Issue 06
Alan Lomax
By Caleb NeelonIllustration By Micheal Delahaut
Eighteen-year-old Alan Lomax would not return to Harvard in 1933, and instead headed out on a car trip wit h his father, John, to record song sin Southern prisons. Huddie Ledbetter, 44, had already been in for murder in Texas, released, and was serving at Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana for assault with intent to murder. He had a scar on his neck that wrapped around from ear to ear, and had, in his own words, taken a pistol and “played a tune on the head” of the man that had given him the wound. He was a massive man, and was known as Leadbelly for his ability to take a beating. The sensible and patrician Lomaxes were at once terrified of Leadbelly and in awe of his musicianship.
John Lomax was a recent widower, and had taken the honorary and unpaid position of curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress . Between the two of them they would record thousands of America’s folksongs. With little in the way of printed music in the 1930s, a rural musician’s memory was all-important, doubly so in prison. Leadbelly was an archivist’s dream, and he had a trick for remembering songs,sort of: the knife would slice bread in the first verse,shave a beard in the second, and stab an unfaithful woman in the third. John Lomax would record in prisons in a dozen Southern states, paying close attention to the African-American work songs that gave a pulse to the labor of breaking rocks or chopping wood. Rural prisons functioned as musical time capsules. The young Alan Lomax noticed that Leadbelly “had work song traditions of both Texas and Louisiana, and he had the backwoods cowboy songs and square dance traditions of his own from growing up in Louisiana.” Leadbelly’s voice boomed over his12-string guitar, belting songs like “Gallis Pole,” “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” and “John Hardy,” all of which utterly defied categorization.
Legend has it that Leadbelly recorded a song for the Lomaxes in order to plea for his freedom from Louisiana governor O.K. Allen; the governor obliged. The less romantic truth is that he was released for good behavior a year after the Lomaxes recorded him, but the story stuck, and Leadbelly was a legend in the making. John Lomax set up a tour for Leadbelly of Northern colleges and society clubs. By New Year’s Eve 1934, when Leadbelly hit New York City, he was something of a sensation. John Lomax’s lead on his press release to newspapers read: “Leadbelly is a nigger to the core of his being,” and while there isn’t a white man on Earth today that could, or should, be able to get away with saying that, John Lomax was in his own way progressive, however utterly bizarre it seems in hindsight. He arranged for Leadbelly to play early engagements at the most aristocratic of venues– but would have him play hiss et while wearing prison garb. Like most men, Leadbelly preferred double-breasted suits and other respectable finery. The relationship between Leadbelly and the elder Lomax would fray over the coming years, but the far more progressive Alan remained close to Leadbelly.
Nobody in the recording industry gets a sympathetic ear; we naturally favor the artists while branding industry people as exploiters. In the case of both Alan and John Lomax this was complicated once over by their status as well-to-do white men recording the songs of poor people, doubly so when they recorded poor black people. It took a certain combination of obstinate drive and interpersonal charm on the part of Alan Lomax to do his job. The present-day curator of the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress, Todd Harvey, describes him as“a very intelligent, extremely curious person, very gregarious, and he could make people feel comfortable and give their best, knowing that he would do the right thing with it.” Folklorist Benjamin Filene, author of Romancing the Folk, explains that Lomax “was serious, and was a notoriously cantankerous person, but it was hard to get a handle on what he was cantankerous about.” Bruce Jackson, who would later work with Lomax in the 1960sand 1970s, remembers him as“domineering, aggressive, and opinionated – but he was driven, absolutely driven, about getting the music, getting it recorded, and getting people to hear it.”
Alan and his father together amass ed over 7,000 recordings, bringing to light the likes of Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Son House, Burl Ives, Josh White, Pete Seeger, Jelly Roll Morton, Muddy Waters, and scores of others. While Alan is best remembered for recording American folk, jazz, and blues, he also would record substantially throughout the Caribbean, Great Britain, Ireland, Spain, and Italy. Then, as Filene explains, “There’s a broader influence of Alan Lomax’s that’s harder to quantify, in terms of his vision of American culture and the scope of that vision, and how he strove to implement it at every level, from academia to government to festivals to record production. He was omnivorous and omnipresent.” He was also very much his father’s son, regardless of the generational differences that emerged between them.
John A. Lomax lived from 1867 to 1948, and was the seventh child of poor farmers. He grew up near the Chisholm Trail in Bosque County, Texas, midway between Dallas and Austin. John was the first in his family to go to college, and he took on a career in university administration and banking. In the grainy photographs that document his life, he looks every bit the conservative Southern gentleman.
While at the University of Texas in Austin, John Lomax wrote a paper that was graded harshly for its praise of folksongs. Taking this affront as a motivating factor, he hit the road in the American West in cowboy country to collect and compile a book of their songs. He was frequently laughed off, as by a rancher who yelled out to his men that “there’s a man named Lomax here who wants to know if anyone knows some of the old cowboy songs. Why, everybody knows those damn-fool songs, and only a bigger damn fool would try to collect them. I vote we adjourn to the bar.” The bigger damn fool published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910, with a preface from Teddy Roosevelt. In that volume were a handful of now-ubiquitous songs, most notably “Home on the Range.” After publishing the book, John Lomax went back to banking and college administration. Folklore work wasn’t easy to come by.
