by John Szwed
On their next visit to a prison—Imperial State Prison Farm, at Sugar Land, just outside Houston—they were granted entry. Some cajoling and the right state officials’ names had sufficiently impressed the warden, and they were allowed to record two older prisoners, both of them powerful and dramatic performers, and among the most impressive singers they would hear on their travels. First, in the prison hospital room, they encountered Mose “Clear Rock” Pratt, a man who had spent forty-seven of his seventy-one years incarcerated for stoning three people to death, but who seemed to possess an endless body of songs. He was also something of a folklorist’s dream, as he knew any number of variations of individual songs, and was able to make up several new ones on the spot. He never sang a song the same way twice.
The second singer recorded was James “Iron Head” Baker, a sixty-four-year-old trusty whose deep knowledge of songs led John to proclaim him a black Homer. Baker lived his songs, feeling their emotions viscerally, pacing mournful songs like “Old Hannah” as slow as the day he had just spent in the sunburnt fields, or carefully building the drama of “Shorty George”—a song about leaving prison that had once moved him so much that he tried to escape, only to be caught.
What they heard in that prison and those that followed were songs about trains, dogs, foxes, and horses; praise songs of black and white cowboys and legendary supermen like Jody and Stavin’ Chain; songs about women who ruled the men around them; deeply personalized ballads; stomp-down dance tunes; and songs of cotton, boll weevils, and the miseries of work—heat, hammers, guards, endless days, iron bars, and the sun. There were none of the sentimental meditations or ancient European ballads that John Lomax was accustomed to hearing from white singers. Indeed, the white prisoner workers they encountered never sang alone or together, and were sullen, withdrawn into their own worlds of tuneless silence.
Rather than face further rejection at prisons, John wrote Carl Engel at the Library of Congress and asked him for a letter of introduction to the prison authorities, one that was as impressively worded as possible. On July 7 they were again allowed entry into a prison farm, this time at Darrington, thirty miles from Houston. They were developing a routine of working as long as the circumstances and the inmates would tolerate it. Their days were filled with meeting resistance at the gate and again inside the prison walls, tending to a recording machine that needed constant watching, keeping track of the short stretches of time that a cylinder could be used, and operating in a general state of tension in the heat and the dust of the farms.
Driving on to East Texas, near the Sabine River that divided Louisiana and Texas, they reached the Big Thicket, the huge, densely wooded, dark and swampy area that gave many of the nearby communities their names: Pineland, Bleak-wood, Yellowpine, Live Oak, Pine Grove, Quicksand, Pine Forest. Wiergate was the first stop, a sawmill community built by the Wier Brothers lumber company. In a makeshift bar, Alan recorded “Stagolee” sung and played by a pianist named Joe Hunter. (A few years later, under the name of Ivory Joe Hunter, he’d write songs that were covered by Elvis Presley and Pat Boone, and would record his own hit records, “Since I Met You Baby” and “I Almost Lost My Mind.”) But for John the true thrill of the place was in hearing the cry of a lumberjack as a tree was felled, something he described as “a dirge of the dying pine and at the same time a warning signal.” (Alan was annoyed by what he saw as his father’s excessive romanticism, and later criticized him for it in an essay published that year in Southwest Review, “ ‘Sinful’ Songs of the Southern Negro.”)
When daybreak came, Alan followed the woodsmen into the hills, riding the train that carried the sawyers and track crew, observing every step of the logging process and writing down the songs that accompanied each. What particularly caught his attention, though, was the voice of Henry Truvillion, the head of a track-lining crew that laid new rails wherever they were needed to run yellow pine logs out of the woodland and down to the mill. As they tamped down clay and gravel and hammered spikes into ties, Truvillion sang,
I’m goin’ tell you somethin’ I ain’t never tole you befo’,
What de ole lady say when she come to die?
Han’ on her hip an’ de odder on her thigh—
Oh, Lawd,
Have mercy,
Oh, Lawd,
Have mercy
With each “Oh,” the men heaved against the long steel crowbars that were used to align the tracks.
