Subject: RE: Alan Lomax: Another View
From:
Bennet Zurofsky
Date: 23 Jul 02 - 12:07 PM
Many of the criticisms of Lomax that are expressed above reflect an almost complete failure to appreciate the times and context in which he did his most important work. Alan Lomax was raised in Texas, i.e., he was a child of the Jim Crow South. He did most of his important collecting in the Jim Crow South. It is not, therefore, surprising, that some of the racism that was at the very heart of that culture is sometimes reflected in his work.
What is surprising, and what makes Alan, and his father John, great, is the extent to which they overcame that culture. More than any other collectors, including the commercial recording companies that limited their releases to the "race records" audience, the Lomaxes gathered the many musics of Southern Black culture, preserved them and, perhaps most importantly, dignified them as the important cultural heritage they are, preserving them in the Library of Congress, publishing them, and presenting them to an international, multi-racial, educated audience.
In "The Land Where Blues Began" Alan Lomax describes much of this work. Can you imagine the impact it must have had when he came to a small Southern town, identifying himself as from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and then sought out the Black musicians among the sharecroppers and denizens of the jook joint? Although he also recorded many White musicians in the South, his principal focus was upon Black musicians. Here he was, the voice of authority, effectively saying that this Black culure was the most important thing to be found in those towns. This certainly had an impact on Black pride and probably upon Southern White attitudes as well.
And how about going into the prisons to record the Black prisoners, i.e., the very people that the prevailing Southern White culture viewed as the lowest of the low? Those prisons essentially were a re-invention of slavery for Southern Black men. The Lomax's prison work not only discovered and preserved a great deal of wonderful music, it also opened up those prisons and their conditions to a great deal of scrutiny from non-Southern eyes that they would not have otherwise received.
John and Alan Lomax were an extremely interesting pair. If they had not been father and son it seems unlikely that they ever would have worked together. John was reputedly fairly conservative in his politics while Alan was, at the least, a close fellow traveller of the Communist Party. When one looks at Alan's most productive years, i.e., the 1940's and early 1950's (until he decided to live in England to avoid McCarthyism in the U.S.), it is plain that he had a strong political agenda that he worked hard to promote through folk song and which included racial equality as one of its principal planks. It is no coincidence that Lead Belly began to compose and sing political songs like "Bourgeoise Blues" only after he became closely associated with the Lomaxes. Alan Lomax was extremely active in promoting concerts and acting as a "svengali" for up and coming folksingers to whom he provided material, including performers like Burl Ives and Josh White whose names don't often come up in connection with Alan's obituaries. The Bear Family multi-cd set "Songs for Political Action" is a good source to get some perspective on this aspect of Alan's carreer. It seems to me that Alan is the one who largely gets the credit (or some might say blame) for folk music's strong identification with the left. Prior to that, many of folk music's better known promoters, like Henry Ford, used it to promote specifically right wing causes (cf. Adolf Hitler, another promoter of "folk music" in the 1930's).
The copyright question also needs to be placed in context. First and foremost, the Lomaxes had to make a living and they had to support their collecting activity. Contrary to what most people seem to believe, they were paid very little for their work with the Library of Congress and had to support their collecting largely from their own pockets. Collectors had long copyrighted the music they collected, see, e.g., Percy Grainger, Bela Bartok and Cecil Sharpe. The Lomaxes were probably better than most in sharing the credit with their source.
The fact is that in our culture you have to figure out a way to make some money from it if you are going to be able to continue worthwhile work. Composers and the sources of traditional songs certainly deserve their royalties, but so do people like the Lomaxes who schlepped their so-called portable recording equipment (a concept that we take for granted but which they pretty much invented), which weighed five hundred pounds or more, to remote places with no electricity to "discover" these musics, record them, and then bring them to the world, successfully promoting them to the culture at large. Copyright of traditional material is an extremely controversial and difficult subject, but it is far from plainly evil for the Lomaxes to claim royalties arising from their collecting work. They were intrepid collectors who brought us a great deal of music that it is unlikely we would have ever heard otherwise.
Their relationship with Lead Belly is also a highly complicated one, involving all of the issues referred to above and more. Lead Belly was in many ways the Lomax's colleague in collecting, as well as their greatest "discovery," and it is undeniable that at times their attitude towards him seemed condescending and their remuneration of him for his efforts seemed less than fair. (Although from what I read it seems that Alan was considerably less guilty of these sins than his father was). Nevertheless, but for the Lomaxes, Huddie Ledbetter would have likely ended his days as an unknown and undiscovered genius, worked to death in the virtual slavery of the Southern prisons. Surely the vastly improved life, the continuing fame and the international appreciation of his genius that Lead Belly would never have attained but for the Lomaxes must stand as a significant counterweight against whatever "sins" they committed against him.
-Bennet Zurofsky
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