Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  A new kind of filmmaking would have to be developed to create the consciousness needed to offset these problems, and documentary makers would have to be sensitized to microbehavioral observation and nonverbal behavior. Lomax offered a set of suggestions that would help to make documentaries free of the clichés, conventions, and biases that made most films of limited use for research. Filmmakers should start with an overview of the context of the event being filmed; continue with medium and long shots and not change focus or angle; keep the principal actors in the frame in the longer and more important parts; avoid close-ups of one person or one person’s face or isolated body parts; and always keep a complete, unedited copy of the original filming. He also called for the filmmaker to involve the people in the film, especially by showing them the work as it progressed and then listening to their opinions of what they’d seen. If camera operators, directors, and editors objected to these constraints as the very things they avoided because they would put an audience to sleep, Alan’s retort was that it was the nervous cutting, zooming, and refocusing that made documentaries fatiguing to watch, and more often than not it was not the audience’s taste that was driving the nervous, busy camerawork, but rather something that the camera operators didn’t want to watch that led them to cut away.

  As new and cheaper communication technologies began to appear, he persistently tried to convince UNESCO to give money to talented people in each of the great cultural families of the world to enable them to make films that would show their cultural traditions and their unique cultural style to their own people and to the world, and to store these films in archives around the world, forming a global network of archives. It was again his idea of cultural feedback, but now at a global level. UNESCO, however, never seemed to understand how this would work. He tried to interest influential people such as Rudolf Nureyev, Yehudi Menuhin, and Jean Rouch, the great French ethnographic filmmaker, in becoming involved with the project, and to get Time-Life interested in making films. He wrote to Sony to persuade them to put portable cameras into the hands of every “tribe in the world for the purpose of documenting their own culture.” When in the early 1970s the Society for Visual Anthropology was created, a group of social scientists that shared many of Lomax’s beliefs, Alan argued with them about their priorities, telling them that they were narrow and self-serving by wanting to make their own films when they ought to be finding ways to help others make films.

  With the support of Margaret Mead, he sought funding to build up an archive of film, and hundreds of personal letters were again sent out across the world for help in finding dance films. But as with the library of the world’s folk music, many of his requests went unanswered, especially those sent to Russia. In May 1972 the National Science Foundation gave him $119,000 to continue the search for dance footage and to produce two pilot films that would teach choreometrics. It was not enough, but sufficient to make him redouble his efforts.

  Dance and Human History was the first of four films on dance he would write and direct, all of them produced by the University of California Extension Media Center at Berkeley. It opened with a long, visually stunning montage of the variety of the world’s dances, most of which had never before been seen by even the best of the dance specialists, and was followed by a demonstration of two of the scales used in choreometric research, for arm and body trunk movements, and their variations that existed across cultures. The rest of the film provided directions for coding dances and analyzing them in relation to social structure, climate, and forms of tool use and level of subsistence of the society. Unlike most anthropological and ethnographic films, this one was both a research report and a set of directions for its viewers on how to conduct the research themselves. It was also one of the most cinematic of anthropological films, as it counted on images more than words to communicate. It was awarded a Cine Golden Eagle Award in 1976.

  Two more choreometric films followed in 1980—Step Style and Palm Play, the former devoted to the legs and feet in dance and their relation to work movements and sports, and the latter to the openness or closure of the palm in dance and the cultural symbolism of these gestures. Both films once again won Cine Golden Eagle Awards. The Longest Trail, made in 1986 and the last of the dance films, followed the settlement of the New World by Native Americans and showed more than fifty different dances. Alan’s theories of the relation between environment, economy, culture, and dance were all brought to bear on the history of these dances, explaining their continuity and spread from Asia to South America.

  Three months before NASA launched Voyager I and II into space in 1978, Carl Sagan wrote Alan and asked him to join a committee that would be advising the part of the project that would place a gold-plated copper disc containing ninety minutes of earth’s music in each spacecraft. The two ships would pass by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and continue on into interstellar space at a million miles a day, capable of surviving for an estimated billion years, giving them a probable life greater than any human artifact, greater than the life of most of the continents on earth. Whatever music was chosen to be fired into space would become the ultimate mix tape, each selection becoming a classic by virtue of being granted immortality. Lomax’s study of the evolutionary history of the earth’s music made him the most influential member of the committee, so when the final choices were made, half of the selections were his. While the music included works by Bach, Stravinsky, Mozart, Debussy, and Beethoven, there was far more music from the Solomon Islands, Bulgaria, the Navajo, Peru, India, Japan, Mexico, Australia, and Java. There were no American classical composers, but Blind Willie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry were included.

  But Alan was unhappy with the way things were organized and he perceived himself as being treated like just another media hack. He wrote Sagan to instruct him on the years of work that lay behind the choices he had made and to chastise him for not treating his role in the enterprise more seriously, as scientist to scientist, rather than just someone in the recording business. Sagan apologized and assured him of his importance to the project.

