>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
[ Silence ]   >> John Cole: I'm John Cole.

I'm the Director of the Library's Center for the Book,
which is the reading promotion and book promotion arm of the Library.
One of the advantages of the Center for the Book is
that we have opportunities to meet and greet and also work
with all kinds of custodial divisions in our celebration
of the results of work in the Library of Congress's collections,
such as the book that's going to be discussed today.
The Center for the Book also is responsible in large part
for the National Book Festival, which this year will be held
on the National Mall from September 21st to 22nd.
We are in charge of these Books and Beyond talks and also work
around the country with a network of reading promotion partners.
We've inspired a state Center for the Book in every state
and they honor the authors and the writers of those states,
often with book festivals, sometimes with book awards,
and also we have a network of literacy promotion partners.
And our latest project actually is the management of the new Library
of Congress Literacy Awards, which is going to be a major endeavor
for us, but it is all in the spirit of promoting books and reading
and hosting talks such as this, which bring out the importance
of the Library of Congress's wonderful collections and also some
of the wonderful characters
who are behind these questions, these collections.
And we're joined also by Todd Harvey who is the curator
of the Alan Lomax collection and he will be part, I hope,
of the question and answer period that we will have
at the conclusion of the talk.
All of our talks are filmed for later showing
on the Library of Congress's website.
Tom will speak for about 40 minutes with a chance
for questions and answers.
So we also would like you to turn off all things electronic.
There will be a book signing at the end of this,
which is part of what we do with each
of our Books and Beyond programs.
We have hosted since 1996 well of 200 of these book talks
and have been able to share the Library's collections then
with a good part of the world in part
because of the website productions.
Before I introduce our introducer, as the historian of the Library
of Congress, I'm just going to share something from the forward
to this wonderful, beautiful book that was written by a friend
of the Library of Congress's, Bill Ferris, William Ferris
who for years, of course, was in Washington as the Head
of the National Endowment but also Bill is a scholar and someone
who deeply appreciates both the Library of Congress, it's history
and one of our, our chief character, and here's a comparison
that Bill makes in the introduction about two institutions
that helped shaped his life.   One was Alan Lomax himself.

One was the Library of Congress and he wants us to reflect
on the symmetry of the Library of Congress's acquisition
of the Thomas Jefferson Library of 6,487 books way back in 1815
and of the acquisition of Alan Lomax's library of 5,000 hours
of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of motion picture film,
2450 video tapes, 2000 [inaudible] books and journals,
hundreds of photographic prints and negatives and over 100 linear feet
of manuscripts acquired by the Library of Congress in 2004.
Thus, standing two centuries apart, Thomas Jefferson
and Alan Lomax are both icons of the American culture,
and their legacy is intimately tied to this great library.
Their respective collections are intellectual bookends
that ground us both in our nation's past and its future.
Thomas Jefferson and Alan Lomax chronicled written
and oral traditions that today constitute our cultural birthright
as Americans.
Mr. Jefferson would be proud to know that his library has grown
to over 29 million books, oops more like 33, 34 million now,
and Alan must be rightly smiling to see old friends and colleagues
to gather for this particular presentation.
To introduce our speaker I'm pleased to introduce Ralph Eubanks
who is our publishing officer and this is a book of which Ralph
and the publishing office rightly are very proud of
and Ralph will introduce Tom.   Let's give Ralph a hand.

[ Applause ]   >> Ralph Eubank: Thank you John.

I'm very pleased to introduce Tom Piazza who's here to talk about
"The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax".
Tom Piazza is the author of 11 books including the novel "The City
of Refuge" which won the William Morris Award for southern fiction,
the post-Katrina manifesto "Why New Orleans Matters",
and "Devil Sent the Ring-Music and Writing in Desperate America",
a collection of his essays and journals.
His novel "My Cold War" won the Faulkner Society Award
for Best Novel and his short story collection "Blues
and Trouble" guarded him a James Michener Award for Fiction.
Since 2008 Tom has been a writer the for HBO drama series "Treme".
No less a literary critic than Bob Dillon has said,
"Tom Piazza's writing pulsates with nervous electrical tension.
Reveals the emotions that we can't define."
Tom is also a well-known writer on American music.
He's a three time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award
for music writing, and the winner of a Grammy Award for this album notes
to "Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues-A Musical Journey."
His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Book Forum,
the [inaudible] American, the Columbia Journalism Review
and many other periodicals.
And for someone who has both a Faulkner Society Award
and a Willy Morris Award, he's not from Mississippi,
he's a native New Yorker, but he's made New Orleans his home
for the past 18 years.
So I'm pleased to introduce Tom Piazza.
[ Applause ]   >> Tom Piazza: Thank you.

