Bluegrass Messengers

Lomax in London: Alan Lomax, the BBC and the Folk-Song Revival in England, 1950-1958
E. David Gregory
Folk Music Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2002), pp. 136-169

FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL VOLUME, 8 NUMBER 2, 2002, PP.136-169

Introduction
Pete Seeger once described Alan Lomax as the 'most important single figure' in the world of folk music, and a standard reference work has called him 'America's most eminent folk song collector and scholar'. [1] If Lomax's later academic work in comparative ethnomusicology has proven controversial, few would deny the immense contribution he made to the study of American traditional music between 1933 and 1949, through his wide-ranging activity as a field-collector, editor, archivist, teacher and broadcaster. [2]

Duringie 1950s his primary focus was on collecting and studying the folk music of Europe, in cluding the British Isles, and by the end of the decade he probably had as comprehensive an understanding of European folk song as any other contemporary scholar in the field (with the possible exception of A.L. Lloyd). If the depth of Lomax's scholarship was sometimes questionable, the breadth of his vision was not, and in later years his interests expanded to encompass the folk music and customs of many different regions of the world. On the basis of his research in both the Americas and Europe he developed an ethnomusicologicmal ethodology named cantometrics that he believed to be scientific.[3] This failed to win widespread academic acclaim, and Lomax's practice as a folk-song editor and his theories about the relationship between singing styles and socio-economic structures have both been sharply criticized. His work as a song collector and as a broadcaster may therefore prove to be his most enduring legacy.

Lomax's achievements as a collector in the Americaasr ew ell known,a ndt he reissue by Rounder Records of the many field recordings that he made in the Caribbeaann dt he DeepS outhw ill further publicizeh is work. The Alan Lomax Collection will also include recordings made by Lomax and his collaborators in the British Isles, plus extensives elections from his Spanish and Italian field trips and all nineteen volumes that w ere completed in The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music LP record series. [5]

Almost all of the European (including British) material in the Rounder collection was assembled between 1950 and 1958. These were the years when he lived in Europe, making London his base, although he was frequently away from the city on extended research trips to other parts of the British Isles or to the continent of Europe. The day before Lomax's return to the USA in the summer o f 1958, jazz critic Max Jones wrote a column in Melody Maker lamenting his loss. Jones recalled that, quite suddenly, in the autumn of 1950, a 'substantial Texan with enormous a ppetites and vitality to match' had appeared in England. He commented that during the past seven and a half years [Lomax]has spent a lot of time in Italy, Spain and France, even more in London. He has collected songs in Scotland, Ireland, England and on the Continent, has written books, worked for the BBC, made records, and done everything in his power to further Europe's interest in its own folk music.[6]

As Jones recognized, Lomax had tremendous energy, he worked fast, and he achieved much in a short time. His extended visit to Europe occurred at the time when the post-war folk-song revival in England was gathering steam, and he must be reckoned a player - even, perhaps, a key player - in that movement. Hamish Henderson excepted, historians and sociologists have been slow to recognize Lomax's contribution to the revival. Fred Woods, for example, virtually ignored his work in Folk Revival: The Rediscovery of a National Music, and dismissed him in one sentence in The Observer's Book of Folk Song in Britain.

Dave Harker' s single comment in Fakesong is hostile and inaccurate, Georgina Boyes's handful of references in The Imagined Village hardly do Lomax justice, and he is not even mentioned in Niall Mackinnon's The British Folk Scene.[7] The aim of this article is to begin to set the record straight. It does not attempt to provide a systematic survey of Lomax's song collecting in the British Isles but focuses instead on his impact on the English folk-music scene.[8] It analyses Lomax's collaboration with leading British collectors and singers, and surveys his brief career in England as a musician. It examines the most important radio programmes that Lomax made for the BBC while in England, and the several series of long-playing records with which he was associated. And, finally, it evaluates the ways in which Lomax' s influence altered, for better and for worse, the development of the folk-song revival in England.

Opening Moves, 1950-51
Alan Lomax was aged thirty-five when he set foot in Europe in the fall of 1950.[9] By then he was already an experienced folksong collector and broadcaster, and his reputation had preceded him. He had initially intended to make the trip a year earlier, and in July 1949 an internal BBC memo advised programme planners that this 'authority on American folkmusic, both of Negro origin and of the English settlers' who was also a 'collector of folk songs, writer, singer, lecturer and archivist to the Library of Congress' would be 'fully competent to undertake a feature programme or illustrated talk, possibly for the Third Programme' .[10]

In the event, Lomax ended up making more than thirty radio and TV programmes for the BBC during the 1950s, and he subsequently revealed that working for the Third Programme was his primary source of income while a song hunter in Europe. [11] Nonetheless, at the beginning of the 1950s Alan Lomax was hardly a household name in England, and he had only a few contacts at the BBC, the main ones being Bill Reid, Evelyn Gibbs and producer Geoffrey Bridson, whom he had previously met in America.[12] So why did Lomax decide to visit the UK and continental Europe in the first place? Domestic difficulties and the unpleasant Cold War atmosphere in the USA may have been contributory factors, but the main reason, according to Lomax, was a chance meeting in a Broadway coffee shop with Goddard Lieberson, President of Columbia Records. [13] Lomax had for several years dreamed of producing a multi-volume LP set of folk-music recordings from all around the world, but he had failed to obtain sufficient enthusiasm and funding for the project either from Decca Records or from academic folklorists assembled at an international conference in 1949. Lieberson, on the other hand, warmed to the idea immediately, and in 1950 commissioned Lomax to 'assemble ... 30 one-hour LPs entitled A World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, edited by the principal folklorists of the world from their collections of records'.

Lomax originally intended to accomplish this in a year by means of a 'tremendously complicated world-wide correspondence' combined with a five-week field trip to Europe, but in the event the project would take the best part of a decade and indeed was never finished as planned.[14] The reason for Lomax's delay in crossing the Atlantic was the need to complete his ground-breaking oral history of Jelly Roll Morton, Mr. Jelly Roll, before leaving America. It was eventually published in 1950, and royalties from this and other books and from Leadbelly's 'Goodnight Irene', a hit for both the Weavers and Frank Sinatra in 1950, financed the first phase of Lomax's transatlantic trip. On his arrival in Europe he first visited Belgium and France, teaming up with folk-singer Robin Roberts in Paris, but before the year was out the two of them had reached London and Lomax decided to make it his base. He soon realized that compiling the Columbia series would not be as easy as he had hoped, since the field recordings he required were in many cases simply unavailable, and not all European folklorists and archivists proved co-operative. [15]

The United Kingdom provided a good example of the first of Lomax's problems: there simply was no national sound archive of authentic folk-song recordings in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. Spain provided a good example of the second: the director of folk-music research at the Institute of Higher Studies in Madrid, an ex-Nazi, refused point-blank to co-operate, apparently for political reasons. [16] Lomax's solution to both problems was to stay in Europe in order to make the field recordings he needed himself. In the event he did in fact find collaborators in various countries, most notably Eduardo Torner in Spain, Diego Carpitella in Italy, Peter Kennedy in England, Hamish Henderson in Scotland and Seamus Ennis in Ireland.

On arriving in London, Lomax called at Cecil Sharp House. The Director of the English Folk Dance & Song Society, Douglas Kennedy, was a friend of one of Lomax's buddies, folk-singer Burl Ives, and his son Peter had just spent the best part of a year working for the BBC West Region in Bristol and making his own field recordings of West Country folk-singers, using one of the first tape-recorders manufactured commercially in the UK. Not surprisingly, Peter and Alan quickly became friends and agreed to collaborate on the English volume of the Columbia series. Peter also took on responsibility for Yugoslavia, making the required recordings there in 1951 at a five-day national festival of folk music planned to coincide with a conference of the International Folk Music Council organized by his aunt, Maud Karpeles. He alerted Lomax to the recordings that he and others had already made for the BBC Permanent Recordings Library, and provided the names and phone numbers of potential informants and collaborators. These included Brian  George, an Irishman employed by the BBC as Head of Central Programme Operations, and two communist intellectuals: actor and playwright Jimmie Miller, whom Kennedy had himself recorded in 1950, and Bert Lloyd, a frequent user of the EFDSS library who had recently resigned from his job as a journalist on the Picture Post and was now attempting to earn a living as a freelance writer and folklorist.

Lloyd would be recruited by Lomax to collect and edit the Bulgaria volume of the Columbia series. George and Miller (whom I shall from here on call by his nom de plume, Ewan MacColl, the name he later used as a professional singer) would soon become close friends and collaborators with Lomax.[17] Lomax also called at Broadcasting House. He already had a few friends there, most notably features producer Geoffrey Bridson, and he made others, including Roger Fiske, Charles Chilton and Charles Parker. Their support, and even more so Brian George's, undoubtedly helped Lomax considerably in his dealings with the BBC bureaucracy. At the time George was lobbying for a budget sufficient to mount a field collection project that would vastly expand the BBC Permanent Recordings Library's holdings. This, the BBC Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme, would eventually be launched in 1952, but in the meantime George recruited Lomax as a persuasive advocate for the idea. Although now an expatriate, George had retained his love for his native land and its music, and in 1947, working in collaboration with the Irish Folklore Commission, he had made a number of recordings of English-language and Gaelic folk songs for the Library. Listening to them re-inforced Lomax's decision to start his field collecting in Ireland. Before leaving the USA he had been entranced by a recording of Maire Sullivan singing 'The Airy Girl' which was, in his words, the kind of 'Irish folk song one heard about but never heard' in North America, and which revealed 'a delicacy of musical line and subtlety in singing we couldn't match in the States'.[18] But how should he go about tracking down such material in Ireland? George recommended seeking out his collaborator on the 1947 pilot project, a Dubliner named Seamus Ennis. So off went Lomax and Roberts to Dublin to visit the Folklore Commission.

They received polite but minimal assistance from Commission archivist Sean O'Sullivan. Fortunately their meeting with Seamus Ennis produced entirely different results. [19] Lomax spent an evening in the Ennis family kitchen, listening to Seamus playing his uilleann pipes and swapping songs with him into the night. He discovered that his favourite cowboy ballad, 'Git Along Little Dogies' had its roots in the Irish song 'The Old Man Rocking the Cradle' which Ennis knew both in an English-language version and in a Gaelic version he had learned from Elizabeth Cronin.[20]

By daybreak the two collectors were drunk, exhausted, and friends for life, and moreover Ennis had been recruited to help plan, gather material and co-edit the Irish volume. A few days later Lomax and Roberts, with Ennis's assistance, were collecting in the field in the south and west of Ireland, and by May of 1951 they had 'in the can' more than sufficient recordings to produce the first volume of the Columbia series. [21] Of the thirty-four tracks eventually chosen for the album most were field recordings made by Ennis and Lomax that winter, although five were from Brian George's 1947 recordings for the BBC.

Seamus Ennis, incidentally, also -featured as a performer on eight tracks, singing or playing tin whistle or uilleann pipes.[22] Before he left for Ireland Lomax had made his first radio programmes for the BBC. The producer quickest off the mark in using Lomax's talents was his old friend Geoffrey Bridson who was making a two part series on Traditional Ballads for the Third Programme; Lomax appeared in the second of these on 12 February 1951. The very next day saw the broadcast, on the Home Service, of Lomax's own first BBC series. Titled Adventurein Folk Song, the three-part series combined a coast-to-coast survey of the wealth and variety of American folk song with an account of Alan's experiences collecting for the Library of Congress in the 1930s.

Although Lomax slipped in an occasional recording, such as Leadbelly's 'Goodnight Irene', the majority of songs were performed by himself (usually with guitar accompaniment) or by Robin Roberts. Their repertoire was a skilful mix of traditional narrative ballads, pioneer songs, lullabies, cowboy songs, bad-man ballads, lumberjack songs, shanties, field hollers, Afro-American folksongs and blues, and compositions by Woody Guthrie. This entertaining primer served to bring British listeners up to speed on the American folk- music [23] revival.

On returning from Ireland, Lomax made two follow-up series for BBC radio that allowed him to explore some aspects of American traditional music and culture in greater depth than had been possible in Adventurein Folk Song. Patternsi n American Folk Song, another three-part collaboration with Robin Roberts, was organized on thematic lines, one programme devoted to 'Love', one to 'Violence' and one to 'Work'. Once again Roberts and Lomax performed the songs themselves, but they had more opportunity to discuss their social function and their derivation from English, Scottish and Irish ballads and lyrics. Indeed Lomax made a point of including numerous American versions of British traditional ballads and lyrics, among them 'Seeds of Love', 'Bryan O'Lynn', 'Matty Groves', 'Geordie', 'Barbara Allen', 'Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender' and 'The House Carpenter'. [24]

Implicitly, then, the programmes suggested some of the richness of Anglo-Celtic as well as North American folk song. Lomax's other series, on the other hand, was strictly American in content, and went beyond folk music (in the narrower sense of the term) to encompass New Orleans jazz, spirituals and gospel music, and the blues. It was also an oral history of black America. Titled The Art of the Negro, this series was broadcast on the Third Programme in three parts: 'Mr. Jelly Roll from New Orleans', 'Trumpets of the Lord' and 'Blues in the Mississippi Night', and it made extensive use of Lomax's field recordings for the Library of Congress and also his private collecting since 1942. The voices heard by listeners included Jelly Roll Morton, Vera Hall, Big Bill Broonzy, and numerous folk artists from Mississippi, Alabama and Texas: in Lomax's own words 'a washerwoman, blues singers, preachers, mule-skinners, railroad workers, convicts . . . all singers, all artists, who have sat for hours and poured out in unforgettable language their story of the Southern United States'. [25]

At once an enthusiastic championing of the music of ordinary black Americans and a damning indictment of Southern racism, The Art of the Negro was an extraordinarily powerful documentary feature that won Lomax many admirers and, no doubt, not a few enemies too. Collaborations with Kennedy and MacColl, 1951-52 In the spring of 1951 Lomax resumed work with Peter Kennedy on the English volume of the Columbia series. [26] They decided to include eight items recorded by Kennedy in the West Country: four songs (Fred Perrier's 'The Turmut-Hoer's Song', Bunny Palmer's 'The Mallard', Walter Lucas's 'The Prickle Holly Bush' and Fanny Rumble's 'Richard of Taunton Dean'), two country dance instrumentals ('Up the Sides and Down the Middle' by Bert Pidgeon and Alfie Tuck and 'The Seven Step Polka' by Kennedy's own Haymakers Village Barn Dance band), and two examples of folk customs: a selection of singing games and rhymes by children from Sidbury, Devon and an excerpt from the Symondsbury Mummers' Christmas play. Kennedy suggested that there were two songs by Phil Tanner on commercial 78s that deserved inclusion, 'The Sweet Primroses' and 'The Wassail Song', and for good measure they threw in a short example of Tanner's mouth-music, 'The Gower Reel'. Another Kennedy suggestion was Bristol shantyman Stanley Slade, but rather than using Kennedy's own recordings of Slade, Lomax opted for two selections from the BBC Record Library, recorded in 1942: 'Haul on the Bowlin'' and 'A-Roving'.[27]

Other items culled from the BBC archives were Jim and Bob Copper's 'The Contented Country Lad' (recorded by Brian George), Jim Copper's 'The Threshing Machine', the 'Earsdon Sword Dance' by fiddler Jimmy McKay, a 'Quarryman's Chant and Song' by Tom Tewkesbury and a gang of workers in the Portland Stone Quarries in Dorset, 'The Padstow May Day Song' by the villagers of Padstow in Cornwall, Cyril Biddick's 'Old Daddy Fox' from Boscastle in Cornwall, and William Kimber's version of 'Country Gardens' from the Headington Morris in Oxford. To these were added two selections from the 1947 East Anglia Sings recordings by Maurice Brown and E.J. Moeran: Jumbo Brightwell's 'The False Hearted Knight' and Charger Salmons's 'The Rigs of Time'.

