Ceci Conway + Alan Lomax

My friend Ceci Conway worked with Alan Lomax. She took me to meet some of the musicians living in rural NC when I lived there. I'll never forget it.

It's the birthday of musicologist Alan Lomax (books by this author), born in Austin, Texas (1915). His father, John Lomax, was also a musicologist and wrote books like Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads (1910) and Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp (1918). Alan went to the University of Texas and then to Harvard to study philosophy, but after his mother's death he dropped out of Harvard to accompany his dad on one of his folk song-collecting missions. He loved it so much that he decided to make it his life's work.

He wrote: "Our way of work is simple. From letters and books and word of mouth, we hear of someone, perhaps a Vermont woodsman or a Kentucky miner, who knows a store of old folk tunes. We get into our car and go to visit him. But my father and I don't burst in like college professors in search of quaintness. We make friends. We live in the neighborhood. And before we even go to a place, we find out about the kind of work in that section so that we can talk about it. Only then do we go and ask for songs. [...] Generally the reaction of people is friendly. They're proud you consider their music important, and they want to do the best job possible. I remember one Finnish singer in the Middle West, from whom we were recording a song about a Finnish Robin Hood. It took 20 minutes to sing. When we had cut the record, we played it back for him. His sharp ears discovered one tiny mistake, and he was so eager for perfection that he made us do the entire record over again."

The Lomaxes went to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where they met Huddie William Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly. Lomax wrote: "I'll never forget: He approached us all the way from the building where he worked, with his big twelve-string guitar in his hand. He sat down in front of us and proceeded to sing everything that we could think of in this beautiful, clear, trumpet-like voice that he had, with his hand simply flying on the strings. His hands were like a whirlwind, and his voice was like a great clear trumpet. You could hear him, literally, half a mile away when he opened up."

Lead Belly had been playing music since he was a kid with an accordion, and entertained his fellow inmates with his concerts. The Lomaxes were so impressed with Lead Belly that they cut a whole record of his singing, and they agreed to record a song he wrote for the governor of Louisiana, begging to get out of jail. The lyrics were: "In nineteen hundred an' thirty-two, / Honorable Guvner O.K. Allen, / I'm 'pealin' to you. / If I had you, Guvner O.K. Allen, / Like you got me, / I would wake up in de mornin', / Let you out on reprieve."

The Lomaxes took the song to Governor Oscar K. Allen, and not long afterwards Lead Belly was let out of prison — it was actually an early release for good behavior, but both Lead Belly and the Lomaxes thought the song had helped. After that, the Lomaxes helped put Lead Belly in the national spotlight.

Alan and John Lomax headed up the Library of Congress "Archive of American Folk Song," recording and preserving thousands of songs. Alan was particularly interested in doing more extensive interviews with their subjects, and he recorded the oral histories of musicians like Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Jelly Roll Morton, Muddy Waters, and Vera Hall.

In August of 1940, Alan started a prime-time radio program called Back Where I Come From. The first episode was hosted by literary critic Clifton Fadiman and featured Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Len Doyle, Josh White, and the Golden Gate Quartet. Performers took turns saying, "Back where I come from, we always say..." and filling it in with a local saying. Each episode was centered around a particular theme — for the first episode, it was "weather." The cast sang "It Ain't Gonna Rain No More," "The Erie Canal," "The Foggy Dew," and "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You," which was interwoven with Guthrie's commentary about the Dust Bowl. Back Where I Come From aired three nights a week, for 15 minutes. Soon Pete Seeger signed on as well. Besides "Weather," other themes included "Jails," "Nonsense Songs," and "Love True and Careless." The cast and crew thought the show was a success, but CBS unexpectedly canceled it in February of 1941.

Lomax wrote to Guthrie: "Our agent William Morris told us we were set for life. And then the great paw of America reached out and stopped it: Mister William B. Paley said that he didn't want any of that goddamn hillbilly music on his network. And that was that." Guthrie replied: "Too honest again I suppose? Maybe not purty enough. O well, this country's a getting to where it cain't hear its own voice. Someday the deal will change."

For the rest of his life, Lomax continued to record folk artists, champion folk music, and publish books. His books include American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934), Mister Jelly Roll (1950), Folk Song Style and Culture (1968), and The Land Where the Blues Began (1993).

The award-winning, best-selling soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) begins with a recording that Lomax made in 1959 of James Carter and fellow prisoners in the Mississippi State Penitentiary singing "Po' Lazarus." More than 40 years after Carter sang "Po' Lazarus," Alan Lomax and his Lomax organization teamed up with an investigative reporter and T Bone Burnett — the producer of the soundtrack — to track down Carter and pay him royalties. Carter's first check was for $20,000, and he was amazed to hear that the soundtrack was outselling albums by Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson. That was in March of 2002. A few months later, Alan Lomax died at the age of 87.

He said: "We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they're not like him. Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency."