Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  The long dream of some for peaceful racial integration was beginning to lurch toward reality, with Martin Luther King Jr. leading the way. The Beats had made themselves a generational phenomenon, still talking nostalgically about “The People,” but now with a hydrogen cloud overhead. Jackson Pollock, whom Alan had known only as a boozy folknik, had spilled and dripped himself into becoming the best-known painter in America. Jazz had splintered into several new directions, some absorbing the lessons of experimental music learned on the GI Bill at conservatories, some retreating from the heat of bebop, others attempting to push bop to higher planes of excitement and speed. What some were calling a second folk revival was under way, this time with black folk music, especially the blues, at its center, along with English-derived or Anglo-American songs. But to hear the music you no longer had to go to the country looking for untutored singers sitting on a cabin porch: the songs were right there in the city, in Washington Square in Greenwich Village, and the pop charts were heavy with folk songs like the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley,” a ballad from North Carolina; Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee,” the blues ballad that Alan had sought all across the South years before; Wilbert Harrison’s one-man-band blues “Kansas City”; and Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans,” an old fiddle tune with words added.

  Alan had missed a lot, and found himself having to catch up. The FBI and Congress were still tracking those they perceived as the enemy within—Pete Seeger would be indicted for contempt of Congress within the next two years, and folksinging would be banned in Greenwich Village parks. Coming back when he did would prove to be not particularly easy.

  Pete Seeger publicly welcomed Alan’s return to the States in the pages of Sing Out!, reminding people of his importance and of what he had been achieving in his years abroad. But Pete also offered a stern warning about how things had changed both musically and politically while he was gone: “The folksong revival did grow, and flourishes now like any happy weed, quite out of control of any person or party, right or left, purist or hybridist, romanticist or scientist. Alan Lomax probably looks about him a little aghast.” And sure enough, when Alan responded with “The ‘Folkniks’ and the Songs They Sing,” he acknowledged that while “city-billy” singers who were appearing on records and stages had quickly mastered the words, tunes, and accompaniment of rural folksingers, it remained to be seen whether they would be able to learn the authentic singing styles of the various groups from whom they borrowed. Style, he explained, was not only the emotional expression of the song to its singers and community but also the means by which singers learned to create variations on older songs. Many folkniks did not grasp the point of the article, taking “emotion” to be false performance or a showbiz device, and Alan irritated many of them. John Cohen, for example, of the New Lost City Ramblers, a group that based its music on hillbilly recordings of the 1920s and 1930s, answered that Lomax ought to listen more closely, for there were many kinds of responses to songs, and many meanings:

  Lomax has suddenly encountered a folk singing development far different from the social reform movement which he left.... The “city-billies” have created audiences; some have traveled and engaged in first-hand research; others have studied field recordings and poured [sic] through the riches of the Library of Congress and the Public Library. The general level of understanding is higher than it was when Lomax left.... The emphasis is no longer on social reform or worldwide reform. The effort is focused more on a search for real and human values. We are not looking for someone to lead us. We are looking within ourselves. In his article, Lomax has presented himself as the “holy ghost” sent from on high to deliver the gospel. He says, in effect, that he will lead us to the “truth” if only we will follow him.

  “I began to feel as if I was the grandfather of folk music,” Alan said, “and the grandfather had to die. When I first returned, many city-billies asked me to lecture and perform for them, and I consistently turned them down. My refusals were mostly out of shyness and the feeling that they would be judging me. And it still seemed to me that something was being soiled and made into a careerist machine.”

  Alan had returned from his European travels with a tale to tell. He had heard the world’s music, discovered the connection between song and the survival of the world’s peoples—between song and the soul, he would say. And what he encountered when he returned to America was folk songs stripped of their social roots and the pain they inscribed and instead turned into fodder for pop artists. When a publisher of a small folk magazine asked him for suggestions for improving it, Alan said “stop publication.” He angered black singers Odetta and Leon Bibb by telling them they needed to go deeper into black style to be able to sing the songs he had collected in the South. He told Robin Roberts, who had an actress’s ability to project strong emotion, that if she was going to sing white ballads she ought to stand absolutely still when she performed.