Alan borrowed a horse from the camp office, rode deeper into the woods to where the men were cutting down trees, and recorded their call-and-response chants as he watched the physical rhythms that connected each man to the collective effort. Some men resisted singing other kinds of secular songs for him, as they were church members and forbidden to sing the “devil’s songs.” Others deferred to Henry Truvillion as the only real singer among them. When John later heard the recordings that Alan had made that day, he asked Truvillion to let them record more of his songs, and they spent the last night of their stay on the porch of his house. He was an elder in a nearby church, and he too was hesitant to sing anything but the “sanctified tunes.” His wife firmly backed up his objections. But after he heard the playback of the spirituals and was pleased by the sound of his voice, Henry admitted that there might not be any harm in singing some children’s songs, and he even permitted Alan to record a few “hollers”—the melodic cries that served as calling cards across fields and yards—once he had closed the door and windows so that neighbors who were members of the church couldn’t hear him.
After those three days in Wiergate the Lomaxes drove to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to pick up a new recording machine they had requested from the Library of Congress, paid for by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The rear of the car was now stuffed with a 315-pound disc-cutting recorder, a vacuum tube amplifier, two seventy-five-pound Edison batteries to power them, a generator for recharging the batteries, piles of aluminum and celluloid blank discs, a mixing board, a loudspeaker, a microphone, and boxes of replacement parts. Like the 1940s crime photographer Weegee, they had turned their car into a studio, and wherever they could they pulled it close to the recording site. If that wasn’t possible, Alan dragged the equipment up hills, across fields and creeks, onto front porches, and into houses. This made it possible for them to cut a record “live” in a natural setting, play it back on the spot with the use of a stylus of cactus needles, thorns, or casein knitting needles (made from cow’s milk), and check the recording to see if a second take was needed, even while its playback entertained the singers. The sound quality was limited, but oiled aluminum discs had the ability to withstand aging better than any other medium.
It was the first time that most of the singers they were finding had ever seen a recording machine, and their reactions were unpredictable. On hearing his own voice in playback, one man cried out, “Stop that ghost!” Another started his recording by saying, “Hello Mr. Roosevelt,” and then just trailed off. When he was told to continue, he said, “I’m waiting for him to hello me back.” Many reluctant performers found the machine irresistible and poured forth. While the Lomaxes were now effectively in the recording business, it was a nonprofit, archival version—a subtlety that often escaped the singers, some of whom assumed that as soon as they were recorded they would become stars.
John and Alan were not naïve about the source of whatever cooperation they received among prisoners, and they quickly learned to discern how they were likely to be received. By the early 1930s, penal reform was in the air, with movies like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and exposés such as John L. Spivak’s book Georgia Nigger (1932) leading the way. Wardens were suspicious of every outsider, and many prisoners thought that visitors with notepads were reformers or important figures from Washington, and their means to talk or sing their way out of a sentence. When the wardens did not outright reject the Lomaxes’ request to enter the prisons, they agreed to it grudgingly, with warnings about the dangers they were risking inside. The gu
ards often stood there while the recordings were being made, intruding into the session, ordering the prisoners about. The Lomaxes sometimes found themselves accidentally or on purpose left alone in a barracks with hundreds of inmates. The guards regarded them with paternalistic humor, if not open hostility. Alan recalled many years later the menace of the black snake whips the guards snapped close to his ears to amuse themselves. And try as they might, it was difficult for the visitors not to wonder what crime had put each of the inmates they met behind bars. While they were visiting the women’s prison and listening to young girls angelically sing “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again” to their sewing machines, the warden informed them that most of the women were there for murder.
On July 16 the Lomaxes arrived at the Central Convict Sugar Plantation, the prison more commonly known as Angola, named after the eight-thousand-acre plantation in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, on which it was built, the farm itself having been named for the area in Central Africa from which so many slaves had come. Surrounded on three sides by the Mississippi River, and thirty miles from the nearest town, it was infamous for its long list of prisoners with sentences that guaranteed they’d never leave alive.
