Bluegrass Messengers

Mr. Lomax Meets Professor Kittredge
Roger D. Abrahams
Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 37, No. 2/3, Special Double Issue: Issues in Collaboration and Representation (May - Dec., 2000), pp. 99-118

Mr. Lomax Meets Professor Kittredge
by Roger D. Abrahams

Looking back on his many years of collecting and writing about American folksong, John A. Lomax told of the formative moments in his life. In his memoir Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (1947), he recounted many of the stories that he had "dined out on" for much of his life. The anecdote which has maintained its fascination for me as an historian of folklore studies has the 40-year-old Texan taking a year of study at Harvard, enrolling in a course taught by Barrett Wendell, and being introduced to George Lyman Kittredge. Deeply conscious of age and class distinctions as he had already encountered them within the academy in Texas, he now also had to contend with differences of cultural style between Yankees and Southerners, especially those bearing on deference and demeanor. Accordingly, Lomax encountered the Grand Poohbahs of the literature department somewhat nervously. He describes his experience:

At the beginning of the second term the instructor, Wendell, asked each man to select examples of regional literature for study. ... "I am worn to a frazzle," Professor Wendell declared, 'With reading . . . dissertations on Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Holmes and Poe. You fellows come from every section of the country. Tell us something interesting about your regional literary productions." (Lomax 1947:33)

Emboldened by these words, and in need of a topic for his course paper, Lomax approached Professor Wendell in his office. Wendell, an anxious and underachieving snob, seems to have made an effort to put his student somewhat at ease, calling Lomax out of the New England chill "one snowy February morning in 1907" and into the warmth "of the big open fireplace piled with burning logs, just to the left of his desk" (1947:33).

When I said that the cowboys themselves had made up the songs describing life on the round-up and the trail, Professor Wendell sprang from his chair, and, in his enthusiasm, came around the table to shake my hand. "Do you know Kittredge? I'll arrange a meeting." (1947:33) 

This story is far from transparent. It is difficult to appreciate the way in which the Old Boy network had been playing itself out in those northeastern climes for most of the previous century and to understand how different it was from that of the South. Though Lomax clearly was unaware he was being sponsored in this Yankee manner, and though he was probably ignorant of the reasons Wendell and Kittredge might have been interested in cowboys, he nevertheless recognized a chance to catch the notice of these august presences. Kittredge himself had received the benefits of Yankee-style patronage when he came up to Harvard thirty years before, just as his mentor and friend Francis James Child had when he was befriended by Charles Eliot Norton and his father, Andrews, the wealthy dean of American writing on scripture. Child graduated as first scholar in the class of 1846 (Norton was second) and was sent to Germany to complete his philological training. Both Child and Kittredge, then, were beneficiaries of that strange elite system of reward in which early merit and demonstrations of genius led to both professional and social elevation. As noted, Lomax could hardly have been aware of this particularly Yankee system of rewards- yet he realized the importance of this kind of patronage as he rose to national prominence as the chronicler of American vernacular song traditions, beginning with these cowboy songs.

Perhaps Lomax reminded Kittredge of his own modest rural upbringing; perhaps it was simply genius recognizing genius. As he did with many other regional folksong collectors, Kittredge enthusiastically sponsored Lomax's professional efforts throughout his career; for instance, Kittredge backed Lomax's presentation at the Modern Language Association annual meeting two years after his student's return to Texas in the spring of 1907. Lomax's presentation at the 1909 MLA conference was crafted to reinforce the image of the roughneck cowboy that had first brought him notice. He narrates the experience, again reliving his sense of insecurity in that company (and changing his pronouns and getting the date wrong by two years in the process):

On a bleak wintry afternoon in late December 1911 {sic], a timid and uncertain young man stood on the platform in a circular auditorium in Cornell University to read a paper on "The Songs of the Cowboys." My book with the same title had just been published to a frozen-faced audience in Texas. (1947:82)

[Rich Brown (right) and John A. Lomax at the home of Mrs. Julia Killingsworth near Sumterville, Alabama, October 1940. Courtesy the Library of Congress.]

