Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Once Jelly Roll was situated on West 145th Street in Harlem, he began to rehearse a band, but he wrote Lomax that the Musicians Union was not anxious to accept him for membership since the numbers of musicians who had come to town hoping to work at the World’s Fair were overloading its ranks. Morton was disappointed that the Library of Congress recordings had not done more for him, and Alan promised to come to New York to introduce him to Decca Records executives. But when Elizabeth became ill, their meeting was delayed. In March they met again at one of Morton’s rehearsals, and by the end of the month Lomax had managed to get him an audition with John Hammond with the idea of having the Brunswick Company record him. But Jelly Roll was stricken by a heart attack on April 17, hospitalized for three weeks, and advised to give up playing.

  Lomax, meanwhile, was trying to interest jazz writers such as Charles Edward Smith to write articles about Jelly Roll in national magazines to increase his visibility. In September 1939 his efforts paid off when Morton signed with RCA Bluebird to record eight pieces with a band that included New Orleans musicians such as Sidney Bechet, Albert Nicholas, Zutty Singleton, and Wellman Braud. The session went well, but Jelly Roll was sick. Frederic Ramsey Jr., who was at the studio, said that Morton “tried to show that he could outdo the younger men, but emotionally he was walking a tightrope. He was doing a brave thing.” Lomax then set up a number of sessions for him at General Records beginning in December 1939. The plan was for Morton to record a series of single records that followed the general outline of the Library of Congress sessions, but without speech. They were issued as an album under the title of New Orleans Memories. A series of recording sessions in January 1940 would prove to be his last. Morton continued to search unsuccessfully for work, traveling around the country, even going as far as the West Coast, where he died in 1941.

  Music pundits have often charged Jelly Roll Morton with being a braggart whose only subject was himself, not considering perhaps that his accounts of jazz history and his own role in it might have been more accurate than not. Lomax, too, has been criticized for taking Morton at his word. Without a doubt Jelly Roll was a man of words, indefatigable in his own defense. But in truth, he did not brag excessively. There are some factual errors in his autobiographical accounts and some overstatements, but considering that he was improvising the history of jazz for recordings that could not be edited, and given that he was speaking to a generation who knew little or nothing about the history of jazz, a music that they as yet didn’t understand, his was a generally reasonable, well-considered performance.

  Musicians he played with in New Orleans like Albert Nicholas and Omer Simeon said Morton could live up to his talk and that he was the best at what he did. Danny Barker was one of Morton’s staunchest defenders, and he became something of his interpreter, often speaking of Morton’s presentation of self: “Jelly Roll never spoke of being held back by anyone. He believed in Jelly Roll and was not going to step off for anyone. Those trunks of Hart, Schaffner, and Marx clothes were his armor against those who would deny him and his importance. The diamond in his gold tooth was testimony to his status, that he was good for whatever he asked for, just as the two or three bulldogs he kept with him were marks of the gentleman he laid claim to being.... Jelly Roll was outspoken.... He spoke up when people weren’t speaking up. And he could back up what he said.”

  His story had convinced Lomax that jazz had been developed within a small community, that it was only a very few talented people who had introduced the music into the fertile ambiance of New Orleans. In a word, they were a folk society. “I realized that Jelly was telling me the history of jazz, because jazz was a neighborhood project. Only a few individuals in this small, sleepy town were involved in evoking the music of jazz out of the broad basis of American Negro folk song. The Downtown Creoles could play their notes, but the Uptown boys had much to teach them. As Papa Big-Eye Nelson told me: ‘You had to put the cryin’ in your clarinet.’ ”

  Morton saw his mission to be one of correcting music history and elevating this small community of musicians to their rightful place. “There was as yet no serious jazz criticism or jazz history. Jelly Roll was attempting to find a basis for such criticism and history. It was also a time in which the music that had been created first by black musicians was being taken away from them by the ‘amusement industry.’ Suddenly everyone was calling themselves jazz musicians. He himself had his rights to his music pirated away, and the contributions he made to the orchestration of jazz had been formalized in swing for millions of dollars to be made, while he himself had faded from the picture. It had been done by the tricks and gimmicks of the newly forming public relations industry.”

  Lomax believed that the changes that occurred in jazz were not just a matter of dollars and cents. “The industry thought it was loving jazz,” he said, but loving it as Middle Europeans, as members of an American business culture—as a people raised within a different aesthetic. “The consequence was that they attempted to make changes in the music, beginning with tempos and organizational detail, and wound up with whites replacing blacks in the musicians’ chairs.... It began as a bit of conflict and irritation and moved on to corruption.” It was not so much the corruption of entertainment by commercial enterprise, for New Orleans had always been commercial; but it was rather a forced change in “New Orleanians’ Afro-Creole Southern context” when the music reached Chicago and New York and lost its regional quality to become a nationalized music, much as had country music when it was first popularized.

