1934–1950: The Early Collecting Years
Introduction by Ed Kahn
When Alan Lomax burst out of Texas onto the folklore scene, he came out with the force of a powerful Texas Norther. By the age of eighteen, he was a force to be reckoned with. In the years between 1933 and 1950, he established himself as a collector, popularizer, performer, writer, and folklore theoretician, as well as a behind-the-scenes political activist. Any of these
avenues would have been sufficient for a fruitful career, but Lomax chose to pursue them all. In the years that followed, we can see the fruits of the seeds he sowed during these early years of his career. In his early work, we see his initial interest in folksong, folk music theory, dance, folk narrative and the relationship between these expressive materials and the broader cultural context.
Alan’s story is amazing not only in that his interests and talents were so wide ranging, but for the fact that at the age of eighteen he virtually became an equal with his sixty-five-year-old father. John Lomax had made initial contributions to the study of American folksong, but that was far in his past. Now, in his golden years, he embarked on a second career in folklore and Alan unwittingly became his partner and then emerged as his own man. In 1930, at the age of fifteen, Alan entered the University of Texas and before the school year was out, he applied for a scholarship to Harvard for the next year. Following his year at Harvard, he moved back to Austin and lived with his father while once more attending the University of Texas. In
June 1933, he left Texas with his father to begin an extended field trip collecting folksongs that ultimately were deposited in the Library of Congress.[1]
This initial fieldwork was recorded on a Dictaphone machine, which eventually was replaced with a portable disc recording machine. By the time they reached Washington, D.C., in August of 1933, they had collected some hundred songs on twenty-five aluminum and fifteen celluloid discs. Carl Engel, chief of the music division of the Library of Congress, was so anxious
to publicize any activity of the folksong archives that he arranged an event in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library. Alan discussed their collecting activities and played discs from the summer’s activities. Alan’s first publication was a broad discussion of the 1933 field trip. This was published in the Southwest Review in the winter of 1934. The focus of the article was on Negro folksongs as the title, “Collecting Folk-Songs of the Southern Negro” suggests. From 1933 forward, Lomax’s folklore career was in full swing. He did, however, manage to complete a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas in 1936.2
As a collector, Alan took down interviews on a typewriter early on,
eventually using the most sophisticated tape recorders. He realized that
recording interviews allowed him to preserve not only the words that were
spoken or sung, but the context and style of a performance, too. Eventually,
he augmented his fieldwork to also include filming of some of his collecting
experiences. He elaborates on the advantages of recording fieldwork in the
introduction to Our Singing Country. He points out the limited scope of
collecting without the use of the recorder. As he says, the folk song “…
collector with pen and notebook can capture only the outline….”3
After completing his degree from the University of Texas, he and his wife,
Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold, went to Haiti to do fieldwork. He published an
article in the Southwest Review in January of 1938 detailing some of this
fieldwork. In this article, “Haitian Journey” we see for the first time Lomax’s
interest in the broader context of folk song as well as his emerging interest in
dance and narrative. The year following the publication of this article on
Haitian folklore, Lomax enrolled at Columbia University for graduate work
in anthropology. While he never completed an advanced degree in
anthropology, the rest of his career is clearly marked by this experience as he
increasingly worked as an ethnomusicologist with a strong anthropological
bias.4
In 1937, Lomax was appointed director of the Archive of American Folk-
Song at the Library of Congress. This twenty-one-year-old kid was a
seasoned veteran, having done extensive fieldwork and published, with his
father, both American Ballads and Folksongs (1934) and Negro Folk Songs
as Sung by Lead Belly (1936). Lomax set out to record folksongs from across
America. The exact number of recordings in the Archives at that time is
unclear, but on various occasions Lomax cites the number of recordings. In
the introduction to Our Singing Country, he says there are over four thousand
aluminum and acetate discs in the Archive. In an interview in 1942, Lomax
states that there are over 20,000 songs on records in the Archive. In the
spring of that same year, under the direction of Lomax, a checklist of English
language holdings of the Archive was published in mimeographed form as a
2 ALANLOMAX
Check-list of recorded songs in the English Language in the Archive of
American Folk Song to July, 1940. In the introduction Alan makes reference
to his historic recording expeditions of 1937–39, which took him to
Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Vermont. These recordings are all
included in the Check-list. This publication was important for it was
organized by song title as well as geographically.5
Lomax had a way with informants. He knew how to put them at ease and
gain their confidence so they felt comfortable offering their material to the
stranger who came to value what they had perhaps never considered valuable.