Kittredge and Wendell, then, had seen in Lomax in 1907 a fine representative figure of the American local genius. Lomax was far from the only such collector to emerge from Kittredge's Harvard. For the great F. J. Child had not been aware of ballad-singing still in place on the American frontier; his protege (and literary executor) Kittredge only became aware of these non-Appalachian folksongs as students came to Harvard from beyond the East Coast. The next generations of students who returned to their state and provincial institutions across North America not only re-discovered the ballad, but were encouraged by Kittredge to initiate local folklore organizations affiliated with the American Folklore Society. These organizations sponsored and organized the collecting activities that eventually led to the publication of the great collections of the early twentieth century (see Wilgus 1959).

We are several worlds away from the one in which John Lomax emerged as the genius of American folksong collecting. For much of the twentieth century, his name (and that of his son, Alan) was synonymous with finding the most important traditional musicians and recording the most cherished and representative songs of American frontier life. A prodigious worker at whatever he took on, Lomax senior's longing to elevate his place in the world took its toll on those around him. As a goodly number of more recent song collectors have found, our enterprise didn't have to be explained to many of the singers we met, since they already knew the concerns and the practices of Mr. Lomax or his son, Alan. This familiarity with the Lomaxes' work was sometimes to our discomfort, for the publishing practices of father and son sometimes appeared unprofessional and didn't seem to cleave to the standards of authenticity thought to record more accurately the waifs and strays of old-time Singing America.

The mixed reception of Lomax's work by folksong scholars also rested in large measure on what was perceived as his unseemly selfpromotion and his slippery way of reporting texts. He authored the legend of the ballad-mongering adventurer and placed himself firmly at its center. The real story, that of an independent collector/scholar scrambling for financial support for his family and his collecting enterprise, can only now be pieced together. This story reflects both romantic dreams and hard realities, achievements and frustrations. But more than this, in the arc of John Lomax's career, we can discern the carrying-on of a romantic enterprise begun by Bishop Thomas Percy when he published Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765).[2]

The argument with the way in which John and Alan Lomax printed songs was an old one, as old as the fight between Bishop Percy and Joseph Ritson in the late-eighteenth century: Should songs be printed as found, or changed to make them more consistent, readable, appropriately representative of the best of the tradition from which they grew? The purists of the first half of the twentieth century feared that the Lomaxes constructed composite texts from those they collected from a number of performers. But Lomax, whose personal circumstances dictated that he leave the academy and pursue his project on his own and through the charity of others, found a penchant for writing to a more general audience. Working within the direction set out by Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, and Joel Chandler Harris, he recorded and presented vernacular creativity: first of the cowboys, then of the former slaves who often filled prisons in the south, and finally, of the working stiffs throughout North America: sailors, sod-busters, lumberjacks, and miners.

I.
Should we make anything of the fact that John A. Lomax was born in Mississippi immediately following the War Between the States and grew up in that part of Texas which was still Southern and yet at the edge of the West? Or that he nourished an upward-striving set of desires to enter the professional class even while he maintained his connection with workers and their songs? These elements of his life-story resonate in such a way that we should, perhaps, better regard both Lomax and the character he created as representative of his particular time and station.

Born in 1867, he moved with his family to Texas a year later. Mr. Lomax, then, was a man raised in the late-nineteenth century in an East Texas agricultural environment that emphasized the strong values of character development and self-instruction as the basis of selfimprovement. If he constructed an image of himself as a personality, that is, a person of some consequence, this was in tune with the times in which his work matured, the first third of the twentieth century. This was a time when many American cultural observers revealed the myths by which American character was propounded. John Lomax represented all of these: the pioneer and settler, the self-made man, the scholar-adventurer, the man of the land, the social and cultural outsider who reported on the values of those who worked on the land away from the contagions of bureaucracy and industrialization.

