Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  John and Alan had also begun to learn how Lead Belly thought about his material, how he saw himself performing. Fred Ramsey, a folklorist who recorded many of Lead Belly’s songs some years later, described how the singer learned songs:

  We asked Lead Belly how his songs came to be. He stated that he took a melody from any given song, combined it with words of another or of his own free rhyming, and then had the piece he was ready to sing. Some he felt he should change a great deal; others he left pretty much as he found them.

  “I just take ’em an’ fix ’em,” he said. “But you got to keep your mind together.” When Lead Belly heard blues singer Bessie Smith’s record of “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” he sat very still at first, listening to the introduction and the chorus. By the time Bessie was on her second go-’round, Lead Belly was humming along with her. Then right after hearing the record, he sang it through. But two weeks later, Lead Belly came back, announced that he had “learned” the song, and proceeded to run through it in a style completely his own.

  Alan attempted to record every song that Lead Belly knew in multiple versions whenever possible, since he often sang them differently. He also asked him to annotate each song—“annotate” was the word Alan used—and explain its meaning to him. What resulted was an encyclopedia of black American song, from blues to work songs, many of which are even today known to singers only from the Lead Belly versions, such as “The Midnight Special,” “Boll Weevil,” “C. C. Rider,” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” He was also interviewed while he was being recorded to create an oral autobiography to be deposited in the Library of Congress. Alan had heard that Soviet folklorists were writing down the stories of folk artists’ lives, in part because they wanted to honor them as artists, but also because they felt that these biographies were the best way to understand the meanings of the performers’ songs. But Lead Belly was not an easy interview: “He sang, he was very pleasant socially, but he was also close-mouthed. He’d been through too much, and he’d learned not to talk. But I was his young admirer. We lived together with my father for about six months and I became his confidante. Bit by bit, he told me his story ... and I wrote his story, which was the first singer biography in America.”

  When Martha arrived at Penn Station in New York City on January 13 she was greeted by Lead Belly, John (Alan was sick in bed), and a corps of press and photographers, as the New York papers had been carrying the story of her arrival for the past three days (with headlines like SWEET SINGER OF THE SWAMP GRINS ALL OVER AS “BOSS” LOMAX WIRES FOR BRIDE, and HOMICIDAL HARMONIZER AT THE TRAIN FROM DIXIE). When Lomax told the reporters that a marriage would take place as soon as a license could be granted, it was more than a soap opera script he was following, as he had worried that if the two weren’t married quickly, Lead Belly might be charged for violation of the Mann Act, the law that prohibited the interstate transportation of women for immoral purposes.

  The wedding was set for January 20 in Wilton, timed for the end of Lead Belly’s probation, but the Associated Press photographers were so keyed to the story that they arrived five days early. The minister and deacons of the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Norwalk presided, John gave away the bride, and Alan was best man, with reporters from Time and the New York and Norwalk newspapers looking on. Afterwards Lead Belly and John rushed off to play a party in Brooklyn given by the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, where the mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, was the guest of honor.

  What John had hoped would be a rural escape from show business was short-lived, as they were now deluged with requests for performances, an increasing number of them for fraternity parties and private gatherings. John tried to handle all the invitations by mail, but finally gave up and began to schedule bookings over a phone he had installed.

  It was Tex Ritter, the country singer from Texas, and a friend of John’s, who got Lead Belly his first commercial recording contract with the American Recording Company, then the dominant force in popular records, for an advance of $250 against royalties. Art Satherley, an Englishman who pioneered country music recording, was the producer of the session, which resulted in approximately forty songs being recorded in their Broadway studios between January 23 and 25, and two more sessions in February and March. In the end they decided against releasing most of them, and only six songs, all of them blues, and all intended to appeal to current tastes, were issued in Lead Belly’s lifetime. Their sales were poor, however, for his relative fame. Lead Belly’s songs seemed out of date and too rural to the black record buyers who bought music on the “race” labels on which American Recording Company issued them, while whites, who would never have heard such music before, could not find them in record stores.

  It was beginning to be obvious that Lead Belly could succeed only within the college music circuits that John Lomax had been cultivating for several years as a speaker/performer. Most of the academic performances were well attended, some remarkably so, but when they went outside these institutions trouble often followed. Invited to perform for a society wedding, all three of them were treated as servants and told to stay out of the way of the guests. Even some of the college dates could be difficult, as when the president of Hamilton College canceled their appearance after he read one of the New York City newspaper articles on Lead Belly. On his own, Lead Belly could find bars to sing in within black neighborhoods and keep all the money for himself, but he seldom made enough to cover his own food and drink.

