Alan Lomax: Producer of the people. Part 2

Alan Lomax in space

It seems somehow fitting that as the Civil Rights took off, so did the Space Race. Sun Ra in particular, was convinced that the salvation of the black race lay in the new lands of other planets, something that John Szwed of course touched on extensively in his biography of Herman Blount. Similarly, many of the black musicians who would pioneer electronic music would also return to future and space imagery as a way of advancing black society and equal rights, in particular Detroit techno artists like Juan Atkins, Underground Resistance and Drexciya whose Atlantean world of drowned slaves bears many similarities.

It is thus a curious and somehow poetic addendum to the Lomax story that he should be involved with Carl Sagan in choosing the music that would go with the Voyager Golden Record on the mythical 1977 Voyager expedition. Szwed elaborates a little here.

In the interview, Szwed mentions an album of Voyager remixes, the “Scrambles of earth remix” which is, apparently, a remix of the Voyager music by aliens.

Alan Lomax in Spain

Lomax arrived in Spain in 1952, arriving by train from Paris, first changing at Port Bou on the border, as everyone still does, and then driving down to Barcelona prior heading to Mallorca and a state-sponsored folk festival. Although the festival was a disappointment, largely from being rehearsed and manipulated to uphold Franco’s cultural ideas and soured by the omnipresence of police, Lomax was undeterred and went on to record some of the most beautiful music of the entire archive and at the same time undergo many cultural epiphanies.

“This is a great country. Day hot. The sea near. Figs, oranges, plums, pears ripening. The houses old and simple. The towns old and beautiful. The people the most pleasant I have met anywhere, I decided to settle for life in every town and marry every young señorita I see… For a month or so, I wandered erratically, sunstruck by grave beauty of the land, faint and sick at the sight of this noble people, ground down by poverty and a police state. I saw that in Spain, folklore was not mere fantasy and entertainment. Each Spanish village was a self-contained cultural system with tradition penetrating every aspect of life; and it was in their inherited folklore that the peasant, the fisherman, the muleteers and the shepherds I met found their models for that noble behaviour and sense of the beautiful which made them such satisfactory friends.”

Throughout his trip, Lomax was followed by the Guardia Civil essentially working as Franco’s secret police, which had been tipped off by the FBI as to his “potential threat.”

“The black-hatted and dreadful Guardia Civil had me on their lists - I will never know why, for they never arrested me. But apparently they always knew where I was. No matter in what God-forsaken, unlikely spot in the mountains I would set up my gear, they would appear like so many buzzards carrying with them their stink of fear.”

It was not only the police who Lomax had to contend with, but the priests (curas) who wielded their own influence in different regions and feared the corrupting influence of an outsider who could give a voice to the people. As always, there was also a distinct lack of money. However, the results of Lomax’s work are extraordinary.

There are several commercially available recordings of Lomax’s trip in Spain and the diversity of the music within is astounding, as is the quality and naturalness of the recordings with coughing and ambient sounds often entering into the mix. He relates one story

“I remember the night I spent in the straw hut of a shepherd on the moonlit plains of Extramadura. He played the one-string vihuela, the instrument of the medieval minstrels, and sang ballads of the wars of Charlemagne, while his two ancient cronies sighed over the woes of courtly lovers now five hundred years in the dust.”

Lomax represents Spanish folk music as more than just the obvious Flamenco sound, recording songs accompanied only by bells, drumming, tambourine, bagpipes, as well as children’s songs, group singing and poetry. But what Lomax’s recordings give back to Flamenco is a sense of the Orient. Many of them sound far more Gypsy than modern Flamenco, meaning that they sound like they still had their living roots sunk into Indian music with obvious traces of Moorish influences on many songs. Listening now to this music, it somehow seems to transform the whole country into a more exotic panorama.

Lomax and media – Cultural equity

As a man who recorded and produced music, who wrote books and academic papers, educational shows for radio in many countries and eventually evolved into studies of dance, Lomax understandably had many strong ideas about the medium of TV when it finally emerged. When trying to find cinematographers for the 1975 Smithsonian Folk Festival Lomax wrote in an open letter:

“One of the central problems of our culture, a source of sickness and of anomie in our culture and in the world, is that everything these days happens at the centre and is broadcast put from the centre to the periphery, to the small places. This makes anyone who is not from megalopolis a hick by inference… we have to make culture again grow on the periphery – where culture has always grown.”

