Bluegrass Messengers

Reds, Whites, and the Blues: Lawrence Gellert, "Negro Songs of Protest," and the Left-Wing Folk-Song Revival of the 1930s and 1940s
By Steven Garabedian
American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 179-206

Reds, Whites, and the Blues: Lawrence Gellert, "Negro Songs of Protest and the Left-Wing Folk-Song Revival of the 1930s and 1940s


In 1936, a slim songbook of African American vernacular music was published by the American Music League, a Popular Front-affiliate of the Communist Party U.S.A. Negro Songs of Protest, as the volume was titled, included just twenty- four song transcriptions and accompanying musical arrangements. Nevertheless, the modest publication featured lyrics of black discontent and rebellion rarely encountered by a white readership. There were, among the striking compositions, verses of caustic irony and warning:

You take mah labor
An' steal mah time
Give me oP dish pan
An' a lousy dime
'Cause I'm a nigger, dat's why

White man, white man
Sit in de shade
Heah in de hot sun
I sweat wid his spade
'Cause I'm a nigger, dat's why

I feel it comin', Cap'n
Goin' see you in Goddamn
Take mah pick an' shovel
Bury you in Debbil's Ian'
'Cause I'm a nigger dat's why
("Cause I'm a Nigger")

There were also expressions of black religious disillusionment and militant worldly defiance:

Sistren an' brethren
Stop foolin' wid pray (2x)
When black face is lifted
Lawd turnin' away
Yo' head tain' no apple
Fo' danglin' from a tree (2x)
Yo' body no carcass
For barbacuin' on a spree
Stand on yo' feet
Club gripped 'tween yo' hands (2x)
Spill dere blood too
Show 'em yo's is a man's
("Sistren an' Brethren")

Such lines were characteristic of the evocations of race, class, and protest collected within the songbook. Their release in print sounded a note of revolution in terms of both the culture and politics of the modern United States.[1]

The compiler behind the book was one Lawrence Gellert, an independent white music collector who had been documenting black protest traditions in the South for more than a decade. The younger brother of prominent radical artist Hugo Gellert, Lawrence was an active proponent of the Communist movement of the era. Since 1930, he had been contributing articles of song lyrics and commentary culled from his fieldwork to such left-wing periodicals as New Masses. With this first book publication - to be followed by a second, "Me and My Captain", in 1939 - Gellert received considerable acclaim. In a short profile in 1936, Time magazine applauded the "lean, scraggly-haired New Yorker" for his skill in "collecting Negro songs that few white men have ever heard."

His collection, determined the New York Times, unearthed a "new
genre" of black music dealing with "the realities of Negro life." The left-wing
press was even more enthusiastic. The Communist Party newspaper Daily
Worker called the release of Negro Songs of Protest a "landmark in American
culture." Composer Lan Adomian, in New Masses, wrote that the book featured
"some of the finest examples in Negro folk music" of the day. The material,
he concluded, represented an "indictment" against long-standing white
ignorance and denial, a stark rebuke to "the slander that a nation of thirteen
million people, reduced to peonage, is nothing more than a grand minstrel
show."2
Nearly seventy years later, Lawrence Gellert s name has fallen into obscurity.
More important, his impressive documentary archive of African AmeriReds,
Whites, and the Blues I 181
can musical protest rarely gains a hearing.3 Gellert researcher Bruce Conforth
has identified close to half of the work songs, chain gang songs, hollers, and
blues in the full collection as "overt songs of protest." This compares with "less
than 5 percent," he concludes, in the collections of recognized predecessors
and peers in the field of white research on black vernacular music. Along the
same line, blues scholars Guido van Rijn and Bruce Bastin have written on the
Gellert archive as a valuable "alternative source," as Bastin put it, to the canon
housed in the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress.4
Composed of more than two hundred aluminum and acetate sound recordings
encompassing more than five hundred song items as well as extensive
lyric transcriptions from the field, Lawrence Gellert's collection spanning the
1920s through the 1940s is a valuable store of information on black culture
and history in the United States. It deserves a place alongside that of the other
major collections in the nation's folk music repository.5
This article explores the life and work of Lawrence Gellert in his peak years
of public activity in the left-wing folk-song revival of the 1930s and 1940s. It
calls attention to a critical tradition of protest within African American music
history, and the cultural politics of white collecting and scholarship on this
tradition of black expressive critique. As I will make clear, Gellert s place in the
emergent field of black folk-song scholarship in these years affords revealing
perspectives on core issues of the historical period, from the relative radicalism,
reformism, or, indeed, conservatism of the so-called red era of the American
past to the viability of oppressed "cultures of opposition" from the racial
and economic margins. Moreover, Gellert's story complicates generalized readings
of the time as a singular isolable moment of finite origins and meaning. If
the Depression signaled a turn to the left in terms of anticapitalist politics in
the United States, African American intellectuals, activists, and artists had
already been challenging the status quo with renewed fervor since the end of
World War I. Within the Communist movement as well, there were sharp
distinctions between the sectarian Third Period of the late 1920s and early
1930s and the more centrist Popular Front of the late 1930s and into the war
that are sometimes glossed over by American cultural historians.6

