American Voices: Folklife and the Great Depression
Ella Vorenberg
Senior Thesis, American Studies: American Studies: American Identities, American Exceptionalism, and Folk Music
Bryan Rommel-Ruiz & Ryan Bañagale
5 August 2013
1 Introduction
Lize Pace was not a singer. Well into her eighties, she had spent a long life carving an existence from the hills of the Kentucky Appalachians. She bootlegged alcohol, farmed her land, raised her children, and served as the cultural matriarch of
Hyden, Kentucky. The songs she knew came from the memory of living and dying in a community that used music to express emotion and experience. Her songs were homemade, passed from one generation to the next. Her songs told stories, entertained friends, and maintained tradition. Yet she was not a singer. She was simply an American, living through the Great Depression in her corner of the country, sharing her songs with the Library of Congress.
Alan Lomax spent only a few days in Hyden in the fall of 1937. He recorded various members of the community, noting “I have made more records that I am proud of since I have been in Hyden than I have during the whole of my stay in Kentucky” (Cohen
53). Many of these recordings were ballads sung by Lize Pace. Pace, though elderly, remembered a great number of songs, and left a lasting impression on both Lomax and his wife Elizabeth. A year later, Lomax wrote to Pace in a correspondence that provides a window into the nature of Depression era folk work and Lomax’s identity as a folklorist.
July 1, 1938.
Mrs. Eliza Pace, Hyden, Kentucky.
Dear Aunt Lize:
I feel ashamed of myself for not having written you sooner, but things go very fast here in Washington.
2 Elizabeth and I think about you often and whenever we can, we play over your records and look at the little movie we made of you and your house. We both agree that you are the grandest old lady we ever met and wish that there was something that we could do for you.
I remember when I left you that you asked me to send you the words to “Erin Go Bragh.” Here they are – two sets of them – and I hope they are what you wanted.
Give our best regards to your daughter and remember that we both love you very much.
Alan Lomax Assistant in Charge Archive of American Folksong
Hyden Ky, July 10th, 1938
Mr. and Mrs. Alan Lomax, Dear Friends,
Your letter came we was pleased to hear from you. It was a surprise we did not think we would hear from you any more. How are you both getting along? Mr. T. G. Hoskins (Peggy) and wife was baptized shortly after you left here so you got your songs in good time. Lize says that you and your wife are the best people in the world and she hopes you will be back here this fall. She has been sick this hot weather and can’t write. She insists on me writing for you when you get a raise sending her a little money. I did not want to write about money but she was standing over me and made me. We was glad to get the song ballads. Lize sends you both lots of love and hopes to see you again soon. She said there was a few songs she forgot to give you but I guess you got them from someone else. We are having awful hot weather here. We will glad to hear from you anytime.
Your Friend, Bettie Lewis
July 18, 1938
Eliza Pace Bettie Lewis Hyden, Kentucky.
Dear Friends:
3
I am glad I caught Mr. Hoskins before he quit the banjo for church. Elizabeth and I were delighted to hear from you but sad that Lize has been sick.
Enclosed you will find a small token of our affection which is all we can afford at the moment.
With love to you both, Alan and Elizabeth
(Enclosure of $2)
During the late 1930s, the federal government sent writers and collectors throughout the nation to record America’s folklore. Agencies like the Works Progress
Administration, the Joint Committee on Folk Arts, and the Library of Congress engaged unemployed individuals in the business of identifying and presenting valuable folk culture to the American people. This work took on the largest role in the publication of
State Guidebooks by the Federal Writer’s Project. These books provided information about each state in the union, and most included a section on local folklore. As these guidebooks were compiled from multiple sources, they were published anonymously.
The collectors and informants who contributed their work fell into obscurity, as the bureaucratic nature of large-scale collection glossed over the deeply personal nature of
American folklore. The stories that have endured from these projects do not speak to the intricate and vibrant realities of daily life, but instead ascribe to stock images and stereotypes of the diversity of American life. Images of the hardy, puritanical New
Englander, the segregated, romantic and mysterious South, and the pioneering homesteaders of the West all began to take root through the America presented in the state guidebooks.
4 Alan Lomax’s work, as evidenced by his interaction with Lize Pace, took a different route. No person, song or story was too small or insignificant for Lomax to record. He developed strong personal connections with his informants, and ensured that their culture was faithfully preserved. In his publications, Lomax included anecdotes from his travels, providing readers with a sense of the humanity of America’s folk artists.
In the first chapter of this thesis, I will examine the way in which folklore gained national attention during the Great Depression, and how government agencies created a lasting impact on the perceptions of the American folk.
The second chapter will focus on one folklorist’s work during these years. Alan
Lomax was a prolific and dedicated recorder of the world’s folk traditions for over sixty years. His work as a young folklorist during the Depression influenced his understanding of and approach to American culture. His correspondence with Pace demonstrates his profound emotional connection to his work. Throughout his life, Alan Lomax existed within the liminal space between folk and high culture. He respected and emulated folk artists. To many in the big cities of the Northeast, he was a folk artist, putting on performances and presenting his experiences with enough passion and panache to give the impression of authenticity. However he was never truly a part of the folk community.
As a collector, he had received years of training and education. He followed his father’s unconventional footsteps into the world of academia and removed himself from the folk communities he felt drawn to. He lived most of his life in large cities, and connected with folk arts only in passing, always with some recording equipment standing between him and his informants. However, in developing close personal relationships with his informants, Lomax was able to feel one step closer to the folk he so admired. A
5 friendship with Lize Pace served as a bridge between Alan’s two worlds. His conflicts with his identity as a folklorist are explored in chapter two.
The third chapter addresses the music Alan collected for the Library of Congress in eastern Kentucky. This trip, which lasted only a few months, resulted in hundreds of audio recordings. Three of these work together to tell a compelling story about American life in the 1930s, the burgeoning role of folk culture in American society, and the relationship between collector and informant during this period. While some songs, like
“The House of the Rising Sun” and “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” have transcended folk boundaries and entered the national consciousness, others like “The Mermaid,” performed by Lize Pace, continue to exist primarily in dusty library recordings. However, these almost forgotten tunes nuance our understanding of folklorists, folk artists, and
American culture during the Great Depression.
6 Chapter One: Folklore and the Great Depression
In a time of national crisis, the folklorists of the Works Progress Administration were able to capture a moment in their history that would have otherwise been lost. As the government shifted toward aiding everyday Americans by generating useful infrastructural works, new attention was paid to the arts. Through the efforts of the Works
Progress Administration, Federal One and the Joint Committee on Folk Arts, essential elements of the American experience in the 1930s were recorded and preserved. The movement to archive American folk life marked a significant point of departure for
American art and culture. A society that had once valued only high culture was now turning toward art in the vernacular. In the process of this shift, folk traditions were given new value in our national identity. Folklorists, moving from academia to the government’s employ, were the key in effecting this shift
In 1939 Benjamin A. Botkin, initially the director of the folklore section of the
Federal Writers’ Project and ultimately the chairman of the Joint Committee on Folk Arts, published an article in the Southern Folklore Quarterly. This article spoke to the energy surrounding folk work during the Great Depression. The movement to record America’s folklore entirely altered the legacy of the WPA and created a trove of national heritage through folk recordings.
In the depths of the depression the WPA is not too busy building roads and bridges to collect and study American folklore. And those of us who have come from the academic groves feel that we are participating in the greatest educational as well as social experiment of our time (Botkin 10).
7 This passage demonstrates the enthusiasm for folklore in the WPA, while also placing folk work in the broader context of federal work relief. To some, building roads and bridges was the most essential and sensible work for the WPA. To others, including
Botkin, the government’s decision to support the collection of folklore marked a great moment in American cultural history.
The Great Depression confronted the American people with a unique set of challenges. At the forefront of many American minds was how to pull a third of the nation out of poverty with dignity, hard work, and resulting national benefit. The solution was a series of government programs and agencies that have left a lasting impact on the
American landscape. From roads and bridges to municipal buildings and airports to murals and an archive of American folklore, Depression-era work projects touched all aspects of American life. While the goal of government funded work relief was to employ as many needy Americans as possible, some artists and creative minded individuals took advantage of the unique moment in history to entirely change the face of
American art and culture. During the Great Depression, the government financed programs in the arts, including visual art, music, theater and writing. It was the collection and study of folklore, however, that united all these disciplines and contributed to a growing sense of American identity. Folklore, which had once been relegated exclusively to intellectuals, became the business of the entire nation. The rich diversity of American folklore entered the national consciousness through the work of the federal agencies, and this work helped to engender a sense of pride and ownership of American folk arts throughout the country.
The Works Progress Administration
8 Americans in the Great Depression were desperate. In the years following the stock market crash of 1929, a quarter of the American workforce was without jobs
(Taylor 7). President Herbert Hoover, a Republican committed to laissez faire governing, turned an antiquated and unrealistic eye to the needs of struggling everyday Americans.
“The fundamentals of the economy were strong, he insisted, and a balanced budget ensuring the sound credit of the government was the only sure way to bring about recovery” (Taylor 21).
While Hoover’s slow and conservative response to the demands of the national crisis seemed impractical, Hoover was very much a product of his environment. “It was outlandish to think that employers would have any interest in their employees beyond their productive capacity, and even odder to think that the federal government would interfere by telling them how to treat their workers” (Taylor 8). In an America that still believed in the power of the individual to achieve success, the idea of broad and direct national involvement in personal lives was unthinkable. One teacher articulated a sense of personal failure at her inability to get work: “If, with all the advantages I’ve had, I can’t make a living, I’m just no good, I guess” (Taylor 12) While need was great, most
Americans were not interested in a “dole” (Taylor 59). Rather than a direct payout from the government, Americans wanted work. The tension between basic human needs in the face of poverty and the American need to feel independently successful resulted not in the desire for charity, but for compensation for an honest day’s work. In a climate of national self-doubt and disappointment, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election provided a new hope.
9 From the moment he stepped onto the national stage as a Democratic presidential candidate, Roosevelt resonated with millions of struggling Americans. On 7 April 1932,
Roosevelt addressed the nation over the radio airwaves and spoke to the need for grassroots progress in America:
It is said that Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantry. He staked too much upon the more spectacular but less substantial cavalry. The present administration in Washington provides a close parallel. It has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army. These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but indispensible units of economic power; for plans… that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid (Taylor 69).
In this speech, Roosevelt identified the failings of the Hoover administration in a way that resonated with much of America. Millions of Americans felt abandoned by Hoover’s laissez faire approach, yet Washington continued to provide little support. Roosevelt offered an alternative. By proposing plans that relied on the common American,
Roosevelt put faith back in the hearts of the struggling. Americans regained faith not only in themselves and their ability to overcome the obstacles of the Depression, but faith in the government as an agent of positive change.
On this platform on 8 November 1932, Roosevelt was elected to office (Taylor
72). Four months later he was inaugurated and immediately set to work. Within hours of his inauguration, he enacted the bank holiday and called an emergency meeting of
Congress. He held his first fireside chat on 12 March, just a week after his inauguration.
He had begun to affect real change, and now spoke to the nation directly. In clear and simple terms he articulated the challenges ahead and slowly began to restore America’s confidence. Roosevelt proposed a volley of legislation: to aid farmers; protect
10 homeowners; limit Wall Street; to bring electricity to great swaths of the country; and to create a federal relief administration that would generate and support sweeping public works projects (Taylor 93). For this proposed agency, Roosevelt needed “a design that would unify the scattered existing relief efforts, varying from state to state, into a single central agency that could put the money where the need was” (Taylor 94). Other federal relief projects had been established before, yet these works could not provide the multitude of jobs necessary to get America back on its feet. The solution was the Works
Progress Administration.
The work generated by the WPA was intended to simultaneously support individual Americans through the challenges of the Depression and to improve the future of the nation. Roosevelt spoke to the duality of the administration in his 1935 State of the
Union address: “all work undertaken should be useful – not just for a day, or a year, but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living conditions or that it creates future new wealth for the nation” (Taylor 161). In large part this useful work was dedicated to improving infrastructure. Roads, bridges, sewers, waterlines, and public spaces all benefitted from the WPA. Women went to work as nurses, teachers and seamstresses. WPA workers provided relief to disaster stricken areas, helping rescue and rebuild after floods, tornados and fires. As contemporary photographs show, other miscellaneous works got the WPA involved in the broad spectrum of American life, from building toys to golf courses, cobbling shoes to offering fishing lessons (Taylor).