  New Orleans provided all the evidence Lomax needed to see what had happened. Jazz music had a pronounced vocal quality to it. “The musicians seemed to be singing through their horns, emoting through them, not merely playing with pure tones as in the European classical tradition” but using moans, animal noises, calls, and children’s cries. There was bodily response to the music, among the dancers and the seated audience, and also among the musicians. When Jelly Roll stomped on the floor during the recordings at the Library of Congress, it was his attempt to keep the body within the music, to mark off the differences between European- and African-derived traditions of music performance. The recording process had not only denied the listener a means of observing the age, race, and gender of the performers, it also standardized musical procedures and removed the body in ways that buried style and aesthetic. New Orleans drummer Baby Dodds said that when he recorded with Morton’s trio, Jelly Roll sometimes stomped so loud that it sounded as if they had two bass drums. And when he heard Morton’s orchestrally oriented piano playing, with the various horns assigned to his left and right hands, Lomax saw Morton as hewing to an ancient African form of musical organization—with multiple leads spread among instrumental voices, with overlapping parts, all of it supported by a strong polyrhythmic sense.

  Lomax was also fascinated by the role of the Creoles in the making of jazz. He saw Morton as practicing the Creole tradition of using cultural elements from any tradition that was handy and appealing. The jazz band as Morton understood it was constructed from European and African materials, and Jelly Roll had underlined this multicultural nature of New Orleans. It was French, Spanish, and English, but also African and American Indian. In that sense New Orleans was a Caribbean city.

  New Orleans was the only place in America, socially speaking, where you had many, many independent black musical organizations that played for funerals and for the benefit of the community, marching in the streets from 1860 forward. I think that is the most important thing about New Orleans. The fact that this was a town where the blacks were sticking up for themselves in the street with uniforms and parades, and able to make a statement. As I listened to Morton’s story, I realized that I had never heard any American Negro speak of “music lessons.” This was a privilege of the Creoles. They kept all they could after the defeat of the Reconstruction period. If they didn’t have the vote, they were, as Jelly Roll said, “very organization-minded.”

  Some have accused Alan Lomax of b
eing a “moldy fig,” one of those fans who in the late 1930s and early 1940s regarded swing (and later bebop) as diluting the African American contributions to jazz. Like many of the jazz revivalists at the time, Lomax saw a parallel between folk music and early jazz, both being indigenous, emergent musics of the working classes, and both in danger of becoming corrupted by values imposed from the pop and high arts. He even considered moving to New Orleans and writing “a sort of musical dictionary of all the principal jazz breaks and riffs,” locating them on the commercial records on which they were first widely introduced, then connecting them to folk songs and ragtime music that were their original sources. This, he hoped, would be used to show how these elements were different in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York, and how jazz came to absorb and accommodate these differences in its development. But he had also witnessed both sides of the social and economic equation and had seen people with few resources having their own creations appropriated, reshaped, and turned into American popular culture by powerful forces with different cultural assumptions and predispositions. More than merely reflecting his personal taste, Lomax was making a judgment about inequality and the forces at work on the aesthetics of American peoples.

  In just a few years you get the amazing kind of swing from Kansas City with bigger orchestras. But those people were all playing basically unison. The unison principle had taken over from the polyvoiced principle. And it’s been that way ever since to the great detriment, I think, of the development of music.... I mean, New Orleans gave an incredible vision of new possibilities. And unfortunately the white world couldn’t handle them, and so the music went white in various ways until the blacks were then taking off from the whites based on the whites’ interpretation of the jazz, rather than from their own. And they thought that these old handkerchief heads down there in New Orleans were nothing, but they couldn’t hack that [music]. Nobody has hacked it since. Nobody. There’s nothing like it still. Nothing, nothing.

  CHAPTER 7

  Bohemian Folklorist

  In the fall of 1938, at the age of twenty-three, somewhere between recording Jelly Roll Morton and spending a few months collecting songs in the north of Michigan, Alan considered straying from the true path. He had just received a raise that brought his pay to $2,600 a year ($34,017 in current money), but once again even this modest success heightened his concern. He was on the verge of becoming the best-known folklorist in America, but self-doubt haunted him. Was he also on the way to turning into yet another one-dimensional bureaucrat? Was this what he wanted to do with his life, or only what his father wanted? Did he know enough to do this kind of work? So, after only a year on the job, he suggested to Spivacke that in order to continue, he needed to take graduate courses at Columbia University, the birthplace of American anthropology, where the faculty took seriously the cultures of all human societies and where he could learn the anthropological approach to music from Professor George Herzog, one of the first scholars to be called an ethnomusicologist. Once he was back in New York he could also take classes at NYU with Curt Sachs, a European musicologist who promoted the idea of creating archives of world music and whose theories attempted to take account of all the music and dance on earth.

  He asked the library to let him work only part-time while he began studying in the spring of 1939. In return, he offered an ambitious plan to record the folk music of New York, and while he was in the city that was home to the music industry he would begin “investigating the extent of American folk song items already recorded by commercial concerns” and create a discography. He would also complete the second volume of folk songs that he and his father were still working on with Ruth Crawford Seeger.

