Alan Lomax: A Life in Folk Music

Alan Lomax's career was long, almost seventy years,and his interests many and varied. He achieved somuch in those seventy years that it is impossible forany short account of his life and work to becomprehensive. The following overview is thereforenecessarily selective and, to avoid duplication, Ihave passed quickly over those aspects of Alan'scareer emphasized by Ron Cohen, but I hope that itcovers the ground reasonably.systematically and atleast hits the highlights of a remarkable, indeed quiteextraordinary, story. This was a man whose like weshall not often see again.

APPRENTICESHIP,1933-36

Born in Austin, Texas, in January 1915, AlanLomax was the son of renowned folklorist JohnLomax, whose pioneering Cowboy Songs and OtherFrontier BalladsI had been first published in 1910,followed in 1919 by Songs of the Cattle Trail andCow Camp2. The Lomax family had moved to theeastern USA by the early thirties and Alan began hisuniversity education by attending Harvard Collegefor a year, but in 1933 he switched to the Universityof Texas, the institution from which he wouldgraduate with a B.A. in Philosophy in 1936. Onereason for Alan's transfer back to his home state wasthat it allowed him to accompany his father oncollecting trips in the Deep South. John Lomax wasnow effectively the director of the tiny Archive ofFolk Song at the Library of Congress, and in 1933he began making field-recordings for the archive inthe penitentiaries and work-houses of severalsouthern states, including Kentucky, Tennessee andMississippi. That year Alan visited the infamousParchman State Farm at Canton, Mississippi, for thefirst time. He also helped his father compile and editthe first of their published folksong collections,American Ballads and Folk Songs.3

During the next three years father and son spentmany months together carting their extremely heavybut (for the time) state-of-the-art recordingequipment around Florida, Georgia, Louisiana,Texas and the Carolinas. This was when they madetheir celebrated recordings of Aunt Molly Jackson,of the Soul Stirrers gospel group, and of Cajun andCreole music from (among others) the Hoffpauirfamily, the Segura Brothers, fiddler Wayne Perry,

and the duo of Lanese Vincent and Sidney Richard.It was also when they discovered Leadbelly at theAngola State Prison and recorded such classics as"Goodnight Irene", "Matchbox Blues", "MidnightSpecial", "Roberta" and "Take a Whiff On Me", aswell as the plea for clemency that persuadedGovernor O.K. Allen of Louisiana to pardon him.4

Leadbelly worked as the Lomaxes' driver for theremainder of their 1934 field-trip, and resumed hisperforming career at the December meeting of theModem Languages Association in Philadelphia. Buthe soon quarreled with John, who had initially actedas his manager, although he remained on good termswith Alan and between 1935 and 1942 made many

.5more recordings for the Library of Congress. Negro

Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, jointly edited byJohn and Alan, was first published in 1936.6

ARCHIVIST, 1937-42

In 1937 Alan obtained the position of Assistant inCharge of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library ofCongress in Washington, while his father remainedas "honorary consultant" and his nominal boss.Father and son continued to collaborate, jointlyediting a new edition of Cowboy Songs and FrontierBallads and compiling Our Singing Country: ASecond Volume of American Ballads & Folk Songsin 1938/ but they now did most of their collectingseparately. Alan had a new partner, Elizabeth Harold(whom he married in 1937), on his research trips tothe Southern Appalachians, the mid-West, the DeepSouth, the Bahamas, and Haiti.

.

5

Alan was now also doing exte~sive recording for theArchive in New York (where he recorded SarahOgan Gunning) and in Washington, D.C. In 1938,for example, he ftrst recorded Woody Guthrie, andthe same year he made his greatest contribution tothe history of jazz, interviewing at length jazzpioneer Jelly Roll Morton.8

The Morton recordings would eventually be issuedas a twelve-volume LP set in 1950,9 to accompanythe publication of Alan's book, Mr. Jelly Roll, ofwhich more later. 10

Equally legendary were Alan's fteld recordings ofblues musicians in the Mississippi Delta, the by-product of his abortive search for the already-deceased Robert Johnson. Bluesmen discoveredincluded the young Muddy Waters (recorded on theSherrod Plantation), Son House (recorded mainly inRobinsonville), and Honeyboy Edwards (recorded inClarksdale).

Yet it was one thing to build up the archivalholdings at the Library of Congress and another topublicize what had been collected and to make therecordings available to researchers. Alan was wellaware of the need to catalogue the growing moundof archival recordings contributed by such folkloristsas Sidney Robertson Cowell, Herbert Halpert andVance Randolph, among others. He hired his youngfriend Pete Seeger to help him do the job. Seegerwould later acknowledge Alan as his mentor, andremark that he achieved in his few years at theLibrary as much as would take most men a lifetime.One result of their labours was the invaluableChecklist of Recorded Songs in the EnglishLanguage in the Archive of American Folk Song toJuly, 1940. II Alan supplemented this by alsocompiling, with Sidney Cowell, the equally usefulAmerican Folk Song and Folk-lore, a RegionalBibliography. 12Yet despite his evidentachievements, Alan's career as an employee of theLibrary of Congress came to an abrupt end in the fallof 1942. His resignation was the price required tosave the Archive's funding in the face of attacksfrom hostile congressmen on its alleged politicalbias.