The term “boondoggle” entered the American lexicon concurrently with the
WPA. For many Americans, direct job creation and payouts for public works were frivolous examples of an oversized and over involved government. Many of the works
11 sponsored by the WPA were attacked as unnecessary. The New York Sun began a daily column entitled “Today’s Boondoggle,” which attacked projects such as “The WPA arts programs, a plan to clean and varnish desks in Gadsden, Alabama, schools, road landscaping in Tucson, Arizona, a $65,000 monkey house at the zoo in Little Rock,
Arkansas, and a city-wide program of park improvements in Chicago” to name a few
(Taylor 217). Clearly, the breadth of FDR’s work relief programs gave conservatives no shortage of criticisms. Yet while some denounced them as wasteful and unnecessary, the
WPA arts programs were perhaps the most fascinating component of the Depression work recovery. What had been a chiefly blue collar, labor focused endeavor shifted its attention to the needs of America’s creative workers.
Artists, like all classes of people, were hit hard by the Depression. As money evaporated on a national scale, demand for perceived luxuries such as art works, concerts, plays and new books decreased dramatically. Yet artists were considered part of the elite class and perceived as immune to the immediate threats of poverty. “Artists, like other white-collar workers, suffered from neglect in the early years of the Depression. Some communities ignored the existence of professional classes; others misinterpreted their need” (McDonald 348). However, mere months after the Emergency Relief
Administration was passed, the WPA began sponsoring the Federal Arts Programs. “It is the intention of this Administration to sponsor nation-wide projects intending to employ persons now on relief who are qualified in fields of Art, Music, Drama and Writing”
(McDonald 128). As Roosevelt had articulated in outlining the basic goals of the WPA, all works sponsored were to be useful in the long term. By incorporating arts projects into the administration, the federal government was sponsoring national creativity as a valid
12 and valuable contribution to the life of the nation. Artists, musicians, actors and authors could now turn to the government for work and support. The arts workers added their creative efforts to the WPA laborers in helping to shape a more culturally rich nation.
WPA Arts Programs
The WPA Arts Program incorporated both folk and high culture into its efforts.
Some divisions, like the Federal Music Project, focused their energy on more classical traditions. Others, like the Federal Writer’s Project, had the most success when working from folk sources. This dichotomy highlights the transition occurring in American culture during the Great Depression, as the nation began to recognize its folk traditions as equally valuable to high culture.
Jacob Baker, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration Director of Work
Relief and Special Projects, helped to engineer what would eventually become the
WPA’s Arts Program. His vision for work relief, which preceded the WPA by three years, swept across class lines and endeavored to create jobs for people in every walk of life. “The history of the FERA … could be summed up as a continuous effort to devise the best methods for providing jobs, so that as many people as possible might be given employment in the skills and trainings which they have been accustomed to practice”
(McDonald 35). While for years work relief had been confined to manual labor, it was becoming increasingly clear as the Depression deepened that need extended far beyond the laboring class. The problem confronting work relief organizations like the FERA and later the WPA was how to provide all of America with a working wage and a sense of purpose.
13 An essential component in the development of the Arts Program was the nature of government funded work relief. If the intentions of work relief were to support
Americans until they could support themselves and to get the nation’s economy back on track, work relief could not compete with private sector jobs, nor could it overlap with pre-existing public works projects. The jobs that remained for these programs, then, were jobs that “if there was no depression, would not be undertaken by a public or private body” (McDonald 14). The arts fell smoothly within this narrow window, in that often artists were independently employed and not directly involved with either the public or private sector. They were, however, vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy and could therefore benefit greatly from government intervention.
The FERA made initial attempts to support white-collar workers, if not artists directly. Jacob Baker articulated the organizations intentions: “We are anxious to provide work opportunities for as many of the clerical and professional people who have been forced to seek relief as we can” (McDonald 40). In April 1933, planning continued for
FERA funds and it was decided that ten percent of the works in the program would be dedicated to “public education, arts and research” (McDonald 68). However, lack of funds across the board made these initiatives appear superfluous and detrimental to the broader community. Funds were needed in more pertinent works that could employ larger numbers of the desperately needy, and outcry against these early art measures was strong.
By December 1934, the aid for professional workers from the FERA lost support and ended.
With the WPA came new hope for the professional classes, specifically artists.
Initial plans intended to provide relief for visual artists only, but it soon became clear that
14 individuals from other artistic pursuits were also in need of work. In a letter to FERA director Harry Hopkins, Baker encouraged supporting artists from various fields: “If you do it for artists you will certainly have to do it for musicians, actors, and we ought to
[offer support] for engineers and architects and other white collar people on different sorts of national surveys” (McDonald 116). On 1 June 1935, the Section for Professional and Service Projects joined the WPA. By the end of June that year, this section of the
WPA had outlined a series of white-collar projects that had long since been discussed but were waiting to be officiated. Federal Project Number One, shortened to Federal One, was the first program on the agenda. Federal One included programs for visual art, music, theater, writing and eventually historical records. The program began receiving federal aid in August 1935, and Roosevelt officially approved the program in September of that year.
Highlighting the bureaucracy of this program, each of the five branches of Federal
One had its own director. Initially, Holger Cahill oversaw the Federal Art Project, Nicolai
Sokoloff the Federal Music Project, Hallie Flanagan the Federal Theater Project and
Henry Alsberg the Federal Writers Project (McDonald 129). A year later Luther H. Evans and the Historical Records Survey joined Federal One (McDonald 759). Accordingly,
Federal One drew some criticism from state branches, as Washington controlled all aspects of projects and programming. “In short, the state administrators were to have no responsibility for: (1) the appointment of the state directors and their staffs; (2) expenditures, either as to amount or as to object; (3) the selection and approval of projects” (McDonald 139). However, regional and district representatives did organize in the field and played an instrumental role in the success of Federal One in general.
15 The first, and one of the most visible arms of Federal One, was the Federal Arts
Project (FAP). The program was divided into three main areas of focus: producing new art works and maintaining artistic skills, art education and community art centers, and creating the Index of American Design. Holger Cahill, the director of the FAP, had a background in American folk art, and encouraged the program’s artists to create images of the “American Scene” (McDonald 424). This guideline was broad enough, and the topic was relevant and engaging enough to permit great freedom for the artists. The majority of artists involved in the program worked individually, producing large quantities of art works and demonstrating the value of the government’s aid. These were most commonly painters working independently, yet the program also commissioned murals, sculptures, and other public art works across the nation. These enabled a broader involvement in the FAP, while still providing room for creativity on the part of the principal artists. The FAP also provided for graphic arts, printmaking, poster making, and the development of new techniques (McDonald 436). The research branch of the FAP endeavored to assemble the Index of American Design. Intended to aid American artists searching for inspiration or visual accuracy, the Index was a catalogue of images from the course of American history. “Design is everywhere and, in America, everywhere different. It is to be found in costumes, furniture, household utensils, textiles, architecture, etc. It changes by locality, sect and generation” (McDonald 443). Because the Index was to collect images from all over America, it was inherently more national than local, unlike many other FAP projects.
The Federal Music Project (FMP), like the FAP, was separated into three main subdivisions. There was support for performances by musicians and composers, musical
16 education outreach, and music research. The FMP helped the raise the number of symphony orchestras across the nation from eleven to thirty four in three years
(McDonald 619). The FMP sponsored smaller, urban opera initiatives. Composers were commissioned individually, and in many places composer forums were organized in which composers could work in close concert with one another and have their pieces performed. The FMP used the radio as a medium for widespread musical education, and commissioned orchestral pieces to air on the radio. Musical education had suffered significant blows during the Depression, and the FMP endeavored to reach communities that lacked adequate musical resources. “In the change from an agricultural to an industrial nation, the old singing school, the singing convention, and the ‘singin’ gatherin’’ dropped out of favor” (McDonald 628). WPA workers offered instruction in music theory, appreciation and performance. Communal singing again took hold in many communities, in large part thanks to the WPA. FMP workers participated in music festivals around the nation, and organized national music weeks emphasizing “the folk song and folk music of America” (McDonald 634). The collection and preservation of folk music was a major component of the FMP across the nation. The FMP also sponsored some music therapy, in addition to music research and collecting, such as the
Index of American Composers, music analysis and music copying.
The Federal Theater Project (FTP) employed actors on relief to perform shows across the country. It commissioned new plays with American themes, and produced shows accessible to underprivileged audiences. The WPA’s support of the FTP created a freedom from the usual tensions that exist in the theater business. Hallie Flanagan, the director of the FTP, spoke to the privileges of a federally funded theater program: “Here
17 are actors, stage hands, designers, musicians, paid and at our service. Within reason we can do any plays in any ways we wish” (McDonald 545). Flanagan had experience in experimental theater, and encouraged fresh and creative approaches to classical drama.
The FTP commissioned Living Newspaper topical shows, dramatizing current events and providing regular fodder for FTP playwrights and companies. The FTP sponsored a wide variety of theatrical projects, from children’s theater to African American companies to foreign language theater and theater for the blind. Musicals were popular throughout the nation, and the research branch of the FTP worked to identify American songs useful for these shows. The Bureau of Research and Publications “conducted research for the playwriting department; and from that activity there developed a folklore and folksong department” (McDonald 579). These American folk tunes were used in FTP commissioned musicals. In using these folk tunes, the FTP identified the value of
American folk culture in creating a sense of national identity. It was the Federal Writer’s project, however, that capitalized and expanded on this notion in their state guidebook series.
The Federal Writer’s Project made heavy use of folk arts and traditions in its
American Guide Series. These were a series of state and local guidebooks, written for each of the forty-eight states at the time and a series of other locations as well. The guides were critically well received and popular among the American people. However, the writers involved felt stunted by the limitations of the guidebooks. The confines of structure prohibited the writers employed from exploring their creativity, and many writers felt that they were less supported than the artists of the FAP. “If the purpose of the
WPA is to rehabilitate the unemployed, what more logical program for the writer than the
18 publication of his actual literary work?” (Mangione 241). Alsberg, the director of the
FWP, recognized the need for creativity among his writers. “If I can get occasional creative stuff published in a book, and if I can get out the guidebooks, I can give some writers time to do their own creative writing” (Mangione 245). The priority from the
Washington office was certainly the guidebooks, yet there was some room for more creative output. A few literary magazines were produced, and a more widely circulated work which FWP worker Jerre Mangione “named and helped to compile, American Stuff, a collection of short stories, poems, and Americana by fifty Project writers, which Viking
Press issued in 1937” (Mangione 244). Yet the works most universally well received, by critics and writers alike, were the folklore projects.
Federal One was an enormous national endeavor for the arts. It employed thousands of people across regions, races, classes and training to produce quality creative works. It democratized Shakespeare and the symphony, while simultaneously creating a national audience for the family histories, folk tunes and community traditions. It is the connection between Federal One and the folk arts that is perhaps most compelling, as it speaks to the role of the American vernacular in the developing cannon of American art.
WPA organizations like the folklore section of the Federal Writers’ Project and the Joint
Committee on Folk Arts helped to cement American folklore as valuable national heritage.
Folk Work in the WPA
In 1936, Henry Alsberg, the director of the FWP, recognized the immediacy of creating a folklore section of the Federal Writers’ Project. “There is in prospect the probability of making a collection of national folklore. While use for the State Guide is
19 the immediate consideration in covering the field, items too abundant for inclusion […] will have great future value. Such an opportunity to collect this material may never recur
(McDonald 706). At this point, the state guides were still the single priority, yet many
FWP authors had grown restless with the rigidity of the guides and were eager to engage their literary talents in new and creative ways. In an effort to address these frustrations,
Alsberg appointed John A. Lomax as the first director of the FWP’s folklore division. He was already employed by the Library of Congress in connection with their growing collection of American folk music, and had done extensive collecting throughout the
South (Mangione 265). Lomax outlined the FWP’s goals for field workers, expressing the program’s intention to collect local customs, songs, dances, superstitions, traditions, tall tales and more. From beginning to end, the WPA efforts in folk work were centered on primary source recordings. Workers were expected to faithfully record interactions with individuals, or “informants.” The FWP frowned upon, and often refused to publish, folk work that derived from secondary sources.