Thank you Ralph.   I hope one of these days maybe

to be an honorary Mississippian, we'll see.
Thank you all for coming by here today for this talk.
And I'm so proud to be here standing in front
of you talking about this book.
Of my text, which serves as I guess the principle text
for the book is I hope an interesting part
but certainly the least interesting part of an extraordinary array
of photographs and materials that document, or provide a window,
into an extraordinary moment in the life and career of one
of the titanic figures of 20th Century culture.
Alan Lomax, as many of you probably know, was a pioneering figure
in American folklore, particularly in the documentation of the range
of American vernacular music through sound recording and oral history.
Beginning in the early 1930s Lomax made countless trips
to the American south and later throughout the United States
and world, collecting folk songs, work songs,
ancient Anglo-American ballads, African-American blues, dance music,
the full range what came to be known generically as folk music.
With his father, John A. Lomax, who was himself a kind of titanic figure
and a pioneering folklorist,
he discovered the African American songster Huddie Ledbetter,
better known as Lead Belly, in the Louisiana state penitentiary.
Alan recorded the first formal oral histories
of an American vernacular musician when we sat
with the New Orleans pianist and composer, Jelly Roll Morton,
in 1938 in the Library of Congress Coolidge Auditorium.
I remember when we were doing the initial spade work for this book,
I sort of realized the lifetime ambition of going over there
and actually standing on the stage where Lomax talked
with Jelly Roll Morton, it was a great thing.
And for those of you, by the way, this is a parenthesis
but I would really recommend seeking out those Library
of Congress recordings that Alan Lomax did with Jelly Roll Morton.
They're an absolutely staggering picture not just of the early years
of jazz in New Orleans but of America just after reconstruction
when everything was up for grabs.
It was just an extraordinary time and those are great recordings.
Alan greatly expanded the Library of Congress's archive
of American folk song while working here in the late 1930s
and early 40s, and recorded Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie
for the library alongside folklorist John Work in 1941.
He made the first recordings of McKinley Morganfield,
another Mississippi person, who would become world famous
as the blues singer Muddy Waters.
He produced wildly influential radio programs in folk music,
recorded an astonishing spectrum of music in Europe throughout the 1950s
and he continued all of these activities well
into his eighth decade and the final years
of the 20th century before his death in 2002 at age 87.
Just a remarkable figure in just about every way.
But this book, "The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax" opens a door
into a more personal, you might even say intimate,
side of Lomax's sensibility through a media
with which we don't primarily identify him,
which is to say photography.
Specifically the photographs and other materials
in the book document a trip that Alan Lomax made
through the American south in the autumn of 1959,
with a brief coda in the spring of 1960.
It was a homecoming for him in a figurative as well
as a literal sense after a decade of self-imposed exile in Europe.
With these stunning photographs we get a new view of Lomax's relation
to the subject matter of his work and his life.
The one with the sometimes startling immediate view of the people
who were the source of all that extraordinary musical expression.
It offers a double vision, one that not only takes in Lomax's subjects
and their context but that reveals a side of Lomax himself
and that's a vision that's [inaudible]
to been available only really in hints and glimpses.
So what I want to do in this talk is give you a modest overview
because in this time period you could do no more
than an extremely modest overview of Lomax's life and career.
And then I'll try to give you a sense of how "The Southern Journey"
as this little trip that he made through the American south in 1959,
Kennedy called, fits into the arc not just
of his career but of American culture.
And really and truly the two could be kind of hard to separate
because I think much of what we've inherited as American culture,
certainly vernacular culture,
we know because of the efforts of Lomax.
Excuse me while I do a little Marco Rubio here.
[Laughing] I'm trying to maintain eye contact but [laughing].
Alan Lomax was born on January 31st 1915 in Austin Texas,
and his father John A. Lomax already had a reputation as a collector
of folk materials, most especially cowboy songs.
Five years before Alan's birth, John A.'s book "Cowboy Songs
and Other Frontier Ballads" had been published with an introduction
by President Theodore Roosevelt no less.
The elder Lomax was a force of nature.
After blowing through his undergraduate career
at the University of Texas in two years, he went to Harvard for a year
and studied partly under the literature scholar
and ballad expert George Lyman Kittredge, who was himself a student
of Francis James Child,
who assembled the monumental ten volume collection of the English
and Scottish popular ballads.
It's worth saying that academic consensus or agreement
on the significance and worth of these kinds of materials,
folk ballads, etc., was by no means unanimous.
It still isn't really.
And J.A. Lomax never held a steady academic position as a professor.
He served as a registrar and later as secretary of the faculty
and alumni association at the University of Texas,
taught English briefly at Texas A and M and he sold bonds in Chicago
and later Dallas as well as constantly applying for grants
and graduate fellowships.
So in other words he was kind of a crypto academic without portfolio
in a funny kind of way and I think worked hard all his life
to get a kind of respect that never really came his way during
his lifetime.
He made a significant part of his living traveling
and giving lectures about cowboy songs.
This was the father John A. He often performed the songs he collected
and contextualized them with stories that cast the collecting
of the songs as a romantic adventure itself
and much the same would be true of Alan his son.
Alan Lomax was by all reports something
of an intellectual prodigy as a boy.
He attended private schools first in Austin and then in his senior year
at Choate, and although his father really wanted him to go to Harvard,
Alan stayed and matriculated at the University of Texas in Austin
to be close to his mother who was very ill.
And she died in 1931 and Alan was just 16, and he was very depressed
but he agreed to go off to Harvard.   And despite his intelligence

