It might seem unfair to examine John and Alan Lomax together so frequently, but their work and attitudes overlap to such an extent that delineating either cleanly becomes
problematic. Since John Lomax’s early work was concerned mainly with cowboy songs, it is
243 Russell, Ian, and Atkinson, David. 2004. Folk Song: Tradition, Revival and Re – creation. The Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen. p. 89.
244
worth looking at how he defined the cowboy songs and the culture that created them. When the introduction to Cowboy Songs is explored, one of the most arresting aspects of its definition is what it owes to the Romantic Movement as well as Antimodernism. Lomax refers to the same conditions of social isolation and illiteracy that Sharp invokes, and also includes the same kind of generalised folk history as the basis for the cowboy song.245 The purpose of Lomax’s definition in Cowboy Songs is difficult to gauge, because of the popular aim of the collection. The romanticism of this characterisation may have resulted from Lomax’s desire to make the collection commercially appealing. In his discussion of the development of the singing cowboy, Peterson accords a prominent place to Cowboy Songs,
The 1910 anthology Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads was the first widely – distributed, full – length publication that featured the image of cowboy as
singer. In his introduction to the anthology, John A. Lomax presents the stock
romanticised depiction of cowboy ways…246
This ‘stock romanticised depiction’ of the American cowboy owed a considerable amount to Sharp and his ‘stock romanticised depiction’ of the American ‘peasant’, since both characterisations of the ‘folk’ are based on cultural isolation and the ‘natural’ instinct towards song. However, it is somewhat reductive to refer to Lomax’s image of the American cowboy as a ‘stock’ image, since this obfuscates the various traditions at work in Lomax’s cowboy. There is the Romantic tradition of characterising the rural folk as living simple lives, which are representative of traditions that are disappearing in the face of modernisation of one kind or another. As Berlin points out, the notion of the traditions of men being
communal and valuable can even be found in the work of Rousseau, such as The Social
Contract (1762), ‘…which is a typically classical treatise that speaks of the return of man to
those original, primary principles which all men have in common…’247 The romanticisation of the cowboy was not a simple process of personally distorting the nature or origins of
something, but was based on an inherited discourse of Romantic ideals. Perhaps the more
245 Lomax, John A. 1910. Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. New York, MacMillan Press. 246
Peterson, Richard A. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. University of Chicago Press. p. 82.
247 Berlin, Isaiah. 1999. The Roots of Romanticism: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. Princeton University Press. p. 7.
important context for Lomax was the tradition of manhood at Harvard and the associated Antimodernism movement. As discussed previously, conceptions of manhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were based around the live of strenuous activity, without the trappings of overcivilised late Victorian society. Lomax’s cowboy was an embodiment of the idealised Harvard man, who lived simply, strenuously, and honestly. Perhaps most importantly, the cowboy worked hard for his honest living, and in doing so did the duty of an ideal man. William James offered a violent exhortation along these lines in the Dilemma of Determinism (1884), ‘Hang your sensibilities! Stop your snivelling
complaints, and your equally snivelling raptures! Leave off your general emotional
tomfoolery, and get to WORK like men!’248 Lears describes the related desire during the late Victorian period of reviving the traditional artisan,
Yearning to reintegrate selfhood by resurrecting the authentic experience of manual labour, a number of Americans looked hopefully toward the figure of the premodern artisan. His work was necessary and demanding; it was rooted in a genuine community; it was a model of hardness and wholeness.249
This could easily describe the work of the cowboy, ‘necessary and demanding…rooted in a genuine community…a model of hardness and wholeness’.
Lomax also followed on from Child, and cites the collective and anonymous composition of the cowboy songs, and also the spontaneity of such folk song creations,
The work of the men, their daily experiences, their thoughts, their interests, were all in common. Such a community had necessarily to turn to itself for
entertainment. Songs sprang up naturally, some of them tender and familiar lays of childhood, others original compositions, all genuine, however crude and
unpolished...in this sense, therefore, any song that came from such a group would be the joint product of a number of them...250
248
Townsend, Kim. 1996. Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others. Norton, London. p. 39.
