Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Then Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, the originator of the Human Genome Diversity Project, and other geneticists became interested in his projects. Things were once again looking brighter, but just as his health began to deteriorate. When doctors recommended surgery of the carotid artery, he was operated on in mid-1994 and emerged from the first stage of his surgery successfully. Yet after the second operation at the end of 1995, he had a stroke. He was kept for five months in Beth Abraham, a rehabilitation facility in the Bronx, and made great strides in recovery. When he was released, an apparent overdose of blood thinner caused a brain hemorrhage, and he became unable to speak or write or care for himself. He fell into depression, living in a small house in Long Island, with only $9,000 left in the bank, $800 a month retirement from Columbia University, and $1,100 a month from Social Security, while the IRS was still attaching his income. In order to get the money for the care he would need, Anna reopened negotiations with Rounder Records to bring out recordings of most of the music he had collected. She moved him to Tarpon Springs, Florida, where for the next seven years he lived quietly with her and her son, Odysseus.

  Alan Lomax died on July 19, 2002, at age eighty-seven.

  After his death, the obituaries noted that Alan Lomax had been a musicologist, archivist, singer, DJ, filmmaker, photographer, author of books, producer of dozens of radio, TV, video, and concert programs and hundreds of recordings, in addition to being the world’s most famous folklorist. Still, they might have also added that he was an anthropologist, political activist, lobbyist, and, in his later years, something of a social theorist. This was a remarkable achievement for a man who never held an academic post or a high government position, nor received an international or even a national award for his work until the very end of his life. But Lomax was arguably one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century, a man who changed not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America.

  Lomax was part of the group of competing yet intertwined interests defining the cultural landscape of the first half of the twentieth century—a group that included the New England Brahmins, the labor movement, the exclusivity and cultural conservatism of a Henry Ford or a Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the folklore scholars, and the entertainment and communications industries, all of them contending to set the agenda for American identity. It was a time when race and social class were given new status and visibility through popular culture, an epoch in which new electronic media brought the social pariah and the rejected into everyone’s living room. (George Clooney’s character in the folk-song-soaked film O Brother, Where Art Thou? says of the coming of electricity in the South, “Things will never be the same.”)

  Lomax had begun his career with an early-twentieth-century folklorist’s aesthetic, the belief that a song was a thing, an object to be collected, labeled, and put on display as a text that was evidence of a community’s collective cultural creation. Yet as he tramped through canefields and visited prisons, he became aware of the astonishing creativity and artistry of individual folk performers, something not discernible in the frozen words of songbooks. He believed his own collection could function not as a display of relics from the old worlds of Europe and Africa, but rather as proof of the vitality and the richness of the living traditions of people. Folklore could show what it meant to be an American. At the same time, Lomax was convinced that every village and town had its own stars, singers and composers who captured the spirit of their people. If these artists were presented properly, they could attract an audience as large as America itself. Folk culture could become pop culture.

  In Washington he was given the opportunity to document all of America’s folk artists, even to present them in popular recordings and on national radio. When he moved to New York City he transported the southern idea of the local music festival there, eventually filling Town Hall every few weeks with an eclectic mix of black and white folksingers. Thereafter, nothing excited him more than acting as impresario for the whole country, bringing unknown rustics to venues like Newport or Carnegie Hall and seeing them win over crowds of urban sophisticates.

  As the poet laureate of the folk, he was viewed by some as a kindly, benign guide to a nostalgic return trip to simpler times. But he was also the pied piper of the Other America, the common people, the forgotten, the ethnic, those who always came to life in troubled times—in the Great Depression, in the storms of World War II, during the postwar anti-Communist hysteria, and in the chaos of the era of civil rights and counterculturalism—those who with their resentment and unpredictability could provoke the deepest fears in the more privileged. At such times folk songs seemed not so much charming souvenirs as ominous and threatening portents.

  In his later years, travel abroad exposed Lomax to a greater variety of song styles and content and set him to wondering about the deeper functions of song in all societies. He recalled the rhythms of the rattle and flap of pulleys and sails aboard ship, and the grunting and singing of deckhands; the thwack of axes against wood and the cries of the prison work team leaders; and the tears and pinched faces of singers in the southern Mediterranean. Eventually he turned to the cross-cultural techniques used by anthropologists and drew on insights derived from his own experience with psychotherapy to work out a complex vision of song and, later, dance and speech, as part of the apparatus of cultural adaptation and survival. Lomax now asked us to listen more closely to recordings, to the sounds that revealed a depth of emotions previously undisclosed, in light of what amounted to his theory of an auditory unconscious. His later work in photography of dance and body motion demystified elements of human nature far beyond what Edweard Muybridge’s pioneering freeze-frame photographic studies of animal and human movement had accomplished before him.