"The Greatest Authority on Black Folk-Song in the World":
Lawrence Gellert in His Time and Place
Lawrence Gellert was not the first white collector to venture into the vernacular
music of the African American South, nor was Negro Songs of Protest the
first such sonebook in the field. In his efforts in black folk-song research,
182 I American Quarterly
Gellert was part of a longstanding tradition of white inquiry that dated back
at least as far as the mid-nineteenth century.7 Still, there was a difference.
By the time he published Negro Songs of Protest, Lawrence Gellert was a
committed activist in the cause of black social and economic justice. "Look
for the complete liberation of all the Negro masses only under a Soviet America,"
he declared in New Masses in 1934.8 Throughout the decade, Gellert was an
active participant in that struggle through Communist movement efforts in
the South. In reminiscences from later in life, he recalled working with district
head Nat Ross in the party's Birmingham office as well as crossing paths with
field organizer Boris Israel amid the violent Share Croppers Union wars of
Tallapoosa County, Alabama.9 All the while, Gellert was documenting the
African American songs of protest that he heard around him. Such material
was never intended for the world of academic folklore. "I'm not a folklorist,"
he asserted. "I hate folklorists!" As the independent researcher expressed it, he
was "much more interested in the plight of the Negroes" than "in folklore, per
se," in his years of fieldwork in the South. "I wanted it for propaganda," he
said plainly. "I wasn't interested in just music" for its own sake, but rather
music "as a weapon" in the service of black freedom.10
In this fusion of cultural work and political radicalism, Gellert was unique
among his white peers in the field of American folk-song collecting. Even
Alan Lomax - a fellow traveler in the left-wing folk-song revival of the 1930s
and 1 940s, and the single most recognized exponent of progressive "people's
songs" in the United States today - did not share such an apparently singular
emphasis on "protest" in his decades of folk-song collecting and promotion.
Ultimately, such a distinction would mire Gellert's archive in controversy. In
the postwar period, his collection was defamed as a fabrication, an example of
white left-wing propaganda rather than black vernacular creativity. In its moment
in the early and middle 1930s, however, the work was applauded by
many. Literary historian Lorenzo Thomas writes, for instance, that Sterling
Brown was an enthusiastic supporter. From the 1930s on, Brown cited Gellert's
work in "almost every article on the blues he subsequently published," he
reports.11 For another of the New Negro young guard, the collector's contribution
was also held in high regard. In his own recollections, Hugo Gellert
remembered that Langston Hughes thought his younger brother Lawrence
was "theg reatesta uthority on black folk song in the world."12I n 1932, Hughes
wrote:
These songs collectedb y LawrenceG ellertf rom plantations,c hain gangs,l umberc amps,
andj ailsa reo f inestimablev alue,i f theyd o nothingm oret hans how thatn ot all Negroesa re
Reds, Whites, and the Blues I 183
shoutings pirituals,c heeringe ndowed football teams, dancing to the blues, or mouthing
inter-raciaol ratory.S ome of them are tired of being poor, and picturesque,a nd hungry.
Terriblya nd bitterlyt ired.13
The statement was part of a four-page preface intended for Gellert s first
songbook, but that was ultimately not included. In an accompanying letter,
Hughes worried that the piece was "not too late, and that you will like it." He
commented, "I think the songs are great, and am honored to be chosen to do
the foreword." The following year, while he was touring in the Soviet Union,
Hughes went about preparations for a Russian translation of Negro Songs of
Protest. After a lengthy delay, the Soviet publication was finally released in
1938.14
Born on September 14, 1898, Lawrence Gellert was the fifth of six children
in a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant family.15 In the early 1920s, he relocated
from New York to remote Tryon, North Carolina, in search not of rural traditional
music, but simply sunshine and relaxation. An iconoclast with a romantic
spirit, Gellert, by his own telling, had succumbed to a "nervous breakdown"
in his young adulthood. The tiny town of Tryon, situated in the
temperate foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was known in these years
for its recuperative powers, and was in fact a popular winter colony for wealthy
