by John Szwed
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 - From Chisholm Trail to Harvard Yard
CHAPTER 2 - Road Scholars
CHAPTER 3 - The Saga of Lead Belly
CHAPTER 4 - Travels with Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle
CHAPTER 5 - Honeymoon in Haiti
CHAPTER 6 - Doctor Jazz
CHAPTER 7 - Bohemian Folklorist
CHAPTER 8 - A Bourgeois Town
CHAPTER 9 - The People’s War
CHAPTER 10 - The Century of the Common Man
CHAPTER 11 - Living on the Black List
CHAPTER 12 - The Grand Tour
CHAPTER 13 - Skiffle: From Folk to Pop
CHAPTER 14 - The American Campaign Resumed
CHAPTER 15 - The Science of Folk Song
CHAPTER 16 - To Hear the World in a Grain of Sand
CHAPTER 17 - The Culture War
CHAPTER 18 - The Global Jukebox: “Got the World in a Jug, the Stopper in My Hand”
Acknowledgements
NOTES
INDEX
ALSO BY JOHN SZWED
Space Is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra
So What: The Life of Miles Davis
Jazz 101
Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © John Szwed, 2010 All rights reserved
Frontispiece: Alan Lomax in Greece, 1957. Courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archive.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Szwed, John F., 1936-
Alan Lomax : the man who recorded the world / John Szwed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-19034-0
1. Lomax, Alan, 1915-2002. 2. Ethnomusicologists—Biography. I. Title.
ML423.L6347S98 2010
781.620092—dc22
[B] 2010015332
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To
Roger D. Abrahams
and
The Department of Folklore and Folklife,
University of Pennsylvania
1962-1999
INTRODUCTION
The first time I saw Alan Lomax was in November 1961 at a meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, an academic group then too new to have developed its own orthodoxies. They were still debating the definition of music, the meaning of dance, the function of song, all with a sense of wonder and urgency. The founders of the discipline were all there—Charles Seeger, Mantle Hood, Alan Merriam—but the doors were still wide open.
I was a graduate student new to the world of folklorists and ethnomusicologists and eager to connect with them somehow. The big event that night was a concert of African music by the Nigerian drummer Olatunji, who had added to his group some of the members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and the mixture of the two musics had the scholars puzzled. As the audience filed out, I saw Lomax talking with two men who I later learned were Colin Turnbull and Weston La Barre, not your everyday anthropologists. I knew it was Lomax despite never having seen a picture of him, because his slightly genteel Texas accent drifted to the back of the room. He was big, though I suppose not as big as he looked, in an ill-fitting blue suit, with his collar and tie askew. Well-dressed enough to be a Bible salesman in Alabama, I thought, but missing the mark of a successful academic. Later, in the high sixties, when I knew him better, it was he who chastised me for my choice of clothing—he told me that government-grants people and highly placed folks of color would not take me seriously. (My one effort at dressing up for something or other amused him, and he said my tan suede jacket and bright tie made me look like a southwestern TV station manager.)
I must have been staring at him that day in the theater, for as he passed me, stepping over rows of seats, he declared as if it were the day’s headline, “Pygmies are a baseline culture,” and went on his way. He sounded like some nineteenth-century grand theorist speaking from a higher plane, with a scarcely concealed moral program and no sense whatever of then-trendy cultural relativity. Once I had heard him speak at length, I began to wonder what kind of folklorist was this, if that’s what he was, with no particular interest in the text of a song or a tale. It turned out that he was speaking comparatively of other levels of art, of humanity—preverbal levels, where bodies interact in front of a cross-cultural tableau, and where art emerges from deeply encoded but virtually nonconscious behavior.
Later, I worked for Alan on occasion, though never for money, as it was understood that he was always short, and I had a day job. He was infinitely patient with the novice, answering questions more fully than was required, with tales of this or that epiphany on the shores or in the swamps of this or that community, of sheriffs with bowie knives who threatened to cut his throat if he ever came back to their county. His stories of working with Zora Neale Hurston were rich and full of his admiration for her fearlessness while doing fieldwork among hoodoo practioners. When I asked him for advice about graduate study, he suggested I drop out and instead do as he had done: seek the company of the very best people in the fields that interested me.
