The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

Chapter 2: Kelly Pace: Coworker in the Kingdom of Culture

[ 47 ] 2 Kelly Pace Coworker in the Kingdom of Culture O n October 1, 1934, using Arkansas State Penitentiary letterhead, John Lomax wrote home, “I ought to turn up something of rare interest.”1 And over the next few days he did. Despite the malfunctions of his recording apparatus and the long drives “down the worst roads in Arkansas” to get it repaired, he could report on his very next postcard, “We are headed for fine stuff at Cummins.”2 This unit of the state’s penal system, some seventy miles southeast of Little Rock, operated as a farm tended by an entirely African American workforce. There, for a second time within a week, a group of convicts performed for him a regional song that eventually became part of the American musical idiom—“Rock Island Line.” At Cummins Camp One, a charismatic twenty-one-year-old convict named Robert Kelly Pace, then serving his second term in prison, led the song with a group of seven fellow inmates. Their performance involved a closely patterned call-and-response, their voices dispersed in three- and sometimes four-part harmony. Between the choruses one of them imitated a train whistle. On the brown dust jacket of the recording disc, John Lomax noted that the singers, accompanied by a guard on horseback, had just run in from working in a cotton field, eager “‘to git on dat machine.’”3 Curiously, Lomax always associated this piece with the tasks of outdoor labor. Although [ 48 ] he had set up his disc machine in the wood yard, and recorded several songs that day to the sounds of chopping wood, “Rock Island Line” was not among them. During his next visit to Cummins in 1939 he wrote about another group of convicts: “After several experiments with shovels and picks in an effort to get the right sound effects, a group finally recorded ‘Rock Island Line’ in the mess hall where the machine was set up.”4 Yet on that recording, too, no sounds of tools appear, no effects audibly related to physical toil, only voices arranged in close harmony.5 Still later, in The Ballad Hunter, his 1941 recorded lecture series, and in his subsequent autobiography, Lomax depicts Kelly Pace and his companions filling their sacks to the rhythm of the song, “as if they were on an express train tearing through the cotton patch on the famous Rock Island Line.”6 When Lomax recorded them singing it one last time in September 1942, “Rock Island Line” again incorporates only vocal harmonizing as before. Nothing about these performances ties it to the essentially solitary task of cotton picking. Instead, the recordings John Lomax made of “Rock Island Line” show it to be a quartet song—unaccompanied, social, church based, arranged for singing, and staged for listening. When Kelly Pace and his companions bounded from their labors in the cotton fields to perform for the Library’s recording machine, they carried with them circumstances and conditions that freighted this song from the start. “Rock Island Line” began its journey in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the repair shops of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. Based on a traditional form and arising within a commercial setting, the song, like a trunk line whose branches radiate across the countryside, soon moved beyond this work site making new stops, shifting its contents, and streamlining its load. It migrated from a gospel quartet that the Arkansas prisoners performed to a rhythmic fable that Huddie Ledbetter created as he traveled with John Lomax as chauffeur, auto mechanic, and musical demonstrator. Eventually the song reached an incalculable number of players, singers, and listeners via skiffle, rock and roll, country, pop, and the folksong revival.7 Yet for all these crossings and couplings, “Rock Island Line” hung on to its message, emblazoned in boxcar letters of a train fleeting past, to become the poetry by which a proud railroad is still remembered. On December 3, 1929, at Little Rock’s Arch Street Missionary Baptist Church, just off the main stem of the city’s black shopping district, an African Americhapter 2 [ 49 ] can vocal quartet opened the evening’s program. Known as the Rock Island Colored Booster Quartet, these singers—Clarence Wilson, Jake Mason, Walter Dennis, and Phil Garrett—worked at the nearby Biddle Shops, the central freight yard, repair works, and roundhouse for the Rock Island railroad’s Arkansas-Louisiana Division. At...