Lomax and many of his generation were, in fact, refugees from the family farm. Creating a folk group, any folk group, in America is tied to the nostalgic image of the family farm and its loss. But here was someone, as Robert Cantwell has noted, who just barely managed to get himself and most of his family off of the land and into the office (1998). Porterfield's fine biography of the man details just how agonizing the process of "making it" was for this child of small plot yeoman farmers as he distanced himself from his hardscrabble home in Bosque County, Texas (1996). Lomax had authored himself carefully in his writings, from the introductions in his early cowboy song collections to the autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (1947). As with the Horatio Alger figures who embodied the American ideal, the autobiographical Lomax brought to his endeavors an abundance of good luck, ingenuity, perspicacity, curiosity, and a dreadful persistence, always finding helpful figures along the  way. Like Alger, as well, he expected aid and comfort from paternal donors. Though he was less than successful in his pleas much of the time, he forwarded himself and his work through correspondence and personal visits.

In leaving the farm or the small town he followed the metropolitan impulses of the times. He was of the generation for whom this change of life-style was normal, common, and fully encouraged by the altered focus of American economic developments. Not only had the worker and his family been removed from the workplace, but putting on a white collar and entering into the consumer world was regarded as the appropriate way to elevate oneself in the world.

In such an emergent, newly urbanized population, few worried about the distance between image and reality; reality lay in the stories one might tell on oneself. The stories in turn accounted for the strength of character they illustrated. This kind of move doesn't go unremarked in the skepticism of the present age. Under the name of self-fashioning or cultural invention, self-promotion is revealed as a mere trope- finding life within a specific "discourse." If John Lomax painted himself in heroic terms, drawing on the tropes of exploration and discovery, and tied this heroism to frontier and settlement narratives, he was drawing upon a potent set of understandings that had been explicated in American writing a century earlier. In addition, he was using self-advertising techniques that were regarded by contemporary entrepreneurs as appropriate, even inventive. His success in this image-making endeavor speaks for itself.

This myth also happens to be the one that first propelled me and my generation into the field. Lomax was in sync with many other forces of popular culture when he identified himself with the sites where, he felt, the American bardic impulse lived most strongly: on the frontier, and especially in the cattle camps. Submitting John Lomax to demystifying rhetoric that aims toward emptying everything discredits the achievement of Lomax and others in forging the figure of the folklore-collector. Lest folklorists forget, back in the dark ages of folklore study, before even Mary Ellen Brown and I professed ourselves as folklorists, collecting and writing about American folksongs and folktale evoked adventure. Deeply connected, intellectually and spiritually, to the trans-Atlantic Victorian ideal equating physical and spiritual health, Americans in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had rediscovered frontier virtues and espoused a return to the values of 'The Age of Homespun," as minister-orator Horace Bushnell named the virtuous times of pioneering. The folksong collector could claim virtue simply by setting out to recover the remnants of this age of home-manufacture and to publish the scarce remains as being ineluctably tied to the American landscape. And if the lore was imagined to be Old English or Elizabethan, all the better. This old-fashioned way of approaching life was associated in the minds of commercial elites with hardy pioneer values that should be maintained as an alternative to effete city ways.

Anti-modernism had been a persistent theme of East Coast life throughout the nineteenth century, expressed particularly strongly by Boston-Cambridge elites (Lears 1981; Townsend 1996; see also Bustin 1988). The Harvard professors of the late-nineteenth century self-consciously attempted to instill these virtues among their students. Teddy Roosevelt, class of 1880, was the exemplar of this attitude toward virtuous action in the face of the effete Eastern upbringing, as was his friend and contemporary Harvard student, Owen Wister, author of The Virginian (1902). Then, as today, it was easier to espouse the virtue of physical exercise than to carry out a regular regime of such healthy and morally purposeful activity.[3]

