by John Szwed
There may have been a degree of filial baiting in his letter, but Alan was serious in urging his father to become a full-time folklorist. The problem was that he was not at all convinced that chasing down folk songs was what he should be doing in such volatile times, let alone traveling with his father and arguing politics and race with him day after day. At the same time, he also knew that given his father’s age and state of health he would not be able to drive long distances, carry the recording equipment, and do the rest of the work that lengthy traveling involved. And without this trip, his father and he and Bess would soon be destitute. Shortly after writing this letter, Alan and his father agreed that they should work together for a couple of months.
Walter Goldschmidt could not believe that Alan was so willing to accompany his father. “He got whisked away ... his father wanted him to go collect songs. It surprised me because Alan was part of that whole radical movement, [which is] anti-family—there’s the element of slaying the father.” Said Goldschmidt, “Alan was very snide about his father. Money would never draw him into his father’s world ... but folklore did.” Alan also saw the trip as a chance to learn about social conditions in the South, especially those of black people. The family house in Austin was on the edge of the black community, where he could hear singing in church and see people of color on the street every day. “Our cook, Ethel, who had great dignity and force, was my second mother. One of the sorrows of growing up was feeling the distance between us widen.” In Dallas, when he was eleven, during the brief period in which his father made good money, the Lomaxes had had a maid—“the prettiest girl I had ever seen except for my big sister”—whom Alan had invited to share his sandwiches and milk one Saturday. “Very pleasantly, very quietly, my mother took me aside and told me that I had made a mistake. Why? I asked. She explained that one didn’t sit down and have lunch with Negroes. But I like her, I protested. She’s nice. What’s wrong with that? My mother said, ‘We don’t eat at the table with Negroes. You cannot invite her today or tomorrow or any day, because even though she is a very sweet girl, she’s a Negro. Now run along and have your lunch.’ ... By the time I was sixteen and in the state university, I had read enough to be certain that my mother had been wrong. And that my whole state, my whole part of the country was convinced of something I could never believe.” It was a moment of disappointment in his mother that would resurface in his writings and interviews for the rest of his life.
When Alan finished the term at the University of Texas in May, his father moved into his apartment with him and began planning a collecting project for them, which had over the last few lazy months grown epic in scope. John had received modest sponsorship from the Library of Congress, which included money for food and gas and the use of a car and recording equipment. He had come to see their collecting trip as both a temporary way out of his financial problems and the kind of project he had always dreamed of undertaking but never could afford. Having given up his beloved house in the woods, John would be homeless, bumming across the country, but doing so with noble goals and legitimacy of the highest order.
It had been ten years since John had last done fieldwork, and at sixty-five his age was showing. But he was eager to begin, and he went to work, spending his days writing letters to anyone he thought might be willing to share songs with him and to libraries that might have folk songs hidden in their stacks. In the evenings he began another ambitious venture, courting Ruby Terrill, the dean of women and a professor of Latin at the university. He had met her thirteen years earlier when he was lecturing at East Texas State Teachers College where she was then dean, and she had later been one of Alan’s teachers in Austin. She had never been married, and marriage hardly seemed an obvious fit for a man who had already raised a large family and was thrilled to go wandering across the country without a job. There was precious little time for him to get to know Miss Terrill, much less wed her, but he felt the need for someplace to return to, with someone there to represent home, and once he and Alan were on the road he began writing carefully thought out, courtly letters to her.
In the last weeks of May, Alan was out most evenings attending parties thrown by seniors, and on the day after graduation John roused him from a few hours’ sleep and they drove off to Lubbock to visit Bess and Shirley in what was to be the first step toward their journey. In June the two of them set out in earnest, and over the next few months they would travel through the South—first across Texas, then on to Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Most of their days would be spent among people of color, their nights camping out, like knights of the road. When there was a need to look presentable to a certain class, they would rent a room in a hotel or stay in a rented cabin where they could wash and iron their.lothes. They traveled in a Model A Ford with its backseat removed, along with the wall separating the trunk from the inside of the car. But they traveled light: nothing but a few changes of clothes, two army cots, bedding, and camping gear.
Their first stop was Dallas, to buy a windup office Ediphone that could record voices, but with a thin, faint sound that would later have to be transferred from cylinders to discs at the library in Washington. Two years before, John had approached the widow of Thomas A. Edison about a recording machine. She had loaned him one of her husband’s early hand-wound cylinder recorders, but it was ill-suited to the conditions under which they would be working. Now, anxious to try out this new, lighter device, they pulled off the road in Terrell, some twenty miles south of Dallas, when they heard a black washerwoman singing, and asked her to sing for the recording machine. It was intended in part as a test of the equipment, but when she put on a fresh apron and began singing, it turned into a performance:
Healin’ water done move.
Healin’ water done move,
Soul so happy now,
Healin’ water done move ...
