Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Returning to Washington, Alan and Elizabeth stopped at the Galax Fiddlers’ Convention in Galax, Virginia, to do some recording, where they were struck by the voice and guitar of Estil C. Ball, a singer with an exceptional knowledge of religious songs, and they followed him home to Rugby, Virginia, to record him. They recorded the fiddling of Emmet Lundy, and Elizabeth interviewed him on record. They also recorded fifteen songs from Texas Gladden of Salem, Virginia. Gladden was not new to Lomax, for her songs had been transcribed by collectors Arthur Kyle Davis and Alfreda Peel in the 1930s, she had been recorded as early as 1935 by folklorist Richard Chase, and Alan himself had recorded her at the National Folk Festival in Washington in 1938. Gladden had grown up in a musical family, and often sang at musical events in rural Virginia. She was an especially fine ballad singer in the old, unaccompanied style that allowed the story of the song to come through clearly and precisely and highlighted her light ornamentation and subtle stylistic touches. “Texas sings her antique ballads in the fashion of ballad singers from time immemorial,” Alan said. “The emotions are held in reserve: the singer does not color the story with heavy vocal underscoring; she allows the story to tell itself and the members of her audience to recover and interpret it in accordance with their own emotions.” These were songs that made her home audience cry for the beauty of the sadness within them, and her style would come to influence Joan Baez and many other revivalist folksingers in the 1960s. She was equally eloquent in her thoughts about her singing and her songs, and Alan returned to record and interview her several more times over the years.

  During that same summer, Pete Seeger was singing at political fund-raisers and strikes with Lee Hays, a singer from Arkansas, and Millard Lampell, a writer from New Jersey, and they were calling themselves the Almanac Singers. Pete wrote to Woody in Oregon, who came back to New York to join them. By the fall they had added to the group Bess Lomax and Sis Cunningham, a labor organizer and music teacher from Oklahoma, and all of them moved into a house in Greenwich Village. Alan was fascinated by their blend of voices, their harmonies, the range of their repertoire, and the spirit with which they approached songs. “Alan had a way of making proclamations and value judgments that could ring down the years,” Pete recalled, “and he said of the Almanacs: ‘This is the way American folk songs will be introduced to the American people.’ ” What the public had seen so far was John Jacob Niles dressed up in a suit, giving a very eloquent concert, singing folklike songs he had written himself in a dramatic high voice, maybe also performing the Niles-Merton Song Cycle, his setting of Thomas Merton’s poems to music; or they’d seen Richard Dyer-Bennet, a classically trained, pitch-perfect tenor who on other nights might be singing his own translation of Schubert’s Die schöne Mullerin, wearing a tuxedo; Burl Ives presented songs he’d heard on the road or read in books, much as Carl Sandburg did, though more informally. But they were all actors, in a sense. And Will Geer was in fact an actor, who acted out the songs with great professionalism, even when he took Woody along with him to sing at strikes or union rallies.

  The Fisk seminar for folklore fieldworkers began on September 27 and ran day and night for three days. After Alan met and talked with the students, his excitement grew with the certainty that their project might be the most thorough and objective study of an art ever done in the United States. He wrote his father that “naturally the Negro looks at the South with different eyes than the white man, but it seems to me that while neither point of view is exactly right, before a decision can be reached in a democracy both sides must be allowed to have their say, and before the Negro will do the job right he perhaps has to get things off his chest. However, this recording project will not be a propaganda means for anyone, but it is complete and well planned.” (Charles Johnson wrote him a few days later that “the seminar yielded, I note, a rich array of materials and a degree of stimulation far exceeding anything expected, although I confess I expected a great deal. You have a genius for hard work as well as for catching, following through and recording a wide range of the most excitingly beautiful as well as culturally significant folk materials.”)

  Before he ever set foot into the rural Delta that summer, Alan had already accumulated information on local ministers and their denominations, the name of the guard on the local chain gang, and the names and locations of singers and musicians mentioned in W. C. Handy’s book Father of the Blues. This was the first field trip on which Alan had to take the blues seriously, the music that he and his father had once thought too commercial to be of interest. The record companies had been there at least twelve years before him, and many of the singers they had recorded, advertised, and promoted were still there, either having returned after the Depression crushed their dreams of fame, or never having left at all. Alan knew their names as specters from scarce Okeh and Paramount records—figures like Charlie Patton, who was raised on the Dockery plantation near the crossroads where some said that Robert Johnson had sold his soul to the devil at midnight. Patton himself had been promoted under a shadow of mystery as “the Masked Marvel.”

  When Alan posed the question “What are the blues? What do they mean to you?” the answers were in part something he sought for himself, to understand this musical form that may have been as ancient as griots in West Africa, or perhaps as recent as the automobile, the airplane, and the phonograph (all of which made guest appearances in the blues). The blues had become a craze, like ragtime, which grew up alongside it, and it leaped from the bottom of the social order to the Astors and the Vanderbilts, who staged blues contests for their own amusement well before the rest of white America came to know them.