  Spivacke was convinced by Alan’s sense of mission and recommended to the library that he be allowed to go on half salary from February 1 to June 1; that he have access to a New York recording studio; and that he be given transportation costs and expenses to return to Washington once a month. To help cover what Alan estimated would be $250 for tuition and $600 for living expenses, the library would also ask the American Council of Learned Societies for a tuition grant. The council did eventually award him $500, but it did not arrive in time for him to pay his tuition bills until after the term was over. In the meantime, he applied for loans from various welfare agencies, and Spivacke lent him money on his own from time to time. Alan also got the occasional invitation to sing at parties in Washington for organizations like the Department of Labor and the Colorado State Society. He also performed for gatherings in the homes of senators, and since many of these events were covered by the newspapers, his name was soon recognized around the capital. Alan also sang for labor unions, at the social gatherings of government workers, and at cabarets and local bars; though he was often paid, he refused to call himself a professional singer and sometimes settled for drinks and food.

  Alan and Elizabeth moved to New York City at the beginning of February and were put up by friends at several different addresses before they found an apartment in the Village at 124 West 12th Street. While he waited for classes to begin at Columbia he worked full-time for the archive, meeting with representatives of Radio France and the BBC about lending them recordings from the archive for their radio shows. He also began negotiations with Goshen College in Indiana to record more of the Amish music that he and Elizabeth had recorded there the year before. (The Amish were initially resistant because they feared that these recordings would be played on the radio and would be laughed at by the outside world.)

  Within days of his arrival in the city Alan joined the widening circle of performers and playwrights who saw the arts as a key to political change, groups like the Theatre Arts Committee, which was formed in 1937 to raise money for the Republican cause in Spain. When he first approached them about working with them, they were in the process of adding musical performances to their schedule, and he became part of their first cabaret. It was held at the YMHA, and was important enough to warrant a feature in the New York Times:

  You’ll get some idea of what TAC would like to do by scanning this list of compositions and performers: “I Hear America Singing,” text by Walt Whitman, cantata setting by George Kleinsinger; Earl Robinson’s “Ballad for Americans,” words by John LaTouche, sung by Michael Loring and the American People’s Chorus; Henry Brant’s tone-poem, “The Marx Brothers—Three Faithful Portraits,” Morton Gould, composer; Alan Lomax, American balladeer; and the Clarence Profit Trio, in some jazz improvisations, or—to coin a word—swing.

  By the end of the year Alan was planning cabarets for TAC, scouting through Harlem with Lawrence Gellert in search of black singers, and doing lecture-performances at Café Society.

  At registration for the spring term at Columbia, Alan signed up for three anthropology classes: two with George Herzog, “Primitive Music” and “Phonetics and Technology,” and “Invention in Human Culture” with Gene Weltfish, a woman less known for her research in American Indian cultures than for her efforts on behalf of the rights of minorities and women—a commitment that later led to the loss of her job at Columbia after she refused to answer questions when called before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Alan also audited Curt Sachs’s class on “Primitive and Oriental Music” at New York University. Elizabeth had become very ill shortly after their move, with what may have been a breakdown, and required nursing that they could not afford. But despite his studies and the constant care that Elizabeth needed, by working overtime Alan made good on his promised projects for the library.

  He wanted to visit as many record companies as he could to hear what they had recorded on “race labels” (records aimed at African American buyers) and hillbilly recordings (the name the companies had given white country music), and to ask to have copies of the ones he selected given to the archive. This way he would develop a discography of the best American commercial recordings and organize them by artist, biographical information, title, geographical location, and type of music, “so that the basis would
be laid for a really intelligent study of American taste.”

  Alan first contacted John Hammond at Columbia Records, who assured him that he could get him everything he wanted. RCA also promised to help, and Alan wrote the library to tell them about his successes. This was not the way things were done at the library, however, and Harold Spivacke asked him to let them handle these negotiations: he had already received promises from officials much higher than Hammond at Columbia that they could obtain what they desired. Spivacke informed him that he had also broached the possibility of Alan’s producing reissues of commercial recordings for Columbia. But his instructions had come too late, and records were already beginning to arrive at the Library of Congress by the truckload. Spivacke begged Alan to at least listen to the records before he asked for them: there wasn’t enough help to unload the trucks, much less to process and store the records in the library. Alan then traveled by train up to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to the Columbia factory to go through their catalogs, and learned that the company had over twenty-four thousand masters of recordings of hillbilly and black music, but no copies of records to be listened to. Much of what he wanted to hear had already been scrapped anyway, he was told. Discouraged as he was, he nonetheless went ahead with the project and worked his way through the holdings of Decca, Vocalion, and Bluebird (the cheaper RCA label), and made plans to listen to the records in Hammond’s own collection and those of other New York City collectors.