Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935-1945

Introduction

Alan Lomax’s life spanned much of the twentieth century (1915–2002), and during most of this time he was an active folk song collector and scholar. He has been both praised and criticized. The Rounder Records Alan Lomax Collection, with at least 100 CDs, is only one example of his incredible musical output. He was not only active in making field recordings, he was also a prolific writer, as demonstrated in Ronald D. Cohen, ed., Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934–1997 (New York: Routledge, 2003), which also includes biographical information, analyses of his musical theories, and a complete bibliography. He was also a busy correspondent, particularly during his time with the Library of Congress, demonstrating a complex individual, far more interesting and expansive than the folklorist/ethnomusicologist, even radio personality, who has been written about and feted. Fortunately, John Szwed has now covered much of his amazing story in Alan Lomax: A Biography (New York: Viking, 2010).

A reading and examination of his letters reveals not only someone who led an extremely complex, fascinating, creative life. He also had great love for his family and extensive relationships with hundreds of friends and others. Most of the letters published here are located in various collections in the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress; others are from smaller, scattered repositories. Lomax was a prolific correspondent with his family, even when young, but I have had to begin in 1935, when he initiated his formal relationship with the Library of Congress. I have included all of the available letters that are in the public domain through 1945, when Lomax was mostly working for the government. I have also occasionally cited pertinent letters to Alan in the notes. There are certainly others that will eventually be indexed in the American Folklife Center correspondence files, both to and from Alan. I do not have permission to quote from those letters that are part of the Lomax Papers at the Center for American History at the University of Texas, which vividly indicate Alan’s intimate, and occasionally feisty, relationship with his father. Some of these letters, including details missing from his professional letters, are referred to in the endnotes.

Lomax had a complex relationship with his elderly father, John. They shared many experiences and personal moments, but also disagreed about politics and music. He also confided in his brother Johnny and younger sister Bess. He did field collecting with his father and particularly with Elizabeth, his wife. Lomax’s life was full of triumphs, but also many hardships, criticisms, health problems, and financial difficulties. He was skilled at luring plain folks before his microphone, and continued to correspond with them in order to maintain contact. He was also involved with the mechanics of recording in the field, often with primitive, troublesome equipment. As an employee of the federal government he had to continually deal with bureaucratic hurdles and financial matters and constraints; during this period he was always short of personal funds. His radical politics surfaced in various ways, sometimes giving him trouble, but also meant the excitement of meeting and working with politically active musicians such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Burl Ives, Josh White, and the Golden Gate Quartet.

He recorded extensively in the South, which is commonly known, but also in Haiti, the Bahamas, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Washington, D.C., and Vermont during the years covered in these letters (and, of course, in Great Britain, Spain, and Italy in the 1950s, and other places in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s). He was an omnivorous reader and collector, always bubbling over with fresh ideas and projects, many of which never went much further than his fervent, creative imagination. He was as much at home behind a microphone in a dusty field as before it in a radio or recording studio.

Alan Lomax was born in Austin, Texas, January 31, 1915, the third child of John Avery and Bess Brown Lomax, after Shirley and then John Jr. Their fourth child, Bess, followed six years later. Following a year at the University of Texas (1930–1931), then a year at Harvard College (1931–1932), he returned to the University of Texas, and finally graduated in 1936. During 1933 he accompanied his father on a recording trip through the South, and he continued occasionally to travel with his father while at the University of Texas. He helped his father with the publication of American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934), and the same year published his first article, ‘Sinful’ Songs of the Southern Negro, in the winter 1934 issue of the Southwest Review. Father and son also worked together on Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936) and Our Singing Country: A Second Volume of American Ballads & Folk Songs (1941).

In mid-1935, accompanied by the folklorists Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, Lomax participated in a collecting trip through Georgia, Florida, and the Bahamas, having gotten some Library of Congress support. Alan began working for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in 1936, first as a special and temporary assistant, then as the permanent Assistant in Charge starting in June 1937, until he left in late 1942 to work for the Office of War Information, where he stayed into mid-April 1943. He joined the army on April 4, 1944, and remained in the military into early 1946, continually stationed within the States. This means that his government letters wound down in 1943, although there were a few into 1945. While in the army he continued broadcasting a variety of radio shows.

Alan’s interest in folk music and radical politics sprang from a combination of his father’s aesthetic influences and his own experiences at Harvard during the nadir of the Depression. While John remained a political conservative, Alan connected vernacular music with a strong populist sensibility, infused with a belief in racial justice, that would carry throughout his life. He was anxious to spread these messages through his numerous publications, radio shows, promotional activities, collecting trips, and so much more. While his health at times appeared rather fragile, he nonetheless kept up an amazing, and seemingly tireless, creative and physical agenda. He was prickly and sensitive, and his single-minded focus on his work sometimes made him appear ruthless and uncaring. However, despite occasional outbursts of temper or frustration, he focused not on the negative but on the tasks ahead.

There were some controversial issues, such as his collecting trips in Mississippi connected with John Work and other researches from Fisk University in 1941–1942. Alan’s letters help present his side of this rather complex story. He tried, more or less successfully, to document and present folk music in all sorts of formats and venues. His recording sessions with Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Jelly Roll Morton are major achievements. Through his early radio programs he presented Woody, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Josh White, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee to a broad public, and in the process was vital in shaping their commercial successes. He corresponded with most of the folk song and ballad collectors of the day, both major and minor, while cultivating grassroots informants throughout much of the country.