One of the things that set Lomax apart from many other fieldworkers of the
time was his innate understanding of the dynamic quality of folksongs. He
knew that folksongs were born, had a life, and then faded into obscurity.
Lomax states his case succinctly in his 1942 interview with John T.Frederick
on “Of Men and Books,” a radio pro gram from Northwestern University:
“our folk stock is not stagnant, some songs are dying, some are on their last
legs, but out of them and beyond them new songs are growing up better
adapted to survive in our seas of restless and eternally unsatisfied people.”6
This statement underscores Lomax’s approach to collecting. He wanted to
collect what the informants had to offer. Many earlier collectors were rooted
in antiquities and searched for survivals rather that repertoires of their
informants. As a result, Lomax recorded much topical material that has not
stood the test of time. In preparing for the publication of Our Singing
Country, the Lomaxes sifted through hundreds of recordings in the Library
of Congress archives that were made between 1933 and 1939 and selected a
couple of hundred songs for inclusion. What is especially interesting about
the volume is that many songs are introduced by a transcription of the
informant’s thoughts about the material. Also, many of the songs lacked
pedigree, which to my mind is important as it underscores the willingness of
Lomax to include folksongs that were new or not yet considered folksongs. It
took guts for him to publish this material because it did not conform to the
academic standards of the time.
Our Singing Country was a joint effort between the Lomaxes and Ruth
Crawford Seeger, who was musical editor of the volume. Bess Lomax
Hawes, Alan’s sister, stated in a paper given at a commemoration of the
100th anniversary of Ruth Crawford’s birth, that the collaboration on this
volume opened Alan’s eyes to musical analysis in a way that he had not
previously focused. While Alan had concentrated on the context of the
material, Ruth took the recording as a document that could not be
questioned. Subsequently, in Alan’s work, he, too, gained an added respect
1934–1950: THE EARLY COLLECTING YEARS 3
for the recorded document and rigorous musical analysis of the recorded
material.7
On many of these early radio presentations, Lomax also emerges as a
performer. By the late 1930s, Lomax was intimately involved in radio. He
produced a series for CBS’s School of the Air as well as a series called Back
Where I Come From. These shows introduced a national audience to
numerous artists who later received wide recognition. Among those
showcased were Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger.
Other established names like Leadbelly and the Golden Gate Quartet were
also featured. Lomax, among other things, was a popularizer. He consistently
worked to bring the voice of the folk to the masses.
While much of Lomax’s early collecting centered around English language
material, from the very beginning he was interested in other ethnic groups as
well. 14 Traditional Spanish Songs from Texas was taken from field
recordings made between 1935 and 1939 by John Lomax, John’s second
wife, Ruby, and Alan.8 In addition, early on he saw the importance of Cajun
material from Louisiana.
Lomax always had a flair for the dramatic. In presentations, he often
interwove pictures of the context of the material with the songs themselves.
In this volume, we have Lomax’s 1943 lecture/program of “Reels and Work
Songs.”9 In this piece he sets the stage and context for every recording he
presents. His language is almost literary as he draws a picture of the context
for these selections, some recordings and some performed live by Willie
Johnson and the Golden Gate Quartet. In some ways, this harks back to his
father’s presentation of cowboy songs in the lectures he gave earlier in the
century. It was Alan’s purpose in these lectures to change the way an
audience listens to this material in the future.
