Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  By pulling pop music out of the language of fashion that surrounded it and placing it into a historical context, then comparing it to other musics without the use of musical transcriptions, the Urban Strain project aimed to demystify the music, chart its growth and its spread across the world, and then offer explanations for its success. Unlike those in the music business who looked for novelty everywhere, it sought the traditional elements within the new. What Alan found was that American pop had tapped some of the richest and farthest-reaching of the world’s style structures—the folk and the art musics of West and Central Africa, and those of Northeastern, Eastern, and Middle Europe. The Western European ballad, African hocketing and orchestral form, and the Eurasian brass band and concert orchestra traditions had all come together in the United States.

  The scope of the project was huge: an entire country’s popular music and dance were to be assessed and analyzed, including musical ads, Broadway dances, and movie scores, and then reduced to a final sample of 321 songs and a hundred dances. Under the pressure of the size of the task facing him and the limits of staff and money, Lomax departed from cantometrics and choreometrics methods, and most of the work was done in discussion and debate; all of it was recorded, but without codings and statistical analysis. The real work of the project was in Lomax’s mind: he knew the musical and social background of American pop song better than anyone else, but lacked the time to put together what they had discovered in the research with the knowledge he had already accumulated over a lifetime, and even though he had written several hundred pages for a book, he never had time to finish it. Instead, he planned to use what they had discovered for a later effort.

  With the retirement or passing of several of Alan’s key supporters at Columbia University and more of his time being spent in film and public media, his future at the school seemed less secure. In 1983 he decided to incorporate his various preservation, research, and media activities and founded the Association for Cultural Equity, a nonprofit corporation with which to support his various projects and to develop methods of assuring “cultural feedback,” the means by which equity could be assured for the people whose music had been recorded as part of ethnographic and folkloric studies. The idea of “return” was then circulating in cultural circles—the restoration of cultural artifacts or documented materials to their originators, making it possible for them to receive royalties for their works. Lomax took this idea a step further by urging that people should also have the means to document their own cultures by setting up recording and filming centers in third-world countries “to give them media status, the educational standing, and the sense of professional competence in the arts that will enable them to face the pressure of the media and to grow from their own roots.” Those outsiders doing field research among them should take along tape recorders, a tape duplicator, a video camera, and a videotape duplicator, all of which they would leave behind after they had been used cooperatively with the people who were documented.

  The fieldwork and filming for the American Patchwork films funded by the National Endowment for the Arts would preoccupy him for the next few years. In 1983 alone he was shooting film in Tucson, rural Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington. Alan had enough money for the five one-hour films he had planned, but he had shot enough footage in a number of places that he also hoped to make several more: The Harp of a Thousand Strings, on shape-note singers in Georgia and Alabama, with comparisons to black Sacred Harp singers in the Carolinas, long-meter singing among Baptists in Kentucky, psalm singing in the Hebrides, and Holiness spirituals in the Tennessee mountains; the stories and songs of the Papago, Mountain Apache, and Yaqui Indians and Mexican Americans in Desert Folk: The Most Civilized Americans; and Festa Italiana, a comparative study of the Giglio festival, the feast of Saint Paulinus, in Neapolitan communities in Italy and the United States.

  When he finally received funding for the Recorded Treasury of Black Folk Music from the National Endowment of the Arts, Alan hired folklorist, collector, and record company owner Peter Lowry to work with him at the Library of Congress. He had estimated that the project would take two months, but even with a research fellowship at the Smithsonian to support him it took Alan ten months of working six ten-hour days a week to listen to all the black American folk recordings in the archive, then organize them by region and occupation. He stayed in Bess’s apartment while Lowry took the copies home with him to upstate New York and spent several more months assembling the master tapes. Alan’s plan was to shop the recordings to record companies, but it was not until the 1990s that the black song collection would be released by Rounder Records, because he was distracted by the postproduction work on the American Patchwork film series and a half dozen other efforts: a book on dance for the University of Nebraska Press; The Hot and the Cool, a one-hour film mapping sub-Saharan African dance style; a four-hundred-page rough draft of a book for the Urban Strain project; and another songbook, one that would expand his Folk Songs of North America to seven hundred selections.