and energy Harvard was a bad fit for Alan Lomax.
Given the death of his mother his early taste of night life
in the black section of Austin and his fledgling interest
in radical political ideology, Cambridge was bound
to seem cloistral to him.
He disliked, and this is a quote, "sheltered Harvard students
and the doubly sheltered Harvard professors" as he described them
in one letter home, and as the year went
on his interest and his studies waned.
And he also seems to have gotten really involved with,
or at least very interested in, the Communist movement,
which at that time attracted so many idealistic younger Americans.
At the end of that school year his scholarships were not renewed
and he headed back to Texas.   He was restless.

The restlessness and the constant hunger in this man is a theme
and a sort of figure in the carpet throughout his entire life.
At the time that he got back he just, he just couldn't stay put.
He wanted to join the Merchant Marine,
had all kinds of ideas, he wanted to travel.
In that same letter home, in which he talked
about the sheltered Harvard students, he expressed admiration
for a Russian movie he had seen.
I don't think it's been documented which movie it was
but in it the characters were, and here's the quote from his letter,
he says, "they were working intensely, unselfconsciously,
eating, drinking, working with an enormous gusto
that will probably always be denied to me."
This combination of romantic energy with a genuine affinity
for working class people, along with a profound sense of the gulf
between them and himself, would characterize Alan personally
and professionally for the rest of his life.
He returned to the University of Texas for the '32, '33 school year
but while he had been away the nation's economic crisis had
deepened badly, sharply,
and his father's bond business was doing badly.
And Alan had the sense that his father was heading for some kind of,
at least, trough or possible breakdown, you know,
very serious depression, and Alan did something very interesting
and in one of those kind of life changing moments,
he suggested that they make a collecting, song collecting,
trip together, father and son.
And in the summer of 1933 they did just that, and they headed south
with newly acquired recording equipment.
My God I wish we could have this recording equipment here
for you to see.
You know in a time where we have iPhones
that can record this whole lecture in, you know, high definition
and then send it out to thousands of people over the internet,
the recording equipment is hard to describe.
It's as big as a truck practically.
Anyway they headed south with this extraordinary array
of recording equipment and headed for a series of penitentiaries
in order to record work songs and field hollers from the prisoners.
And that trip marked John A. Lomax's return to active collecting
and it was the beginning of Alan's life work.
When father and son headed south in the summer of 1933,
this new machine they had acquired recorded directly onto disks
that could be played on an ordinary turntable.
The disk recorder weighed over 300 pounds and it took up most
of the rear of the car in which they traveled.
Along with the recorder itself they had to carry piles
of these aluminum blank disks onto which the recorder would actually,
you know, etch the music.
When it was impossible to get their portable recording studio
[inaudible] car in proximity to the subject of their efforts,
Alan would have to remove the machine from the car and drag it
to where the music was, whether it was
up in the mountains someplace or a prison compound.
Moreover they did this during the heat and the heart of summer
in the American south in places where the temperatures regularly got
into the 90s or higher and there was no air conditioning of course,
especially in the Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi penitentiaries
that were their primary destinations.
For Alan the trip was a profound, life changing experience.
I dwell on it here because I really think this was the place
where his sense of some basic affinity for this music
and his sense of a life mission, really got fused.
In the remarks they delivered in 1989
at the New York Public Library Alan identified that trip as the occasion
when he heard the music that first, and this is a quote,
"allied me with the people,
with which made me forget Beethoven and all of that.
In the Texas prison camp where black men driven from camp to camp
under the shotgun had the glorious humanity to make great music.
It was shock to see men who might otherwise have been faceless
and voiceless to outsiders show a sense of life and humor and wit,
not to mention the will to beauty in circumstances that were
to say the least oppressive."
It was that just a position of the painful human situation
with insistence on the insertion of humanity
that put not just a human face but a spiritual significance
on a social dynamic that Alan had previously considered only
in hypothetical terms.
The music itself, the songs, all were suddenly folded into a kind
of unified field with an attitude tone became connected to a body
of physical gestures, stance, context that illuminated everything
with a light from a new angle.
And for Alan it kind of represented a kind
of secondary radicalization you might say,
the fusion of his political stance with a mission of collecting.
It's also worth saying that left, or leftist politics,