In his foreword to the Vermont state guidebook, Alsberg spoke to the intention of the guides project: “Though the project was originally designed to give useful employment to needy writers and research workers it has gradually developed the more ambitious objective of utilizing the talent among the employed writers to create and present a comprehensive portrait of America” (Vermont Foreword). With this goal in mind, the guidebooks were organized into three main sections. General background described various aspects deemed important to the state, from formal state history to education to transportation. Anything about folklore included in the guide appeared in this first section. The second section detailed the main cities and towns in the state, and
20 the final section provided a series of tours throughout the state, including some local history and important destinations.
Vermont’s state guide does not have a specific “folkways” section, but does include backstories about different localities in the state. “Amos Story first settled the town in 1774, but was killed under a falling tree before he could bring his family there.
Mrs. Story a woman of great strength and courage, came with her brood of small children to carry on the work of the farm” (Vermont 286). These anecdotal entries included in the different tours of the state gave a sense of community history and heritage, even when folk sections were absent. This was likely in large part due to the nature of New England states, where “even in rural areas of New England, written tradition predominates over oral” (McDonald 709).
Southern and western state guides included more standard folk sections.
Nebraska’s section of folklore, “Folklore and Folkways,” dedicated a significant amount of attention to Nebraskan folk heroes such as Febold Feboldson and Bergstrom
Stromsberg, both cut from a similar American cloth as Davy Crockett and Paul Bunyan.
Native American influence was present throughout, in stories and tall tales, songs, place names and remedies. Social practices, like community dances, festivals and coyote hunts were detailed, as well as more contemporary social events in 1939, like rodeos, school plays and church picnics. The Nebraska guide was very much an account of frontier life.
Living lore and traditions seemed to be an afterthought in the section rather than the main target. This is summed up well in describing one social event: “Just before the coming of the automobile, old settlers and their children were distinguished from newer settlers by annual barbeques given in their honor” (Nebraska 110). New comers to the community
21 annually celebrated these older and hardier Nebraska families as they represented the true spirit and heritage of Nebraskan settlers. The folklorists involved in the Nebraska project chose to focus on the older Nebraskan’s experiences rather than more contemporary lore in their state.
Although the government was making strides towards collecting folk traditions, the bureaucratic nature of collecting a national review of American folkways continued to present challenges. One such obstacle was how the FWP could collect authentic folk traditions. As much as possible, the folklife section attempted to draw collectors from within communities so that the recordings would come from a place of ownership and personal connection. However, in some instances this was not the case. Outsider perspectives biased and complicated folklife sections of various guidebooks, as evidenced in the state guide from Mississippi.
The Mississippi guide has two distinct folklore sections: “White Folkways” and
“Negro Folkways.” “White Folkways” is chiefly dedicated to white farmers; their political beliefs, their superstitions, their common remedies, their eating and living habits and their music. “They play popular pieces and well loved hymns and folk ballads which tell a legend and end with a moral” (Mississippi 15). White southerners also enjoyed
Sacred Harp singing; a specific type of choral shape note sight-reading that required a certain amount of familiarity and musical literacy. Young people who showed vocal promise could work closely with adults in the community and hope to one day become a song leader in church. In discussing religion, the section describes “the preacher, whether our pastor or an itinerant evangelist, understands our preference for feeling rather than knowing, and he builds his sermons on the fact” (Mississippi 20). The author of this
22 section identifies with the group by using first person pronouns like “we” and “our.” The author would have the reader believe that he is a part of the white folk community he writes about, yet the lack of personal testimony and the use of elevated language suggest otherwise.
The discrepancy between “White Folkways” and “Negro Folkways” is significant.
If the use of “we” in the white section is a sign of deference toward white folk culture, the use of “the Negro” and “he” are certain signs of distancing and condescension. Where a white preacher understands and appeals to the decent spirituality of poor white farmers, a black preacher is depicted as almost satanic:
For weeks prior to the annual “protracted meeting” he fasts and prays and works himself into a state of feeling that will make the church services highly exhilarating and weirdly African. For this reason his religious leader is more an emotional expert than a practiced theologian. He moans, groans, and injects various other psychological stimuli which he does not understand (Mississippi 24).
This section of guidebook deindividualizes African Americans by classifying them as
“folk Negro,” “town Negro,” “unimportant” and “important” Negroes. Superstitions around healing practices are judged as unreasonable, and young women are mocked for their attire: “Others, particularly those who are unmarried, imitate the latest styles. This practice often leads to the rather ludicrous spectacle of a young and highly roughed
Negro woman struggling through the crowd with the pale blue train of an evening gown trailing behind her” (Mississippi 27). If there is any doubt of the author’s derision, it is quieted in the quote chosen to end the section: “Seated in the white man’s wagon, and subtly letting the white man worry with the reins, the Negro assures himself a share of all things good. Once a landlord was asked if the Negro really has a soul. ‘If he hasn’t,’ the
23 landlord replied, ‘it’s the first thing that a white man ever had that a Negro didn’t share if he stayed with him long enough” (Mississippi 30). If the goal of the American Guide
Series was to paint a portrait of American life in the 1930s, it seems that Mississippi’s
African Americans were not to be faithfully depicted. This treatment of black life provides a good example of why it was deemed useful to employ writers and workers from within the community being recorded, as they had more incentive to write honest depictions of their own people.
FWP collection efforts changed the tack of the more traditional style of recording folkways, which up to this point had been almost exclusively academic. WPA folk workers were usually not classically trained musicologists, anthropologists or sociologists. The American Folklore Society disagreed with the Writers’ Project use of amateur collectors, and “were skeptical of an unorthodox folklorists like John Lomax, whose scholarship they questioned” (McDonald 717). However, the amateur nature of the workers was largely regarded as an asset to the process. “Until the advent of the Writers’
Project, American folklore had been the almost private preserve of scholars, who, with few exceptions, dealt with it formally, as part of a remote past” (Mangione 269). By employing amateur workers from within communities, the FWP was able to produce a certain familiarity among recorders and informants. The results, far from unprofessional, were more genuine than many scholars would have been able to procure.
Due to pressure from the academy, the FWP replaced Lomax with Benjamin A.
Botkin, introduced at the outset of this chapter. Botkin, an anthropologist from the
University of Oklahoma, was born to Lithuanian immigrant parents in Boston. He received a Harvard undergraduate education and a PhD from the University of Nebraska.
24 While Botkin’s credentials may have been more traditional than Lomax’s, his approach to folklore for the Writers’ Project was similarly focused on amateur workers recording internally in their own communities:
The folk movement must come from below upward rather than of above downward. Otherwise it may be dismissed as a patronizing gesture, a nostalgic wish, an elegiac complaint, a sporadic and abortive revival – on the part of paternalistic aristocrats going slumming, […] defeated sectionalists going back to the soil, and anybody and everybody who cares to go collecting (Mangione 270).
Botkin advocated a grassroots form of folklore collection, one Lomax had championed and one that continued to produce quality work from a variety of American regions and communities.
While Lomax and Botkin agreed in regards to the collection of folklore, they differed in an essential way that had an important impact on the development of the folklore section of the WPA. Botkin was a northern urban son of immigrant parents.
Lomax was a born and raised Texan. Lomax was chiefly interested in rural folk culture, specifically that of the Southeast. Botkin took a broader approach. “The material collected will have important bearings on the study of American culture in both its historical and functional aspects, including minority groups (ethnic, geographical and occupational), immigration and internal migration, local history, regional backgrounds and movements, linguistic and dialectic phenomena” (Botkin 13).
If Lomax believed the abundance of American folklore lay in the country, Botkin believed it was in the city. “There is already an immense body of evidence indicating that urban industrial life creates its own types of ‘isolation’ and ‘homogeneity’ and consequently evolves its own ‘folk ways’ and its own fantasy patterns” (McDonald 712).
25 With Botkin at the helm, WPA folk work turned new attention to urban industrial lore.
Collectors began to record traditions, stories and songs from immigrant groups and
Americans in a variety of professions. Botkin worked to place the same value on urban lore that had long been placed on rural folk traditions: “The Negro street cries of Harlem are work songs, just as surely as are the Southern Negro’s songs of the cotton, cane and tobacco fields, road construction, saw mill and turpentine camps, and chain gangs”
(Botkin 8). This turn towards urban lore highlighted the modernizing world of the 1930s.
As more and more work came from industry, and more and more communities became tied up with that sort of work, the stories, songs and attitudes changed to accommodate.
“It is the tall tale transplanted from the country to the city, with freaks of machinery replacing freaks of nature and the work hero supplanting the frontier wastrel” (McDonald
715). The decision to record this shift in American folkways reflected another key element of Botkin’s agenda for the folklore section of the Writers’ Project.
Botkin turned the emphasis away from memory projects, or folklore recalled from the past, toward what he defined as “living lore,” or folk traditions that existed in current time. By entering communities and speaking with living individuals working from their own experiences, be they elderly people recalling the folklore they held in their memories and shared with their families or younger folk sharing stories and generating new ones, the Writers’ Project was able to capture a moment in American cultural history that could have otherwise been forgotten. “While it existed, the Project was able to salvage for posterity a rich and significant part of the American Past that was in imminent danger of being lost through the decline of early settlers and the accelerated development of mechanical means of communication” (Mangione 268). Botkin stressed the importance
26 of living lore and urban folk studies, yet he also officiated works outside these spheres.
The slave narratives and life histories recorded during this period, as well as recording work done in rural and southern regions were important aspects of the WPA folk works throughout. By augmenting the course of American folklore, Botkin became “a liberating force, rescuing folklore from the academically embalmed atmosphere in which it had long been contained and bringing it to a large audience that was hungry for the kind of
Americana which reflected the nation’s varied personality” (Mangione 677). Under his direction, the folklore section of the FWP was a booming success. Publications were popular, critically acclaimed, and about to become even more significant as the folk workers of the WPA united in the Joint Committee on Folk Arts.
The Joint Committee on Folk Arts was formed in response to the successful role of American folklore throughout the various branches of Federal One. The committee was founded in 1938, with Benjamin A. Botkin as its chairman. Botkin served as the
FWP representative, while representatives from the Federal Music Project, the Federal
Art Project, the Historical Records Survey, the education division, the National Youth
Administration and the technical services laboratory also served (McDonald 749). Botkin explained the organization in this way:
Specifically, the folklore program of the WPA falls into two parts; first, the folklore work of the individual projects, and second, the work of the Joint Committee on Folk Arts, WPA, which, with the help and approval of the American Council of Learned Societies, has recently been set up in Washington to integrate and coordinate al the folklore, folk music, folk drama and folk art and craft activities of the WPA (Botkin 11).
The formation of this committee enabled folk workers to collect and record beyond the confines of FWP projects like the state guidebooks. In his 1939 article published in the
27 Southern Folklore Quarterly, Botkin stated: “As its first field trip the Joint Committee is planning a three months recording expedition to the Southeastern region” (Botkin 12).
This trip, which began that month and continued through June of that year, employed a
Federal Theater Project sound truck to record folk songs as it drove through Virginia,
North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida (McDonald 749).
The Joint Committee on Folk Arts sponsored a variety of recording efforts in addition to the Southern expedition. It conducted a study of traditional New Mexican music in conjunction with the department of Hispanic Studies at the University of New
Mexico that revealed ties to Spanish American heritage. The committee published a collection of Mississippi folk tunes that included “Negro spirituals, work songs, play songs, river songs, hillbilly songs, and fiddler’s tunes” (McDonald 639). They produced disc recordings of five Oklahoma Indian tribes, as well as fiddle tunes from that state.
They gathered Creole and Acadian songs from Louisiana, as well as black and white traditional tunes from North Carolina. Many states, such as Virginia and Nebraska used
WPA folk work in their state education systems. These projects and others represent some of the work done under the Joint Committee on Folk Arts. Amateur collectors were the chief executors of these projects, for the committee “discovered […] that project teachers working within their own territory could approach as neighbors those in whom the music resided” (McDonald 641). Despite pushback from traditionalists, the Joint
Committee was able to exact excellent results and publish popular and valuable folk work using amateur collectors.