Excellent though most of these pieces were, they left the collection rather unbalanced: the north of England was clearly under-represented, as was urban and industrial song. Kennedy's remedies didn't entirely redress the balance but they helped somewhat. He sent Lomax to Wideopen, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to record Northumbrian piper Jack Armstrong playing 'Roxburgh Castle' on his smallpipes and performing a medley of 'Corn Riggs' and 'Morpeth Rant' with his band, the Barnstormers. He also suggested that Lincolnshire might be represented by Percy Grainger's historic phonograph recordings of Joseph Taylor. Lomax reluctantly decided that these were insufficiently 'hi-fi', but opted instead for performances of 'Brigg Fair' and 'Died for Love' by Newcastle-born Isla Cameron, whose singing of narrative ballads in Bridson's radio programmes had impressed him.

For industrial songs Kennedy suggested Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl. At the time Lloyd was heavily involved in compiling and editing material for his book Come All Ye Bold Miners: Ballads and Songs of the Coalfields, which would be published in 1952, so he was a logical choice. But to Lomax's disappointment Lloyd was not using a tape-recorder in his collecting, nor was he himself a miner. He was a singer, however, and he had already recorded for the BBC archives some of the narrative ballads and other folk songs he had learned as a child, so in the end it was his version of 'Polly Vaughan' that Lomax included on the LP. As for MacColl, Kennedy had already recorded him singing a couple of Scottish ballads but what Lomax wanted was English occupational songs, so it was a matter of tracking down the itinerant actor and seeing what he could offer. Luckily, when Lomax got back  from Ireland, MacColl was in London.

Their first two meetings are described in detail in MacColl's autobiography, Journeyman. Their first was at the BBC studios, and it was probably then that Lomax obtained what he needed for the Columbia LP: performances of 'The Four Loom Weaver' and 'Fourpence a Day'. Their second meeting took place in the mining village of Tow Law in County Durham where MacColl was acting in a Theatre Workshop production. MacColl recalled the incident as follows:

We are in the midst of the rig when Alan turns up intent on recording more songs from me. It just isn't possible, there is too much work to be done. So he produces a guitar and starts to sing. For a couple of hours he serenades us with songs recorded in the coal towns of West Virginia and Kentucky, with chants and hollers learned in the prison camps of Texas and Florida, with blues from Mississippi and Tennessee, with lowdown ballads from Louisiana. I had heard snatches of this kind of music on record and, very occasionally, on radio programmes, but this was different. The man singing those songs had actually heard them sung in coal camps, had actually listened to convicts singing them on prison farms. It was an education and an entertainment which I doubt any of us, rigging the stage that night, will ever forget. In the course of the next year or so I spent more and more time listening to Alan's enormous collection of tapes, to songs from the Americas, Africa, India, Italy, Spain and Britain, arguing, discussing, learning and trying to acquire Alan's world-view of this extraordinary corpus of songs and stories.[28]

MacColl's reminiscence captures the extraordinary impact that Lomax's personality, enthusiasm and knowledge could have on receptive individuals. Of course, not everyone responded the same way to Lomax's personality. To MacColl's erstwhile partner, Theatre Workshop director Joan Littlewood, the American's arrogance and egotism was as evident as his engaging openness and his enthusiasm for her [29] work.

MacColl's autobiography also reveals that Lomax was instrumental in bringing him and Bert Lloyd together for the first time, the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership that played a pivotal role in the English folk-song revival.[30] Furthermore, according to MacColl, Lomax quickly became one of the first and most enthusiastic champions of the idea of a British revival that could obtain wide popular participation, thereby making folk music once again the dominant popular culture of the working masses.[31]

MacColl concluded that Lomax was far ahead of his time and that it would take another five or six years to lay the groundwork for an effective British revival. [32] In reality the revival was already under way, and Lomax was now playing a significant role in it as both collector and theorist. His views on what was and what was not folk music informed his activities and his discussions with MacColl, Kennedy, Lloyd, Ennis and others. Lomax's concept of folk song at this time was ecumenical. He was interested in both rural and industrial/urban traditions, and he embraced both source and revival singers without making much distinction between them.[33]

This eclecticism had both drawbacks and merits. It meant that Lomax was eager to record and publicize a wide variety of performers, some of whom would undoubtedly have been ignored by collectors with a more purist definition of folk music. But it did result in a rather mixed bag of material on the Columbia LPs, with no attempt to distinguish clearly between field recordings of source singers and studio recordings of professionals such as MacColl and  Cameron. As a pioneer in the field of collecting with a tape-recorder in Britain, Lomax was happy to capture on tape whatever folksongs he found, no matter who sang them. He felt he didn't have the luxury of being too fastidious, and, in any case, he genuinely admired the singing of his new friends and allies, Isla, Bert and Ewan.

Project Montgomerie from the School of Scottish Studies, and of Calum and Sorley MacLean from the Hebridean island of Raasay.[34] Lomax's visit to the Hebrides was all too brief, and the Gaelic scholars to whom he played his recordings on his return to Edinburgh must have had mixed feelings about his activities.[35] If one was in an uncharitable mood, one might well be tempted to describe Lomax's approach to field collecting as quick and careless. Certainly at this time he did not document fully the lives and circumstances of his informants, although this more academic approach to collecting was still unusual at a time when only a handful of individuals were making field recordings at all. But what Lomax did do in Scotland in 1951 was to demonstrate to the School of Scottish Studies how essential the tape recorder would be in carrying out the systematic documentation of local customs and song traditions that they were planning at the time. Lomax was a pioneer in this field, and Hamish Henderson, among others, recognized the merits as well as the shortcomings of his efforts. [36]

One of the most important results of Lomax's few months in Scotland was Volume 6 of The Columbia World Library. It included an impressive set of Gaelic songs (including waulking songs, drinking songs, ballads, lyrics, a lullaby and a hymn) from the Western Isles, plus fine English language performances by Flora MacNeil, John Strachan and Jimmy McBeath, among others. [37] To these Lomax added pipe tunes, children's songs, comic songs, instrumentals by Jimmy Shand, and a few performances by Hamish Henderson, Isla Cameron and Ewan MacColl. The LP was another mixed bag, with some of the material verging on the commercial and some (as in the case of the English volume) performed by revival singers rather than more authentic traditional singers, yet in short compass it provided a surprisingly comprehensive survey of Scottish folk music.[38] As late as 1977 Hamish Henderson reviewed it favourably as 'remain[ing] to this day a stimulating and by no means unrepresentative 'sampler' of one of the richest and most variegated folk music traditions in Western Europe'. [39]

Nor was this LP the only fruit of Lomax's labours north of the border. His fourth major project with the BBC was 'I Heard Scotland Sing', an hour-long account of his travels and song collecting north of the border that summer. Recorded in August, 'I Heard Scotland Sing' was first broadcast in the Home Service on 4 December. Although the last segment, a dramatic sketch about Bonny Prince Charlie's escape to the Isle of Skye after his defeat at Culloden in 1746, could be criticized as an unnecessary excess of romantic Jacobitism, the heart of the programme consisted of Gaelic songs and mouth-music recorded on the Hebridean islands of Barra and Uist.

Lomax's narrative took the form of a journey that began in Edinburgh, then moved northeast to Dundee and Aberdeenshire, and finally headed through the Highlands to the Western Isles. Interspersed among the many folk songs were the sounds of pipe bands, fiddling, country dances, children's rhymes and comic or dramatic stories by John Strachan and Jimmy McBeath, but the songs were the glory of the programme. They included, among many others, Flora MacNeil's version of 'Cairistiona', John Strachan's 'The Bonny Lass o' Fyvie' and 'The Tinker's Wedding', Ewan MacColl's 'The Banks of Deveron Water', Jimmy McBeath's 'Come All Ye Tramps an' Hawkers' and two by Blanche Wood, 'Portknockie Girl' and 'The Sailor Lad'.

Lomax's recordings on Barra and Uist were almost entirely in Gaelic: mouth music, bird imitations, ballads, shorter lyrics, rowing songs, drinking songs and several kinds of work song, to accompany milking, churning, spinning and waulking (shrinking hand-woven tweed). The performers included Kate Nicolson, Rena MacLean, John Maclnnes and John MacLeod from South Uist, and from Barra, Flora MacNeil, Annie Johnston, Mary Gillies, Mary Morrison and piper Calum Johnston. The whole was a tour de force, a serious exploration of the folk music of Aberdeenshire and the Hebrides skilfully packaged as entertainment, a technique of which Alan Lomax was already a master.[40]

Annie Johnston, undoubtedly one of the finest Gaelic singers in Scotland, was also featured on Lomax's follow-up programme to 'I Heard Scotland Sing'. Recorded in December 1951 but not broadcast in the Third Programme until 16 April 1952, 'The Gaelic West' was written by Lomax and narrated by Seamus Ennis. It was the most erudite and esoteric of all Lomax's BBC productions, although to anyone with an interest in the subject matter it was utterly fascinating and it contained some of the most haunting music ever heard on radio. Since the average Third Programme listener could be assumed to be quite sophisticated and also willing to be educated, Lomax and Ennis on this occasion adopted the personae of professional folklorists. Drawing upon their field recordings in Ireland as well as the fruits of Lomax's Scottish trip, the programme explored the Gaelic songs, ballads and instrumental music of Western Ireland, comparing these stylistically with parallel songs and tunes of the Scottish islands.

Ennis's own personal reflections on the differences in singing style and playing techniques between Irish and Scottish musicians provided the thread that ran through the programme, but above all 'The Gaelic West' was a grand opportunity to present a wealth of beautiful and little known music to a receptive, if no doubt fairly small audience. [41]

Taken together, 'The Gaelic West' and 'I Heard Scotland Sing' demonstrated that Celtic music was alive and well, and that English-languagea s well as Gaelic folk song was a living tradition in both Scotland and Ireland, a vibrant cultural heritage that could be preserved and further developed as a vital force in the lives of ordinary people. Moreover, Lomax had shown that the two forms of traditional music coexisted and complemented each other, with some singers equally at home in both languages. No doubt there were plenty of people in Scotland and Ireland who knew all this perfectly well already, but it took the efforts of an American folklorist to reveal this truth to most English listeners to the BBC in the winter of 1951-52.

Project England, 1953
Apart from recording Ewan MacColl, Isla Cameron and Jack Armstrong for the English volume of The Columbia World Library, Lomax did relatively little collecting in England (as opposed to Ireland and Scotland) during 1951-52. He was soon off to Spain, where he spent about six months collecting during the autumn and winter of 1952 [42] On his return to England in early 1953 he set out to improve his collection of English, Scottish and Irish folk song and folklore. This was the year when he recorded, among others, such important singers as Harry Cox, Margaret Barry and Jeannie Robertson.[43]

But the first thing he did was to participate, at Ewan MacColl's invitation, in another radio series that played a significant role in the English folk-song revival. Ballads and Blues was a collaboration between BBC North Region producer Denis Mitchell and MacColl, Bert Lloyd, Isla Cameron and jazzman Humphrey Lyttleton.[44] Mitchell's guiding idea for Ballads and Blues was to bring together a varied and eclectic mix of traditional music forms around a series of common themes. The individual programmes had the following thematic titles: 'The Singing Sailormen'. 'Bad Lads and Hard Cases', 'Song of the Iron Road', 'The Hammer and the Loom', 'Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier' and 'The Big City'. In each case an attempt was made to demonstrate the similarities and parallels between older British folk songs and modern American blues and jazz lyrics about the tribulations and joys of everyday life, whether the subject matter was work, crime, travelling, warfare, the railroad or the pace of city life. Lyttleton's band supplied plenty of traditional jazz, then experiencing a boom in popularity in Britain, Cy Grant provided the calypsos, Neva Raphaello, Lomax and Big Bill Broonzy sang the blues, American folk music came from Lomax and Jean Ritchie, Celtic music from Seamus Ennis, and English folk song was supplied by MacColl, Lloyd, Cameron and a supporting cast of instrumentalists. While Bert Lloyd helped considerably with the research that underpinned the series, MacColl took the initiative in planning and scripting the individual programmes, and it was he who drafted a promotional article for Radio Times.

The influence of Lomax's worldview can be seen in this text: There are, in fact, many indications that we are on the eve of a great folk-song revival and even Tin Pan Alley has, in recent years, turned more and more frequently to the task of ransackingth e old collectionsf or number-one hits. It is to folk singers like Burl Ives, Woodie [sic] Guthrie, Josh White, and to folk-lorists of the calibre of John and Alan Lomax that the present revival owes most, for they have largely succeeded in dissipating the aura of preciousness and sanctity with which 19th.