  The two spacecraft were launched with their sonic payloads, and shortly after, a letter arrived from Moe Asch of Folkways Records asserting that certain recordings for which he held copyrights—the Navajo, Blind Willie Johnson, and the Pygmies—had been launched and written about without his permission, and he was concerned about abridgement of his rights on earth and presumably in space as well.

  The excitement about documentary filmmaking in the 1970s was partly the result of a rediscovery of the power of documentaries, enhanced now by improvements in quality, along with the drop in the cost of the necessary equipment. After so much writing and giving talks about the potential of film, Alan wanted not only to show folklorists and anthropologists what they could accomplish with it, but also to get such works aired on television. In 1978 he convinced PBS to back another trip into the South, this time to focus on the blues and the musics that contributed to it, and to make a pilot for a projected series of folklore films. This one was to be called The Land Where the Blues Began, but with the rapid spread of television itself, and his not having been in the South for a while, Alan wasn’t certain that there was any folk music left there. Still, if everything else failed, he thought they could at least interview some of the older people about the past.

  For assistance Alan turned to Worth Long, a SNCC folklorist and photographer, to point the way to the best singers and musicians, and to John Bishop, whom he had just engaged as a photographer at the Newport Folk Festival. NEH gave them a small grant, and because PBS couldn’t offer them a great deal of money, they videotaped instead of filming. When Bishop arrived in Mississippi, Alan and Long had already been there for ten days, looking around and making arrangements to work with a camera crew from Mississippi ETV.

  Over the next month they found their way into Arkabutla, Bentonia, Bolton, Canton, Como, Greenville, Hollandale, Independence, Lexington, Sardis, Senatobia, and Vicksburg, all shrines of the
blues lover’s world. Alan had to adapt his recording style to film: what he didn’t know about cameras, editing, and how a film was put together he made up for in his mastery of microphones and their placement. He wanted to catch all the parameters of singing style on film, but there was no time to train camera operators in the method. Despite the summer heat, when the sun went down they rigged up lights and sweated while the bugs burned up as they hit the bulbs; or they set up the lights in bars and juke joints, turning them into ovens. They filmed singers and musicians such as R. L. Burnside, Sonny Boy Nelson, Napoleon Strickland, and Sam Chatmon of the Mississippi Sheiks, famous for “Corinna, Corinna” and “Sitting on Top of the World.” There were interviews with workers in the field and tractor drivers, talking about their youth spent picking cotton by hand, or men who had built the levees recalling working for white men on horseback who had one hand on the horse’s reins and the other on a gun. They walked the tracks with railroad men, filming them straightening rails, laying ties, and singing so loudly that they failed to hear a train coming at them and barely were able to save the cables and cameras.

  Postproduction work was started back in Boston without money to pay for equipment and labor, and somehow they managed to get the program finished by September 1979. It was first aired in Mississippi and then nationally on PBS in 1980. The film was given a Gabriel Award in 1980 from the Catholic Broadcasters Association; a Houston International Film Festival Gold Medal, also in 1980; and a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival in 1985. The success of the pilot got Alan the money he needed from the National Endowment for the Arts to make a series of films for PBS called American Patchwork, and between 1978 and 1985 he would make field trips to Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arizona to videotape regional American culture—Jazz Parades, Cajun Country, Appalachian Journey, and Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old.

  Two of the most important people in Alan’s life died within a few months of each other between 1978 and 1979. Margaret Mead was the first. When he spoke at her memorial service at Columbia University, Alan told the gathering that he had not met Mead until she located him while he was working in the UK in the mid-1950s. She invited him to hear her speak in London, and afterwards told him that she had seen his film ’Oss ’Oss, Wee ’Oss and wanted to tell him that he had interpreted it wrong. Nonetheless, she admired the film, and insisted that he come back to the United States and get a grant for research. She actually applied for a grant for him to make sure he obtained it, and introduced him to her inner circle. She and Alan worked together more often when she organized and pushed for the creation of the American Film Research Institute, sometimes jointly applying with him for various film projects. “In our last conversation, Margaret said, ‘Is anybody making trouble? If so call me and I’ll deal with it.’ And she would have.”

  Nick Ray died in June 1979, and his memorial was held at Lincoln Center, with Alan as master of ceremonies. They had stayed in contact over the years, and when the jagged trajectories of their lives intersected they found they still shared the same dreams and aspirations they had developed together some forty years earlier in Washington. During the long illness that led to his death, Ray had been teaching at Harpur College in New York State, and often stayed with Alan when he was in the city. In his eulogy Lomax said that Nick had become a play-boy in Hollywood, “the perfect camouflage for a man who was making socially significant pictures in the 1950s.” But the speakers at the memorial were not the moguls, the actors, the bankers, those for whom he had made money, but Will Lee, a blacklisted actor who remained close to Ray and who ended his career as Mr. Hooper on The Muppet Show, and film students like Jim Jarmusch. Alan said at one point that Nick was forced to go to Europe to find work, but he was never comfortable there because American culture and American character were his subjects. If it had not been clear before this that Alan was also speaking about himself, it became so when he turned to the vision Nick had of America: “The world which Nick [and] his contemporaries knew was full of injustice, poverty, tyranny, and above all the threat of Fascism—Nick worked and fought, covertly, with every weapon he had, his whole life to change these conditions, to expose the evils of his time.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The Global Jukebox: “Got the World in a Jug, the Stopper in My Hand”

