Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Alan continued to recommend John Work’s own projects to Fisk and the Library of Congress administration, and promised him partial underwriting from the library for a smaller collecting project that Work wanted to carry out in the Nashville area. But as time went by and Alan heard nothing from Work, the two exchanged letters that suggest the beginnings of mutual distrust: for his part, Work wanted assurance in writing that if he shipped his recordings to the archive for copying he would get them back, and that he would receive credit for having collected them. There was also confusion over where Work should be collecting and when.

  The plan was for research to begin with a two-week trip in mid-August when Alan was off the air at CBS. He would meet up with Work and some of the Fisk fieldworkers to familiarize themselves with the area, as well as do some preliminary collecting during the season when the religious revival services were taking place out in the country, a project he and Johnson had developed as a preliminary step toward the larger study. But preparations for war were beginning to intrude on every aspect of American life, and Mississippi was no exception: cotton farmers were under pressure to get their crops in, but being short of workers and fearing union organizers, they wanted no outsiders in the area. Wages almost tripled within a few weeks, and everyone—children, cooks, teachers—grabbed sacks and went to work in the fields, leaving the streets empty of activity. With the boom, the research plans quickly shifted. Johnson suggested that as an alternative plan, he would send some of the Fisk researchers ahead into an area to orient themselves before Lomax began collecting, since they would not draw as much attention as a white man and woman would. Alan would come back to Fisk to give seminars to the fieldworkers to teach them about folklore studies and get them ready to be folk collectors, and interviewing and recording would then begin in mid-November when the crop season was winding down. He, Elizabeth, and Work would do the recording in late November.

  Alan was now being taken seriously by many of the same academic folklorists who had written his father off as an amateur and a popularizer. In fact, he was one of the first to systematize folk song collecting, and he used his position at the archive to get others to think more seriously about their use of folk songs and how to make their work less academic and more usable for others. Writing to the WPA’s Music Division of the Florida Folklife and then to the Florida Writers’ Project, for example, he offered some ideas on how the focus of folk song collecting could be widened beyond the text to include the singer, and how the roles of the song and the singer in the community might be better understood:

  It would be worth-while: to ask singers of different types, ages, etc., to recite the words of a song or so for the records, to question them before the mike about their own opinion of their songs, of the factual or moral content of the song; to obtain biographies of singers with large or extensive repertoires.

  The interview technique does seem to run a little slow, but I feel that the workers are in process of learning how to make documentary field recordings. This is an almost unexplored field. Sometimes an interviewer appears to interrupt the performance more often than is necessary, or to have phrased the question so that the informant was supplied with the answer thereby. In general, the objective is to get the informant to talk very freely and sometimes a few stimulating questions or remarks are better than a straight interview technique.

  Alan even offered suggestions to his father to improve the value of his work:

  My personal opinion is that it is valuable to get the informant talking eloquently for himself, rather than interrupt him or push him with questions. The recording interview can be as significant as the song itself and is valuable as a fresh field document, especially, if the informant does not know that the interview is being recorded, and if he ever learns it.... It is very important to record the tunings of all instruments which play a part in the music, to photograph the instruments and get the informant to explain how he plays it. In the case of unusual instruments, it would be worthwhile to make accurate drawings or send the instruments where they could be drawn to scale. If part singing is recorded, it would be a real contribution to record the parts in the harmony separately. This can be done by shifting the singers in front of the microphone.... As you know, valuable material is to be had from comparison of different versions of the same song from different regions. So also, are different performances of the same song in the same community by different singers, or the same song by different members of the family, or the same song by the same performers at different times. Therefore, it is not so important to us that material be always rehearsed without a mistake or hesitation. The great beauty of field recordings is that performers take their own time and do things their own way, feeling that if they make a mistake, they can try again. The results are such that no commercial recording company can ever hope to achieve.

  To illustrate this social approach to song, Alan began to work on Listen to Our Story, a book of first-person narratives based on the lives of people he had recorded, and he submitted twelve pages on Jelly Roll Morton as a sample to Macmillan. He conceived of the book as a new kind of literature and history, with subjects speaking directly to the readers without the outside voice of an editor interpreting them. But the publishers were not impressed and judged it as merely dialect literature, local-color writing that was “flavorful” but nonetheless monotonous. They imagined that it might work better with a proper introduction and with an editor providing connecting passages that would explain the significance of the texts—something more in the spirit of John Dos Passos or John Steinbeck. Alan refused to abandon the idea, however, and continued to work on the book off and on for the next few years.

  Archibald MacLeish’s goal of having the library use its resources to reach out to the country fit nicely with Alan’s work, and MacLeish backed him wherever he could. One of his first acts on being appointed Librarian was to convince the Carnegie Foundation to fund a recording laboratory for the library. The lab was set up by the beginning of summer 1941, and a sound truck was bought for recording in the field. Its initial project was to make copies of recordings in the library to distribute to other libraries for educational purposes, but with hostilities breaking out around the world, these recordings began to seem more valuable for use as part of the State Department’s “good neighbor” efforts to influence Latin American countries to remain friendly to the United States. MacLeish also wanted to use the recording lab to create a series of short radio programs or public-interest spots to be offered free to radio stations for broadcast in the United States and abroad. In a time when fascism was gaining footholds in Europe, there was fear that even the United States could be vulnerable. The Rockefeller Foundation was persuaded to support a library experiment in popular education in which radio programming would be used to remind listeners of the history and traditions of local communities, regions, and their place in the entire nation.

