by John Szwed
At the RCA plant in Camden, New Jersey, he talked to special products supervisor R. P. Wetherald and to Frank Walker, who when he was at Gennett Records was one of the first people to record hillbilly music. What Alan found in their Bluebird catalog of hillbilly music and blues was far richer than he expected. Many of the songs on these records were in whole or part the very tunes he and his father had collected in the field, or at least showed the stylistic influence of those field recordings. Far from being corrupted by commerce, many of them seemed quite fresh. He was also surprised to find a number of songs of open protest, apparently recorded without the constraints or censorship of commercial interests.
He met with Jack Kapp and Art Satherley, the hillbilly producers at Decca, a new company that was building a large catalog of old and new ethnic and southern musics. He also talked with J. Mayo “Ink” Williams, the pioneering black producer of race recordings who had worked for Paramount Records. No folklorist before him had ever taken commercially recorded music this seriously: “My opinion is that the commercial recording companies have done a broader and more interesting job of recording American folk music than the folklorists and that every single item of recorded American rural, race, and popular material that they have in their current lists and plan to release in the future should be in our files.”
Not satisfied simply to collect recordings, Alan wanted to take up Spivacke’s suggestion of producing his own collections of reissued recordings. He had already discussed the prospect with Columbia, and Hammond and he were planning to do a reissue of the late Robert Johnson’s music, and were considering new recordings with Jelly Roll Morton. When he approached the Musicraft Record Company to look at their catalog, he also proposed producing albums by Aunt Molly Jackson and Lead Belly. Next, he negotiated with Wetherald at RCA for his father to produce a set of older cowboy songs for commercial release, and for him to reissue three sets of older RCA Bluebird recordings. One of them was to be an album of square dance music, as there was something of a fad for it at that moment, especially in New England and New York City. Alan and Charles Seeger were to pick the records, but when they heard what was available in the catalog they were disappointed, and Alan instead suggested that RCA should record new square dances with some of the groups they already had under contract, with callers added. The Musicians Union, however, had recently blocked the recording of any singers and musicians who were not union members—and none of RCA’s cowboy singers were—and the company had already canceled the usual recording expeditions they had been running into the South.
Alan’s projects in New York sometimes became entangled. RCA began to use him as their expert to tell them which copyrighted folk songs were actually old songs that should be in the public domain, and therefore free for them to use. This meant that he would have to pore through songbooks and listen to records to track down the words and melodies of pieces like “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble,” copyrighted in 1902, only to discover that its music was actually drawn from the melody of an old English song, “The Ram of Darby.” What must have seemed a simple matter to Alan quickly became more complex when he sent the results to RCA. The company wanted to see more than his opinions: they asked for copies of song texts and recordings to see for themselves that the songs were the same. They also asked him to judge the merits of conflicting stories told by musicians about who wrote what, and soon they were needing more and more versions and better evidence. It was a relationship in which he was expected to act as an intellectual property attorney at the same time that he wanted the company to learn to think like a folklorist.
While rummaging through record stores, Alan stumbled onto a large stash of leftover Paramount recordings that was something of a hidden museum of rural culture from 1922 to 1932—white country performers like Wilmer Watts and the Lonely Eagles, the Fruit Jar Guzzlers, the Blue Ridge Highballers, Cajun singers Soileau and Robin, and black songsters and bluesmen James “Boodle It” Wiggins, Bumble Bee Slim, and Sweet Papa Stovepipe—recordings whose scarcity and antique sonority would one day make them the most prized discs among collectors. Alan asked Spivacke if he could buy 225 of them at fifteen cents each. After this find, he wanted to go out to the Port Washington, Wisconsin, furniture factory where Paramount records were pressed to see if there might still be some more stored there.
It didn’t take him long to figure out that it would take a good part of a lifetime to listen to all of the rural recordings, as he had learned that at least seventy-six recording companies had at one time or another operated in the United States. So with the small budget he had, he hired his sister Bess (then in her first year at Bryn Mawr) and Charles Seeger’s nineteen-year-old son, Peter, to help him.