  To some who followed folk music, Alan seemed a purist who had not listened carefully to the changes that had occurred in music in the eight years that he had been gone. But in fact he had been paying close attention to them, and what fascinated him were precisely these changes. What he had thought of as ethnic and racial styles ten years earlier were now rapidly beginning to influence each other, with singers crossing lines once held in place by custom and even by law. He listened to the radio as if he were collecting in the field, treating the hits as something to treasure and analyze, writing out the words to those he thought were most important: the Cadillacs’ “Peek-a-Boo,” the Coasters’ “Charlie Brown,” the Everly Brothers’ “Problems” and “Bird Dog,” Ricky Nelson’s “Gotta Travel On,” Ray Charles’s “Talkin’ About You,” Fats Domino’s “I Want You to Know” and “The Big Beat.” Alan’s interests went far beyond their texts, however, for he wanted to know what the words and music triggered in the imaginations of those who heard them on record and radio. When he heard the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” with its saucy, slow-rolling rhythms that turn into a double-time Latin strut, he said he could see the singer’s girl walking away from him, feel the sass and sway of her hips as she left him standing in that street or country road.

  In an interview for the New York Post, he came out punching for the new pop music:

  “I’m sticking up for Rock ’n’ Roll,” says Alan Lomax, “because even though some of it is destructive and crude, it is essentially a creative American impulse. It’s made by young people for young people. It’s a rebellion against the puritan ethic which had decreed from the beginning of our society that Americans are not allowed to have pleasure..... Many of our folk songs . . . are fantasy symbols. ‘Barbara Allen,’ for instance, is the story of a girl who rejects a suitor. He turns his face to the wall and dies. As simple as that—in hundreds of different lyrics. But what is it really if not the sexual rejection at the moment of climax, the pioneer women punishing their men in the only way they knew how? This was the central drama of a pioneer community which was dominated by that Protestant puritan ethic: ‘Thou shalt not have pleasure.’

  “I remember . . . when I was recording in rural England. London, of course, maintains a reserve, but rural England is a kind of pagan world, music rolling off the tongue, drink in hand, girl on the knee, hayrollers all—and I said to myself: these were my people, the stock I was descended from. Lord! What happened to us, who took the joy out of the songs, why did our pioneers go sighing through their lives in those songs with the death wish?”

  In its blunt way Lomax’s reading of these songs was a transvaluation of the pleas and rants of parents and preachers against them. For him, rock and roll was both a sexual and a racial revolution, with white youth finding new meaning in the words of rhythm and blues songs aimed at mature black audiences. He saw rock and roll as part of a tradition of “outlaw music,” the music that whites had learned from blacks throughout the history of American music—minstrel shows, vaudeville, blues, even early jazz. His defense caused a stir when two years late
r he appeared on Coming of Age, an FM radio series, with a lecture titled “The Rocking Rebels.”