While Lomax is most noted for his field recordings, the letters make clear that he was also very interested in the commercial hillbilly, race, and even popular recordings of the 1920s and after. Indeed, Alan eagerly collected thousands for the Library of Congress, and he followed his father’s reissue collection, Smoky Mountain Ballads (Victor, 1941) in compiling two Brunswick 78 rpm albums of early country songs, Mountain Frolic and Listen to Our Story (1947). Moreover, while his role in recording and promoting African American music has often been emphasized—partly stimulated by his late publication of Land Where the Blues Began (1993)—throughout his life his musical tastes were truly, even increasingly, eclectic.

During his last months in the army he was living in New York with his family. After his discharge in the spring of 1946, he plunged back into the worlds of folk music and radical politics, through his radio shows on the Mutual network, as well as through his work with People’s Songs, an organization formed by Pete Seeger and others in late 1945 to promote a singing Left. Alan organized musical shows for Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party presidential campaign in 1948, for example; but, feeling the heat of the growing Red Scare beginning to sweep the country, he moved to England in 1950. During much of the 1950s he promoted folk music through his BBC radio shows, while conducting collecting trips through the British Isles, Spain, and Italy. Lomax returned to the United States in 1958 and immediately began a recording trip to the South, while connecting with the developing folk music revival. His writings now took a more theoretical turn, first with Cantometrics, his ideas about singing styles based an international comparative perspective, resulting in Folk Song Style and Culture (1968), followed by Choreometrics, a similar study of the world’s dance and movement styles. He published his final songbook, The Folk Songs of North America, in 1960, followed by the award-winning Land Where the Blues Began. Up to his death in 2002, Alan continued to promote his ideas about cultural equality—the notion that all cultures were equally valuable and relevant—through various publications and activities.

Until a full biography of Alan Lomax appears, these letters will serve as a way of understanding his fascinating life, both public and private, at least through the end of World War II. Unfortunately, some topics are barely touched upon, if at all. For example, there is little overt discussion of his left-wing political views, his wife Elizabeth’s role in their various collecting trips, or his radio shows. Alan Lomax was one of the most stimulating and influential cultural workers of the twentieth century, and it is time to allow him to speak for himself through his voluminous correspondence. His work for the Library of Congress was particularly important: he greatly expanded its collection of field and commercial recordings, and promoted the positive role and image of the federal government throughout the country. He quickly became recognized as perhaps the preeminent folklorist in the country.

I had a brief exchange of letters with Lomax in 1993 and have cherished his two responses; I believe I have taken all of his information and advice to heart. I feel privileged that he took the time to write, and I hope this volume is another step toward acknowledging his helping a younger colleague.

Since Alan was a most prolific writer, and was often in a hurry, I have found it necessary to correct any obvious misspellings and punctuation errors in order to smooth things out (and avoid numerous uses of [sic]). I have attempted to retain his occasionally idiosyncratic style, and have tried to preserve his paragraph breaks as much as possible (while grouping together shorter paragraphs to enhance the flow). He was, fortunately, an excellent typist, but his handwriting could be problematic. He usually dated his official correspondence, but with undated letters I have made an educated guess, and I have omitted some for which the dating is too problematic. The letters are in basic chronological order, in a narrative format, allowing Alan to tell his story as it unfolded. I have included background information as headnotes to the letters, where appropriate, and also in the numerous endnotes; but until a full biography of Alan appears, it will be necessary to assume that the reader has some general knowledge about him, or at least access to the numerous secondary works I have cited. I have also tried to identify as many of the individuals mentioned as possible, along with supplying detailed information for many, but certainly not all. Moreover, I have not referred to Alan’s detailed field notebooks and documentary films now available in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, which add significant information about his collecting trips.

I want to thank Nancy-Jean Ballard for the Helen Hartness Flanders letters; the Center for American History at the University of Texas for the Lomax and John Henry Faulk correspondence; the Woody Guthrie Archives for Alan’s letters to Woody; Steve Weiss of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina for his letters to Annabel Morris Buchanan; the Wisconsin Music Archives, Mills Music Library at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for the Helene Stratman-Thomas letters; Matt Barton; and so many others. I have had the extraordinary assistance of Todd Harvey at the American Folklife Center, who is the keeper of the Lomax collection and so much else. Without Todd’s help there would be no book. I particularly want to thank David Evans for his exacting editorial skills and keen insights, Jim Leary of the University of Wisconsin for his assistance, as well as Anna Lomax Wood, Don Fleming, and Ellen Harold of the Association for Cultural Equity for their most helpful comments. Craig Gill of the University Press of Mississippi has been most supportive as this project has proceeded to publication.

