Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  The coding system shows that within any given culture area sometimes one, but never more than three or four, performance structures shape all folk songs.... They produce a trait cluster which defines a musical style in an extremely precise way.... When master sheets are made up from the averaging of all the samples from a given area, it then becomes possible to compare musical styles cross-culturally by comparing these master sheets. Heretofore such a thing was completely impossible. One could talk about the melodies of one area or the rhythms of one area or the harmonic system of one area as compared with another, but never about the overall shape of the music as it was performed; that is, as it lived in the culture. This, I believe, is the first time that it has been possible to make anything like a scientific comparison of aesthetic patterns cross-culturally, and this is due to the fact that all music is so highly systematized, no matter how primitive it may happen to be.

  Lomax was the first to understand the consequences of audio recording for the study of folk song. Having lived through the transition from transcribing songs to recording them, he could appreciate the limitations of an audio-only medium, but also understood how these limits refocused the way music was received: the body of the singer could now be heard, if not seen, and a physical presence was connected to what had before been only words on paper, or at best, words with a more or less correct musical transcription. The breathing of the singers could be perceived, and where they took breaths could be noted, along with the tension of the throat, the nasality of the singer, the speed of the song, the role of the vowels in sounding the song, the clarity versus the slurring of words. In a work song, one might hear the vocal consequences of muscle strain; if it was a lullaby it was possible to hear sounds that soothed and comforted. Was it a group that sang, or a solo singer? Did they sing together as one, or seem to be unconcerned with blending? A materialist view of song was now possible, and one might think about what could be called the economy of song. The choice of sounds that a people make and the way the body is used to create them might provide a means to consider how they felt about the song and how it related to their lives through a form of musical psychoanalysis.

  Unlike the anthropologists and psychologists who studied the microbehavioral level of communication primarily in terms of social interaction, Lomax went one step further, seeing those small and largely out-of-awareness behaviors as being the basis of traditional arts. It was the folk artist’s job, he believed, to stay close to the cultural norms and baselines of their societies. Their place in their communities was one of underscoring and reinforcing the norm, rather than attempting, like the avant-garde artists, to expand, improve, or confront the existing aesthetic.

  In 1961, Lomax was awarded the one-year Rockefeller Grant he was seeking for the “development of descriptive techniques for folk song.” The first task was to collect as many samples of the world’s music as possible. This meant writing hundreds of letters and making endless phone calls, and following up again and again when samples were not forthcoming, sometimes even trekking to a collector’s or scholar’s home to get them himself. Robert Farris Thompson, a professor of art history at Yale, remembered a phone call from Alan asking if he had tapes of Yoruba songs and music. When Thompson said he did, Alan told him that he needed them immediately, and he would take the train from New York to New Haven the following day to copy them himself. Alan arrived looking exhausted just as Thompson was leaving for a dinner party. When Thompson returned hours later he found Alan asleep on the floor, the tapes copied, and the tail of the last reel of tape spinning round and round.

  As tapes and discs grew in number and spilled from the shelves of his apartment, maps covering the walls, and song profiles accumulating on every surface, some wondered why a person who had been so close to the singers and the communities that produced this music would step so far back from them and begin high-level comparisons of whole cultures through statistics, of all things. Folksingers listened to his excited accounts of his discoveries and often left puzzled. Alan patiently explained, as he would have to for the rest of his life, that he was still doing folklore, but a folklore long dreamed of by European scholars and yet never achieved. He was lifting the top off folksinging, looking at its parts, and seeing how it worked—what kept it going for centuries, why so many shared it, and what it was about it that gave them pleasure.

  To those who knew him best, what he was attempting was perhaps even more bewildering. After he explained cantometrics to his sister Bess, she asked him why he had come up with the idea. “When you have to sit through a half-hour song in Spanish that you can’t understand,” he said with a laugh, “you need something else to do.” When he tried to interest Geoffrey Bridson at the BBC in his work, Alan told him that he at last had something that television would like: “profiles that look like business curves on performing styles”; “abstract drawings which have to do with the poetics”; and “pictures of timbre, which are rather like fingerprint diagrams.”

  For years Alan had tried to operate in the old southern tradition of personal management—that is to say, he managed himself. But when his life in New York had grown too complex he found an agent, Paul Rosen, to promote some of his ideas to media companies. The first target was Brad McCuen, the reissue producer at RCA Records, who handled the company’s country music. Lomax proposed a series of thematic albums—folk Christmas carols, railroad songs, folk guitar, folk dances, and some eleven other ideas. He also suggested packaging albums of reissues of RCA-owned recordings—a history of the blues, or of hillbilly music, and a collection of ethnic musics from America. RCA showed no interest in his notions, though only four years later they issued some LPs very similar to the ones Alan had recommended. Alan also directed his agent to see if there might still be some opportunities for him in London to write a new play for the Theatre Royal in Stratford, or to develop a TV “spectacular” on folk music, maybe write some documentaries on American life for BBC, select the music for an upcoming documentary on Tuscany featuring the comic actor Terry-Thomas, or write a musical based on the Jelly Roll Morton book.

