Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Only days after starting the Morton interviews, Lomax was beginning to dream up ways of bringing Jelly Roll and the music of his era back into the limelight, and he started searching for others who might share his enthusiasm. Earlier that year the New York Times music critic Olin Downes had been put in charge of all of the musical events for the World’s Fair of 1939, a spectacle that carried unusual weight in a world struggling to pull itself out of the Depression, fending off the onset of war, and desperate for forms of entertainment that were emblematic of better days. Downes was the obvious choice for the job, a hearty, blond popular lecturer and radio personality, and a cheerleader for the composers he admired. His taste in classical music was not the most progressive, but his politics were leftist, and he supported innovative efforts to bring other forms of music into the concert hall and the classroom. Downes himself had conceived of the idea of short operas for radio, and encouraged Kurt Weill to write Down in the Valley, a thirty-minute collage of American folk songs. A few years later he and Elie Siegmeister would put together their own version of the Lomaxes’ book when they published A Treasury of American Song. Now Downes was prepared to bring American folk music into the World’s Fair.

  Harold Spivacke, his boss in the Music Division, recommended Lomax to Downes as the best person to plan a series of folk performances for the event, especially for the Fourth of July festivities. Nick Ray and Alan set to work together to plan an elaborate production with the title “Yankee Doodle Comes to Town.” It was a pageant that would cover three hundred years of New York City’s history with a huge stage backdrop that grew and expanded from a dull green wilderness in 1609 to the shadows of giant buildings in the twentieth century. Two choruses representing “The People” and “The Mighty” would grow in size as actors in different sketches left the light for the shadows and then reemerged as members of one or the other group. At times they would represent the living and the dead of the city, at others they would be General Howe’s marching army singing “God Save the King,” only to be scattered when General Washington’s troops appeared singing “Yankee Doodle.” There would be Dutch and English folk songs, sea chanteys, pirate songs, American Indian music, and dances.

  Behind their proposal was a form of populist modernism, a sophisticated sense of theater for the masses, hinted at throughout and then finally mentioned in the last sentence of their proposal: “We suggest these techniques as a few supplementary ideas, already assuming that we will utilize our experience with Living Newspapers, the Mayerhold [sic] technique and with folk plays to the best advantage.” “Living Newspapers” was a new dramatic form being used by the Federal Theatre Project of the WPA to engage their audiences through presentations that brought history to bear on contemporary social problems. Actors planted in the audience, spotlights, projections, masking, ramps into the audience, and an offstage voice on loudspeakers that connected scenes and introduced characters were all used to jolt the spectators out of their passivity. Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold was an acolyte of Stanislavsky at the turn of the century who had broken with the master and developed anti-realistic and anti-Method acting techniques that attempted to stimulate an audience’s imagination more directly and immediately. The “folk plays” that Lomax and Ray had in mind were the regionally based outdoor pageants and plays staged in North Carolina by Paul Green, a playwright who collaborated with black authors like Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and brought them to the University of North Carolina in the 1930s and 1940s, wrote plays for the socialist Group Theatre in New York City, and cowrote Johnny Johnson with Kurt Weill. His folk plays were vehicles for social and historical themes specific to the region, but were aimed at working- and middle-class families and were filled with dancers and musicians, dazzling lighting, rich costuming, live animals, military reenactments, and special effects not possible in an indoor theater.