Following are the manuscript collections I have drawn upon, with the abbreviations used in the text sources:

Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge

Program cover to A Program of American Songs for American Soldiers, a concert at the White House, 1941, produced by Alan Lomax. (Alan Lomax Recordings of Rehearsals for White House Program, AFC 1941/006, fol. 302, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress)

LETTERS, 1935–1938

1935

In May 1933, at the tender age of eighteen already a fast learner, Alan began traveling and collecting folk songs through the South with his father, John A. Lomax; this was also the start of his connection with the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress.¹ John Lomax would become Honorary Conservator of the Archive in September 1933. Alan assisted his father with the publication of their pathbreaking compilation American Ballads and Folk Songs in 1934, and the same year published his first article, ‘Sinful’ Songs of the Southern Negro, in the winter 1934 issue of the Southwest Review.² In 1936 father and son would again collaborate with the publication of Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, whom they had met at the Angola State Prison Farm in Louisiana during their 1933 trip. In 1935, while still in college, accompanied by the somewhat older Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, Alan launched another collecting trip to Georgia and Florida; he then went with Barnicle on a similar journey to the Bahamas, after having obtained the loan of a recording machine from the Library of Congress. Hurston (1891–1960) was already an established folklorist and novelist of African American life, while Barnicle (1891–1978) taught English and folklore at New York University.³

During his trip with Hurston and Barnicle, he composed a lengthy letter from Miami, Florida, on July 1, 1935, to his father at the Library of Congress. The message demonstrates his sharp eye and ear for detail, fascination with and knowledge of vernacular music, and a felicitous writing style, but also evinces some of the racial stereotyping so common in that era:

I have just completed a count of our records. So far we have made seventy-five double-faced records consisting of the following types of recordings: Spirituals, chanteys, ring-shouts, folk-tales, jumping dances, work songs, ballads, guitar picking, minstrel songs, praying, sermons. The chanteys are of two sorts. 1) Chanteys sung by the longshoremen at Savannah and Brunswick to help them load cotton and turpentine aboard ship. 2) Chanteys sung by Bahaman Negro sailors, some traditional, some indigenous. The ring shouts are the oldest spirituals we have yet recorded, date back to slavery times, are sung to the accompaniment of dancing and hand-clapping. They are closely linked up by their rhythm and their melodies to the Bahaman jumping dances, which are sung with a drum accompaniment, in which the dancing is a direct descendant of African dancing. The folk-tales we have recorded have to do with a Negro heroic character called John who is the strongest and most cunning man who ever lived. They are wonderful stories and, since so common and so important, I am sure you won’t regret a few records devoted to them. Our narrator was at least as good a story teller, if not a better, than [Mose] Clear Rock [Platt] on that occasion we both so pleasantly remember [at Imperial Prison near Sugarland, Texas]. This same John Davis, the man who told the John stories for us, staged an argument about the nature of the world in which he drew in a whole crowd of Negroes and worked them up to a high pitch of excitement. I couldn’t resist the chance to turn on the recording machine and get down this garrulous, aimless discussion, so full of Negro wit and Negro illogic.

You will love the records. The prayers and sermons I have recorded have not been particularly good. I am quite disappointed in them, but they are important, perhaps, if only they show what the Negro does even when he copies the white man word for word, even when he reads a white sermon, as one old fool of a preacher did, when I asked him to record. This incident was both ridiculous and tragic. Picture to yourself a huge, lazy, ignorant black preacher in a high stiff white collar and a long grey frock coat—the whole topped by a black stetson hat—picture this man in a big Methodist church with a congregation of fifteen assembled for the Sunday afternoon service, this old fool who had been told carefully that we wanted one of his rousing, revival sermons, rising and roaring and mumbling out, stumbling as he read a wordy discussion of the relation between special and general providence in which we may clearly see Mr. Bushnell was well established in his position. Not a single amen did the old man get out of his congregation, not a single song to rest him when his voice and eyes were tired. But even after an hour of roaring at a stone faced audience, the old fool was still pleased with himself and rocked back and forth from heel to toe, thumbs in his vest and said; In this first sermon I give out to the world, I want to let them know that I’m a man of learning and education. The records were painfully accurate and the congregation stood around the machine and shrieked with laughter as they listened until the poor old man realized what a fool he’d made himself and went away talking to himself into his own house and shut the door on the laughter of the young people.

This was in Eatonville [Florida] on a Sunday, Eatonville being the town where Miss Hurston was born and raised, the town about which she wrote her first novel. Her first novel, by the way, was about her father—a very successful, spell-binding preacher and a regular devil among the women. The day before on Saturday Miss Barnicle [and] Miss Hurston had gone over to a neighboring city, Orlando, to get Miss Barnicle’s camera fixed. I was very dirty and needed a haircut, so I stepped into a little barber shop where it was advertised you could take a shower for a dime. I got my haircut, took my shower, and was walking across the sidewalk when a policeman accosted me, asked me where I was from, what I was doing in town and etc. I told him. He didn’t like my story, so I was loaded into a police car and with Miss Barnicle bringing up the rear with a trailer of motorcycle cops we made a nice little parade down to the police station. There I was booked, my pockets ransacked, carefully searched and put into a cell in the city jail, too stiff with amazement to protest. In about an hour, during which I slept most of the time and recovered somewhat from the shock, I was taken up to the chief detective’s office, carefully questioned and finally released. At the time I couldn’t understand why I was picked up, but I now do. Police all over Florida were on the lookout for suspicious characters and bums. They are making every effort to keep this beautiful place from being overrun with criminals and hoboes. We were stopped on our way into Miami, Miss Barnicle and I, after we had dropped Miss Hurston with some [of] her friends, and we were stopped and our license was inspected.

