means of communication.

  In an effort to “revitalize” PBS, he wrote up a statement and sent it to influential figures in the arts and broadcasting. Recalling that PBS had been designed to do what he had long been advocating—decentralize and diversify American media—he argued that public broadcasting had fulfilled the first part of its mandate, bringing high culture and information to the hinterlands, but had failed at the second, celebrating the regional and cultural resources of the country. The local stations were top-heavy with administrators and in need of local talent and local culture and information. It was time for a national talent search to find the Studs Terkels of every region, the interviewers and commentators deeply rooted in their own territories. Local programs featuring the festivals, shows, and events of every region should be supported by the media. Alan’s one specific suggestion was to have every PBS station program the best of their local church music against the worst of the paid religious broadcasts.

  When Jimmy Carter was nominated as the Democratic candidate for president in 1976 and gave an acceptance speech that spoke about moral decay, disillusionment, cynicism, and the need for the values of the local, the ethnic, and the small-town, it reawakened Alan’s New Deal optimism, and he responded by writing Carter a long letter praising him and promising his support. But the letter was also a cry for help for America, to revitalize cultural life and battle the corruption of Washington and the media. Only the week before, he had sent Carter a proposal titled “Toward a Presidential Commission on Grass Roots Culture,” which reached the president-elect through Andrew Young, who passed it on to Stuart E. Eizenstat, of Carter’s campaign, and later Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser. Lomax once again argued for reversing the monolithic nature of TV, radio, and education, but now using the FCC, PBS, the National Endowments, the National Park Service, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, NIMH, the Agency for International Development, the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress to create cultural equity, offering examples of films that could be made and recommending the creation of regional cultural centers. The document caught the attention of Eizenstat, who wrote him before Carter’s inauguration, urging him to apply for a job within the incoming administration. Though Alan never followed up on that sugestion, he did attend Carter’s inauguration on January 20, 1977, where he introduced the Georgia Sea Island Singers.

  Now that he was well known at the National Endowment for the Humanities through the many grants he had received, Alan met in 1978 with Joseph Duffy, the chairman, to offer his ow
n perspective on what the NEH might accomplish in the non-metropolitan centers of America. They apparently agreed on principles, because a few months later Alan wrote Duffy to say that in spite of their discussion, things were still headed in the wrong direction. The NEH humanities scholars had “organized themselves into elitist cadres,” leaving out the “non-professional, unorganized culture carriers.” Included with his letter were pages of proposals for new ways of documenting and presenting foreign cultures and arts on PBS, ways to refocus the NEH toward the needs of peoples they had never considered, and some detailed and very specific plans for projects that the NEH might fund and that could serve as models: community television developed by the elderly for themselves; an institute for cultural ecology; a field staff whose only function would be to locate and oversee local projects; classroom programs using local artists and craftspeople; and in the wake of the success of Alex Haley’s Roots, a series of TV and film projects exploring the variety of African American art “enclaves” across America, and reconnecting different facets of the African diaspora. A few months later, Alan wrote Duffy again, since he had not heard back from him, this time including yet another proposal for NEH to consider, a study of America’s dance roots, involving film and TV, dance festivals, sending dancers into the schools, developing a “panorama” of American dance history, and promoting a national black folk dance company.

  Pete Seeger, who had suffered his share of indignities and blacklisting from television, was also alert to its rising power and its squandering of cultural resources. When he heard that there were plans in the works to blanket the world with American television shows, and to conquer it by exporting reruns of soaps, teen music shows, sports events, political news, and advertising, he became alarmed. Sesame Street was already popular in places like Hong Kong, Seeger said, and as much good as it had done, Hong Kong should have its own children’s shows. He sent out a letter addressed to “pickers and singers” who he hoped would share his concerns about a new phase of cultural imperialism. When Alan received the letter, he wrote back to Pete, doubling the charges: it was more than content that was a problem with television, it was the nature and use of the technology. It was a one-way, simultaneous, glitzy, loud assault that destroyed cultural styles, exported alien and inappropriate values, and forced people everywhere in the world into passive and potentially hostile and violent reaction. “The result is, in the country where TV operates around the clock, America, we have a rising tide of evil. Evil is absolutely everywhere, in every part of the country and there is an awful feeling that has developed in the country.” The tools to fight back with were now available in cantometrics, where cultural styles could be identified and lines of resistance drawn. And, incidentally, Sesame Street was far from innocent, he said: it mainstreamed movement, accent, and attitude. “The puppets are great, but the people in it are terrible, and they’re teaching the world to be poker-faced Americans or square, clownish Americans.” The media, in short, must come to terms with differences in communication systems. “The best thing, of course, would be to turn television clear off, for good.”

