Dirty Linen #71: The Alan Lomax Collection

Lomax's Legacy:
The Alan Lomax Collection
by Steve Winick

Alan Lomax, the most important folklorist of the twentieth century, has made it his life's work to collect, analyze and promote the musical folk arts: folk song, folk music and folk dance. The diverse styles and forms he personally collected in the field, from ballads to blues, from stornellos to shanties, and from fife bands to fandangos, bear witness to his curiosity and his drive to understand all the musics of the world. Although there are large sections of the world that his fieldwork did not cover, he has spent a lot of time analyzing the field recordings of others, a task for which he invented whole new systems of measurement - cantometrics for song, and choreometrics for dance. On top of this, he has been one of the most important popularizers of folk music; wherever he has gone, a folk revival has followed shortly after. As Brian Eno has observed, "without Lomax, it's possible there would have been no blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles and no Stones and no Velvet Underground." Still, Lomax's main desire was not to create new forms of pop music, but to make old forms increasingly popular. Pete Seeger has said of Lomax that he "set out to make [folk] songs as well-known as any pop song from Tin Pan Alley."

Lomax is finally getting his wish. His magnificent field recordings, some of which have been released before on LPs, but many of which have remained strictly archival, are being released by Rounder Records. The entire Lomax collection, which will consist of ten separate series and more than a hundred individual CDs, will be one of the most monumental sets of field tapes ever released, and offer as rich and detailed a panorama of world folk music as has ever been assembled by an individual collector. To kick off the mammoth project, Rounder has released The Alan Lomax Collection Sampler and the first six volumes of Lomax's Southern Journey series.

The Alan Lomax Collection Sampler [Rounder CD 1700 (1997)] is a wide-ranging collection of 37 short tracks that introduce the individual series. It contains music from the American South, from Canada, from England, Ireland and Scotland, from Italy, Spain and Romania, from the Caribbean, from Japan and from Bali. Since they had the whole range of the various series to work with, the producers (headed up by Lomax's daughter Anna L. Chairetakis) had every opportunity to pick attractive and interesting material, and they have done so admirably. Anyone who wants a guide to the collection, or a gauge of what unexplored musical areas might be to his or her taste, ought to buy this CD.

The Southern Journey series will ultimately consist of 13 CDs, taken from Lomax's 1959 and 1960 field trips to the southern U.S. At the time of these recordings, Lomax was thoroughly familiar with the territory and its performers; he had made numerous field trips there with his father, recording for the Library of Congress, and with others under the auspices of Fisk University, in the 30s and 40s. He returned with a veritable mountain of tape. This rich mine of song and music was originally the basis of two series of LPs: Atlantic's Sounds of the South and Prestige International's Southern Journey. The 12 LP Prestige series was released in mono even though the original tapes were stereo, and some of the tracks were released in incomplete, edited versions. This Rounder series, which replaces the Prestige recordings, presents all the original Prestige tracks, this time all complete and in stereo, plus many unreleased tracks.

Voices from the American South [Rounder 1701 (1997)], the first volume of Southern Journey, is described in the notes as "a kind of road map to the many artists and styles represented on the following volumes." It offers a variety of extraordinary performances from unparalleled artists. Fred McDowell, who had such influence on the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, provides a lyrical and moving spiritual with gorgeous slide guitar accompaniment. Neil Morris, whose son went by the name of Jimmy Driftwood, sings the old Scottish ballad "The Lass of Loch Royal," and also calls a square dance. The Bright Light Quartet harmonize richly on two gospel numbers. Other great performers include Almeda Riddle, Sid Hemphill and J.E. Mainer. Performances by the versatile singer and instrumentalist Hobart Smith and the brilliant singer Bessie Jones bookend the disc, and help to emphasize Lomax's importance in the cross-pollination of southern styles that led to rock and roll; Smith, a white man from Virginia, and Jones, a descendent of slaves from the Georgia Sea Islands, would probably never have met if not for Lomax, yet their musical collaborations show a remarkable ability to communicate across the considerable cultural divisions of the South. As a metaphor, this could stand for the Southern Journey series, and also for Lomax's distinguished career of communicating across cultures.

Volume 2, entitled Ballads and Breakdowns [Rounder CD 1702 (1997)] features songs and tunes from the southern mountains. This Anglo-American mountain tradition, which at different times has been called "Hillbilly" and "Old-Timey" music, was the basis of bluegrass and one of the main ingredients of country and western. By the time Lomax made these field recordings, it had been popularized by commercial recordings and the Grand Ole Opry, but Lomax always had a knack for finding virtuoso musicians who performed songs and tunes from their family and regional traditions. This disc presents songs and tunes of mostly British and Irish origin, ballads like "Three Little Babes," a version of "The Wife of Usher's Well," and fiddle tunes like "Bonaparte's Retreat." The murder ballad, so popular in Appalachia, is represented by Estil Ball's "Poor Ellen Smith," the Lullaby by Texas Gladden's "Whole Heap a' Little Horses" and the protest song by Hobart Smith's "Peg an' Awl." These are interspersed with plenty of fiddle and banjo tunes. There's even an example of the blues, which had come to the mountains with black folks and had been taken up by whites; the example here, by Smith, is a classic 16-bar blues with guitar accompaniment that has a bit of old-time music's brightness wedded to the characteristic melodic runs and blue notes of African-American blues.