As a hold over from Botkin’s emphasis on urban immigrant groups, the Joint
Committee on Folk Arts maintained attention to urban folk collection. While many of the
28 Joint Committee projects were centered in rural areas, Botkin was able to explore his interest in urban lore through the Social Ethnic Studies branch of the FWP. The Writers’
Project began publishing ethnic studies in 1938, including groups such as Italian and
Jewish immigrants in New York, Armenians in Massachusetts and Scandinavians in New
Jersey. The dynamic, energetic and overly ambitious Morton W. Royse oversaw this section of the FWP, and worked closely with Botkin both within the Writers’ Project and as a part of the Joint Committee as a whole (Mangione 278). Royse intended to use the
Social Ethnic Studies program to discover “how a social and cultural unity was achieved by these people, without stamping cultural differences into one mold, producing the unique American civilization” (Mangione 278). Beginning with such a vast intention, it is not surprising that the Social Ethnic program struggled with an overload of projects, inefficient leadership and ultimately collapsed under its own weight. The program’s inability to publish more of their intended works “robbed our heritage of what undoubtedly would have been a series of profoundly enlightening studies conducted at an ideal time – while most of the nation’s twentieth century immigrants were still alive”
(Mangione 284). While broad recording of urban life and lore fell short, Botkin and the folk workers of the WPA ultimately achieved their goals.
At the start of Federal One, individuals concerned with the preservation of
American folk culture faced a challenge. “The most important task confronting the folklorist in America is that of justifying folklore and explaining what it is for, breaking down on the one hand popular resistance to folklore as dead or phony and on the other hand academic resistance to its broader interpretation and utilization” (Botkin 14). As folklore publications flew off the shelves of bookstores nation wide, and as the academy
29 recognized the quality and value of governmental folk work, Botkin had achieved this most important task. The question then becomes how Botkin and federal folk workers accomplished it. It was folk workers on the ground, like Alan Lomax, who achieved these goals. Alan Lomax, an up and coming folklorist in the Depression era, embodies many of the tensions and challenges faced by the entire New Deal folk collection initiative.
30 Chapter Two: Alan Lomax
On his first recording trip in 1932, Alan Lomax and his father John pulled over on the side of the road to test their new equipment. They asked a black woman washing her clothes nearby to sing for them, and Alan responded to her song this way: “I was seventeen… and I was embarrassed. But beneath the embarrassment, I wondered what made her voice soar so beautifully in her simple and charming song of one line, and what sorrow lay behind her tears and her ‘Lord have mercy’” (Szwed 36). In this moment, his first field recording, “he became convinced that folk song collecting was important, something he had to do” (Szwed 36). This story functions as a good metaphor for much of Alan’s career.
Working to collect folklore for the better part of the twentieth century, Alan’s identity was closely intertwined with the changing tides of American history. He saw his world through the lens of folklore, working tirelessly for over seventy years to collect, preserve, and garner appreciation for American folk culture and music. He worked through the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, and a series of technological and social advancements that altered the nature of folk collection. In large part because of his ambition to be the “messenger of the masses,” Lomax was always spread thin, constantly generating new ideas, struggling with finances, and never feeling fully satisfied with his work (Szwed 37). Yet because of his unflinching dedication to folk work, countless voices, stories, and songs were preserved as American cultural heritage. Lomax saw his efforts as more than mere preservation; he saw himself as a voice for the voiceless: “My job was to try and get as much of these views, these feelings,
31 this unheard majority onto the center of the stage” (Szwed 37). This chapter endeavors to piece together how Lomax came to such a stance.
A Rising Folklorist
For better or worse, Alan Lomax had a famous folklorist for a father: John
Lomax. Alan’s relationship with John had a profound impact on his identity and work as a folk collector. Their familial connection and close working relationship has resulted in some conflation of the two in American memory. For example, the father and son team are often considered together as “the Lomaxes.” As much as they relied on each other as fellow folklorists in the development of our national folk heritage, they diverged significantly in their approach to folk work and the lives they lead.
John Lomax’s interest in folk recording began early in life. Born in Mississippi and raised in East Texas just after the Civil War, John was imbued from a young age with both southern pastoral romanticism and a sense of white racial superiority. Growing up he was exposed to the cowboy way of life, learning their songs and hearing their stories as they headed west on the Chrisholm Trail through Texas (Szwed 5). In a famous anecdote from his autobiography, John had collected a series of cowboy songs through his travels. He showed this manuscript to an English professor of his at the University of
Texas, and was told the songs were “tawdry, cheap and unworthy.” After class that day,
Lomax burned his papers out of embarrassment (Szwed 9). Later in his intermittent education, northern scholars would encourage and validate John’s folk work, spurring him to found the Texas Folklore Society in 1909 and ultimately be named “Honorary
Conservator of our Archive of American Folksong,” and the first director of the folklore section of the Federal Writer’s Project of the WPA (Szwed 51, Mangione 265).
32 John began his folksong collection in earnest while working towards his masters at Harvard University. Professors in the English Department encouraged him to return to his Texas roots, and helped him amass a collection of cowboy songs he would later publish in his book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (Szwed 10). After years of hiatus from collecting, during which he lectured extensively, served on the staff of the
University of Texas, and worked as a bond salesman out of Chicago, Lomax suffered a breakdown. Over the course of a few months in 1930, Lomax lost his wife suddenly and lost his job as a salesman to the Great Depression (Szwed 22). At the urging of his sons
John Jr. and Alan, John and Alan struck out on a recording trip in the summer of 1932.
They drove from Boston to the Pacific Northwest and back to Texas, collecting recordings that would eventually become an part of an anthology of American folk song
(Szwed 32).
Alan Lomax was a product of his father’s life experiences. From a young age,
John singled out Alan among his siblings to follow in his father’s footsteps in folk collecting. Born on 31 January 1915 in Austin, Texas, Alan was the third child to Bess
Brown and John Avery Lomax. Although John’s education had been patchy at best, picking up a year of formal schooling here and there, spending summers in Chautauqua,
New York hearing public lectures, he was passionate about folk traditions. With this background, John Lomax ensured that his children would receive excellent educations, and that each would share his love and respect for the American folk. This was perhaps most true for his son Alan. According to Bess Lomax Jr., Alan’s sister, “Alan may have puny as a child, but he was intelligent, and it was he who was father’s favorite” (Szwed
17).
33 On the surface, John and Alan Lomax shared quite a bit in common. Each had taken a circuitous and lengthy route through their formal educations, bouncing from
Texas state universities to Harvard and back again. Both struggled throughout their lives and careers to achieve recognition and acceptance from academia. They both occupied a liminal space between standard musicology practices and a deeply personal, emotional approach to their work. In large part because of this unorthodox method, neither ever acquired the teaching positions they desired, and each faced lifelong struggles with financing their work and their lives. Philosophically, however, the two men differed dramatically.
The generational divide between John and Alan Lomax resulted in significant differences that affected their respective approaches to folk work. John was born in
Mississippi in 1867, and his environment informed his conceptions of race. He was a firm believer in the theory of cultural evolution and primitivism. As his contemporary folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett put it, “folk beliefs and superstitions are normal stages of development through which all peoples have passed and are passing in their societal evolution” (Mullen 43). John reconciled an inherent contradiction of how people he regarded as primitive could create great art by determining the value of folk arts stemmed from primitiveness. Conversely, Alan romanticized folklife, desiring an insider perspective on informant’s cultures rather than his father’s outsider perspective. He was a firm liberal, advocating socialism and communism in his youth, and staunchly defending civil rights later in his life. While both men exercised a paternalistic approach, specifically in their work with African American communities, John did so consciously, enjoying superiority over his subjects based on race.
34 Alan’s paternalism is perhaps more subtle, in that it appears as white guilt. In his autobiography, John describes their work in African American southern prisons: “At every opportunity they told Alan and me their pitiful stories. Alan seemed to want to set them all free” (Mullen 84). This passage encapsulates both John’s superior contempt as he mentions their “pitiful stories,” and Alan’s deep-seated guilt at his own freedom and the oppression of his informants. This difference is key in understanding the two men as individuals with two separate approaches to folklore.
Throughout the early years of his career, Alan struggled to come to terms with his identity as a folklorist while still working closely with his father. Being connected to a name like Lomax was both a blessing and a burden, allowing him entrance into the elite of folk work, while also generating deep-seated fears of feeling inferior to his father or that folk work was not his true calling. From childhood, Alan recalled experiencing “an oppressive sense of not living up to family expectations and standards” (Szwed 16).
Perhaps because he was recognized as the favorite from a young age, Alan felt a constant pressure from his father. It is unclear if this pressure was entirely real or if Alan imposed much of it on himself. On issues of race and politics, father and son most certainly disagreed. One such example followed a concert commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment – the federal outlaw of slavery. Alan became heavy-handed with the audience about his liberal feelings regarding race, which outraged
John. The elder Lomax declared that his son had “disgraced the South” by drawing attention to the racial inequalities which existed in the southern states (Szwed 171).
While their disagreements could occasionally become heated, they agreed fundamentally
35 on their shared vision as folklorists. John respected, trusted and loved his son for the work he did in folklore.
It appears that the same was true for Alan. In a 1940 article for The American
Girl, Alan described an abiding respect and love for his father:
My father, John Lomax, is what is called a “Folk Music Specialist,” a rather frightening title which masks a job that is pure adventure. He travels around the country in his car – it used to be an old jalopy until a year or so ago – looking for people who can sing folk tunes. When he finds them, he gets out his portable recording equipment from the back of the car, and makes records – we call it “cutting” records – which are sent to the music archives of the Library of Congress. For the government is eager to keep in permanent form the songs of its people (Lomax 49).
This quote reflects some of Alan’s characteristic romanticism, yet in this instance it is directed at his father. His work is “pure adventure,” and an invaluable service to the government and the people of this country. The article appeared in a publication for the
Girl Scouts, yet even in this basic and concrete description, Alan’s care and pride for his father show through. Their relationship may have been a complicated one, but ultimately each benefitted from the other’s influence. Even so, Alan felt unsure of his identity as a folklorist.
Despite spending much of his career working relentlessly, toiling long hours, and never letting his work too far from his mind, Alan struggled to feel confident in his direction:
What are my own purposes, then? What do I like? What do I think about? What do I want? Why am I born? What path shall my feet follow? All the paths that have opened up before me have been the paths of other people – my father, Dr. Spivacke, Charley Seeger. … It’s not that I don’t know where I stand in my own field of folklore. I stand very much alone, very much in my own place making my own direction, carving a new direction for others to
36 follow. But I am too uncertain of myself to feel strong in this (Szwed 216).
Alan located himself inside folklore, claiming it as his “own field,” while simultaneously doubting that he has any place there after following other men’s footsteps. He questions the very core of his work, wondering if his position in folk collection was really his choice and his passion, or rather something forced upon him. John and Alan often argued, and in at least one instance, in a letter to his brother, Alan voiced, “He makes me wish sometimes that I’d never gone into this folk-lore work” (Szwed 120). In this moment, it seems clear that Alan had a hard time separating his relationship with his father from his relationship with his work. He seems to blame his father for his own life choices, and also seems unable to see his work as ever entirely separate from his father’s influence.
However, there are clear moments in Alan’s early career where folklore captivated him, where he felt certain of his life’s path. He felt that “unless I meet folk- lore in terms of a living voice – on a record or in person – something which I can control,
I really have no interest in it (Szwed 215). He constantly came up with new projects, struggled to see his work through to completion, and focused almost entirely on music itself. If he was not on the road collecting, he was at the Library of Congress listening, transcribing, and combing through hundreds of recordings. His dedication to the music itself manifested in his concern for authentic, faithful depictions of the folk traditions he encountered.
Authenticity in Song
As a man at the heart of a movement to collect and preserve American cultural heritage, Alan was constantly confronted with challenges surrounding the authenticity and effectiveness of his work. In the 1930s, a time when popular recorded music, radio,
37 and access to traveling shows were expanding, the ideal of “isolated” folk music was becoming more remote. This growing infiltration of popular culture created a sense of urgency in documenting folk traditions and generated a unique atmosphere for that work.