It was Wendell, the celebrated professor-poetaster, who first "discovered" Lomax when the bashful, anxious, misplaced, middle-aged Southerner worked up the nerve to call himself to Wendell's attention. While locally an acclaimed teacher and scholar, Professor Wendell was far from secure in his role as mentor to Lomax or anyone else. The author of the path-breaking book A Literary History of America (1900), Wendell conveyed the idea in conversation that he found it difficult to take any American literary effort seriously (Townsend 1996:138). Incapable of robust activity himself (as with so many of his generation, he suffered from depression and tied it to the emasculation of the age), he nevertheless embraced the Cult of Manly Virtues, in which sport and life were spoken of as one. A self-confessed Tory snob, he yet subscribed to the Emersonian romanticization of the working man. "Muscularity is not my trait," he reports on himself, "... so I love the trait far more than it may be worth by the standards of the eternities" (Howe 1924:109, cited in Townsend 1996:139).

While he suffered from a similar set of constitutional questions, philosopher George Santayana said of Wendell, his contemporary at Harvard, that "his force spent itself in foam" (cited in Townsend 1996:138; Self 1975; but see Green 1978). Along with Henry James, Henry Adams, and others of his Harvard generation, Wendell was deeply concerned with the feminization of American life. While it is difficult to imagine, given the shy and tentative manner of Lomax, Wendell saw in the man an embodiment of a vital and manly alternative life-style. While Professor Wendell's impact was confined to his work with Harvard students for the most part, Professor Kittredge was a different story. By the time Lomax was led into the presence of His Eminence, Professor (but not Dr.) Kittredge had the place of honor as the direct inheritor of Child's mantle as the leading philological comparativist in the United States (Graff 1987:66; Turner 1999:152-53).

Legend has it that Lomax took a manuscript entitled "Minstrelsy of the Mexican Border" to this meeting with Wendell (Porterfield 1996:115).[4] If so, taking the liberty of claiming kinship of enterprise with Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border cannot have hurt in this Harvard encounter, as this was the site in which scholarship on the English and Scottish ballads had been wrested away from the control of scholar-antiquarians in Great Britain and established firmly in the domain of Cambridge, Massachusetts.[5] Francis James Child had published his great work The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98) in a bold preemptive strike that unsettled English scholars. In this great work, he went far beyond British antiquarians in method and scope, thereby demonstrating how German philological method might be brought to bear on the matter of the ballads. The acclaim given him by his colleagues and students was inspired not only by this feat of scholarship but also by his availability and sweetness of nature that inspired loving memories long after his death.

II.
It is surely time to put behind us the misgivings and misreadings of John Lomax's enterprise. For his life reveals a man closer to his public presentation of self than to that whispered about by those assuming a more "professional" stance. In good part, this reputation arose because of Lomax's decision to write as a public intellectual and not in the approved academic presentation style. His model, announced by the title of his earliest collecting effort, "Minstrelsy of the Mexican Border", suggests that he saw his work in the romantic nationalist tradition of Scott (Porterfield 1996). It should also remind those of us interested in the history of folksong collecting that Scott and his confreres had tied the garnering of songs to the search for bards who celebrated the doings of national warriors. In his espousal of vernacular expression, Lomax discovered a new kind of manliness, one not always attached to wars but rather connected to the extraordinary feats of those living dangerous lives on the frontier.

For much of the first century-and-a-half of American history, Americans yearned for a bard who would celebrate the American accomplishment. This was a call that many American cultural figures attended to closely, feeling that an American Homer or Virgil must somehow emerge from this great social and political experiment, a sophisticated poet who would find the story and the voice by which Americans could imagine themselves as having climbed beyond frontier barbarism and into the ranks of the civilized.