  At the same time, he was being forced out of his office because the building in which it was located was being turned into co-op apartments. When Columbia University failed to offer him space so that he could continue his research under their name, he made a desperate attempt to sell his collections and papers to some university that would also allow him to continue working, on salary, so that he would be able to finish the work and have something to leave to his family. But he had no takers. At the last second he was introduced to Joseph S. Murphy, the chancellor of the City University of New York, a former labor organizer who spoke Yiddish and Gaelic, had worked in Africa and the Caribbean, and was seeking to open the city’s universities up to more minority and working-class students. He offered Alan an unpaid position of research associate in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College, and office space near one of Murphy’s own offices on the west side of Manhattan; in exchange, Alan would give the college a percentage of whatever grants he received.

  When President Reagan awarded the National Medal of the Arts on July 4, 1986, Alan was surely the financially poorest recipient of that honor: his tax return for the previous year showed that his adjusted gross income was $11,531.

  The Grateful Dead’s Rex Foundation gave him a grant that kept him at work on the archives’ databases, and he was able to borrow enough equipment from the Smithsonian Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to begin digitizing the song collection, but research money was becoming harder to find. To keep the foundations interested in his work he still had to take his research results to various academic conferences to demonstrate the validity of the methodology of his various projects. Many of the older folklorists and ethnomusicologists had never fully accepted his later work, and had warned some of the younger ones away from it. Alan knew too much, had done too much, had been there before anyone else, and was too hot for the cool eighties. At one of the annual folklore meetings, someone printed up buttons that showed his picture with a bar across it, the universal sign of “no.” At gatherings where he tried to win over some of the young scholars who were now committed to an extreme form of cultural relativism and narrowly defined research projects, they often found his old-school passion to defend the forgotten people of the world a bit embarrassing, and he was mockingly referred to by a few as “The People’s Republic of Me.” As he saw his influence fading and the support of foundations shifting elsewhere, the energy and vision that had driven him for a lifetime began to waver. He resolved not to publish any more until he could fully respond to his critics. Falling out of touch with even the colleagues who did support him, he retreated.

  But Lomax was not done yet. The move from Columbia to a Hunter College building near the Hudson River was an awakening to how much he had accomplished. The boxes and crates, weighed down with more than 8,000 tapes and recordings from the United States, the Caribbean, and
Europe, 300,000 feet of film from Africa and Asia, hundreds of hours of dance on videocassettes, 200 volumes of printouts, maps and charts, and piles of electronic equipment, were testament to the hours in the field and at the computer, and the sheer human cost of what had been accomplished and what remained to be done. But his work was still stored away in an archive, without the money or facilities for it to be made available to the public. He was beginning to realize, however, that with the rise of personal computers, CD-ROMs, and the digital compression of music and film, all that he had seen and done might now be made accessible to everyone in the world. What was needed was an “intelligent museum,” an easy-to-use, interactive computerized audiovisual system that would allow anyone to access the databases he was still developing. It would be called a global jukebox, and “jukebox” was the perfect word for what he had in mind, as it was the electrical playback device that first brought music created in distant places to groups of people in small towns and big cities alike, a machine that Alan and his father had once feared would destroy local and regional styles and bury folk song.

  The databases from the cantometrics, choreometrics, parlametrics, and phonotactics projects, along with other musical and ethnographic data, would be the heart of the Global Jukebox, so that musical, dance, and speech styles of single performances, whole cultures, or regions of the world could be called up by the user. The microbehaviors that underlay cultural styles but were virtually impossible to see and difficult to demonstrate could be made visible. Descriptions of cultural styles could be read on the screen as text. Maps of peoples and styles would be used to locate and trace cultural patterns. Statistical comparisons could be made; migrations and settlement patterns might be traced. Every occurrence of a particular feature of style throughout the world could be located. Observations of behavior and their interpretation could be made directly by the individual, as well as the expert. The evolution of culture and the conditions under which it occurred could be reconstructed. A user could code her own examples of performance, enter them in the computer, and locate them globally. Everyone could find his own place in the cultural world, locate his roots, and trace his links to peoples and cultures never imagined.