habitues from the North and abroad. Though he recalled later that he merely
happened upon on it on his train ride south, Gellert would remain in Tryon
"on and off," as he said, for the next twenty-five years.16
With a regular community of artists, intellectuals, and socialites from outside
the area, Tryon was, in Gellert s estimation, a relative oasis of liberal sentiment
in the South. Shortly after resettling, the newcomer had his first significant
encounter with African American musical culture. In or about 1924,
as Gellert remembered, a resident of the black community came to seek his
aid in staging a "sing fest for the white folks." The local country church was in
disrepair, he was told, and members thought Gellert could help in organizing
a fund-raiser. When Gellert asked, "Why me? I'm a stranger here." The man
responded, "We heard you were doing good things for our people." Gellert
did help produce what was ultimately a sell-out performance, and this first
experience proved fortuitous. "That was the beginning of my interest," the
collector explained. "I had never heard anything like it." Though he "knew
nothing" about music - black or white - in these early years, he did follow
up. "I was very curious, and I got acquainted with some of the boys, and we
had a couple evenings together. And, then I heard something which had nothing
to do with church." It was, he stated, "terrific protest."17
184 I American Quarterly
Gellert, it seems, had been given a rare hearing into a provocative current
of African American lyricism. Such expression, as Sterling Brown characterized
it, was a "verboten"t radition with respect to the dominant culture.18N ever
meant directly for white listeners, it represented an alternate stream of black
musical practice - parallel and sometimes overlapping - that had with due
cause gone largely without recognition across the color line. For Gellert, this
was a revelation. The music reflected a level of intellectual and social consciousness,
he believed, that exposed the fundamental conceit of white racism,
and he began to investigate its workings in everyday black life and labor. To
this end, another early experience was formative. Gellert was sunning himself
on a porch one day when along came a "Negro chain gang . . . widening the
road," he explained. "I hear a guy there singing. . . . this guy was singing a
protest song. I mean just like that." As the collector recounted, however, "As
soon as I came on the scene, the same music, but some words about 'a cat and
a basket,' you know. Just nothing." Curious, Gellert again "removed" himself
out of range, and then "crept back behind a bush." As he discovered, the man
was "back again" with the previous lyrics. "Fucking white man," the singer
intoned, "me working in the sun, and he's sitting in the shade . . . laziest man
God ever made."19
The story is revealing, and not without precedent. At work in the field
since the early 1 900s, eminent white collector Howard Odum had his own
telling encounter. As Lawrence Levine reports, upon "hearing the singing of a
Negro road gang working in front of his Georgia home," Odum "promptly sat
on a rock wall nearby in an effort to record the lyrics of their songs." The men
sane:
White man settin' on wall, (2x)
White man settin' on wall all day long,
Wastin' his time, wastin' his time.20
Odum was amused. But, in Gellert's instance the impression proved more
indelible. Rather than being merely another case of the curious, the quaint, or
the outright nonsensical, the incident, for Gellert, was a striking glimpse into
the reality of African American "infrapolitics."21F rom the beginning, he had
been told that black southerners were "a happy and contented lot." The "official
dictum of the South," he quickly discerned, precluded otherwise. "Find
me one that ain't," a white host had once told him, "and I'll give you a tendollar
bill, suh. Worth it to string up the biggity black so and so." In Gellert's
understanding, such an oppressive racial order had deep implications. "Hence
Reds, Whites, and the Blues I 185
the mask of the docile, amicable, treadmilling clown, the Negro must appear
in if he is to survive," he concluded. The job of the credible fieldworker, he
came to believe, was to endeavor beyond such racial minstrelsy. "Long and
painstakingly I cultivated and cemented confidences with individual Negroes,"
he explained in his preface to Negro Songs of Protest. Without similar efforts,
he asserted, "any attempt to get to the core of the living folk lore is foredoomed
to failure."22
At some point in the early 1920s, Lawrence Gellert started recording the