Century folk-lorists shrouded popular music. The task of creating a new, wide audience for folk musicw as made comparatively easy in the United States by the fact that the American folk form is the blues and the blues not only formed the basis of jazz but has inluenced [sic] all American popular music. The connection between jazz and American folk music in general is something that most British jazz authorities recognise. What is not so widely realised is that the Blues are not a unique phenomenon; the form has its counterpart in the cante hondo of Spain, in the corrido of Mexico, in the waulking songs of Gaelic Scotland, and, indeed, in many English and Lowland Scots folk-songs. 'The blues aint nothin' but a good man feelin' bad, the blues aint nothin' but a woman on a poor man's mind, the blues aint nothin' but the poor man's heart disease...' This is equally true of Lancashire songs such as 'The four-loom weaver,' and 'Van Dieman's land,' it is true of songs like 'Lord Randall,' 'The Rocks of Baun' [sic] and 'The Sheffield Apprentice'; it is true of all the harsh and bitter melodies which came out of the slums and the sweatshops of early-nineteenth century England. Loneliness, hunger, frustration, despair ... these are the common factors which link the ballads of the old world with the blues of the new; the music which is the product of such forces is elemental and violent and this is no less true in England than in America.[45]

This was a manifesto for a British folk revival quite different from that promoted by Douglas Kennedy and the EFDSS. In 1953 MacColl's vision of the revival, like Lomax's, was of an eclectic music of working people that would naturally mix songs and tunes from both sides of the Atlantic. Both men felt a natural affinity between Anglo-Celtic folk music and American folk song, blues and jazz, and they saw nothing wrong in promoting these various musical forms together as different kinds of real popular music as opposed to that sold by the commercial music business. Nonetheless, as they both recognized, a great deal of the folk song that they wanted to promote remained undiscovered, or at least, unissued on record.

Lomax still saw his primary task in England as that of collecting, and, once Ballads and Blues was in the can, he teamed up with Jean Ritchie, George Pickow (Jean's photographer husband) and Peter Kennedy for a field trip to Devon and Cornwall. Ritchie and Pickow had come equipped with a movie camera and a brand-new Magnacorder (an American portable tape recorder that provided superior sound quality), and Kennedy suggested that one good way of making use of this technology would be to film and record the Padstow May Day ceremonies.

Jean Ritchie recalls that Lomax's involvement in the project initially caused some difficulties, but that he played an important role in planning and scripting the movie: Peter [Kennedy] got Padstow to agree to the filming. When we arrived, however, there was consternation at Alan's being there. The Oss dancers wanted to pull out of the deal . . . the townspeople were saying 'That Lomax man will steal our song and get it on the hit parade  like 'Goodnight, Irene', it won't belong to us anymore'. There were meetings in the pub until night time, and at last a promise was written out, that the Padstow May Song, 'Unite and Unite,' would be copyrighted in the name of the People of Padstow. Alan bought a lot of pints and did a lot of talking, and then George and I were able to start shooting.

George did all the photography, and I ran the tape recorder from our car, with occasional help from Peter. Most of the time Peter stayed with Alan, as a kind of translater (and protector I guess)! Once things got underway, and we were doing black & white filming because there wasn't enough light for color then, Alan got the idea of doing a script and dressing things up with several small plots, and he was literally writing the script as we went along.[46]

That was how the four collectors came to make the movie, Oss Oss, Wee Oss. Tracing the role in the local May Day customs played by the Padstow hobby horse, the film captured the singing and frolics of the villagers from sundown on the last day of April to the processions and dancing of the first day of summer.[47] Kennedy also introduced his American friends to a number of the traditional singers he had previously recorded in the West Country, including Bill Westaway at Belstone on Dartmoor.[48] (Figure 1.) Several of Ritchie's and Pickow's recordings would eventually appear on the Folkways LP edited by Jean Ritchie, Field Trip - England, including Westaway singing 'Widdecombe 147 Fair', George Endicott's 'Three Scamping Rogues' and William Rew's version of 'Barbara Allen' .[49]

Lomax saw his other, secondary but also very important, mission as that of publicizing what he and others had collected. He already knew that the BBC would be his single most important vehicle for telling the British public about their own musical heritage and that of other countries too.[50] Indeed, the BBC was proving surprisingly co-operative to Lomax and his English allies. In February to March 1953, for example, the Third Programme aired a series of four programmes on the Folk Music of Yugoslavia in which Peter Kennedy presented the recordings he had made for The Columbia World Library at the Opatija Festival in 1951.[51]

Three of the Ballads and Blues series were re-broadcast in June on the Light Programme, thereby reaching a much wider audience. MacColl was permitted to make three programmes for the Third Programme on British industrial folk song, topical folk songs and traditional ballads; they were titled 'St. Cecilia and the Shovel', 'Living Ballads' and 'Come All Ye Good people.[52] Visiting American folk singers Burl Ives and Jean Ritchie were also given their own feature programmes.[53] But the most important BBC radio series of all was As I Roved Out, the brainchild of Lomax's collaborator, Peter Kennedy. Designed in part as a successor to the long-running Country Magazine, As I Roved Out combined anecdotes about rural locales and their inhabitants with excerpts from the field recordings of traditional song made by Kennedy, Ennis and others during their work for the BBC's Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme.

[Figure 1 Alan Lomax, George Pickow and jean Ritchie recording Bill Westawav in a Devon village Photograph courtesy of George Pickott]

The five series of As I Roved Out comprised fifty-three individual programmes, most of them broadcast on Sunday mornings between September 1953 and September 1958.[54] Lomax himself also hosted an eight-part BBC television series, Song Hunter: Alan Lomax, the first of which was transmitted on 25 June 1953.[55] As far as I can discover, there is no extant copy of this TV programme, but a short article in Radio Times described it as follows:

Alan Lomax will tell viewers something of his world-wide travels in search of folk songs ... Lomax's researches in Europe have brought to light a mass of material and his travels in Spain a short time ago resulted in several thousands of recordings never before collected. He has recently completed three large albums of longplaying records of folk songs of the world. On Thursdayh e will take viewers on a world tour of folk songs and show, on a recently made film, the son of the Devon man who first sang 'Widdicombe Fair' for the English collectors. He will also show some film made at Padstow this spring. [56]

The Padstow film, of course, was Oss Oss, Wee Oss. The Devon folk singer was Bill Westaway, probably the first English traditional singer to appear on television  in the UK. Jean Ritchie sang 'The Cuckoo' and 'Goodbye Girls, I'm Going to Boston', while Lomax himself performed 'John Henry' and played excerpts from his Spanish field recordings. Subsequent programmes in the Song Hunter series included appearances by (among others) Theodore Bikel, Ewan MacColl, Isla Cameron, Seamus Ennis, Michael Gorman, Margaret Barry, Jimmy McBeath, Anne Cosgrave, Flora MacNeil, Harry Cox, Charlie Wills and the Copper family.[57]

Song Hunter thus exhibited the characteristic Lomax mix of revival singers and source singers, a format that he seems to have chosen quite deliberately in this instance. Since his producer, David Attenborough, had strong doubts about the advisability of using elderly amateur performers from rural backgrounds in 'live' TV broadcasts, Lomax's successful inclusion of such unpredictable personalities as Charlie Wills, Jimmy McBeath and Margaret Barry was a signal achievement. In every programme he sought a balance between these authentic carriers of various regional folk-music traditions and more polished singers of folk songs whose performances he also admired. Despite the small audience that BBC television obtained in those pioneer days, Song Hunter functioned as a useful adjunct to the longer-running As I Roved Out radio series on the Light Programme. Lomax certainly deserves credit for creating the first television series in the UK in which source singers and traditional folk songs were featured front and centre.