  John and Alan Lomax arrived in the field just after blues records began to circulate widely, and he and his father had sometimes passed up recording the songs in favor of older ones because they seemed to be everywhere, a part of popular rather than folk culture. Alan, however, came to understand them as another form of folklore, but a recorded form, and therefore one whose origins he might be able to uncover. But he continued to worry: were the blues really folk song? They were not collective or community-based in the usual manner of folk songs. Could they be legitimately considered part of a tradition if they were only, say, forty or fifty years old? Or were they really popular music disguised in overalls, especially when most decent folks wanted nothing to do with juke joint music, those devil’s songs? Or were they a form of art song, created by only a very few artists who were trailed by a body of imitators? Lomax eventually solved the problem by coming to regard the blues as an artful response to pain, suffering, and oppression, but one with musical roots in Africa.

  The Library of Congress’s efforts to expose composers to folk music were beginning to have an effect, and a small body of compositions continued to develop around field-recorded performances, with works by Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Earl Robinson, and others. Though Alan still scorned it as an out-of-date and elitist approach to art, he did what he could to help composers when asked. Perhaps the most unlikely musician to seek Alan’s help was Harry Partch, a writer of experimental music whose attempts to radically rethink the nature of music had been encouraged by Charles Ives, although most of the music establishment treated him as a hopeless eccentric. Like Walt Whitman, Partch was interested in the musical possibilities of American speech and developed the ability to hear minute gradations of pitch in talk. He created extended scales to notate the inflections of the speaking voice and invented his own musical instruments to express these vocal qualities, ultimately constructing his own musical universe. While studying the history of tuning systems in London on a grant, he met W. B. Yeats and convinced him to give his permission to write an opera based on Yeats’s translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. But when he ran out of money, he returned to the United States and hoboed across the country for the next ten years, riding the rails, doing odd jobs, and transcribing onto music paper bits of speech that he had overheard. When he wrote Lomax, he had just completed Barstow, a composition for voice b
uilt on eight examples of graffiti that he’d seen on a highway railing in California. Written in a forty-three-tone scale, it was intended to be accompanied by Partch’s homemade instruments. It may have been an extreme form of art music, but it nevertheless hinted at folk songs, albeit what some would have heard as the folk songs of aliens. Partch later acknowledged that he had been influenced by the singing of Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie.

  In his letter to Lomax, Partch talked about Barstow and explained that he was broke and hoped that the archive might want to support his work. Alan replied:

  Your work sounds extremely interesting, and I hope some day to hear you talk about it, face to face. Human speech, particularly as spoken by people rather than poets, is in some ways music richer than our musicians can comprehend. I wish you could hear some of the magnificent human documents on records here in our collection. Somehow, though, it seems to me that for the moment we need songs which are simple and direct and courageous, rather than subtly exploratory.

  Partch wrote back to say that he thought that was exactly what he was offering.

  The news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached Washington by radio early in the afternoon of Sunday, December 7, 1941. The shock and anger at the Japanese “dagger in the back of America” spread across the country in the nation’s first serious engagement with the wireless conscience that radio was becoming. Three thousand soldiers and sailors were rumored to be dead, and the fear was that if part of America could be attacked without anyone knowing it was coming, what would be next? Alan spent the day thinking about what he might do, what kind of response the library might make, and by evening he had called the people in the Radio Research Project and asked them if they’d support him in recording the reactions of average Americans to what had happened in Pearl Harbor. He reminded them that their unit had been created to offer a counterbalance to an eastern, urban-dominated commercial radio that excluded the voices of most of the country’s citizens. Now, of all times, was the moment to give Americans a chance to comment on the attack on their lives by interviewing them and putting them on the radio. The next morning, while Alan was waiting to record the president’s response to the attack, the project was approved, and he sent telegrams to folklorists in Nashville, Texas, Denver, Bloomington, Madison, New York City, Boston, and North Carolina asking them to record in their area over the next day or so and mail the results back to Washington. That night, he and two engineers at the library went out into the streets of Washington with a recording machine, visiting a number of African American pool halls and theaters, and standing on the sidewalk so that their microphone could reach the truck with the recording equipment. Later, they edited the interviews down into a fifteen-minute program that was broadcast on the Mutual Broadcasting System, a program that the Library of Congress said was the first documentary broadcast in the United States.

  This launch into documentary radio was considered so successful that the Office of Emergency Management commissioned Alan to record a second set of interviews for a program to be called Dear Mr. President. This time people were asked to speak directly to the president and explain what they were doing, or wanted to do, in this emergency. Some of the interviewers decided that the “man on the street” designation should also include administrators, politicians, their neighbors, or even members of their own families: the superintendent of the main building at the University of Texas invited the president to come down to see their beautiful campus; the editor of a newspaper assured Mr. Roosevelt that all the papers were supporting the war effort; Alan’s old friend Johnny Faulk interviewed his own wife, who asked Mr. Roosevelt to stop the profiteering off the war; and the superintendent of public safety of the city of Pittsburgh assured the president that they had the machine guns and fire trucks to deal with civil defense. Since these recordings were bound for radio, an occasional ringer was brought in by the interviewers to make sure they produced a quality segment: the New York team got Lead Belly to sing “President Roosevelt” and “We’re Gonna Tear Hitler Down,” and Pete Seeger sang a song about how the Martins and McCoys had ceased feuding in the Kentucky mountains and had joined together to battle the fascists.

