Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934-1997 (review)

As a collector and an unflagging advocate of American folk music in the years before and after World War II, Alan Lomax, the son of John A. Lomax, had no peer. A great percentage of the field recordings deposited in what was then the Archive of American Folk Music sprang from the battery-powered Duotone recording machine the Lomaxes stowed in the trunk of their car. It was the Lomaxes, particularly Alan, who introduced us to Iron Head Baker, Mose Platt, anonymous prison wood cutters and tracklayers who appeared on his recordings, Vera Hall, Muddy Waters, and hundreds of other great artists. It was Alan who refused to hide these treasures away in an archive and ceaselessly promoted the singers and their songs on the radio and through commercial recordings, concerts, and hootenannies. And to Alan goes no small measure of credit for the folk revival that has sustained academic interest in folklore.

For all those reasons, Lomax's various writings anthologized here by the astute Ronald Cohen are historically important. If there is anything of great value missing from these selected readings, it might be some of the liner notes Lomax wrote for his Southern Journey anthology of field recordings, now available on compact disc from the Rounder Records label.

At the same time, it is not always wise to reread one's early writing, as every writer learns sooner or later. At times, Alan Lomax is patronizing, describing various African American individuals as "blue black" (p. 10), "kinky head[ed]" (p. 10), or a "cotton headed old fellow with a mouthful of snuff" (p. 13). The unconscious racism of a lad raised in Texas early in the twentieth century leaks through in the use of the term "buck Negro" (p. 19) or when he refers to an adult African American as "the boy" (p. 21). Other passages reveal a raw naivety: "I had heard several versions of the song ['Stagolee']," Lomax writes, "but I wanted the correct one" (p. 50). His galloping romanticism sometimes expresses itself in sheer overwriting. In one passage, for example, he states that the American singer's "songs have been strongly rooted in his life and have functioned there as enzymes to assist in the digestion of hardship, solitude, violence, hunger and the honest comradeship of democracy" (p. 63).

Over time, Lomax outgrew such comments, particularly after coming in contact with the American Left in the prewar years. Nonetheless, he continued to find it difficult to curb his habit of grand generalizations. For example, he wrote that the "Southern Italian [capitals in the original] . . . comes to the bed of his inexperienced madonna flushed with wine and the repressed passion of a long engagement, a feeling that is closely akin to anger. Little wonder that so many Southern Italian marriages are sexually infelicitous" (p. 162–3). This cultural observation, one adds, spilled from the typewriter of a forty-four-year-old man who had spent no more than a year in that country.

That habit of thought involving grand generalizations infused the two most controversial articles of Lomax's career: "Folk Song Style" (American Anthropologist 61(6): 927–54, 1959) and "Song Structure and Social Structure" (Ethnology 1(4):425–51, 1962). In these articles, Lomax becomes the first to link the vocal cords with the sex organs, insisting again with broad generalization that courtship patterns conditioned vocal style around the world. Stated simply, the more repressed a culture, the more constrained the singer's vocal production—never mind the exceptions. He had become the Alan Lomax, authority on folk music around the world. Even then he was still promoting folk music. If the revival had moved past him, if he had outlived his Rooseveltian times, he has still left his mark.