  Alan himself was no computer expert, but he had been working innovatively with communications technology ever since the early 1940s, when he and Jerry Weisner were editing records and experimenting with multitracked recordings in the Library of Congress. If this new idea seemed utopian in the pre-Web, pre-Google days of digital enthusiasm, Lomax was in fact dreaming up what later would be called metadata, huge banks of data from which other data could be derived; in conceiving of discrete features of music as predictors of style, he was imagining the concept of predictive algorithms; and in foreseeing that average people could make reliable judgments about complex style systems, he was anticipating the digital concept of folksonomy—collaborative categorization and indexing. All he needed were some smart young people to work on these ideas, and he found them in Michael Del Rio, Gideon D’Arcangelo, Michael Naimark, and others, who contributed fresh musical, technical, and aesthetic ideas. Once again Lomax was attracting the interest of people with money and equipment: Apple, the MacArthur Foundation, and Interval Research Corporation (headed by Paul Allen, who with Bill Gates had created Microsoft) all helped, and were then followed by the National Science Foundation, which gave him a grant of a million dollars. He was back in business.

  An Apple Macintosh IIcx with CD-ROM and laserdisk players constituted the hardware for the Global Jukebox; HyperCard was used as a data management program, and four thousand songs and one thousand dances were selected for its software database. For demonstration of the device there was an LCD projector, a low-resolution LCD panel, and a high-luminosity overhead projector. A prototype was constructed, and Alan, now seventy-six years old, was once again on the road, dragging bulky electronic equipment with him as he demonstrated it to the world. It excited everyone who saw it, with corporate executives spinning out ideas for their own uses on the spot or rushing to the phone to call their colleagues. They had never seen such masses of data organized electronically, and it fired their imaginations. But in the end none of them followed through. Michael Naimark concluded that their failure to invest in the Global Jukebox was part of a central problem of the multimedia industry:

  The Global Jukebox has fallen into an abyss between academic and pop culture, between world-saving and money-making, and between content and technology. And in the new media industry, the technology folks seem to drive the content, rarely the other way around . . . it’s too bad, since most of the planet’s cultures have the content but not the technology.

  In the late 1970s, stage productions built around black composers’ works, such as Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978), One Mo’ Time (1979), and Sophisticated Ladies (1981), had become very successful, and Alan might have found in them a hopeful sign of the integration of long-segregated musical and dance styles. Instead, he was sadly disappointed, dismissing them as travesties, crude misrepresentations of period productions that resulted in stereotypes. Lomax had long dreamed of a production based on Jelly Roll Morton’s life, and feared that if he didn’t move quickly to shape it himself, it might be done by someone who would turn it into another historical distortion like the Leadbelly film. He had already sold the motion picture rights to Mister Jelly Roll to Harry Belafonte and Harold Leventhal when he was in need of the money, and Belafonte had since bought Leventhal out when they were unable to interest Hollywood in the idea. But Alan had kept the theatrical rights because he wanted to develop a musical around Morton’s life, and had even discussed the idea with jazz saxophonist Bob Wilber and others. Now he proposed to Belafonte that the time was right for the two of them to work on a theatrical musical, with words added to Morton’s instrumental compositions. But Belafonte was leaving on a lengthy world tour just as Alan’s letter arrived, and nothing came of it.