  When Alan began to write the proposal for the folk theaters and entertainment on the midway at the fair, he started with food. The restaurants at the fair, he said, ought to serve “authentic food, drink, dance, and music” of the cultures they represented, and the organizers of the fair should have the right to “edit” these concessions and show them the commercial possibilities of a “genuine atmosphere.” To frame these traditions, a giant “main street” would offer a re-creation of the French Quarter of New Orleans; a Pennsylvania Dutch tavern; a Haitian house with cooking, religion, “voodoo dances,” and “the tempestuous history of this island for dramatic materials”; a western saloon with cowboys, miners, “gambling sharks and gay ladies, serving venison steak and whiskey with saddle nails for chasers”; a Down East fish house with ballads and chanteys; a Mexican patio with tamales, tacos, and tequila vendors with the ballads and religious festivals of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States; a Hawaiian house; an Acadian dance hall with food, music, and dance, but which would also be used to draw parallels to French cultures in southeastern Missouri, western Indiana, and French Canada; an Appalachian square dance hall; and an African American church and juke joint. In all of it, he stressed, these would not be staged re-creations, but lived environments, spilling into the street and the fields around it. Visitors were to join in the cultures, learning to cook and dance and sing and coming to understand the cultural bases on which these arts and crafts were built. And unlike most of the other exhibits at the fair, these would be fun, free of commercial influence, and free of charge.

  Alan worked out the details for staging these cultural groups in remarkable detail, especially given that he was far from certain of being hired for the position. For the Appalachian square dance hall, for example, he specified that

  the stage [should be] a raised dais about eighteen feet in diameter leading down by a series of steps to a dance floor that encircles the stage, and around the dance floor, in turn, levels for tables. On the dais-stage, scenes from back country life will be set in the simplest possible fashion. For example, a pot-bellied stove and a big lard can will represent the country store. The actors will make their entrances and exits down the series of steps and through the audience that surrounds and watches them. The stage will serve to raise the performer to the level where all the participants can see him as he sings or acts or dances, even when a dance is going on the floor.

  Here as well, a demonstration group of square dancers can perform so that the audience, both on the dance floor and at the tables, can observe them and learn the figures. The action of the drama will be punctuated with numerous dances, and the company of folk performers can step across the narrow well of the dance floor and bring the audience into the action of this play by teaching them the square dances. In this fashion, the folk performers will not feel themselves isolated from their audience; and thus working under conditions to which they are accustomed in their own environment, will be able to unfold for the patrons their own culture in the most natural fashion possible.

  I should insist that in the break-down house, there be served corn bread, corn liquor, spare ribs, hominy, green corn, apple cobbler and all the other succulent dishes of rural America.

  Each table should be provided with a set of songs that will be sung in the course of the entertainment, and the audience naturally will be encouraged to join in the chorus.

  I have in mind at this moment a number of mountain people who could fit into the break-down house very naturally: Aunt Molly Jackson, Sarah Ogan, Pete Steele, Luther Strong, Walter Williams, Uncle Alex Dunford, Crockett Ward, Fields Ward, and many another.

  As for the dramatic material, the ordinary mountain square dance can provide plenty of this. Such affairs are beyond the religious pale in most communities because they are often times the scenes of quarrels, desperate fights, and a great deal of love-making. Into this picture the whole pattern of back-country speech and culture can be woven and I predict that all of New York will come to the break-down house to learn really how to square dance and sing mountain ballads.

  What he was aiming for in this ambitious progra
m was a means of helping Americans redefine the country to themselves and to the world by means of performance. But he also wanted to take these performances into the streets of the fair, both to reach the public and as a demonstration of the kind of popular arts that were disappearing. “Driven into the back woods by the radio and the cinema,” he wrote, “popular art has tended to become the monopoly of professional virtuosos and big corporations. The World’s Fair can, by falling back upon the ancient techniques of the strolling player, the Commedia dell’arte, the wandering minstrel, the medicine show and the parade, help to bring art participation back to the people and at the same time make the World’s Fair the simple and merry people’s festival that it was in the Middle Ages.” The object was to engage the audience face-to-face, on the same level, in the spirit of street performers. “People come to the fair, despite the educational exhibits, to look at each other, to participate in hard amusements and to do and see things that are outside their everyday experience. They will look at a few wonders of science, but what they mainly want is fun; and they should find it in the streets of the New York World’s Fair, free.”