However, Alan had mixed feelings towards the concept of authenticity. In many ways he agreed with older and more conventional collectors that true folk traditions were orally transmitted within a community and stemmed solely from that specific community’s heritage. Alan learned his early conceptions of authenticity from some of his first recording trips with his father to southern black prisons. “Our purpose was to find the
Negro who had had the least contact with jazz, the radio, and with the white man”
(Mullen 83). Isolated communities, by this conception of authenticity, were pure communities and the most valuable communities from folklorist’s perspective. While
Alan continued to work closely with his father, he maintained these conventional feelings about authentic and valuable folklore collection.
A 1934 recording trip the Lomaxes took to southern Louisiana to collect Cajun and creole music provides one example of this shared approach to authenticity. Upon their arrival, they encountered more popular styles than they had expected: “When the
Lomaxes heard these records coming out of the juke boxes and store radios of the area, they knew they would have to go to homes and worksites to find the older styles they were after” (Szwed 55). In this instance, Alan and John identified pop radio and records as a threat to the art they had come to collect. They were not interested in the growing and changing musical traditions, but rather the raw materials, the “older styles,” established folklorists were desired.
38 The impulse to collect from isolated, authentic communities stayed with Alan through the years. Before recording and ultimately writing a book about him, Alan felt some trepidation toward Jelly Roll Morton: “At that time, jazz was my worst enemy.
Through the forces of radio, it was wiping out the music that I care about – American traditional folk music” (Szwed 122). The omnipresence of popular recordings and styles, even in the 1930s, was seen as corrupting the purity and authenticity of folklore. Through this perspective, folklore was a stagnant, rigid entity, entirely vulnerable to the polluting influences of the outside world.
However as Alan continued to record, and as he began to recognize the cultural value of genres such as jazz, his feelings about folk music and authenticity shifted. While spending some time in New York City after his recording trip to Florida and the Bahamas in 1935, Alan experienced some hostility from the northern city folk: “Alan treated rebuffs he faced in the city much as he did those in Southern hamlets – as the mores of the folk, data to be observed and gathered by an anthropologist who understood cultural relativism” (Szwed 87). This is one example of Alan beginning to open his mind, recognizing that all local cultures and habits have value and can be evaluated in much the same ways. In a report submitted to the Library of Congress in 1938 regarding his recording trip to eastern Kentucky the previous year, Alan described folk music and traditions as somewhat more plastic and open to the influences of a changing world:
The tenacity of homemade music even in the mining area, however, is evidenced in three ways: in the use of traditional tunes by union-conscious mountaineers in the composition of strike songs and ballads, in the tremendous vogue of “hillbilly” and cowboy music and in the resurgence of songwriting in the Holiness and Gospel churches (Szwed 114).
39 In these three examples, folk music was being adopted and adapted for contemporary purposes, like union strike songs. Also folk music styles, such as hillbilly and cowboy songs, were appropriated into popularity, enjoying a vogue presumably outside the community initially responsible for these styles – an important consideration with respect to the songs collected on this trip, as explored in the following chapter.
Alan was doing his own recording and coming to his own conclusions about folk traditions in the late 1930s. For instance, in a late-1938 review of Folk Songs of
Mississippi and Their Backgrounds by the established folklorist and professor Alan
Palmer Hudson, Alan decried the absence of the “fiery Holiness minister and his guitar- picking wife, the Negro blues singer, that traveling band of ‘hill-billy’ musicians, the indigenous union organizer,’ the ‘mouths through which American folk song is growing’” (Szwed 117). In this review, Alan displayed his belief that folk traditions were living, breathing, evolving entities that had the resilience to survive the coming changes, even if the surviving versions were altered from some imagined “original.” Although somewhat removed from the original source, Kay Dealy Newman, a folk music enthusiast from Pennsylvania, recalled Alan saying, “Modern folksongs are as important as old ones. All folksongs should be sufficiently collected so they may be studied, and this race to collect special gems and then tie up the records, etc., is silly. We must show social conditions, not just songs” (Szwed 120). Alan spoke to his sense that folklore is very much alive, and in a way putting a song down on paper immobilizes a living thing.
This quote also emphasizes Alan’s own internal dialogue about the need to record and preserve folk music for posterity, and the challenge of maintaining the vitality of oral traditions.
40 A Folklorist in the Federal Government
Alan’s sense that folklore was more progressive than stagnant may have contributed to his understanding of folklore study as a whole. In a talk given to the
“Conference on the Character and State of Studies in Folklore” at Indiana University in
1942, Alan laid out his vision for the study of folklore: “Folklore, he said, should be understood as the ultimate interdisciplinary subject, one so complex that it required linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, musicians, and scholars of literature… Folklore was the product of both individual artists and the community within which they function”
(Szwed 191). As Alan claims in this speech, the study of folklore is a complicated thing.
No one discipline can fully approach the understanding of folk traditions, because folk traditions span every element of human culture. This explanation helps to understand why the Joint Committee on Folk Arts had five distinct branches, why multiple levels of the Library of Congress were involved in folk collection during the Great Depression, and why other government agencies like the Resettlement Administration engaged in folk work at this time.
On 26 December 1938, The New York Times announced the creation of the Joint
Committee on Folk Arts as a new section of the WPA. The committee functioned as “a collation of ‘all the oral, popular and traditional materials that express ways of living in our country’” (“Move to Explore Folkways of U.S.”) It coordinated materials from “the
Federal Writer’s Project, the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Music Project, the
Federal Art Project, the Historical Records Survey and the Recreation and Education divisions of the WPA” (“Move to Explore Folkways of U.S.”). In addition to organizing the various folk works of the disparate branches of the WPA arts projects, the Joint
41 Committee also generated a repository for American folk heritage: “The Archives of
American Folksong, in the Music Division of the Library of Congress, has offered its facilities to the committee so that materials can be classified, indexed and preserved”
(“Move to Explore Folkways of U.S.”). The committee was comprised of a series of prominent figures of the folklore world, including Ben Botkin, Harold Spivacke, chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and the young Assistant in Charge at the
Archive of American Folksong, Alan Lomax.
Alan had been affiliated with the Archive of American Folksong for many years, both in his own right and through his father. John and Alan’s recording trips in the early
1930s were grounds enough for the Library of Congress to offer John an official position.
This mutually beneficial relationship supplied John with recording equipment and credibility, and the Library with “the ideal individual to carry out this work, since conventional academic musicology seemed unwilling and was perhaps incapable of dealing with folk music” (Szwed 32). In the summer of 1933, John Lomax began working for the Library as “Honorary Conservator of our Archive of American
Folksong” (Szwed 51). While the position only paid one dollar a month, it gave both
John and Alan a connection to the prestigious institution and lead to a series of further opportunities. This position at the Library was the apex of John’s career. Yet for Alan it was only the beginning.
In 1936, Alan was given his first official position: “temporary assistant to the archive,” paying him thirty dollars a month for a collecting trip to the South with anthropologists Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle. In April 1937, John arranged for Alan to take on a more permanent role at the Archive, with a line added to
42 the Library of Congress’ budget. Alan became the “Assistant-in-Charge of the Archive of
American Folksong” (Szwed 104). This put him in direct contact with Harold Spivacke, and put him in place to become directly involved with the folk work under New Deal programs.
As government money became increasingly available through programs such as the WPA, folklorists and other creative individuals seized the opportunity to assert themselves and their work as American culture. In Alan’s opinion, even in the early years of the Great Depression, “American music was still not felt to be equal to European music. American painting was still not thought to be equal to European painting.
American writing… not yet equal to the European tradition. The developing concern about what our own American culture was actually like, about who we were as people peaked at this time. And the search for American folk roots was part of this” (Cohen 93).
This period, when jobs were scarce and national morale was so low, enabled the country to self-reflect and identify just what made America a great and unique nation. The Great
Depression, in Lomax’s mind, represented the moment when America stopped looking to
Europe for its cultural standards and began to recognize its own national identity. Again, in Lomax’s words: “Culturally, America had a whole 12 years to feel good about itself, to gather its strength, to become conscious of its power and potential” (Cohen 93). Alan centered himself at the heart of this cultural evolution.
Alan’s initial pull towards the WPA began towards the end of 1935, after he had returned to New York from his recording trip to Florida and the Bahamas. While in New
York he met Herbert Halpert, then collecting children’s rhymes on the Lower East Side for the Federal Writers’ Project. Alan became enamored with the idea of joining these
43 new federal programs and expanding his folk work to education, proposing a musicology class for WPA workers. In his excitement, Alan wrote his father: “You and I now have the chance to do something really big, something of lasting value in all sorts of ways both to ourselves, for this country and for folksongs. The money is crying to be spent. I would suggest that you come on to Washington so that we can march in on the WPA together next week” (Szwed 90). Alan’s enthusiasm for the possibilities of WPA work was palpable. Not only was this an incredible moment for American history and folklore, it also provided the funding of which both father and son were in such constant need.
Alan’s proposal to the WPA was denied, however, and he turned his attention instead to the Library of Congress’ efforts to supplement the folklore collection of the time. It was through that institution that Alan made his mark.
The government agencies involved in folklore collection encountered some significant challenges in their efforts to record America’s cultural heritage. As folk workers continued to amass material, it became clear that the goal of collecting folklore from every corner of the nation was simply too ambitious. This stemmed in part from the question of just who was worth recording. Questions of authenticity, urban versus rural collection, racial tensions and sheer logistical difficulties all complicated folk workers recording. In an attempt to simplify and streamline the process to achieve an effective and representative sample of American folk tunes, the Archive of American Folksong sent Alan to eastern Kentucky to create a model for other government folk workers. Yet the trip was anything but streamlined and efficient. Alan moved from county to county slowly, occasionally meeting hostility, often meeting reticence and confusion, and struggled throughout with equipment and financial troubles. In a letter to Alan, Spivacke
44 made the Library’s goals for the trip quite clear: “This trip is supposed to be the beginning of a nationwide survey. Please don’t prove such a survey impossible by your own actions. Your visit was also supposed to have a propagandistic value and bring in more material from others” (Szwed 113). While his work in Kentucky may not have been replicable on a national scale, Alan did manage a successful trip. He worked closely with local folk collectors already recording in Kentucky communities to generate a significant and representative collection. He amassed hundreds of recordings and identified the flourishing folk traditions in the mountainous and mining communities of eastern
Kentucky.
Alan’s personal perspective was a factor impacting the authenticity of his recordings in Kentucky and throughout his work as a folklorist. As a white American man from a privileged family and with years of higher education, Alan Lomax entered his work as a folklorist with a very influential lens. Where his father had believed in cultural evolution and the moral right of racial separation, Alan’s feelings were more complex. Alan was prone to speaking in romantic hyperbole. For example, Alan explained his perspective on black prisons: “In the burning hell of the penitentiaries the old comforting, healing, communal spirit of African singing cooled the souls of the toiling, sweating prisoners and made them, as long as the singing lasted, consolingly and powerfully one. This habit of group singing throughout all activities is the very core of
African tradition” (Mullen 86). Alan’s creative, emotive language demonstrates his sentiment toward his subjects. This feeling extended beyond race to any cause for oppression among his informants, be it poverty, labor strife, lack of education or
45 incarceration. Far from experiencing his informants as data points without feeling or soul,
Lomax felt a visceral connection to their use of music in the face of hardship.
His connection to his subjects often took the form of guilt. While Alan’s guilt at his freedom, his whiteness, his relative wealth and success may have come from a place of care, concern or respect for his informants, it nonetheless informed his perception of his subjects as somehow inferior. His guilt stemmed from the sense that he was better off than the poor, downtrodden, voiceless subjects he recorded. However he did not necessarily desire to elevate the downtrodden to something resembling his lot in life. He respected and deeply valued folk traditions, and in many ways recognized that the communities he recorded were often more culturally rich than he would ever be. Alan struggled throughout his career with his identity as an outsider. While he was such a passionate supporter of folk music and the musicians who made it, his position as an outsider in every community functioned as a barrier between his actual work and the work he wished he could do. In one example, “Alan wanted desperately for Lead Belly to be his friend, but Lead Belly always kept a certain distance. (Much to Alan’s distress,
Lead Belly called John ‘Big Boss’ and Alan ‘Little Boss’)” (Szwed 60). “Big Boss” suited John just fine, but Alan desired closeness, a friendship, and a trust that was unusual between a sixty-year-old black ex-con and a twenty-year-old white boy. Alan’s lens, like the lens through which all folklorists approach their work, impacted the authenticity and purity of the recordings he generated.