BROADCASTER AND PRODUCER, 1939-45

One of the events that made Republicancongressmen see red was Alan's participation in thefamous "Grapes of Wrath" concert in Washington,D.C. on March 3rd,1940, which featured Guthrie,

Aunt Molly Jackson, and Will Geer. The success ofthis event led to his collaboration with Seeger andGuthrie on a songbook, Hard Hitting Songs forHard Hit People, for which no publisher could befound until 1967.13 He also encouraged theAlmanac Singers (of which his sister Bess laterbecame a member) to persist with their idea ofdeveloping a repertoire that would mix traditionalfolksongs with union and other political material,paciftst at ftrst but patriotic after Pearl Harbor. Heeven helped a group of unionized office workers toform a group called the Priority Ramblers.

Lomax's work at the Library of Congress was a full-time job, yet his enormous energy and enthusiasmfound other important outlets too. For example, theseeds of his later academic career can be seen in hisenrolment in a graduate program in anthropology atColumbia University and in his ftrst experience ofteaching folklore (at the University of Indiana) in1939. He also began his career as a broadcaster that

6

same year, with a 26-part series titled American FolkSongs on the CBS network's American School of theAir. It illustrated a wide variety of English-languagefolksongs, featuring Aunt Molly Jackson, Burl Ives,Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and the Golden GateQuartet. A follow-up series, Wellsprings of America,ran for another 26 weeks on the same networkduring the winter of 1939-40. Late in life, Lomaxremembered this show with pride, commenting that"one of its programs, co-authored with WoodyGuthrie, won an award as the best Music EducationProgram of its years, and the two series led directlyto MENC adopting American folk songs as a mainemphasis in its public school teaching materials.CBS then decided on a prime-time network show[for adults] featuring folk songs" .14This was BackWhere I Come From, which Lomax co-producedwith Nicholas Ray, and its regular performersincluded not only Guthrie, Ives and the Golden GateQuartet but also Josh White and Pete Seeger.

Lomax also found opportunities to producerecordings by his favourite artists. Negro SinfulSongs pelformed by Leadbelly, issued by Musicraftin 1939, was probably the fIrst commercial album ofAfro-American folksongs, and it was followed ayear later by two influential releases on Victor: TheMidnight Special: Songs of Texas Prisons,peiformed by Leadbelly and the Golden GateQuartet and Dustbowl Ballads peiformed by WoodyGuthrie. Moreover, one of the major projects onwhich he had been working at the Library ofCongress came to fruition the year after hisdeparture: the release of eleven albums of traditionalmusic collectively titled Folk Songs of the UnitedStates, a survey of the fIeld recordings in theArchive that included material from Mexico and theBahamas as well as from most regions of the USA.As Lomax later remarked, "this was the fIrst time inhistory a country had ever published a full, fIeld-recorded picture of its folk traditions. It had a world-wide impact".15SignifIcantly, fIve of the albumscomprised material collected by Alan and hisfather. 16

Lomax spent the remaining war years working forthe Office of War Information and for the SpecialServices unit of the US Army. One of his activitieswas to produce and host a CBS radio series titledTransatlantic Call that was also broadcast inwartime Britain by the BBC. A by-product of thiscollaboration with the BBC was his fIrst radioballad, The Martins and the Coys, whi~h wasscripted by his wife Elizabeth and starred Woody

Guthrie, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger. Another was hisfIrst fIlmscript, for a movie called To Hear MyBanjo Play that was directed by Willard Van Dykeof the Office of War Information.

FREELANCE FOLKLORIST, 1946-49

After the war, Lomax eamed his living as a recordproducer, broadcaster, impresario, and freelancewriter. Cognisant of the power and influence of themedia, he tried to use it to win a mass audience forthe music he loved, folksong and blues. An exampleof his journalism from this period is his article"America Sings the Saga of America" whichappeared in the New York Sunday Magazine inJanuary 1947. He also edited, in collaboration withhis father, a new collection of traditional songs, FolkSongs: USA, fIrst published under that title in 1946and reissued a year later as Best Loved AmericanSongs. For more than a decade this best-sellingpublication would serve as the standard resource forany performer, amateur or professional, who wantedto sing American traditional folksongs. Although thesong-texts were composites and the documentationpoor, it was nonetheless higWy effective as a workof popularization.

For a couple of years, between 1946 and 1948, Alanserved as Director of Folk Music for Decca Records,a grandiose title that implied more authority than heactually had within the organization. He did succeedin issuing a number of albums, includingcompilations of hillbilly and country bluesperformances originally recorded between 1927 and1931, which appeared on Decca's subsidiary label,Brunswick. Actor Burl Ives and poet Carl Sandburg

7

were two of the best-known personalities to recordfolksongs for Decca around this time, although I amnot sure if Alan personally supervised theirrecording sessions.

He got back into broadcasting as a disc jockey,hosting a program titled Your Ballad Man whichfIrst aired on the Mutual Broadcasting Network in1947-48. This was complemented the next year byOn Top of Old Smokey, a new series that was heardcoast to coast. Catering to as wide an audience aspossible, Lomax mixed a lot of country & westernmusic with recordings by his favourite bluesmen andfolksingers. His career as a DJ and record producerwent hand in hand with his activities as animpresario. In the post-war years he organised avariety of folk music, jazz and blues concerts,sometimes working with the left~wing organizationfounded by Seeger and Lee Hays, People's Songs. Avocal advocate of racial equality, Alan took as hismodel John Hammond's famous Spirituals to Swingconcerts that had given black musicians equal billingwith the"likes of Benny Goodman. One such concertseries, Midnight Special, held at New York's TownHall during 1946, led to another of his most famousand important recording sessions, the evening in theDecca studios with Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slimand Sonny Boy Williamson that resulted in thepowerful documentary Blues in the Mississippi