Passionately enthusiastic about the traditional
music he had discovered and
recorded in Spain, Lomax next persuaded
the Third Programme to run not one but
two series on Spanish folk music. The first,
The Folk Music of Spain, scripted and
presented by Lomax himself, consisted of
two programmes, broadcast in October
1953. One was on the traditional music of
Andalusia, the other surveyed northwestern
Spain, and both used the personal
travelogue format that had been so
successful in 'I Heard Scotland Sing',
Lomax illustrating his wanderings with a
variety of 'actuality' recordings that
included the sound of ox-carts, religious
processions and street cries as well as
instrumental performances and folk
songs.58 These two programmes, however,
were merely the hors-d'oeuvre to the
main meal. In November and December
LOMAXIN LONDON 149
the Third Programme ran a six-part series
called Spanish Folk Music that also drew
extensively on Lomax's field recordings,
although this more detailed and systematic
survey was scripted by Spanish folklorist
Eduardo M. Torner, and translated and
read by John Gavall.59 If Lomax remained
in the background on this occasion, he
could be heard again on the Third
Programme in December in a programme
on 'The Folk Music of the Orinoco
Indians' in which he introduced Pierre
Gaisseau and the field recordings made by
Gaisseau in the Colombian rain-forest.60
This was a good example of Lomax the
publicist for world music and the unselfish
promoter of his colleagues' work. A
companion programme, recorded the
same month (July 1953) but not broadcast
until May 1954, was 'The Folk Music of
Canada'.61 This, although scripted and
presented by Lomax, drew heavily on
information and recordings supplied by
Marius Barbeau from the collection at the
National Museum. 62
Skiffle, 1955-57
the BBC airwaves between May 1954 and
March 1955. For most of 1954 Lomax was
in Italy, with the aim of duplicating in that
country what he had recently done in
Spain. He later recalled his year in Italy as
the happiest of his life, commenting that
the peninsula turned out to be a 'museum
of musical anitiquities' and he felt like a
kind of 'musical Columbus in reverse' who
was discovering daily the 'buried and
hidden treasure' of ancient folk-song
genres unknown even to Italian musicologists.
63 Among those discoveries were a
living tradition of Italian sea-shanties,
eight-hundred-year-old Moorish music on
the Amalfi coast, and a flourishing survival
of commediad el' arte in the Campagna. He
returned to England early in 1955 with
about sixty hours of field recordings on
tape, far more than he required for either
the projected Italian volume in the
ColumbiaW orldL ibraryse ries (which turned
into two volumes, one on northern and
central Italy and one on southern Italy and
the islands of Sicily and Sardinia) or the
Third Programme series for which the
BBC had commissioned his expedition. For
this, a set of eight programmes titled The
Folk Music of Italy and broadcast between
March and June 1955, Lomax also drew
upon the archives of the Accademia Santa
Cecilia.64 The series demonstrated that
traditional music was still a living force in
the lives of many rural (and some urban)
lower-class Italians in a variety of regions
of the country, and that their music, often
archaic in style, had roots that went back
to the Middle Ages. It was a tour de force,
and perhaps the highest scholarly achievement
of Lomax's work for the BBC.
The England to which Lomax returned
in 1955 had just embarked on a period of
unprecedented creativity and change in the
realm of popular music. British rock 'n'
roll would soon emerge, with such early
gems as Tommy Steele's 'Rock with the
Caveman', 'Doomsday Rock' and 'Rebel
Rock'. Not that Alan Lomax was much
interested in the likes of Tommy Steele,
Cliff Richard, Billy Fury and Marty Wilde.
But the Soho coffee bars in which several
of these teenage rockers started their
musical careers were at the heart of a
new London music scene that expanded
rapidly in the wake of the unexpected
success of a recording by the Chris Barber
Skiffle Group, featuring Lonnie Donegan
on guitar and vocals, 'Rock Island Line'
coupled with 'John Henry'. 65 For at least
two years. 1956-57, skiffle equalled rock
'n' roll as the music of English youth, a
150 FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
form of music, moreover, that many
thousand teenagers attempted, with
greater or lesser success, to perform
themselves 66
An earlier form of skiffle had been
pioneered in the early 1 950s by John
Hasted, initially within the framework of
the London Youth Choir and then subsequently
at the Good Earth Club in Soho.67
Another pioneer, perhaps more influential,
was Ken Colyer, who featured a skiffle
group within his Original Crane River
Jazzband in 1950 and again with the Ken
Colyer Jazzmen in 1954.68 Other early
exponents of the genre were guitarists Diz
Disley and Alexis Korner, who both
sometimes played with Ken Colyer and
his brother Bill. What all these early
skifflers had in common was a love of the
music of Woody Guthrie, Josh White and
Big Bill Broonzy, and visits to England by
White and Broonzy in the early fifties
certainly played a role in the genesis of the
skiffle movement. Yet what was particularly
noticeable about the earliest skiffle
recordings was the predominance of
Leadbelly material and of other Negro
folk songs recorded in the penitentiaries of
the Deep South by the Lomaxes in the
1930s. 'Take This Hammer', 'Midnight
Special', 'Down By the Riverside', 'Go
Down Old Hannah', 'John Henry' and
'Rock Island Line' are a few of many
examples. Alan Lomax loved these songs
and often played them himself, as he had
done on his first programmes for the BBC
in 1951-52. When he heard them performed
in a manner that derived from the
washboard, jug and spasm bands of the late
1920s and early 1930s, Lomax could have
responded by denouncing these amateur
English efforts as a dismal caricature of the
original, an insult to his friend Leadbelly.
He did not. On the contrary, he applauded
skiffle as a genuine form of British do-ityourself
entertainment, a people's alternative
to Tin Pan Alley. British skiffle, he
pointed out, had a different beat from that
of the American original, and it had
developed its own sound, musical form
69 and repertoire. 9 He approved of the
skifflers' use not only of Afro-American
material but also of songs by Woody
Guthrie and the Carter family, and he
suggested that they should look to their
own folk traditions as well. Most skifflers
ignored this advice, but some were already
thinking upon the same lines, John Hasted,
Peter Kennedy, Hylda Sims and Nancy
Whiskey among them. Kennedy, for
example, adapted to the skiffle format a
Cornish folksong 'Camborne: Hill', about
one of the first steam engines, that he had
discovered on one of his field trips to the
West Country.70
Lomax also jumped at the opportunity
to perform as a singer/guitarist in London
clubs and coffee bars, and he eventually
recorded a single for Decca, an EP for
Melodisc, an LP for HMV, and an LP for
Nixa, as well as two LPs for the American
label Tradition. The single coupled two
Ewan MacColl compositions, 'Dirty Old
Town' and 'Hard Case'. The EP comprised
four tracks: 'Ain' No Mo Cane On
This Brazis', 'I'm a Rambler and a
Gambler', 'Long Summer Day' and 'The
Red River Shore'. The Nixa LP was called
American Song Train and included 'Railroad
Bill', 'This Train', 'Johnson Boys', 'Kicking
Mule', 'Doney Gal', 'The Two Sisters'
and 'Mary Anne', a repertoire of pioneer
songs aimed primarily at the skiffle market.
The HMV LP, titled Great American Ballads,
included 'Long John', 'Jesse James', 'The
Boll Weevil', 'The Grey Goose', 'Po'
Lazarus', 'Darlin' Corey', 'Buffalo Skinners'
and 'Git Along Little Dogies', a
mixture of material from Lomax's Texas
background and from his collecting trips
LOMAXIN LONDON 151
among blacks in the Deep South. Again,
almost all the tunes were suited to a skiffle
treatment.71
From solo performances it was only one
further step to forming his own skiffle
group, The Ramblers. Alan Lomax's
Ramblers was, in part, an offshoot of an
earlier group, led by John Hasted, which
included Shirley Collins as one of the
vocalists.72 Lomax was particularly taken
with this young protegee of Hasted's who
had a strong Sussex accent and who was, at
the time, intent on playing banjo and
performing Jean Ritchie's Appalachian
versions of traditional ballads. His advice
to Shirley was to concentrate on singing
material from her own, southern English,
heritage, and to stop using Hasted as an
accompanist. She didn't initially follow his
advice: her first recordings (made in 1958)
reveal her still playing the banjo herself or
accompanied by Hasted. But she did join
the new Ramblers, along with Ewan
MacColl, jazz clarinettist Bruce Turner,
and a banjo-player whom Lomax imported
specially from the States, Peggy Seeger.
Peggy, of course, made an even stronger
emotional impact on MacColl than Shirley
had on Lomax, and would remain based in
the UK until the 1990s. She was a key
component in the Ramblers, giving the
group a more American, even hillbilly,
sound on its US material, such as 'Freight
Train' and 'Sixteen Tons'. This American
material was what Granada TV was most
interested in, and Lomax and the Ramblers
made fourteen one-hour programmes for
commercial television, beginning in the
summer of 1956.73 Surprisingly, given this
media exposure, the group failed to land a
recording contract, but one publication
resulted from the venture. The Skiffle
Album, featuring Sk!ffle and Folk Songs
popularisedb y Alan Lomaxa nd the Ramblers
was published in 1957, and obviously
aimed at the thousands of amateur skiffle
groups in existence by this time.74 (Figure
2) The song book consisted mainly of
British material, although two American
tunes, arranged by Lomax, were included:
'O-Lula' and 'Railroad Man'. The remainder
were either compositions by Ewan
MacColl ('Dirty Old Town' and 'Hard
Case') or British traditional songs. Of the
latter, Peter Kennedy contributed 'When I
Was Single I Wore A Black Shawl' (better
known as 'Still I Love Him') and MacColl
'Barnyards of Delgaty', 'Rothesay-O' and
'Calton Weaver' (better known as 'Nancy
Whisky'), while Lomax contributed 'Blow
the Candles Out' and Collins 'The Water
Is Wide' and 'Newcastle'. Most of these
songs would become staple fare in English
folk clubs by the end of the decade, and in
1963 this very same song collection would
be republisheda s The Folk SongA lbum.
Editing the Field Recordings
Lomax in London in the mid-fifties was
not only a broadcaster, skiffler and folk
singer, he was an author too. In 1955 he
wrote the script of a folk pantomime, In
the Big Rock Candy Mountains, which was
performed in December by Joan Littlewood's
Theatre Workshop. Jack and June
Elliott, who were visiting England for the
first time, were members of the cast.75 As
a money-spinner, Lomax wrote a children's
book, Harriet and her Harmonium,
and then, with the assistance of Peggy
Seeger, he compiled an instruction book
on how to play folk-music accompaniments
on guitar,A mericanF olkG uitar.76H e
also edited for the English label Nixa a
selection from his 1947 Southern penitentiary
field recordings that was released in
1957 as Murderers' Home.77
Lomax saw these activities as incidental to
his primary tasks of collecting and editing.
. .. . . .
Figur2e ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.....
Lomaxa ndt heR amblers, from the front cover of the songbook TLheo mSkaffxJ.l.eiAs .lobnu.mth e.far.left.Seated
ar.Pgg SeeEeMrw aC. o..an.Shrle.Colin
Publishedb yB . Feldman& Co. Ltd. Photographuenrk~n~o~w~n~.~..~...~. ~.... .... ......
As soon as he was back in England he
resumed compiling the Columbia World
Library series, with the result that fourteen
of the volumes had been released or were
ready for release in the USA by the spring of
1955: two from the Americas (Canada and
Venezuela); six from Europe (England,
Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain and Yugoslavia);
two from Africa (French Africa and
British East Africa); and four from Asia
(India, Indonesia, Australia and New Guinea
and Maritime East Asia, including Japan and
Korea). Subsequent volumes were two on
Italy (edited by Lomax and Diego Carpitella)
and two more on Eastern Europe: Bulgaria
(edited by A. L. Lloyd) and Rumania. A
nineteenth volume on 'Mexico' was compiled
by Lomax but never issued by
Columbia, and at that point the project
78
was abandoned. The first fourteen LPs
were reviewed by American folklorist
Frederick Ramsey, Jr in a Saturday Review
article titled 'Girdle 'Round the Globe'.
Ramsey praised most of the series, including
Lomax's Spanish and Scottish field recordings,
but was not impressed by the two
volumes, 'England' and 'Yugoslavia', in
which Peter Kennedy had a hand. He also
attacked Lomax for including performances
by Isla Cameron (whom he claimed to be
'not a folksinger, but an actress appearing in
London') and by Seamus Ennis (whom he
called a singer of folk songs not a folksinger).
79 These criticisms were harsh, but
Ramsey had a point. At this time Lomax was
certainly careless of the distinction between
source and revival singers, although he
would probably have defended himself on
LOMAXIN LONDON 153
the grounds that such singers as Ennis,
Lloyd, MacColl and Cameron were legitimate
inheritors of their own folk-song
traditions. It was an argument that was
perhaps more convincing for Ennis and
Lloyd than for MacColl and Cameron, both
of whom were professional artists who drew
upon their considerable theatrical talents
when they performed songs in various
regional accents.80
With the Columbia project well in hand,
Lomax was free to resume his former
collaboration with Peter Kennedy. They
now worked together on another major
contribution to the British folk revival, the
ten-volume LP series, The Folksongs of
Britain, that brought together a goodly
selection from Lomax's field recordings,
Kennedy's, and those made by Kennedy,
O'Boyle and Ennis for the BBC Folk Music
and Dialect Recording Scheme. The
biggest challenge with this project, apart
from persuading the BBC to allow material
from the Permanent Recordings Library to
be used in it at an affordable price, was
finding a record label willing and able to
finance and release the series. No such
label could be found in the UK, and it took
a while before the project found an
American sponsor. In the end Caedmon
signed on, and the first five of these LPs
were issued in the USA in 1961, with the
other five following a year or two later.
The series would eventually be issued in
the UK on Topic approximately ten years
after Kennedy and Lomax initiated the
project and began selecting the material.81
Each volume of The Folksongs of Britain
comprised a selection of between twenty
and two dozen field recordings from
source singers in England, Scotland and
Ireland, designed to capture the oral
tradition of rural folk song before it was
lost entirely. Unfortunately the excerpts
chosen were often very short, with each
singer limited to a few verses. This format
echoed that of As I Roved Out, in which
items from source singers had rarely
exceeded a minute or two. It permitted
the inclusion of many more singers and
recordings than could otherwise have been
squeezed onto an LP record, but the
briefness of the excerpts was frustrating.
Whether the trade-off was a good one
remains debatable.82
The series was also a scholarly project.
Each LP was accompanied by a booklet
(written mainly by Kennedy) with notes
on the songs, references to other collected
versions, and a bibliography of older
printed collections. This printed material
added considerably to the value of the
recordings by linking them to the earlier
collections made by such Victorian pioneers
as Bunting, Christie and Child, by
such first-revival stalwarts as Baring-
Gould, Greig, Kidson and Sharp (among
others), and by more recent collectors
such as Frank Brown, Helen Creighton and
Vance Randolph.8 3 The Folksongos f Britain,
despite its delayed appearance in the UK,
was thus an important achievement.
Although Peter Kennedy contributed
more of the field recordings and editorial
matter than did Lomax, the series was
nonetheless a joint effort. Moreover, it
was Lomax who eventually found a record
company to underwrite the costs and
release the albums, without which the
enterprise would have been left unfinished.
Long after his pioneering radio programmes