While Alan’s initial proposal to educate WPA workers about folklore collection was denied, he ultimately was able to reach and teach hundreds of thousands of
Americans about folklore through his radio program. The American School of the Air:
46 Wellsprings of Music was broadcast three times a week on CBS radio starting in August
1940 (Szwed 165). Alan hosted the show, and incorporated dialogue between such folk greats (and Lomax favorites) as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Burl Ives. Artists would also perform songs for the show, all circulating around different daily themes such as weather and travel. The show represented a joint effort with multiple government agencies, with Alan hosting from the Archive of American Folksong and Nick Ray from the Recreation Department of the WPA directing. Furthermore, the radio program was picked up by American public schools and incorporated into the curriculum. Before the show was suddenly cancelled in early 1941, it had reached millions of listeners nationwide (Szwed 167). From this moment forward, Alan Lomax was recognized as the voice of American Folklore.
Through the 1930s, Alan worked for the Library of Congress collecting folk music and helping to generate interest in folklore among the American people. His contributions at this time advanced the national effort to collect and preserve American folk traditions, and added richness to the growing awareness of American cultural value.
In the years between beginning work for the Archive of American Folksong and leaving in 1942, Alan made thousands of recordings, preserved thousands of voices, and visited dozens of different locations throughout the United States. His trip to eastern Kentucky in
1937, however, provided unique insight into Alan’s relationship with informants, his feelings towards authenticity in folk collection, and his keen ear for America’s most powerful music.
47 Chapter Three: Music of the Kentucky Highlands
Almost a year after his 1937 recording trip to Kentucky, Alan sent informant Lize
Pace a letter. In it, he told her that his wife “Elizabeth and I think about you often and whenever we can, we play over your records and look at the little movie we made of you and your house. We both agree that you are the grandest old lady we ever met and wish there was something that we could do for you” (Letter from Alan Lomax to Liza Pace,
July 1, 1938). He concludes the letter with “Give our best regards to your daughter and remember that we both love you very much” (Letter from Alan Lomax to Liza Pace, July
1, 1938). While Alan clearly wants to maintain a close relationship with Pace, this letter seems to traverse the boundary between folklorist and informant. Alan speaks to Pace as if he were her son, thinking of his mother often, going over shared memories, and sending her love from himself and his wife. In Pace’s response, penned by her daughter
Bettie Lewis because “she has been sick [in] this hot weather and can’t write,” Pace asks the Lomaxes to send her money. A window into Pace’s character, Bettie includes, “I did not want to write about money but she was standing over me and made me” (Letter from
Liza Pace to Alan and Elizabeth Lomax, July 10, 1938). While she may have been too feeble to write, Pace had enough spunk to stand over her daughter and make her ask the
Lomaxes for money. Although Alan and Elizabeth Lomax were especially strapped for cash, they sent along “a small token of our affection which is all we can afford at the moment,” an enclosure of two dollars (Letter from Alan and Elizabeth Lomax to Liza
Pace, July 18, 1938).
This interaction can be read in many ways. It is entirely likely that Pace was indeed sick and in need of assistance, and in writing her a letter, Alan reminded Pace of
48 their friendship and his potential ability to support her. It seems possible, however, that
Pace capitalized on Alan’s bleeding heart tendencies. While it is clear she was old, there is never a suggestion that she was sickly or frail. She seems strong enough to manipulate her daughter writing the letter, and sharp enough to remember Lomax and his wife.
Alan’s gift also speaks to his desire to connect to folk artists. Pace was not his relation, and he spent only a few days with her recording. Yet Lomax felt compelled to send some of his meager funds in order to maintain a relationship with a person he had deemed a national treasure. Each of his informants helped him create his own understanding of
America’s folk heritage, and characters like Lize Pace played an enormous role in this creation. In a way, then, sending Pace money had a positive impact for both parties: Pace received a few extra dollars, and Lomax enabled himself to feel a part of the American folk family.
But who was Lize Pace? How had the Lomaxes grown so fond of this hill-country woman? In the fall of 1937, Alan Lomax and his young wife embarked on a Library of
Congress recording trip to the heart of southern Appalachia. The songs and stories they collected there helped to preserve and promote an image of the American folk that persists to this day, from fiddlers and banjos to tales of ramblers, lust and loss. Some songs have entered the American musical vernacular, while others have faded from memory. Lize Pace and her music are far from well known. Her story and her songs have almost been lost to the pages of history. Yet her connection to Alan Lomax illuminates a moment in the tapestry of American culture. Alan Lomax believed in the power and importance of the folk. His Depression-era work in eastern Kentucky helped the
American people begin to share that belief.
49
Lomax in Kentucky
Alan had just begun his career. At twenty-one years old and on the Library of
Congress’ dime, he completed a recording trip to Haiti in the winter of 1936. While there, he married his wife Elizabeth, and received word that the Library was appointing him to a more permanent position. As Assistant in Charge of the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress, his duties were manifold. He wrote articles, delivered lectures and performances, gave interviews, and began “plans to collect folklore in every state in the country” (Szwed 104). These plans would have sent library-employed folklorists to states around the nation to do surveys of local folklore, much like the state guidebook project of the Federal Writers’ Project. Lomax looked initially to Michigan, where he planned to gather songs from miners, sailors and lumberjacks (Szwed 104). Soon, however, it became clear that a national survey of this scope was wholly unfeasible.
Instead, Lomax endeavored to generate a representative sample of American folklore by identifying cultural pockets that could speak for an entire region. In his words, this work
“should add another colorful panel to the mosaic of American oral literature and music that the Archive is occupied in piecing together” (Cohen 43). The first piece of this mosaic took Lomax to eastern Kentucky.
There was a confluence of indicators pointing Lomax and the Library to eastern
Kentucky. Firstly, Lomax had been interested in a trip to the South. While he had only recently returned from his journey to Haiti, he had “already done considerable reading about Kentucky and [had] looked into collections of songs that [had] been made there”
(Cohen 43). These collections proved inadequate, as the Archive of American Folksong
50 had only twenty-two recordings from the state (Szwed 111). Furthermore, the archive had received requests from Kentucky collectors for support in their recording efforts in that part of the nation. Both local interest and archival needs supported the Library’s decision to send Lomax to Kentucky first. And, from Alan’s perspective, eastern Kentucky was facing a critical moment in the trajectory of their folk traditions:
Throughout most of this region, especially in the coal-mining counties, the tradition of ballad singing and that which is associated with it – the dulcimer, the five string banjo, the fiddle, the country dance, the play party, the traditional airs and the oral memory – seem to be in process of rapid degeneration or of transformation. Commercial music via the radio, the movies, and the slot phonograph is usurping the place of traditional and homemade music, but that their case is not entirely hopeless I shall have occasion to point out later on (Cohen 48).
Modern technologies were infiltrating folk traditions, but all was not lost. Lomax saw himself capable of salvaging the stories, dances, and songs of this region through his recordings. “At the very least we shall give certain melodies and tales, that Kentucky mountaineers have already chosen as worthy and beautiful, more rich years to live”
(Cohen 43). Lomax desired to capture a moment in Kentucky folk history. The songs that had survived the influx of technological advances had already been chosen as worthy to remember by the people of the Kentucky highlands. Lomax deemed them worthy to record. On 3 September 1937, Alan and his wife Elizabeth set out on a two-month recording trip to the hills of eastern Kentucky.
Lomax discovered a series of unexpected challenges upon his arrival in the South.
One that persisted throughout his trip was the question of finances and supplies. Likely due to some youthful impulsivity, Alan had announced his trip to Harold Spivacke, the director of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, only two weeks before his
51 proposed start date. On such short notice, it seems that the Library struggled to keep pace with Alan’s needs throughout his trip. In his letters, he writes almost daily asking for more batteries and parts for his recording machine, more needles and discs to cut recordings, and more money for daily expenses, hotel bills and car repairs. The car, an old Studebaker, also posed problems. Unpaved and poorly maintained roads made travel difficult between counties, and remote recording locations were also hard on his vehicle and recording equipment.
Lomax ran into certain social mores that made eastern Kentucky an especially difficult location for folk recording: “The trouble is in covering this sort of country that one has to make friends of the people everywhere one goes and that takes time. They simply won’t sing for you until they feel that you are friendly or that you are friends of friends of theirs” (Cohen 54). Drawing unique and genuine folk material out of this reserved culture slowed Alan’s progress and resulted in fewer recordings than he had originally anticipated. Even with these setbacks, Alan and Elizabeth were able to gather
“a good representative picture of folk-singing in this state” (Cohen 54). This picture included some recordings that would go on to impact the future of American music.
Alan Lomax recorded the folk music of eastern Kentucky during the Great
Depression in an effort to combat the homogenizing influences of mass culture that were rapidly infiltrating traditional American life. As the government brought electricity to the
South with agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority, it simultaneously sent folk workers like Lomax to preserve the culture it was actively extinguishing. Lomax looked to the mountains of Kentucky as a wellspring of folk tradition, due to their relative isolation and deep cultural roots. “The mountains have always been poor but, so long as
52 that poverty also meant comparative isolation, the tradition of homemade music could survive more or less unchanged” (Cohen 48). Three recordings from Lomax’s trip to
Kentucky demonstrate the relevance of his work during the Great Depression. “The
House of the Rising Sun” by Georgia Turner, “Bonaparte’s Retreat” by W. H. Stepp, and
“The Mermaid” by Lize Pace represent three lines in Southern folk tradition that Lomax attempted to preserve for and present to the American people as national cultural heritage.
“The House of the Rising Sun – Rising Sun Blues” Georgia Turner
Example 1. “House of the Rising Sun – Rising Sun Blues.” Reprinted from Our Singing Country: A Second Volume of American Ballads and Folk Songs, John and Alan Lomax.
53
On 15 September 1937, a group gathered on a neighbor’s porch in Noetown to meet the man from the Library of Congress and sing into his machine. Among those present were Mary Gill Turner and her young daughter Georgia. All those who had a song to share made recordings for Lomax, including Mary Gill who sang a few tunes.
After her mother’s turn, Georgia began her session with “Married Life Blues,” accompanied by a friend on harmonica. After this higher pitched number, Georgia lowered her voice and growled out “The House of the Rising Sun” in a blues scale.
Weeks later on his recording trip, Lomax encountered the song again. A man named Bert
Martin from Horse Creek, a settlement north of Middlesboro, sang the tune this time.
Some of the verses from his version would be incorporated into the Lomax’s published edition (Anthony 54). While the song was present in various individuals throughout the
South, it was Turner’s rendition that received the most praise. Ultimately it was her version, her lyrics and her inflection that sparked the future of “The House of the Rising
Sun.”
Georgia Turner was known in Noetown for her voice. Her mother, Mary Mast
“Gill” Turner was a singer as well, but where Mary Gill sang religious songs, Georgia ventured into more secular repertoire. Sixteen years old at the time of the Library of
Congress recording, the blonde-haired miner’s daughter sounds far beyond her years singing “The House of the Rising Sun.” Yet another unanswered question in the history of this recording is just how a young white woman learned the song and became known in her community for singing it. On the dust sleeve of the recording, Alan Lomax provided one possible hint. Highlighting the two songs the younger Turner sang that day,
Lomax made the note: “Both from records” (Dust jacket to disc AFS 1404, Georgia
54 Turner singing "Rising Sun Blues"). While it is unclear exactly what he meant, Lomax’s comment seems to connect to his concern about the infiltration of new technologies into the area. “Traditional material … has been ousted by the influx of records and radios, the ballad singer and the fiddler have been driven out by … the ‘hill billy’ singer who copies the broadcaster slavishly” (Anthony 53). It is entirely possible that at some point Turner heard one of the earlier recordings of “The House of the Rising Sun,” for by 1937 the song had already been recorded commercially by two other performers (Anthony).
However, Lomax also acknowledged Turner’s version of “The House of the Rising Sun” as unique in its bluesy quality. Again, Turner’s rendition inhabits two spaces: the old world of folk music traditions and burgeoning frontier of music technology.