Alternatively, arguments for American Exceptionalism encouraged the search for national bardic genius in the local and the vernacular forms of expression arising on the frontier. The vitality of the country itself rested on the creation of uniquely American heroes, and, perhaps more important, on the emergence of the American language and American singers of praise. But when the songs of heroes were uncovered, they were not about George Washington or even Daniel Boone; rather, they celebrated Jumping Jim Crow, the Bowery Boys in the cities, Little Joe the Wrangler, and the logger Young Munroe. While there were a few prescient social commentators in the middle of the nineteenth century who recognized the emergence of a representative national expression in the blackface show, not until the first generation of the twentieth century did the search for bardic voices become focused on vernacular creative forms. In the cultural wars of the first quarter of the century, Americanist bellelettrists pursued the idea that perhaps the native genius of the land would be discovered in folksong.[6]
 
Certainly as a result of the intensive campaign to collect and archive traditional songs state by state, folksongs began to be included in the inventory of American cultural inventions. Figures such as Constance Rourke, Carl Sandburg, Thomas Hart Benton, and others congregating around the Art Students League and the New School in New York contended that folksong was the lingua franca for American bardic expression. The painters and the musicians and the poets themselves took to collecting and to incorporating these songs in their own public art.[7] In great part, this move toward folk expression was energized with the discovery that traditional ballads and songs were alive and being performed throughout the nation. No figures were more important in bringing this to the attention of the American public than John Avery Lomax and his son, Alan.

During the early twentieth century many states began folklore societies to carry out folksong collecting in a methodical fashion, publishing songs according to strict scholarly criteria, or so the scholars claimed. At the same time, Carl Sandburg and Tom Benton took their guitars with them wherever they hung out and performed those songs they had lucked upon. Robert Winslow Gordon began his widely read feature series, "Old Songs that Men Have Sung," in Adventure and provided the collections that inspired the idea of the Archive of America Folksong at the Library of Congress (Kodish 1986). And John Lomax brought attention to the wealth of folksong still to be found throughout the land, first through his achieving acolyte status to George Lyman Kittredge and the elites of the Modern Language Association, and later by bringing his ward and sometime chauffeur, Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter to the attention of scholarly and urban audiences.

More of Lomax's constant refashioning was taking place in this process. Self-invention portrays Lomax as The Cowboy as well as the very embodiment of The Success Story. He surely deserved the latter; the former he could righteously claim through his interest in cowboy songs as well as his having grown up near the Chisholm Trail. After all, Teddy Roosevelt, the role model for the most manly Harvardians, had gone to Texas to recruit young men for his Rough Riders at the beginning of the Spanish-American War. While this was hardly the role for which Lomax thought he was being auditioned, he played the part very well.

[Billy McCrea (right), with John Lomax (center), and friends, at McCrea's home in Jasper, Texas, September 1940. Courtesy the Library of Congress.]

The image created in some measure by John Avery Lomax, as approved by Teddy Roosevelt, was a strong blend of the Southern Gentleman and the Man of the West. The two stereotypes were not that far removed from each other, and each was strongly marked by the romantic notions of Sir Walter Scott himself. Cantwell perceptively notes that this was an "adopted Anglo-American ruling-class outlook" which was most aggressively masculine and set against the effete features of Eastern middle class ways (1996:70). Indeed, in Lomax's introduction to his first book (which grew out of the "Border Minstrelsy" manuscript), he describes cowboys thus: "These boys in their twenties who could ride and rope and shoot and sing came mainly from the Southern states. They brought the gallantry, the grace, and the song heritage of their English ancestors"  (1910:xvii).

This was an undiluted rendering of the Anglo-Saxonist argument which had begun in the South but which had been adopted by the New England elites in the wake of the mass introduction of Irish laborers into their domain. Historian Barbara Miller Solomon documented this development:

In the early part of the [nineteenth] century, the time of conscious emancipation from England, many wanted to repress English origins and influences. And in the democratic pitch of the 1840s, liberal Yankees left the Anglo-Saxon cult to Southern slaveholders or British empire builders. But when, by the 1850s, Boston society lost its unity, the distinction between the practical Anglo-Saxon, solid in building nations and adventurous on the high seas, and the imaginative, gay Celt who lacked the capacity to create or sustain successful political institutions, underlined the New Englander's superiority over the Irish immigrants. Derived from both the philological and ethnological studies of European scholars, the Anglo-Saxon became the archetype of the most desirable branch of the Teutonic race. (1956:60)