Because of the experience we had in Orlando, I have decided to go around and see the police when we work a small town. In Belle Glade, the town in the Everglades we have just come away from, this is what I did. I called first on the mayor, then on the chief, explained what I was doing, showed them my letter to Governor Sholtz. They were very nice and even sent around a special officer to the tourist camp where I worked to help keep order. Belle Glade I have found to be the most interesting town I have visited in a long time. It lies in the center of a huge tract of drained swampland. The sun boils down with tropical intensity. The air is humid. It rains almost every day. The soil is black muck, so rich that it stings one’s flesh slightly. It is a new development and a new town, swarming with new cars, laborers, rich in money and opportunity. It is the center of a great bean and cabbage industry which feeds the Northern markets. And in season, which lasts from the fifteenth of September until the last of May, the town is overrun with ten to fifteen thousand laborers, who earn from a dollar and a half to four dollars a day, who come from all over the South, white and black, who sleep in their own cars or in the filthy rooming houses or in the hovels that the plantation owners have erected for them. In the four days we were there we ran into a great deal of material and the most interesting set of Negroes I have seen in a long time. In town during the season the streets are so crowded with Negroes that it is impossible to drive a car through certain sections at night. The barrel houses and gambling joints run all night long every night, for the men are paid off every day. Out in the country, where the Bahaman Negroes live, the drum goes all night long and the Negroes dance just as they used to in Africa and in the fire dance they strip off all their clothes and the men leap over the fire to get to the women. We left there only because we were utterly worn out with the day-long grind of contact with swarms of people who wanted to sing but were suspicious. You know how this can weary one. Now, after two days of doing nothing here in Miami, I am just beginning to feel myself again. But you and I must come back to Belle Glade together during the season; it is the richest place in material I have ever been out of season and when those fifteen thousand poor whites and blacks from all over the South are about it must be marvelous. If I can’t come back, I have left introductions all over the place for you, these along with glowing descriptions.

I think you can see why I would feel safer with some more letters of identification. I wish you would try to get something of the sort together for me and send them to me here—a letter on Library of Congress stationary that mentions us both along with a personal letter from yourself, mentioning Miss Barnicle and Miss Hurston and what we are doing. I will need these in the next few days because of two plans that are on foot. 1) To visit Mr. Hansen, Commissioner to the Seminole Indians at Fort Myers, to record Indian songs. 2) To sail over to Nassau, which is only overnight from here and which costs $19.50 roundtrip, to get the chanteys, the jumping dances and the African songs which Miss Hurston says are so thick there. From my contact with the Bahaman Negro I should judge that he has more songs than any other variety of Negro we have so far encountered—English Ballads, English Sea Chanteys, indigenous sea chanteys, indigenous ballads, African songs, jumping dances, etc. You see in the Bahaman, cut off completely as he is from his white associates by the British colonists’ attitude, you have the mixing of the English and the African cultures in the earliest stage—a condition probably duplicated in America at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. In Bahama we can get at the root stuff and since it is such a short distance away from us here it seems a pity not to go after it. Miss Hurston tells us that on one island of the group—Cat Island, the plantations have been deserted for fifty years and the Negroes have lived in isolation and have dropped back into their way of living in Africa. They practice juju openly and sing many African songs. I think the records and pictures I can get there will make a sensation in Washington and will make up for whatever they have against us there. There, where they dance every night, where every sailor knows the chanteys and the ballads, I could probably get seventy-five records in a week.

I figure that I have spent of the Library’s money in the month I have been away from home $117 and some cents. I think it would not be too unreasonable, since I have done such good work and so much wo[r]k in that time that you allow me a hundred dollars more to spend between this time and the day we will meet in Northern Florida toward the end of the month. Miss Barnicle and I can carry on with that sum, by living inexpensively for fifteen or twenty days and then we could go on to Nassau or down to Key West, where the French, Spanish, and English Negroes meet, just as we see fit at the time. Right now we are all a little too weary to decide exactly what to do and we shall spend the next two or three days writing letters and working the records.

I want to add that I have appreciated and enjoyed your frequent letters and your encouragement and I want to apologize for not having written more often. But I have worked harder and learned more in the past two weeks than I have ever done since I have been in the field. I have lived pretty hard as well and the combinations of all these things has left me too tired to write or do anything but flop to bed. This is the richest state, besides Texas that I have ever worked. You and I must come back together some day and take our time at it.

I am happy for your and Miss Terrill’s sakes that she got her appointment for another year, but in some ways I almost wish it hadn’t happened, so much did I want to see you gracing an official desk in Washington this year. Well, anyway, love to you and Miss Terrill and don’t forget to give my felicitations to Elnora. Keep well and happy and please send me some letters of introduction and one hundred dollars in cash by airmail return, because until it comes we are pretty well tied down here. I have consulted bankers here and they tell me the best way to get money in a country where you’re not known is to send it cash, by registered letter.