had swerved in a new direction in the mid-1930s
when they had undertaken that trip.
Efforts to establish a "proletarian music" written
by American composers trained
in European classical technique were replaced by movement
to use vernacular forms of music and culture
to further the left leaning ideological agenda.
The popular front idea provided the ligature
that connects the expressive efforts of "common people"
with the ideals of a vanguard movement.
What might have been seen in a different light as provincial
or regressive had its polarities reversed and now represent the voice
of the folk undefiled by the corrupting effects
of commercial media and the temptations
of big city sophistication.
So when Alan, who already had his sympathies pointing leftward,
encountered not just the cultural expression of these prisoners
but the prisoners themselves, it had the effect of revelation.
In 1935 he made his first collecting trip without his father
through Georgia, Florida and the Caribbean in the company
of the folklorist Mary Barnacle and Zora Neale Hurston who, of course,
was a very significant writer in a number of arenas.
His activities soon began to eclipse his fathers' in scope and magnitude.
In the following year he began working for the Library of Congress.
And between 1935 and 1942 he made collecting trips almost every year
covering an astonishing amount of territory, almost all of it east
of the Mississippi River.
In 1938 and '39 his effort centered on the mid-west
and New England respectively.
The rest of the time his efforts led him south.
During this time, and through the 1940s,
Alan also produced radio shows and oversaw the assembling
of several books, a couple of them in collaboration with his father.
He was also increasingly involved in radical political activities,
excuse me, including Henry Wallace's Presidential campaign,
and the formation with Pete Seeger of People's Songs,
which was a project harness the singing ideal to the labor movement
by means of creating union choruses
and gathering folk performers together
to raise money for progressive causes.
It is forward to the "People's Song Book", published in 1948,
Lomax wrote that the songs in the book were part of,
" an emerging tradition that represented a new kind
of human being, a new folk community composed of progressives
and anti-fascists and union members," and had been "tested
in the fire of the people's struggle all around the world."
Now this kind of talk, unsurprisingly, put him on the radar
of the FBI and other hunters of radicals.
As early as 1942 he was questioned about his activities under oath
by the FBI and although he denied membership in the Communist party,
his activities and statements pointed toward
at least a significant degree of sympathy with radical movements.
And although he was supported by the Librarian of Congress at the time,
Archibald MacLeish, and agency director J. Edgar Hoover, I'm sorry,
and agency Director J. Edgar Hoover declined to proceed with any action
against him, Alan was to be watched closely from that time on.
For the rest of the 1940s he raised money for leftist causes,
consorted with the likes of Paul Rogsen [assumed spelling],
Earl Robinson who wrote the song "Joe Hill" and Aaron Copeland
and he advocated for the cultural centrality of disadvantaged
and working class people, but when the nation's fear
of Russian inspired Communist infiltration began to come to a boil
in the late 1940s, these activities were flags to attract the attention
of red hunters and red baiters.
And when Lomax found himself listed in June 1950 as a subversive
in the pamphlet "Red Channels", which was a listing
of supposed Communists and sympathizers in the media,
Alan saw the writing on the wall and he left the U.S. in September 1950,
ostensibly to assemble a library of world folk music
for Columbia Records, and he stayed away for eight years.
Now when he left the country in 1950 he left his wife and his child
and his job and he left the culture
that had given him an overarching [inaudible]
out of which he could operate.
He used his time well, to say the least,
traveling through the British Isles as well as Spain and Italy,
using some of the same techniques that he had employed at home
to find traditional musicians and record them.
He covered an astonishing amount of ground.
It was also a period of great personal challenge
and growth for Alan himself.
For a long time he seems to have recognized a tension
between his private search for meaning as an individual
and the ideological rationale for this work,
the idea that we are less important as individuals than as "links
in a chain" in Pete Seeger's phrase.
In the 1950s he would write that, "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 emphasis, in other words, was not on self-expression
or the realization of a personal vision of experience or existence,
but on a connection with a community and with the past.
Yet in an un-sourced 1946 document quoted
in John Szwed's excellent biography of Lomax called "Alan Lomax-The Man
Who Recorded the World", and I'd recommend that also to anybody
who has a deeper interest in Lomax's life and career,
Lomax himself addressed this disconnect
between his underlying motives and the rationale
for the work that came out of them.
"What were my own purposes in living this way?
What are my reasons for continuing to immerse myself
in this quagmire of folklore?   What do I like?

What do I think about?   Why and I born?

What path shall my feet follow?
All the paths that have opened up for me
so far have been the paths of other people.
I know the kind of intellectual, moral and emotional structure
that can be made out of folklore.
It is a lack of personal conviction that is my problem."
And on his time in Europe, although he experienced home sickness,
periods of frustration and constant financial worries,
had a transformative effect on him.
Freed both from his father's shadow and from the harness
of institutional involvement, he seemed to find his way toward a kind
of pleasure and physical presence in the world.
And I go into detail on this because I think that this is the foundation
of what we end up seeing in his photographs
that he took during the southern journey,
and he also found I think a more direct and immediate connection
to the people who made the music he recorded,
which had eluded him before.
Spain, in particular, seems to have opened him up.
In his notebook he wrote "Day hot.   The sea near.

Figs, oranges, plums, pears ripening.
I decide to settle for life in every town
and marry every sweet young Senorita I see.
Words, movement, ambition are conquered
by the sheer pleasure of living.
What I want to do is swim, sleep, stare,
chat and if there's anything more pleasant than chatting
with a black-eyed girl on the [inaudible], the shaded promenade
and [inaudible] between 9 and 11:30, I never ran into it."
Perhaps not coincidentally, Alan began taking photos
in earnest during his time in Europe.
He'd always taken pictures but now he seemed more attuned than ever
to the nuances of movement and expression
that accompanied the musical performances he was documenting.
He also began developing some of the theories about the relations
between a region's sexual and social morays, I'm sorry,
and the kinds of music produced by the region's people.
Theories that later became codified
in the analytical system he called canto metrics.
His mind was full of plans for books, plays,
for television series, even for a ballet.
Here's another quote.   "All the imaginative qualities

that were repressed all my life are beginning
to merge now for the first time.
I can tackle literally anything I choose."
This was from a 1953 letter to his wife.

The great paradox is that even as he was being opened up in a new way
to the life of the body and the senses,
his analytical ambitions were shifting into overdrive.
And during this time Alan was making plans for a kind
of ground Wagnerian synthesis of psychology, anthropology,
musicology, folklore and technology,
to study in biographer John Szwed's words, "Patterns of muscular tension
in the body during singing.   Patterns of breathing and songs.

Variations in electrical current on the skin
and in the brain and heart rate."
"If you found musical style A in a community", Lomax wrote,
"almost giddy with a sense of possibility.
You would know that a certain family
of perhaps deeply hidden emotions was at play in the emotional
and aesthetic life of the whole society.
Folk song can become an index as to what is aesthetically wrong or right
about a certain branch of the human family, or even with an individual."
It is to Lomax's credit that he did not let these kinds
of theories determine what he recorded.
While he was evolving this set
of notions toward a comprehensive analysis of folk expression,
he was also able to maintain a boyish pleasure in and even awe
at the moment of the expression.
Then words, movement, ambition would indeed be conquered
by the thing itself in all its uniqueness.
And as all this was happening the word from home was
that the McCarthy era was fading into the past
and there was a serious revival of interest in folk music,
especially among the young, and coming home began
to seem like a good idea.   Eye contact.

Awakened in a new way to world of the sense and on fire was the vision
of a unifying set of theories to explain it all.
Lomax came home in 1958
to an altered cultural and political landscape.
When he had left, folklore as he had practiced it had been the province
of a very small group of people,
none of whom were professional performers.
In the interim interest had been stimulated by the reissuing
on LP records of old recordings.
Most especially Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music"
on Folkways Records, now available on Smithsonian's Folkways Records,
and Samuel Charter's book and companion LP "The Country Blues".
Recording equipment had gotten more portable and younger men,
they were mostly men, like Mike Seeger, John Cohen, Ralph Rinzler
and others, some of whom not only collected the music but played
and sang it on a professional level,
began going out into the field so called.
Out of this activity came the rediscovery
of early recording artists, many of whom had been heard on the
"Anthology of American Folk Music" or the "The Country Blues",
like Mississippi John Hurt, Dock Boggs, Son House, Eck Robertson,
Bukka White, as well as great musicians who had never been heard
by a wide audience such as Roscoe Holcomb
and the autoharp virtuoso Kilby Snow.
This new movement had sects of purists of various types
and the center of gravity had moved from Washington D.C.
to the northeast, mainly New York City and Boston.
Lomax, who had left the country as the undisputed king
of folk music collecting, returned as a kind of Pope in exile
and was a somewhat bumpy reentry.
All the younger generation folk music aficionados had learned from
and valued Lomax's recordings and contributions, to say the least,
through the Library of Congress and elsewhere,
and Lomax affiliated musicians like Woody Guthrie
and Lead Belly were saints of the movement.
But there was something free and even anarchic about this new inquiry
and it bristled at any top down theorizer or prescriptive discourse.
Even Pete Seeger, who was every bit the man of the left that Lomax was,
said of the late 1950s folk song revival that is was "out
of the control of any person or party, right or left,
purist or high [inaudible], romanticist or scientist.
Lomax's response, in a sense, was to mount a kind of counter offensive
of recognizance of the American south, its places and its people.
In many of the locals that he had visited years before,
to see for himself what had changed and what had endured.
He would bring along a new stereo tape recorder
to document the singers and players, some of whom he had first met
and recorded as long as two decades earlier, in clear
and startlingly present sound quality by the way.
He would be accompanied by a young British folk singer named Shirley
Collins, who was his assistant and lover, and who has provided us
with the most thorough narrative of the trip's up and downs,
and he would bring his camera.
The first and most important part of what came to be called
"The Southern Journey" began in August 1959 and continued
until October of that year.
Starting in Salem Virginia, Lomax and Collins wound their way
through much of the southwestern part of the state through Kentucky,
down through Nashville to Alabama and into Mississippi,
where they visited the prison farm at Parchman,
as well as other spots mostly in the northern part of the state.
They bounced back and forth between parts of Arkansas
and Memphis Tennessee before heading back across Mississippi
through Alabama again, on route
to Saint Simon's Island off the Georgia coast.
They accomplished all this in under two months and that was at a time
when the interstate highway system was barely in its infancy
and certainly hadn't penetrated the areas where they were headed.
To this day the roads in southeastern Virginia,
as well as in the mountainous neighboring areas of Kentucky,
Tennessee and West Virginia, can be almost unbelievably torturous
when you leave the main highways.
It's hard to image the difficulties of navigation 50 years ago
as the duo made their way up and into "lonesome hollows, shady groves
and heads of creeks" in Shirley Collins's words, to record people
like Wade Ward, Hobart Smith and Texas Gladden.
Adding to the logistical travail was the decision to camp out much
of the time in order to save money.
Collins vividly describes the conditions in her memoire
"America Over the Water".
Quoting from a letter she sent home to England at the outset
of their trip she writes, "We arrived late in Salem and decide
to camp out at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
It took hours to get the tent up in the dark,
Alan trying to hammer tent pegs into the very hard ground and waking
up all the local dogs who barked furiously while I fussed
about snakes and spiders.
Alan got very cross and when we finally crawled