249 Lears, T.J. Jackson. 1994. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880 – 1920. University of Chicago Press. p. 60.
250
Lomax uses very similar terms to those Child and Sharp use, such as ‘naturally’ and
‘genuine’, to emphasise the place these songs have in a wider folk song tradition. Also, this infers the existence of ‘unnatural’ and ‘un – genuine’ folk songs, of the sort decried by Child and Sharp as the products of people other than the real ‘folk’. Peterson also makes an interesting point about the relationship of the cowboy to civilisation, ‘Imbedded in this scenario is the tragic realisation that the cowboy, in working as an agent of civilisation, is bringing about the demise of the older communal ways in which his way of life is
imbedded.’251 Lomax presented the idea that civilisation has ended the cowboy traditions, but as Peterson points out the image of the cowboy suggests that this decline is inevitable because of the nature of the cowboy. Beyond this realisation, it has been observed by
Townsend that the cowboy did not necessarily completely disappear from American culture,
Of course the cowpuncher did not really have to retreat after all. He only had to relocate and change costumes. He has survived, he has thrived, in fact, in hard – boiled detectives, gangsters, superannuated cold warriors and new frontiersmen, in fictive space probers, rogue stock manipulators, or purchasers of second homes “in the country.” He has taken up permanent residence at the heart of American culture.252
Townsend makes the point that the cowboy as an image of manhood has persisted
throughout the twentieth century, and can be seen the ideal of manhood of each successive decade in America. Although the profession of the cowboy had declined, some of the
characteristics which Lomax values in the cowboy, e.g. hard work, sense of duty, and belonging to a community, can be seen in these images of manhood Townsend describes. Although, an intrinsic part of the Antimodern idea of manhood was its existence despite the overcivilisation of modern society, so it is easy to understand why Lomax conceived of the cowboy as living in a declining tradition.
Clearly Lomax was determined to promote these cowboy songs as authentic, particularly since he was defining a type of indigenous American folk music. This is an
251 Peterson, Richard A. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. University of Chicago Press. p. 82.
252
important point since indigenous American musical styles had hitherto been largely ignored, certainly by academic collectors. Even though Sharp transcribed songs from rural Americans, he was only interested in identifiably English songs. Lomax needed to provide the cowboy songs he collected with some kind of legitimacy, which partly explains the introduction to the third edition by academic folk song authority Barrett Wendell, with tacit endorsement from Kittredge. The definition of cowboy songs served as much to enhance their importance as to theorise their origins.’253 He was quietly promoting the idea of an indigenous American folk music, which was an unfamiliar idea particularly in 1910 when the book was published, while still emphasising the British tradition prevalent in America. He referred to the ‘Anglo – Saxon ballad spirit’ as being responsible for the continuation of British folk music and for the cowboy songs. Lomax manages to mitigate the audacity of his indigenous American folk music claims by suggesting they are basically British in their origin and style.
By the time John Lomax began working with his son Alan he was more outspoken about uniquely American folk music, and his agenda was to document this tradition rather than linking it to British traditions. Working together on recording expeditions in the early 1930s, John and Alan were developing their own definition of this unique American music which diverged from the Child/Sharp tradition. Filene describes the Lomaxes as having,
…produced a web of criteria for determining what a “true” folk singer looked and sounded like and a set of assumptions about the importance of being a “true” folk singer. In short, they created a “cult of authenticity,” a thicket of expectations and valuations that American roots musicians and their audiences have been
negotiating ever since.254
Although the Lomaxes believed this ‘authenticity’ manifested differently from Child and Sharp’s conception of authenticity, they still based much of their definition of American folk song on the same assumptions. Filene is incorrect when he ascribes his ‘cult of authenticity’ to the Lomaxes, because the rudiments of their ‘web of criteria’ are very similar to Child and Sharp. The Lomaxes undoubtedly contributed to this ‘cult of authenticity’, but as this
253 Lomax, John A. 1910. Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. New York, MacMillan Press.
254 Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. University of North Carolina Press. p. 49.
chapter shows the foundations were created by the European collectors and the early American collectors.
