Music
Folk Hero
He practically built Woody Guthrie’s career and growled when Bob Dylan went electric. Meet Alan Lomax, the Austinite who changed American music.
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In 1934 Alan and John jointly published American Ballads and Folk Songs. As John (who died in 1947, at age eighty) decelerated his activities, Alan went into overdrive, bouncing between New York City, Washington, D.C., and the field. He was always on the move, with little time for small talk unless it involved a stiff drink and a woman. In 1935, traveling through the island communities of Georgia, Florida, and the Bahamas with black novelist Zora Neale Hurston, he blackened his face. In 1938, while tending the Archive of Folk Song, he staged eight hours of recordings by aging New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton and interviewed him to create the oral history Mr. Jelly Roll. After heading into the Mississippi Delta in 1941 to find the elusive and, it turned out, late bluesman Robert Johnson, Alan recorded the first songs ever by Muddy Waters, at Stovall’s Plantation outside Clarksdale. (This trip was later documented in the American Patchwork episode “The Land Where the Blues Began,” which was the basis for the 1993 National Book Critics Award winner of the same title.)
Alan had a knack for finding musicians overlooked by other ethnomusicologists, and he worked quite differently from those who preceded him. They generally tolerated inferior equipment; he kicked and screamed to see that he had state-of-the-art electronics. They set their gear up, put the musicians in front of the microphone, and stepped aside to listen; he was careful about mike placement, and when the music sounded good, he might smile, nod his head, and let out a little whoop of approval to keep the atmosphere ripe. When he played a recording back, most of these performers from the backwoods of America were hearing their voices for the first time, which fired them up for their next song. His combination of meticulousness and informality resulted in a clarity and liveliness seldom heard on musicological work. “I was always academic,” he insists, but his recordings hold their own technically against the commercial, major-label output of the day.
“I found out what I was really doing was giving an avenue for people to express themselves and tell their side of the story,” he said in 1991. Typical of the folkies of that era, Alan was equal parts student, teacher, and crusader, communist and idealistic patriot; he was zealous about folk music because it exalted the common American ignored by other art forms. He almost single-handedly built Woody Guthrie’s career, helping the Oklahoman get a record deal and booking him on radio and concert shows. On Lomax’s early forties radio shows Wellsprings of Music and American School of the Air, he brought out guests and played tunes himself, discussing each one. The 1940 show Back Where I Come From featured such radical music and casual mixing of blacks and whites that it never found a sponsor. His Greenwich Village apartment became an boardinghouse for the performers he was presenting in concert—especially the black ones, who couldn’t get rooms outside Harlem.
But just as the folk music scene looked to become a mass movement, McCarthyism stepped in. The Weavers, who best personified the folk movement—and actually had a number one hit with Leadbelly’s “Goodnight, Irene”—were ripped apart by informers. John Henry Faulk, Alan’s best friend since his days at UT, was about to lose his New York radio show and end up on the blacklist. In 1950 Alan talked Columbia Records into funding a European song-collecting trip. He would ultimately be gone seven years.
His work in Europe went much as it had in America. Basing himself in England, he did a BBC radio show and opened his home to itinerant folksingers, while recording everyone he could; soon, a full-scale folk revival was under way. In Spain he moved around constantly to avoid Franco’s troops, but he recorded indigenous music that had never been documented before. (Miles Davis, at a loss for material for his landmark Sketches of Spain album with Gil Evans, turned to the Lomax recordings for two pieces.) In impoverished, post-war Capri, much of the population remained in mountainous areas, the folk music preserved. The commercially released recordings from this trip, which stayed in print until CDs replaced vinyl, were the closest thing to a world-music collection America had.
When he returned to the States, Alan was surprised to find that the pre-McCarthy folk movement had been replaced by a folk revival. And again, his work was at the center of it: “Abilene” and “House of the Rising Sun” are just a couple of the songs he first collected that later became commercial hits. With funding from Atlantic Records, Alan took off on new trips through the South in 1959 and 1960 and returned with material for another series of albums.
Folk music became so huge that, like all pop trends, it would soon be replaced by something cooler. In 1965 one of the heroes of that folk movement—a skinny, surly kid named Bob Dylan—played a set of electric music at the Newport Folk Festival. As Dylan wailed, Alan and Pete Seeger (who’d first entered the folk world as Alan’s assistant in 1939) scowled backstage. Next came folk-rock rock stars in garish clothes playing Alan’s cherished music-of-the-common-man so loud you couldn’t even hear the noble lyrics. He was through with field trips, so he took an apartment with Faulk on West End Avenue in Manhattan and concentrated on his writing.
Working with professors from Columbia University, he began shaping the discipline he calls cantometrics out of some ideas he’d been entertaining since his career began. “It took all that time to really understand it,” he says in his high-pitched voice, “because it was really complicated.” It’s a system that analyzes traditional music of the world for its rhythmic, melodic, and lyrical differences and similarities, which he finds are plentiful regardless of the cultures being compared. This, in turn, led to the creation of his Global Jukebox, a multimedia interactive database that explores relationships between song, dance, and social structure in more than six hundred cultures.
Alan was working on the database when the strokes hit. He never finished it, but the Association for Cultural Equity, a Manhattan foundation set up by Alan and Anna and overseen by staff editor and Alan Lomax Collection archivist Matt Barton, is searching for money so that someone else can. Meanwhile, old tapes of Alan’s are being restored so that more albums can be put together for the Rounder series. He’s well enough to listen to them and recommend particular tracks, but that’s about all he can do. “I did all those things, and I got pretty good at it,” he says of the recordings. That’s an understatement; he was the very best.
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