Even before his encounter with Lomax, Kittredge had become aware of the continuing presence of folksongs and ballads in rural North America. Among others, one of his students, Phillips Barry, had discovered a rich lode of ballads in what remained of the New England backwoods. After graduating from Harvard in 1903, Barry set out to learn about ballads by searching for singers of tales in his native New England and "sitting at their feet" to learn from them about the life of these songs. He was among the first to recognize that the assumptions of Child and Kittredge, that the old songs had been dormant for a very long time, were incorrect.[8]

Lomax was the beneficiary of this softening of the official line regarding balladry. If the last generation of the nineteenth century sought to educate young Americans in physical and spiritual manliness, this was in the service of civilized development. Each male student was conceived of in terms of replaying the history of mankind, living through the stages of savagery and barbarism; thus, the next generation of collectors set themselves up as pioneer types. Their collecting became their journey back to nature, their songs transposed in terms not unlike the big game that T. R. so loved to hunt. Folksong collecting was also made into a mining expedition or an archaeological dig. For now, as the collectors entered into the lives of people living by tried and true, if sometimes backward ways, the songs were more than relics. Now the folk, as well as their songs, were awaiting discovery.

As Debora Kodish argued some years ago, Lomax not only had the example of Barry to follow, but he also had that of journalistcollector Robert Winslow Gordon, who had begun to create a popular audience for these old-timey ballads and songs (1986). Gordon was a protege of Kittredge at the same period that Lomax was being "taken up," though Gordon came from a genteel family, certainly more to-the-manor-born than Lomax. Though he made an active attempt to find employment as an academic, he failed to find a place. In July 1923, Gordon began a series of articles in Adventure in which he corresponded with old-time singers throughout the country, searching out now one song, now another (Kodish 1986:33-49). Later in the decade, Gordon would take to the road with an early recording machine, much as John Lomax did, recording songs wherever he found them. From his correspondence and wax cylinder recordings, Gordon was able to persuade the Library of Congress to establish an archive.[9] This was the position that John and Alan Lomax were to extend in the mid-thirties (Kodish 1986). Just as the Lomaxes were to represent in their classic American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934), Gordon came to recognize the variety of American song forms and the intensity of regional variation.

These songs were a part of the cultural repertoires of those living year-round in areas adopted as summer retreats by city elites seeking to toughen up and live close to the land for at least part of the year. A ready audience for the Gordon articles and the Lomax books, these summer residents regarded themselves as hardy pioneers too- at least in those parts of the year when they lived in their mountain cabins (often as palatial as their city houses, but built of logs or some other indigenous material). Elite wives sometimes established settlement schools for the children of those who occupied these "retreat" areas all year (Whisnant 1983; Becker 1998). Collectors, some of whom used these settlement schools and mountain colleges as their base of operations, were led to the geniuses of memory, often those who had already been identified as local resources by the school. The social attitudes of those retreating to these areas, and even among the collectors themselves, were characteristic of elite thinking.

The excitement of finding not only old songs but ones that seemed to be sung by those of pure Anglo-Saxon stock was palpable. It was a cruel hoax being perpetrated on those actually being collected from, because of the stereotypes used to keep them in their place. But, in the form of the mountain man and the granny woman, the year-round mountain residents were portrayed as people who could be envied, in principle, for their feats of recall. Indeed, illiteracy and backwardness were regarded as virtues, at least from the song collectors' perspective, for the collectors could then hold to the notion that folksongs were passed on through the natural operation of a closeknit, unlettered community- that is, by word-of-mouth transmission.