Alan listened to the woman’s intensity and seriousness as she sang while scrubbing the clothes, and he had the first of many epiphanies on the road:
The voice of the skinny little black woman was as full of the shakes and quavers as a Southern river is full of bends and bayous. She started slow and sweet, but as the needle scratched her song on the whirling wax cylinder, she sang faster and with more and more drive, clapping her hands and tapping out drum rhythm with heel and toe of her bare feet, and as the song ended, she was weeping and saying over and over, “O Lord have mercy, O Lord have mercy.”
I was seventeen ... and I was embarrassed. But beneath the embarrassment, I wondered what made her voice soar so beautifully in her simple and charming song of one line, and what sorrow lay behind her tears and her “Lord have mercy.”
He would later say that it was at that moment that he became convinced that folk song collecting was important, something he had to do, even if it meant dropping out of college and putting off his last year of study.
Along the Trinity River near Huntsville they stopped at the Smithers Plantation and approached the manager with their plans for collecting songs, stressing that they wanted to hear locally “made-up” songs, not spirituals and pop tunes. That night they were summoned to the schoolhouse, lit only by a single oil lamp. When their eyes adjusted to the darkness they saw that the building was filled with black tenant farmers and their families, sitting there quietly waiting. The manager had assembled a command performance for them. The whole group sang several spirituals, which they duly recorded, and then Alan awkwardly asked if anyone there could sing “Stagolee,” a song about a legendary badman, a figure whose celebrated feats he suspected were sung by black men as an allegory to express dissatisfaction with their own lives in America. Protest, even in poetic form, was out of the question in the South, and could lead to beatings, or worse.
A man called Blue was pushed out in front of the group, and he allowed that he could sing that song, if they would let him sing another one first. “Is it a made-up song?” the plantation manager asked. “Well, I reckon ’tis,” Alan recalled him saying. “Didn�
� I make it up dis afternoon in the field, special foh des gen’lmuns? I reckon it’s ’bout the madeupines’ song dey is. Turn on yo’ machine, young mistah, ’cause I ain’t gwine sing it but one time an’ I want to git on yo’ recort.” With one eye on the manager and the other on Alan, he began:
Poor farmer, poor farmer, poor farmer,
They get all the farmer makes,
His clothes is full of patches,
And his hat is full of holes,
Stoopin’ down, pullin’ cotton,
From the bottom bolls,
Poor farmer, poor farmer, poor farmer,
They git all the farmer makes ...
As the singer described the sorrowful role of the tenant farmer for several verses more, a giggle started to rise from the assembled workers, which soon turned into a “nervous” roar. The man called Blue stopped his song and began to speak as if he were addressing a letter to President Roosevelt, in hopes these white folks from Washington would pass it on:
Now, Mr. President, you just don’t know how bad they’re treating us folks down here. I’m singing to you and I’m talking to you so I hope you will come down here and [do] something for us poor folks in Texas.
Alan remembered this moment as his calling to be more than just a folk song collector. He was also to be a messenger for the masses:
When the record was over, we played it back and there was immense joy in this group because they felt they had communicated their problem to the big world.... They [knew] the machine and they did know we came from somewhere else and they wanted those people at the other end of the line to hear what life was like for them. That’s why they were singing for us; they wanted to get into the big network....
That experience totally changed my life. I saw what I had to do. My job was to try and get as much of these views, these feelings, this unheard majority onto the center of the stage.
Prisons held a certain fascination for John Lomax, as they did for most southern men, who had grown up hearing stories of men who were broken by heat and dehydration and the dawn-to-dusk work of the prison farms, or who had simply disappeared, lost in the system, incarcerated “under the jail.” Farmers had been the last producers to adopt machinery and industrial methods, and prison farms were even more resistant to change, since they were never short of labor. For black men, such prison work meant a return to slavery. For whites it was the ineradicable mark that signaled trash. Like army bases and lumber camps, prisons were the sites at which men were separated from their wives, mothers, and sisters, the women who kept them in check. Though segregated by race, these men were reduced to a common human denominator and made into servants of the state, plagued by fierce loneliness, isolation, and displacement. There remained nonetheless an awful dignity rooted in a certain body of knowledge that was passed from generation to generation of inmates, and it was that knowledge, that lore, that made some degree of artful living possible. Prisons were a warped mirror of a segregated world, so it was there, among black men—the Lomaxes reasoned—that a degree of cultural purity might still be found. There they might observe a culture unsullied by daily contact with white people, radios, phonographs, and jazz, the corrupting force they feared most, the music that was blazing a modernist trail across America and the world. A proposal written by seventeen-year-old Alan to the Carnegie Foundation summarizes their thinking:
The Negro in the South is the target for such complex influences that it is hard to find genuine folk singing. His educational leaders, broadening his concepts and thus making him ashamed or self-conscious of his own art; his religious leaders, turning away from revival songs, spirituals, and informal church services to hymns and formal church modes, ranting against any song that has to do with secular subjects; prosperous members of the community, bolstered by the church and the schools sneering at the naiveté of the folk songs and unconsciously throwing the weight of their influence in the balance against anything not patterned after white bourgeois culture; the radio with its flood of jazz, created in tearooms for the benefit of city-dwelling whites—these things are killing the best and most genuine Negro folk songs.