  Wilton might have seemed a kind of heaven at first—plenty to eat, logs in the fireplace, a snowy landscape away from the rattle and hum of the city—but it turned out to be just a place to sleep for everyone but John. Alan had his own friends in Greenwich Village, and spent whole days commuting back and forth or disappearing for a day or two at a time visiting some girls in New Milford. Lead Belly chafed at being so far away from people of color, and when he could he headed for Norwalk to escape. John, following his own version of Booker T. Washington’s plan of self-help and improvement for the Negro, had vowed to Martha to save Lead Belly’s earnings so that they could buy a house and farm and be free and independent back in the South. But Lead Belly’s vision of himself had been changing those many weeks, and with life in prison receding behind him, he now wanted his money for himself as fast as he earned it.

  Even for John, peace was hard to find in the Connecticut countryside. If the phone wasn’t ringing from some college or other looking to book them, visitors from New York City tracked them down, or Alan invited people up. In February, for example, they were visited overnight by Aunt Molly Jackson, the spiritual leader of the miners’ strike in Harlan, Kentucky (though Alan introduced her to his father as merely a fine example of a mountain singer, without mentioning her union credentials). While John was away in March, Alan recorded her in Connecticut for the Library of Congress, singing fifty-four traditional songs, but none of them political in nature.

  The three made many visits up to New Haven to see Professor George Herzog at Yale. Herzog was then something of a rarity: he was trained in music in Europe, but had also studied anthropology at Columbia, and was the perfect candidate for making accurate transcriptions of Lead Belly’s singing and writing scholarly notes on the transcriptions. The problem was that Herzog took the task too much to heart, became deadly serious about making the Lead Belly book a model of anthropological musicology, and critiqued the project as the Lomaxes conceived it. To begin with, he disliked the book’s title: “Sinful,” he argued, did not accurately describe the music. The Lomaxes countered that that was the word that African American church folks themselves used for all secular songs, but Herzog held firm. The notes that he was to write turned into a thirteen-page introduction in which he described the complexity of transcribing black singers’ songs on paper and discussed the compromises that had to be made to make them readable by a general audience. But he also claimed that very few of the songs in the book—as few as three—were original with Lead Belly; many of the rest
came from white American tradition (“more than half of these melodies and texts have been published in other collections, in some other version”). Some of the guitar accompaniments Herzog characterized as “jazzy,” and seemed to come from ragtime and popular recordings. This was very different from the image John had originally had of black prison songs, which he had conceived as being in a state of purity, but his views were changing, and variability and creativity were becoming more important to him. Herzog and John Lomax had lengthy discussions that held up the publication of the book, and in the end most of Herzog’s introduction was cut. But in John’s introduction, he acknowledged having responded to some of Herzog’s criticisms:

  We present this set of songs, therefore, not as folk songs entirely, but as a cross-section of Afri-American songs that have influenced and have been influenced by popular music; and we present this singer, not as a folk singer handing on a tradition faithfully, but as a folk artist who contributes to the tradition, and as a musician of a sort important in the growth of American popular music.

  Alan’s contribution to the book was a twenty-five-page “character study” of Lead Belly, mostly in dialect, and the annotations, in the form of introductions to the songs that Lead Belly had given him. John wrote a long account of his experiences with Lead Belly, much of which had to be cut. When it was published under the title of Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly in November 1936, the critical response was good, with raves from James Weldon Johnson, Constance Rourke, J. Frank Dobie, and others, and Life did a photo feature. In the New Masses, Lawrence Gellert criticized John Lomax for exploiting Lead Belly, accusing him of bribing guards to get into prisons, and in subsequent letters to the editor he claimed that Lomax had passed over the “heart of contemporary Negro folk lore” in favor of a patronizing, romantic view of black life in the South:

  Beyond the doggerel—beyond the nonsense jingles served up for the white man’s amusement, lies the heart throb of the Black Folks—the agonized voice of the mass crying out against the peonage, poverty and degradation. The savage brutality of the Law and the lynching mob. And the new attitudes toward all that exemplified by Tallapoosa, Angel Herndon, Scottsboro boys and other vital factors in the lives of the suppressed black masses. A hundred songs current in the Black Belt freshly stamp the glorified images of members of their race who participate in the day to day struggles against their oppressors. But we catch not a glimmer of all this in the Lomax volume.

  A few years later, Richard Wright would also discover Lead Belly, and would call the John Lomax prison recordings “one of the most amazing swindles in Amazing history,” implying that he had made a great deal of money from them.

  Lead Belly, too, was unhappy with some of what John had written about him, especially the accounts of his violence, and hinted at taking legal action. When the attention the book attracted led to offers to appear on radio and film, he thought that Macmillan held all rights to the songs in the book, and so retained a lawyer to help him regain the performance rights. The publisher quickly agreed, eager to indemnify itself against his threatened suits against the content of the book. Lead Belly accepted the offer of ten dollars and the right to sing his own songs in exchange for his promise not to sue the Lomaxes and the publisher for any reason pertaining to the book. But Macmillan was mistaken in thinking it held the rights to each individual song when used outside the book. In fact, it later emerged that Macmillan had not copyrighted the songs properly, and had no rights to them whatsoever. As it turned out, the book sold poorly, never earning out its advance, and was out of print a year later. As John Lomax would later complain, Lead Belly was the only one to ever make any money on the project.