were no more than memories,
the thirteen LPs from The Columbia World
Library and The Folksongs of Britain continued
to provide access to many of the
best field recordings of source singers
made in Britain during the 1950s. It was
Lomax's most enduring legacy to the
British folk-song revival, a significant
contribution indeed to the work of saving
154 FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
traditional cultures that he had come to
know and love deeply.84
This is an appropriate point to mention
one other important service that Lomax
provided to his English friends and consequently
also to the development of the
British folk revival. In the mid-1950s no
English commercial record company was
interested in marketing folk music, unless
it was performed by an American celebrity
such as Burl Ives. The only English label,
Topic, that did record and release folk
music was still a private record club for
members of the Workers' Music Association.
85 Lloyd and MacColl did make one
LP, The Singing Sailor, for Topic in 1955,
but distribution of the disc was very
limited, and there was virtually no
opportunity for either of them or for Isla
Cameron to make more commercial
recordings.86 In the USA, on the other
hand, there were already a few labels that
specialized in folk music, Folkways, Riverside,
Stinson and Tradition among them.
Two individuals, Kenneth Goldstein and
Moses Asch, had a great deal of say in what
these companies recorded and issued.
Lomax realized that both men might be
interested in including some British
material in their catalogues. He therefore
encouraged MacColl and Lloyd to make
some recordings 'on spec' and send them
to Asch and Goldstein. Riverside, at
Goldstein's urging, was the first to bite,
and Tradition soon followed. The result
was that the first commercially available
LPs of folk songs performed by British
revival singers were released in the USA
on Riverside, Tradition, and, later, Folkways
and Stinson. The first, and probably
the most important of these recordings,
was a set of nine LPs by Lloyd and
MacColl released by Riverside in 1956:
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (The
Child Ballads) and Great British Ballads Not
Included in the Child Collection.87 Initially
these discs were not available at all in the
UK, but by the late fifties they could be
obtained as special imports - at a price. 88
Without Lomax's encouragement and
his contacts in the USA it is unlikely that
much of this considerable - and very
important - recording activity would have
occurred much before 1960 or thereabouts.
Return of the Ballad Hunter
Once he had completed his Granada
television series, Lomax was again ready
and willing to work for BBC radio. In the
process of compiling and editing The
Columbia World Library, he had arrived at
some general conclusions about the nature
of folk song world-wide, and was looking
for an opportunity to expound his theories
to a receptive audience. The Third Programme
seemed the obvious vehicle for
this new venture, since, as far as he knew,
its programmers had been very satisfied
with all his previous series. Yet when he
made the proposal, sometime during the
first weeks of 1956, Lomax encountered
unexpected difficulties. His activities as a
skiffle-group leader on commercial TV and
his close association with such communist
intellectuals as Lloyd and MacColl had not
gone unnoticed in either the Ministry of
Labour or the Talks Department of the
BBC. In both places Lomax now had
opponents: in the Ministry a bureaucrat
named H.W. Clark who was inclined to
deny him another work permit, and at the
BBC Ian Grimble, a Talks programmer
who specialized in folklore studies and was
highly sceptical about the validity of
Lomax's theoretical work as an ethnomusicologist.
89
Lomax also had his admirers and allies at
the BBC, producers Geoffrey Bridson and
LOMAXIN LONDON 155
Roger Fiske, who set out to obtain for him
a lucrative contract to make a new six-part
series. In this they were successful, and a
letter from the BBC brass to the Ministry
of Labour affirming that Lomax was
uniquely qualified effectively neutralized
Clark.90 But Grimble, assigned to manage
the new project, was not so easily dealt
with. He soon made his reservations clear.
The fieldwork of Murray Groves and
George Farwell on folklore and children's
singing in New Guinea, he claimed,
'underline[d] the difficulties of the Lomax
project', and rather than giving Lomax
carte blanche to expound his ideas in detail
it would be better to compare his views
with those of otier ethnomusicologists.91
When this tactic failed, he asked to see
Lomax's draft script for the introductory
programme in the series, and then
criticized it as being below 'the standard
that this subject requires'. If Lomax was
allowed to proceed, he argued, his writing
would have to be edited carefully to
remove passages of 'potted Marxism' and
others that 'identify "sexual permissiveness"
with happiness and the Christian
attitude to sex with sorrow and suffering'.
Moreover, Lomax should be required to
'confine the areas about which he speaks to
Italy and Spain, with comparative references
to the parts of America of which he
has knowledge'. 92 Unable to torpedo the
project entirely, Grimble was determined
to transform the new series from one
which would present Lomax's ethnomusicological
theories on a world canvas into a
travelogue based strictly on his recent
wanderings and field recordings.93
Grimble got his way, the idea of a
world folk-song series was abandoned
and Lomax was instructed instead to
write scripts for a series to be called
Reminiscences of a Folk Song Collector.
Retitled Memories of a Ballad Hunter, it
was eventually broadcast in January and
February 1957, and the format resembled
that employed six years before in 'I
Heard Scotland Sing'. 4 Highly successful
in combining education and entertainment,
these programmes provided an
excellent survey of the traditional music
of three countries, copiously illustrated
with many of the best of Lomax's field
recordings. For better or for worse,
Third Programme listeners were spared
Lomax's theoretical ideas about the social
bases of world folk music, and were
treated instead to a first-hand account of
his personal odyssey in three countries:
the USA, Spain and Italy. The six
programmes employed a travelogue format
in which Lomax spiced his survey of
the riches of American, Spanish and
Italian folk music with tales of memorable
human encounters and comic incidents
from his travels. It was all very genial and
non-theoretical, except towards the end
of the last Italian programme when
Lomax summed up his overall perspective
on the difference between commercial
music and folk music, and argued for the
vital role still played by the latter.95
Memories of a Ballad Hunter thus consolidated
the ground covered in Lomax's
earlier broadcasts during 1951-53. Third
Programme planners were delighted with
the series, and re-broadcast it the following
summer. But, taken as a whole, the
series was not ground-breaking in the way
that Lomax's earlier work for the BBC
had been. If this was a fault, the blame lay
with Ian Grimble and the BBC rather than
with Alan Lomax. Given the opportunity
to be innovative and provocative, Lomax
was capable of both. But the BBC was
now much more cautious about giving him
his head than it had been when he first
arrived from North America five years
before.
156 FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
The Ballad Hunter Roves Out
Lomax's next proposal to the BBC was
several years ahead of its time, although he
merely suggested that he do for the BBC
something similar to his 'Your Ballad Man'
programme aired during 1947-49 on
Mutual Broadcasting in the USA. Folk
Song Train, as he called his proposed series,
would have been a folk-music record show
ranging world-wide for its material.96 This
was perhaps the genesis of Lomax's
concept of a 'global jukebox', and it
anticipated the folk-song and world-beat
record shows that the BBC would eventually
air, many years later.
Yet in 1956 the idea ran into a number
of obstacles at the Corporation. Not
everyone in the programme-planning
bureaucracy liked Lomax's style or his
politics, and it was easier to oppose Lomax
the prospective disc-jockey than Lomax
the renowned ethnomusicologist. As freelancers
went, he was expensive, he had to
be paid in scarce US dollars, and employing
him rather than a British national had
to be justified to the Ministry of Labour.
Moreover, there was the matter of scarce
needle-time: any new record show had to
displace an existing one, given the restrictions
placed by the Musicians Union on the
amount of 'canned music' that the BBC
was permitted to broadcast under the
collective agreement. And then there was
the question of which programming division
of the BBC would take the show. Not
the Third Programme, since Folk Song
Train smacked too much of popular
entertainment. Not the Light Programme,
which daily purveyed 'dance music',
'variety', 'light music' and 'pops' but
allocated little time to minority music such
as blues, folk and jazz. That left the Home
Service, to which Lomax directed his
proposal. But the Home Service, although
fairly flexible in its programming, was not
primarily a music channel - it tended to
leave classical music to the Third and
popular music to the Light and concentrated
on current affairs, drama, features
and other spoken-word programmes.
Furthermore, its planners already had an
idea for how to use Lomax in a totally
different way. So Folk Song Train was
turned down, but instead Lomax was
invited to do A Ballad Hunter Looks at
Britain.97 This project offered him more
room to be innovative than had Memories of
a Ballad Hunter, and he made use of the
opportunity.
A Ballad Hunter Looks at Britain was the
last major radio project that Lomax
undertook before returning to the United
States in 1958.98 The guiding idea behind
the series was to provide a systematic
survey of traditional folk song in the British
Isles, using selections from the field
recordings made over the previous five
years for the BBC Folk Music and Dialect
Scheme by Peter Kennedy, Seamus Ennis
and others. This collecting project had
been deprived of further funding and was
now being wound down, but some two
thousand items had been taped in the field
and a substantial proportion of them
transferred to BBC discs. Brian George,
the BBC administrator who had made the
project happen, regarded Lomax as the
ideal person to script and host a valedictory
series designed to show the project's
critics that it had been a success and well
worth the money spent on it. Lomax was
happy to oblige, on condition that Kennedy
and Ennis also appear in the broadcasts.
Their on-air contributions thus
provided a degree of continuity with As I
Roved Out. A Ballad Hunter Looks at Britain,
however, was free from the constraints
imposed by the As I Roved Out producer,
Harold Rogers, since Lomax's producer,
Sasha Moorsom, recognized his profesLOMAXIN
LONDON 157
sional expertisea s a broadcastera nd gave
him freedom to plan and script as he saw
fit.
Lomax's plan for the series was to
constructa musicalm ap of traditionaflo lk
song throughout the entire British Isles,
and his intent in the first programmew as
to demonstrates ome of the musicalp earls
he had found while collecting in Britain.
This was titled 'Come Listen to My Song'
andw as broadcasot n 1 November1 957. It
began with the swirl of Seamus Ennis's
uilleann pipes and Lomax's bold assertion
thatt he piperw as 'the LouisA rmstrongo f
the British Isles' and that his music was
'the finest, happiest and most wonderful
sound' to be heard anywhere in western
Europe. Nowadays, Lomax announced,
such pipe music was rare, but two hundred
years ago it had been played throughout
the British Isles, and England, Wales,
Scotland and Ireland were once referred
to in song as 'the bonny bunch of roses', a
metaphor for the richest garden of music
in the Western world. His purpose in A
Ballad Hunter Looks at Britain, he declared,
was to show that 'the songs and the singers
are at hand for a native musical reawakening'
that could make the British
Isles once again a bonny bunch of roses.99
Lomax's examples of the very finest in
British folk song included a ballad performed
by Isla Cameron, a shorter lyric by
Blanche Wood, a shanty by Ewan MacColl
and Bert Lloyd, and a waulking song by a
group of women on the Hebrideani sland
of Lewis. He than asked Peter Kennedy
and Seamus Ennis to nominate their
favourites, which turned out to be
'Twankydillo'b y the Copper family and
'The Jug of Punch' by Frank McPeake.
These two songs, Lomax claimed, represented
the two main elements in British
folk music, a 'smooth, steadily flowing,
frank[ and]h earty'S axon-Danissht raina nd
a 'subtly coiled, playful' Celtic strain.100
He argued, however, that all the folk songs
of England, Scotland and Ireland were
members of one big musical family and
sounded 'akin', merely combining their
common Celtic and Saxon roots in
different ways.101
Lomax then set out to define the major
folk-song regions of the British Isles,
suggesting that there were three. The old
Celtic west, he argued, included Cornwall,
Wales, Lancashire, Westmoreland, Yorkshire
and the west of Scotland as far north
as the Hebrides, and was a region
characterized by blended chorus singing
with big, open voices, and by the
prevalence of mouth-music. Ireland, on
the other hand, was a different region, a
land in which there was very little group
harmonizing but instead an elaborately
decorative solo singing style. The third
region, where Saxon and Danish influence
was the strongest, stretched from Dorset
to Aberdeenshire and encompassed the
entire East coast of the United Kingdom.
This was ballad country, par excellence,
and here the words were given prominence
and the melodies kept plain and
strong. To illustrate the differences
between these three basic traditions
Lomax chose Gaelic singer Kitty MacLeod
leading a female chorus to represent the
old Celtic west, Annie Jane Kelly singing
'The Magpie's Nest' to portray the
decorated Irish style, and Bob Roberts's
account of 'Windy Old Weather' to
exemplify the more straightforward eastern
approach.102
A fourth major type of British folk song,
Lomax suggested, was not associated with
a geographical area but rather with a
cultural tradition, that of the travellers, a
people with a style of singing that was their
own. As examples he played excerpts from
Davie Stewart's version of 'MacPherson's
158 FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
Rant' and Margaret Barry's 'She Moves
Through the Fair'. Finally, Lomax argued,
there was a newer form of British folk
music performed by groups of singers and
instrumentalists, whether Irish ceilidh
bands or English skiffle groups. 'These
skifflers', commented Lomax, 'believe
they are playing American style - but to
a Texan only their name and some of their
tunes seem American - for the rest is as
East British as Bow Bells and Piccadilly.
They're just a newest bud on the old
Bonny Bunch of Roses and if they want to
keep on growing, they should, in my
mind, try to get closer to their own roots,
where the great music is still flowing wild,
wonderful and free.. .' 103 This closing
remark suggested the positive role that
Lomax saw skiffle playing in the English
folk-song revival: in his opinion both
skifflers and revival singers were legitimate
successors to the older folk-music traditions
of the British Isles. It was a point of
view that would increasingly come under
challenge during the next few years.
The succeeding programmes in A Ballad
Hunter Looks at Britain were designed to
explore in more depth each of Lomax's
three major folk-song regions. Programme
2, titled 'From Devon to Dover', illustrated
what Lomax called the 'Saxon
heritage' in British folk song, a musical
tradition characterized by 'serene, rather
slow-moving songs, notable for quiet
warmth, lusty good humour and plain
sober sweetness'. 104 'From Cornwall to
Yorkshire' focused on the English and
Welsh segments of the bigger region that
Lomax called 'the old Celtic West'. In this
Celtic border region, Lomax argued,
traces could still be found of the most
ancient folkways of the British Isles,
remnants of the rites and festivals of the
Iron Age, as well as a very old singing
style, that of group harmony singing with
blended voices. 105 Lomax's other programme
on English folk song took him on
a journey through ballad country, up the