  He developed a proposal to make a series of films on folk song subjects, framing them as a critique of American media for “turning their backs on documentary work.” With a crew of three for just a year, he said he could make a series of half-hour films on subjects such as Chicago blues, the songs of vaqueros, Lead Belly, the Sea Islands, bluegrass music, Sacred Harp singers, fiddlers, folkniks in Washington Square, and a half dozen other areas of vital and unique musical life. It was how he planned to make these films that would make them distinctive: before they began filming he would interview the singers and musicians and build the story line around what he learned, using them as narrators when possible. While the camera would stay close to the subjects, the “films must not watch the folk actors, but give the audience a sense of participation.” Everything would be filmed with handheld cameras and portable recording equipment in order to be able to move freely with the performers.

  Though no one was willing to support his own film projects at the time, Alan was hired to be one of the musical directors for the film The Music of Williamsburg . Its sponsor, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, was reacting to criticism of civil rights activists that the reconstructed colonial town had failed to show any black life or culture in its re-creation, and the foundation planned to use the film for classroom and touristic purposes. Lomax’s task was to re-create the kind of music that would have been familiar to the town’s slaves and might have been performed by them on any given day in 1768, while another music director would do the same for the whites of Williamsburg. Alan explored the earliest writings on the colonies to find authentic songs from the period, and went to work full-time on the project in April 1960. To find performers, he made phone calls to talent agents, to the commissioner of public relations in Nassau, the Bahamian labor commissioner, and to Belle Glade, Florida, where Zora Neale Hurston had located Bahamian dancers and musicians. He went to Warrenton, Virginia,
in search of a banjo player, to North Carolina looking for a fiddler, to St. Simon’s Island off Georgia for singers, and then to Miami in search of Bahamian drummers (since he could not find black American folk hand drummers). It was a difficult month, filled with dead ends, false leads, and hundreds of miles of driving and auto breakdowns.

  His expense sheets listed the tips given to people he asked for help in finding performers, the purchase of food and drinks for parties to audition performers, a musical saw, strings for instruments, a goat hide for drum heads, lime for taking hair off the hide, and a wooden barrel for the drum. He noted that Miami was “an extremely difficult Negro community to enter. It took me five days and many, many contacts before I found [drummer] Nat Rahmings. Actually I bought my way in by handing out odd bits of money to various slum characters who then introduced me down the line.” Though keeping the film from becoming anachronistic was a struggle, it was nonetheless one of the early efforts at correcting the television and film image of African Americans as ciphers who had made little contribution to American culture.

  Once filming was completed, some singers he had recruited from the Sea Islands stayed on another day so that Alan could record them with fife, drum, and what Alan called a “reconstructed” fretless, bowl-shaped banjo from slavery days (played by Hobart Smith). How authentic this attempt was at getting music from the previous century on record is hard to say, though it surely broke the rules of white-black interaction in the rural South. But Alan took heart when the group enthusiastically approved the addition of the white banjoist and was pleased by the music.

  It was during this period that the Friends of Old Time Music was formed by John Cohen and Ralph Rinzler. The name was chosen to avoid the word “folk,” which its members thought had already become too identified with commercialism. They sought to associate themselves with all the seriousness that the Friends of Music—an esteemed classical group in New York—would insist on. Cohen and Rinzler thought up the idea of bringing singers and musicians from the hinterlands—the real folks—with the help of Mike Seeger, Margot Mayo, Jean Ritchie, and Izzy Young. (Young was a convert from jazz who had invested in the new Village folk revival by opening the Folklore Center on MacDougal Street, a mixture of a tiny performance space, a folk bibliotheque, and a meeting place for those in the folk movement.) With folk music becoming a national craze and establishing new careers for pop stars who crossed over to folk songs, the Friends decided to return to the kind of performances that Alan had presented in the mid-1940s and again in the 1959 concert at Carnegie Hall and at the Newport Folk Festival. The performers they brought to town for their concerts from 1961 to 1965 were chosen to show the world that there was a difference between folksingers and those who simply sang folk songs. The Friends developed a language and an aura of authenticity to explain these differences, even if they themselves were often not so clear on them. In fact, most of the people they presented turned out to have made commercial recordings or worked in minstrel, vaudeville, and tent shows in the South, and as such were themselves professional folk performers. The Friends of Old Time Music were attempting to turn back musical time at the very moment when the civil rights movement was hitting its peak, and it was not always easy to celebrate southern folk artists gracefully in this climate. John Cohen articulated the larger goals that lay behind their efforts:

  The act of finding linkages between peoples who would otherwise be opposed to one another was interesting and political. We were putting our stamp of approval on these white guys who until that time had been stereotyped as racists, lynchers, and all those nightmarish things about the South. We were trying to turn Ashley and Watson and the Stanleys into real people, and I thought this was a good thing—acknowledging those people and their culture was political.... We were looking for deeply human, positive connections rather than confrontations.