Whenever Alan asked me to join him for lunch or dinner, it was always someplace with well-etched character, though sometimes with marginal food. It might be a bar where the bartender was also waiter, cook, and cashier—“like it used to be.” Or a tiny Chinese restaurant where he felt free to order something not on the menu. In conversation, Alan could shift instantly from deadly serious or highly focused to mock folksy or laughing at the absurd, his eyes always a clue as to what was coming. When he called me, usually late at night, it was never just to talk, but because he wanted something—a reaction to a new research project, maybe a suggestion of a name of someone who might work with him on it. Though the request was unspoken, I always knew he was asking me if I would do it. And I wondered how many he had called before me.
Sometimes what he had dreamed up could cost great sums of money, or simply be impossible at the moment. One i
dea was a plan to sell the television networks on a half-hour prime-time program that featured old people being old people—talking about their lives, maybe sharing secrets, making connections to tradition, performing wisdom and maturity, he said, something like that. He spelled out the details of what would be a kind of homespun reality show. When I cautiously suggested that this would be impossible to sell in the high-profit atmosphere of the media, he pointed to a little vase on the table with a few tired daisies in it and said, “This is not much of a vase, and the flowers aren’t much. But if you knew that you could count on finding this vase and those flowers on the table every night for years to come, wouldn’t that be something?” He could be hard to argue with.
His enthusiasm was boundless and seemed to grow with age. His drive to celebrate life in all its diversity and to see, taste, and hear everything was astonishing. If you mentioned the blues, he could tell you that Son House was the greatest folk musician in the Western world. Tell him that you were on the way to Trinidad, and he’d say that a man named Nassus Moses who played a one-string fiddle and lived in a hut in the suburbs of Port of Spain was the greatest folk musician in the Western world. And in one sense or another, they always were the greatest at something or other.
One night he suggested that several of us go to the Village Gate in New York to see Professor Longhair. It was a bit surprising to hear him praising the brilliance of New Orleans’s sainted rhythm and blues pianist, since we weren’t aware that he kept up with that sort of thing, but we happily followed him to the club. Since we were late, we squeezed our way in and found seats wherever we could. When ’Fess opened his first set with “Jambalaya,” Longhair’s rolling, “blues rumba”- flavored revision of Hank Williams’s revision of Cajun music, backed by a Crescent City band of beboppers and funksters, I expected a post-gig lecture from Alan about taking creolization too far. But then I felt something brush by my leg, and when I looked down there was Alan crawling on the floor toward the bandstand so as to stay out of people’s vision. When he reached the stage he knelt there, his hands on the edge of the stage like a supplicant Kilroy, until the set was over. As he came back to our table, he cried out over the crowd, “Greatest folk musician in the Western world,” then followed it up with a letter to the Village Voice spelling out the New Orleans piano lineage, how Longhair was the roots of Fats Domino’s style, and thus basic to the history of rock and roll, if not the world.
To those who knew Alan’s work only from his songbooks he seemed to be the pied piper of the folk, a kindly guide for a nostalgic return trip to simpler times. But he might have thought of himself as spokesperson for the Other America, the common people, the forgotten and excluded, the ethnic, those who always come to life in troubled times—in the Great Depression, in the rising tide toward World War II, during the postwar anti-Communist hysteria, and inside the chaos of the era of civil rights and counterculturalism—those who could evoke deep fears of their resentment and unpredictability. At such times folk songs seemed not so much charming souvenirs as ominous and threatening portents.
Despite having spent most of his life in New York, he never quite seemed to fit the city. He took up too much space, assumed too much, and laughed too easily for a New Yorker. But neither did he seem to fit Texas either. We once shared chili and beer in an El Paso dive, where his beard and sideburns were the event of the evening. Yet he never seemed uncomfortable, for he moved with an absolute assuredness of who he was and where he was at the moment. In that, he was a true bohemian, not a New Yorker or a Texan. But it seems odd to call Lomax a bohemian. His father had aspired to being a hobo, wandering the countryside, but bohemian was something else; it meant belonging nowhere or everywhere. Much of Alan’s life in the city was spent in Greenwich Village, among its artists and his dissident neighbors. Most Village residents, after all, came from somewhere else, some small town in the hinterlands, and most of them were happy to say that they had come from nowhere, never mentioning their family and their life before the city. But Alan never denied that he was from Texas or tried to disguise his accent. In his youth he often lived in a state of resistance to his father, but he never rejected him publicly, and in fact often quoted him and identified with his goals. To many in New York, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, a Texan was all the bad things they had left behind somewhere on the other side of the Hudson River—insularity, bigotry, churlishness, and various hatreds and philistinisms. But Lomax would not let them get away with it, and insisted that he be seen as an individual.
I once asked him why he stayed in New York, and he said he could get done in the city in one day what it would take a month to do somewhere else. And before the age of the computer and cell phone, who could deny it? But that was not the whole story—bohemian or not, he had lived in New York longer than anywhere else.