"

Night. The recording was the fInest achievement ofhis stint with Decca, but the content was too hot tohandle, and the recordings were issued only in 1959when the bluesmen were safe from retaliation fortheir truthful reminiscences about segregation andthe penitentiary system in the Deep South.17

Alan's 1946 encounter with the Chicago bluesmenwhom he most admired reinvigorated his latentdesire to get back into the Deep South with state-of-the-art recording equipment. A successfulapplication for a Guggenheim Fellowship allowedhim to do just that. The years 1947 and 1948 sawhim returning to the Mississippi Delta, and makingnew recordings at the Parchman State Pentitentiaryand also in Greenville. Selections would eventuallybe released on Tradition Records in 1959 asMurderer's Home: Negro Prison Songs. Anotherresult of this research was an article titled "I Got theBlues" published in Common Ground, and a thirdwas Alan's brief return to academic life, teaching afolklore course at New York University in 1948.That same year saw him again heavily involved inpolitics, as volunteer music director for HenryWallace's campaign as presidential candidate for the

short-lived Progressive Party. This, and his previousassociation with People's Songs, meant that Alanwould come under suspicion in 1950 as aCommunist fellow-traveller, one reason for hisdecision to leave the USA and spend the worst yearsof McCarthy ism in Europe.

Meanwhile, his next fIeldtrip (in 1949) took him toLouisiana, where he interviewed such New Orleansjazz musicians as Alphonse Picou and Johnny St.Cyr about their work with Jelly Roll Morton. Thisresearch was for Alan's innovative essay in oralhistoriography, Mr. Jelly Roll. Published in 1950,the book was a cross between biography andautobiography, and it was issued along with a twelvealbum set of Morton's 1938 Library of Congressrecordings. A signifIcant contribution to the historyof traditional jazz, Mr. Jelly Roll is a classic thatremains as readable and colourful today as when itwas compiled.

18

THE COLUMBIA WORLD LIBRARY PROJECT,1950-57

Lomax now had a dual career, as a freelancejournalist, broadcaster and record producer, and as

8

an academic folklorist specializing in fieldcollecting. As an ethnomusicologist, his horizonswere expanding. He was aware of the activities ofthe International Folk Music Council and made theacquaintance of such luminaries as Maud Karpelesand Marius Barbeau. He also participated in theMidcentury International Folklore Conference atIndiana University, a gathering of eminent scholarsfrom a number of different countries. Yet he wasunable to sell his fellow academics on a grand visionthat was dear to his heart: a systematic effort torecord the traditional music of all regions of theworld and to release the results on a series of LPdiscs. Not that Barbeau, Karpeles and companywere opposed to the idea, but the problem was howto fmance the field-work. And if the field recordingswere ever made, what record company wouldrelease the albums?

A chance meeting in a coffee shop with GoddardLieberson, head of Columbia Records, provided theblade to slice through the Gordian knot. Liebersontook to the idea immediately and commissionedLomax to assemble thirty one-hour LPs to be "editedby the principal folklorists of the world" from theirown recordings in a series called The ColumbiaWorld Library of Folk and Primitive Music. 19Assoon as Mr. Jelly Roll was in the press, Alan headedfor Europe to begin work on the project. It provedmuch more difficult than he ever imagined, and halfa decade passed before he had the first fourteen LPsready for release in 1955.

Lomax encountered three main problems inachieving his goal: in a surprisingly large number ofcountries no national folk music archives existed sothe required recordings had to be made from scratch;some folklorists upon whose help he had countedwithheld their cooperation, preferring to keep theirrecordings for their own use as academics; othersagreed to cooperate but failed to produce recordingsof the right kind or quality, either through technicalincompetence or because they hired professionalsingers instead of venturing into the field. To besure, this was not always the case. For example,Peter Kennedy supplied the required material for thevolumes on England and Yugoslavia, and MariusBarbeau did the same for Canada. Bert Lloyd usedhis Communist Party connections in Eastern Europeto obtain suitable recordings from Bulgaria andRumania, although a companion volume onHungary never materialized.

- ~--The Historic: Series

. ~~"::t't VVORLI:> LIBRARY OF

':'.. \, ~ FOLK and PRIlVIITIVE~1!)~[I, lVIUSIC

,..,,"~~" "":''''",_p.'iIf.-.", I.C""',!;"--~~-=;~ ~,"- }:.~At7'~A"--1"..,.""_~-"k~"<.~:[17~~,~i}.~\~:&¥1{:;

In any case, Alan found ways of solving some of hisdifficulties. Where possible he found anethnomusicologist he could trust, such as HamishHenderson in Scotland, Seamus Ennis in Ireland orDiego Carpitella in Italy, and worked closely withthem to make the recordings he needed. If not, hesimply set out to make them himself, as in the caseof Spain. But for South America, Africa, Asia, andAustralasia he had to rely on what the experts cameup with, if indeed they came up with anythingusable. Lomax insisted that the technical quality ofthe recordings be quite high, which ruled out usinghistorically important cylinder recordings by BelaBartok and Percy Grainger (among others), and hetoo often chose performances by revival rather thantraditional singers.