  One of the last pieces of writing that Alan did before he fell ill was the notes for what he was calling a “general theory,” his first steps toward a synthesis of his life’s work. He began by reaffirming well-established anthropological knowledge, and then adding his own findings: Cultures are systems of adaptation that shape and motivate the behavior of those within their borders, and they over time vary with survival needs and environment. The main features of culture—the means of subsistence, population size, nature of government, level of social stratification, solidarity of social groups, technology, methods of childrearing, family size and type, sexual division of labor, severity of sexual sanctions—all take symbolic form in music, dance, and speaking styles, all of which reflect and support each other in a tradition. So powerful are these symbolic functions that within a few seconds of hearing a particular piece of music or seeing a dance, audiences accept or reject the performance because it clearly states its cultural allegiance to some form of social structure, some type of adaptation, that is or isn’t important to the audience. Every cultural system has affinity for some other cultures, and the world is made up of twelve to fourteen cultural regions with some sixty subregions. Despite the differences in these cultural systems, Lomax thought they were all ultimately traceable to two ancient and primal sources—the African gatherers and the hunters of North Asia.

  These were big ideas, and he saw there was much left to do to support them. Lomax wanted to apply his theories to folktales, and the stories and pop songs that derive from them, and then turn his attention to the visual arts. He was especially concerned with the vanishing of some cultural systems under the spread of modernity, seeing musical diversity as akin to biodiversity: every song style that disappeared was potentially as serious a tragedy as the loss of a species. He was also seeking out new forms of communication and education to create tolerance and appreciation for the diversity of cultures in the world. (Much of this work—which involved the physical return of works of art and the means to document and analyze them to their originators; the payment of royalties; the development of teaching materials; and the use of the Web to make the databases available to the world—was continued and expanded by his daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, through the Associatio
n for Cultural Equity.)

  While Alan’s public influence reached its peak between 1940 and 1960, when he was the single greatest force in bringing folk songs to American awareness, it continues today in any number of cultural domains: in the music used for Alvin Ailey’s dance “Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder”; in the soundtrack of Gangs of New York; in his persona as played by an actor in the film Cadillac Records, or as animated in RiP: A Remix Manifesto, or in the spirit of the PBS children’s show Lomax the Hound of Music; in his field recordings as remixed by Moby on Play, or by the Italian sound collagists Fabio Orsi and My Cat Is an Alien’s recording For Alan Lomax; and even in the street names of McGill’s Common in Columbia, Maryland, that were taken from Alan’s Folk Songs of North America.

  At times his influence can be seen in the distortions of the funhouse mirror of American culture, where a hard-fought idea can be perverted through the countervailing forces of social and technological interests and the discourse of fashion. Though he never had the time or the funding to make the Global Jukebox fully operational to the public, the idea nonetheless migrated into various commercial ventures, most notably Pandora.com, an online project developed by the Music Genome. In Pandora, more than four hundred “musical measures” (“breathiness,” “depth of bass,” and the like) are used to analyze each song in a database, and users can enter either a song or several musical characteristics that in turn are used to find other songs that are similar, then fed into a personal “radio station” that plays nothing but examples of that type of music for the listener. A request for, say, “Barbara Allen” sung solo by a woman might lead to Texas Gladden’s recording of that folk song, then to Hazel Dickens’s “Pretty Bird,” Dorothy Elliott’s “Adieu to Judges and Juries,” “Whirling Whorl” by Anne Briggs, and on to many others with similar characteristics. But where Lomax’s Global Jukebox took the listener beyond his or her own tastes, beyond his own culture, leading to new worlds of music, Pandora’s recommendations based on personal taste tend to lead sideways, apparently staying closer to production style than to deeper principles of cultural and musical organization. It creates a musical identity specific to the personal-taste parameters entered, closing the listener into a sonic world of her or his making.

  Throughout his lifetime of struggle with commercial media, Lomax anticipated the misunderstanding of his ideas, though he was not always able to prevent it. Following the disappointment he felt when the captains of the information technology industry could not see the uses he proposed for the Global Jukebox, he drew on his own cultural theories to explain to himself the source of this misunderstanding: “The romantic tradition has long provided a needed emotional balance to the practical, operational forces in North-West-European culture. It is crucial that we gain some perspective on this very unusual—in the eyes of most humans, rather outlandish—cultural tradition.” He then traced the history of the cattle herders and fishermen of Scotland, Ireland, Norway, and Spain, with their solo ballads and dances, single-family farms, deep-sea fishing and boat building, to factory systems in Great Britain, the Low Countries, and northern France.

