Alan Lomax, Mediation, and the Archive David Lacrone History

Making Music: Alan Lomax, Mediation, and the Archive David LaCrone History 698: Processing the Past Profs. Blouin & Rosenberg Fall 2005 Introduction Folklorist, collector, and self-made musicologist Alan Lomax spent nearly his entire life making field recordings of segregated, isolated, oppressed, rural, or indigenous peoples across the world. He began his work in the United States as a teenager, collecting recordings with his father John Lomax, mostly in the American South for the Archives of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Alan continued his association with the Library after his father left, and from 1933 to 1942 gathered a mass of material that would profoundly influence popular culture, sparking at least three folk music movements and serving ultimately as a canon of American folk song. He worked on recording and writing up until his retirement in 1996. In 2004, two years after his death, all of Alan Lomax’s remaining papers, books, photographs, recordings, and films were brought together with the recordings from the beginning of his career at the Library of Congress unit now known as the American Folklife Center. This paper will look at the Lomax recordings through a framework informed by archival studies and historiography. It will center on his recording activities of African Americans in the South in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. This focus will simply provide a manageable scope in which to view these issues. Questions about his worldview and influence are, if anything, more clear in his treatment of African American music than other types. It will be important to consider issues relating to the authority of the archive in general, and ways that it serves to legitimate Lomax’s idiosyncratic view of the world. What does it mean that his recordings are housed in a national repository like the Library of Congress? These issues become more pronounced when one considers the characteristics of this worldview. The extent to which Lomax’s beliefs influenced what 2 he collected and how he collected it has profound implications for the archives that result. In a sense, he was collector, archivist and historian all at once. His presence as a mediator is therefore very clear. Finally, I will attempt to think about the lasting appeal of Lomax’s life and work. Within two years of his death, his personal material went to Washington; he was recognized world over as having been an extremely important individual in the realm of folk music. Memory will be a vital consideration here—the memory that Lomax tried to preserve, the memory that he deliberately constructed, and the collective memory of Lomax and his work that continues to sustain his archive. The Power of the Archive Lomax’s association with the Library of Congress began very early. Initiated by his father in the early 1930’s, it was a very important part of establishing his own recordings as a canon of folk music. Both Alan and his father leveraged affiliation with this national institution to obtain permissions from local governments, prison administrations and individuals to meet musicians whom they were interested in recording. 1 This issue underlies all of Lomax’s work. Arguably, his primary motivation was to legitimize folk music as a genuine art form, worthy of appreciation, academic study, and celebration as uniquely American. Working for the Library of Congress enabled the Lomaxes to enshrine their recordings in an institution of great reknown, alongside other traditional collections which were 1 Filene, Benjamin. "’Our Singing Country’: John and Alan Lomax, Leadbelly, and the Construction of an American Past." American Quarterly 43.4 (1991): 602-24; Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk : Public Memory & and American Roots Music . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000, p.56. 3 more firmly established in the American artistic and cultural canon. Alan, with his political ideals, certainly saw the possibility of bringing these marginalized or overlooked voices into the mainstream through the stability and prestige of the institution. During the course of his collecting journeys, Lomax’s association with the Library and with the Washington power structure had a pronounced effect on those he wanted to record. A well-known account reports how one musician in the Brazos Bottom plantation in Texas punctuated his performance with a statement directed at the United States government and the president himself. Lomax himself repeated the tale many times, including in a speech given at the New York Public Library in 1989, “And everybody said ‘let ol’ Blue sing you a song.’ So ol’ Blue came shambling up out of the dark and we said ‘well, sing it to us first so we can see whether we want to take it or not’… ‘no suh I’m gonna sing it and you gonna record it as soon as I sing it.’ So we turned the machine on, and the plantation manager was sitting in the back. Now these people were ragged as jaybirds, they were real tenant farmers then. They were very, very oppressed people. He leaned into that little horn and he said ‘Mister President’—he thought he was talking right to Washington—he said ‘Mister President, I want you to listen to this song so you can know how they treatin’ us poor niggers down here in the Brazos bottom.’” 2 Blue goes on to sing, “Work all week / Don’t make enough / To pay my board / And buy my snuff.” 3 This man viewed Lomax and his cylinder recording machine as a conduit to the most powerful forces in the land, forces capable of relieving him and his friends of their debilitating circumstances. It would be naïve to think that, given these kinds of associations, this performer and others played their music in pure, unadulterated form. Moreover, Lomax seemed to embrace his role as an emissary from Washington. Benjamin Filene writes, “harnessing the power and appeal of the recording machine and of the federal government, the Lomaxes succeeded in collecting thousands of folk 2 Lomax, Alan. Speech given at the New York Public Library on March 7, 1989. CD to accompany Alan Lomax: Selected Writings . New York: Routledge, 2003, track 3. 3 Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk : Public Memory & and American Roots Music , pg. 57. 4 songs in the thirties.” 4 The very fact of his relationship to the archives did change how he was perceived, what material he collected, and the nature of the material itself. Interestingly, Lomax, unlike ol’ Blue, did not see his work this way. Lomax was telling a story of diversity, not necessarily advocating dramatic social change. Primitivism & The Threat of Progress Guiding Alan Lomax’s work was the perceived threat of modernity and technological progress which he saw as leading to the marginalization and stifling of vibrant, authentic forms of musical expression. Lomax glorified the days before stories and information were filtered through mass media--when songs were heard on the front porch instead of the radio, when families entertained themselves with tall tales and old songs rather than phonographs.5 Many of his writings recount tales of the difficult process of finding “good” music in towns and villages of the South. The complicated relationship of many African Americans to the Church, as well as greater opportunities provided them in more densely populated areas made many dismissive of their own musical heritage. Lomax writes, “So it was that we decided to visit the Negro prison farms of the South. There, we thought, we should find that the Negro, away from the pressure of the churchly community, ignorant of uplifting educational movement, having none but official contact with white men, dependent on the resources of his own group for amusement, and hearing no canned music, would have preserved and increased the heritage of the secular folk-music.” 6 4 ibid. 5 Lomax, Alan. "Vanishing American Lingoes: The Media Threat to our Native Gift of Gab." Family Heritage 1.2 (1978): 34-8. 6 Lomax, Alan. “Sinful songs of the Southern Negro.” Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997 . Ronald D. Cohen, ed. New York: Routledge, 2003. 5 He came to a realization very early on that socialization and social progress for African Americans was detrimental to the sustenance of their traditional musical forms. In order to obtain a higher concentration and a better quality of folk music, he sought out these isolated locales in which to capture more authentic samples of this music. 7 He believed that blacks who embraced progress lost an important, musical aspect of their heritage. A step further, he lambasted middle class, educated blacks who looked down upon their rural brethren. 8 Lomax, in appreciating the circumstances of being poor and isolated for what they were, actively resisted some kinds of change in the African American community. In this way he was the protector of a culture that was not his own, claiming something essential about blackness that, to him, eluded many Blacks themselves. Today, his almost romantic appreciation for the music of an era of oppression seems extremely problematic. In a certain way, this is Lomax the Collector at his most neutral. He had to separate his ideals on one hand, from his love for this music on the other. His writings are full of stories about white farmers, policemen and officials disrupting his attempts at recording. 9 An idea emerges from his reflections that something beautiful could flourish if racists would just butt out. It is odd, however, that Lomax’s notion of authenticity is entirely dependent on oppression, ignorance, and isolation. He sees African American folk music as an example of the extraordinary resiliency of a people under duress, a wonderful example of human creativity in the face 7 Lomax, John & Alan Lomax.

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