  Radio had now become such a way of life for Alan that when anthropologist Melville Herskovits, impressed by what Lomax had accomplished in Haiti, offered to make him his field assistant for a study of Brazil, he turned the professor down, thereby closing off a possible entrée into university life: “It was a wonderful opportunity, and the kind of training I would have received would have set me up in the academic world, but I was fascinated by what I thought would be a transformation of American radio into a new and remarkably broad avenue of communication.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The People’s War

  One spring morning in 1942, Alan received a message asking him to appear at FBI headquarters in Washington. He assumed it was a routine matter—maybe a security check on all government workers during wartime—but when he arrived at the Bureau on April 3 he was put under oath and before a stenographer prepared to take down everything he said. Though he was never given a reason for the summons, it was part of an investigation of federal employees alleged to be members of groups advocating the overthrow of the government. The questioning moved quickly to accusations and denials: he denied membership in the Communist Party, denied that he had ever said he was a member; yes, he had once been a member of the American Youth Congress, but he wasn’t sure whether he ever joined the Washington Committee for Democratic Action ... he had signed so many things. None of the names he was shown on a list were Communists, so far as he knew. By the time they were done he was certain that they saw him as a Communist threat. When he was asked if he had any further comments, he replied:

  I am perplexed as to why I should be investigated because since 1936 when I first came here to work, I have worked so doggone hard at my job—so many hours a day—that it sort of hurts my feelings a little that I should be investigated because I do know that I sure have done my part—as much as I could in my job in the government which has been a source of some unhappiness to me because this thing has come up. I know it came up once before when I sang at the White House for the King and Queen, and my feelings were hurt a little there, and I thought the thing was settled.

  When Archibald MacLeish received two reports following the FBI’s investigations, he wrote back that he saw no evidence of subversive activities in Lomax, declared him a loyal American citizen, and said he would take no disciplinary action against him. A week later even J. Edgar Hoover himself declared that no action should be taken.

  Alan reacted much as he did when he was arrested for protesting in Boston: he was doing what he thought any American should. At the moment he was called in by the FBI, he was working on a national defense songbook that would include patriotic songs, work songs, and recent antifascist songs like Woody Guthrie’s “Duck Mister Hitler,” “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” “Round Up the Nazis,” “He’s On His Last Go ’Round,” “Ring Around Hitler,” and “You Fascists Bound to Lose.” Who, he wondered, among his coworkers, friends, and family might have accused him?

  But he was not about to draw back from what he thought was important, and never turned on his friends. He did all he could for Woody Guthrie, especially, and it was on his recommendation that E. P. Dutton agreed to publish Guthrie’s Bound for Glory. Alan told Woody that he had played the Almanac Singers’ records for Eleanor Roosevelt, who enjoyed them, but he also encouraged Woody to rename the Almanacs with a “good old countrified name like ‘Oklahoma Rangers’ or something of the sort.” He also asked for permission to send Guthrie supplies to record new songs that he had written, though Spivacke questioned whether that was a good idea, since Guthrie was becoming a well-known performer and anything he was working on was likely to wind up issued by a recording company. It was something that Alan would run into more and more: either the people he found in his travels had already been recorded commercially, or those he found who were sti
ll unknown could easily become the objects of record company interest after he recorded them.

  This suggested to him that he should create his own groups and record them. With the backing of his union, the United Federal Workers union of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), behind him, Alan asked his secretary (and sometime girlfriend of Woody Guthrie) Jackie Gibson to help him find some singers for a vocal group to be modeled on the Almanacs. She located Tom Glazer, a songwriter destined to become a successful folk and pop songwriter, and Edna Neil. Alan added Bernie Ashbel, a follower of the Almanacs who worked at a clerical job in the Library of Congress, and Helen Schneyer, who would ultimately move from being a singing secretary to premiering works for John Cage, and who would join A Prairie Home Companion near the end of her career. Alan named the group the Priority Ramblers, taking their name in part from the Prairie Ramblers on the National Barn Dance radio show. They sang at local dances, parties, and union affairs, and Alan got them a performance for Mrs. Roosevelt’s annual party for the White House guards. In September 1943 he recorded some of their songs at the library, including one of his own, “In Washington,” which poked fun at D.C.’s many circles, statues, and disproportionate female-to-male wartime ratio, and then ended with a surprise stanza in praise of the CIO. The following year Alan would create another singing group, the Union Boys, to make records only. It was an all-star folk group along the lines of the Esquire- and Metronome magazine-sponsored jazz all-star recordings, and gathered together Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Josh White, and Tom Glazer. When he arranged for them to record for Asch Records in March 11, 1944, he joined them in the singing.