In the event, only just over half of the planned thirtyvolumes were ever issued, although one more (onMexico) was compiled but never released. Theeighteen that did appear included three on the BritishIsles (England, Scotland, and Ireland), four onWestern Europe (France, Spain, and two on Italy),three on Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia, Bulgaria andRumania), two on the Americas (Canada andVenezuela), two on Africa (French Africa andBritish East Africa), three on Asia (India, Indonesia,and Japan, The Ryukus, Formosa & Korea), and oneon Australasia (Australia and New Guinea).Understa..'"ldably the results were not perfect, and thequality varied from LP to LP. But many of the LPsquickly became recognised as the best availablesingle disc overview of a given country's traditionalmusic, and some (including the Irish, Scottish,Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian and Rumanian volumes)seem likely to perform that role again when reissuedin CD format.

9

The Historic Series

~~Wt'4: VV"ORLD LIBRARY OF

~C" '§ FOLK a.nd. PRIlVIITIVE~. }~ ~.~

L~. %.'lVIUSIC

~~\~tl~~j;~~

EUROPE, 1950-58

If Lomax began collecting in England, Scotland andIreland with the World Library in mind, hisactivities in the British Isles soon went far beyondthis limited goal. Although he was often absent fromthe country for months at a time, he made Londonhis European base and, while living there, played asignificant role in the English folksong revival. Hedid so through his influence on such friends as PeterKennedy, Ewan MacColl, Bert Lloyd and ShirleyCollins, through his skiffie group The Ramblers (forwhich he brought Peggy Seeger to England), by hisparticipation in the Ballads and Blues folkclub in thelate fifties, and, above all, by means of his manyradio and television broadcasts on the BBC and onGranada TV.z°

Lomax's many BBC radio programs are toonumerous to list in full, but they included severalseries (Adventure in Folk Song, Patterns inAmerican Folk Song and The Art of the Negro) thateffectively brought British listeners up to speed on

.

the American folksong revival. Other series andindividual programs presented some of the fruits ofAlan's field collecting in the United Kingdom andIreland. Among the most important of these were "IHeard Scotland Sing", a collaboration with SeamusEnnis called "The Gaelic West", and the six-partseries A Ballad Hunter Looks at Britain, which wassupplemented with two programs on Ireland.He also participated in a couple ofBBC Radioventures that have become almost legendary: theBallads and Blues series masterminded by EwanMacColl and Bert Lloyd, and Charles Parker'sexperimental exploration of the seasonal music of

various regions of the United Kingdom, "SingChristmas and the Turn of the Year".

Alan was also the fIrst folklorist to host a BBCtelevision series, the eight-part Song Hunter: AlanLomax, and he later made fourteen one-hourprograms for commercial television that featured hisskiffie group, The Ramblers, which included PeggySeeger, Shirley Collins, and Ewan MacColl, as wellas jazz clarinetist Bruce Turner. He made one moviewhile in England, a collaboration with PeterKennedy, George Pickow and Jean Ritchie titledOss, Oss, Wee Oss, about the traditional May Dayceremonies at Padstow in Cornwall. As a performerhe also made several discs for HMV, Nixa, Melodiscand Decca, but much more important were the fieldrecordings he made of traditional singers andmusicians. They included, among many others,Harry Cox, Margaret Barry, Seamus Ennis, JeannieRobertson, Jimmy MacBeath, Davie Stewart, andJohn Strachan.

Unfortunately most of these recordings remainedsequestered in Lomax's personal archives until a fewyears before his death, but selections (along with

.field recordings made in the fifties by Peter Kennedyand other participants in the BBC Folk Music andDialect Recording Scheme) were used when he andKennedy compiled the ten-volume LP series, TheFolksongs of Britain, that was issued by Caedmon inthe USA in 1961 and by Topic in the UK a fewyears later. Although arguably marred bycontroversial editorial decisions reflecting Lomax'sand Kennedy's habits as broadcasters, this was thefirst systematic and scholarly overview of Britishtraditional song on record, and, as such, was hugely

10

important and influential. It remained the defmitivesurvey until the late 1990s, when Topic released theVoice of the People series compiled by Reg Hall.

Alan's field collecting in Europe was not limited toBritain and Ireland. Indeed, he worked moreextensively in Spain and Italy than he did in theBritish Isles. He spent several months collecting inSpain during the second half of 1952, and returnedagain the next year: "seven months of wine-drenched adventure" was the way he rememberedhis trip.21Since the country still suffered under therepressive Franco regime and Alan received a chillyreception ITommusicologists at the Madrid InstituteITom whom he had hoped for guidance, obtainingthe field recordings he needed seemed a fonnidablechallenge. To begin with he was on his own, but heeventually found two collaborators, Eduardo Tomerand Jeannette Bell, and with their help he got the jobdone, recording over seventy-five hours of songsand instrumentals.

It was evident from the programs on Spanish folkmusic that Lomax made for the BBC that he hadassembled a wealth of wonderful and very variedmaterial. Together they provided a fairly extensiveoverview of his Spanish travels and recordings. Thefirst series, broadcast in October 1953, was titledThe Folk Music of Spain and came in two parts, thefirst program devoted to Andalusia and the second toNorthern Spain.12Alan scripted and presented thesehimself, using an entertaining travelogue fonnat. Hislisteners hooked, he followed this introductorysurvey with a more erudite six-part series titledSpanish Folk Music for which the commentary hadbeen written by Eduardo Tomer. The fieldrecordings were Alan's, and they covered mostregions of Spain. The first program ranged widely,and the fifth, titled "Arragon, Valencia, Catalonia,

Baleares", also covered a large geographical area,but the other four focused on specific regions:Galicia and Asturas, Castilla, Vascongadas, andAndalusia.23

Many of the recordings were also issued as LPrecords. A selection first appeared in 1955 as theSpanish volume in the Columbia World Library, butWestminster subsequently released an eleven LP setas Folk Songs of Spain. Unavailable for severaldecades, this material is at long last being reissuedon CD as "The Spanish Recordings", one of thesubsets of Rounder's The Alan Lomax Collection.