east coast of England from 'East Anglia to
the Borders', beginning with the Suffolk
sea-songs of Bob Roberts and ending with
the Northumbrian pipes of Jack Armstrong.
106
For the fifth and sixth programmes in A
Ballad Hunter Looks at Britain Lomax
crossed the border and explored Scottish
traditional song with the help of Hamish
Henderson. These Scottish programmes
were shorter than the four English ones,
lasting only half an hour each, and their
content was similar to the Scottish volume
in The ColumbiaL ibraryo f Folk and Primitive
Music, with an emphasis on Gaelic music
from the Western Isles. The remaining
two programmes in the series were billed
as A Ballad Hunter Looks at Ireland. 'From
Dublin to Donegal' saw Lomax in the
company of Seamus Ennis and Brian
George, while 'Folk Music from the
North and South' consisted mainly of the
field recordings made in Ulster by Peter
Kennedy and Sean O'Boyle for the BBC
Recording Scheme. Lomax ended this
programme, and his last major radio series
for the BBC, with Dominic Behan singing
'The Old Triangle', followed by this
ringing call for support for the British
folk-song revival:
With this modern prison ballad from Dublin
we come to the end of our ballad hunting trail
throughI reland,S cotland,E nglanda nd Wales.
I have heard enough myself to be convinced
that in the past these islands were the richest
garden of melody in the western world.
Neglect, snobbery and the harsh years of the
industrial revolution wrought serious damage
to this rich heritage. But now on every hand
there is evidence of a popular resurgence of
enthusiasmfo r the musicw hichl ies at the very
marrow of the cultural life of these islands.
LOMAXIN LONDON 159
Only if it is fostered will there be a rich
musical life in the future.107
Auld Lang Syne
A couple of days before the last prerecorded
programme in A Ballad Hunter
Looks At Ireland was broadcast, Lomax
appeared 'live' on BBC radio for the last
time that decade. Midland region features
producer Charles Parker had been given
the task of planning and directing an hourlong
Christmas morning programme on
the Home Service that would link up all
the regions of the United Kingdom and
survey how each was celebrating the
religious holiday. A fan of folk music
who himself played the guitar and sang,
Parker conceived the idea of using folk
song, and especially folk carols, as a
'challenge to be merry' and as a way of
presenting the 'true spirit of Christmas
uncluttered by sentimentality or cant'.108
The format of the programme, although
technically demanding, would be simple
enough. There would be a sing-song, with
performers all around the UK singing
music of the season in a variety of styles.
Parker hit on the idea of having Alan
Lomax host and script the programme.
Since the Midland region was sponsoring
the enterprise, Lomax, as master of
ceremonies, was in a Birmingham studio,
but he progressively opened radio links to
collaborators in London, Plymouth (West
Region), Castleton (Midlands), Bangor
(Wales), Glasgow (Scotland) and Belfast
(Northern Ireland). They included Peter
Kennedy, Cyril Tawney, Ewan MacColl,
Seamus Ennis, Shirley Collins and Peggy
Seeger. 109
'Sing Christmas and the Turn of the
Year' was more significant than the casual
listener realized. In retrospect it can be
seen as Charles Parker's first substantial
collaboration with leading members of the
English folk revival, and a precursor of the
influential radio ballads. It was a programme
that worked on two levels.
Superficially it was no more than a multiregional
Christmas party with a variety of
different kinds of Christmas music. But it
was more than a party, it was a ceilidh, and
most of the music was folk music of one
kind or another. And if you listened
carefully you noticed that much of this
music was unusual: ancient folk carols that
were rarely heard, unusual forms of
religious music, wassails and other pieces
of musical folklore, and unconventional
performances of more familiar Christmas
pieces. No 'White Christmas' or 'Jingle
Bells' here. All in all, the programme
represented a deliberate attempt to wrest
Christmas music back from the commercial
music industry. Lomax's commentary
wore its ideology lightly, but nonetheless
he reminded listeners of the pagan origins
of Christmas and of the meaning of
Christmas to poor people in other countries
of the world, including blacks in the
Deep South and crofters in the Hebrides.
In effect this was a programme of topical
folk music that combined entertainment
with a quasi-political message: that it was
time to take the people's music and
cultural traditions back from commercial
capitalism before it was too late. On this
occasion Lomax's manifesto was only
implicit in the structure and subject-matter
of the programme, but it was nonetheless
still there for those who had ears to
hear.110
Although he stayed in England for
another six months, editing The Folk Songs
of North America and The Penguin Book of
AmericanF olk Songs,1l Lomaxs ailed back
to the USA at the end of June 1958 with
the intention of returning to the Deep
South to make an extended series of new
160 FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
field recordings. He took Shirley Collins
with him as his assistant, and their fieldwork
was subsequently to appear in two
major LP series, the twelve volumes of
Southern Journey on Prestige and the six
volumes of Sounds of the South on
Atlantic. 112 Lomax also presented an
account of his Southern field trips and
the recordings that he had gathered in a
four-part radio series, Folk Songs and Music
of the SouthernS tates,b roadcasbt y the BBC
in October 1960. 13 But whereas Collins
soon returned to England to become a
leading figure on the British folk scene in
the 1 960s, Lomax was never again to make
London his home for an extended period
of time.
Conclusion
A major difficulty in assessing Alan
Lomax's importance to British folk song
is the regrettable fact that many - perhaps
most - of his field recordings in the United
Kingdom and Ireland remain unissued.
While additional Rounder releases will do
much to remedy this lamentable situation,
they are unlikely to solve the problem
entirely. In any case, field recordings that
remained on dusty shelves in a collector's
office or basement could have no influence
on the styles and repertoires of revival
singers. This article has therefore concentrated
on discussing those fruits of
Lomax's fieldwork that were made available
on LP records in the fifties and early
sixties, and on the many radio and
television broadcasts that he made while
living in England during the 1950s. But if
we cannot yet evaluate Lomax's entire
contribution to the post-war revival
because part of it is still to come, it is
nonetheless possible to make a preliminary
assessment of his time in Britain and
Ireland.
Of all Lomax's activities, his BBC radio
programmes probably had the greatest
immediate impact. They included such
pioneering individual productions as 'I
Heard Scotland Sing', 'The Gaelic West'
and 'Folk Music of Canada', and the series
Memories of a Ballad Hunter and A Ballad
Hunter Looks at Britain. Taken as a whole,
his work as a scriptwriter and broadcaster
had three very important functions. First,
throughA dventurein Folk Song, Patternsi n
AmericanF olkS ong, TheA rt of the Negro,h is
contributionsto Ballads and Blues, and the
American segments of Memories of a Ballad
Hunter, Lomax brought British listeners up
to speed on the American folk revival. He
was uniquely qualified to do this, and he
achieved it largely single-handedly. The
flow of music and information from the US
that he facilitated would have happened in
any case, albeit more slowly, but the
timing was important. Lomax undoubtedly
helped pave the way for the skiffle
movement by popularizing the music of
Leadbelly, Guthrie and others in Britain
just at the time when a younger generation
was looking for an alternative to the wares
of Denmark Street.
The second thing that Lomax achieved
through his broadcasts - and also through
the ColumbiaW orldL ibraryL P set - was to
make many more people aware of the
depth and richness of folk cultures in other
countries of the world. He was one of the
very first advocates of world music, and
certainly one of the most effective. In
particular, he made British listeners aware
of the folk music of Southern and Eastern
Europe; of Spain and Italy especially but
also (indirectly through the efforts of Peter
Kennedy and A.L. Lloyd) of Yugoslavia
and Bulgaria. Had he received better
support from the BBC (for example,
acceptance of the original concept of the
first Ballad Hunter series and a go-ahead for
LOMAXIN LONDON 161
Folk Music Train) Lomax could have done
even more in this regard. But he certainly
made a difference.
Lomax's third major achievement as a
broadcaster for the BBC was to stir up
renewed interest in the traditional songs
and music of the British Isles. Not
everyone wanted to know, of course. But
for those with open ears, he provided
a systematic overview of Celtic traditional
music in 'I Heard Scotland Sing',
'The Gaelic West' and the last four
programmes of A Ballad Hunter Looks at
BritainlIreland. And, whether or not one
agreed with his theoretical perspective, he
did much the same for English traditional
music in the first four programmes of that
same series. Furthermore, A Ballad Hunter
Looks at Britain publicized the achievements
of the BBC Folk Music and Dialect
Recording Scheme, thereby reinforcing
the impact of the first four series of As I
Roved Out.
Lomax's work as editor of the Columbia
WorldL ibrarya nd of The Folksongos f Britain
series of LP records had less impact on the
revival during the 1950s but in the longer
term may have been even more influential
than his radio and TV broadcasts. The
English, Scottish and Irish volumes in the
Columbia series were uneven in content
and susceptible to criticism, but they were
pioneering efforts that demand respect for
theiro riginality.T heF olksongosf Britainw as
an excellent series, that drew upon not
only Lomax's and Kennedy's private
collecting but also the fruits of the BBC
Folk Music Recording Scheme. Lomax can
be criticized for his decision to trim many
of the field recordings, but this hard choice
was a trade-off that made it possible to
include many more items than would
otherwise have been possible. As a collection
of recordings by source singers the LP
set remained unequalled for over thirty
years, and deserves to be ranked among
Lomax's finest achievements. 114
Another significant aspect of Lomax's
influence was the impact of his personality
and vision on friends and collaborators.
We have seen that he quickly became a
personal friend of many people involved in
the revival, including not only the Kennedy
family but also Brian George, Seamus
Ennis, Ewan MacColl, Bert Lloyd, Hamish
Henderson, John Hasted and Shirley
Collins. Of these, he probably influenced
MacColl, Kennedy and Collins the most.
From Lomax MacColl obtained a much
broader understanding of world folk
music, and also in part his concept of
what the British revival could be and do.
Kennedy found in Lomax a role model
who encouraged him in his collecting and
in his radio work, and whose American
contacts made ambitious projects such as
The Folksongos f Britainr ealitiesr athert han
dreams. Collins found in Lomax not only
an engaging personality who whisked her
from rural Sussex to the backroads of the
Deep South but also a mentor who
encouraged her to pursue a singing career
rooted in the traditional culture of her
home. Lomax's skiffle group, the Ramblers,
had a similar message for other
skifflers: that they should look for new
material in their own heritage of British
traditional tunes, songs and ballads.
Some negative effects of Lomax's presence
in Britain must also be recognized.
Notwithstanding his own advice to British
skifflers and folk-singers to look to their
own traditions for material rather than
imitating American models, Lomax
boosted the American element in the
English revival through his radio programmes,
his own performances, and
through the US folk-singers he brought
over: Robin Roberts, Jack Elliott, and
Peggy Seeger. Moreover, his radio pro162
FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
grammes, entertaining though they were,
tended to edge out thoughtful programme
proposals by such English folk-music
scholars as A.L. Lloyd, Maud Karpeles,
Pat Shuldham-Shaw, and Peter Kennedy.
There were only so many guineas to be
spent on contracts and only so many
programming hours to be filled, and in
certain years (1953 and 1957 in particular)
Lomax creamed the budget.
It is a matter of opinion whether
Lomax's eclectic and ideological conception
of folk song should be counted as a
negative or a positive factor. Although he
had a talent for tracking down and
recording important singers, his radio
broadcasts sometimes presented them in
an excessively political or romanticized
context. As we've seen, some BBC
programmers came to object strenuously
to what they perceived as Lomax's naive
Marxism, while the Hollywood-style
account of the Jacobite rebellion in 'I
Heard Scotland Sing' must have made
Hamish Henderson wince.1 5 Lomax had a
gift for presenting folk music (and his own
activities as a collector) in an engaging,
entertaining way, but this very talent for
effective communication with a mass
public led him, perhaps inevitably, to a
degree of oversimplification and distortion.
He brushed over useful distinctions
and he was prone to sweeping generalizations.
An example is his oversimplified
division of the British Isles into just three
main folk-song regions in A Ballad Hunter
Looks At Britain, a division that ignored the
more subtle analysis of the similarities and
differences between Irish and Scottish song
in 'The Celtic West'.
Indeed it is noticeable that two of
Lomax's most scholarly efforts, 'The
Gaelic West' and The Folksongs of Britain
were collaborations with Seamus Ennis and
Peter Kennedy, folklorists who knew the
recorded material at first hand and who
strongly influenced the final product in
each case. Kennedy also helped behind the
scenes with the innovative Song Hunter TV
series. Similarly, Lomax had expert collaborators
for his excellent programmes on
Italian and Spanish folk music, not to
mention those on Canada and Colombia.
Left to his own devices, as was the case
withA BalladH unterL ooksA t Britain,h e was
liable to indulge in rhetoric and the depth
of his scholarship was suspect. But the
other side of the coin was that Lomax was
a superb broadcaster who could write
glorious purple passages and deliver them
with aplomb, a talent to which he gave free
rein in A Ballad HunterL ooksA t Britaina nd
'Sing Christmas and the Turn of the Year'.
It is not always feasible to reconcile the
standards of the scholar with the imperatives
of popular entertainment, and sometimes
the latter won out. More surprising
than Lomax's failure to achieve the
impossible is the remarkable number of
times that he did succeed in squaring the
circle.
Taken overall, Lomax' s presence in
Londonwith Peter Kennedy,
Seamus Ennis and Hamish Henderson
created a permanent legacy of recordings
that have still to be fully explored and
utilized. The revival would no doubt have
occurred without him, but its pace would
have been slower and its gestation more
difficult. There is no question that Lomax
passionately wanted English folk music to
regain a mass audience, and that he did his
level best to further this cause. In the
winter of 1958-59, as the skiffle movement
waned, the popularity of hootenannies
at MacColl's and Lloyd's Ballads and
LOMAXIN LONDON 163
Blues folk club in London suggested that he
and his allies might well have succeeded.
Yet that very word 'hootenanny', an
American import albeit with a Scottish
root, suggested the ambivalence of
Lomax's impact in Britain. Although an
enthusiastic champion of British traditional
music, he had also been a conduit for an
increased American influence on the
English folk scene. He had been a blessing,
but for the critics of eclecticism within the
folk movement (who would soon find new
and outspoken champions in his good
friends Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger),
something of a mixed blessing.
Notes
Quoted in Kristin Baggelaar & Donald Milton,
Folk Music: More Than A Song (New York: Crowell,
1976), p. 229.
2 In the summer of 1933 Alan Lomax accompanied
his father John Lomax on an extended field trip to
the Deep South, making recordings for the Library