  Folk music in New York City, meanwhile, had developed its own conservatism. Alan had returned “to find that New York had gone to sleep around the Peter Seeger banjo picking folknik image, and I was shocked to find that the kids here thought that folk music pretty much began and ended in Washington Square.” Folk music was now something one heard at summer camps, in after-school programs, at student clubs at the High School of Arts and Music or the YMHA. “So I decided to show them what America was really like, what urban folk music really was and I put together a concert consisting entirely of urban material.” The first program that he sketched out was a blockbuster, the kind of grand staging that John Hammond had accomplished with “Spirituals to Swing,” but with a different evolution of music on display, one that led from the farms and small southern towns to urbanized country bands, churches, and pop singers. Balladeers and singing prison crews from the South would represent the origins, while more recent developments and transformations would be illustrated by Bill Monroe’s bluegrass group, Muddy Waters’s Chicago blues band, a northern gospel choir, Ray Charles, Merle Travis, the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, Bobby Darin, and Ricky Nelson; and from the urban folk revival, Pete and Mike Seeger, Odetta, Jean Ritchie, and the Kingston Trio. Alan managed to find enough financial backing from promoter Lewis Gordon that for the first time he could do some traveling in search of new artists, hire a press agent, offer recording contracts to some of the musicians, and promise them all a share of the profits depending on the ticket sales—but not enough to hire all the performers he needed for the sweeping tableau he envisioned. He did manage to set off on a few brief field trips, where he found Jimmie Driftwood, an ex-school principal from Arkansas who two years earlier had written and recorded “The Battle of New Orleans,” the song that Johnny Horton had since turned into a hit; Alan thought Driftwood had the potential to be another Woody Guthrie. Just across the river in Brooklyn he heard the Selah Jubilee Singers, a gospel quartet, and the Drexel Singers. Mike Seeger led him to Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys, a bluegrass band from Baltimore. A group of black girls from Detroit whom no one seemed to have heard of represented rock music. The blues performers were Isaac Washington, Memphis Slim, and Muddy Waters from Chicago, plus a harmonica player from New Jersey.

  “Folksong 59” was presented at Carnegie Hall on April 3, 1959. Though some in the audience complained that they failed to see the connection between the different genres, it was an exceptionally well-planned event, with a rationale developed for every act and a script to explain its presence. Alan came on stage with a whoop, “a wild war whoop of the early morning of American History”:

  It expresses the way I feel tonight at seeing all you people here in Carnegie Hall tonight . . . and it tells me the way I felt when I returned from Europe a few months ago and discovered what was happening to American music.... A stampeding herd of youngsters—hillbillies, citybillies, rockabillies—had broken through the gates and set America singing, dancing, rocking to its own rhythms. The juke boxes were pouring out the wild expressive singing that I once had to hunt for in the Mississippi Delta. I saw geetar and banjo pickers on every subway train. Ballad singers packed the concert halls.... I saw rock and roll audiences clapping time on the off-beat and watched the kids dancing more expressively than ever in my memory. When I closed my eyes I often couldn’t tell a Negro from a white singer. Tin Pan Alley with its stifling snobby European standards was spinning on its pinnacle, the giant amusement industry that had always condescended to our folk songs was hastily signing up every guitar player in sight.

  His narrative continued to thread its way through the introductions to each of the performers and their various styles: the devil in the music, song as a means of fathoming the loneliness and fragmented society of an uprooted people, gospel as putting the sinners’ music to the service of the Lord, a music that has no regrets and doesn’t apologize. Alan worried that his presentation might be too didactic, and near the end of the evening he announced that “the history lesson is over,” adding that he’d “stay clear of the track and let this thing run wild on its own.” If some in the audience heard it as a rant, it was at least an antipuritan rant, and a declaration of freedom for music in America.

  Not as many recordings resulted from that evening as Alan had hoped, but Alan Lomax Presents Folk Song Festival at Carnegie Hall (United Artists, UAL 3050, 1959) was a reasonable slice of its blues and bluegrass, and Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys was a brilliant bluegrass album, confirming all that Alan had said about the music being country jazz, even if Taylor’s group never caught the public’s attention. One might imagine that Alan would have found bluegrass music too citified, too diluted by jazz, but all those jangling and sliding strings, the odd combination of ballads and minstrel-show songs, those soaring tenor voices grabbed him and fired his poetic imagination. He might on one occasion compare it to the excitement generated by the Eastern European village bands of Romania or Yugoslavia. On another, he’d link bluegrass back to its postwar southern roots: “Folk music in overdrive,” a “mountain dixieland combo,” he called it, still in the fever of discovery, for an article in Esquire:

  The mandolin plays bursts reminiscent of jazz trumpet choruses; a heavily bowed fiddle supplies trombone-like hoedown solos; while a framed guitar and slapped bass make up the rhythm section. Everything goes at top volume, with harmonized choruses behind a lead singer who hollers in the high, lonesome style beloved in the American backwoods. The result is folk music in overdrive with a silvery, rippling pinging sound; the State Department should note that for virtuosity, fire, and speed our best Bluegrass bands can match any Slavic folk orchestra.