These criteria and assumptions include the perennial idea that the rural working classes can be the only ‘true’ folk singers, as demonstrated by Alan Lomax’s declaration that, ‘To be folk, you live folk’255. This statement was made in 1959 in response to the growing folk music revival movement, which was sustained largely by people who would not qualify as ‘true’ folk singers by the Lomaxes standards. The context for Alan’s declaration regarding authenticity was an epiphany following his period collecting music in Europe, primarily in Britain. Szwed describes this realisation as,
Work songs in Spain, Scotland, and Italy had made Alan further aware of the relationship between vocal tension, sexual restrictions, and socioeconomic development. Reading Freud, Marx, and Emile Durkheim on the relationship between forms of production and social organisation and Darwin’s writings on emotion in animals and humans, gave him the means to bring together
materialism, psychoanalysis, and social and cultural evolution as the foundations of a theory of song.256
Alan became convinced that folk music was defined by style, which in turn was defined by the culture which produced the songs, and its attitudes to sex, death, family, and various other important aspects of life. He was determined to find the connections between societies and folk song styles, particularly vocal styles and the physical complexities of the voice. Following these realisations Alan urged revival folk singers to reproduce vocal style and even posture, if they wanted to be able to sing folk music authentically.
The revivalists were urban, college educated, middle – class young people who were breaking somewhat from the middle class culture of the period. However, this idea was by no means only a reaction to the American folk revival: Child claimed authenticity in popular ballads was linked to the circumstances in which it was created, and that they are
255
Denisoff, R. Serge and Lund, Jens. 1971. ‘The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture: Contributions and Contradictions’. Journal of American Folklore. 84/334. p. 396.
256 Szwed, John. 2010. The Man Who Recorded the World: A Biography of Alan Lomax. William Heinemann, London. p. 330.
fundamentally inimitable by the modern writer.257 Sharp also limited authenticity in folk music to, ‘those whose mental development has not been due to any formal system of training or education, but solely to environment, communal association, and direct contact with the ups and downs of life.’258 Tied to this depiction of rural working class authenticity is the notion held especially firmly by John Lomax that isolation was conducive to authentic folk music, ‘The Lomaxes hoped to find the old styles “damned up” in America’s more isolated areas.’259 They also dismissed the relevance or influence of contemporary popular music, as could be heard on the radio in the early 1930s. Alan Lomax was particularly
disappointed during a recording trip in the mid-1950s when he could not find the folk music he was expecting.260 John Lomax resented the proliferation of popular music through technologies like the radio and phonograph, and the fact that they appeared to be supplanting folk music in many working class areas.261
The Lomaxes definition of American folk music was complicated by their interest in African – American music, and their progressive belief that it belonged under the banner of ‘American folk music’. John Lomax identified one of the most distinctive traits of something that could be called American folk music: its ethnic diversity. Even in his early recording expeditions John Lomax recorded British – American, African – American, and Spanish – American music, and made no value distinctions between ethnicities in folk music. In fact, he believed that one of the strongest aspects of indigenous American folk music was the African – American music he had recorded. In his 1937 report to Congress, he explained the larger numbers of African – American folk song recordings in the Archive, ‘The explanation of the proportionately larger number of records of Negro folk songs is that more Negro songs are available. The Negro is our chief folk singer.’262Patrick Mullen argues,
Lomax’s attitudes towards race were complex and changed over the course of his life; they were based on nineteenth century cultural assumptions about blacks, his
257 Child, Francis. 1900. ‘Ballad Poetry’. Johnson’s Universal Cyclopaedia. New York. 258
Sharp, Cecil J. 1907. English Folk Song: Some Conclusions. London. p. 3. 259
Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. University of North Carolina Press. p. 50.