of Congress in several penitentiaries including
Parchman Farm in the Mississippi delta and the
Angola Prison Farm in Louisiana (where they
encountered Leadbelly for the first time). For the
next five years Alan combined being a college
student (at the University of Texas and at Columbia
University) with working as his father's assistant;
together they made numerous collecting trips for
the Archive of Folk Song, acted as Leadbelly's
manager for a while, and edited four printed folksong
collections: American Ballads and Folk Songs
(1934), NegroF olk Songsa s Sung by Leadbelly( 1936),
Our Singing Country (1937), and a new edition of
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1938, first
published 1915). In 1937 Alan was hired as the
Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song,
nominally under his father who was the honorary
director of the archive but in fact doing all the
work. That work included further field trips within
the USA and also to Haiti and Samoa, several major
recording projects (including Leadbelly, Jelly Roll
Morton, Woody Guthrie and such Mississippi
bluesmen as Son House, Honeyboy Edwards and
Muddy Waters), and editing a discography and a
bibliography. Political opposition in the House of
Representatives to the work of the Archive brought
to an end Lomax's career as an archivist in 1942,
and for the rest of World War II he worked first for
the Office of War Information and later for the
Special Services unit of the US Army. By this time
he was also teaching courses on folklore (his first
was at the University of Indiana in 1939),
performing as a folk singer, promoting other singers
(including Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger,
Leadbelly, Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy), and
occasionally putting on concerts in Washington and
New York. And, significantly, he had begun his love
affair with radio, devising 'American Folk Songs'
and 'Wellsprings of Music' for CBS's School of the
Air in 1939. A prime-time series, Back Where I Come
From, followed on CBS in 1940, and Lomax
continued broadcasting during the war years,
hosting the American component of Transatlantic
Call, a collaborative series between CBS and the
BBC that was aired in both Britain and the USA.
After the war Lomax was employed as director of
Folk Music for Decca Records (1945-48), and he
also went back to collecting folk songs, receiving a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947 to return to the
Mississippi delta to make further field recordings.
Broadcasting remained an important part of his life,
and from 1947 to 1949 he hosted the radio series
Your Ballad Man for the Mutual Broadcasting
Company.
3 Lomax explained and demonstrated this cantometrics
approach to the study of world folk music in
three publications: Folk Song Style and Culture
(Washington, D.C.: American Association for the
Advancement of Science, 1968), SongA s A MeasureO f
Man (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Dept. of Education,
1975) and CantometricsA: Methodo f MusicalA nthropology
(Berkeley, CA: University of California
Media Extension Center, 1977).
4 Other significant publications by Lomax include
The Folk Songs of North America (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1960), Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit
People (with Woody Guthrie & Pete Seeger), (New
York: Oak, 1967), and Land Where the Blues Began
(New York: Pantheon, 1993). When first published,
TheF olk Songso f NorthA mericaw as the largest
and most systematic one-volume, general collection
of English-language folk songs from the USA then
available. Lomax intended it as a song-book,
however, and he took editorial liberties inappropriate
to a more scholarly publication. He and his
father have both been taken severely to task for
their decision to amend and expurgate texts. See
Vance Randolph & Gershon Legman, Roll Me In Your
164 FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
Arms: 'Unprintable' Ozark Folksongs and Folklore
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992),
pp. 481-82 & 579-80.
5 The Alan Lomax Collection Sampler (CD, 1700,
Rounder, 1997) Insert booklet, pp. 26-34. The Alan
Lomax Collection is divided into a number of subseries.
At the time of writing [April 20011, three
volumes in the Portrait series feature artists from the
British Isles: Jeannie Robertson, The Queen Among the
Heather (CD, 1720, Rounder, 1998); Margaret
Barry, I Sang Through the Fairs (CD, 1774, Rounder,
1998); Harry Cox, What Will Become of England?
(CD, 1839, Rounder, 2000). These complement
the English, Scottish and Irish volumes in [The
Columbia] World Library of Folk and Primitive Music
series. Rounder unfortunately chose to renumber
the volumes in the Columbia series and omitted the
word 'Columbia' from the title. In the new CD
versions the three volumes covering the British Isles
are: World Library of Folk and Primitive Music I:
England (CD, 1741, Rounder, 1998); World Library
of Folk and Primitive Music II: Ireland (CD, 1742,
Rounder, 1998); World Library of Folk and Primitive
Music III: Scotland (CD, 1743, Rounder, 1998). To
date three CDs in a series titled Folk Songs of
England, Ireland, Scotland & Wales have also been
issued: Classic Ballads of Britain and Ireland, Vols 1 &
2 (CDs, 1775-76, Rounder, 2000); Songs of
Seduction (CD, 1778, Rounder, 2000). These are
expanded versions of LPs in The Folksongso f Britain
set (previously released on the Caedmon and Topic
labels). At present it is unclear whether Rounder
intends to reissue the entire set. The Folksongs of
Britain certainly deserves to be made available on
CD, but any reissue should include full-length
versions of all the performances, even if this
requires additional discs.
6 Max Jones, 'This World of Jazz', Melody Maker 28
June 1958. Photocopy in the possession of the
author, no page number indicated.
7 Hamish Henderson, Alias MacAlias: Writings on
Songs, Folk and Literature (Edinburgh: Polygon,
1992), pp. 2, 16, 138-39, 187 and 206-07. Fred
Woods, Folk Revival: The Rediscoveryo f a National
Music (Poole, Dorset: Blandford, 1979), p. 56. Fred
Woods, The Observer'Bs ook of Folk Song in Britain
(London: Warne, 1980), p. 130. Dave Harker,
Fakesong:T he Manufactureo f British 'Folksong1' 700 to
the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University
Press, 1985), p. 235. Georgina Boyes, The Imagined
Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival
(Manchester & New York: Manchester University
Press, 1993), pp. 200, 211, 215 and 230. Niall
Mackinnon, The British Folk Scene: Musical Performance
and Social Identity (Buckingham & Philadelphia:
Open University Press, 1993).
8 As far as I know, no systematic description and
analysis of Lomax's folk-song collecting in the
British Isles is yet available. Matthew Barton and
Anna Chairetakis of the Association for Cultural
Equity, Hunter College, New York, aim to make a
comprehensive catalogue of Lomax's field-recordings
available on the Alan Lomax Archives web site
at http://www.alan-lomax.com.
9 Alan Lomax's birth date seems to be in dispute,
given as either 15 or 31 of January 1915, but there
is no question that he was born in Austin, Texas, the
son of folklorist John Lomax his wife Bess (nee
Baumann), grew up in Dallas, and studied at
Harvard during 1932-33.
10 Elford, Irene M., 'Visit of Alan Lomax,
Folklorist, from USA', memo dated 18 July 1949.
Caversham, BBC Written Records Archive, Alan
Lomax Artists File 1 (1949-62).
11 'As a matter of fact, for several years I had
supported my dream of an international 'vox
humana' by doing broadcasts on the British Broadcasting
Corporation's Third Programme.' Alan Lomax,
'Saga of a Folksong Hunter', HiFi/Stereo
Review (May 1960), reprinted in the booklet insert
to The Alan Lomax Collection Sampler, p. 49.
N.G. Luker, BBC internal memo, dated 7 July
1949, Alan Lomax Artists File 1.
13 Lomax, 'Saga of a Folksong Hunter', p. 49.
14 Lomax to Ray Lawless, April 1953, quoted in
Lawless, p. 145.
15 Lomax, 'Saga of a Folksong Hunter', p. 49.
16 Ibid, pp. 51-52.
17 Bert Lloyd's relationship with Lomax remained
more distant, although cordial. Peter Kennedy
recalls that Ewan MacColl was still known to friends
and acquaintances as Jimmie Miller when Kennedy
first knew and recorded him in 1950-51 (interviews
with the author, 18 November 1996 and 13
October 1997). BBC administrative records for this
period also normally employ the name Miller.
Miller apparently adopted his professional name as
his everyday name gradually during the mid/late
1950s.
18 Alan Lomax, Script for 'A Ballad Hunter Looks
at Ireland: Dublin to Donegal', pp. 1-13. Photocopy
in the possession of the author, courtesy Peter
Kennedy. Programme broadcast 13 December
1957.
19 Robin Roberts, 'Recording in Ireland with Alan
Lomax', part of the new introductory notes to the
LOMAXIN LONDON 165
compact disc, WorldL ibraryo f Folka nd PrimitiveM usic
II: Ireland.
20 Alan Lomax, Script for 'A Ballad Hunter Looks
at Ireland: Dublin to Donegal', p. 5.
21 Lomax's brusque method of collecting seems to
have irritated some Irish singers and folklorists. Jean
Ritchie, collecting in southern Ireland in 1952, was
warned by Seamus Delargy that she and George
Pickow might meet with some opposition if they
went to places where Lomax had been as 'he had
upset many of the people', and Sean O'Sullivan
commented that 'Lomax had been in too much of a
hurry, had rushed the singers and made them
nervous'. Ritchie did find that there seemed to be
'some bruised feelings at Alan's collecting methods'.
She recalls that she 'always tried to smooth
things by saying, Well, that's just his way; he's got a
lot of energy and is always in a hurry'. Jean Ritchie,
Letter to the author, 18 February 2001.
22 The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive
Music, Volume 1: Ireland. Columbia KL 204; reissued
as WorldL ibraryo f Folk and PrimitiveM usicI I: Ireland.
23 Alan Lomax & Robin Roberts, 'Adventure in
Folksong', BBC Home Service, 13, 20 and 27
February 1951. Part 1 was subtitled 'The story of
the adventures of John A. Lomax and his son Alan
with some of the songs they discovered', part 2 was
subtitled 'The Negro's Contribution to American
Folk Song', and part 3 was subtitled 'From Maine to
California'. Scripts of the three programmes are on
microfilm at the BBC Written Archives Centre,
Caversham.
24 Alan Lomax & Robin Roberts, 'Patterns in
American Folk Song', Third Programme, 15, 20
and 30 August 1951. Scripts of the three
programmes are on microfilm at the BBC Written
Archives Centre, Caversham.
25 Alan Lomax, 'The Art of the Negro', Third
Programme, 3 and 31 October and 28 November
1951. Quotation from Alan Lomax, 'From a Great
Dark River.. .', Radio Times 23 November 1951, p.
6.
26 The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive
Music, Volume 3: England. Columbia KL 206;
reissued as World Library of Folk and Primitive Music
I: England (see note 5). Kennedy has confirmed that
the design of this volume was primarily his work
(interviews with the author, 18 November 1996
and 13 October 1997). He has also indicated that
most of the editing was done in 1950 (letter to the
author, 18 January 2001).
27 Kennedy's own tapes of Slade's shanties were
solo performances made at home without a chorus
and for this reason were less suitable than the BBC
recordings.
28 Ewan MacColl, Journeyman: An Autobiography
(London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990), p. 270.
29 Lomax' s reported attempt to seduce her left her
cold. Joan Littlewood, Joan's Book: Joan Littlewood's
Peculiar History As She Tells It (London: Methuen,
1994), pp. 409-10.
30 MacColl, Journeyman, p. 271.
31Ibid. pp. 271-72. '[By 1952] Alan had become
deeply preoccupied with the idea of a British
folk-song revival. He had become fascinated by the
waulking songs he had recorded on the Hebridean
island of Barra and argued that they could
eventually provide us with a musical form as
popular as the blues or the corridas of Mexico. His
enthusiasm was infectious and I began to see in my
mind's eye an invading army of singers and fiddle
players, of troupes of dancers, actors and storytellers.
"And why not?" said Alan. "Take the
ballads, for instance. Imagine the kind of magnificent
theatre they'd make." And we're off in pursuit
of another exciting vision. Alan has amazing
energy. Everything is done at breakneck speed.
No sooner is a task completed than he is hurrying
to begin the next one. In fact, he rarely has less
than four or five projects on the boil at the same
time... Then there is the telephone. Through
every one of Alan's frantic activities, there is the
telephone. Conversations take place over and
around greetings and salutations to friends in
Mexico, Sydney, Washington, Marseilles, Rome,
Accra. Through all these conversations and
telephone calls is interwoven the open-ended
discussion of how a theoretical British folk-music
revival can become a reality.'
32 Ibid. p. 272. 'Our timing was wrong. We were
too early by five or six years.
33 The distinction between source and revival
singers is not always easily made, and the value of
making it at all has remained controversial since the
late 1950s when it first became fairly common in
the UK. By source singers I mean those who carried
on oral singing traditions that they inherited from
their parents or other members of their local
communities. By revival singers I mean enthusiasts
from a different social milieu or geographical area
who learned their repertoire from songbooks,
recordings, or other singers in folk clubs, and also
those who, whatever their background, became
professional singers of folk songs, earning their
living by means of their club and concert
performances and the sale of their recordings.
166 FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
34 Hamish Henderson, Alias MacAhas, pp. 206-07.
Henderson quotes the following tribute by Lomax
to the late Calum MacLean: 'It was my great
privilege to be initiated into the Gaelic culture of
the West of Scotland by that wise and generous
scholar Calum MacLean. He took me under his
wing when I got to Edinburgh with my tape
machine in 1951, made me hear Flora MacNeil and
the pibroch, made me read Carmichael and, in
many cosy talks over whisky, acquainted me with
the deathless spirit of Gaelic culture. He insisted
that I go to the Western Isles, telling a somewhat
sceptical American that I had a priceless experience
in store. And then he gave me a few addresses and
made a few judicious telephone calls that opened
the way. There followed meetings and music
making and wonders that are still as vivid in my
heart today as they were thirty years ago. For me
the culture of the Hebrides that MacLean devoted
his life to is the finest flower of Western Europe.
And Calum in my mind's eye is the man who
understood it and represented it as well as any one
man could.'
35 There is an anecdote that Kenneth Goldstein
used to tell about the mirth produced by one of
Lomax's tapes of Gaelic waulking songs; apparently
on one occasion the women singing in Gaelic
improvised a few verses about the personality of
their American visitor. Attempts to find verification
of this possibly apocryphal story have been
unsuccessful so far.
36 For Henderson's opinion of Lomax, which is
generally favourable, see Alias MacAlias, pp. 2, 16,
22, 138-39, 187 and 206-07.
37 There seems to be some disagreement about the
correct spelling of McBeath's surname. Lomax gave
it as MacBeath, but Peter Kennedy consistently uses
McBeath. I have chosen to follow Kennedy's usage.
38 The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive
Music, Volume 6: Scotland (LP, KL 209, Columbia,
1951); reissued as World Library of Folk and Primitive
Music III: Scotland (see note 5).
39 Hamish Henderson, 'Scots Folk-song: A Select
Discography, Part 1', Tocher, 25 (Spring 1977);
reprinted in Alias MacAlias, p. 138.
40 'I Heard Scotland Sing', BBC Home Service,
4 December 1951. Script (on microfilm) and
Programme as Broadcast log at BBC Written
Records Archive.
41 'The Gaelic West', BBC Third Programme,
16 April 1952. Programme as Broadcast log at BBC
Written Records Archive. I have been unable to
locate a script for this programme. A poor-quality
'off-air' cassette recording exists in Peter Kennedy's
collection at Heritage House, Gloucester, UK.
42 In 'Saga of a Folksong Hunter', p. 51, Lomax
dates his extended collecting trip in Spain as