The job of folklorist in the early 20th century, like that of anthropologist or sociologist, was a relatively new academic discipline. In the late 1800s, the preeminent folksong collector was Francis James Child, who sought the oldest songs in the English language. He was a Harvard profess or who did little field work, but had a network of contactsthatsent him transcriptions of ballads from England, which Child would analyze, eventually whittling down the candidates to 305songsthat he deemed to be both pure and old. Child’s aim was not to popularize these songs, but rather to authenticate the oldest and preserve them in book form, which he did.
With his invention of recording technology, Thomas Edison would make such an approach inadequate. He prototyped the wax cylinder recorder in 1877, and in 1890 gave it to Harvard ethnologist Jess e Walter Fewkes, who took the enormous device up to Calais, Maine, in order to record Native American songs and stories. It wasn’t immediately obvious that recording technology should be used for music –scholars and others were more impress ed with its potential use for interviews and dictation.
Eventually, of course, recorded music took hold. The Library of Congress created the privately-funded Archive of American Folk Song in 1928, led by folklorist Robert Winslow Gordon, who did field recordings in the North Carolina mountains and the Georgia Sea Islands. The Great Depress ion followed immediately afterwards, knocking out the funding, and the Archive lay inactive until 1933, when John Lomax took it on. He bought a sound recorder from Thomas Edison’s widow and hit the road again with Alan. It was that trip on which they would meet Leadbelly. The Lomaxes traveled in a sedan, as did their recorder, which took up both the trunk and much of the backseat. The disc recorder weighed 300 pounds and measured two feet square and a foot tall. It required an amplifier of similar size and was powered by a pair of car batteries. As Texans, they didn’t mind the heat of a Louisiana summer, though the bumpy country roads gave frequent flat tires. As would be expected, the father and son occasionally drove each other nuts.
The Great Depress ion was at it speak and the nation sass searching both for itself and for solutions. Franklin Roosevelt had recently taken office and convened Congress in a special session that would result in the New Deal, which would offer an unprecedented level of government investment in American arts and culture. Roosevelt had a taste for folk music, and wanted to celebrate the cultural contributions of the downtrodden but culturally rich Americans who had been so ignored by the previous president, Herbert Hoover. The young Alan Lomax, for his part, both believed in and benefited from big government and its ability to collect its own culture, but he very much distrusted business to do the same job,since he thought it would ultimately homogenize culture in the service of profit. The Library of Congress was the perfect base for Alan Lomax to operate from. According to Todd Harvey, “Washington in the 1930s, especially the Library of Congress, was an intellectual and cultural center, in addition to being the seat of government. Very interesting people came through the Library every day, and judging from the Lomaxes’ correspondence, they were right among them.” Alan Lomax grew up and came of age in the Library and on the road.
In 1935, Alan Lomax led an expedition alongside Columbia University literary anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who would soon write Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they traveled to the Bahamas, the Georgia Sea Islands, and to Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida, just north of Orlando. Lomax was barely 20 years old, Hurston was44, and the two of them riding in the car together in the Jim Crow South was a dangerous proposition. In fear of the locals’ reaction to a young white man and an older black woman together, Hurston would paint Lomax’sface and hands black.
Like his father’s Leadbelly press release, this wasn’t an episode that Alan Lomax was interested in discussing decades later, particularly when he found himself among some of the most radical people of his time. He had grown up in a different era, and sometimes it would show in his behavior and in the ways that he would address people of different races and backgrounds. Bruce Jackson knew him, and carefully explains that “it’s easy to condemn Alan now for not being like us, but he wasn’t like us; he grew up in a different world. I don’t think Alan had a racist bone in his body, except that he would come out with these dumb-ass things every so often. He would have done it to anybody. It was a time that a lot of us were becoming aware of this, and he may not have got it.”
The spectrum of race relations that Alan Lomax lived through is difficult to believe today. In his visits to Louisiana and Mississippi, he was often accosted by police and taken to the station, where he would have to explain himself out of the charge of fraternizing with black people. The prevailing Southern etiquette was that visitors were not to speak with a plantation owner’s sharecroppers, almost invariably black and always poor, without permission. The fiefdoms that were Southern counties in the 1930sand 1940s seldom had law enforcement officials who had heard of the Library of Congress . Lomax was from Texas, but the Library was in Washington, which frequently made Lomax seem like an outside agitator of some sort, and whether he was there as a labor organizer, folklorist, or a Red, he wasn’t welcome.
