"Our Singing Country": John and Alan Lomax, Leadbelly, and the Construction of an American Past

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"Our Singing Country": John and Alan Lomax, Leadbelly, and the Construction of an American Past Benjamin Filene American Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4. (Dec., 1991), pp. 602-624. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0678%28199112%2943%3A4%3C602%3A%22SCJAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F American Quarterly is currently published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/jhup.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Wed Sep 19 14:38:20 2007 "Our Singing Country ": John and Alan Lomax, Leadbelly, and the Construction of an American Past BENJAMIN FILENE Yale University IN THE EARLY 1930~,JOHN A. LOMAXLOST HIS BANK JOB TO THE depression and his wife to illness. Needing to make a fresh start, Lomax returned to the vocation he truly loved, collecting American folk songs. In 1933 he persuaded the Macmillan publishing company to contract for a book of songs, lined up charitable foundations to support a collecting expedition, and enlisted the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song to provide recording equipment and to be the official repository of the materials he gathered. Then, with his sev- enteen-year-old son Alan to assist him and a 350-pound Presto recording machine built into the back seat of his car, Lomax set off to spend a summer collecting America's music.' The 1933 trip was only the first in a series of expeditions the Lomaxes made in the thirties and early forties, when they travelled tens of thousands of miles and made thou- sands of recordings.= One of the first people the Lomaxes recorded in 1933 was an African- American singer and guitarist named Huddie Ledbetter or "Leadbelly. " The Lomaxes "discovered" Leadbelly while searching southern prisons for Negro work songs. Roughly forty-four years old at the time, Lead- belly was in Louisiana's Angola Prison for murder. He astonished the Lomaxes with the variety of songs he knew and the verve and virtuosity Benjamin Filene, a Smithsonian Fellow (1991), is completing his dissertation at Yale on Alan Lomax, Moses Asch, John Hammond and their efforts to collect and popularize American vernacular music. I am grateful to Michael Denning and Rachel Seidman for their suggestions. American Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4 (December 1991) O 1991 American Studies Association 602 LOMAX, LEADBELLY, AND AN AMERICAN PAST 603 with which he played his twelve-string guitar. When Leadbelly was released in 1934,3the Lomaxes took him with them on their recording expeditions and, early in 1935, brought him to New York City. There they launched a barrage of publicity promoting him as the living em- bodiment of America's folk-song tradition. In addition to recording scores of Leadbelly's songs for the Library of Congress archive, the Lomaxes booked appearances for him at concerts and benefit perform- ances, arranged commercial recording sessions for him, and even re- created the story of their "discovery" of him in a March of Time new~reel.~ Although Leadbelly achieved only limited commercial success be- fore his death in 1949, ultimately the Lomaxes established his place in America's popular music history. Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, another singer whose career the Lomaxes helped shape, are considered folk forefathers of rock, pop, and blues. In 1988, CBS Records made a video entitled A Vision Shared: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, based on an album on which rock musicians from Bruce Springsteen to Bob Dylan to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys covered Guthrie's and Leadbelly's songs. The video's narrator, folk-rock singer Robbie Robertson, describes Guthrie and Leadbelly as "America's most important folk musicians." In the video, rock star Little Richard calls Leadbelly "one of the foundations of mu~ic."~ Most of the pop-music world today seems to agree with Little Rich- ard's assessment. In the past decade, Leadbelly has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1988), the Blues Hall of Fame (1986), and the Nashville Songwriters Association International's Hall of Fame (1980) His songs "Goodnight Irene ," "Rock Island Line," and "The Midnight Special," considered traditional standards today, are covered by punk rock bands and country music crooners alike.' As Leadbelly's and Guthrie's reputations have continued to grow, so have the Lomaxes'. Today they are considered among the premier American folk collectors of the twentieth century. In 1990, PBS broad- casted a new folk-music series narrated by Alan Lomax entitled "Amer- ican Patchwork." Newsweek headlined its review of the show "Tuning in to Mr. Folklore" and referred to Lomax as "the dean of American folkl~rists."~At the White House in 1986, President Reagan presented Lomax and eleven other "titans of the arts" with National Medals of the art^.^ The Lomaxes' contribution to American culture has been recognized, 604 AMERICAN QUARTERLY but it has not been understood. Within the folklore profession, the Lomaxes have long been held up as seminal figures, but they have received almost no analytical treatment. Historians have essentially ignored the Lomaxes. Gene Bluestein's The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory (1972) includes a chapter that offers insights into the relationship between the Lomaxes' collecting and the ballad-collecting tradition that preceded it, but there have been no full- length studies of the Lomaxes' work published.1° The Lomaxes, for the most part, have been treated as preservationists who reclaimed an endangered folk-song heritage. But they were cre- ators as much as caretakers of a tradition. As with most canons, the canon of American folk music that the Lomaxes defined says as much about their tastes and values as about the "reality" they documented. The Lomaxes' vision of America's musical heritage was shaped by their involvement in the politics and culture of the 1930s. In the de- pression, when many Americans were looking for sources of strength in their culture, the Lomaxes pointed to a particular brand of old- fashioned, rural folk music that they felt exemplified the country's creativity and vitality. Fearing that this traditional music was being overwhelmed by commercialism, they determined to record it in as pure a form as possible and to awaken new audiences to its power and charm. The Lomaxes' goal, therefore, was both to preserve and popularize folk music. This two-sided mission created powerful contradictions in their work-contradictions that were compounded by their lack of self- consciousness about their role as intermediaries between folk and pop- ular culture. The Lomaxes had a specific conception of America's folk music and ignored any songs that did not fit that conception. And, as their relationship with Leadbelly indicates, when they found the type of folk music they liked, the Lomaxes determined to gain an audience for it, even if doing so involved rounding off the music's rough edges and creating a false public persona for the singer. The Lomaxes claimed to be impartial folklorists who documented an existing tradition, but they had a personal vision that has powerfully influenced how Amer- icans remember their musical heritage. Exploring the elements of this vision can give historians insights into 1930s America. Although John Lomax transcribed cowboy songs even as a boy in the 1880s, the Lomaxes' conception of America's song heritage was forged primarily in the thirties. Their work sheds LOMAX, LEADBELLY, AND AN AMERICAN PAST 605 light on Americans' efforts at that time to discover a vibrant, indigenous culture. Since the thirties, the Lomaxes' view of American music has, if anything, become more established in American culture. Leadbelly's and Guthrie's names have greater currency today than they did fifty years ago. The Lomaxes' work therefore illuminates the process of canon formation, the ways in which certain cultural figures gain pre- dominance in the public memory in lieu of others. Examining the Lomaxes' career can help historians understand why certain songs, certain styles, certain "looks" strike us as "American," or "authentic," or "folk." In building the folk music canon, the Lomaxes sought traditional folk music in the "eddies of human society,"" self-contained homo- geneous communities cut off from the corrupting influences of popular culture. Mainstream communities, the Lomaxes feared, had lost touch with their folk roots. As historian Joe Klein writes, "Instead of listening to Grandma sing 'Barbara Allen' on the back porch, the kids-and often Grandma too-were listening to Bing Crosby on the radio."12 The Lomaxes hoped to find the old styles "dammed up" l3 in America's more isolated areas.
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