Lomax later recalled 1954 as the happiest year of hislife.14He spent most of it in Italy, and when hereturned to England early the next year he had oversixty hours of field recordings on tape, far more thanhe required for either the projected Italian volume inthe Columbia World Library or for the ThirdProgramme radio series that the BBC hadcommissioned. In the event, Columbia issued twoLPs: Volume XV: Northern and Central Italy, andVolume XVI: Southern Italy and the Islands.

The eight-part radio series, titled The Folk Music ofItaly, was broadcast between March and June1955.15It was divided into two parts: the first fourprograms were organized thematically, while the lastfour examined geographical regions. Alan had foundthe Italian folklore establishment much more helpfulthan the Spanish, and in Diego Carpitella he foundthe local expert and collaborator he needed.Moreover, he had access to the folklore archives ofthe Accademia Santa Cecilia. Italy was thus one ofthe very few countries in which things panned outjust the way he had hoped they would when he

11

planned his European expedition five years before.The result was a magnificent and very varied set offield recordings. Regrettably, however, he neverfound the opportunity to make them available on LP,so the CDs that make up "The Italian Recordings"subset of The Alan Lomax Collection are especiallywelcome.

THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1958-61

Lomax returned to North America in the summer of1958. Back in the States he continued to make radioprograms for the BBC, including "LonesomeValley", "Folk Songs and Music of the SouthernStates" and "The Cowboy: Pioneer Days". He wasnow at a major turning point in his life, and theacademic world promised a more stable income thanfreelance media work and journalism. He applied forand received a fellowship to do research atColumbia University. At the same time he resumedhis career as an author, giving his reflections on theAmerican folk revival in "The 'Folkniks' and theSongs they Sing", jotting down the auto-biographical "Saga of a Folk Song Hunter", andwriting The Rainbow Sign, an expose of racism inthe South based on the life of Vera Ward Hall(whom he was forced to disguise as "Nora" in orderto avoid repercussions from the Ku Klux Klan). Healso wrote a seminal academic article, "Folk SongStyle", which appeared in American Anthropologistin December 1959 and summarized many of theconclusions he had come to while working on theColumbia World Library project.

Alan's most important new publication appeared in1960: The Folk Songs of North America, a sixhundred page annotated songbook that supersededhis earlier printed collections of North Americantraditional music. A reviewer in the New York Timesdescribed it, with some justification, as "the fullest,most representative and best edited popularanthology of American folk songs so far compiled".Not everyone would agree with the phrase "bestedited" since Lomax persisted in his decision to printcomposite texts, but there can be little doubt that thebook was highly effective as a work ofpopularization, which was what Lomax intended,and, moreover, it was underpinned by a wealth ofscholarship that was evident to anyone who botheredto read the fme print.

Lomax, however, had not gone back to America justto become a writer and an academic. His primary

'1It}t1f)I]I'Sf)N(~'S<ttl~,N4JIrI'II.l'J:II~I'I()L\ 1. .. .

\. TheIi'"

complete paperbacl< edition o!the de"""ive bookby"'"' -

.!

. t.:' mosl8~1horlty on American folk music. Words, music and origins 01 0Y8I' .

i: {.3OOsongs,' trom. bal~ to spirituals, .rom every region of the counlry. f~

.

!

motive was to undertake for his native land more ofthe kind of systematic field collecting that he haddone in Spain and Italy. It was not long before hehad persuaded two record companies, Prestige andAtlantic, to fmance an.extended search for survivingexponents of country blues, gospel music, whitespirituals, traditional folksong, and old timey musicin the Appalachians and the Deep South.Accompanied by Shirley Collins, Alan rangedwidely in 1959, recording singers andinstrumentalists in nine states: Alabama, Arkansas,Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina,Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.

The results were impressive: Prestige released atwelve volume LP set titled Southern Journey in1959, and Atlantic followed suit the next year withthe seven volume set Southern Folk Heritage. Thetitles of the Atlantic set provide a summaryillustration of the variety of traditional musicalforms that Lomax and Collins discovered were stillalive and kicking in the American South: anintroductory survey titled Sounds of the South wasfollowed by LPs devoted to Blue Ridge MountainMusic, Roots of the Blues, White Spirituals,American Folk Songs for Children, Negro ChurchMusic, and The Blues Roll On. There were too manystars in the galaxy of traditional musicians who

12

produced this musical feast to be listed here, butperhaps two names among many stand out: VeraWard Hall and bluesman Fred McDowell.

In 1993 a substantial selection from these recordingswas reissued by Atlantic on the four CD set Soundsof the South, and they also provide the material forthe thirteen CDs in the "Southern Journey" subset ofRounder's Alan Lomax Collection. Despite the factthat many of the same singers and instrumentalistsappear in these two collections, there is very little, ifany, duplication, a tribute to the quantity and qualityof the field recordings. It was one of Alan's greatestachievements.