Alan had first met Pete in 1936, the year after Charles moved his family to Washington. He was then seventeen, a senior at Avon Old Farms, a Connecticut prep school modeled on a mixture of Eton and social consciousness that encouraged work for the poor and needy. (“It’s where I leaned to use an axe,” Pete would proudly exclaim.) He went on to Harvard, like all the men in his family, but with the goal of becoming a journalist. By the spring of 1938 he left the school without taking his exams and headed for New York, where his dreams of a career as a newspaperman were quickly dashed by his lack of experience. But he still managed to survive in the city by sweeping up trash at the World’s Fair or singing and playing for dances at the Dalton School and for Margot Mayo’s folk dance company. (Mayo was a Texan who pioneered folk music in New York and spearheaded the revival of folk dancing and square dancing there in the 1940s.) Alan became Pete’s guide to the city, enthusiastically introducing him to Aunt Molly, Lead Belly, and the rest of the folk crowd. (“When we were walking around New York, Alan would sometimes break out in a ballad at full volume. One day on Park Avenue he just started singing Lead Belly’s ‘Julie Ann Johnson.’ At the top of his voice!”)
Pete began working for Alan in 1939: “John Hammond told Alan that they were about to throw out a lot of records at the Columbia plant in Bridgeport, so he went up there and filled a car trunk with hundreds of them. He did the same with the Decca and RCA recordings. He told me to listen to them, set aside the schmaltz, and pick out the best.” Then in the fall of 1939 Alan asked Pete to come to Washington with him, where for fifteen dollars a week he would be his assistant and learn about folk music by cataloging and transcribing songs, and continuing the quest to find the best commercial country records. “I picked out about one in ten,” Pete said. “He wanted me to listen to banjo pieces such as those by Uncle Dave Macon.... Alan was almost completely deaf in his left ear, from an ear infection, and it only made him want to listen harder.”
When she could get away from school, Bess also helped out. She recalled going with Alan to a small record company in New Jersey and setting to work in a room filled floor to ceiling with record masters. In a battle against the destructiveness of commercial culture, they had twenty-four hours to hear them all, as the company was destroying the records and melting down the plates used to press them. “We sat there in two chairs with a phonograph and listened to country, race records, anything promising. Alan had to have the best, and nothing but the best. He asked my opinion, and when we both decided to reject a recording, he dramatically sailed it out the window and down an air shaft.”
Alan’s long trek through the lists of commercial country and blues recordings was finally completed, or completed as far as he could go at the time, and it would be published as a “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records” in the Report of the Committee of the Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music in September 1940, and then made available in free mimeographed copies. Of the some three thousand records he had listened to, he selected 350, and those he listened to closely, classifying his choices in an elaborate system of styles (“hill billy in quality,” “hill billy with jazz,” “modern,” “traditional,” “revival,” “Holiness”) and importance (“representative,” “fine,” “very fine,” “important,” and �
��remarkable”). His very small list of “remarkable” recordings included Sleepy John Estes’s “Diving Duck Blues” and “Milk Cow Blues,” Blind Roosevelt Graves and Brother’s “I’ll Be Rested” and “Woke Up This Mornin,” Memphis Minnie’s “I’m Talkin’ About You,” Elijah Jones’s “Katy Fly” and “Mean Acting Mama,” Robert Johnson’s “Kind Hearted Woman,” and J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers’ “Back to Johnson City,” all of which were African American performances except for Mainer’s, but even that was a blues. What he found gave him hope for the future of American music:
But I have come away from this listening experience with the certainty that American music, while certain folklore specialists have been mourning its decline, has been growing in new directions to compete with “thick” commercial music, and that it is today in its most “distorted” form in a healthier condition, roving across the radio stations and recording studios, than it has been or ever will be in the notebooks of collectors. No better indication of this can be found in the scores of contemporary ballads and songs, some of them songs of protest, that can be found on this list.
On March 5, Lead Belly fought over Martha with an acquaintance, Henry Burgess, and slashed him repeatedly with a razor. Lead Belly insisted that he was defending her, but the police had their doubts, and he was arrested and placed on Rikers Island, with the bond set at $1,000. He called Alan for help, and Lomax found a bail bondsman who accepted fifty dollars to get him out, and then tried unsuccessfully to get the victim to drop his charges. Alan and Barnicle held benefits at her New York apartment to hire a lawyer for Lead Belly and to find money to support his wife. While trying to find a recording session for Jelly Roll, Alan also got Lead Belly a contract for a record date with Musicraft, a label created to record baroque and early organ music, but whose owner, attorney Samuel Pruner, was also recording the folk music of blacks and soon would become one of the early promoters of bebop. The advance for the recordings went straight “from Huddie’s hand to the lawyer’s pocket,” Alan said.
Lead Belly came to trial on May 4 at a general sessions court, where the charge was lowered from felonious assault to third-degree assault, and the jury voted to convict him. Sentencing was delayed for a few days while the judge examined his prior prison record, and during the wait, Lead Belly walked into a store where a robbery was under way, overpowered the gunman, and held him until the police arrived. His actions got him a lighter sentence, less than a year on Rikers Island, and his “good time” there got his stay shortened to eight months.
Through it all, Alan fell behind with his studies, and at the end of the term was given credit for “attendance only” and dropped out of Columbia graduate school. Spivacke hadn’t heard from him for weeks, and repeatedly asked him for news of what he had been doing for the library, reminding him that he was due to come back to work full-time on June 1. Though Alan did not immediately tell Spivacke about Lead Belly and the efforts he had made on his behalf, nor even about leaving Columbia, his work for the library took up so much time that he had little left in which to file reports. He routinely answered mail forwarded from the archive, met with foreign scholars when they visited New York, and advised the National Progressive Education Association on their American regionalism research project, even speaking at their annual meeting in New York City. And he was receiving so many requests to speak on American folklore that he was passing many of them on to Lawrence Gellert and Pete Seeger.
Alan had also begun planning for what he would do when he went back to the archive full-time. There was still more work to be done with Mrs. Seeger on the new folk song book. He corresponded with Vermont folk song collector Helen Hartness Flanders about joining her in collecting in her state, and applied to the Ford Foundation for support. Several trips to Vermont were scheduled for collecting, spread over several different weeks. He also wanted to go back to Michigan to record a lumberjack singer he had missed on the previous trip. Maybe there would also be room for a visit to the Southwest, now paying more attention to the people’s lives and the communities in which he and his father had recorded songs. If there was any time left over, he’d spend a week or so with cowboy singers, maybe go into Mexico to see what there was to be done there. He wrote Spivacke with these suggestions, adding that he thought he ought now to begin making recordings good enough to serve as record masters, by using only one side of each disc so as to better preserve the surfaces. Spivacke was astonished by Lomax’s ambitious plans and replied that “for the life of me I don’t see how you can possibly do all of that in less than a year.... Personally, I shall be very satisfied if you succeed in completing a good New England trip this summer.”
But at the same time Spivacke himself had been pushing Alan to widen his efforts, urging him to use his connection to John Hammond to become a writer and producer for Columbia Records, even before he left for New York. And in May, Hammond did offer him a contract to anthologize some of the early folk recordings on commercial records owned by Columbia, with the promise that if they did well he could go on to do other albums. But Alan and Hammond had become wary of each other, and Alan was not sure that the work would go so smoothly: “[Hammond] does not completely trust me in the matter of Negro material, but that he’ll leave the hill-billy things completely up to me—he’s a very impudent young lad, indeed.”
In May, Lomax went over to Staten Island to Sailor’s Snug Harbor, the retired seamen’s home, for two days of recording eighty-two-year-old Captain Dick Maitland singing sea chanteys. The captain’s songs turned out to be far older than those already in print, and Alan got him to talk on the recordings about how those songs were used aboard ships of the Black Ball Line and other vessels. He once again recorded Aunt Molly Jackson, this time for a talking and singing biography that took up sixty-one records. As with the Jelly Roll Morton recordings, it went beyond biography to become an ethnography of songs sung in the southern mountains, with her own thoughts about what they meant. Alan was now managing to pay the singers and performers he recorded, a practice the library had not been willing to allow on a regular basis before, and something that no other folklorist was doing.