“The House of the Rising Sun” is a mysterious song. Lyrically it is rich with ambiguity, elusive characters, and a haunting sense of displacement. While the lyrics have a clear destination, it is less clear where the story takes place. The narrator ultimately ends up in New Orleans, but where did he or she come from? Who gets left behind? Why did the narrator leave home initially? These questions are left unanswered, allowing listeners to imagine their own narrative.
The nature and history of the tune are elusive in much the same way. Turner’s recording has a blues-like sensibility, in the songs blues scale and Turner’s vocal inflection of subtle scoops and warbles. In many instances the tune has been published as
“The Rising Sun Blues.” In the tune’s introductory paragraph in Our Singing Country, the Lomaxes surmised, “The fact that a few of the hot jazzmen who were in business before the war have a distant singing acquaintance with this song indicates that it is fairly old as blues tunes go” (Lomax 368). However, the Lomaxes go on to say “we have heard
55 it sung only by southern whites” (Lomax 368). “Rising Sun Blues” was a popular title for early blues recordings by black artists, yet beyond their titles, these pieces have no musical or lyrical connection to “The House of the Rising Sun” as sung by Georgia
Turner (Anthony 23). Complicating the question further, there are examples of “‘The
Rising Sun’ as a whorehouse, in England, entirely separated from its American context”
(Anthony 26). While verses and lines change from singer to singer, the image of the
“House of the Rising Sun” as a “bawdy house” remains constant across versions (Lomax
368). The ballad form of the tune is another distinctly English characteristic. The diverse elements of the song suggest the influence of both African American blues and British ballad traditions on “The House of the Rising Sun.”
These influences give a window into the way of life for the people of
Middlesboro, Kentucky in 1937. Middlesboro was a small town nestled in the southeast corner of Kentucky. During the Depression the area enjoyed a boom due to incoming train traffic and mining. This boom resulted in prostitution, gambling and drinking, and railroad traffic welcomed many ramblers and transients. The influx likely included all sorts of individuals of all walks of life, including African Americans. Noetown, a small community along the tracks on the outskirts of Middlesboro, was home to many miners and their families who had come from rural areas to find work. One such family was the
Turners (Anthony 52).
Georgia Turner’s 1937 recording shows the roots of the tune that has become so familiar to American ears. The melody stays inside a small vocal range, usually within a single octave, making the tune comfortable for a singer even through multiple verses. The melody line follows a rolling, loping arc, moving slowly through predictable notes
56 without significant embellishment. There is an almost locomotive-like sensibility in
Turner’s rendition, as the song moves gradually but constantly, cycling forward through high notes and low like wheels on a track. The bare bones of Turner’s performance lend themselves to further verses, vocal embellishment, and accompaniment. The simplicity and consistency of the melody line creates a musical environment in which the emphasis is placed more on the words than on the notes themselves (see Example 1).
“The House of the Rising Sun” has a series of lyrical markers that make the song identifiably American. Firstly and most obviously, the setting in a distinctive American city like New Orleans centers the story and provides the listener with a very specific context. Furthermore, “The House of the Rising Sun” tells a familiar American narrative.
A small town innocent ventures into the big city only to be ruined by the pernicious influences of city life. While this narrative is familiar, there are elements that challenge what listeners might expect from a song with these themes. After a verse of warning for her sister, a verse of longing for her mother, and a verse of shame about drunken New
Orleans sweetheart, the narrator goes against the expected and returns to the vices of the city. This is not a tale of redemption, but one of conscious and willing sin. In 1937, less than a decade after the height of the Klan in the South and their efforts to reform and purify, a young girl in Kentucky sang a song of sin for the Library of Congress. The rebellious and mysterious tone of “The House of the Rising Sun” might be its most
American feature.
Lomax’s decision to record the tune, and to include this version in two different publications, speaks to his vision of Appalachian folk culture. The song, and its singer, are removed from urban life, connected to a transient tradition, and speak to a rough
57 underbelly of American society. Georgia Turner is almost a domestic immigrant, moving with her impoverished family out of the countryside and into a growing city in search of a livelihood. It is a familiar narrative from the 1930s, and one that folk workers during the
Depression actively cultivated. By capturing these people’s music, Lomax preserved the image of the rural white Southerner as one of the pillars of our national folk identity.
This image was further propagated by the enormous commercial success of “The
House of the Rising Sun,” recorded and performed by British pop group The Animals in
1964. In the years following Georgia Turner’s version, Woody Guthrie recorded “The
House of the Rising Sun” “pulled straight from Our Singing Country” (Anthony 135).
This version would directly impact folk revival artists of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, namely Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan recorded the song on his self-titled first album in 1961, and sparked an international reawakening of the tune. Eric Burdon, lead singer from The
Animals, heard the song performed by folk artists in his native Newcastle. “He wondered where it came from; he figured it was probably from the American black blues tradition, though [some] used to say the song went back all the way to Elizabethan England”
(Anthony 143). The song would become the band’s signature tune, playing into the 1960s demand for a marriage between the contemporary and the authentic. In many eyes, The
Animal’s version is the iconic recording of “The House of the Rising Sun.” Their pop hit would immortalize Georgia Turner’s sound in American ears, even if her story has been all but lost.
58 “Bonaparte’s Retreat” W.H. Stepp
Example 2. “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” Reprinted from Our Singing Country: A Second Volume of American Ballads and Folk Songs, John and Alan Lomax.
America loves an underdog. From our mythic infatuation with the confederate
South to our undying commitment to the “little guy,” there is a distinctly American desire to identify with the long shot. Perhaps this impulse helps to explain part of the history of the song “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” Napoleon Bonaparte’s greatest historical association with
59 the United States was the Louisiana Purchase. However, a well-known American fiddle tune is sometimes referred to as “Bonaparte’s Retreat across the Rocky Mountains.” In an anecdote from Allen Eaton’s book Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, one fiddler put it this way: “Now I want to play you my favorite; I calls it Napoleon Crossing the
Rockies. Some folks say Napoleon never crossed the Rockies, that it was the Alps, but historians differ on that point” (Letter from Allen Eaton to Alan Lomax, Dec. 15, 1939).
The true stories, of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and his defeat at Waterloo, gave
American audiences the sort of underdog story they craved.
The tune began its life as military music. In Samuel Bayard’s recording for his
1944 book Hill County Tunes, a western Pennsylvanian fiddler “learned the tune from a civil war fifer who ‘played it as a retreat in Civil War days’” (Wade 355). Bayard’s research also connected the tune to traditional Irish folk melodies including “The Eagle’s
Whistle” and “The Old Man and Old Woman Quarrelin.” In both examples, the important connection is drawn through the use of a drone note to accompany the melody line (Wade
355).
Prior recordings of the tune existed before Lomax recorded W.H. Stepp in 1937.
The first recording, by A.A. Gray in 1924, was a slower, almost classical rendition of the piece. Other groups and individuals also recorded and performed the tune. In fact, Lomax recorded other performers playing the tune on his Kentucky trip. W.H. Stepp’s contribution, however, was a change in tempo. Where other performers had taken the tune as a march, Stepp played a hoedown (Wade 356). It was at this tempo that
“Bonaparte’s Retreat” would be immortalized.
60 In 1940, Alan Lomax commissioned Aaron Copland to write a version of “John
Henry” for his American School of the Air radio program (Pollack 334). Perhaps because of this interaction, Copland was familiar with Lomax’s work and recognized his publications as an excellent resource for American folk materials. In 1942, then, when
Agnes De Mille commissioned him to score her patriotic ballet Rodeo, Copland looked first to Our Singing Country. De Mille had outlined “various moods and techniques, including ‘fiddle-tune hit hard’” in her vision for the music (Pollack 371). “Bonaparte’s
Retreat” fit that description perfectly. Copland’s “Rodeo – Hoedown” has become the most famous tune from the ballet, and is recognized as one of the American melodies. It has been used in state tourism campaigns, commercials for American beef, and even as airport music (Wade 25). Like “The House of the Rising Sun,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat” has gone on to influence American music far beyond the hills of eastern Kentucky. The song’s impact is Fiddler Bill Stepp’s legacy.
Bill Stepp was born into a hard life. His mother, a Nottaway Indian, lived on the outskirts of society, working intermittently as a prostitute and living for extended periods of time in a cave away from town. Bill’s father was a judge in Beattyville, Kentucky, yet never married his mother or acknowledged Bill as his son. At the age of five, Bill was taken from his mother’s custody and put into the foster care of a local family. They treated Bill fairly, and it was in this house that Bill began fiddling. He played the fiddle throughout his life, but supplemented his work as a musician with logging and odd jobs.
He married many times, had twelve children, and was known for his “high style, his appealing flamboyance” (Wade 29). He was something of a rambler, yet he was always a musician.
61 On 25 October 1937 during the last week of his Kentucky trip, Alan recorded Bill
Stepp playing “Bonaparte’s Retreat” in Salyersville, Kentucky. There is not much information available about the recording itself, how Lomax became acquainted with
Stepp, or what Lomax’s stop in Salyersville was like. However, it is clear that Stepp was a very well known musician in that region of Kentucky, and that if Lomax had come looking for players, he most certainly would have been pointed to Stepp. Stepp’s playing was remembered in this way: “Bill Stepp hit it at a dog race. I mean he moved along. He fiddled like he meant it” (Wade 34). That energy, that drive, is apparent in his recording of “Bonaparte’s Retreat”
The tune is a reel, played in duple meter with a rapid tempo and a consistent beat.
These elements directly connect to Irish fiddle traditions, and demonstrate the ties between the Kentucky mountain communities and their immigrant heritage. The form of the tune is as follows:
A A B B A A B B A A C C’
This figure repeats, so that the song is made up of six refrains and two A sections as the final tag. The A section opens with a compelling rhythm, harmonic melody, and higher pitches. The listener is drawn in as the line descends into measures two and three of the A section, and then again as the melody rises for the A section repeat. The lower second half of the A section is accompanied by a deeper droned note. This drone continues into the B section, which hovers in a more contained and lower register. The B section has a driving quality, with an almost agitated rolling movement as opposed to the even descending line of the A section. This movement is visible in measures five and seven.
After a repeat of this pattern and another pair of As, the tune moves into the C section.
62 This is the climactic moment of the tune, reaching the highest pitches while maintaining the fierce directionality of the B section. The C section mirrors the B, except the C is an octave up. C’, which begins at measure twenty, is almost the exact same figure as the rest of the C section, except the opening note is one whole step higher. The tune ends with two final A sections, as a return from the more frantic B and C sections to the more consistent descending line of the A (see Example 2).
Stepp’s 1937 recording is an example of the humanity present field recordings.
Stepp begins slowly, playing the first two A sections with caution, sure to hit every note.
By the B section of the first refrain, the tempo has already begun to pick up. By the final
A before the tag, Stepp is playing so fast that the notes are almost indiscernible. It is as if
Stepp took the first few measures to test his memory, and soon realized he could play the notes with confidence. However, his daughter remembered him playing the tune “always last,” as a grand finale for each performance (Wade 30). Rather than remembering the tune, perhaps Stepp enters slowly for effect. He builds the tune up as he moves along, so that the final lines are triumphant and dizzying.
Stepp slurs and blends notes, adding to the sense of insistency and driving motion in the tune. At the start of the second refrain, Stepp alerts Lomax “Now this Mr.
Bonyparte.” A beat later, “That’s the Bonyparte.” Following this announcement there is some inaudible murmuring, and then a distinct chuckle. Stepp’s emphasis in the word
“Bonyparte” suggests some word play. Rather than saying “Bonaparte,” Stepp implies he is playing the “boney part” of the tune. This could mean any number of things; the first that comes to mind is a rhythmic quality that might sound similar to the bones percussion instrument. Whatever Stepp’s intention, this is a wonderful moment in which the scene of
63 two men sitting around bulky recording equipment in the cool Kentucky October air comes vividly to life. This is no concert hall, but a porch or a living room or a back yard.
In these moments that might be considered imperfections, listeners are able to gain access to Stepp’s identity, his connection to his tune, and his performance for Lomax.