III.
John Lomax's genius at self-fashioning was not shared by his opposite number, Robert Winslow Gordon. Like writers of the generation before them- Twain, Harris, and Cable- Gordon and Lomax found their literary voices through reporting the performances of traditional singers. Borrowing from the image of the inquiring traveler freed up from cosmopolitan concerns by the open road, Gordon and Lomax were both vagrant spirits who spent a good deal of their lives moving from one outpost to another. If some chose to see this activity as the essence of adventure, they were able to interest many, many others in the lore of those they encountered on the margins: not only cowboys, but also lumberjacks, seamen, migrant workers, prisoners, and children of the ex-slaves.

With African-American singers, we see yet a further spinning out of the theme of patronage, of "taking up. "John Lomax's greatest "discovery" by any accounting was Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. Released on pardon from prisons in Louisiana and Texas, Leadbelly was enlisted to assist Lomax in his field collecting. Through correspondence with Wendell, Kittredge, and many others in the Northeast, Lomax reported on this extraordinarily powerful singer-murderer. The combination of Lomax and Leadbelly seemed to be working so well that, when Lomax was asked by letter if he would like to report on his fieldwork at the Modern Language Association, he suggested that Leadbelly might come along with him and sing at a smoker.

Alan and he had been at a previous meeting, Alan playing some of the recordings from their first go-round in Texas and Louisiana. They had been received very well indeed, so well that the local arrangements chairman wrote back to Lomax saying that he liked his "generous suggestion" to present his "talented aborigine." By his father's report, the suggestion was Alan's.

Prison compound No. 1, Angola, Louisiana, July 1934. Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) in the foreground. Courtesy the Library of Congress.]


This much is known: the three of them made the trip east, stopping along the way at prison camps in Georgia and South Carolina. The local newspapers picked up the story of this strange crew and their self-assigned task en route, so that by the time they arrived in Philadelphia, there was a certain degree of anticipation among the participants. Professor Wendell was there to greet them, as were numerous others that the Lomaxes had known at Harvard. The Philadelphia newspapers played up the more lurid side of Leadbelly's life, of course, making much of the ironies of a convicted murderer singing to the assembled scholars at the MLA.

On the last day of 1934 they reached New York, "the capitol of all the states in the world," as Leadbelly exclaimed. On the evening of New Year's Day, he gave his first concert in that city. The Herald Tribune ran a story on the singer, following it two days later with a more sensational account of his life. The story horrified the Lomaxes. It was, perhaps, an important lesson for Alan: for the past sixty years Lomax's son has generated his own headlines, discovering ways of launching his endeavors that have continued to capture a general public interest in the greatness of American traditional music and the lives that go into making it (Wolfe and Lornell 1992).

[Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) and Martha Promise Ledbetter, Wilton, Connecticut,
February 1935. Courtesy the Library of Congress.]

Leadbelly began to feel uncomfortable in his position, as did John Lomax in his own way, and they had a good many difficulties from then on. But the die was cast. Leadbelly had tasted triumph, while John Lomax had seen in his life and songs the resources for a new book that would set a model for folksong scholars that remained unrecognized for fifty more years. And Alan Lomax had recognized his life calling in bringing such music to the attention of the nation and the world. As they sat that winter at a farm made available to them, working on the document that would become the book, they were invited for lecture-singing demonstrations at many places throughout the Northeast, including a famous series of concerts at Harvard where John Lomax and Leadbelly were welcomed by Kittredge. For the moment, the circle was again complete.

In the final version of their groundbreaking book Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936), John and Alan Lomax presented Leadbelly's stories along with his songs, letting the singer's humor and irony emerge from within. It would take other folklorists two generations to recognize the innovations represented by this work, a book which used all of the devices of record, script, and print available at the time to bring this remarkable single performer's life and art alive for the reader. Yes, again the pattern of patronage was put to good effect by Lomax, this time with Leadbelly the recipient of the attention. Using his understanding of Southern custom, Lomax was able to have the convict released to his custody. As a chauffeur, a singer in other prisons, and finally as a representative survivor of the Southern repression of former slaves, Leadbelly found his way to public acclaim through the efforts of his patron. Lomax was drawing on a pattern of sponsorship and deference, not of the Harvard variety as he had encountered it in dealing with Kittredge, but as he had observed it in the customary practices of the Southern Gendeman.

University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia
---------------------------

Notes

1. The story told well. But as Porterfield notes, the year was 1909 and the book was not published until 1911; the same paper when it was read, in absentia, by his wife at the first meeting of the Texas Folklore Society, was extremely well-received (1996:143).

2. The controversy has been recounted many times. That the principles involved in "discovering" Lomax involve a soil-worn song manuscript such as Percy found being used for fire-starting makes the parallels especially poignant, and the legend especially suspect (Stewart 1991:102-27). Dave Harker's "plague on both your houses" argument presents a lively and politically engaged narrative (1985:15-37). See also Bertram Davis's biography of Percy (1989).

3. The degree of socio-sexual ambivalence in the face of Muscular Christian ideology, Townsend and others argue, produced a strong pattern of depression and neuresthenia in a number of these figures. This pattern of fear, associated with the diminishment of pioneer energies, emerged as the leaders of the Revolution died, and became especially strong at the passing of Jefferson and Adams on the same day, exactly fifty years after the beginning of the rebellion. As George Fredrickson argues, these fears and the presence of "survivor guilt" became almost pandemic after the Civil War, especially among the Boston-Cambridge community, including the Harvard Professoriate (1965).

4. In a footnote (1996:449), Porterfield presents the conflicting evidence that Lomax had called his manuscript by this title.

5. The story of this ballad-skirmish has not yet been remarked upon. Perhaps the opening shot was launched by a young James Russell Lowell when one of the first of his Lowell lectures covered balladry. He celebrated the centrality of Scott in bringing ballads to public attention. In this as-yet-unpublished speech (Bell 1995 provides an overview of Lowell's argument), he advanced the notion that England failed to establish legitimacy in claiming the ballads as their native product, placing emphasis on the Celtic bards and minstrels as their progenitors. He seems to have been clearing the ground for the assertion of American cultural independence by arguing the culturally-mixed history of ballad composition. The lectures were delivered at the Boston Atheneum in 1855. Though they had not yet met and established the basis of their life-long friendship, Francis
James Child was in the audience. My thanks to Mike Bell for sharing this manuscript with me and discussing the position put forth by Lowell.

6. For a history of the ballad wars and related subjects in American folksong collecting and publishing, Wilgus 1959 remains the best source. For the larger questions associated with ballad production and transmission, along with the many literary interventions, see Friedman 1961 and Stewart 1991:86-88, 102-31.

7. This move is discussed by Rubin (1980) with regard to the career of Constance Rourke, by Kodish (1986) in her study of Robert Winslow Gordon, and by Cochran (1985) in his biography of Vance Randolph.

8. The pattern of this agonized sense of dislocation from the firm New England past is seen in the life stories of many descendants of the old families such as William and Henry and Alice James, Henry and Brooks Adams, as well as the founder of the American Folklore Society, W. W. Newell. See here Bell 1973 and Abrahams 1988.

9. For a discussion of the importance of the technological innovations relating to phonograph recordings, see Brady 1999.

Acknowledgments
I have benefitted from the counsel of many in discovering these doings, including many hours spent with son Alan and with his equally gifted sister, Bess Lomax Hawes. My pals Archie Green, John Szwed, Kenny Goldstein, Bob Cantwell, and Regina Bendix have enthusiastically encouraged the retelling of this set of stories, along with others affecting the informal history of American folkloristics. My graduate students have put up with my slipping in these personal stories in the midst of exploring the more official history of the discipline. My old friend Mary Ellen Brown talked me into writing an article on the subject, going well beyond her role as editor of JFR'm giving shape to the final product. My thanks to her and her editorial assistants for putting up with the endless revisions.

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