Bess Lomax Hawes (1921-2009)

Bess Lomax Hawes was born Bess Brown Lomax Jr. on January 21, 1921, in Austin, Texas. Her father John Avery Lomax had published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910, gaining a national reputation as a pioneering folklorist and champion of the oral traditions of "ordinary" Americans. Her learned Texan mother, Bess Bauman Brown, was an admirer of music, Latin, and history, and she left her intellectual stamp on Bess and her three older siblings—Shirley (b. 1905), John Avery Jr. (1907), and Alan James (1915). Home schooling by her mother included rigorous piano training and being assigned a Latin motto—faciendo ediscere facere, "learn through doing"—that Bess would often bring to mind later in her life. Bess recalled growing up in a nurturing family setting filled with song and sophistication, up to the time of her mother's death in 1931. In the wake of her mother's passing, Bess lived happily for a time with her sister Shirley in Lubbock, Texas. In 1934, her father married Ruby Rochelle Terrill, dean of women at the University of Texas, and assumed the position of honorary consultant and curator of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He took Bess, Alan, and Ruby with him on the road trip to D.C., and Bess would later recount how the stark, unnerving poverty that she witnessed on the drive through Appalachia to Washington would steel her enduring concern for remedying social and economic inequities.

In Washington, Bess made acquaintances that would shape her later professional life. She assisted composer Ruth Crawford Seeger in transcribing field recordings for her father and brother's milestone book, Our Singing Country. Friendships with Seeger's composer-musicologist husband Charles, cofounder of the American Musicological Society, and his musical children Peter, Peggy, and Michael, endured over their lifetimes. Bess studied sociology at Bryn Mawr College (1938-41), took a job with the New York Public Library in New York City, and joined the seminal folk-music revival group, the Almanac Singers. The loose-knit Almanacs comprised Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Sis Cunningham, and many other cornerstones of the folksong revival movement, as well as Baldwin "Butch" Hawes, whom Bess married in 1943. She would record two albums with the Almanacs for Moses Asch, Songs for Citizen C.I.O. (Asch record label) and Talking Union (Folkways Records). When the US entry into World War II following Pearl Harbor in December 1941 led to the end of her work as research assistant for the Columbia School of the Air (CBS) at the library, Bess joined the Radio Program Bureau of the Office of War Information, contributing to its music programming. The OWI's New York station broadcast via short-wave radio news and music to the western war theater in Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa.

Bess and Butch settled into family life, eventually giving birth to three children: Corey (1946), Naomi (1947), and Nicholas (1948). In 1947, the Hawes family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in pursuit of opportunities for Butch's work as a book illustrator. There, both were active in the Progressive Party, Butch creating political leaflets and Bess providing music for the campaign sound trucks that cruised Boston with their progressive message. To this end, she and her fellow song parodist Jacqueline Steiner in 1949 wrote a piece in opposition to the Boston mayor's proposal to increase train (Metropolitan Transit Authority) fares by charging fees when exiting the train (charging by distance ridden) rather than when entering. She recalled taking the idea of parodying "The Wreck of the Old Ninety-Seven" and "The Ship that Never Returned" from another parody Pete Seeger and the Almanacs had done in New York. The humorous song, "Charlie on the MTA," told of the sad lot of Charlie, who lacked a nickel to get off the train and whose wife would come to the train station each day to hand him a sandwich through the window as the train rumbled by. The song was well received but was all but forgotten after their candidate, Walter A...