P. S. It may console you to know that I wrote you a letter three days ago in Belle Glade, lost it in the rush of leaving when a tube went bad, found it here, but decided it was too far out of date to send it. By the way, I have made two sets of recordings of children’s game songs and some hollers of Negro boys which latter remind me of Lead Belly’s Hoday. Which further reminds me that I have the Lead Belly material, shall get in the mail at least by tomorrow and shall get an airmail to Dr. [George] Herzog tonight. You were very considerate to give me the details of Dr. Herzog’s letter, but I am glad you didn’t send his musical introduction along. I have no mind left to give it. As I read it, this reminds me a little of Lead Belly’s letters but perhaps my good intentions can make up for my lack of coherence. [ALC]⁴

On August 3 he informed Oliver Strunk,⁵ chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, of his current situation, now that he was in Nassau, the Bahamas:

The department’s recording machine has had an interesting time this summer and I should like to give you some account of it before you leave for Europe. In many ways this has been the most exciting field trip I have made and, really, can only be told in a long, rambling novel, but I shall confine myself to a catalogue of records which, while exciting enough, is by no means adequate for the whole story. Miss Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, professor of the ballad at New York University, Miss Zora Hurston, Columbia anthropologist and probably the best informed person today on Western Negro folk-lore, and myself met in Brunswick, Ga. on June the fifteenth and began our search for folk-songs there. Through Miss Hurston’s influence we were soon living, in an isolated community on St. Simon’s island, on such friendly terms with the Negroes as I had never experienced before. This community is a settlement of Negroes that has remained practically static since the days of slavery. We rented a little Negro shantey and sent out the call for folk-singers. The first evening our front yard was crowded.

In a week’s time we had made about forty records. 1) Children’s game songs, both traditional and indigenous. 2) The shrill, strange cries that these children use to signal to each other across the fields. 3) Chanties of the sort that the Negroes sing in loading the ships in Charlestown, Savannah and Brunswick, songs of the like that the white sailors heard in the days of clipper ships and turned to their own use—probably the earliest type of Negro work-song. 4) Ring-shouts, probably the earliest form of the Negro spiritual, widely current in the days of slavery, but now all but forgotten except in a few isolated communities. These songs are for dancing. 5) Records of what is called jooking on the guitar. The jook is the saloon and dance hall of this part of the South and jook music furnishes the rhythm of the one-step, the slowdrag and the other dances of whiskey filled Saturday nights. At St. Simons island we were lucky enough to find still current and popular an early and primitive type of guitar playing, in which the drum rhythm is predominant, that was forerunner of the more highly developed and sophisticated blues accompaniments so popular over the South today. 6) A miscellaneous set of spirituals, ragtime songs, ballads, and a few stories completed this group of records. We felt when we left St. Simons island that we had turned back time forty or fifty years and heard and recorded some genuine Afro-American folk-music of the middle of the nineteenth century. Our next stop was in Eatonville, Florida, where Miss Hurston was born and brought up. Miss Hurston introduced us there to the finest Negro guitarist I have heard so far, better even than Lead Belly although of a slightly different breed. His records along with a more usual group of spirituals, work-songs, and children’s games were made up and we moved on to Belle Glade on Lake Okeechobee in the Everglades.

About ten or fifteen years ago the Government drained this section of the Everglades and opened it up for farming. The soil is rich, black muck, so acid that it burns a sensitive skin, and out of this soil you can almost see the plants as they grow. In the bean-picking season, for let it be known that this section of the world furnishes most of the beans and cabbages for the Northern markets in the winter, Belle Glade, a town of two or three thousand inhabitants, swarms with from ten to fifteen thousand workers from all over the South. Most of these are Negroes—and folk-songs are as thick as marsh mosquitoes. For the first three or four days we recorded work-songs, ballads, spirituals of the usual sort, then Miss Hurston introduced us into a small community of Bahaman Negroes. We then heard our first fire-dances and for the first time, although we and other collectors had searched the South, the heavy, exciting rhythm of a drum. The dances and the songs were the closest to African I had ever heard in America. These, along with a set of spirituals and chanties new to me, we recorded and then moved on to Miami for a little rest. Up to this time we had made ninety records. We decided that the only thing for us to do was to make a visit, however brief, to the Bahamas where we could hear the fire dances in their own country. Here we came and here we have remained ever since, bewitched by these fairy islands and busy recording the liveliest and most varied folk-culture we had yet run into. Miss Hurston, who had been, so to speak, our guide and interpreter in Georgia and Florida, who had led us into fields we might never had found alone, who had generously helped us to record songs & singers she had herself discovered, could not, for various reasons, come with us to Nassau; but we felt that up until the time she left us, she had been almost entirely responsible for the great success of our trip and for our going into the Bahamas.

Our first week in the Bahamas we stayed on Cat Island where the spirits of the dead and voo-doo men walk by day and by night the drum begins to roll for the fire-dances. Here we recorded—1) Rushing songs—a form of the holy shout where the congregation shuffles round and round the church singing, clapping, and stamping on the floor. When the Baptist church wants to raise money, it has a rush and the church is sure to be packed. Instead of a collection being taken, each rusher is supposed to drop a penny or a thruppence in the plate as he shuffles by. The boys break their shillings & sixpences up into halfpennies and distribute it among the young women. Then they all sail away. When I see you next, I’ll teach you how to rush. It’s great sport. The melodies are very fine & some of them quite odd. 2) Anthems—a Bahamian adaptation and elaboration of American spiritual singing. 3) Jumping dances. A ring is formed. The goat-skin drum, taut from heating over a fire of cocoanut leaves, begins its peculiar jerkey[?] thump. The girls begin to clap and raise a song that consists of an endless & timeless repetition on a simple tune of such a sentence as—See Uncle Lou when he falls in the well. A boy leaps from the circle out into the moon-lit ring. A dramatic, angular, sensual posture & then he flings away in his dance, his own personal move, as much his property as his skin. For a minute he dances then, when the drummer by muffling his beat, has told him to leave the ring, the dancer stops his move short before a girl. She has her dance & then goes for a boy. Thus the dance goes on free, lovely, primitive, and, it seems to me completely African. There are hundreds of jumping dance songs. 4) And then there are the ring-plays, hundreds of them too, calling for a different kind of dancing, a different drum rhythm. 5) Along with this material which was so largely of Negro origin, we recorded a number of fine English ballad airs.