  When I hear the moralists of the present era bemoaning the materialism of the electronic-industrial system, accusing it of lacking in a value system, I wish to remind them that the value profile of modern American culture is a reworking of this ancient North-east European tradition. It was present in the court of Beowulf, who was no less self-aggrandizing than the overseas market manager of Ford and Sony. The inventive flair of a group of programmers tackling a problem in Silicon Valley replicates the team-work of a boat-building crew in the Norwegian fiords or in the Chesapeake, where the clipper ship was designed and launched. Such teams bring together the talents of a peer group of equal experts, each one listened to in his turn respectfully and with the absorbed attention given to a singer in the Scottish ballad circle.

  The driving force is ancient—the sure knowledge of the lone fisherman, herds-man, and crofter that if he doesn’t manage his affairs on his own, his family will starve and his generation will disappear. This powerful and ancient incentive, fostered in the cold latitudes, is now focused with equal intensity on the bottom-line as a commercial solution for the solution of all human problems. Its shibboleths are total independence for the individual and free trade. But we may question whether this primeval Northwest European solution to human affairs, which is now summed up in the doctrine of the bottom line, can apply to corporations like General Motors and General Magic, and have much relevance for other adaptive cultural systems with other goals and other techniques for arriving at them.

  Yet in the end, it was those very commercial and bureaucratic bodies he struggled with who recognized him for his achievements. After the film awards, the National Medal of the Arts, and the National Book Critics Award, he was named a “Living Legend” at the Library of Congress’s bicentennial celebration in 2000. He received an honorary doctorate of philosophy from Tulane in 2001 and a Trustees Award of the National Academy of Recording Arts in 2003 for his lifelong contributions to music. It was all far more than his folklorist and anthropologist colleagues were willing to grant him.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book began with discussions I had with Bess Lomax Hawes and Roger D. Abrahams, two friends of many years back, who encouraged me to write it. Bess, whom I had known almost as long as I knew her brother, was an inspiration and a great help, even while she was writing her own autobiography. Roger has supported me on any number of projects, often as my coauthor, and his help on this one was essential: in addition to being the most important folklorist in the United States, he had known and worked with Alan Lomax. If the dice had been rolled differently, Roger would have been my coauthor of this book. Once I began the research, Anna Lomax Wood, Alan’s daughter, helped me in countless ways, and has been tolerant of my often awkward forays into her family’s life. I have also benefited enormously from her own brilliant interpretations and extensions of her father’s work. These three people above all made this book possible.

  Biographers depend on letters, manuscripts, published materials, and interviews for their work, and in writing this book I was blessed with an exceptional archive that Alan Lomax built throughout his life. This collection filled several large rooms in the office of the Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College in New York City, with 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of motion picture film, 2,450 videotapes, 2,000 books and journals, hundreds of photographic prints and negatives, several databases concerning portions of the archive, and more than 120 linear feet of manuscripts, letters, field notes, files, program scripts, indexes, and book and article manuscripts. To find my way through that collection, I, like many others before me, counted on the courtesy and help of its staff: Odysseus Chairetakis, Bertram Lyons, Nathan Salsburg, Molly W. Sirignano, John M. Tan, and others. To each of them I offer my thanks. But I want to single out Don Fleming and Ellen Harold for special praise. For years they put up with my endless requests for scraps of paper, tapes, images, explanations, and guidance, and did so cheerfully and expertly.

  When the Lomax archive was moved to the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and was added to the very large Lomax collection that institution already had, I followed its migration there and again was given help and guidance by its wonderful staff of scholar/librarians. My thanks to Peter Bartis, Peggy Bulger, Jennifer Cutting, Judith Gray, Nancy Groce, Joe Hickerson, Fabian Holt, Guha Shankar, Michael Taft, Stephen Winick, and others, and most especially to Todd Harvey, the man whose role it is to oversee the Alan Lomax Collection. His knowledge of the materials and his commitment to their preservation and use is exemplary. In another part of the Library of Congress, the Music Division, I was especially fortunate to have the aid and advice of Larry Appelbaum and Matt Barton, two individuals whose knowledge extends over vast territories.

  I’m pleased to have a chance to state my gratitude to other libraries and librarians: the Chicago Histo
rical Society, The Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, the Indiana University Library, the Stanford University Library, Diana Cary at the Schlesinger Library of Radcliff College, Elizabeth Davis of the Music & Arts Library of Columbia University, James Moske of the New York Public Library Archives, Karl Schrom, the Recordings Collection supervisor of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University, Bruce Boyd Raeburn of the William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz of Tulane University, and Dan M. Morgenstern and his staff of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark.

  Profound thanks to those who worked with Lomax or knew him well and helped steer my efforts. Pete and Toshi Seeger, who have always been open to writers, fans, and musicians, treated me with great kindness. Their long memories were invaluable. Others who were close to Alan and became saints of this book were John Bishop, Shirley Collins, Gideon D’Arcangelo, Michael Del Rio, Victor Grauer, Carol Kulig, Joan Halifax, Robin Roberts, and Roswell Rudd.