Alan was intense, passionate, in and out of love, dependent on others, but often resistant to them when they got too close. He could get by on little money, live an unsettled life, drift out of his times at one moment, but then come back again, deeply involved. He worked like a dog, driving himself until he fell asleep—in the middle of a recording session, in the waiting room of an office—but only for moments, as life to him was too long not to fill the time with curiosity. He took on more than was humanly possible, and paid for it in frustration over his own incomplete projects. His was a life not easy to live.
CHAPTER 1
From Chisholm Trail to Harvard Yard
It begins like so many other stories—a sensitive, intelligent, and sickly child, kept at home under his parents’ close watch, overcomes obstacles to achieve great success. It could be written as an American romantic narrative—but it was tougher and earthier than that, and lingers in some of the lost and forgotten backwaters of America. It might be a western, but it travels to the rarefied air of Harvard Yard, into the heart of the United States government, and across the ocean. It plumbs the depths of the homegrown American character by examining the soul of Haiti, the north of England, and in a near-parody of the Grand Tour, wanders into Franco’s Spain and the hard land of the Italian paisan.
It begins, then, with a boy in Texas in the first part of the twentieth century, and the boy’s father is John Avery Lomax.
Two years after the end of the Civil War, John Lomax was born in Goodman, a tiny Mississippi farming village in Holmes County. By the time John was two, his parents, James and Susan Frances Lomax, had left the chaos of postwar Mississippi and traveled by covered wagon to Texas. There, on the Bosque River, just up the hill from the Chisholm Trail, they settled in Meridian, a small frontier community southeast of Fort Worth, made up of fellow southerners, recently freed slaves, and a few Norwegian immigrants. Like many southerners, the Lomaxes claimed well-to-do ancestors who had come from England and had fallen on hard times. “The upper crust of the po’ white trash” is the way that John described his family’s place in Texas society—a family often surviving by hard work and discipline.
At age six John was already clearing brush and beginning to chop cotton. Soon he was cutting wood and tending the cattle and horses. Though he was never quite a cowboy because their livestock was never that numerous, he nonetheless grew up in the world of working cowhands, since the cattle drives brought them down the Chisholm Trail. Huddled in the brush near their campfires, watching and listening, John was fascinated by their talk, even more so by their songs, and he absorbed their style and manner from an early age. Still, his father and mother were eager to have their children educated, both at home and at school. They subscribed to several newspapers from as far away as New York City, and there were always books in the house—Shakespeare, the English poets, works in Latin. Poetry was taken very seriously, and they all memorized poems and songs, reciting and singing on special occasions. This mix of poetry from the printed page and the poetry of folk songs was never a contradiction to John, since he viewed both as oral forms, and both of them imbued his life and shaped his character. Later, when it occurred to him to
turn the cowboy songs he grew up with into books, it made perfect sense.
John’s parents tried to have their children take a year of college by the time they were twenty-one, and in 1887 it was John’s turn. To pay his way, he sold his horse, borrowed money from his father and a cousin, took a part-time job, and left home to enroll at nearby Granbury College, a tiny country school. By the end of the year he qualified for a teaching license, which he used to get a job as principal and the only teacher in the Preparatory Department of minuscule Weatherford College in Clifton, near Meridian. At the end of the first year, the school paid his way to study bookkeeping at summer school in Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York, so that he could return to head up Weatherford’s newly created Business Department (where, once again, he was the sole teacher). For six years John stayed at Weatherford, teaching twelve to fifteen classes, six days a week, and was paid so little that he was continually in debt, especially as he helped support several of his brothers and sisters. His only real personal expense was a trip he took every summer alone to Chautauqua, New York, where one of America’s grandest efforts at mass education was under way. It was a series of performances and lectures, held out of doors in the main, and attended by folks eager to escape the heat and go to the country, where the Chautauqua tents were set up by the lake. There they would see William Jennings Bryan preach, Maud Ballington Booth (“the Little Mother of the Prisons”) decry the horrors of the penal system, and Jacob A. Riis describe life in the slums, or they would learn higher mathematics or listen to poetry readings and concerts. Some thought Chautauqua was a godsend (Woodrow Wilson described it as “an integral part of the national defense”), while others saw it as an early sign of the decline of a great country (Sinclair Lewis said it was “nothing but wind and chaff and ... the laughter of yokels”). For John it was the quickest and cheapest way to get an education, even though he was all too aware that it was not the real thing.