In the ensuing years, Lomax went on to criticise television more closely. Lomax’s one time assistant and journalist friend Pete Seeger wrote to Lomax and other like-minded people in 1978 about his growing concern of American cultural imperialism being spread by “exporting reruns of soaps, teen music shows, sports events, political news, and advertising” (Szwed’s writing) including even Sesame Street. Lomax would contest that:

“
The puppets are great, but the people in it are terrible, and they’re teaching the world to be poker-faced Americans or square, clownish Americans.”

Lomax agreed whole heartedly with Seeger and suggested, again in Szwed’s words, that

“it was more than content that was the problem with television, it was the nature and use of the technology. It was a one-way, simultaneous, glitzy, loud assault that destroyed cultural styles, exported alien and inappropriate values, and forced people everywhere in the world into passive and potentially hostile and violent reaction. Lomax wrote “The result is, in the country where TV operates around the clock, America, we have a rising tide of evil. Evil is absolutely everywhere, in every part of the country and there is an awful feeling that has developed in the country… The best thing, of course, would be to turn television clear off, for good.”

Earlier in his career, Lomax had already expressed concerns about “the greying out” of culture by the centralised entertainment industries and part of the fears had already gone into his anthropological ideas of folk music. It is not surprising that Lomax should fear so much for the well spring of cultural creativity as he had been a man who had travelled well into the ill-defined realms of the periphery and drunk heartily from the well springs of cultural sources. Indeed, in the book “Mister Jelly Roll” written by Lomax and published in 1950 about another famous son of the divided south, Jelly Roll Morton.




Lomax perhaps best summed up his ideas about art, culture and society and the inherent dangers of cultural machines. Lomaxes words are passionate and naked, coming from a deep place within himself as well as the cultural in which he swam.

“Jazz was the hybrid of hybrids and so it appealed to a nation of lonely immigrants. In a divided world struggling blindly toward unity, it became a cosmopolitan musical argot. This new musical language owes its emotional power to the human triumph accomplished at the moment of its origin in New Orleans – a moment of cultural ecstasy. Two neighbourhoods, disjoined by all the sordid fears of our time, were forced to make a common cause. This musical union demanded that there be not merely acceptance and understanding, but respect and love on both sides. In this moment of ecstasy an interracial marriage was consummated, and the child of this union still jumps for joy wherever jazz is hot. Perhaps it is so wherever people share their treasures and a truly fresh stream of culture begins to flow. Such moments of cultural ecstasy may occur prior to all great cultural movements just as seeding precedes birth.”

Szwed analyses that “These lines may tell more about Lomax than they do about Morton, as they focus on his desire to put art at the centre of humanity and return us to the magic of creation.”

It is not surprising then, that one of Alan Lomax’s legacies has been to establish the idea of “Cultural Equity” to the point of founding a foundation, the Association for Cultural Equity, based on the principle of preserving and respecting cultural and linguistic differences.

“Scientific study of cultures, notably of their languages and their musics, shows that all are equally expressive and equally communicative, even though they may symbolize technologies of different levels… With the disappearance of each of these systems, the human species not only loses a way of viewing, thinking, and feeling but also a way of adjusting to some zone on the planet which fits it and makes it liveable; not only that, but we throw away a system of interaction, of fantasy and symbolizing which, in the future, the human race may sorely need. The only way to halt this degradation of man's culture is to commit ourselves to the principles of political, social, and economic justice."

Lomax’s ideas are not unique, but still their importance cannot be underestimated in the internet age, where access to the wealth of information is seemingly limited by the use of personal preferences and algorithms. The impact of globalisation and the continuing dominance of the cultural centre by big companies is still a threat despite the promises of easier and broader access to more peripheral cultural centres, a threat as dangerous as extinction in the Amazon or a coral sea. The legacy of Lomax stands tall and has much to teach and should serve to empower us to defend our differences.

Alan Lomax: Producer of the people. Part 1

A long post that I have split into two parts to make it a bit more manageable.