  Alan had passed his sixty-fifth birthday, and though he had been diagnosed as having arrhythmia of the heart and was taking Ritalin, he had no thoughts of retiring. He was deep into unfinished research—no one else knew the material well enough to take over and complete it—the grants were running out, and government funding agencies were reluctant to continue backing projects without tangible results. In any case, Alan could hardly afford to retire, given that his total income for 1981 was $41,218—a figure that included the sale of stock his father left him, worth $36,088. Over the next two years he would have problems with late payment of taxes, and the IRS attached his wages. He would need to work harder, come up with new research proposals, or find a way to sell some of the work he had done in the past, work with which he was identified and that no one else could do.

  In a letter to the president of the Carnegie Foundation in January 1981, Alan reminded him that it was his organization that had helped create the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, and that the most serious purpose of his and his father’s work was “to give a new basis for growth to America’s finest and most important indigenous tradition—the folk music of the black people of the South.... [But] this our most beautiful music has, for a variety of reasons, fallen into disuse . . . this break in cultural continuity represents a serious threat to the future development of American culture and its music.” What he was asking for now was funds to create the Recorded Treasury of Black Folk Music, fifty to one hundred records that would survey black folk music of the United States and the Bahamas (the latter because of its ties to people of the southeastern coastal United States):

  This Treasury will present one of the most remarkable of mankind’s cultural achievements. The blacks, brought here as slaves, deprived of their languages and their material culture, and learning a new system of musical and linguistic communication, combined these traditions to create a new river of song and dance which has, in the last two or three hundred years, swept the whole world into its currents. Nothing quite like this had ever happened before. Having just surveyed the music of the whole world on the Cantometric Project, I can say that no song style exists anywhere that can beat this material for sheer variety, originality and charm. Yet its most genuine aspects are little known today and are fast fading out of currency, under the pond of the media. It would be possible to put the whole back into circulation, to start this mighty river flowing again with the stimulus of the Recorded Treasury.

  Though his claims for the reissue of black folk music might have seemed exaggerated, the Southern Journey recordings of 1960 had in fact become extraordinarily significant. When they were issued by a major recording company they found their way into every corner of the country and began to influence both the folk revival and popular music in general. The Carnegie Foundation decided not to fund the project in 1981, but a decade later the National Endowment for the Humanities would underwrite it.

  Despite the label of “folk purist” that was hung on him later in his career, Alan had spent years thinking about pop music and its power to affect the lives of Americans from birth to old age. He tracked the changes in the content of pop songs, such as the switch from the nineteenth century’s pain and sorrow at the loss of one’s mother and the old homestead to the twentieth century’s heartbreak and anguish over the loss or the lack of a lover. But the most striking difference was the way in which Euro-American and African American singing styles had radically affected each other in spite of a long history of racial censorship that kept each group’s recordings and performances separate from the other (race records, rhythm and blues, the ban against blacks in popular radio DJ programs and in t
he early days of American Bandstand, and even MTV, which was then still refusing to feature black performers). Alan applied to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a grant to study the development of American popular music, and in 1982 was awarded $50,000 for a project he called “The Urban Strain: A Cross-Cultural Interpretation of American Performance Styles.” According to Roswell Rudd, one of his associates on the grant, “Alan began the Strain project because he was criticized for not including the development of urban society into his system.” Some skeptics insisted that while cantometrics might work on isolated or very old societies, it would be unable to deal with the vast and complex hybrid or creolized modern musics of North America.

  To enable the coding system of cantometrics to include these newer musics, Rudd added electronics, overdubbing, and new forms of musical instruments to the categories, along with novel stylistic features such as “strict temperament,” “blue notes,” “speaking quality like Louis (Armstrong),” “screaming,” “sprechstimme,” “imitating singers,” and “imitating animals or environmental sounds.”

  The survey covered a full range of singers, right up to Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra. Alan and Forrestine Paulay examined changes in dance and analyzed their relation to dance music. In films of the early white pop singers, such as Bing Crosby, they noticed that the performers’ head motions did not match the phrasing of their singing; only later in their careers were the two synchronized. An African American performer like Fats Domino, in contrast, phrased not just with his head but with his whole body. Members of Domino’s band also phrased with their entire bodies, though not necessarily in the same manner or at the same time, but in a complex synchrony with the singer’s. As the researchers worked their way forward in time to white performers like Pat Boone, they saw the beginnings of new physical phrasing emerging.