We left Cat Island on the bi-weekly mailboat to return to Nassau, not because we had exhausted or even begun to hear all the material, but because our batteries had discharged and something had gone wrong with the recording instrument. A day or so later in Nassau, we were recording again—jumping dances, ring play, quadrilles, anthems and the songs of the streets—a genuine, casual ballad lore that concerns itself with the latest street fight or love affair. Three weeks ago, when we came to town, I was calling Miss Barnicle sweetie pie as a joke. Today, out on the streets, one hears nothing but sweetie pie bandied back & forth and there are already two songs simply riddled with sweetie pies. Here, you see, there is a live, flowing, vital folk culture and the collector lives in a continual state of confusion & exhilaration. A week ago we returned from another trip to the Outer Islands—this time to Andros. There we had spent another week when songs & stories & superstitions were pouring in from morning until night. On Andros, since the native dances have more or less gone out of fashion, we recorded nothing but the folk tales—variants of European fairy stories, shot through, as must have been their originals with songs & dances. Some of these songs are fragments of old English ballads & sea shanties; some African songs; some from Jamaica, Haiti & Cuba. Altogether they are the loveliest folk-melodies I have recorded and in their dramatic setting are perfect. About 20 records of this sort.

Back here again, so exhausted we could scarcely stagger, found an old lady whose mother had come from Africa. From her we recorded 35 African melodies. Then a group of Haitians strolled our way and gave us ten fine records of their singing. Songs & people pour in on us all day every day until we have to stop them in our weariness. Altogether we have made, despite trouble with the machine, lack of charging facilities for our batteries, and shortage of blank records, some ninety double-face records since we have been on the islands. With a month’s experience behind us and a fair wind we can make easily a hundred more before we leave and get besides some fine movies of the native dances. The material here, besides being interesting in itself, will have great importance in the study of the Afro-American music, since it represents a mixture of African & English cultures at a much earlier stage than can now be found anywhere in America. The absorption of the Negro into white civilization has gone on very slowly on these islands and is, I should say, where it was in America about the time of the American revolution. I hope to see you face to face some time and tell you a little more clearly and in detail about this material. But for now this report is quite long enough I think. [ALC]

Once back in New York, Alan initiated some new plans, while following up on his work with his father regarding their previous recordings. He now began reaching out to the wider world with his increasingly expansive ideas and queries. He needed additional assistance from the federal government, since his recording work for the Library of Congress, through his father’s position, carried few funds, and the private foundations were difficult to tap.

For instance, on September 12 he wrote to Miss Francis McFarland, Director of Music Projects for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Here he continued his multi-pronged approach, stressing the many uses of folk music, including academic and professional. Regarding the latter, American composers, particularly Aaron Copland, were using folk songs in their compositions:

The possibility of the Works Progress Administration approving a project in American folk music has been this week suggested to me by Mr. Herbert Halpert.⁶ On the basis of your interest in American culture, I should like to submit a project that will be an important contribution to the scientific study of American folk songs and to American culture. I have discussed this project with many musicians and students of folk song, and it has generally been agreed that it is vital to the study, preservation and proper presentation of American folk music. As you perhaps know, my father, John A. Lomax, has been for twenty years a collector of American Folk Songs and was the compiler of the first book of indigenous folk-songs issued in this country—Cowboy Songs—which still remains the authoritative book in its field. For the last two years my father has been Honorary Consultant in Folk Songs at the Library of Congress and under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation has been, by means of a high fidelity electric recording instrument, engaged in recording folk songs in the South. During this time I have been his assistant and have collaborated with him on two books, American Ballads and Folk Songs, issued last fall by the Macmillan Company, and The Songs of Lead Belly, to appear in the near future.

Our collection of recordings, made up of Negro folk songs from all over the South, French folk songs from Louisiana, Mexican material from Texas, songs from the mountain whites, and a large and interesting collection made by myself last summer in the Bahamas, is deposited in the Archives of the Library of Congress. But to make use of this material in furthering either the scientific study of folk songs or the composition of an American music which should be based on our extensive and beautiful folk traditions, it is first necessary that a careful musical analysis of the available recorded material be made. There are few musicians capable for this highly technical and precise work, which consists in the studies of subtleties most of which are foreign to conventional music; and yet it is these subtleties, often unnoticed or corrected by musicians, that make a folk-song what it is. The project I suggest is the establishment of a course, which will at the same time be a research and artistic project, in the transcription of folk music. This class should work under the supervision of some expert in the field of primitive music, most preferably Dr. Herzog of Yale University; and use as its raw material the collection of records at the Library of Congress supplemented by material from Yale, Harvard and Columbia.