Alan and John stopped at the women’s prison first, and when the warden granted them entry they went straight to the dining room where some of the inmates were singing hymns while others played cards. In a letter he wrote from Angola, John noted with some amusement that one of the young women did her best to attract Alan’s attention. And, in fact, Alan had all along been doing his best to slip away to talk to the prisoners on his own, asking about their working conditions, where they came from, and the reason for their incarceration. He kept this from his father, for John was already angered by what he considered Alan’s exaggerations of the condition of the poor farmers they saw along the road. Alan, he insisted, was disappointed to find out that many of them owned their own land. And now, John wrote home, “Alan seemed to want to set [all the prisoners] free.” This was a terse summary of a more serious problem: throughout the trip he and Alan had been arguing about the politics of race and the conditions of the prisons. The twenty-four-hour days they were spending together had heightened the tension between them.
During their four-day visit to Angola, they moved on to the men’s prison, where they were shocked to discover that the prisoners were no longer allowed to sing while working in the fields. They had assumed that everyone knew that blacks worked better while they were singing, and to see all of these men toiling in silence was a huge disappointment. But then, just as they were leaving, they encountered one remarkable singer.
He was hard to miss. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, the self-proclaimed “King of the Twelve-String Guitar,” was a powerful presence, bold, outspoken, and, at forty-two, unbowed by his years in prisons. He had earned his name from a life of toughness, from his strength, his badness, and a bullet in his stomach. Though only five feet seven inches tall and 171 pounds, he appeared bigger than he was, and seemed to give off light when he sang. He spoke with confidence, pride, and an undisguised intelligence, none of it part of the standard prisoner’s repartee. He moved like a boxer, light on his feet, and had the muscles of having been a lead man on the prison work crews for years. Born in the 1880s on a family farm near Mooringsport, Louisiana, Lead Belly had learned to play an array of instruments while he was still a child, but had settled on the twelve-string guitar because of its volume and the buzzing sound that he said appealed to women. He played with an aggressiveness that suggested Texas Mexican guitar bands and two-fisted juke-joint piano, and sang in a declamatory tenor that, like his guitar, could cut through the noise of street traffic and crowded bars. Singing with his eyes closed, rocking his body as he kept the rhythm with his feet, he seemed to draw inspiration from some distant, undisclosed source, or perhaps just from long memory.
As a young man he had worked on farms and in the oil industry, played in bars and at parties, and for a while performed on the streets of Dallas with the legendary blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, from whom he learned new songs and the technique of slide guitar. In 1915 Lead Belly was arrested for an assault charge in Marshall, Texas. After his father mortgaged the family farm to pay a lawyer to defend him, Lead Belly was convicted for carrying a pistol, a lesser charge, and then imprisoned on a chain gang for a month. But he escaped after only three days, and under the name Walter Boyd settled in DeKalb, Texas, with his wife, Althea “Lethe” Henderson. Two years later he was charged with the murder of his friend Will Stafford and sentenced to seven to thirty years in the prison at Sugar Land. During a visit to the prison, Texas governor Pat Neff heard him sing a song that Lead Belly had written for him, and Neff became a fan, sometimes even bringing his houseguests to the prison to hear him perform. When Lead Belly was close to the seventh year of his minimum term in 1925, Governor Neff commuted his sentence.
After a year spent as a mechanic and a musician in Houston, Lead Belly returned to his birthplace in Louisiana, where he lived by doing odd jobs and distilling moonshine whiskey. In 1930 he was arrested again, this time for using a knife in what he said was self-defense, when three white men tried to push him off the sidewalk. Since one of the men in the incident was cut badly, Lead Belly was charged with assault with intent to kill. He barely escaped a lynch mob in the local prison, and received a six- to ten-year sentence, most of which he served in Angola.