I have just finished reading John Szwed’s biography of the great American folklorist Alan Lomax. It’s an excellent, but albeit curious book in many ways. The subject is intensely fascinating and given the incredible activity of Lomax throughout his life, the 400 pages of text seems somehow too short without ever feeling overburdened with facts and figures. If anything, there is perhaps a lack of prose at certain times, in particular describing the atmosphere or some of the more personal events during some of the road trips to the Mississippi Delta region and small town America in the 30s,  or the European trip in the 50s. As described in one of the videos below, Szwed himself confesses the original text was cut by around a quarter which may account for these kinds of omissions. But as well as a lack of prose, there is at times a certain lack of analysis or deeper interpretation of the significance of Lomax’s work

One reason for this could be reading it as a non-American, my lack of knowledge of 20^th Century American history and politics leaves me exposed and unable to join the dots myself. The other more practical reason is that Lomax’s contributions to society, not just American society, are perhaps too great even for an excellent and efficient author like Szwed to tackle in one comfortable volume. Indeed, comparing “The man who recorded the world” against Szwed’s great biography of Sun Ra, “Space is the place”, suggests just this: Sun Ra’s equal rights philosophy and plan for salvation of the black race in outer space is a complicated idea, but is essentially the only one running through the book and Szwed unravels the code with ease. Lomax instead builds himself as a champion not only of race politics, but workers’ rights and socialism, anthropology and the broader implications of art, as well as being a writer of books, radio and television programs and an international folk song collector. A lot of themes and a lot of context to supply. Nonetheless, the introduction to Lomax’s life and work provided by the book are resonant and easily build him to be a titan and deeply admirable figure of the 20^th Century.

One of four videos of John Szwed talking about his book:

There are plenty of other internet sources for rounding up a brief summary of Lomax’s life, so I won’t double-up here, but instead focus on some of the more interesting aspects from an outsider’s point of view.

The DNA of folk music

Lomax’s archive consists of around 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 2,450 videotapes, 2,000 books and journals, numerous prints, documents and databases, and more than 120 linear feet of paperwork. The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) is custodian of the Alan Lomax Archive, and in March this year, they in association with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress have made much of this material available in digital form. In many ways, this represents the culmination of what Lomax had wanted to achieve in establishing a “Global Jukebox.” Lomax had developed the idea in the late 80s, having wanted to create an “intelligent museum” where uses could search the database for music and dance styles they were interested in from all over the world. However, the computing power at the time was not capable of such feats, whereas that moment now seems to have arrived.

Click here for the related Alan Lomax Youtube channel

Lomax’s ideas for this Global Jukebox had been permeating since the 50s however. In a letter to his family in 1954 he first sets out the philosophical ideas that he would go on to develop for the rest of his life:

 “The primary function of music is to remind the listener that he belongs to one certain part of the human race, comes from a certain region, belongs to a certain generation. The music of your place stands for everything that has ever happened to you when you were a kid, reminds you of what your family was like, what it was like when you fell in love – in fact is a quick and immediate symbol for all the deepest emotions that people of your part of the world share…. Naturally the musical style is only the outward manifestations of the deep river of feeling that produces it. This is shown by [the] fact that musical style tends not to alter because of musical reasons, but because of important changes in the lives of people who make the music.”

However, the Global Jukebox bore earlier fruit in Pandora (click here if you are in the US, but licencing restrictions apply outside) a project which aimed to develop the Music Genome. Here, four hundred “musical measures” similar to Lomax’s cantometrics, choreometrics, parlametrics and phonotactics are used to analyse songs in a database and see where they fit together. By entering several parameters of personal taste, one can find related songs based on inherent musical identity.

This is not to be confused with composer Todd Barton’s genomic compositions. Here, different pitch and instrumentation are assigned to different bases of the genetic code and the individual sequence can be obtained and the translated into a unique song. Barton has also transcribed protein amino acid sequences into song form.

Barton is not the only one to try and make music from DNA or protein sequences. An article in The Guardian  from 2010 also details another genomic composition by Michael Zev Gordon under the sponsorship of The Wellcome Trust which can be heard at the official site.

For a list of other examples of where DNA and genetic or protein information have been converted to music or compared with musical notation click here, though unless you really have a lot of money to burn, I would stay away from Your DNA Song. This company will sequence your own genome and make a unique song for you, for a nominal fee. One can already imagine the TV commercial: “…and that’s not all, we’ll also clone your DNA so that future generations will be able to listen to your song. Don’t wait. Call NOW!”

