by John Szwed
The incident made enough of an impression on Eleanor Roosevelt that she mentioned it years later in This I Remember:
One of the young men who had been asked to sing some folk songs had been reported to the FBI as a communist or Bolshevik and likely to do something dangerous. The charge was completely untrue and made by someone who wanted to be disagreeable, but when the FBI reported it to the secret service men they had to be true to their traditions and follow the tip through. When the young man came in after dinner he was “frisked” by our secret service men and then by the Scotland yard people, and apparently was so frightened he could hardly sing. I hoped fervently that he would not reach for his handkerchief during the performance.
The source of the trouble was a woman who had contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s field office in St. Louis in early June after she read about Alan’s upcoming White House appearance. She told them that he had been arrested while at Harvard for “making Communistic speeches”; that “he had lived with a Russian-born Communist while at Harvard,” “a Jewess”; he was now married to a member of the Communist Party; and that she had been told that Alan was overheard saying to his father at a family wedding in Dallas (“in effect”) that “I am just as much a Communist as I ever was—if not a stronger one, but don’t say anything about it for you will only get me into trouble.” On receiving the report, J. Edgar Hoover asked the Attorney General’s Office to determine if an investigation should be launched. When they failed to reply, Hoover asked again, and this time they took him seriously: the Bureau began a new series of investigations of Lomax that would continue for the next thirty years. Agents in Boston, Austin, Dallas, and Washington were put to work compiling files on his life, and the heads of Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Library of Congress were all contacted, along with the Lomax family’s neighbors in Austin and Washington and his coworkers at the Library of Congress. The FBI learned little beyond the fact that Alan was the “artistic” or “bohemian” type; that he collected hillbilly songs and cared little for his personal appearance; that he often took the side of the underdog, and once protested to the administration about the beating of a black man at the University of Texas; and that he sometimes brought undesirable-looking people into the archive. But no one they interviewed said he was a Communist.
There was not much that could top an appearance at the White House, but when Alan attended the Third American Writers’ Congress a week later—a forum for leftist intellectuals that Time labeled a Communist gathering, “a flock of well-shepherded sheep”—he managed to keep the excitement going. Following a talk by Edvard Benes̆, the exiled president of the recently overrun Czechoslovakia, he sang at a reception at Carnegie Hall where writers like Sylvia Townsend Warner, Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett, and Thomas Mann were gathered. The next day he spoke on a panel at the New School for Social Research that included the presidents of all three radio networks. But Alan could keep things in perspective, and when the chance to collect folk songs arose anywhere, he was ready. Seeing Langston Hughes, he pulled him away from the buffet table and asked him if he had anything for him. Hughes later sent him a number of texts, including “Dupree,” which he had heard in Cleveland. Alan put music to it and included it in the second volume of the Lomaxes’ ballads and folk song books, and he thanked Langston, saying that it just showed “who should be collecting Negro folklore.”
Unlike most folklorists of the time, Alan never hesitated to ask for help on musical questions. For a young man, an untrained musician, and an advocate of a music that most academics dismissed, he was nonetheless respected by many music scholars. Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that when the newly formed American Musicological Society brought together the world’s music authorities for its first International Congress in New York on September 1, there were performances of medieval music scheduled at the Cloisters, Handel at Juilliard, colonial and Federalist period music by Ralph Kirkpatrick at the Metropolitan Museum, a trip to the World’s Fair to see The Hot Mikado, a visit to Harlem “under the chaperonage of Wilder Hobson to experience American jazz in its natural habitat,” but also “an evening of ballad singing by Alan Lomax.” And just four months later, he hosted a segment of radio station WNYC’s first “Annual Festival of American Music,” a ten-day series that included composers Leonard Bernstein, Morton Gould, Henry Brant, Deems Taylor, Earl Robinson, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Wallingford Riegger, Elie Siegmeister, Vernon Duke, Paul Bowles, Roy Harris, and Marc Blitzstein.
By the early 1930s, radio had outgrown its novelty stage and developed the technology to reach across the country to every farmstead, rooming house, and mansion. There were those who grasped that it was the latest in a series of electronic inventions like the telegraph and the telephone that had the potential to knit people together, to create a country in synch with itself. They understood radio’s possibilities as an educational force, a powerful means of communicating information and culture. But most of the owners of the first radio networks saw their companies as extensions of the entertainment business, whose profits lay in providing what they thought people wanted to hear and what advertisers would support. It was not until 1934, when the Communications Act was passed and the Federal Communications Commission was created, that the networks began to fear that unless they improved the variety and quality of broadcasting they might become subject to governmental control. RCA hired conductor Arturo Toscanini to create a symphony orchestra, and the Columbia Broadcasting System began developing original radio dramas with writers like James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Archibald MacLeish, and Stephen Vincent Benét. Under this government-inspired competition, radio rapidly matured into a medium with distinct values and forms and its own auteurs. Orson Welles, for example, came into radio from the theater, and by 1938 his ensemble company was appearing weekly on CBS as The Mercury Theatre on the Air, performing adaptations of literary classics such as The Count of Monte Cristo. Their notorious production of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds interwove the new conventions and genres of radio so effectively that they convinced a large part of the audience that an invasion from outer space was under way. Norman Corwin, a writer and director on the same network, was so innovative that he seemed to be creating new directions for radio every week: dramas were built around famous poems or songs (Corwin had already shaped “Ballad for Americans” into a play starring Paul Robeson), and dramatic programs were written that marked news events, such as the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish civil war, almost as quickly as they happened.
