Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  When the National Institute of Mental Health awarded him a six-year grant to run from 1963 to 1969, he assembled a staff that included Roswell Rudd, an avant-garde jazz trombonist and graduate of Yale University with roots in Dixieland music who would serve as the archivist; Joan Halifax, who would work with him on the analysis of the verbal content of song; Norman Berkowitz, who would be the computer programmer and statistician; Victor Grauer the ethnomusicologist; Edwin Erickson and Barbara Ayres the anthropologists; and Conrad Arensberg, who would codirect the project with him.

  The first findings of their work were published by Victor Grauer in a short article in the journal Ethnomusicology. In it they explained that they had hypothesized that characteristic performance traits would be found in most of the songs in the samples from each of the style areas that Alan had sketched out, and in fact they had found these features grouped into distinct clusters that defined European, African, Bardic (the Muslim Mediterranean, India, and high-culture Asia), semi-Bardic, and African style areas. It was a modest and very preliminary finding, Grauer admitted, but it suggested they were on the right path.

  Alan never saw any incongruity between his scholarly work and his public persona, and the Newport Folk Festival was at that time the one place where he could bring together his life’s work with his political views. When the 1961 jazz festival ended in drunken youth crashing through gates and knocking down fences, both festivals were banned from Newport for the next two years. But George Wein did not give up, and with Pete Seeger’s help he got them approved by the city of Newport in time for the 1963 dates. For that year an even larger folk festival was planned, one that would better balance name performers with the folk musicians. The board decided that each of the performers would receive fifty dollars for an appearance, and all of them would be housed in a rented mansion that would serve as a temporary dormitory. But folk musicians, unlike their jazz counterparts, were not accustomed to traveling long distances to perform before big audiences, and were uncomfortable staying in strange houses. Nor were all of them accustomed to being placed on equal terms with members of another race, so that sharing the festival’s facilities—such as the seating on a festival bus, when many of them came from areas of the South where people of color sat in the back—became a test for many.

  The civil rights movement changed the tone of the festival that year, with singers and organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee present as performers and activists. SNCC was a younger, more assertive wing of the movement, a group whose members had put themselves on the line in the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders. They worked close to the rural black populace—registering voters, running literacy programs, and advising them of their rights under the law—and unlike the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, they were drawn to the expressive power of black folk tradition. On the first night of the festival, their Freedom Singers performed the songs that had seen them through violence and demonstrations in the South, and on the second night SNCC led a march through Newport and staged rallies supporting an upcoming march on Washington. The final night of the festival was brought to a close by Bob Dylan singing some of his most political numbers, followed by Peter, Paul, and Mary with their version of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Finally, Pete Seeger, Dylan, Joan Baez, Theodore Bikel, and the Freedom Singers all joined together for “We Shall Overcome.”

  As 1964, the fourth year of the festival, approached, the board added Mike Seeger and Alan, two of the advocates of folk music most concerned with the state of tradition. Alan’s first step was to write a long letter to his fellow board members expressing his dissatisfaction with the way the Newport Foundation was dispensing grants. The heart of his complaint was a familiar one with him: the singers of the American folk song revival knew little about performance, and as a result the quality of their singing was still at a very low level. Style is difficult to learn, he granted, because it can’t be written down and can only be learned in part from sound recordings. Yet style was where the real meaning of folk song lay, in its verbal, musical, and physical dimensions. It was the reason for song having survived along with the human species. For him it was about more than the survival of an art, it was part of the continuance of the various ways of being human.

  He believed that young urban singers would benefit by learning directly from the best performers. This meant searching the entire country for outstanding local singers and musicians, and then preparing them for travel and performance on a scale far greater than they had ever experienced, as well as making sure that they received the respect and care that would enable their artistry to be both understood and appreciated. This was not a task for a talent scout or theatrical agent, since it took a scholar of folklore to find and recognize local artists, some of whom were lonely performers, perhaps ignored even by their own people who had put their traditions behind them in a quest for a better life. Alan’s own work with Lead Belly in the house in Connecticut was the model he had in mind. In a note in the 1964 festival program, he seemed to be speaking to the festival’s promoters as much as he was to its audience when he wrote that he hoped the festival would be a triumph for these performers:

  For most of them it is their only outlet. Furthermore, despite the fact that they are not all “smooth” entertainers from the point of view of city audiences, they are our only source for learning the art of American folk music, itself. Their more relaxed way of performing, which is sometimes mistaken for lack of accomplishment, is often simply a matter of another style and other standards. Their art lies hidden in these stylistic differences. It consists of more than the words, the tune and the fun of singing. It is, perhaps, our most important, serious and original contribution to world musical culture. These performers are its only carriers and they deserve to be listened to with respect and love and delight.