  Years later, producers Margo Lion and Pamela Koslow set out to stage their own musical based on Jelly Roll’s life, and they approached Alan with a proposal to make him a partner with a small share in the show. But Alan wanted a part in writing the show, or at the very least wanted an acknowledgment that the musical had been adapted from Mister Jelly Roll, neither of which the producers were willing to do. When he learned that they were thinking of August Wilson to write the book for the show in order to bring a black perspective to it, he was sorely torn, as he considered Wilson America’s greatest playwright and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom a great work of art. Yet he could not bring himself to be involved. Wilson asked to meet with Alan, but when Lomax explained that he wanted a collaborative relationship, a relationship acknowledged by contract, Wilson directed his attorneys to write him that nothing from his book would be used in the musical, and that in the future Alan should communicate with him only through his lawyers. It was the end of their relationship.

  Shortly afterwards Wilson’s script was rejected by the producers, and George C. Wolfe was brought in to rewrite it. With the recent successes of his satirical revue The Colored Museum, and Spunk, his adaptation of some short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Wolfe seemed ideally poised to save the production. But to Wolfe the story of Jelly Roll was that of a man who so hated the “black” side of his heritage that he destroyed himself and everyone close to him—in short, his story was a tragedy, not a romance. The show went forward as Jelly’s Last Jam and opened in New York in 1992 starring dancers Gregory Hines and Savion Glover as the older and younger Jelly Roll (this Jelly Roll was also a tap dancer), with script and direction by Wolfe. Alan was erased from the story, along with most of Morton’s life. The spirit of Morton’s music was gone as well. To Lomax the show was another example of the corny Dixieland clichés and raucous laughter and singing of all Broadway shows set in the 1920s. It ignored the efforts of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s to free Harlem musicals from the conventions of Broadway theater by bringing in the music and dance of black America and the Caribbean. By
turning Morton into a dancer, it obscured the circum-Caribbean rhythms of his music and substituted the more straightforward 4/4 meter of East Coast tap. And in order to accommodate a shallow sense of jazz history, Alan complained, Morton was portrayed as taking part in jam sessions, a practice that he disliked. In his preface to the 1993 edition of Mister Jelly Roll, Alan criticized Wolfe bitterly for condemning Morton for race prejudice on slim evidence, as if Morton were the only person of color to hold such views. But Jelly’s Last Jam had nonetheless gone on to win the cheers of critics, three Tony awards, and six Drama Desk awards in 1992.

  Many of the issues Alan raised against the musical were on his mind because at that time he was writing The Land Where the Blues Began, a summary of his experiences with African American culture and the South that was published in 1993. The book represented something of an odyssey of what he had seen and done, his memories of preachers, storytellers, blues singers, church congregations, the levee and railroad builders, prisons and chain gangs, the police, Big Bill Broonzy, and Chicago blues. Included were sections of “Burning Hell,” the article on prisons he had never been able to sell, a history of the blues; a part of the book that the Fisk/Library of Congress team never completed; and pieces of an autobiography. It also accommodated sections of another book he never finished, My Heart Struck Sorrow, which if it had been completed back in the 1940s would have been an exposé, a racial bombshell, and an introduction to a music and a people’s existence of which most of his readers were unaware.

  Among those who read The Land Where the Blues Began were many who did not recall the full extent of the horrors of the caste/class system of the South in the 1930s and 1940s. Nor did they recall the tales of the blues collectors of the 1960s who fanned out across the South in search of what was left of the great black troubadours whose songs were passing quickly into the voices of blues-based rock and roll. When Lomax wrote about what he saw in the South by saying, “My heart struck a depth of sorrow and hurt such as I had never imagined,” and described the wonder of finding those great bards driving tractors or picking cotton, he faced an audience many of whom were made uncomfortable by his witness. Instead of praising his work, they judged him as a type, an exploitative white southerner, and took pains to point out the shortcomings in his account—he collapsed two Tennessee trips into one; he wasn’t up on recent blues scholarship; and was that really Robert Johnson’s mother to whom he spoke?—or looked for a crack in his outrage at naked injustice and rejected the romanticism of his account of discovery as crypto-racism. He was vindicated, however, when The Land Where the Blues Began won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993.