Performing in and out of prison for years enabled Lead Belly to develop a large and diverse repertory of songs that stretched from church music to blues, folk songs to popular vaudeville favorites. The Lomaxes recorded eleven record sides with him in Angola, three of which were versions of what later came to be known as “Goodnight Irene,” and two of which were variations on “Angola Blues.” During their talks together, Lead Belly asked John Lomax to help him get paroled so that he could come to work for him, driving his car, cooking for him, washing his clothes, and helping him with his collecting. Although John resolved to get him pardoned so that he could travel with them through the rest of their trip, his enthusiasm cooled when the warden told him that Lead Belly had been sentenced for murder.
The Lomaxes reached New Orleans on July 21 in a rainstorm, and the rain continued for another week. John phoned Bertrand Cohn, one of his old friends from the University of Texas, who got them guest cards at the New Orleans Athletic Club, where they could for the moment live like gentlemen, and where Alan could spend some time swimming in the pool for his health. John had also asked Cohn to find a pair of plainclothes detectives to travel with them to what John called the “jungles of Negroland,” looking for ballads of the seamier side of city life. But before they could move into the streets, John was struck with a high fever, and by what Alan described as neuritis, indigestion, sciatica, and the grippe (although it was more likely malaria that both of them had picked up at Angola). His father was in the hospital for over a week, and though Alan himself was feeling ill, he kept going out with his bodyguards, wandering the waterfront, the French Quarter, and the Creole district, stopping people on the street or in bars to ask for old songs. But an eighteen-year-old white man who walked into a black bar with a couple of detectives only encouraged the customers to flee. Finally, at one bar, a man named Billy Williams spoke up. “I knows what you wants,” Alan remembered him saying. “You wants to make records of my singin’ an’ play ’em over de radio en so nobody will ever wanter hear me play again ’cause den ev’body’ll know de songs dat I knows an’ den where am I at? Des’ like you say, dey ain’ many of us folks what knows de old songs lef’, and dat’s what makes my livin’. Dat’s the way I sees it—a cole cash proposition, dat loses me money ef I makes any records fuh yuh. Every minute I picks de guitar, every note I sings, us wurth money to me. How much do I git?”
When the new recording machine broke down, Alan went out into the streets alone in a last-ditch effort to salvage the New Orleans trip, dragging his bulky typewriter along to take down the words to any song
s he might hear. This time he hired a pimp he had met at one of the bars to steer him through the neighborhood, until his guide quickly ran up bar bills and lost money at pool, and Alan was obliged to pay for them all. Ditching his guide, he set out the next day on his own. With no one to talk to, he paid closer attention to his surroundings and began making notes: he passed a dead man on the sidewalk, watched a fight between lovers, chatted with folks hanging on a corner. The next morning he tried again, and this time, like Blanche DuBois on her first walk down Elysian Fields Street, he heard what Tennessee Williams called a “blue piano” tinkling from a darkened house. He stepped through a wide-open door and at last found a man who really knew “Stagolee.” There in the unlit, unlicensed bar, a small crowd drank and joked while a man played an upright in the corner. The pianist struck a deal with him: if Alan made a record that sold, they’d split the profits, and meanwhile Alan could pay for the gin that he and his friends were drinking. The singer launched into the epic of a battle over a milk-white Stetson hat between Billy Lyons and Stagolee, a blue steel .44-toting badman. Twenty stanzas in, the singer became offended by the rudeness of some in the bar, and led Alan and his own friends miles away to another “barrelhouse” where he felt he could get more respect. But after only a minute of singing, with Alan seated on a milk crate pecking away at his typewriter, the owner threw them all out. Finally, in another house along the way, Alan was thrilled to hear the singer finish the last of the forty-one stanzas he knew, where Stagolee winds up in hell, drives the devils away, and rules their evil kingdom by himself.
After a few more days of hearing no French Creole spoken on the streets, and nothing sung but church songs, the blues, and jazz, Alan gave up and mailed a postcard to Carl Engel, saying that New Orleans was now “a barren field for collection. The river packets are gone and with them the singing roustabouts. The police have driven out the ‘Hoo-doo’ dances. And speaking in Creole is entirely out of style.” The recording machine was running again, but before he had an opportunity to use it, he too grew sicker, and was now lying on a cot in the same hospital room as his father.