President Roosevelt pointed the way for radio to become a national medium by using it to appeal for unity to a nation that was becoming increasingly anxious in the face of world events and the instability of the American economy. His Fireside Chats with the public began with a talk on the banking crisis at the end of his first week in office, March 12, 1933, and continued throughout his years as president. The role he assumed on his program was a mix of kindly patriarch and the nation’s teacher. When letters to the president began to flood the White House in response, radio began to be viewed with a new sense of its power and purpose.
In the same spirit, the Library of Congress attempted to convince radio networks to program folk music by demonstrating to them the uses that the BBC and Radio France were already making of American folk music they had borrowed from the archives. Then, during a recording session in May, Alan was approached (“when I was very tired, broke, and dirty”) by Davidson Taylor, the supervisor of the CBS Workshop, the series that initiated some of the most experimental programming on radio with broadcasts of The War of the Worlds and some of composer John Cage’s first performances. Taylor offered him a chance to create a season of twenty-five weekly programs of American folk music for CBS’s American School of the Air as part of a series of shows that had been developed between CBS and the Board of Education of New York City. It would be the most costly production that radio had ever attempted, with four scriptwriters, ten actors, five producers,
three commentators, a fifty-piece symphony orchestra, singers, educational directors, engineers, and announcers.
Alan had never been particularly interested in radio, thinking it at best a waste of time and at worst a tool with the potential for fascistic manipulation. But Nick Ray saw its theatrical possibilities and its ability to quickly connect with a large audience, and he encouraged Lomax to listen to what Norman Corwin’s radio documentaries were accomplishing:
I thought this was a joke. I didn’t know that anybody could be seriously interested in working on the radio, a pile of crap. Then I heard Corwin’s broadcasts and I did a flip, I realized that radio was a great art of the time, there was a way to do it quick and straight.... I took the job, partly because Nick encouraged me and said it would be an opportunity. He was always a good writer, he had a sense of theater and drama, so it was with his encouragement that I learned how to write a script.
CBS accepted Alan’s outline of programs, and they signed him for the next season, from October to May. He was to be the principal singer, on-air commentator, and the adviser on the script for a program that would reach 120,000 classrooms across the country. Each week, he would present a new musical and social theme: British ballads in America, the gold rush, love songs, lumberjacks, railroads, sailors, the American Negro, the blues. This was exactly the use of the archive that the library had envisioned: the music it had recorded and collected would be the means of introducing all of America to its many parts and regions, while at the same time communicating the government’s interest in the vernacular arts of the country. But CBS had an even bigger idea. Alan would sing most of the songs, and the network would commission a series of classical composers to use one or two songs as the basis for new compositions to be premiered on each program—the folk supplying the raw material of art, the popular media helping it reach a larger audience, and the serious artists developing and refining it. That was how culture was supposed to operate in the eyes of the high modernists of the times, and out-of-work composers rose to the occasion. Ruth Crawford Seeger and Charles Seeger wrote compositions, as did Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Henry Brant, Ross Lee Finney, William Grant Still, Nathaniel Dett, Ferde Grofé, and others, each for a $400 commission. For a song like “Rissolty, Rossolty,” Aunt Molly Jackson would sing a Kentucky version:
Married me a wife in the month of June,
Rissolty, rossolty, row, row, row,
I carried her home in a silver spoon,
Hey, gee-wallity, nickety-nollity, rest of your quality,
Nickety, nackety, now, now, now.
Then Ruth Crawford Seeger’s orchestral fantasy on the song would follow, after which Aunt Molly and Lomax would discuss a woman’s life and work in the mountains.
Incredible as the opportunity was for him, Alan was uneasy with the concept: for one thing, he thought it was old hat, the sort of thing that George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman had tried to do in the twenties, an idea that people who didn’t appreciate the importance of folk songs would come up with. He recounted the behavior of one of the composers—Aaron Copland (though not identified in Lomax’s text)—when he was face-to-face with the music:
I recall the day I took all our best field recordings of “John Henry” to one of our top-ranking composers, a very bright and busy man who genuinely thought he liked folk songs. I played him all sorts of variants of “John Henry,” exciting enough to make a modern folk fan climb the walls. But as soon as my singer would finish a stanza or so, the composer would say, “Fine. Now let’s hear the next tune.” It took him about a half-hour to learn all that “John Henry,” our finest ballad, had to say to him, and I departed with my treasured records. Not sure whether I was more impressed by this facility, or angry because he had never really listened to “John Henry.”
