Banjo picker, and onetime member of the folkpop group the Journeymen, Dick Weissman introduced me to Lawrence Gellert (1896-1979), whom Dick regards as fundamental and unjustly deprived of a position in the first rank of song collectors. Gellert's collection of some 500 songs (200 of them protest songs) from American southern blacks beginning in 1924 is a landmark ... and almost totally unavailable.

Dick devotes several pages to Gellert in his book "Which Side Are You On" (Continuum), which I draw on here. He quotes (p 27) Nolan Porterfield's biography of John Lomax that Gellert was angered at John Lomax as having a "slaveholder mentality" in his treatment of Leadbelly, and charged Lomax "failed to get to the heart of contemporary Negro folk lore."

IMHO there's a real case to be made for this view. But Lomax ruled the folksong collecting world at the time, and what with this, his Marxism, his unfashionable insistence on the sheer power of black resistance, his insistence on using the N word where it occurred in folksong, and much else, Gellert ticked off a good few people and earned obscurity as a result. Too bad, for his collecting turned up a whole world of black folksong not tapped by anyone else. Gellert's thesis was that the heart of black protest singing had been overlooked or shunted aside. He came up with some gems.

Long before I'd ever heard of him I'd heard some of the unusually powerful songs he'd collected. They were part of the songlist on Josh White's little-known album "Chain Gang Songs," originally issued on 78 rpm in 1940, pressed on LP in 1958, and still available on CD, domestically on Collectibles label, or as a cheapie import. It had, if I remember correctly, either 6 or 8 songs, including:

Trouble
Going Home Boys (Crying Won't Make Me Stay)\
Nine Foot Shovel
Crying Who? Crying You

They were performed by White and three or four other singers in a pocket-choral style that made this one of the stranger releases I ever heard, but it's one you don't soon forget.

That album produced controversy. White's story was that he'd learned most of the songs while touring America with Blind Man Arnold, but Gellert charged that the album featured songs from his collection, some of them partly rewritten. According to Weissman's book Gellert sued White, demanding songwriting and music publishing credits. Columbia Records eventually granted him coauthorship, but Gellert was lost in the turmoil.

Three LP records have been released from his collection, but they're now out of print, and his books are fabulously rare, so his valuable collecting remains mostly out of reach.

Here's one loud vote for a reprint of both Gellert's books, "Me and My Captain" (1936) and "Negro Songs of Protest" (1939). They should be available to folklorists, and everyone, black and white alike, as basic sources.

Bob