“As you probably know by the papers,” Alan wrote to Spivacke in late May, “I’ve been asked to play banjo for the King and Queen next week in a very august assembly of performers. Will Dr. Putnam permit it or not?” Eleanor Roosevelt was planning an evening of entertainment at the White House for the visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England, an event she hoped might encourage solidarity between isolationist American and war-threatened Great Britain. Recalling previous performances of folk music put on by the WPA, Mrs. Roosevelt asked their staff to organize the entertainment for the June 8 visit. It was to be a memorable occasion, and would be recorded, with only three copies to be made, to be placed in presentation folders for the king and queen, the White House, and the WPA archives. Charles Seeger was put in charge, and he quickly organized an evening that must have seemed like something out of the court of Louis XIV, an urban pastoral scene, with the Washington elite and British royalty encountering the likes of the Coon Creek Girls from the Renfro Valley Barn Dance radio show in Cincinnati, Nell Hunter and the North Carolina Spiritual Singers, Sam Love Queen’s Soco Gap Cherokee Indian square dancers (using steps they had learned from many sources, including black dancers), banjoist Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and a cowboy singer. When Seeger couldn’t find a cowboy who could sing, he asked Alan if he would perform some of the songs from his father’s collection. But then the program was tinkered with by what Seeger called “the committee who is always hanging around to manage things in the White House [and who] managed to filter in some things that were out of key,” namely pop and opera singers Kate Smith, Marian Anderson, and Lawrence Tibbett.
The officials at the Library of Congress were thrilled to have one of their own staff appear at the White House, though Harold Spivacke was worried about Alan’s casual attitude toward the occasion: “I should like you to devote all your energies towards this
for the next week. You will have to ‘open cold’ and must therefore be thoroughly rehearsed.... I want you to go over big, very big.” And according to the Dallas News, rehearsing was just what he was doing, in front of a reporter in his apartment in Greenwich Village a day later:
Young Alan Lomax threw back his head, thrust his fingers fast across the face of his blood-red guitar and sang a low, throaty lament.... This was Saturday, in New York City. But as he strummed along, his voice rising in that old song of men who lived in a day that has gone now, you couldn’t hear the subway anymore. You could hear the wind waving the Johnson grass. You could see, not the bright shabbiness of The Village, but the blue black of a slow dusk.... “I’m no singer. I don’t claim to be. I hope it goes well, though.”
When the evening arrived, Alan was thinking about all those singers who had asked him to let them send a message to the president or Mrs. Roosevelt, messages he sometimes recorded, sometimes wrote out as letters for them. It was how he saw himself on his best days, as the people’s messenger. And now here he was in the White House, on the first hot evening of the season, sweating in his borrowed tuxedo in a small dressing room downstairs from the ballroom and nervously fingering the few chords he would need for “The Old Chisholm Trail” and “Git Along, Little Dogies.” It was a thrilling but daunting evening for a twenty-four-year-old, sitting at the edge of the source of power, the First Lady praising the performers, the king and queen of England looking small and a little faint in the D.C. heat, a grinning Vice President Jack Nance Garner with his fiddle under his chair, ready to join in with some Texas tunes if the opportunity arose, and five hundred guests. The only problem was, everywhere Alan went in the White House, people were bumping into him and then begging his forgiveness. A polite bunch, he thought, but awfully clumsy. It was only when he walked upstairs from the improvised green room that he understood what was happening: two men—one coming from behind, the other descending toward him—both collided with him at the same moment, then apologized, all the while putting their hands on him. “They told me later that some woman who said she was my aunt had warned the FBI that her crazy nephew was going to blow up the building.” The usual protocol was of little help in dealing with a guest who might also be a terrorist.