  In the middle of it all would be the American Folk Theater, a concert hall and educational center for the popular arts. In order to ease audiences into folk culture and avoid the chaos of the typical folk festival, the theater would promote academic symposia and stage carefully scripted concerts that would put folk music in historical and aesthetic context:

  In [folk] festivals a genuine folk singer is forced to compete with a group of sophisticated singers performing folk songs and no difference is made for the benefit of the audiences between the two types of performers. The folk performer, therefore, is likely to suffer, since the audience is more accustomed to citified than countrified singing. An American Folk Theater, however, if it were carefully edited, could present a continuous series of programs covering all phases of American folk culture from the buck and wing to Katherine Dunham, from the mountain ballad singer to the orchestral suite, from the folk anecdote of the academic lecturer to folk tales.

  The symposia he proposed—on the musicology of folk songs, on folktales, regional literature, the ballad, and the like—would connect to the performances in the theater, and create performed histories of popular song and of vaudeville. One of his suggestions, a concert that would show the development of black music that “led from spirituals to minstrel music to ragtime to cake walk to jazz,” anticipated the “From Spirituals to Swing” concert presented by John Hammond six months later.

  Somewhere in this array of performances, Lomax saw a chance for Jelly Roll to finally be recognized for his achievements, and he wrote Downes urging that Morton be given a key position:

  You may not agree with me that the ragtime-jazz-blues-swing tradition is the most important American contribution to so-called sophisticated music, but at least this tradition deserves a great deal of attention at the World’s Fair. I have encountered a Negro here in Washington who might fit into the World’s Fair program very nicely and who I think could represent this tradition as well or better than anyone I know. His name is Jellyroll Morton. He is well along in his fifties and grew up with jazz as it developed in the tenderloin district of New Orleans and spread up the river to Chicago....

  I am recording for the Library all of his compositions, all of the folk tunes he knows along with very full bibliographical material. I think the musicologists of the future will find in it essential material for writing the history of American music. Jellyroll is still a great pianist and a fine singer and he has had wide experience in the organization of orchestras, in arranging and composing. He also knows personally everyone who has ever had anything to do with jazz or swing. He might be the ideal person to put in charge of the World’s Fair Jam Session, without which, of course, the World’s Fair would be musically incomplete.

  In the end, a series of bureaucratic tangles and turf wars resulted in the musical events planned by Lomax either being appropriated by the director of entertainment’s office or not being approved at all. The African American juke joint was made a concession for the owners of the Savoy Ballroom, the Dutch Tavern was built and sponsored by the Heineken Beer Company, the Hawaiians were put in the South Sea Islands section, and the theater production was The Hot Mikado, a black adaptation of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera brought in from Broadway with Bill Robinson in the lead and Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers to back him up. Finally, in the cruelest of ironies, it was W. C. Handy who was appointed to organize the black musicians and entertainers at the fair, and who then went on to serve as a musical consultant to the next two World’s Fairs in America. Olin Downes resigned in protest over these and other changes made against his wishes.

  Lomax continued to work on Jelly Roll’s behalf, advising him on copyrighting his music and on the lawsuits he was planning against Melrose Music, ASCAP, and the Music Corporation of America. Then, sometime in the fall, Jelly Roll was stabbed by a customer following an argument in his club. He recovered from the wounds but, added to his other ailments, the injuries weakened him. By November business was so slow that he and his partner, Cordelia Lyle, closed the club; and though Jelly Roll tried playing at a lounge run by boxer Natty Brown on 13th and H streets, N.W., he was dropped after a week for lack of customers.

  When Morton talked about his problems with Lomax, Alan suggested he go to New York, where the World’s Fair plans still promised some work, and where possibilities for recording and press attention were better. Roy Carew and Lomax helped him pay off his Washington debts, and Morton and his wife, Mabel, headed north in their car on an icy late December day.