COLUMBIA, THE CARIBBEAN ANDCANTOMETRlCS, 1962-77

By 1962 Lomax's new academic career was wellunderway. He had become a Research Associate inthe Department of Anthropology and Centre for theSocial Sciences at Columbia University, and he wasnow the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundationresearch grant that would allow him to undertake amajor study of the folklife and music of the WestIndies for the Columbia Cross-Cultural Survey of .Performance Behavior. To this end, accompanied byAntoinette and Anna Lomax, he made an extendedfieldtrip to the Caribbean that took him to the islandsof Anguilla, Carriacou, Dominica, Granada,Guadeloupe, Martinique, Nevis, St. Bartholomew,St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Tobago, and Trinidad.

It was not the first time Alan had explored theregion, since he had made recordings in the

Bahamas and Haiti during the late 1930s, but hisfieldwork in the early sixties was much moresystematic and aimed at documenting both theAfrican heritage and the cultural unity of the region.He taped over a hundred hours of music as well asdozens of interviews, but very little of this materialhas ever been made available to the public. Now, atlong last, it will form the basis of "The CaribbeanRecordings" subset of Rqunder's Alan LomaxCollection. A sample can also be found on the CDdevoted to calypso singer Neville Marcano in the"Portraits" series, and an early report on Alan'sresearch in the Caribbean can be found in an articlethat he published with E. Trager in 1964,"Phonotactique du chant populaire".

With the first stage of his research successfullycompleted, Lomax consolidated his academic career.In 1963 he became Director of the Cantometrics andChoreometrics Research Project, a position heretained until the 1980s. The next two decades of hislife would be devoted primarily to cantometrics, histerm for the scientific study of the relationshipbetween popular musical styles and the socio-economic environment of the performers. The studyofchoreometrics (the quantitative analysis ofpopular dance) paralleled his research into thetraditional music of ethnic groups, which heincreasingly aimed at giving a global breadth.

Alan built up a research team at ColumbiaUniversity devoted to these ambitious projects andtook on the responsibility of fmding the necessaryfunding. Grantsmanship was a skill at which heexcelled: the National Institute of Mental Healthprovided a grant from 1963 onwards, and in 1968 helanded further grants from the Ford Foundation and

13

from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthro-pological Research. In the seventies he turnedsuccessfully to the National Science Foundation andto the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Naturally not all of Lomax's energy was consumedby academic administration and research. The sixtieswitnessed the civil rights movement and a folkmusic boom, in both of which he was heavilyinvolved. He still sang, accompanying himself onthe guitar, although he made no more commercialdiscs of his own. Instead he worked with GuyCarawan on producing the LP Freedom in the Air, adocumentary account of the civil rights movement inGeorgia, and in 1965 he took part in the campaignagainst discrimination in Mississippi. Later in thedecade he was closely involved with the PoorPeople's March on Washington (1968), arranging themusical entertainment for the marchers. One of theartists was a bluesman he had ftrst recorded in 1941,Muddy Waters.

Alan's way of blending music, civil rights and left-wing politics was also evident in the role he playedon the committee that organized the Newport FolkFestivals. In the sometimes heated debates aboutwhich performers to choose, he stressed theimportance of presenting both traditional musiciansof all kinds and radical young protest singers such asPhil Ochs and Bob Dylan. He also insisted on theneed to include black artists. It was probably he whowas mainly responsible for the appearance atNewport of a number of elderly blues legends,including Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James andSon House. He (and others) ftlmed some of theirperformances, and some of the footage is nowavailable on such Vestapol videos as Legends ofBottleneck Blues Guitar, Legends of Country BluesGuitar, and Devil Got My Woman: Blues at

26Newport.

Alan was also in demand as an editor: his PenguinBook of American Folk Songs appeared in 1964, thesame year as a new edition of Folk Song USA, whichwas soon followed by a new and enlarged version ofhis old Leadbelly songbook, now titled TheLeadbelly Legend. Alan was no doubt pleased to seehis Archive of Folk Song recordings of WoodyGuthrie issued in a boxed set by Elektra Records asWoody Guthrie: Library of Congress Recordings,and Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People, hiscollection of old union and protest songs, originallycompiled with Woody and Pete Seeger in 1940,belatedly appeared in 1967.

Lomax, in short, was one of the gurus of the sixtiesfolk revival, and in 1966 the BBC recognised thiswhen they employed him to script and narrate "TheFolk Song Army", the program on the folk revival inthe America Since the Bomb series.27

Yet it was the job at Columbia University that paidmost of the bills, and to keep the grant moneycoming, the teams of cantometrics andchoreometrics researchers had to give papers atacademic conferences and also publish their results.Alan himself began doing so in 1967: his "The Goodand the Beautiful in Folksong" appeared in theJournal of American Folklore, and "Special Featuresof Sung Communication" was included in the

1.

al S. 28Proceedings of the American Ethno OglC oClety.

The next year he and his staff published Folk SongStyle and Culture.29 This was the ftrst bookleng~account of what cantometrics was all about, but Itwas a collection of articles on discrete researchtopics rather than a systematic description ofLomax's theory, methodology and preliminaryresults.

More of Alan's own articles followed in the earlyseventies: among others, "Folk Song Texts asCultural Indicators", "The Evolutionary Taxonomyof Culture" and "Cross-Cultural Factors inPhonological Change".3oFinally in 1976 he and histeam brought out Cantometrics: An Approach to theAnthropology of Music, a handbook accompanied by

14

a set of audio-tapes inten~ed as a practical teachingaid,31while the next year saw the compilation of anIndex of World Song and the publication of twomore articles, "Factors in Speaking Styles" and "AWorldwide Evolutionary Classification of Culturesby Subsistence Systems".32 So by the late seventiesethnomusicologists and folklorists certainly hadenough material on cantometrics for a preliminaryevaluation of Lomax's theories and claims.