  MacLeish also felt that too much power was being vested in a few radio networks, and that news reflected their owners’ own biases. What he thought was needed was an alternate medium, a station or a network that expressed the concerns of the country as a whole. Under his plan the library would take to the road and visit small towns, farms, churches, factories, and schools, interviewing people to connect listeners to the speech, songs, and thoughts of their fellow citizens throughout the land. Chief of the project would be Philip H. Cohen, brought in from the Department of Education, with Joseph Liss as script editor, Jerry Wiesner as recordist, and Lomax the music and folklore editor. They formed the core of what was called the Radio Research Project.

  Since Alan was the most experienced in the field, he proposed to MacLeish a series often programs called America in the Summer of 1941 that would create “a new function for radio: that of letting the people explain themselves and their lives to the entire nation.” The Recording Laboratory’s sound truck was sent to places like the Asheville, North Carolina, Mountain Dance and Song Festival, where they recorded the fiddling con
test, folktales, songs, and backstage interviews with the singers. They also recorded a white revival service and interviewed Thomas Wolfe’s mother, in whose house they stayed. They recorded people’s opinions on the war in Europe, asking whether they thought the United States should become involved in it, and documented the Tennessee Valley Authority’s work in Union County, Georgia. The TVA was one of the boldest of the New Deal projects, an attempt to develop an entire region by introducing conservation, controlling forest fires, increasing crop yield, and generating massive amounts of electricity to better the lives of the inhabitants of the region and draw industry to the area. An undertaking this big and intrusive guaranteed disruption and conflict. Dams were built and rivers redirected, displacing thousands of families; labor unions were now legally recognized in a region where businesses had previously blocked them; and the top-down, outsider management of the TVA often clashed with local customs and beliefs. The Radio Research group traveled to the heart of the project, moving among those most affected by the changes under way, and let their interviews and field recordings shape the scripts they wrote.

  In Union County, Georgia, one of the most isolated counties in the South, they recorded ballads, a church service, a family reunion, and a fox hunt. They interviewed farmers about how the TVA was affecting them, talked to the newspaper editor, the county agent, and the doctor, who spun out stories about bootleggers and midnight buggy rides to sick patients.

  “Mister Ledford and the TVA,” another program on the same subject, was a drama that wove together interviews with a single farmer and his neighbors and showed their uneasiness as they chatted about the building of the Notterley Dam that would soon flood their farms out of existence. Lomax spared listeners none of the farmers’ complaints, nor their mocking of the city folk—their visitors from Washington—who seemed hopeless in the countryside. His script for the program was selected for Radio Drama in Action, a collection of the best programs of the early 1940s, which also included scripts by Orson Welles, Arch Oboler, Arthur Miller, Langston Hughes, and Norman Corwin.

  Late in the summer, Joseph Liss brought into the group Arthur Miller, a twenty-seven-year-old playwright, to help with the writing. Miller had already written one of their first shows, a program called “Buffalo Bill Disremembered,” in which the old man was interviewed. He was now asked to do the field interviewing and write the script for the final show in the series, a documentary on the shipbuilding boomtown of Wilmington, North Carolina, even though Alan had doubts about his ability and thought his previous script was weak. Once the crew was in North Carolina they were almost immediately pulled off the job and put on a new one when the Department of Health decided to do a film in Wilmington on North Carolina mine safety instead. While Miller was interviewing miners and engineers, he also managed to record a strike of black workers at a shirt factory when he heard the marchers outside his hotel window singing strike songs based on old spirituals. Later, Alan wrote MacLeish that Miller’s work was “up to now the most stirring program which we have completed.”

  Come August, Alan and Elizabeth arrived in Nashville on the twenty-fourth for a three-week trip to record revival services in Mississippi for the Fisk project, and then to spend a few days on the way back in western Virginia to find some of the ballad singers who had already been located for them by the Virginia Folklore Society. When they reached Mississippi on August 29 they learned that the revival season was just winding down and they had missed their chance to record. But Alan, Elizabeth, and John Work nonetheless went to Coahoma County for a week to look over the area and do some preliminary recording.

  Over the next two weeks they would visit and record services of religious groups in the Church of God in Christ on the Moorhead Plantation in Lula, Mississippi; in the Mt. Ararat Missionary Baptist Church on the King and Anderson Plantation (the singing there was so strong that it overloaded the recording machine); and at the Reverend Ribbins’s church in Maple Springs (where, in the middle of a sermon about the reality of hell, the reverend called Alan out of his technological meditation behind the recording machine: “Do you hear me, Brother Lomax? Hell is a place, and not a state!”).