  Dixieland jazz was his analogy, it should be noted—not the au courant cool jazz of Miles Davis, or the modestly academic music of Dave Brubeck. He had returned home to the Village to find that jazz clubs like Jimmy Ryan’s that featured the older jazz were languishing in the face of a new music that he saw as decadent, lost in “the harmonic jungles of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.” Jazz had become “high-hat and aging.” Yet in bluegrass he heard a new music, fresh, inspired, but nonetheless generated out of its own traditions:

  A century of isolation in the lonesome hollows of the Appalachian gave them time to combine strains from Scottish and English folksongs and to produce a vigorous pioneer music of their own. The hot Negro square-dance fiddle went early up the creek-bed roads into the hills; then in the mid-nineteenth century came the five-string banjo; early in the twentieth century the guitar was absorbed into the developing tradition. By the time folksong collectors headed into the mountains looking for ancient ballads, they found a husky, hard-to-kill musical culture as well. Finally, railroads and highways snaked into the backwoods, and mountain folk moved out into urban, industrialized, shook-up America.

  This closing allusion to an Elvis Presley song seems ambivalent, or at best undecided, as if Alan were waiting to see what else might be coming out of the South, for he had already seen a new level of cultural creolization rising, one that demanded documentation. “Many rock ’n’ roll recording artists came from church quartets, adapting Negro spiritual elements to a fairly sophisticated musical form. A second influence in rock ’n’ roll is the lowdown alley type of jazz, and a third is hillbilly. In other words, it is a music composite of many facets of American popular music.”

  He was now alert to such intercultural transformations wherever they might occur in southern music. Ed Perl, the founder of the Ash Grove on Melrose in West Los Angeles, the center of the folk revival in L.A., recalls Alan’s coming in the club while Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys were appearing. He walked straight up to the stage, and after the second number he asked Monroe where he got the song he’d just played. “I was shocked,” Perl said. “Nobody ever did that, let alone to God. Bill responded, ‘Is that you, Alan?’ and they proceeded to talk about and demonstrate the influence of black
music on Bill and bluegrass.”

  Alan had come back home broke, with no job in sight, and once again had to count on his own creative resources and the projects he was still finishing up as he left Britain. Salt of the Earth, the book of southern autobiographies, was coming out at last, though in much reduced form, though now titled The Rainbow Sign. From the interviews he and Elizabeth had recorded with Vera Hall and Dock Reed, from Livingston, Alabama, came two virtual novellas, one a love story, the other an account of the making of a holy man, both powerfully told in Deep South rhetoric but without the artificial dialect that had spoiled so many renderings of black thought and experience written by whites. As a sort of appendix, he added a sermon from a revival in northern Mississippi.

  In his introduction to the book, Alan was scathing in his account of the systematic debasements of racism, but he also celebrated the strength and discipline that black Americans had found in themselves and in their religions to survive. Then, in a burst of emotion, he wrote, “I have grown almost to detest ‘Western civilization.’ We are so rigid, so complacent, and so careless of human values that we cannot accept another group on its own terms. We must somehow force them to become like our guilt-ridden, tense, and rather miserable selves.” He went on to say that what he called “the relaxed sexual and social mores” of the black working class, their social polyphony, their collective improvisatory abilities had helped them survive, all of which he feared they would lose as they became middle-class Americans with their “solo-voiced ‘cool’ jazz.” It was Lomax’s folkloric revision of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, and it stood to offend many readers—southern whites for his condemnation of them, and blacks for his language, which might have been read as white stereotypical perceptions of life in the underclasses. Yet southern newspapers like the Chattanooga Times and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and black magazines like the Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, celebrated the book for its honesty in depicting the lives and travails of people of color. It was selected by the Book of the Month Club, and Alan was invited by TV anchor Dave Garroway to read from it on NBC’s Today program on May 18.