Still, the riches they were about to mine affected them both profoundly.
The artists were for the most part commercially unrecorded,
although several like Wade Mainer, I'm sorry, like Wade Ward
and J.E. Mainer and a couple others, had made a handful
of recordings many years earlier.
Lomax's major finds, including Hobart Smith, Texas Gladden,
the great ballad singer Almeda Riddle
and the great blues man Fred McDowell,
became irreplaceable figures.
Their contributions moved to the center of our understanding
of traditional American music.
On the trip Lomax recorded 80 hours of music and conversation
on a stereo reel to reel tape recorder
with new expensive microphones.
Lomax set out the recorder and used a new reel for each new occasion,
and while the singers performed, or perhaps afterward,
he took notes not only on the back of the tape boxes
in the space provided where he listed the names of the performers
and the songs that were recorded, but also on the blank insides
of the cardboard boxes describing the singer's physical gestures,
jotting down stray remarks or anecdotes.
The boxes are encrusted inside and out with this kind of commentary
and it reflects Alan's desire
to somehow preserve the moment whole or entire.
Not just the sound but the literal embodiment of the people
and culture that produced it.
And even as he was annotating, transcribing
and recording he was preserving it all in yet another way,
through the lens of his camera as these images that are delivered
so beautifully in this book.
It's easy to recognize a family resemblance between these images
and the work of the photographers affiliated
with the Farm Security Administration of the mid
to late 1930s, Dorothy Alonga [phonetic],
Arthur Rothstein [phonetic], John Fashone [phonetic],
Jack Delano and the rest.
Lomax's ideology came out of much the same New Deal bag.
The FSA photographers had a mandate to focus on lives hither to ignored
or slighted in the interest of awakening conscious
and consciousness, making the case for social improvements and change.
"H. A. Homo", the photo said, "Behold and care
for your less advantaged brothers and sisters."
They were designed in the words of the FSA project director,
Roy Striker, to make a dent in the world.
One of the mysteries of these images in "The Southern Journey
of Alan Lomax" is that while Lomax strongly shared that goal,
his images seemed to advance no agenda other than an appreciation
of the subject's sense of life.
Even some of the finest FSA photographers, like Rothstein,
Dorothy Alonga or even Walker Evans, often tended to brand their subjects
in a sense so that they became instruments
of a statement about a larger vision.
In other words here's a poor Appalachian,
here is his wretched bedroom, here is a bizarre or ironic [inaudible]
of commercial imagery with urban decay.
So in contrast, Lomax almost never argued
for his subject's abjectness or misery.
He didn't have the [inaudible] detached consummate artist's eye
of Walker Evans, nor did his pictures have the kind
of [inaudible] of Rothstein or Longa's,
using images of dire straits to make a rhetorical point
in which too often the human subjects are objectified.
If the photos, if Lomax's photos, argue for any point it is
that people can make meaning and express beauty and fellowship even
in the most dire circumstances.   Even here the images seem to say.

Even on this sagging porch or in this prison, people find a way
to be human and to be together.
His photographs never attempt to usurp the dignity of his subjects.
He sometimes got so close in with his camera they seem to be trying
to enter the musician's skin.
Not only was there no control booth on the porches or the prisons
as there would be in a recording studio,
but there was practically no physical separation at all
between the musicians and Lomax.
In Como Mississippi Lomax took a photo of Ed Young playing fife
and staring us right in the eye with Lonny Young Sr.
in the foreground crowding the camera.
Similar images of the multi-instrumentalist
and singer Hobart Smith, balladeer Texas Gladden
and Mississippi Fred McDowell abound.
Certainly one of the most moving groups of photographs,
and you'll see a couple of these images and a little slideshow
at the end of this talk, certainly one of the most moving groups
of photographs presents prisoners on visiting day
at a Mississippi prison, which probably is Parchman Farm.
It's a companion sequence to another sequence taken mostly in color
of prisoners that work in the sun singing.
Those are the ones that I think you'll see most of.
As iconic as some of those outdoor images are, it's this other side
of the story that pierces the heart.
Men in convict stripes in a common room receiving children,
wives and girlfriends.
Here a convict on a bench looks up at the camera.
Standing in front of him is a young boy, probably his son,
looking out at us from the shadow, excuse me,
from his father's embrace.
One man seated next to a woman with his arm draped around her smiles
at the camera along with his companion.
It could be anniversary shot at a nightclub except for those stripes.
And perhaps the most moving image of all, one of the men is crouched
down in front of a little girl who wears a white frock and sits
on a bench holding a soda pop and listening intently
to what the man is saying.
The subtext of it all is that while these men are prisoners,
and may have done bad and even hideous things, they are still,
in a phrase to be found in more than one blues,
somebody's angel child or father or husband.
And behind the images is also the clear echo of the emptiness
that will be there when the families have gone.
One place where Lomax and his companion, Shirley Collins,
did not feel comfortable getting quite
so close was near Blackie Kentucky where they tracked way back
up a dirt path into the woods to document a Baptist prayer meeting,
and you'll see one image from that sequence also in this slideshow.
Collins, writing about the afternoon in "American
Over the Water" tells us, "The surroundings were pleasantly rural
but before long I started to feel nervous, fearful even."
This is a prayer service remember.
"The people stared at us as we arrived and set
up our recording equipment."
And then paraphrasing, after an hour or so the preacher began railing
against their presence at the reading,
calling the recording equipment the work of the devil
and predicting eternal damnation for the visitors.
Okay, conditions were, of course, different in America in 1959
than they were in the Depression hay day
of the Farm Security Administration is true.
The times were still tough to say the least
in the areas where Lomax traveled.
Within a couple years of Lomax's southern journey national attention
would be focused on the poverty and dire conditions in Appalachia
by the 1962 CBS television documentary "Christmas
in Appalachia", as well as books such as Michael Harrington's
"The Other America" and Harry Caudill's "Light Comes
to the Cumberlands", and of course the deep south locations
in Mississippi and elsewhere were about to be hurled
into the tumultuous waters of the civil rights movement.
So the entire troubled landscape of the southern journey was
about to enter the consciousness of the entire nation even
as the consciousness of the rest of the nation was about to enter
and alter the world we see in these photos.
It was a world rife with poverty and racism.
Problems that Lomax had spent most of his life thinking about
and working against, yet it was also a world that had developed precious
and vulnerable cultural strategies for transmuting pain and travail
into beauty through the sounds of its musicians and singers.
Its tradition bearers if you will.
Almost as soon as Lomax left town, the bright light
of media attention would change the cultural ecology
of those places forever.
For the rest of his life after this extraordinary
and fortuitous exploration into a world that was
about to disappear forever,
Alan Lomax kept doing what he had always done in the arenas
of politics, culture and folklore.
He became a member of the board of the enormously important
and influential Newport Folk Festival, continued his traveling
and collecting activities with time in the Caribbean, continued his work
with canto metrics and expanded the idea to cover dance,
a field he termed choreo-metrics,
produced the fine American Patchwork series of music documentaries,
received the National Medal of the Arts from irony of ironies,
Ronald Regan, and wrote the very powerful book
"The Land Where the Blues Began".
John Szwed's recent biography as I said before, "Alan Lomax-The Man
Who Recorded the World" is an excellent overview
of this brilliant and finally heroic life.
This is a coda.
When in 1967 Lomax compiled the song collection "Hard Hitting Songs
for Hard Hit People" the book was illustrated
with photographs largely chosen from the FSA catalog, those 1930s images,
as appropriate running testimony to the messages contained in the songs.
The combination of the photos
and no holds borrowed songs lent the book an inescapable aura
of [inaudible].
And yet when Lomax himself was behind the camera,
he set the emphasis in a different place.
Not ignoring the hard conditions but singing the beauty of the people
who sang despite those conditions.
Behind all the outsized achievements, the theorizing,
the advocacy, the restless traveling,
there remained alive the very young man whose life was changed utterly
by the experience of hearing the live nerve of a nation's music.
Its very soul transmitted in the vivid present
by people considered expendable by most of the population.
That transfiguring moment became the animating spirit
in all the work he was to do.
It lives in all the recordings he made and Lomax's own experience,
the deepest part perhaps of his own soul, lives in these very human,
very open and immeasurably valuable images
from the lost world he had found.
And now I would like to just end that with a little [inaudible].
This should last about two or three minutes.
Just it's a procession of images that was assembled by the team
at the Library of Congress,
and I want to also before I show this thank a few
of the principals involved here, Ralph Eubanks, Amy Hess,
Todd Harvey, for all the great work they did on this project.
So let me see if this will in fact work.
I think it will.   So let's take a look.

You can look at these monitors on either side, and here just a sort
of sampler of some of the images that Lomax took during that trip.
[ Silence ]
That's Hobart Smith actually playing guitar.
[ Silence ]
That's the prayer meeting in Kentucky where they felt threatened.
[Laughing] It doesn't look too bad.
Now these are the color images that he took at the prison farm
which as I say I think is Parchman.   [ Silence ]

That's the fife player I mentioned.   That's in Como Mississippi.