The legacy of Lomax’s ideas on the importance of maintaining the diversity of the DNA of music and culture will be discussed a bit more in the second part of this post.

Lomax on race, socialism and unionist policies.

Undoubtedly the highlight of the book is Lomax’s continued struggle to improve race relations in a segregated America and his sympathy and support of workers, sympathies that would end up getting his name on the FBIs black list of communist supporters for most of his life.

There are many interesting anecdotes of Lomax’s struggle with race politics. Szwed recounts here one of his first trips at age 17 in which Lomax broke all the rules in the deeply segregated south, travelling not only with a mature white woman, but a black one as well.

Lomax’s most significant work in this period was undoubtedly made with his father, John Lomax, also a celebrated folk song collector, in their trips to several of the more fearsome prisons of the time where they discovered many of the characters who would later exert an extraordinary influence on American popular music. One of the greatest of these was of course Lead Belly or Huddie William Ledbetter who the Lomaxes found and recorded in the fearful Angola Prison Farm in Louisiana in 1933 where he was serving time for attempted homicide. Some doubt exists over whether the Lomaxes really influenced his release or not, or if Lead Belly truly sang his way to freedom, but certainly Alan Lomax maintained a close relationship with him until his death in 1949 recording him on several occasions, writing books about him and including him in several of his radio programs.

An original newsreel with John Lomax and Lead Belly singing “Goodnight Irene”

The life of Lead belly in two parts.

Alan differed greatly from his father John about many social issues including “the black question” and his association with black people and musicians in the years before the Civil Rights movement would often lead him into trouble. One anecdote accounts Lomax punching a patron of a restaurant who had complained to the waiter that he didn’t want to sit next to a “nigger”, meaning Lomax, which has frightening resonance.

The prisons that John and Alan visited together also left a scar on his psyche. Writing many years later he said:

“The prison farms of the American South were living hells of violence, evil and despair. They were American Dachaus, where inmates worked from before sunrise to dark of night, supervised by trusties with shotguns. A surly look or even a reluctant move could get you killed by the guards, no questions asked. The existence of these prisons inspired a terror that kept the population in line throughout the South.”

Before becoming popularised in the later folk revival of the 60s, American folk music had also been heavily linked with the Union movement. Szwed explains at length:

“Lomax introduced Aunt Molly Jackson, the “pistol packing mama” to a wider and more city-based public. Jackson had made her name in the coal miners struggles of the time. She was bought in to sing with the Composers Collective who included within their members Aaron Copland, Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford amongst others. However, the clash of styles was not immediately fruitful. Jackson’s rough and natural approach did not sit easily with the more academic strains of the Composers Collective or other like-minded groups such as the Degeyter Club. Here the influence was set principally by Hans Eisler, a protégé of Arnold Schoenberg who had suggested that more traditional workers songs “like “The Ballad of Joe Hill”, were bourgeois products of the past and only put workers to sleep, the way they had always done.  “Modern life and its tensions demand dissonance,” Eisler insisted.”

But as should be well known, the American political landscape at the time was intensely anti-Communist as becomes subtly evident in this video. Here, Lomax is addressing a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) hearing:

Perhaps the take away phrase is Republican Sidney Yates, Illinois sub-committee chairman, who quotes someone [in the house of congress?] as saying

“That’s the most communistic art that we ever had.”

These tales of racial segregation, anti-unionism and anti-communism (of course leading up to McCarthyism) seem genuinely frightening to me as a non-American. The origins of racism in slavery are obvious, but still unjustified, whereas political repression is harder to fathom. I don’t understand how it is that Americans managed to convince themselves, whilst simultaneously selling to the outside world, of the idea of their country being a bastion of freedom and human rights when quite clearly it is not.

When folk goes digital - Roy Harper

I am a self confessed vinyl freak and my displeasure at the world of digital downloads reached a new level this week. I had been reading a recent issue of the Wire and become fascinated by the Roy Harper interview, especially as the music seemed something like what my dad would like. Since I didn’t send him a birthday present in April, I decided that I would get him some Roy Harper music to try. Following my lead from the article, I dutifully headed to his official website where I paid for a digital download of his latest retrospective collection “Songs of Love and Loss”. That the files I obtained where high quality FLAC may be lost on my father since he will receive only the two CDs I burned for him (had I sent him the FLACs I am sure he wouldn’t have been able to convert them or burn them either!). The strangeness of the gift was that there was nothing to see or even to “have” and even the gesture of giving something paid for and lovingly searched out felt somehow meaningless, even if it is the thought that counts. “Happy Birthday dad, here are your data files”. I know that I probably could have obtained the material by illegal download, but since it was my father and a late present at that, I did not feel like denying Mr Harper a little bit of income, especially as he has been on hard times and is in his seventies. One curiosity of all this as well is that digital folk music sounds like a strange contradiction. Afterall, everone remembers when Bob Dylan went electric, but who remembers when he went digital?