  Lomax also thought that the Newport Foundation should help performers with their own traditions and audiences. The models for this kind of work were Guy Carawan and his wife, Candie, who had recently moved to Johns Island, off of Charleston, South Carolina, where they were helping organize Sea Island singers to present their own local cultural and music festivals. Alan had just returned from a trip there in October 1963, where he and the Carawans had set up weekly gettogethers for local people to explore their local repertoire, sing songs, tell stories, and prepare younger people to carry on their traditions. He would return again at Christmas in 1963 and write an account of the first Sea Island Folk Festival for the Charleston News and Courier. One of the first Newport Foundation grants went to the Carawans for that work.

  Alan proposed that the festival hire three staff to travel throughout the year to find local artists, work with them, and make it possible for them to perform at home, at regional festivals, and at Newport. There were those on the board who wondered why they themselves weren’t considered competent enough to identify such talent when they saw it, and they resisted the idea. But Alan pressed on doggedly until they agreed to hire one person to spend two months a year at the job at a salary of $2,500. At the time, folklore students, blues aficionados, and folkniks were all crisscrossing the country on their own quests to find authentic folk artists, but Alan knew it would be difficult to get anyone of quality to interrupt his or her own life for so little money and under such short notice, so he sought the help of scholars like Charles Seeger and David McAllester to back him, and counted on board members Jean Ritchie and Mike Seeger to support him.

  The board eventually gave in and agreed to spend $5,000 to hire Ralph Rinzler, one of the founders of the Friends of Old Time Music and a member of the revivalist group the Greenbriar Boys, to spend three months a year on the road. Rinzler was passionate about folk music and knew local traditions better than almost anyone else in the country. Over the next few months he traveled twelve thousand miles through eight states, Nova Scotia, and French Canada, visiting many of the people with whom Alan had worked, but also finding many new Cajun performers, cowboy singers, and som
e of the least-known religious singing groups.

  The difference that Alan’s planning and Rinzler’s work made was evident on the 1964 festival’s opening night. A “Concert of Traditional Music” introduced the audience to a wide array of traditional performers, and set a tone of discovery that continued throughout the festival. Alan wrote the script and narrated for a stage filled with white and black singers and musicians. “This is an evening of point-counterpoint,” he announced, as he began to explain how white and black performers’ styles affected one another and shaped the different genres of American folk song. And for the next four hours (most of which were plagued by rain), he held the huge expanse of song together. The performers ranged from Seamus Ennis, brought over to show the Irish style, to Bessie Jones up from the Sea Islands of Georgia; there were hammer dulcimer players, cowboys, Appalachian singers and Cajun musicians, panpipe players, work songs sung to woodcutting, a square dance with fiddlers from different traditions, a jug band, loggers’ songs, a frontier playparty demonstration, and rural and urban blues. Mixed in with these performers over the next three nights were Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and other popular stars, and the festival went to some effort to tell the audiences that the singers they had come to see had gotten a lot of their songs from these unknown performers.

  But the tension in the festival that year was less between the folk and the media stars than between the public’s perception of folk song and what was now being called the protest song. Given the politics of the times, the broadside or topical song workshops attracted a great deal of attention, and Ralph Rinzler was called upon to explain to reporters that protest, too, was traditional, though the examples he cited dated back only to the Depression. Alan, on the other hand, would sometimes add that “every folk song in the Western world was a protest song”—even, and maybe especially, love songs.

  That year at the festival Alan met Joan Halifax, a twenty-two-year-old just out of college in New Orleans, who was working with George Pickow’s film crew. Alan had just ended an affair with Pamela Gerstman, a relationship that had gotten him into the news five months earlier as a co-respondent in divorce proceedings. Halifax was drawn to the civil rights cause, anthropology, and the work he was doing. They were both involved in the antiwar movement, which was locked together with the struggle for racial justice, and together they participated in demonstrations and rallies.

  When it was announced that the International Anthropological and Ethnological Congress would be held in Moscow in 1964, Alan saw an opportunity to gather copies of the recordings he had never been able to obtain when he was assembling the World Library recordings in the 1950s. With the help of ethnomusicologist Anna Rudneva, he went through the archives of Moscow and Leningrad and made copies of recordings of some nineteen groups and nationalities. He also managed to record ten hours of artists from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Siberia, and Russia by himself. On his way back from Russia he visited the village of Dragus in Transylvania and recorded some boys and girls and older women singing dance songs, love songs, and lullabies.

  The Penguin Book of American Folk Songs, a book that Alan had been working on in England, was published that year with piano arrangements by Elizabeth Poston, a composer and pianist who had studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams, the compiler of The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, with which it was paired. Alan’s compilation was largely made up of songs from the previous Lomax books, with an emphasis on how to perform them in the style of the regions from which they originated. When Pete Seeger reviewed it for Sing Out!, he praised it and the Lomaxes’ good taste in music. (“Collectors were looking for the oldest songs they could find, the Lomaxes were looking for the best they could find.”)

