by John Szwed
The concert was in three parts: the first was “Negro Spirituals,” with the Golden Gate Quartet opening with “Freedom,” a song that would echo into the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The second part, “Blues and Ballads,” presented songs like “How Long Has That Evening Train Been Gone?” and “Silicosis Blues” by Josh White, and was interspersed with Sterling Brown talking about racial injustice, under the rather bland rubrics of “What are the Blues?” and “Social Song.” The evening’s last section was “Reels and Work Songs,” with Lomax commenting on juba dancing, Brer Rabbit, and railroad work songs. But just before he introduced the last song on the program, the Golden Gates’ “Rock My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham,” Alan shifted into elegiac mode, nurtured perhaps not so much by his politics as by what he had seen and heard over those countless miles he had traveled and in those many churches in which he had sat quietly and listened to preachers while he recorded them:
I hope you will be ready now to listen to Negro songs with different ears. These songs are full of love for people, they are lonely for people and they are full of hunger for gentleness and kindness in this world. These songs rose up out of slavery, out of misery. They jumped up out of levee camps, they sprang from turpentine camps and back alleys. The people became happy and made them up in churches; the people “got high” and made them up at dances; they rose up out of tough people and good people. Some of these people were so mad that they could kill you as soon as look at you and, when some of these people had the quiet blues, they were so quiet you could hear them think for miles around. Some of these people could look past poverty and misery, they could look clear through the darkness and despair and ignorance and see something on the other side. The old folks said, “On the Other Side of Jordan.” These songs rose up out of these people without their having to think about it, because they were lonesome for more kindness and goodness and richness than they could find in life right where they were.
“Alan was pretty hard-hitting about what the Negro had to bear in the South,” Pete Seeger recalled. “Old John A. [Lomax] was in the audience, getting madder and madder. After the concert, he roared up to Alan, and as their argument grew louder, the shouts were echoing down the corridors. ‘You have disgraced the South,’ John A. was bellowing, shaking his fist.” It was an event that John Lomax would not soon forget, and even a year later he was still complaining about Sterling Brown’s account that evening of the death of the great blues singer Bessie Smith, who Brown said—doubtlessly quoting a published secondhand account by John Hammond—had been refused treatment at a “white hospital” after a serious automobile accident in Mississippi, and was allowed to die without medical care. John doubted the story, and wrote letters to various doctors and officials until he confirmed that it was indeed false: Bessie Smith had been attended to by a white doctor passing by the accident and was taken to a whites-only hospital, where she was treated but died from loss of blood. To John what it came down to was that a false narrative had been created that told of the brutal coldness of whites toward their black neighbors, a story too poignant to correct even when the facts were known. This he was not going to tolerate from Alan, Brown, or anyone else. Alan sent Sterling Brown copies of the documents that his father had collected, along with a letter that said his father was “infuriated” by Brown’s story. Alan and Brown apparently met to talk about it. But even fifty years later, Alan and almost everyone else was still telling the same story of Bessie Smith’s death as an example of racism and neglect in the old South.
At the beginning of 1941 the White House called on MacLeish to organize an evening of folk music in tribute to the troops in the armed services. Alan was sent to talk with Mrs. Roosevelt, and together they quickly organized “A Program of American Songs for American Soldiers” for the East Room of the White House on February 17, with Alan as master of ceremonies and including regulars from Back Where I Come From like the Golden Gate Quartet, Josh White, and Burl Ives. Since Alan knew that the president was fond of sailing, he recruited retired seaman J. M. “Sailor Dan” Hunt to open the program by singing sea chanteys unaccompanied. Hunt started strong and filled the room with “When Jones’ Ale was New,” but when he reached the climax of the first verse he forgot the words. “By that time,” Alan said, “the Golden Gate Quartet had fallen into rhythm with him, and Burl Ives and the rest of us were all tapping time, until he came in with the missing line, and then the audience burst into applause. It was the whole show.... He was obviously an old guy, and he was trying. That melted the hearts of the admirals and the colonels. For he was one of them.”
Wade Mainer and his band followed, playing Appalachian music, Burl Ives sang ballads and music from the pioneer traditions, Josh White played the blues, the Golden Gates performed black sacred music. Finally, a group of black and white recruits that Alan had found in nearby boot camps sang hillbilly and religious songs to wrap up the evening. The guests were a who’s who of Washington, including the secretaries of the cabinet and the heads of all of the military. The printed program included words to the songs, and by the end they were all joining in. The day after, Mrs. Roosevelt chatted happily about the evening in her column in the Washington Daily News, Time magazine stressed the interracial nature of the performances, and Katherine Graham wrote the evening up for the Washington Post, with a large photo of Alan accompanying the article. In Washington terms, there were few bigger social events.
The next day MacLeish asked Alan to prepare a memo for him to send to the heads of the armed forces on using folk music to boost morale. The only branch of the military that responded was the air force, which instituted a program to encourage music-making. Throughout the war its bands and choirs were exceptional, and it built up a collection of songs and recordings from all over the world for its troops to sing.