260 Collins, Shirley. 2004. America over the Water. SAF Publishing, London. 261
Porterfield, Nolan. 1996. The Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax. University of Illinois Press. p. 268.
262 Lomax, John A. 1937. Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress. United States Government Printing Office, Washington. p. 151.
emotional early childhood experiences, his formal education, and social and fieldwork contacts with blacks from different socioeconomic milieu.263
Mullen also quotes Lomax’s biographer Porterfield saying, ‘Those attitudes, although indefensible from an enlightened point of view, were nevertheless commingled with a sensibility which complicates any effort to dismiss him as a simple racist.’264 Mullen also discusses Alan Lomax’s attitudes towards African – American music and culture as the conflation of various attitudes on race, but something which is fundamentally progressive, ‘Lomax seems to be consciously constructing whiteness from what he thinks is a black perspective to more fully identify with blacks himself…’265 Despite any conflicted attitudes the Lomaxes both held regarding race, their work speaks to a commitment towards African – American music and culture, and at least a partial refusal to recognise social constraints of race. For instance, John Lomax went to great lengths to promote Lead Belly as an
accomplished folk singer, to find him work, and to enable his wife to travel with him. John Lomax also spent the latter part of his career working largely with African – American folk music, since he believed it to be among the most important folk music styles in America. Alan also spent much of his career working with African – American folk music, and in particular championing African – American musical styles like jazz. His indefatigable efforts to promote the pioneering jazz music of Jelly Roll Morton is evidence of this, and as Alan later remarked regarding his interviews with Jelly Roll,
I later came to call this process “the cultural system,” where people talk their images into a recording instrument or into a film, and suddenly begin to find that they have importance, what they have to say is significant. All that came out of the Jelly Roll interview…This was the first oral history, and that’s how it all began on the stage. Jelly Roll invented oral history, you might say.266
263
Mullen, Patrick B. 2000. ‘The Dilemma of Representation in Folk Studies: The Case of Henry Truvillion and John Lomax’, Journal of Folklore Research. 37/2 – 3. p. 156.
264
Porterfield, Nolan. 1996. The Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax. University of Illinois Press. p. 169.
265
Mullen, Patrick B. 2008. The Man Who Adores the Negro: Race and American Folklore. University of Illinois Press. p. 96.
266 Szwed, John. 2010. The Man Who Recorded the World: A Biography of Alan Lomax. William Heinemann, London. p. 124.
This is another instance of the political and social context dictating the work of the American collectors: in the case of John Lomax the prevailing attitudes of the early twentieth –
century American South still affected his ideas about African – American music, but what was more important was his own experiences recording work songs, blues, and spirituals which convinced him of the importance of African – American music as part of American culture overall. Much of Alan Lomax’s work was conducted during the Civil Rights
movement, and this political background influenced his promotion of African – American music, and partly fulfilled Alan’s wishes of cultural equity for African – American culture.
Lomax’s racial views are integral to his conception of African – American folk music, and as Mullen suggests must be examined with due consideration of context. His
consideration of black music, and attitude towards the institutional dismissal of black culture and society, was undoubtedly progressive. However, it was inhibited by Lomax’s ingrained ‘Old South conservative’ politics, and in his definition of American folk music black musical forms belonged to a naturally inferior people. Or, as Porterfield observes, ‘He was no less than a product of his time; he was, alas, never more than it either.’267 Lomax was frustrated by the same trends of overwritten folk music in black communities as he was in white communities. He regarded jazz as being especially threatening to the survival of black folk music, and lamented the popularity of ‘white pop music’ in black communities. Lomax deplored,
…that segment of blacks who were ashamed of their heritage and blind to the true artistic value of their vernacular music. They simply made fools of
themselves, said Lomax, when they tried to imitate white music, with all its artifice and class snobbery.268
Speaking of the popular music influences he also said that African – American traditional songs, ‘in musical phrasing and in poetic content, are most unlike those of the white race,