The verdict so far seems to be somewhatambivalent. Lomax has his disciples, but on thewhole the response of the academic community hasbeen one of indifference or even hostility. But thenLomax's avowed positivism is currently out offashion in a climate of relativistic postmodernism.The pendulum will have to swing back before hiswork receives the attention it deserves.

FILMMAKING & THE GLOBAL JUKEBOX,1974-2002

By the mid 1970s Alan was getting tired ofacademia and itching to get back. into the field.Always happiest when he had microphone in handand a camera in action, he was now fascinated withthe possibilities of using film as a way of recording,analysing and popularizing traditional dance. Asearly as 1969 he had co-authored a paper on"Choreometrics: a Method for the Study of Cross-cultural Pattern in Film", followed in the earlyseventies by two more articles on "Choreometricsand Ethnographic Filmmaking" and "Cinema,Science and Cultural Renewal".33 In 1974-75 helanded grants from the Menil Foundation forfilmmaking, and in collaboration with ForrestinePaulay scripted, directed and produced the filmDance and Human History. 34

Then in 1978 Alan took his video-camera toMississippi with the aim of making a TV programabout the roots of the blues. This fieldworkeventually bore fruit in the form of the movie TheLand Where the Blues Began, which won a BlueRibbon at the American Film Festival in 1985. Italso resulted in Lomax's last book, published in1993 with the same title.

Alan's new fieldwork in Mississippi also providedmaterial for a TV series on regional American musicand dance, American Patchwork, which also drewon several fieldtrips to Arizona and Louisiana duringwhich he filmed and recorded Cajun and jazz

musicians.35 The series was long in gestation but iteventually aired on Public Television in 1989, bywhich time its scriptwriter, narrator, director andproducer had been awarded a National Medal of theArts by President Reagan.

Thoughout his life Alan was a vocal and doggedcampaigner for civil rights and racial equality. In1989 he assumed the role of Director of theAssociation for Cultural Equity, and also becameResearch Associate in Anthropology at HunterCollege.36 Fascinated by the opportunities now

offered by computer technology, he embarked onanother major research and development project.The aim was to create a user-friendly, interactivecomputer/audio-visual software that Alan referred toas an "intelligent museum" of traditional song anddance. He called it "The Global Jukebox", and heworked on the project for the remainder of his activelife.37

To begin with, Lomax's idea of what ought be donefar outstripped the technical capacity of the availablehardware and computer programs, but the work hedid in compiling and organizing the content is nowbearing fruit. The Alan Lomax Collection, whichwhen completed will comprise one hundred and fifty

15

CDs of Alan's field recordings, is, in a way, the fIrstversion of the global jukebox to reach the public atlarge. It is also an attempt to carry further hispioneering creation of the 1950s, the ColumbiaWorld Library ofF olk and Primitive Music.

For half a century, Lomax's vision remainedconstant: to make widely accessible the traditionalsong, instrumental music and dance of each andevery ethnic group and region as an antidote toglobal cultural homogenization andcommercialisation. In 1972 he explained hisfundamental concept and mission of giving all localcultures a worldwide forum in an "Appeal forCultural Equity":

.

All cultures need their fair share of airtime.When country folk or tribal peoples hear or viewtheir own traditions in the big media, projectedwith the authority genenilly reserved for theoutput of large urban centers, somethingmagical occurs. They see that their expressivestyle is as good as that of others, and, if theyhave equal communicative facilities, they willcontinue it..Practical men often regard these[traditional] expressive systems as doomed andvalueless. Yet, wherever the principle of culturalequity comes into play, these creativewellsprings begin to flow again...even in thisindustrial age, folk traditions can comevigorously back to life, can raise communitymorale, and give birth to new forms if they havetime and room to grow again in their owncommunities. The work in this field must bedone with tender and loving concern for both thefolk artists and their heritages. This concernmust be knowledgeable, both about the fit ofeach genre to its local context and about its rootsin one or more of the great stylistic traditions ofhuman kind.38

It is sad that Alan Lomax did not live to see the fullimplementation of his global jukebox project, thelast and most far-reaching attempt to achieve hislifelong vision of a world in which there could existgenuine cultural equity.

David Gregory

Notes:

I Lomax, John, ed. Cowboy Songs and OtherFrontier Ballads. New York: Sturgis & Walton,1910. Revised, enlarged edition, N.Y.: Macmillan,1916; reissued 1927. Third, further enlarged,edition, with Alan Lomax as additional editor, N.Y.:Macmillan, 1938.2 Lomax, John (ed.). Songs of the Cattle Trail andCow Camp. New York: Macmillan, 1919.Reissued, 1927. New edition: New York: Duell,Sloan & Pearce, 1950.3 Lomax, John & Alan Lomax, eds. AmericanBallads and Folk-Songs. New York: Macmillan,1934.

.