Lomax’s literary flair often bordered on the poetic. In his introduction to
Woody Guthrie’s “Roll on Columbia,” published by the Bonneville Power
Administration, Lomax tries to nail down the guitar style of Woody. He
evokes pictures with his words, but if his intent was to accurately describe
Woody’s guitar style in anything other than poetic terms, he misses the
mark. Here is how he describes Guthrie’s, and by extension the Carter
Family’s, style of picking: “The vibrant underbelly is Woody’s hard-driving
Carter family lick on his guitar; the left hand constantly hammering on,
pulling off and sliding to create all sorts of syncopation in the base runs and
melody, the right hand frailing with a very flexible pick to make rhythmic
rattles and rustles and bumps such as a hobo hears in a freight car or a hitchhiker
feels in the cabin of a big cross-country trailer.”10
4 ALANLOMAX
In 1941, Lomax had the opportunity to expand his radio prowess by
producing a documentary made up of recordings he had made in the South in
a valley about to be flooded by the Tennessee Valley Authority. This kind of
program was something original and a direct result of the new recording
techniques that allowed long narrative pieces to be recorded. In the end, Lomax
edited the material into a coherent program. He weaved narrative and song
together to tell a story, included in this volume as “Mister Ledford and the
TVA.”11
Lomax was in the center of the New Deal. He not only worked at the
Library of Congress, but caught the attention of the Roosevelts. He
performed at the White House and worked with Mrs. Roosevelt to plan
programs at the White House and elsewhere that utilized American traditional
music.12
As Lomax grew in stature, his writing was in great demand. In the
December 1946 issue of Vogue, Alan reviewed a long series of recordings. We
see the emergence of the commercialization of the folksong revival. While
LP records were still several years away, 78 rpm albums were beginning to
be marketed. His reviews are interesting in that they encompass traditional
material captured on record as well as city artists performing traditional
material. He pays special attention to the Library of Congress recordings that
were making their way onto albums. Many of the early Library of Congress
recordings are highlighted. In this set of reviews, Lomax differentiates
between four kinds of presentations: 1) unsophisticated country singers, 2)
commercial hillbillies, 3) city-billy ballad singers of the big towns, and 4) art
singers. This is an important contribution to our later understanding of the
folksong revival as each of these categories was well represented.13
By the 1940s, Lomax had really come into his own. He was busier than
ever, with his work at the Archives and with various publications. Most
apparent was his work with the media. He spent several years in the Armed
Forces, working primarily on radio shows. Then, after the war, he continued
his research, and in 1945 received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Soon
thereafter, he began working for Decca Records and produced several
albums of historical significance. In 1947, he issued Listen to Our Story and
Mountain Frolic on the Brunswick label, a subsidiary of Decca. These albums
are important because they are two early examples of hillbilly records—
originally marketed to a rural audience and repackaged and directed for a city
audience. While Lomax’s early work was focused on field recordings, early
on he saw the value in some commercial discs. Despite his work in radio and
the recording industry, he continued to publish and explore academic ideas.
In 1942, he compiled a list of some 300 commercial recordings. This stands
1934–1950: THE EARLY COLLECTING YEARS 5
as one of the first discographies of commercial recordings of traditional
material.14
While working at Decca, some obscure recordings from Africa came to his
attention; nobody else at Decca had any idea about what to do with these
discs. Lomax listened to one recording in particular and gave it to Pete Seeger.
It was a song by Solomon Linde titled “Mbube.” Pete listened to the
recording and transcribed it as best as he could. The result was
“Wimoweh.”15
In his joint entry with Ben Botkin, for Encylopedia Brittanica, Lomax
surveys the development of folklore and folksong from 1937 through 1946.
This is one of the first places where he clearly states the importance of sound
recordings from cylinders on. He saw the impact on a wide range of workers
—from the learned societies to the layman. He felt that these recordings both
developed an interest in the real thing in folklore for audiences and brought
about the popularization of authentic material. He develops the notion that
old ballads were gradually being replaced by newer ballads and finally by lyric
songs. This article has many important ideas that served as a foundation for
later work by Lomax and others.16
In a 1947 article, “America Sings the Saga of America,” Lomax states that
American folklore had broken loose from its European roots and had begun
to reflect American values. He also prints some of his earliest ideas about
folklore being “healthily democratic” and “bridges across which men of all
nations may stride to say, ‘You are my brother.”17 It is likely that these
thoughts, which were familiar to Lomax, were influenced by Charles Seeger,
who talked about such ideas openly with the circle of folklorists in the
Washington, D.C., area.