With the war in Europe intensifying, new divisions of the U.S. government were put in place, and plans were being made for shifting national policy to what seemed inevitable. Archibald MacLeish asked Lomax for suggestions on how they could find help in Washington when they began losing personnel to the draft. His response was that of any archivist—a consideration how they might best protect the collection—and he requested that the library make duplicates of all its recordings and folk song manuscripts and then move them to some secure location to preserve them in case of an attack. When MacLeish told him that they had been offered the services of the Music Project of the WPA, Alan asked that Sidney Robertson of that unit might work with them on some joint projects. Alan had heard of her extraordinary background: she had studied with Carl Jung, Ernst Bloch, and Henry Cowell, worked as an assistant to Charles Seeger in the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration, trained as a folklorist in the field with John Lomax and Frank C. Brown, and had carried out her own large-scale recording surveys in Wisconsin and California. (It was Robertson’s collecting in Wisconsin that had originally inspired Alan to work there in 1938.) At the moment she was working to get Henry Cowell pardoned from prison in California where he had been arrested on a “morals charge” for homosexuality and in a few months would marry him. Alan thought that she could help complete some of the checklists and bibliographical work that the archive was developing.
Robertson was familiar with the hard work involved in folk song collecting, but she was still amazed at Lomax’s commitment and energy. “He’d get so excited about a project that it became the only thing that existed. And we’d find ourselves caught up in his drive. He was once putting on a concert in the Library; and as usual, he was staging it, fussing with the lights, checking the recording equipment, changing the position of the chairs. Archibald MacLeish, head of the library, walked in and Alan yelled over his shoulder, ‘Archie, bring that chair over here, will you?’ Mr. MacLeish automatically walked across the room and brought him the chair.” Alan’s friend the anthropologist Margaret Mead said he was like “royalty in action.”
Just as Macmillan Press was preparing to finally publish American Balla
ds and Folk Songs, Vol. 2, a horde of new problems surfaced. Edward B. Marks Corporation was threatening to sue the Lomaxes over their use of “Allá en el Rancho Grande” in the first volume of their folk song book. Though they had gotten the song from J. Frank Dobie, who confirmed that it was “traditional,” there was enough legal activity circling around it that Macmillan insisted that John go back and check the copyright status of every song in the new book. Next, the publishers announced that because manufacturing costs had risen, they were going to have to raise the price of the book to a prohibitive level unless the Lomaxes agreed to a reduction in their royalties. Then, at the last minute, the book’s title was changed by the editor, retaining the old title as a subtitle. Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads, “collected and compiled” by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, with Ruth Crawford Seeger, “Music Editor,” was published in November 1941, with an introduction by Archibald MacLeish that praised the Lomaxes for their work in building the archive and developing the nation’s awareness of the importance of its own folk music.The criticisms of the first volume had now been addressed with a vengeance: this time they sought the best versions of the songs they chose, and minimized their previous practice of editing together different variants into composite songs. The music was no longer arranged to be sung with piano accompaniment but was transcribed to stay as close to the source’s style as possible, making each song less a freestanding artifact than an opportunity to witness a singer’s unique aesthetic at work. The songs were threaded together with comments from the singers, most often Aunt Molly Jackson.
In the same year that literary critic John Crowe Ransom published The New Criticism—which announced the arrival of a school of criticism that drew a hard line between high and popular art and stressed the unity, independence, and purity of a written text from the life, politics, and intentions of the author and the culture within which it emerged—the Lomaxes had produced a songbook with extensive biographical notes about the singer or the composer, with Aunt Molly Jackson acting as Virgil, to guide the reader through another world of meaning and beauty. The book itself argued for understanding folk art as Art: complex, varied, rich in detail, and full of nuance. John and Alan made no attempt to find the oldest or purest versions, and even used songs that had been turned into commercial recordings (“Kitty Kitty Casket,” for example, an Alabama children’s song that had already reached the public by means of Ella Fitzgerald’s 1938 hit recording of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket”). The Lomaxes were saying that folk songs were not artifacts of the past and a subject for historical study, but still alive, and even an important part of modernity. (When Aaron Copland borrowed Ruth Seeger’s transcription of Salyorsville, Kentucky, fiddler W. H. Stepp’s tune “Bonaparte’s Retreat” for “Hoedown” in his ballet Rodeo, it was only one of the first of a series of vindications of the Lomaxes’ work.)
Despite the friction between Woody Guthrie and Nick Ray, Alan remained close to Woody, and tried to help him whenever he could, passing on to him opportunities to perform and write. When the director of the Information Division of the Bonneville Power Administration in 1941 asked for a recommendation of a folksinger for a film project, Alan knew Guthrie was the one they should have. Bonneville Power was building the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in the state of Washington and wanted to document the project on film, in part to work against the northeastern power companies by convincing people to vote in favor of rural electrification. Having seen Pare Lorentz’s celebrated documentary The River, which used bits of folk songs on its soundtrack, it was eager to use a folksinger as the narrator for the film. Woody was signed on to the project for a month, and he drove along the river south from Washington State to Oregon and the Pacific Ocean, writing twenty-six songs in twenty-six days. Some of them, like “Pastures of Plenty” and “Roll On, Columbia” (based on the melody of “Goodnight Irene”), became standards for folksingers for years to come, with lines rich in imagery and poetry that would stand up with the best (“In the misty crystal glitter of the wild and windward spray ...”).
Alan’s talk at the Thirteenth Amendment celebration at the Library of Congress caught the attention of black intellectuals and educators, and just as 1941 began he was invited by Horace Mann Bond, the president of the Fort Valley State College of Georgia, to come to the school’s folk festival to record the performers and be a judge in the musical competition. Bond, despite being an advocate of Booker T. Washington’s no-nonsense black vocational pedagogy (with no time for the arts—too impractical, and maybe too emotional as well), nonetheless promoted the folk festival as a grassroots event in which locals would not be on display but would feel at home. At the same time, it would be a celebration of the arts and culture of working people. This was an idea that was not always appreciated by black music teachers, many of whom thought such music was better left behind in the fields, so Bond sought the help and approval of sympathetic outsiders such as W. C. Handy, who had been a guest the previous year at the first festival. Alan was unable to go, but he recommended to Bond that he invite Sterling Brown, Charles Seeger, Howard Odum, Zora Neale Hurston, his father, and others to be judges for the contests. The festival was an enormous success, winning the praise of the likes of composer William Grant Still, Langston Hughes, and professors of music at Tuskegee and Spelman colleges.
A few weeks later the president of Fisk University in Nashville, the most distinguished black university in the South, invited Alan, Sterling Brown, Josh White, and the Golden Gate Quartet to come to the school on April 29 to repeat their Library of Congress concert as part of the celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the school’s founding. Over the previous two years, the Library of Congress music staff and the head of the music department at Fisk had been discussing some kind of joint project on African American music, and this event was a first step in that direction. The day after the performance, Thomas E. Jones, the president of Fisk, offered Alan a one- to two-year appointment at the university “to make Fisk the center for folk song collecting for the Negro in the South.” Though he declined the offer, Alan proposed that they talk further, and suggested that if Fisk wanted to develop a folklore center, President Jones might encourage the research being done by their own composer and folk song collector, Professor John Work III. (Work’s father, John Wesley Work Jr., was one of the first serious collectors of African American folk songs, and was himself a former professor at Fisk.) Lomax suggested that the university ought to have Work’s recording machine repaired and that they lend him a car to continue his travels to record musicians close to Nashville. Since the Library of Congress was building an archive of song state by state, it could duplicate Work’s fifty-some field recordings, store them in Washington, and give the professor a set of copies to replace those that were wearing out from replay as he transcribed them. Work would also be given blank records by the library to continue his own recording projects.
Leaving Nashville, Alan and Elizabeth went on to San Antonio for a meeting of the Texas Folklore Society, to Clarksville for his brother’s wedding, to Dallas, where he gave some lectures, and then on to Mexico City, where a Latin American conference on educational radio was being sponsored by CBS and the National Defense Council. Even though Alan’s Back Where I Come From had been canceled, Nelson Rockefeller, the council’s coordinator of Latin American cultural and commercial relations, asked to have Lomax, Josh White, and the Golden Gate Quartet give a demonstration of their show. On their way back to Washington, Elizabeth and Alan stopped again at Fisk, where Alan talked further about recording plans with President Jones, Professor Charles Johnson (the head of the Department of Social Science, director of the Institute of Social Research, and later the first black president of Fisk), the heads of the music and drama departments, and Professor Work. Most of the planning was done by Lomax and Johnson, who decided on a joint Library of Congress—Fisk social survey of the folk culture of two Mississippi Delta counties that were familiar to Johnson from his own research for his 1941 boo
k Growing Up in the Black Belt, Coahoma and Bolivar (though Johnson later convinced the others that Coahoma County was dense enough that they should limit their work to that area). The Library of Congress would furnish sound equipment, blank records, an engineer, and Lomax as a collector, trainer of fieldworkers, and coeditor of the book, while Fisk would provide fieldworkers from their sociology department under the direction of coeditor Johnson, with the help of John Work and another Fisk sociologist, Professor Lewis Jones. The book that resulted would be underwritten for publication by Fisk.
The agreed upon study was to explore objectively and exhaustively the musical habits of a single Negro community in the Delta, to find out and describe the function of music in the community, to ascertain the history of music in the community, and to document adequately the cultural and social backgrounds for music in the community. It was felt that this type of study, carried on in a number of types of southern communities would afford: (1) an oral history of Negro music in the South over the past hundred years; (2) describe music in the community objectively, giving all criteria for taste and the relationship of music to the dynamics of social change; and (3) result in a widely varied and completely documented set of basic recorded musical materials.
For both musicology and sociology, it was an intellectually innovative and daring project, the most encompassing study of the social basis of the arts of any community ever attempted. But it was also an unprecedented political act: studies of black people in the South were rare, and, when done at all, were usually carried out by white social scientists alone. It was also the first time that an African American university officially committed itself to the study of folklore.