  Ray Birdwhistell had suggested to Alan when they first met that he should begin his studies with dance rather than music, since dance was a more basic component of human communication than music, more primal and preverbal than song, and was more directly connected to everyday work and the social movements of the body. He also recommended that Lomax should use the Laban system in order to compare dance styles. Rudolf von Laban, an early modern dancer, had devised a method of notation that was meant to be free of language and any particular form or school of dance, and could serve as a universal means of describing other forms of motion as well. His system involved the weight, space, flow, time, energy, and effort involved in the motions of dance; it was more concerned with how people moved than it was with what movements they made; and it did not deal with what the dances meant to particular dancers. As Alan got deeper into the comparative study of music he was obliged to pay more attention to differences in the way that singers and musicians used their bodies; dance seemed to be an extension of the same movements.

  In 1965 Lomax added two specialists in the Laban method to his staff: Irmgard Bartenieff and Forrestine Paulay, and they set out with him to build an archive of the world’s dance films, a far more difficult project than creating a song archive, since fewer of the world’s dances had been documented. Once again, there were no archives and world collections of such films, and channels had to be found or made through which to borrow or buy copies of whatever existed. For the next eight years they would write hundreds of letters and travel to distant parts of the world until they eventually amassed 2,138 films. Meanwhile, they would have to code and analyze much of what they found as quickly as possible, because copying everything they borrowed was too expensive. Progress was slow in all of their work because they had to enter data onto punch cards by the thousands and feed them into Columbia’s IBM 360 mainframe computer.

  After they had watched a number of the films, they realized they needed to add to the Laban system a number of categories that could be quantified and used by nonspecialists to relate body movements to other cultural behaviors and then compare them cross-culturally. The system they devised and named choreometrics was attempting what Margaret Mead called the first ethological study of all the world’s peoples, a form of natural history observation before then reserved only for the study of animals.

  What they came up with did not chart a step-by-step analysis such that one could use it to learn particular dances. Instead, the coding concerned the levels at which the body signals data to other individuals such as age, gender, occupation, health, and cultural affiliation by means of body attitude or stance, the body parts most often articulated, the shape of the path that movement takes, the patterns that link body and limbs, and the dynamic qualities of dance. Lomax and his staff found that these patterns enabled them to define dance style areas that were analogous to those of song style traditions. The American Indian area, for example, was characterized by the body acting as a single unit, with the whole leg and the whole arm articulated, and by movement in one dimension. Sub-Saharan Africans, by contrast, used their bodies as both one and two units, with the head, face, chest, shoulders, leg, and arm articulated, and by movement in one, two, and three dimensions. It was such characteristics that served to identify an individual with his or her culture and made it possible for members of a culture to act in synchrony.

  They quickly expanded the work to include films of representative nondance motions and work patterns of the world’s peoples, as it became apparent that all physical behavior in a culture is shaped by standards of behavior that are passed on from generation to generation. Margaret Mead had long before shown that appropriate spatial relations, timing, stance, and the like were learned very early in life, nonverbally, through parents, siblings, and playmates. Dance appeared to be a heightened, more expressive and more conscious form of everyday movement in a culture, much as song seemed to be a heightened form of speech. When the coded profiles of dance were correlated to other cultural domains, the researchers found parallels between the frequency of finger and hand articulation in dance and the complexity of a culture’s principal productive activities. The degree and nature of synchrony in dance pointed to the synchrony necessary for community subsistence tasks. They also found that the organization an
d makeup of dancing groups reflected the nature of gender and social relations in a society. Overall, dance was seen not as a repetition of everyday motions and postures but as a novel and sometimes even distorted rearrangement of them. Dance reinforces human adaptive patterns, and thus is an indicator of social and cultural evolution.

  In the summer of 1965 the Newport Folk Festival staged a preview concert in New York City’s Central Park. With the pressure increasing within the civil rights movement in response to the death of Malcolm X, the clashes at Selma, Alabama, and mass arrests of demonstrators in Chicago, Alan, who produced and hosted part of the concert, wanted to use it to bring New York audiences closer to the black South and to remind them that there was a long cultural history behind the events they only heard about on nightly TV news reports. The performers included Reverend Gary Davis, the Sea Island Singers, Mabel Hillary, and the Ed Young and Lonnie Young fife and drum band, all of whom were encouraged to take the time onstage to comment and elaborate on their songs and dances.

  When the festival opened in Newport the following day, it played to a new kind of audience. Five years earlier, members of Yale’s singing clubs might turn up, driving off the ferry in Chrysler Town and Country cars, joining serious students from the University of Michigan’s Folklore Society, and any number of Ivy League and Seven Sisters strays, comfortable in their identification with the Kingston Trio’s striped summer shirts, chinos, and tidy stage manners. This year, however, it seemed as though refugees and hobos were moving through the land: they came shaggy-haired, with backpacks and sleeping bags, banjos and guitars slung over their shoulders, thumbing their way to the island, every one of them potentially a folk musician, a blues singer, a revolutionary, a rock star, just one of the new folk.