For deep blues and its antecedents, though, the place to go is volume 3, 61 Highway Mississippi [Rounder CD 1703 (1997)]. Named for one of the most perfect tracks of the series, Fred McDowell's rendition of "61 Highway Blues," this disc presents blues, field hollers, work-gang songs, spirituals, dance music, and other African-American forms. About a quarter of the tracks are by McDowell, who was on the verge of a career breakthrough as a result of Lomax's recordings of him. His slide guitar and voice are extraordinary, and well worth the space lavished on them. Other great blues performers include John Dudley, whose reliance on crying-style chords betray his origins in Robert Johnson's Tunica County, and Rose Hemphill, whose singing guitar and anguished vocals are a match for many bluesmen of the time, and who sings an unabashed blues from the man's perspective: "What you want with a woman, she won't do nothin' she says!" Some of the tracks are relative rarities. Sid Hemphill, Rose's Father, was an accomplished musician on several instruments, but concentrates here on the quills, the southern U.S.'s version of panpipes, which had all but died out by the late 50s. A few tracks were recorded in prisons by working chain gangs, including a fascinating bluesy call-and-response version of the old Irish ballad "Skewbald." The Young Brothers Band gives a fine, rollicking example of dance music for cane fifes and drums, also a moribund tradition at the time, and Miles and Bob Pratcher play in the rare, old black string-band style. Without Lomax and these recordings, marginal black traditions like these would be virtually unheard-of today.

Volume 4, Brethren We Meet Again [Rounder CD 1704 (1997)], concentrates on white spirituals. Most of the tracks are sung in the sharp, nasal voices, steady legato phrasings and piercingly effective harmonies of Old Regular Baptist Churches and Sacred Harp singing groups. Well-known hymns such as "Guide Me, Oh Thou Great Jehovah" and "Amazing Grace" are given this kind of treatment, as are some less common songs such as "Northport." Examples of testimony from folk preachers and ministers are also included, as is the call-and-response hymn "Why Must I Die and Wear This Shroud?" In addition to these performances, many solo songs and even some string-band style numbers are here; songs like "Lonely Tombs," "Old Gospel Ship," and "When the Stars Begin to Fall," which feature the guitar, and "My Lord Keeps a Record" by the bluegrass band The Mountain Ramblers. Several songs in ballad style, including "I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger" by Almeda Riddle and "The Little Family" by Ollie Gilbert, add still another facet. In all, this is a surprisingly varied collection of music, demonstrating both the versatility of the spiritual as a form and the pervasiveness of spirituality in white southern life.

Volume 5, Bad Man Ballads [Rounder CD 1705 (1997)], turns to the theme of crime. Songs about criminals and outlaws were popular among both white and black southerners, and indeed are popular wherever in the world ballads are sung. The best-known songs here are probably "Jesse James," "Railroad Bill" and "John Henry," all of which are given beautiful and spirited performances; the version of "Jesse James," though rather abbreviated from its common form, is interesting in that the singer's grandfather was James's first cousin. Other interesting songs include the murder ballad "Pretty Polly" and "Hangman Tree," a variant of the Child Ballad known as "Maid Freed From the Gallows"; both of these songs became popular in the folk revival, and Led Zeppelin's version of the latter is one of the great rock and roll adaptations of southern blues. Three different versions of the great blues ballad "Po' Lazarus" are included, and make for fascinating comparative listening. One final song that piqued my curiosity was "Willie Brennan." Given the similarities of Neil Morris's version here with that of the Clancy Brothers, I wonder whether the Clancys' performance of it on the Ed Sullivan show in the late 50s, which made them a household name nationwide, had any effect on its life in the southern mountain tradition. Of course, that's one of those questions that will probably never be answered...

Like Volume 4, Volume 6, Sheep, Sheep Don'tcha Know the Road [Rounder CD 1706 (1997)] also explores the theme of spirituality...and that of sin, as well. Subtitled "Southern Music, Sacred and Sinful," it contains songs and tunes with both God-fearing and Devilish sensibilities. Such Satanic titles as "The Juice of the Forbidden Fruit" and "The Devil's Dream" are placed side by side with spirituals like "The Prayer Wheel," "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah," and the title track. In addition, blues, songs and tunes that refer to drinking, sex, crime andother sinful behavior are included. One of these, "You Got Dimples in your Jaws," marks one of the few appearances in this series of the harmonica, whose unaccountable absence on earlier volumes surprised me. Neil Morris's "Long Corn Dodgers," a previously unreleased track, is a wonderfully witty condemnation of everything from professions to religious denominations and on to entire genders, pointing out the universality of sin. In general, this volume suffers a little bit from lack of focus, seeming more like material that overflowed from the three preceding volumes than like an album in its own right; still, it includes some masterful performances of memorable songs.

The Southern Journey series, and indeed the whole collection, has been intelligently designed to provide for the needs of diverse audiences. The initial sampler will be useful for people who want a broad overview of Lomax's life work, Vol. 1 of the Southern Journey series provides an overview of the 1959-1960 field trips, and the following volumes take the listener in greater depth into one current of Lomax's "deep river of song." Each volume of Southern Journey includes excellent notes and full transcriptions of the lyrics and spoken words; these do contain many minor errors, but almost no major ones. The sampler, while not including lyrics, does come with a 72-page booklet of notes. Anyone who loves folk music would be well advised to explore these releases and those that are to follow, enormously important pieces of Lomax's legacy, and of the history of twentieth century music.

This is the full text from the current issue of Dirty Linen #71

You can read more articles by Steve Winick on his Homepage.