  Everywhere they went they were asked if they were union organizers, and were sometimes assumed to be something even worse. In Klack’s country store in Lake Coromant in Tunica County, Alan and Elizabeth recorded a group of musicians—Fiddling Joe Martin the mandolinist, Leroy Jones on harmonica, Willie Brown, guitarist. At the center was Son House, a preacher turned wandering bluesman whose songs and slide guitar playing made him one of the most passionate and powerful of the Delta guitarists, and who by day was a tractor driver. He had been recorded by Paramount a decade before and claimed to have taught Robert Johnson. When he picked up his guitar he was “no longer the quiet, affable person I had met, but possessed by the song, as Gypsies in Spain are possessed, gone blind with music and poetry.... And with him the sorrow of the blues was not tentative, or retiring, or ironic. Son’s whole body wept, as with eyes closed, the tendons in his powerful neck standing out with the violence of his feeling and his brown face flushing”:

  Well, I got up this mornin’, jinx all around, jinx all around, ’round my bed

  And I say I got up this mornin’, with the jinx all around my bed

  Know I thought about you, an’ honey, it liked to kill me dead

  Oh, look-a here now, baby, what you want me, what you want me, me to do?

  Look-a here, honey, I say, what do you want poor me to do?

  You know that I done all I could, just tryin’ to get along with you

  You know, the blues ain’t nothin’ but a low-down shakin’, low-down shakin’, achin’ chill

  I say the blues is a low-down, old, achin’ chill

  Well, if you ain’t had ’em, honey, I hope you never will

  There were also moments of revelation on this trip, such as listening in Mound Bayou while Charles Johnson interviewed George Johnson, a musician who recalled the band that Jefferson Davis organized among his slaves and the music they played. Or the pure joy of hearing someone who had the promise of greatness. Such was the meeting on August 31 at Sherrod Plantation, when Alan, Elizabeth, and John Work met McKinley Morganfield, a tractor driver and guitarist who already had a stage name, Muddy Waters, and who twenty years later would change popular music forever. “Waters was bare-footed in raggedy overalls. He was very shy and his house was in the middle of one of those endless cotton fields. He worked all week and played every Saturday night for the little dances in his county. He’d never seen a good guitar before I handed him mine.” (The interview with Waters revealed that he seldom had the blues and never had the blues when he played it; that whites couldn’t play the blues; that he couldn’t dance and had given up trying; and that his favorite radio performer was Fats Waller.)

  What particularly impressed Alan was the beauty of his songs: “He was not a composer, but a recomposer—he only made a couple of songs in his life.”

  Muddy’s song departed from the rigid AAB, three-line blues formula most of his contemporaries used. Instead, Muddy was rhyming variations on the four-phrase song form—ABAB in outline—using syncopations to make eight lines out of four. In two stanzas of hyperbole, he measured his hurt, the moments that turn his thoughts to death, the empty hours and desolate days of longing for his faithless Jenny.

  Yes, minutes seems like hours,

  And hours seem like days,

  Seem like my baby

  Will stop her low-down ways

  On the way back to D.C. on September 11, Alan began filling notebooks with the kinds of questions he wanted the Fisk collectors to ask and hoped to communicate to the fieldwork seminar. His goal was encyclopedic, going far beyond what was understood as folklore protocol. Like an ethnographer, he wanted to know the demographics of the community, sources of income, and the structure of each of the families. As a folklorist, he was interested in the repertoires of individual performers, even the songs that went beyond the traditiona
l, and he made a point of asking about their knowledge of jazz, school songs, classical melodies, patriotic songs, and lullabies; about their favorite performers, national or local; how long had they spent learning their instruments or songs; how they learned them; what the blues meant to them; if they went to dances, listened to the radio, or owned a phonograph; if they preferred Negro or white music. He worked up schedules for interviewing individuals, groups, and members of institutions, made up reading lists and selected examples of field recordings to use as models, and wrote an outline for the seminar that Charles Johnson called “full and fascinating.” This was going to be the first ethnography of a community’s aesthetics.

  Despite some initial misunderstandings between them, Lewis Jones worked closely with Alan, quickly grasped the point of the project, and threw himself into it. He made contact with the most important officials of the county—the plantation owners, teachers, and agricultural officials—preparing the way for the research to come. When the project was delayed by harvest, Jones went out to pick cotton himself in order to inconspicuously learn something of the workers’ daily lives. (“Sixteen years have passed since I first picked cotton but I am planning to go out Friday and record a cotton picker’s day. I hope I pick enough to pay for the overalls I’ll have to buy.”) And it was Jones who went to Clarksdale’s bars and nightclubs to make lists of the songs on the jukeboxes, a catalog that constituted one of the most important results of the study. The first surprise was that there were very few Delta musicians or singers on any of the jukeboxes, but urban rhythm and blues artists like Lil Green and Louis Jordan were in every bar. Not only were swing bands like Count Basie, Earl Hines, and Jimmie Lunceford popular, but also white bands like those of Artie Shaw, Sammy Kaye, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Woody Herman. As Muddy Waters’s own taste revealed, these rural people were already wired into national popular culture, though they still filtered it through their own aesthetic.