Alan’s father John was a Texas conservative, to be sure, but Alan’s liberal tendencies became more and more clear throughout the 1930s. The Galesburg, Illinois-born poet and singer Carl Sandburg, himself a great collector of American folksongs, was a friend to both Lomaxes and was between the two in age. When John began to worry about his liberal son perhaps falling in with Communists and getting himself arrested, Sandburg reassured the elder Lomax that he’d personally bail the kid out.
Following the Southern miss ion with Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax went song-hunting in Haiti, and his father continued recording in Southern prisons. By June of 1936, the two had already combined for more than 700 recorded discs, each bearing between two and twelve songs. In the late 1930s, Alan had an official and salaried post at the Library of Congress, was loaning out recording equipment to other song collectors, and was hosting national radio shows featuring Archive music. In 1940, he hired a young Harvard dropout who made, in the employee’s own words, “15 dollars a week, and overpaid at that.” He had a good ear, and his name was Pete Seeger, the son of Charles Seeger, a Washington scholar who worked in the 1930sin the New Deal using music as a tool for community development, and Ruth Seeger, who had transcribed the music in Lomax-compiled books. Young Seeger’s job was to listen through the piles of records at the Archive for Alan and to pick out ones of special interest. Pete Seeger was a future star that took little travel to find, and while Alan Lomax traveled the Midwest and northern New England on song hunting trips in the late 1930s, he met one of his most celebrated finds at a New York City benefit for the Spanish Resistance against Franco in 1940. The 21-year-old Pete Seeger and the 25-year-old Alan Lomax drove up from Washington just in time to hear Woody Guthrie sing.
The benefit was in the newly bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, and Woody Guthrie had just hitchhiked into town from Los Angeles. Guthrie was born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, and started drifting in 1935 during the era of the Dust Bowl. He hopped freights, took odd jobs where he could, and wrote songs: more than a thousand in total between 1932 and 1952. Lomax was floored by the authenticity and power of Guthrie’s songs, which included “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad,” and later, “This Land is Your Land.” At the time he met Lomax, Guthrie wouldn’t sleep in a bed, and ate over the sink. He was hard from his hobo life, and had no wish to become soft. Guthrie’s1943 autobiographical novel Bound for Glory told history.
Alan Lomax immediately set up a recording session for Woody Guthrie for the Library of Congress, and also introduced him to Leadbelly, who had left the South and gotten an apartment for himself and his wife Martha in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Lomax commented that Leadbelly and Guthrie “came to town with their whole, fresh, powerful, pure folk repertory intact: living, vibrant, and with the impact of a country mule ready to kick a hole into the future.”
After Pearl Harbor, Alan Lomax knew he would soon be drafted into some form of military service, and in 1942, before his turn came, took another recording trip to the South. He partnered with Fisk University profess or John Work to record in the Mississippi Delta and surrounding hills. The Delta was the cradle of the blues, and on this trip Lomax recorded one of its fathers, Son House, who had taught the legendary Robert Johnson, as well as one of its future icons, a young and eager man named McKinley Morganfield. The recordings didn’t result in stardom for Morganfield, but he would later move on to Chicago, plug in his guitar, and become Muddy Waters. The Mississippi hills were a different kind of country, far more isolated, and it was in the hills that Lomax found Sid Hemphill, then an old man. Hemphill played many instruments and could build most of them himself as well, including the “quills,” a tiny set of panpipes played along with a fife and drum and guitar. It was the musical equivalent of a rhinoceros, like no other music around yet plainly a holdover from time immemorial. The folklorist task had come full circle: while always concentrating on finding the best music, Lomax had also happened upon some of the oldest. When he left for service in the War, Alan Lomax was2 7 years old.
In a sense, Alan Lomax spent the first 10 years of his professional life collecting the material for a musical revolution, and spent the last 50 as one of its caretakers. He spent much of the 1950srecording in England, partly as a result of his being blacklisted, along with scores of other entertainment figures, in the McCarthy hearings. When he returned, the music he had recorded in the United States had inspired a generation of musicians, and this time they had the widest audience imaginable. Along with colleague sat Columbia University in the 1960s, Lomax developed Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and Parlametrics: methodologies designed for analyzing song, dance, and speech, cross -culturally. He was an authority on folk and traditional music, and was territorial about it, especially any part of the story that involved him. “The bottom line was that he didn’t want anyone writing about him at all. It wasn’t anything specific, but it was a feeling that it was his turf and we should stay off it,”says Benjamin Filene. After reading a (flattering) article of Filene’s, Lomax told him he’d punch him in the nose if they met. He offered Bruce Jackson a job, but Jackson had to turn it down for fear that the two would come to blows. Nevertheless, Jackson says, “Alan was recording in the field at a time when few other people were doing it. The academics were in libraries looking for old Child ballads. Whatever their faults, the Lomaxes left us a record of music of incalculable value, which without them we would not have.”
Alan Lomax retired from work in 1996, and died in 2002 in Florida at the age of 87. His own archive is now at the Library of Congress, entirely public and absolutely staggering in size: 330,000sheetsof manuscript material, more than 7,000sound recordings, 5,000 photos, and 3,000 moving images in video and film.