4 These recordings have been re-released on TheLibrary of Congress Recordings, VolXII: Leadbelly"Midnight Special". Rounder CD 1044.SHe died of Lou Gehrig's disease in 1949.6 Lomax, John & Alan Lomax, eds. Negro FolkSongs as Sung by Leadbelly. New York:Macmillan, 1936.7 Lomax, John & Alan Lomax, eds. Our SingingCountry: A Second Volume of American Ballads &Folk Songs. New York: Macmillan, 1941. The bookremained unpublished for several years.8There seems to be some uncertainty about the dateof the Morton recording sessions. May-June 1938 ismost probable, since Jelly Roll made a fewcommercial solo recordings in Washington andBaltimore later that year, and then returned to NewYork in 1939 for a Victor recording date with hisNew Orleans Jazzmen, a group that included twoother legendary fIgures, Albert Nicholas and SidneyBechet.9Jelly Roll Morton: Library of CongressRecordings, Vols 1-12. Circle Records, c. 1950.Reissued c. 1957 by Riverside Records.10Lomax, Alan. Mister Jelly Roll. New York: Duell,Sloan and Pierce, 1950. Reissued by Pantheon, NewYork, 1993. Appendix two lists the tracks recordedby Morton for the Library of Congress but on thesame page (p. 307) gives May-June 1938 and May1939 as the time the sessions took place. One ofthese dates, probably the second, must be atypographical error.II Lomax, Alan, ed. Checklist of Recorded Songs inthe English Language in the Archive of AmericanFolk Song to July, 1940. Washington, D. C.:Library of Congress, 1942.

16

12Lomax, Alan & Sidney R. Cowell. AmericanFolk Song and Folk-lore, a Regional Bibliography.Washington: Progressive Education Center, 1942.13Lomax, Alan, Woody Guthrie & Pete Seeger, eds.Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People.Oak Publications, New York, 1967.14Lomax, Alan. "Curriculum vitae", posted on theAlan Lomax Collection page of the Rounder Recordswebsite.15Ibid.16The Ballad Hunter, 5 Vols. AFS L49-53.17The entire session is now available on CD asBlues in the Mississippi Night. Rykodisc RCD90155.18See note 10, above.19Lomax, Alan. "Saga of a Folksong Hunter",reprinted in The Alan Lomax Collection Samplerbooklet, p. 49.20For an account of Lomax's activities in Englandduring the years 1950-58, see David Gregory,"Lomax in London: Alan Lomax, the BBC and theFolk-Song Revival in England, 1950-1958", FolkMusic Journal, 8:2 (2002), pp. 136-169.21"Saga of a Folksong Hunter", lococU., p. 51.Lomax dates his extended collecting trip in Spain ascommencing in the summer of 1953. This appears tobe a slip of the memory since the evidencesuggesting that he fIrst went to Spain the previousyear is overwhelming.22Lomax, Alan. The Folk Music of Spain, ThirdProgramme, 24th& 25thOctober 1953.

-23Tomer, Eduardo M. & Alan Lomax. Spanish FolkMusic, Parts 1-6, Third Programme, 19th,28th& 30thNovember & 12th,17th& 26thDecember 1953.24Lomax, Alan. "Saga of a Folksong Hunter", lococit., p. 53.25Lomax, Alan. The Folk Music of Italy, 1-6, BBCThird Programme, 7th & 23rd March, 4th & 17thApril, 5th & 15thMay, and 2nd & 23rd June.26Vestapol13002, Vestapol13003, & 13016.27Broadcast on 22ndOctober 1966 on the BBC ThirdProgramme.28Lomax, Alan. "The Good and the Beautiful inFolksong", Journal of American Folklore, Vol 80,no. 317, July-Sept 1967. "Special Features of SungCommunication", in Essay on the Verbal and VisualArts, Proceedings of the 1966 Annual SpringMeeting, American Ethnological Society, Universityof Washington Press, 1967:29Lomax, Alan, et al. Folk Song Style and Culture.Washington D.C.: American Association for theAdvancement of Science, 1968.

30Lomax, Alan. & J. Halifax, "Folk Song Texts asCulture Indicators", in Structural Analysis of OralTradition, ed. Pierre Maranda & Elli Kongas.Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,1971. Lomax, Alan. "The Evolutionary Taxonomyof Culture", Science, Vol. 177, July 21, 1972, pp.228-239. Lomax, Alan. "Cross-Cultural Factors inPhonological Change", Language and Society, 2(1973): 161-75.31Lomax, Alan, et al. Cantometrics: An Approach totheAnthropologyof Music. Berkeley,CA: -University of California Media Extension Center,1976.32Lomax, Alan."Factors in Speaking Styles."Language and Society, 6 (1977): 15-36.Lomax, Alan & Conrad Arensburg. "A WorldwideEvolutionary ClassifIcation of Cultures bySubsistence Systems", Current Anthropology, Vol18 (1977), pp. 659-708.33Lomax, Alan, I. Bartenieff & F. Paulay."Choreometrics: a Method for the Study of Cross-cultural Pattern in Film", Research Film, vi (1969),p. 505. Lomax, Alan. "Choreometlcs andEthnographic Filmmaking", Filmmakers Newsletter,Vol IV, No.4 (February 1971), p. 22. Lomax, Alan."Cinema, Science, and Cultural Renewal." CurrentAnthropology, Vol 14 (1973), pp. 474-80.34Lomax, Alan & Forrestine Paulay (scriptwriters &directors), Dance and Human History. Berkeley,CA: University of California Extension MediaCenter, 1976.35Lomax, Alan (scriptwriter & director). AmericanPatchwork, a fIve program series on PBS, broadcast1989-1990.36Lomax, Alan. "Curriculum vitae", lococit.37Ibid.38Lomax, Alan. "Appeal for Cultural Equity",World of Music, Vol. XIV, No.2, 1972. Quoted onthe Lomax website, from which I have taken thisquotation.

17