We propose to go where these influences are not yet dominant; where Negroes are almost entirely isolated from the whites, dependent upon the resources of their own group for amusement; where they are not only preserving a great body of traditional songs but are also creating new songs in the same idiom. These songs are, more often than not, epic summaries of the attitudes, mores, institutions, and situations of the great proletarian population who have helped to make the South culturally and economically.
The Lomaxes were not the first collectors to look for folk songs behind prison walls. Lawrence Gellert, a northerner with a revolutionary’s temperament and a folklorist’s zeal who worked so privately that few today have ever heard of him, recorded songs in the Greenville, South Carolina, county jail and surreptitiously collected chain gang songs along the road as early as 1924, coding his notebooks to protect the prisoners from retribution. A slaveholder’s son, David L. Cohn, had also visited prisons in the Mississippi Delta in the early twentieth century, sprinkling his observations with texts and descriptions of folk songs and spirituals in his 1940 book Where I Was Born and Raised. But no one before the Lomaxes had appreciated the richness of creativity within prison life, and none had sought it out with such dogged persistence.
Nor were the Lomaxes the first to record African American folk songs in the United States. Folklorists Gellert, Howard Odum, and Robert Gordon had all made cylinder recordings of black singers in the 1920s for archival purposes, at a time when most Americans only knew African American music in the form of spirituals or minstrel and ragtime tunes. Commercial recording companies were slow to realize that they could sell records by African Americans, and it was only when the craze for blues reached national proportions that their talent agents began crisscrossing the country in search of material. John Lomax was, however, the first to claim that there was a wealth of distinct forms of black folk song in the land, and to argue for the importance of systematically recording throughout the country. And only he had foreseen that transcripts of those recordings could be gathered together with others in a book that could accurately represent the songs of all Americans.
On June 10 Alan and his father arrived at their first prison, in Huntsville, Texas, only to have the warden refuse them entry, even after John dropped the names of local and state politicians and the president of the University of Texas, and established that he had the imprimatur of the Library of Congress. Undeterred, the Lomaxes went on to an African American school, Prairie View State Normal College, hoping to find some folk music at a convention where seven hundred black teachers from rural districts had gathered. They played the recordings they had made at Smithers Plantation for the heads of the music and English departments, but the response was tepid and guarded. As word spread over the campus about what these white men were looking for, they were greeted with suspicion everywhere they went. Religious songs that had either been arranged or composed were the only music they were allowed to hear. “They were very polite, very pleasant, but our overture to them totally failed. It was partly because our approach wasn’t exactly right, I think. We were just a couple of Southerners.” Only when they were walking past some of the dormitory rooms could they occasionally hear a few seconds of the secular folk songs they were seeking. One sympathetic professor at the college finally offered to take them to Sunnyside, a black community in the Brazos Bottom, where he introduced them to a family who agreed to help them find singers.
Alan spent the next day sitting under a persimmon tree with a man known as Burn-Down, recording him as he sang blues songs and accompanied himself on guitar. John went up to a house where a group of elders were singing religious songs and sat on the steps writing down the words. That night they drove Burn-Down and his three brothers to a birthday party and dance. Alan went inside to watch, but as the three-room cabin began to fill with dancers, he shyly slipped out the doo
r and watched from outside, realizing that his presence was inhibiting them. He had never seen a rural black dance before, and was astonished by the rhythmic unity of the dancers’ moves, their close attention to the beat, even while they each moved in their own distinct styles:
They were slow-dragging, their big country feet sliding in a heavy one-rhythm over the rough unpainted floor. The whole shack quivered and boomed with this rhythm as if the full Texas moon were beating out the rhythm on the tin roof. The orchestra consisted of one guitarist. He never let the rhythm of the bass strings stop and he kept the trebles always crying out an accompaniment for his harsh young voice....
A dollar’s round and rolls from hand to hand
I tell you,
A dollar’s round and goes from hand to hand
The way those women goes from man to man.
He had enough couplets to last all night. And when he hit off something specially apt, some of the women would break away from their partners and run to the corner where he sat with his guitar and kiss him all over his face.
I wanted to ask a question, but it’s hard to begin when you’re a Southerner born and bred. It’s hard because somehow you have been given the impression that he’s another kind of person than you, not quite human.
The following day, July 3, they drove on to Galveston, slept on the beach, then dressed up and treated themselves to breakfast at a resort hotel. The plan for the day had been to record stevedores on the docks, but they had forgotten that there would be no workers there on the holiday. So they instead spent most of the day attending a nearby black church service simply as wayfaring strangers.