  John Hammond’s “From Spirituals to Swing” concert, which was planned for December 23, was to be an all-black performance for an integrated audience, an event then still rare in New York City. But the bigger impact would come from the concert’s program itself, a history of jazz from Africa through black American folk music to pop music in the swing era (Hammond in the concert program notes called swing the “Children’s Crusade”) to an art of the people, an expression heard more and more in those days. For such an ambitious undertaking, nothing less than Carnegie Hall would do. Hammond was from a rich and elite family (his mother was a Vanderbilt), and he had devoted himself to black causes and especially to jazz since dropping out of Yale. But even he could not afford to pay for the concert himself, and in any case he wanted the imprimatur of a politically progressive group like the NAACP (on whose board he sat) or the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. When neither would support him, he turned to the New Masses, a journal for which he wrote music reviews under the name of Henry Johnson. Hammond even did a bit of his own fieldwork (though he worked through a regional talent scout), driving south in his Terraplane roadster with classical musician (and later president of Columbia Records) Goddard Lieberson to sign up for the concert Mitchell’s Christian Singers, mouth harpist Sonny Terry (Hammond had wanted Blind Boy Fuller, but Fuller was in jail, so he settled for Fuller’s next-door neighbor and sometime recording partner), and blues singer William “Big Bill” Broonzy, who was to fill in for the recently deceased Robert Johnson (who also favored Terraplane autos). Hammond set out to find performers whom he considered authentic—that is to say, who would have never played for white audiences before, or were at least unknown to most whites. He also booked gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons, Meade “Lux” Lewis, and Pete Johnson, blues shouter Big Joe Turner, Sidney Bechet, stride pianist and composer James P. Johnson, and the Count Basie Orchestra. With all this talent and with the help of a few recordings of African music, it was a concert that set out to prove that this was a great art, one that stood alongside the great cultural accomplishments of the world’s civilizations. More than that, it would show white people that it was blacks who were the masters of this music, and that what white audiences had been hearing as jazz was ersatz and counterfeit.

  The concert’s program drove home the poverty of A
frican Americans, even those on the stage (“Most of the people you will hear are absurdly poor”), and what the latter had had to overcome to get there (“Jim Crow unions and unscrupulous nightclub performers”). The ads in the program—for the Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, a new Clifford Odets play at the Belasco Theatre, Soviet films from the Amkino Corporation, and the Workers Book Shop—left no doubt about the politics of the concert’s backers and producers. The concert was an unqualified success (even if Time magazine didn’t get the African bits and thought that Sidney Bechet and Count Basie had leapt up the “evolutionary ladder from the jungle”) and had been oversold, with four-hundred-some members of the audience taking their seats onstage behind the performers. (The next year Hammond would repeat the concert with different performers, adding Professor Sterling Brown of Howard as MC and Joseph Losey as director.)

  Alan came up from Washington for the 1938 concert and said he “adored what Johnny Hammond had done in bringing boogie-woogie and [gospel] quartet music and the blues and jazz together in one place.” Alan was so excited by what he had heard, he asked Hammond if he could record Albert Ammons, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Pete Johnson, Sonny Terry, and James P. Johnson. The day after the concert Alan, Fred Ramsey, Charles Edward Smith, Bill Russell, and the musicians all went to the Allied Recording Company. Before they began, Lomax encouraged all of the pianists to talk about the music or sing a bit. Lewis explained the origins of his composition “Honky Tonk Train”; Ammons and Johnson demonstrated various blues and boogie-woogie styles; Terry played and sang songs he used to do as duets with Blind Boy Fuller; and James P. Johnson reluctantly agreed to awkwardly sing a few bawdy songs and blues, since Alan seemed to have confused him with another Johnson, a blues singer from Kansas City. (James P. Johnson had accompanied Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters and written a number of stride piano classics; but he had also performed “Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody” in Carnegie Hall nineteen years earlier, had written two operas, and in 1938 was working on a symphonic score.) Two weeks later Ammons and Lewis became the first musicians to record for Blue Note Records, the company that a German immigrant named Alfred Lion created just to record them.