  When Alan’s turn came to produce a show for the Friends, he used performers he knew and had worked with for years, like Hobart Smith, Texas Gladden, Bessie Jones, the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Fred McDowell, and Ed Young.

  It was into this mix of musical good intentions and occasional cultural slips that Bob Dylan walked when he arrived in New York City. Carla Rotolo, Alan’s assistant in 1961, had a sister, Suze, who was living with Dylan at the time, so he was an occasional visitor to Alan’s apartment, where he met many of these singers and heard them perform at Alan’s twice-monthly parties—“spiritual experiences,” Dylan called them—and where he learned their songs and performance styles firsthand. He later said that Harry Smith’s recordings were not as important to him as people thought, because he had seen many of the same people who were on the records perform live. Dylan wanted Alan to include his songs in the next folk song collection that he published, which might well have been a possibility if Alan had prepared another book, for he admired Dylan’s work, and even had no objections to his becoming a rock singer. In fact, he said that he saw in Dylan’s music what he saw in the best rock and roll: a conscience.

  In the spring of 1961 Alan scripted a film for television on folk music in Greenwich Village called Ballads, Blues, and Bluegrass, which was shot by George Pickow with one camera (but still without synched sound) in Alan’s apartment. It opened with him at the door greeting his guests, and turning to the camera to say, “Well, you’re in Greenwich Village now, where people come to get away from America. It’s not jazz around here anymore—it’s folk music. Jazz is high-hat and aging. Young people have gone mad over ballads, guitar playing, and banjo picking.” Dropping by that night were Clarence Ashley, Doc Watson, the Greenbriar Boys, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Jean Ritchie, Memphis Slim, the New Lost City Ramblers, Peter LaFarge, Roscoe Holcomb, Willie Dixon, and others. It seemed like a miniature version of what Alan had envisioned for the Newport Folk Festival.

  On August 26, Alan married Antoinette Marchand, a young woman from a Franco-American family in upstate New York whom he had met while he was consulting with the Tragers in Buffalo. She was twenty-six and had just graduated from the University of Buffalo with a teaching degree. For the wedding he rented a shack in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where a handful of friends and relations gathered. But it was not too small a wedding for the New York Times to ignore, and they noted it was a second marriage for both.

  Almost as soon as the newlyweds returned to New York, Bessie Jones turned up at his door and said she was there to get Alan’s help starting her career as a singer, storyteller, and teacher and to have him record her biography. She stayed with the Lomaxes for three months and did fifty hours of recording, with Alan and Toni doing the interviewing. “Bessie lived with us and that machine was there, ready to go at any minute, and we never knew when all of a sudden something would start coming.”

  Though the interviews were never published, Alan wrote letters for Bessie, encouraging various organizations to hire her, and for two years she toured the country playing schools and festivals. Alan’s sister Bess, however, did her own interviewing of Jones, which resulted in Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes’s Step It Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. It was a very different book from what Alan had planned, though it did draw on portions of his and Toni’s interviews. Bessie soon tired of performing alone, however, and wanted to work with a singing group from the Sea Islands the way she had done before. Alan was against the idea, believing that she was such a strong and compelling personality that she needed no one else with her, and he paid for her to take guitar lessons to learn to accompany herself. Without telling Alan, however, she formed her own group, the Sea Island Singers, and was booked on the West Coast by an agent. When he finally heard the group, Alan was convinced she was right, and he had brochures made up, wrote to colleges, and began booking them himself. Bessie and the group moved in with him and worked on how they would present themselves to audiences. They became popular performers at folk festivals, joined in on civil rights demonstrations, and remained together for the next ten years.

  CHAPT
ER 16

  To Hear the World in a Grain of Sand

  When British decolonization began to accelerate in the Lesser Antilles in the West Indies in the late 1950s, and the governments of Jamaica and Trinidad were seeking to create a federation of all these newly independent islands, Alan recalled his stays in the Caribbean in 1935 and 1937 and the plans he once had for doing comparative studies of how Africans had adapted their music and culture to life in the New World. The islands had been colonized and fought over by the English, French, Dutch, and Spanish, with several different nations sometimes ruling the same small island at different points in its history. But rather than completely surrendering to the cultures imposed by the colonialists, their enslaved African residents used whatever materials they encountered to reshape their own traditions and craft new cultures adapted to their own needs. Some of these local creations had become internationally popular over the last century: in dance alone, there was the habanera, mambo, fire dance, limbo, conga, biguine, rhumba, and calypso, all of which had caught the world’s imagination.

  Alan, however, felt there were even more engaging and beautiful dances and musics still to be discovered on the smaller, less heralded islands. To him it was the usual story of powerful media determining who would get the attention and rewards. He thought it might be possible to identify the distinctive qualities of each island, but also to determine the characteristics that all the islands shared, and which could form the basis of a new union. So in 1962 he asked the Rockefeller Foundation to extend his funding to allow him to do a summer-long survey of the music of the Caribbean, and Philip Sherlock, a founder of the University of the West Indies and himself a folklorist, gave him permission to base his research there.