  Alan’s life had always been marked with contingencies, doubts, and dependency on a vast range of personal relationships, yet driven by huge, almost utopian ambitions that he would have to realize alone. Nothing got easier as he grew older. He conceived of new projects almost daily—films that he wanted to make to teach the cantometric and choreometric methods were proposed to the National Endowment for the Humanities; he had not given up on TV and film programs for black cultural education, and was asking CBS producer Fred Friendly, then on the faculty of Columbia University’s journalism school, to connect him to TV executives to do a special on music and dance, and also help him break into film with what he wanted to call Operation Feedback, making mass communication interactive rather than monological; there was also a series of films he had long wanted to make on various forms of folklore. He had never abandoned his older projects, and he was now regularly corresponding with individual performers he had recorded on the last southern trip, many of whom were sick, old, out of work, and in need of money and counted on that brief engagement they had had in some kitchen or farm field years before to save them.

  Since Alan’s interest in cantometrics began with his fascination for vocal quality, it was no surprise when he and his colleagues at one point began applying the cantometric methodology to speaking style, a project they called parlametrics. Since all of the style projects he had developed were concerned with the social nature of performance, they sought the data they needed in dialogues and conversations rather than in interviews. Their interest was in how people spoke rather than what they said. Once again they faced the problem of building up an archive where one didn’t exist: no one had ever collected conversational samples of speech from a wide range of languages. Without the staff or the money to launch a worldwide field search, they turned to the United Nations for help, and arranged to set up situations in which speakers would be recorded while conversing. Other conversations were contributed to them by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, who drew on its fieldworkers in languages across the world. One hundred and fifty-six speech samples of two to five minutes in length drawn from a large number of the world’s languages was the result.

  New coding scales had to be developed, using such features as repetition, timing, speech length, spacing, dominance versus sharing, relaxed versus tense speech sounds, and breathiness, and once again they were constructed so that nonspecialists could do the coding. The analysis of the data was preliminary to a larger study that never occurred, but the results seemed to suggest that music, dance, and speech all evolve in parallel with socioeconomic systems.

  At the invitation of his own therapist, Alan addressed the American Group Psychiatry Association’s meetings in New Orleans, where he met Carol Kulig, who worked for the association and had a background in language study. She became his companion and coworker for the next twenty-three years.

  Though he ran out of money for the choreometrics project in late 1968, Alan continued to work on it, convinced that someone would appreciate the value of his work. He and his colleagues spent a great deal of time making decisions about what parts of each film on dancing could be used for coding and analyzing, since camera placement, movement, and editing are typically not helpful for close observation of dance. The difficulties of having to search for dance films and then struggle to locate the characteristics of the dances spurred him to write several articles over the next few years about the limits and possibilities of film as a research source. His chief concern was the same as it had been for song—namely, the rapid disappearance of the great variety of dances around the globe—and he urged filmmakers, professional and amateur, to set to work immediately to rescue them:

  One of the greatest opportunities and most urgent tasks of this century is to film the full range of human culture while we can: With the new portable sound equipment, the job would require no more than a generation of concerted international effort.... There is little time left, the overwhelming success of the urban-industrial system in controlling and exploiting the biosphere has temporarily blinded the majority of mankind to other values. The entertainment industry, operating a one way communication system, now threatens to obliterate national cultures as it has long shamed into silence neighborhood, peasant and primitive cultures.... Unless we take action now, what remains of human cultural variety will vanish.

  He had been using motion picture equipment for years, but had not attempted to make a film since Ballads, Blues, and Bluegrass in 1961. Margaret Mead had been encouraging him to become a filmmaker for the last ten years, however, and now that he was creating the world’s largest archive of dance and work films he was sharply conscious of how thin the film record of everyday human life was and what it would take to produce films that fulfilled their promise of being the most honest medium for capturing its reality.

  As excited as he was about motion pictures, when he wrote about the po
tential of film he nonetheless focused on the defects that were deeply ingrained in the conventional practices, especially the editing style of the West. “Dramatic editing, shifts of perspective, and all the tricks of montage simply destroy the value of the film document for the scientist. He requires the whole event, the full contest, the whole body and action, the entire group—and above all, long continuous, undisturbed shots, so that the overlay of patterns in the interaction itself will have time to emerge”:

  It is a common experience in screening film to see movements cut off in mid-phrase or interactions sliced in two as they are unfolding. The length and spatial dimensions of movement phrases and segments of interaction vary profoundly among cultures. West Europeans, for example, use linear, punchy, abrupt, moderately long phrases. These factors strongly affect the way they shoot our films. Cultures with a different sense of timing and phrasing are often visually chopped to pieces by Western filmmakers. . . . Western filmmakers can take great liberties with Western material because they know the fit of everything in the behavior of their fellows. Lacking that intimate acquaintance where they deal with unfamiliar kinetic and social systems, they are likely to miscut.