“Bonaparte’s Retreat” is one example of the kind of music Lomax sought to preserve as American cultural heritage. The fiddle tune has strong roots in a European folk past, yet it is also connected to great moments in American history like the Civil
War. It tells a distinctively American narrative, the underdog story, through music. And it is performed by an artist who symbolizes one aspect of the Kentucky mountain culture.
Bill Stepp lived a hard life, yet his music functions as an indelible legacy on the landscape of American music.
“The Mermaid” Lize Pace. Hyden, Kentucky, September 28th, 1937
64
Example 3. “The Mermaid.” Reprinted from Our Singing Country: A Second Volume of American Ballads and Folk Songs, John and Alan Lomax.
Lize Pace held a special place in Alan and Elizabeth Lomax’s hearts. Describing her in Our Singing Country, Alan states: “Aunt Lize Pace, eighty years odd, is the wittiest and gayest lady in Leslie County, KY” (Lomax 151). Lomax adopts an affectionate and familial name for Pace in calling her “Aunt” and depicts her character for his readers as a truly delightful one. In letters back to his boss Harold Spivacke, Alan describes Pace in this way:
“For the past two days I have been recording the songs of an 87 year old woman who sang for Sharpe when he visited this country. I have made movies of her singing and numerous records of her rather remarkable ballad performances and I believe she can typify
65 one of the many colorful characters in the story of folk-song here and in England. For years she has been the gay lady and sometimes the bootlegger of Hyden and at the same time she has been the best ballad singer in the region” (Cohen 53).
Alan clearly liked this image of Lize Pace. She was elderly, but she had a gritty, nefarious past that played to the stereotypes of southern hill people. She was a treasure trove of musical knowledge, yet she was hardened after a long life of rough living. To
Alan, Lize Pace was a perfect fit for one of the many “colorful characters” he was collecting on his trip. He wasn’t just searching Kentucky for songs; he was searching for his own representation of the American folk.
On 28 September 1937, Lize Pace sang “The Mermaid” for Elizabeth Lomax at her home in Hyden, Kentucky. This was not Pace’s first interaction with a folk song collector. In 1917, she sang songs for the British ballad collector Cecil Sharpe on his second collecting trip to the United States. She remembered “years ago when that funny old Englishman come over the mountains and wrote down these old love songs I know, I could sing like a mockingbird, and wasn’t no step I couldn’t put my foot to in a dance”
(Lomax 151). In 1937, Pace was well into her eighties and living off her “old-age money” in a log cabin with her daughter. When the Lomaxes arrived, Pace offered to sing
“some of the good songs I forgot to sing fer that English feller … that come over the mountain years ago” (Wade 273). One of these songs was “The Mermaid.”
“The Mermaid” is one of the classic Child Ballads from the English folk tradition.
It tells the story of a ship doomed after a mermaid crosses its path. As one of the Child
Ballads, the song has a rich history stretching back many years. Yet it seems that Pace’s version is unique on American soil. In Bertrand Harris Bronson’s collection The
Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads with their Texts According to Extant Records of
66 Great Britain and America, forty-two different versions of “The Mermaid” are presented.
All forty-two of these share certain characteristics. All, including Pace’s, describe a shipwreck. All, including Pace’s, mention the ship’s captain. Most, unlike Pace’s, have a repeated chorus or refrain, many make little to no mention of the actual mermaid, and most are performed at an upbeat tempo. While Pace’s rendition shares some characteristics, she sings the song in her own way. The tempo of the tune is slow and mournful, suggesting the tragedy of the shipwreck rather than the more humorous quality of some other renditions. Pace spends a full two and a half verses focusing on the vision of the mermaid, what she looks like, what she sounds like, and what she is doing. While some other versions mention a comb or other object in the mermaid’s hands, none spend the same time or detail that Pace dedicates.
In most other versions, a series of crewmembers come forward in different verses to lament what they will lose as they die with the ship. Pace’s version suggests that these verses may have been present at some point, for the only verse similar to these in Pace’s version is the fourth. The lyric states, “At last come down the captain of our ship.”
Perhaps “at last” in this context references the previous verses about other crewmembers in distress. While Pace may have forgotten some elements of the song in her old age, it is also entirely possible that her unique version is the way she had known the song her entire life.
While less known about “The Mermaid” than “The House of the Rising Sun,” the tune follows the same ballad form in which the melody is repeated over multiple verses, as is made clear in Example 3. Both “The House of the Rising Sun” and “The Mermaid” follow a simple melodic line, however where the melody of “The House of the Rising
67 Sun” cycled in its movement like wheels on a track, “The Mermaid” seems to ebb and flow like waves on the sea. Pace adds some rhythmic embellishments, speeding up and slowing down along with the text of the song. These changes create a more unstable quality, like the changing movements of the ocean. Pace also uses these moments of embellishment to draw attention to important images in the text.
One example comes in the first instance of the word “mermaid,” when Pace accelerates her tempo on the ascending melody line, falling finally on the highest note at
“mermaid.” This word is emphasized again in the third verse, as the highest melodic point in the opening line. While Pace’s jump from one word to the next feels jerky and abrupt at this point, her vocal movement seems to suggest the fate about to befall the doomed ship and its crew. The final line of the third verse, “We’ll never see the land anymore,” has a slightly different rhythm, one that might even allude to Chopin’s Funeral
March. While we cannot be sure Pace was quoting that piece, the foreboding and sorrowful quality is most certainly present.
“The Mermaid” is another wonderful example of the idiosyncrasies of field recordings. Lize Pace is audibly an elderly woman, and the listener can detect her attempt to access a youthful vocal dexterity she no longer possesses. She too interjects her own commentary like Stepp, echoing the second verse’s last line, “Her voice like a nightingale’s air,” with the words “the nightingale” spoken softly. While at other points
Pace emphasizes words with melodic and rhythmic changes, in this instance she uses spoken words to draw attention to an important element from the text. After the second line of the fifth verse, a dog barks audibly, if distantly, on the recording. Pace takes a pronounced pause after the bark, leaving the listener to wonder just what the scene was
68 like as Pace sang her tune. Did Pace pause to quiet the dog, or to glance up at the disturbance, or did the barking simply distract her memory from the following lyrics?
These moments of ambiguity are lost in studio recordings or concert halls. Where “The
House of the Rising Sun” is made up of indelible American markers, “The Mermaid” is more obscure. The song is connected to the Child Ballad tradition, and therefore demonstrates the legacy of the British Isles in the Kentucky highlands.
There are many questions left unanswered in attempting to understand these songs. Because Lomax’s goal was to add music to the mosaic of American culture, he rarely recorded significant information about informants, circumstances of performances, or the history of the songs themselves. While some of the songs have gone on to become culturally significant, like “The House of the Rising Sun” and “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” many others like “The Mermaid” have all but disappeared from the American memory. It is impossible to know how Georgia Turner came to know that song, or why Bill Stepp played a hoedown rather than a march, or why Lize Pace sang her song so mournfully.
What is clear, however, is how these artists and their music inform our understanding of
American cultural heritage. Images of the struggles of the Great Depression throughout the nation have entered the American consciousness. Characters like the miner’s daughter, the wandering musician, and the elderly source of cultural memory have all become a part of the American historical vernacular. The music Lomax recorded in eastern Kentucky played a role in the preservation and creation of these images, by giving voice to the endangered traditions of the Southern Appalachians.
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Conclusion
At a summer camp in Vermont, young girls and boys sit around a campfire singing “The Mermaid.” They know nothing of the song’s history, or of Lize Pace’s
Library of Congress recording. Their version is upbeat, humorous and rowdy. Within the camp context, the song has taken on certain additions. After verses, the campers insert hoots and hollers, repeat words and incorporate hand motions. I grew up singing “The
Mermaid” during my youth at camp. My father grew up singing the song during his time at camp in the 1970s. Over the course of multiple generations, the song has continued to survive in this active, isolated community. It exists separately from its history, but simply as a source of entertainment and connection for the camp community. While songs like
“The House of the Rising Sun” and “Bonaparte’s Retreat” went on to play a prominent, visible role in the arc of American music, “The Mermaid” lives on in a twenty-first century folk culture. Folk artists, like Lize Pace, are an essential thread through the past, present, and future of the fabric of American life.
At the conclusion of this thesis, however, there are still many tensions left unresolved and many potential areas of further study. As is the way with folk work, there is always more to the story. These individuals and their traditions recorded during the
Great Depression were captured in one moment in time. Just who they were and what sort of lives they lead before and after the New Deal recordings are challenging questions to answer. Furthermore, the bureaucratic nature of WPA folk collection makes the history of
Depression era folk workers and their informants still more hazy. It is also difficult to know the success of the government’s efforts to bring American folklore to the masses.
70 While collection projects were deemed a success, it is less clear how Americans actually interacted with the folklore that was recorded. Twenty years after the Great Depression, folklife took center stage with the folk revival movement, but in what ways did America access folklore in those intermittent years? Were the efforts of the federal government enough to convince the American people of folklore’s value and relevance?
Issues that arose during New Deal folk collection efforts continue to pose challenges today. As Alan Lomax encountered, there is an inherent contradiction in recording folklore. If a folk tradition is a living, changing entity, recording it in any way immobilizes its trajectory. Could, or should, folk traditions be continually reassessed?
Year after year, changes occur. Is it possible to acknowledge and track those changes over time? Folklorists continue to enter communities of which they are not a part. The contention between insiders and outsiders based on privilege still impedes the success of faithful, unbiased depictions and recordings. Folk work is intrinsically complicated.
Innumerable factors impact the results of any given recording. Despite these challenges, the efforts made by folk workers in the 1930s helped to shape our unique American cultural identity.
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Bibliography
Anthony, Ted. Chasing the Rising Sun: the Journey of an American Song. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Print.
Botkin, B. A. “WPA and Folklore Research: Bread and Song.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 3.1 (1939): 7-14. Microform.
Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, Volume IV. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972. Print.
Cohen, Ronald D. ed. Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934-1997. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Cohen, Ronald D. ed. Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935-1945. Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2011. Print.
Dicaire, David. The Early Years of Folk Music: 50 Founders of the Tradition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2010. Print.
Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Print.
Lomax, Alan. Folk Song Style and Culture. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1968. Print.
Lomax, John Avery. Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Print.
Lomax, John and Alan. Our Singing Country: A Second Volume of American Ballads and Folk Songs. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1941. Print.
Lornell, Kip. Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Print.
Mangione, Jerre. The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935-1943. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Print.
McDonald, William F. Federal Relief Administration and the Arts. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1969. Print.
Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State. Compiled and Written by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration. New York: Viking Press, 1938. Print.
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Mullen, Patrick. The Man Who Adores the Negro: Race and American Folklore. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Print.
Nebraska: A Guide to the Corn Husker State. Compiled and Written by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of Nebraska. New York: Viking Press, 1939. Print
Piazza, Tom. The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax: Words, Photographs and Music. Washington DC: The Library of Congress, 2013. Print.
Titon, Jeff Todd. Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes. Lexington, KY: Kentucky UP, 2001. Print.
Szwed, John. Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking, 2010. Print.
Vermont: A Guide to the Green Mountain State. Written by Workers of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of Vermont. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937. Print.
Wade, Stephen. The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience.
Wade, Stephen. “The Route of ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat’: from ‘Fiddler Bill’ Stepp to Aaron Copeland.” American Music 18.4 (2000): 343-369. Web.
Archival Sources
Dust jacket to disc AFS 1404, Georgia Turner singing "Rising Sun Blues." Archive of Folk Song Audio Disc Sleeves (AFC 9999/008 ct1220), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Print.
Letter from Alan Lomax to Liza Pace, July 1, 1938. "Pace, Liza" correspondence file. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Print.
Letter from Liza Pace to Alan and Elizabeth Lomax, July 10, 1938. "Pace, Liza" correspondence file. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Print.
Letter from Alan and Elizabeth Lomax to Liza Pace, July 18, 1938. "Pace, Liza" correspondence file. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Print.
Letter from Alan Lomax to Alan Eaton, Dec. 9, 1939. "Bonaparte's Retreat" subject file. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Print.
Letter from Allen Eaton to Alan Lomax, Dec. 15, 1939. "Bonaparte's Retreat" subject file.
73 American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Print.
Letter from Alan Lomax to Allen Eaton, Dec. 18, 1939. "Bonaparte's Retreat" subject file. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Print.
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