commencing in the summer of 1953. This appears
to be a slip of the memory. The summer 1953 date
is problematic because references exist in published
and unpublished contemporary sources to Lomax
recently returning from Spain circa February 1953.
For example, MacColl's draft promotional article
for the Ballads and Blues series states that 'Alan
Lomax, just back from Spain where he has been
collecting folk music for the last six months, will
also be heard. . .', and the Radio Times article on the
Song Hunter TV show mentions that Lomax's
'travels in Spain a short time ago resulted in several
thousand recordings of songs never before collected'.
Similarly, the Radio Times of 16 October
1953, when listing the broadcast time of Lomax's
two programmes 'The Folk Music of Spain'
described them as 'two talks by Alan Lomax
illustrated by recordings made by him in Spain last
year'. The cumulative evidence that Lomax first
went to Spain in 1952 thus appears overwhelming,
although it is likely that he returned to Spain for a
second collecting trip in 1953.
43 Jeannie Robertson, The Queen Among the Heather;
Margaret Barry, I Sang Through the Fairs; Harry Cox,
What Will Become of England?
44 The series consisted of six programmes, initially
broadcast on the BBC North Home Service on 10,
17, 24 and 31 March and 7 and 12 April 1953.
45 Ewan MacColl, Untitled draft promotional
article for Ballads and Blues. Ballads and Blues
programme file at BBC Written Records Archive.
46 Jean Ritchie, Letter to the author, 18 February
2001.
47 Two editions of this amateur movie exist, a
Canadian version edited professionally by Budge
Crawley, and an English version edited by Kennedy
and Lomax. The English version can be purchased as
a video-cassette (in VHS/PAL format) from
Kennedy's Folktrax company in Gloucester, England,
while the Canadian version is available (in
VHS/NTSC format) from the B.C. Folklore
Society.
48 Peter Kennedy, Letter to the author, 18 January
2001. The four collectors filmed Bill Westaway on
this occasion.
49 Field Trip - England: Collected byJean Ritchie and
George Pickow (LP, FW 8871, Folkways [c. 19591. A
cassette version of this record has been reissued by
Ritchie & Pickow.
LOMAX IN LONDON 167
50 Lomax, 'Saga of a Folksong Hunter', p. 53.
51 Peter Kennedy, Arnold Bake, 'Folk Music of
Yugoslavia', Parts 1-4. BBC Third Programme, 10,
17 and 23 February and 4 March 1953.
52 Ewan MacColl, BBC Third Programme, 'St.
Cecilia and the Shovel', 31 December 1952; 'Living
Ballads: A Programme of Traditional Folk Songs', 3
September 1953; 'Come All Ye Good People: A
Programme of Ballads', 7 September 1953.
53Burl Ives, BBC Third Programme, 'Historical
America in Song', Parts 1-6, 2, 6, 14, 20 and 29
October and 5 November 1952. Also BBC TV, 'Burl
Ives, with his guitar', 4 June 1953. Jean Ritchie,
BBC Third Programme, 'Jean Ritchie in Kentucky
Sings, I - Saturday' and 'Jean Ritchie in Kentucky
Sings, II - Sunday', 29 June and 4 July 1953.
54 As I Roved Out. First series, 26 programmes,
September 1953-March 1954; second series,
12 programmes, April-June 1955; third series,
6 programmes, May-July 1956; fourth series,
5 programmes, July-August 1957; fifth series, 4
programmes, August-September 1958.
55 Song Hunter, BBC TV, 25 June, 6 and 20
October, 3 and 13 November, 1 and 15 December
1953 and 19 February 1954.
56 Radio Times, 9 June 1953, p. 15.
57 Programmes as Broadcast log, BBC Written
Records Archive. Jeannie Robertson was also
scheduled to appear, but had to withdraw at the
last moment because of illness. While she was in
London Peter Kennedy, who acted as Lomax's
assistant for the series, took the opportunity of
interviewing and recording her, as did Lomax
himself. Song Hunter also gave Lomax the opportunity
to record Margaret Barry and Harry Cox, and
he probably also recorded other participants in the
series. I have followed Lomax's spelling of Flora
MacNeil's surname, but this is sometimes given as
McNeil.
58 Alan Lomax, 'The Folk Music of Spain, I & II',
BBC Third Programme, 24 and 25 October 1953.
59 Eduardo M. Torner, 'Spanish Folk Music, Parts
1-6', BBC Third Programme, 19, 28 and 30
November and 12, 17 and 26 December 1953.
60 Alan Lomax and Pierre Gaisseau, 'The Folk
Music of the Orinoco Indians', BBC Third
Programme, 6 December 1953.
61Alan Lomax, 'The Folk Music of Canada', BBC
Third Programme, 19 May 1954.
62 Ibid., pp. 9-20. The Barbeau Collection is now
housed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization,
Hull, Quebec.
63Lomax, 'Saga of a Folksong Hunter', p. 54.
64 Alan Lomax, 'The Folk Music of Italy, 1-6',
BBC Third Programme, 7 and 23 March, 4 and 17
April, 5 and 15 May and 2 and 13 June 1955.
65 It was the first of more than two dozen hits for
Donegan between 1956 and 1962, including such
skiffle numbers as 'Stewball', 'Lost John', 'Bring a
Little Water Sylvie', 'Gamblin' Man', 'Grand
Coolie Dam', 'Sally Don't You Grieve', 'Lonesome
Traveller', 'Tom Dooley', 'Battle of New Orleans',
'Jack o' Diamonds', 'Have a Drink On Me' and
'Pick a Bale of Cotton'. Other skifflers would soon
invade the charts, most notably Chas McDevitt and
Nancy Whiskey with 'Freight Train' and the Vipers
with 'Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O' and 'Cumberland
Gap'.
66 The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles (Enfield,
Mddx.: Guinness Superlatives, 1979). On skiffle,
see Brian Bird, Skjffle: The Story of Folk-Song with a
Jazz Beat (London: Robert Hale, 1958); Chas
McDevitt, Skffpe: The Definitive Inside Story (London:
Robson, 1997); Mike Dewe, The Skffle Craze
(Aberystwyth: Planet, 1998).
67 John Hasted, AlternativeM emoirs( Shipton Green,
Itchenor, Sussex: Greengates, 1992), pp. 120-52.
Hylda Sims, Redd Sullivan and Shirley Collins were
just three of many skifflers/folk singers who started
their performing careers as members of Hasted's
skiffle group. For Sims's recollections of the period,
see Hylda Sims, 'On That Train and Gone', English
Dance & Song, 62.4 (Winter 2000), 2-4.
68 Ken Colyer, When Dreams Are In the Dust (Langley
Vale: Ken Colyer Trust In.d.]).
69 ' Skiffle Turns Up Among Folk Songs', Radio
Review, 1 November 1957. Article based upon an
interview with Lomax. Photocopy in the possession
of the author, no page numbers indicated.
70 Ibid. See also Folksongso f Britaina nd Irelande dited
by Peter Kennedy (New York: Oak, 1984), p. 21 1.
71 Alan Lomax, 'Hard Case' coupled with 'Dirty
Old Town' (Single, F10787, Decca, [c. 1957]);
Texas Folk Songs (EP, EPM 7.88, Melodisc, [c.
1957]); Great American Ballads (LP, CLP 1192,
HMV, [c. 1957]); American Song Train (LP, NPL
18013, Nixa, [c. 1957]).
72 Hasted's first folk group, which included Bert
Lloyd, was called The Ramblers, but by the midfifties
this had been replaced by 'John Hasted's
Skiffle and Folksong Group', which performed at
the Forty-Four Club in Soho. Shirley Collins was a
member of this later group. See Hasted, Alternative
Memoirs, pp. 124-46.
Ewan MacColl, Journeyman: An Autobiography
(London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990), p. 277. The
168 FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL
MacColl/Seeger Archives at Ruskin College,
Oxford, have scripts for the first four of these
Granada TV programmes, with broadcast dates of
18 and 22 June and 6 and 13 July 1956. The next
set of programmes commenced in early September
1956.
74 The SkifJle Album, featuring Skffle and Folk Songs
popularisedb y Alan Lomaxa nd the Ramblers( London:
Felman, 1957). Reprinted in 1963 as The Folk Song
Album.
75 Johnny Ambrose, 'In the Big Rock Candy
Mountains...', Sing, 2.6 (February-March 1956),
89-90.
76 Alan Lomax and Peggy Seeger, American Folk
Guitar:a Booko f Instructionin cludingC hordsa nd Lyrics
of 15 Traditional American Folk Songs (London:
Robbins, 1957).
77 MurderersH' ome (LP, NJL 11, Nixa, [1957]). Rereleased
as Pye Golden Guinea LP GGL 0317 in
1965.
78 The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive
Music, Vols 1-18. (18 LPs, KL 204-222, Columbia,
[1955]). Rounder Records plans to re-issue the
entire series (including the Mexican volume) on CD
as part of its The Alan Lomax Collection project.
79 Frederick Ramsey, Jr, 'Girdle 'Round the
Globe', Saturday Review, 12 February 1955,
p. 30-33.
80 Although both MacColl and Cameron specialized
in Scottish songs, neither was Scottish by birth. Isla
Cameron's real surname was Gledhill, and she
hailed from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, while MacColl
was a Mancunian. His parents were Scots and he
claimed to have been born in Auchterarder,
Perthshire, but this is doubtful, and he certainly
frew up in Salford from a very early age.
The Folk Songs of Britain (10 LPs, TC 1142-1146,
1162-1164 & 1224-125 Caedmon, 1961-[c. 19631;
12T157-161 & 194-198 Topic, 1967-69). The titles
of the last two volumes in the Topic edition were
changed to 'Songs of Ceremony' and 'Songs of
Animals and Other Marvels'.
82 The advent of the compact disc has made it
possible to include more material per disc. To date
(April 2001) three of The Folksongso f Britain series
have been reissued in expanded form in a Rounder
series titled Folk Songs of England, Ireland, Scotland &
Wales. They are: Classic Ballads of Britain and Ireland,
Vol 1 (CD, 1775, Rounder, 2000) Classic Ballads of
Britain and Ireland, Vol 2 (CD, 1776, Rounder, 2000)
Songs of Seduction (CD, 1778, Rounder, 2000).
83 The research seems to have been done mainly by
Kennedy and by Shirley Collins.
84 Reviewing The Folksongs of Britain, Hamish
Henderson called the set of LPs 'an impressive
and exceedingly useful collection', Tocher, 25
(Spring 1977); reprinted in Alias MacAlias, p. 139.
85 The Workers' Music Association, founded in
1936, was a cultural organization that catered
mainly to communist and other left-wing intellectuals.
Its president was the composer Alan Bush but
some of its members, who included Lloyd, Hasted
and MacColl, were interested in promoting jazz,
blues and folk music as well as choral singing and
union songs among the urban lower classes. In 1944
the WMA published Lloyd's important and influential
booklet, The Singing Englishman, reprinting it in
1951.
86 Albert L. Lloyd & Ewan MacColl, The Singing
Sailor (LP, TRL 3, Topic, [c. 1955]). Most of the
material on this disc was subsequently reissued on
Row, Bullies, Row (8" EP, T7, Topic, [c. 1956]).
87Albert L. Lloyd & Ewan MacColl, The English and
Scottish Popular Ballads (The Child Ballads), Vols 1-4 (8
LPs, RLP 12-621-628, Riverside [19561); Great
British Ballads Not Included in the Child Collection (LP,
RLP 12-629, Riverside, [1956]).
88 Other Lloyd/MacColl collaborations included
Blow Boys Blow: Songs of the Sea (LP, TLP 1026,
Tradition, [c. 19571); Thar She Blows: Whaling Songs
and Ballads (LP, RLP 12-635, Riverside, [c. 1956]);
Championas nd SportingB lades:B ritishS ongso f Sporting
and Gambling (LP, RLP 12-652, Riverside, [c.
19571). Lloyd's early solo albums were: Australian
Bush Songs (LP, RLP 12-606, Riverside, [c. 19551);
English Street Songs (LP, RLP 12-614, Riverside, [c.
1955]); English Drinking Songs (LP, RLP 12-618,
Riverside, [c. 19551); The Foggy Dew & Other
Traditional English Love Songs (LP, TLP 1016,
Tradition, [c. 1956]). MacColl's early solo albums
on Riverside included Scots Drinking Songs (LP, RLP
12-605, Riverside, [c. 1955]); Scots Folk Songs (LP,
RLP 12-609, Riverside, [c. 19551); Scots Street Songs
(LP, RLP 12-612, Riverside, [c. 19551); Bad Lads
and Hard Cases (LP, RLP 12-632, Riverside, [c.
1956]), and, with Peggy Seeger, Matching Songs of
Britain and America (LP, RLP 12-637, Riverside, [c.
1957]). In the late fifties MacColl also recorded for
Folkways the first few of many LPs he would make
for that label: Great Scottish Ballads (LP, FW 6927,
Folkways, [c. 1958]); Songs of Robert Burns (LP, FW
8758, Folkways, 1961); Songso f TwoR ebellions,( LP,
FW 8756, Folkways, 1960); Scottish Popular Songs
(LP, FW 8757, Folkways, 1961). Isla Cameron was
another important British revival singer whom
Lomax recommended to Goldstein, with the result
LOMAXIN LONDON 169
that she recorded a fine album in 1956: Through
Bushes and Briars, and Other Songs of the British Isles
(LP, TLP 1001, Tradition, [1956]).
89 Letter from Geoffrey Riggs to Mr H.W. Clark,
dated 29 February 1956, and Clark's reply; memos
by Ian Grimble, dated 4, 14 and 18 May 1956, Alan
Lomax Artists File 1.
90 Correspondence between Wendy Heritage,
Variety Booking Department, and Mr Clark, Alan
Lomax Artists File 1.
91 Ian Grimble, Memo to P.H. Newby on 'Singing
and Folklore in New Guinea', 4 May 1956, Alan
Lomax Artists File 1.
92 Ian Grimble, Memo to Miss Kallin and Mr
Langford on 'Alan Lomax', 14 May 1956, Alan
Lomax Artists File 1.
93 Ian Grimble, Memo to Mr P. H. Newby on
'Alan Lomax', 18 May 1956, Alan Lomax Artists
File 1.
94 Alan Lomax, 'Memories of a Ballad Hunter,
Parts 1-6', BBC Third Programme, 2, 11, 15, 20
and 27 January and 5 February 1957, repeated 30
June, 7, 15 and 21 July and 2 and 5 August 1957.
95 Alan Lomax, Script for 'Memories of a Ballad
Hunter, 5: Italy - Sicily and Calabria', pp. 2-3. On
microfilm at BBC Written Records Archive,
Caversham.
96 Alan Lomax, 'Folk Song Train', two-page typed
manuscript (undated but circa October 1956), in
Alan Lomax Artists File 1.
97 Douglas Lawrence, Memo about the 'Folk Song
Train' proposal, 31 October 1956; A.E. Boxall,
Memo about employing Lomax as a performer and/
or script-writer, 20 March 1957; letter from
Wendy Heritage to Mr Clark, Ministry of Labour,
20 August 1957. Items in Alan Lomax Artists File 1.
98 It consisted of eight programmes broadcast on
the Home Service during November and December
1957.
99 Alan Lomax, Script for 'A Ballad Hunter Looks
at Britain, 1: Come Listen To My Song', pp. 1-2.
Photocopy in the possession of the author, courtesy
Peter Kennedy.
100 Ibid., p. 5.
101 Ibid., p. 6.
102 Ibid., p. 8. Lomax's script states that the
illustrative example of choral singing from the old
Celtic west was by 'Kitty Gallagher lead[ing] a
group of Glasgow housewives' but the item
apparently used at this point in the programme
was 'Gaelic Songs from Barra' by Kitty McCleod
[sic]. BBC 16167 F/2, recorded 26 April 1951.
103 Ibid., pp. 7-10.
104 Alan Lomax, Script for 'A Ballad Hunter Looks
at Britain, 2: From Devon to Dover', pp. 1-12.
Quotation from p. 1. Photocopy in the possession
of the author, courtesy Peter Kennedy. Programme
broadcast 8 November 1957.
105 Alan Lomax, Script for 'A Ballad Hunter Looks
at Britain, 3: From Cornwall to Yorkshire', pp. 1-
14. Photocopy in the possession of the author,
courtesy Peter Kennedy. Programme broadcast 15
November 1957.
106 Alan Lomax, Script for 'A Ballad Hunter Looks
at Britain, 4: East Anglia to the Borders', pp. 1-10.
Photocopy in the possession of the author, courtesy
Peter Kennedy. Programme broadcast 22 November
1957.
107 Alan Lomax, Script for 'A Ballad Hunter Looks
at Ireland: Folk Music from the North and South',
pp. 1-6. Quotation from p. 6. Photocopy in the
possession of the author, courtesy Peter Kennedy.
Programme broadcast 27 December 1957.
108 Jeannette Hugh, 'Wireless World: 'Sing Christmas
and the turn of the year". Photocopy of article
[unpaginated and source unidentified] in Birmingham
Central Library, England, Charles Parker
Archive, CPA/2/61. This may have been clipped
from Radio Times, 20 December 1957. The article
was based on an interview with Parker.
109 The programme has now been issued on
compact disc in Rounder's Concert & Radio Series
as Sing Christmaas nd the Turno f the Year( CD, 1850,
Rounder, 2000).
110 Alan Lomax, 'Sing Christmas and the Turn of
the Year', pp. 1-33. Script in Charles Parker
Archive, CPA/2/61.
The Folk Songs of North America, edited by Alan
Lomax (London: Cassell, 1960); The Penguin Book of
American Folk Songs, edited by Alan Lomax
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964).
112 Both sets have now been re-issued as CDs,
Sounds of the South (4 CDs, 782496-2, Atlantic,
1993) and Southern Journey (13 CDs, 1701-1713,
Rounder, 1997-98).
113 Alan Lomax, 'Folk Songs and Music of the
Southern States, Parts 1-4', BBC Third Programme,
5, 8, 15 and 22 October 1960.
T 14 See note 5 for details of CD re-issues.
115 Henderson has long attacked the romanticization
of Scottish history, and in Elegiesfor the Dead in
Cyrenaica coined the phrase 'no gods and precious
few heroes' that Brian McNeill used for the title and
punch-line of his polemical song on the subject:
Brian McNeill, No Gods (CD, FMS 2066 Fenn Music
Service, 1995).