The results of a yearlong project of this sort would be manifold and important. 1) There would be in this country a group of experts in the transcription of folk music whose services in the study of primitive and folk music would be invaluable. 2) An analysis of American folk music on a large scale would have been made which analysis would be basic to all other work in that field. 3) A group of young performers and composers would, perhaps, be on the track of a genuine American music—operas, symphonies and so forth based on American folk music. Fitting arrangements for American Folk Songs, that we are sorely in need of, could certainly be written by these musicians when they had become thoroughly acquainted with the style of this music. 4) Certainly a few American musicians would know how to perform American folk songs.[ALC]

Almost a week later, on September 17, he followed up to Betty Calhoun, also with the Music Projects division of the WPA, with greater details of his expansive proposal:

I have in mind a project in folk song which I believe will be an important contribution to the scientific study of folk song as well as to American culture.

Some Credentials: My credentials are mostly my father’s. For three years under a Sheldon Fellowship from Harvard he, John A. Lomax, collected folk songs in the West and organized folk lore societies through the South. This research resulted in rich manuscript collections and in the publication of the first book of indigenous American folk songs—Cowboy songs. This book, along with Songs of the Cowcamp and Cattle Trail, are the sources for the Lonesome Cowboys who haunt the radio today.

A little over two years ago he and I set out to record folk songs in the South, using the first portable electric recording instruments and visiting the Southern Prison Camps where we believe the richest stores of Negro material had been preserved. In this two year period we have collaborated on two books—American Ballads and Folk Songs, published by Macmillans last fall, and Lead Belly and his Songs, to appear shortly. In addition we have brought to the Library of Congress a collection of over five hundred aluminum records of genuine Mexican, Mountain white, ’Cajun, Bahaman and American Negro Folk Songs. There are thousands of hitherto unknown folk tunes on these records. This collection makes up the largest part of the Library of Congress folk song archive. Of this archive my father is Honorary Curator. Our traveling and part of our collecting expenses have been paid by the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations through the Library.

The Project: But folksongs should not be buried in Libraries, as they are in Washington and in Universities over the Country. This project, which I have talked over with folk-songists all over the country, would provide for their distribution and ready use. This plan has two main features: a) A research group in accurately transcribing folk songs into musical notation. b) A clearing house for folk songs at the Library of Congress.

a) The first project could be complete in a year or less. A group of your musicians and composers under the direction of some expert in primitive music and using as its raw material our collection of records and the additions that can easily be made to it—this research group would bring forth:

1. A group of musicians versed in the precise and difficult technique of writing down folk songs accurately. There are only four or five such experts in American today and they have more work than they can do.

2. A group of potential composers of genuinely American, or at least of competent arrangers and performers of folk songs. Musicians, because they have not carefully listened to and analyzed folk tunes, have generally neglected what is most vital to these tunes—the manner in which they are sung. This manner is characterized by features which fall outside the domain of formal music but which can be transposed into that medium. When composers have once understood the feeling of popular ballads they will be able to put this feeling into their compositions.

3. There will also be amassed during this course of training a large body of analyzed and correlated musical material which will be invaluable in the study of folk songs in this and other countries.

This research project will call for: 1. A set of duplicates of the records in the Library of Congress archive. 2. An expert in primitive music to occasionally instruct the group. 3. A small group of young musicians. 4. A fine reproducing machine for records. 5. And perhaps for some time my services in gathering the raw material and interpreting it.

b) A clearing house at the Library of Congress under the direction of my father and myself should, by adopting a completely generous policy in regard to the material it collected, induce folklorists and libraries throughout the country to send in the collections of songs in their possession. The aim of such an agency should be to direct the collection of new material, classify and catalogue the great body of already collected material, and make available in the form of records and mimeographed bulletins as much of this material as possible. It will call for: 1. The services of several stenographers to copy manuscripts and carry on the extensive correspondence necessary. 2. A machine to duplicate records for distribution and the funds at first to furnish raw material for this machine. 3. Technician to operate this machine. 4. Perhaps a Harvard Ph.D. to assist in the preparation of catalogues and bibliographies of records and books. 5. Covering expenses for the Library’s recording machine. 6. The services of my father and myself to direct the work.

In an intensive year, the machinery for the collection and distribution of American folk songs should have been set up and the greatest part of the work should have been done. I can see no reason why the Library of Congress should not undertake the financing of this organization after it had been well started.

In General: Composers, singers, theatrical and radio producers, writers, all are searching for fresh material. By making available in the form of actual recordings the rich folk culture of America we can supply their needs in a way that will be fruitful for American civilization.

Folk song is the natural and easy introduction to both poetry and music. Insofar as the coming generations will become acquainted with our American folk songs, just so far will there grow up in this country a natural and healthy interest in literature and music. Speaking for myself, as a young person, I have found folk songs not only an open sesame to the hearts of American people, but also an incentive to my interest in the understanding of these people. They can so serve the coming generations over the whole of the United States. This project will be an unending contribution to American culture. Also, it will help greatly in the study of folk songs all over the world, because in that work the assistance of many hands is essential. [CBS]

1936

From New York Alan moved briefly to Washington, D.C., to work at the Library of Congress, then back to Austin to graduate from the University of Texas in the spring of 1936. He now planned a research trip to Saltillo, Mexico.⁷ To support this work, he received a letter of recommendation from Harold Spivacke, Assistant Chief of the Division of Music at The Library of Congress, on September 25, 1936:

I should like to recommend Mr. Alan Lomax for the E. D. Farmer Fellowship to be awarded by the University of Texas for the coming year. In my position at the Library of Congress, I have had several opportunities, during the past two years, to come into close personal contact with Alan Lomax and to observe his work. The result of this observation has convinced me that there is probably no young man in this country better fitted for the study of American folk songs and folklore, than he is. His collaboration with his father and his own independent work recording material for the Music Division of the Library of Congress has given him an unusual amount of experience in this type of work. He is also observant and has often demonstrated his ability to report his observations in a most interesting fashion. The work he plans to do during the coming year, the collecting of folk material in Mexico, represents a field which has hardly been studied…. In addition to this, I should like to call attention to his seriousness and sincerity of purpose which combined with a very winning personality should go a long way toward success in his chosen field of endeavor. [ALC]

After returning from Mexico, he was employed by his father working for the Archive of American Folk Song, which covered his living expenses in the nation’s capital; indeed, he was the Archive’s first paid staff member, named special and temporary assistant on November 21, since his father received no salary. Their Negro Folk Songs as Sung By Lead Belly was just published, although to little notice. But he now had a new interest, Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold. Alan decided to do research in Haiti, where Elizabeth would join him and where they soon were married. He would be paid $30 per month, and the Library would cover all materials and recording expenses. On November 24 Oliver Strunk wrote to the Haitian Minister in Washington:

This will present to you Mr Alan Lomax, son of the Honorary Curator of our Archive of American Folk Music, who is about to make a visit to Haiti in the interests of the Library’s collection of recorded folk music. In Haiti Mr. Lomax will be associated with Miss Zora Neale Hurston, holder of one of this year’s Guggenheim awards. Mr. Lomax has previously worked with Miss Hurston [sic, actually Barnicle] in Jamaica and the Bahamas; it is confidently expected that his present expedition will result in an important contribution to the Archive. [ALC]⁸

Hurston arrived in Haiti in mid-December, stayed until March, then returned for another visit from May to September. Alan sailed for Port-au-Prince on December 10 and probably arrived four days later.⁹ Soon having equipment difficulties, he updated Herbert Putnam¹⁰ at the Library of Congress on December 21:

Perhaps an explanation of the sizable bill from the Sound Specialties Company is forthcoming, since it was somewhat larger than the original estimates. I enclose my copy with each item numbered and shall forthwith explain the items one by one where explanation is called for.

1) The turntable unit (comprising the converter, the turntable motor, the cutter and mechanism, the pickup) had given a year and a half of service under trying conditions without being touched; it deserved a complete overhaul, greasing and cleaning. The amplifier formerly consisted of two parts. These were combined with considerable saving in weight and with the addition of power and better quality.

2) The new cutting head was an absolute essential if I hoped to be able to record drum music. The old cutter, as I had discovered in the Bahamas, would not serve to record drum music, and, since le tambour [tanbou or drum] is the national instrument, I thought it best to take advantage of the obvious improvement [Lincoln] Thompson¹¹ has made in his cutters. I might add that the records I have so far made are the best from the point of view of quality and low surface noise I have ever made, that is, considering the acoustic conditions.

3) [Missing]

4 & 5) The tubes were bought as spares in expectation of a breakdown far from any radio shop or from a shop where the necessary tubes could be bought. I have wasted days at a time in the field waiting for tubes to be sent to me.

6 & 7) [Missing]

8) The old pickup or reproducing-head was always the worst feature of the Thompson recorder because it simply would not track on aluminum records. It skipped grooves whenever the total volume in the sound track jumped suddenly and has often caused me to curse the day I ever was born.

9 & 12) The two batteries were expensive because they are not ordinary automobile batteries, which discharge in a very few hours and are otherwise generally unstable, but are capable of giving more hours of steady power. They are not essential in the United States because there one is always near a garage and charging is relatively inexpensive, but here when I am back in the mountains somewhere and my batteries go dead, it means hours on horseback and then more by automobile to the nearest generator.

I hope this explanation is satisfactory and not too long, long-winded and boring. At least I can assure you that the machine makes the highest quality aluminum records I have yet heard.

I have encountered a few unexpected difficulties here. The Haitian government, because of the yellow journalism that Seabrook¹² and other foreigners have indulged in, is naturally wary of visiting ethnologists and other of that ilk. If I had gone directly to work, making records, my purpose here might have been misunderstood and it is not impossible that I should have been sent back home empty-handed. The President and his staff were en voyage when I arrived and I was forced to wait four days for their return. It has taken several days to arrange, largely through the good offices of Dr. Roux-Léon, the head of the department of national hygiene, the issuance of a permit to make records freely in any part of the island I may choose. I believe that the permit will come through tomorrow. (Miss Hurston has been most helpful in introducing me to the proper people.)

For the foregoing reason my first week in Haiti has had little material result in the way of adding to the folk song archive. I have had very little time to study French and Creole, but have spend most of my time in ante-rooms and in taxiing from office to office to office to keep my white suit as unwithered as possible. I have, however, looked about enough to be sure that this is the richest and most virgin field I have ever worked in. I hear fifteen or twenty different street cries from my hotel window each morning while I dress. The men sing satirical ballads as they load coffee on the docks. Among the upper-class families many of the old French ballads have been preserved. The meringue, the popular dance of polite society here, is quite