However, I must confess to also stealing some of Mr Harper’s music. One thing in the interview that attracted me was a little dialogue about a song he wrote called “When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease”. Being Australian and something of a cricket fan (perhaps not as much as my father) it was too much to not search out at least this track. Its exclusion from the collection was that it was not technically a love song, although perhaps a love song about cricket and not cricketers. I had the added inspiration that, since my father is a good guitar player and often jamming with friends and doing little concerts here and there, it seemed that he might even be able to learn the cricket song as part of his repertoire. I did encourage him to change the names in the lyric

“And it could be Geoff and it could be John, with a new ball sting in his tail”

to commemorate Australian players, rather than the English players Geoff Boycott and John Snow to whom they refer.

Perhaps the most outstanding lyric of this track is the line

“The fabled men and the noonday sun are much more than just yarns of their days.”

which holds resonance for much more than cricket of course.

The collection “Songs of Love and Loss” was a fascinating and surprising trawl through some of Harper’s works. Thankfully there was not too much of the harmonica-folk style of some early Dylan that gets overbearing very quickly. Similarly, while rich in poetry and rivalling some of the words of Leonard Cohen, Harper’s voice and musical ability are often more rewarding than some of Cohen’s droll delivery.

For example, the short track “Francesca” from the album “Flat Baroque and Berserk” resembles Cohen’s style, but is delivered with a real delicacy that emphasises the lyric “thanks for being free” and gives it sincerity, without a hint of sarcasm, despite the fact that Francesca has left him.

“Hey Francesca

You gave me no warning

Hey Francesca

Tiptoes in the morning

Thanks for leaving the sunshine

Thanks for leaving me

Thanks for being all mine

Thanks for being free

Hey Francesca”

Sadly there is no audio or video material I can find for the track “All you need is” from the 1967 album “Come Out Fighting Ghengis Smith” which would seem to reference the Beatles track “All you need is love” from the same year. Harper’s elegant lyrics add a lot more to the Beatles sentiment of love at the peak of the hippie movement.

“I gave my love a daisy, a third eye in my mind

We turned the crazy day around, to see what we could find

And went onto a journey

Reflecting us so deep and wide

That we could see the other side

Of knowing nothing matters in the everything surrounding us

Surrounding everything itself

Surrounding”

The emphasis on “surrounding” is also beautifully embedded in the arrangement of the music as the line is delivered.

Since my father is a guitar player I also fixated on the playing on the opening track “Black Clouds” which is perhaps the most complicated of the collection, contrasting different picking techniques to emphasise discordance. The way Harper’s voice sings across the music is also effective in contrasting his smooth blue sky-voice with the menace of rain and darkness in the trickling and pointillist playing.

Bathetic Records

Here is an interesting label I came across recently called Bathetic Records, who release all their stuff on 7”s and casettes. The style of the label is difficult to pin down, but varies from folk to the more low fi semi-electronic elements of some modern strains of indie, noticeably the Not Not Fun crew who’s roster has crossed over with Bathetic on the odd occasion.

The first video is from Angel Olsen singing a folk piece that is surprisingly haunting and recorded in an interesting homage to 60s psych-folk. The vocal is fragile and delivered with a hint of pain or longing and has received many positive reviews on the web.

Tiniest Lights from Angel Olsen on Vimeo.

Second up is High Wolf, a Frenchman, who apparently lives in exotic locations such as Brazil and Jakarta, who makes low fi analogue tracks with a kind of faux New Age bent that recalls the tongue in cheek “dubious eroticism” of Father Moo and the Black Sheep.

Somewhere in between all these styles and ideas, and with a similar video to Angel Olsen, is the curious group The Wreathes with their debut release.

Wreathes - The Reigns from Death Coast Entertainment on Vimeo.