[ Silence ]   He's playing quills.


Blowing across the top of those reeds.
That's Mississippi Fred McDowell.   That became a very famous image.


[Silence] I believe that's Almeda Riddle.
A terrific singer of ancient ballads.

I believe that was taken in Parchman also actually.

[Silence] This was taken in 1960 on a sort of coda trip that he made
where he produced, or helped produce,
a film for the Columbia Williamsburg Foundation.
These were members of the Georgia Sea Island singers.



[Silence] Okay, [applause] thanks very much
and I'll take some questions if we have
[ Applause ]   Thank you.

Thank you so much.   Yes?

>> As you were speaking about the people at the prayer meeting,
I was thinking they were right.
[Laughter] Here he shows up with a woman, not his wife,

they're not from around there, they go in with the recording equipment,
people feel uncomfortable.
Then you have to think this machine has something to do with the devil.
But then he said that soon after they left there,
the media came [low audio] and in a sense they were right on.
[Laughter] And Alan himself was known as Big Foot [inaudible]
because of the way he ordered people around in order to record them.
So he may not [inaudible].   [Low audio]

>> Tom Piazza: Well he was not, how can I say this diplomatically?
He wasn't famous for his tact.   [Laughing] How am I doing?

He was a larger than life figure really.
It's a clich but let it stand, and I don't know that anybody
without those kinds of outsized energies
and the occasional obliviousness or insensitivity to the fine flora
of human feelings that goes along
with those outsized energies very often, I don't know that anybody
without those outsized energies could have encompassed what Lomax
ended up encompassing in his life.
So, whether we want to say that's diabolical or not,
it's sort of just the way it is.
We have this astonishing legacy and doubtless there were people
who grizzled at probably with good cause in many contexts, you know,
at the way in which their lives were entered into.
As far as brining the light of media attention in, yes well, you know,
it's that way whenever you document anything that's very beautiful
and very precious and a part of a community
that has there before been kind of a closed community.
I say this in all guilt that having written a book about New Orleans
after Katrina sort of, you know, arguing for the restoration
of the city and mentioning all the wonderful things in the city
and then sure enough after the city got back on its feet,
people started going to these restaurants I had mentioned
and now I can get a reservation.
[Laughing] Anyway, so I think the price of the project to a degree.
Yeah Todd?   >> I'm Todd Harvey.

I'm the curator of the Lomax Collection and I just want to say
that this is, this is what happens when a [inaudible] speaker comes
in contact with the library's collections.
You have one book like this and a great lecture,
and I think that all along the lines this has been a wonderful
collaboration between the [inaudible]
and the publishing house [inaudible].
And thanks to Ralph for identifying the right people
to write the text for this book.   I'm very grateful [inaudible].

As a curator [low audio] and this is the result, so thank you.
>> Tom Piazza: Well, gee whiz.   Thank you Todd.

[Applause] Thank you, that's very meaningful.
[Inaudible] you know, it probably goes without saying
but I'll say it anyway that I couldn't have done this
without your help and the help of everybody else in the department.
I mean but especially going
down to see the archives was just an extraordinary,
absolutely extraordinary experience.
I can start ticking off the high points.
The Woody Guthrie letter typed on the inside
of a John Steinbeck book jacket, you know, [inaudible] Alan Lomax
about this, there's just extraordinary treasures in there
and it's great that it's in such great hands.
So thank you for the remarks.
Does anybody else have any questions about Lomax though
or "The Southern Journey"?   Yes?

>> [Inaudible] Lomax for this?
Were you able to interview him before he died?
>> Tom Piazza: I met him only once very briefly in,
when did we go to the Folk [inaudible]?
Was that in '98, '97?
Sometime around then, 1997, 98, maybe 1999,
although I think it might have been before that.
He was in attendance at a big convention of folk music mavens
in Memphis and there was Alan Lomax and I knew somebody who was,
I think, working with him and introduced me to him very briefly
but he was already at the very end of his life he was not
as present I think as he was for a lot of his life, and he was,
he said a few things that I really didn't understand and I realized
that he was, you know, a little bit faded
out in terms of his actual presence.
But my God just to have seen him, just to be able
to shake his hand was an extraordinary experience, you know.
I mean with [inaudible] cultural figures, such as Alan Lomax,
I mean you could go down the whole list, but you seem them
in a whole sort of drop menu of illusive facts
and imagery presents itself and you're instantly thinking
about Lead Belly and Jelly Roll Morton and the southern journey
and all these different places that they made available to us,
whether their methods were what we would have designed in a kind
of frictionless universe or not, it's a titanic achievement.
So, yeah, but that was the only time I ever had a chance to actually be
in the same room with him.   Anybody else?

Okey dokey.
Well listen I want to thank you very much and I'll be over here
to sign some books afterwards.   Thank you so much everybody.

[Applause]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.