Lomax soon developed a serious interest in traditional jazz, and used his
historic recordings of Jelly Roll Morton as the basis for his first book, which
was not co-authored with his father. Mister Jelly Roll was published in 1950,
just before Lomax left for Europe and began another chapter in his amazing
career.18
I have not discussed Lomax’s activist politics, beginning early, because he
did not write about his beliefs and actions, but they were always present,
overtly or covertly. He promoted the Almanac Singers in 1941–42, a loose
group of activists that included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Josh White, and
his sister Bess Lomax. Following World War II, he supported People’s
Songs, a national organization which promoted topical songs to support labor
unions, civil rights, and a progressive political agenda. In 1948, during the
culmination of his early political activism, Lomax became music director of
Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party presidential campaign. In 1950, he was
6 ALANLOMAX
listed in Red Channels, which promoted the blacklisting of numerous people
in show business. He was described as “folk singer—composer—Author of
book, ‘Mister Jelly Roll.’” By then, however, partly motivated by his desire
to escape the escalating Red Scare, he had moved to England.
NOTES
1. I wish to thank Nolan Porterfield, Bess Lomax Hawes, and Matt Barton for
valuable help in the preparation of this article and especially for help in developing
a chronology for these early years.
2. For a more detailed account of the 1933 trip see Nolan Porterfield, Last Cavalier:
The Life and Times of John A.Lomax, 1867–1948 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1996), 295–304.
3. Lomax & Lomax, Our Singing Country (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1941), xiv.
4. Alan Lomax, “Haitian Journey—Search for Native Folklore,” Southwest Review,
January 1938, 125–147.
5. Check-list of Recorded songs in the English language in the Archive of American
Folk Songs to July, 1940. (Washington, D.C.: The Library of Congress, 1942).
6. “Of Men and Books,” Northwestern University on the Air, vol. 1, no. 18, January
31, 1942, 3.
7. Bess Lomax Hawes, “Ruth Crawford Seeger Talk,” New York City, October,
2002.
8. Alan Lomax, 14 Traditional Spanish Songs from Texas (Washington, D.C.: Music
Division, Pan American Union, 1942).
9. Alan Lomax, “Reels and Work Songs,” in 75 Years of Freedom: Commemoration
of the 75th Anniversary of the Proclamation of the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1943),
27–36.
10. Alan Lomax, “Foreword” in Woody Guthrie: Roll on Columbia: The Columbia
River Songs, edited by William Murlin (Portland, Oregon: Bonneville Power
Authority, 1988), iii. My thanks to Ed Cray for this citation.
11. Alan Lomax, in Eric Barnouw, ed., Radio Drama in Action. (New York: Rinehart &
Co., 1945), 51–58.
12. Alan Lomax, “Folk Music in the Roosevelt Era,” in Folk Music in the Roosevelt
White House: A Commorative Program (Washington, D.C.: Office of Folklife
Programs, Smithsonian Institution, 1982), 14–17.
13. Alan Lomax, “The Best of the Ballads,” Vogue, December 1, 1946, 208.
14. Alan Lomax, “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records” (Washington,
D.C.: 1942), originally published in “The Report of the Committee of the
Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music, September 3, 1940”;
manuscript copy in the Lomax Archives.
15. For a complete case study of this song, see Rian Malan, “Money, Greed and
Mystery,” Rolling Stone, May 25, 2000, 54–66, 84–85.
16. Alan Lomax and Benjamin A.Botkin, “Folklore, American” in Ten Eventful Years,
Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1947, 359–367.
1934–1950: THE EARLY COLLECTING YEARS 7
17. Alan Lomax, “America Sings the Saga of America,” New York Times Magazine,
January 26, 1947, 16.
18. Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950).