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Callaloo 27.2 (2004) 406


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lomax v. leadbelly in new york:

letters to home, 1934*

Tyehimba Jess

i am disturbed and distressed at this man messin' with my music,
his beginning to show off preachin' how a songster gotta be pure
in his songs and talk —like he got a deed to folkways,
when his money value is the way blues sweats out a man
to be like prayer
natural and sincere set free from smotherin'
as he was while in prison: in a solitary cell.
of course, fact is,
as this tendency grows, this jailbird that lost it all twice already-
he will lose his charm he ain't 'bout to lose nerve, too,
and become only an
ordinary, old timey,
low ordinary busted out,
harlem countrified
nigger
Tyehimba Jess won the 2001 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Awards and an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry for 2000-2001. His work has appeared in Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, Ploughshares, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, 580 Split, and elsewhere.

*Italicized text from John Lomax's letter to his wife, January, 1935

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