  The producers of March of Time were so pleased with the radio program they had done on Lead Belly that they proposed another one for their newly created newsreel series, which was designed to compete with Fox Movietone News and would be shown between feature films at theaters in 168 cities. The Lomaxes were initially paid $150 to help with the script and to scout locations, with a promise of more. Alan quickly wrote his own script for the filming that emphasized American ideals, but it was largely ignored by the producers in favor of a reworking of the sensationalized Herald Tribune “Sweet Singer from the Swamplands” article. Neither John nor Lead Belly had any control over what was filmed, but by playing the roles written for them, they were seen as approving the accuracy of what was depicted and were permanently typecast by their film characters.

  JOHN LOMAX: Have you got a pistol?

  LEAD BELLY: No, sir, I got a knife.

  JOHN LOMAX: Let me see it.

  [Lead Belly Produces a short knife. Lomax examines it and hands it back.]

  JOHN LOMAX: What do you do with that thing?

  LEAD BELLY: I’ll use it on somebody if they bother you, boss. Please, boss, take me with you. You’ll never have to tie your shoestrings anymore, if you’ll let me—long as you keep me with you.

  JOHN LOMAX: All right, Lead Belly. I’ll try you.

  Production began in Wilton and Norwalk in February 1935, with only one camera, so that many scenes had to be reshot to aid in editing, and in the process some scenes disappeared entirely. In its final version the short film begins with Lead Belly being recorded in prison by John Lomax, who promises to take the recording to the governor. Next, Lead Belly asks Lomax to hire him. The wedding in the Wilton house follows, and the story concludes with Lead Belly’s recordings being placed in the Library of Congress alongside the Declaration of Independence, and with “Goodnight Irene” sung by Lead Belly over a close-up of the Declaration.

  There was something in the film to upset everyone. Alan detested it, and though John was deeply disappointed, he salved himself with the idea that they had brought a great singer and a great folk tradition to an audience that might never have heard any of it. Lead Belly was the angriest of all for not having been paid for his part in either the film or the radio version. In retrospect, many have assumed that it was John Lomax who forced Lead Belly to emphasize his prison history by wearing stripes for this film, and who insisted that he do so when they performed at colleges. But Lead Belly always wore overalls and a scarf onstage in his early years of performing, and he chose to have a picture of himself dressed this way (along with another one of him dancing in suit and tie) on his stationery after he broke with Lomax. Stripes were the visual identifier of prisoners at the time, and when convicts were characters in stage shows, usually as part of early novelty acts, they were always in striped clothes. Even after Lead Belly left Lomax he wore stripes in a reenactment of the March of Time film for two stage shows at the Lafayette and the Apollo in Harlem in the late 1930s, and he was still presented in stripes when Gordon Parks directed the 1976 film Leadbelly, which Alan also detested.

  In mid-February John left Wilton to be with his wife in Atlantic City, where she was attending a convention. While he was away, Lead Belly took the car to town and upgraded it by buying new tires, wheels, and hubcaps, and put it all on credit without John’s permission. When Lomax returned he was furious. Amused by it all, Alan called Lead Belly “a black Uriah Heep,” and had to explain to his father that what he really wanted was a car of his own.

  John had booked performances for Lead Belly and himself from March 3 through March 15 at the University of Rochester, the University Club of Rochester, Albany State College for Teachers, Harvard, and the Wilbraham Academy, often with several appearances at each. Their long drives together through snowy countryside were increasingly silent, especially as John was not feeling well. When they were touring, Lead Belly often took the car and went off on his own, and though Lomax worried about his losing his voice by singing at black bars on the same day as the college performances, he was more concerned about trouble that he might encounter. When they reached Rochester and settled into their rooms, Lead Belly disappeared with the car and had Lomax wandering the streets in search of him and checking with the police. But Lead Belly turned up in time for the concert. “I found some o
f my color and been stayin’ with them,” he said. He had decided that he no longer would listen to Lomax’s pleas to stay away from bars and people he didn’t know. His period of accommodation was over, and Lead Belly the race man surfaced, demanding to go where he wanted to go and the right to sing for his “own kind” after hours. He also wanted Martha with him on the road, and for her to keep all of the money they made.

  In Buffalo Lead Belly became even more independent, demanding the money for their performance up front. John felt so threatened that he asked a judge he knew to have Lead Belly followed. A detective took Lead Belly’s knife away from him and escorted him to the evening’s concert. Somehow John had convinced himself that Lead Belly was on parole and that he was responsible for him, and he feared that he would soon be put back in prison, the tour would come to an end, and John himself would be humiliated. He told Alan that the relationship with Lead Belly was over and that he was sending Martha and Huddie home to Shreveport as soon as they completed their engagement at Harvard. Alan, deeply upset by this news, thought his father was overreacting.