When his piece was played on the air, I was unsure no longer. My composer friend had written the tunes down accurately, but his composition spoke for the Paris of Nadia Boulanger, and not for the wild land and the heart-torn people who had made the song. The spirit and the emotion of “John Henry” shone nowhere in this score because he had never heard, much less experienced them. And this same pattern held true for all the folk symphonic suites for twenty boring weeks.
Even the format of the show bothered Alan, for it seemed to him that the producers had decided on it without really knowing him or what he could do:
They didn’t even listen to me sing. They just said, “Come on and start the program; here is a symphony orchestra.” They didn’t even know if I could carry a tune or not. They should not, with all of the American school children as their audience every morning at 9:30, present somebody that they didn’t even audition just because he happened to have a job in folklore.
The whole thing was ridiculous so I took this job only on the basis that I could have guests on the program and could pay them.
“I specified that I could have so and so many guests who would be paid such and such fees and that the Golden Gate Quartet ... would be hired as the network’s staff quartet,” Lomax wrote. The Golden Gates were singers from Norfolk, Virginia, who worked on local radio in Charlotte and had recorded religious jubilees and secular pop songs for RCA Bluebird in 1937. John Hammond put them in his second “Spirituals to Swing” concert in December 1939, and shortly afterward they appeared at Café Society in New York. They were polished performers with a far smoother sound than most folk quartets, and Alan was able to work them into his radio shows as both singers and actors. This nationwide exposure he gave them led to their being invited to perform on the broadcast of Roosevelt’s inauguration ceremony in 1941, then to make films in Hollywood and tour internationally.
Burl Ives was another of the singers that Alan added to the show, an ex-football player and fraternity boy from Illinois who had dropped out of college, bummed his way across the country singing and doing odd jobs, and who, Alan liked to say, had been sleeping in Central Park since he came to New York. All true, but he had also been studying at Juilliard and NYU, working Greenwich Village clubs, playing small parts in Broadway shows, and, just before Alan’s CBS series began, appearing in a role written for him in Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse. By some people’s standards Ives was not an authentic folksinger (one singer accused him of having been “raised in lace drawers”), but Alan thought he could present a folk song convincingly. Burl turned out to be so popular that a year later he was given his own CBS program, The Wayfaring Stranger, which was named after a song taught to him by Alan. Lomax was so convinced of his potential that he gave him songs from the yet-to-be-released Our Singing Country, making John Lomax furious. As he had done with Lead Belly, Alan helped Burl build a song repertoire in the same sprit that his father and he had created their folk song anthologies, and in the long run his genial manner and taste in songs helped widen the repertoire and style of popular music by adding folk songs to it.
With Ives from the Midwest, the Golden Gates from the Eastern Shore, Aunt Molly from the Kentucky mountains, Lead Belly from Louisiana, Pete Seeger as the young New Englander with the five-string banjo, and himself from Texas, Alan had the beginnings of a repertory company that could cover most of American folk music. “We cut past the fancy ballads. What we had were the songs of occupations, the songs of women, the songs of blacks, the songs of the prisons and we went into every school in the country.”
CBS Pix, the network’s weekly press release, began announcing Alan’s show in the middle of August: “Lomax, 24-year-old assistant in charge of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, explains the purpose is to show that America has an authentic music lore which should be as important and exciting to students as the works of the great masters.” A large manual was prepared by Alan and CBS to guide teachers using the program in the classes, and gave them lesson plans and assignments. The program was aimed at children from ten to seventeen, and listeners would be encouraged to make up verses of their own to go with the songs, or to send in any folk songs they knew. No reco
rds would be used, and Alan or his guests would sing the songs.
Lomax asked the library for two days a week unpaid leave in order to travel back and forth to New York City. The library would then pay him $30 a week and CBS between $100 and $150, depending on what the show required that week, for a total annual income of about $4,685 ($65,081 in contemporary dollars)—more money than he had ever seen, but it had to cover travel and housing expenses while he stayed in New York, and pay various helpers along the way. After a nervous start at rehearsals during the first week, he got a hotel room in the Village and stayed in the city for seven days. He had woefully underestimated the amount of work involved. Over the last few years he had begun to learn how to write scripts, and he was mastering the techniques of interviewing and recording, so he thought he knew what had to be done. But now here he was, standing alone, audibly nervous in front of a microphone with his guitar in the middle of a huge studio before the Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bernard Herrmann.