songs of local African American community members.23 After word spread
about the church fund-raiser, "Negroes used to come up for this and that from
me," he recounted. "They wanted a pair of shoes. They wanted a hat. They
wanted a nickel or a dime." In exchange, Gellert began to entertain his developing
interest in black musical tradition. At first, he relied on his skills in
shorthand - he had received training in court stenography while still living in
New York - in taking down simple written transcriptions of song lyrics. Quickly
though, he began to employ methods for producing aural recordings. Taking
a manual table phonograph, he experimented with rigging the machine with a
reversed megaphone. When black residents came to see him for favors, the
budding collector would bring out his recording equipment and aluminum
blanks. In return for his efforts, he explained, singers would "blow into" the
megaphone "until they got white in the face." The stylus would cut a fragile
groove into the recording discs. As word got out about the operation, Gellert
recalled, these locals "brought other people" around for a visit. These newer
contacts, in turn, would recommend additional family and friends.24
In a matter of time, Lawrence Gellert was afforded the trust of an extensive
network of folk "informants" from throughout theTryon area and surrounding
regions. Over the next years, his interest intensified, and he went about
upgrading his recording setup. In the early 1930s, Gellert was able to acquire
an electrified portable disc cutter from the Presto Recording Corporation.25
Such sound recording technology had only just become available, and he was
eager to employ it in his expanding fieldwork. Additionally, at some point in
the 1920s, he had arranged for a makeshift mobile facility to be built onto the
frame of a Velie brand automobile. With these advanced means, his projects
in field recording were expanded both in terms of mobility and sophistication.
He collected throughout various regions of the Southeast - in the western
Carolinas and in Georgia primarily - but ventured even farther south on
occasion. By the time he published Negro Songs of Protest in 1936, Gellert
wrote that he had "lived alternately in Tryon, N.C., and Greenville, S.C.," for
"more than a dozen years." Through "Georgia, the Carolinas, way over in
186 I American Quarterly
Mississippi and Louisiana even," he related, "in city slums, on isolated farms
out in the sticks, on chain gangs, lumber and turpentine work camps," he had
"gathered more than 300 songs of the black folk."26
Lawrence Gellert always stressed that he had a strict and abiding interest in
only the verboten dimensions of black musical protest, rather than in the
whole of African American musical tradition and, especially, American folk
song generally. He searched out items that featured clear and direct expressions
of social protest, and in the end he did, it appears, obtain a higher yield
of such material than any similar collector. His songbooks and his early articles
from the 1930s covered a provocative range of topics with respect to
black life in the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow United States. Among his
published examples of "Negro songs of protest," there are lyrics about black
poverty and exploitation in the South ("I Went to Atlanta," "Pickin' Off De
Cotton," "Ah's De Man," and "Told My Captain"); lyrics decrying lynching
and the false promise of black Christian deliverance ("Sistren and Brethren"
and "How Long Brethren?"); lyrics chronicling white racism and oppression
("Ain't It Hard - To Be a Nigger" and "Cause I'm a Nigger"); and even open
invocations to black rebellion ("Stan' Boys Stand," "Work Ox," and "Work
All de Summer").
Reflecting back, Gellert asserted that he "had more contacts than any folksong
collector ever had down there." His singer-informants, he elaborated,
believed that "they were going to do themselves and their own people some
good" in recording songs for the collector. They would stress, "You got to
promise . . . that you're going to show it to people that are influential." In
Gellert's own appraisal, it was his sympathetic local reputation combined with
the initial random luck of his "stumble" intoTryon, North Carolina - a "northern
island in a southern ocean" - that accounted for the striking dissimilarity
of his archive as compared with the other major collections of black folk song
from the period.27
In the late 1920s, Lawrence Gellert began sending his song transcriptions
and accompanying reflections to older brother Hugo, then among the contributing
editors at New Masses. Hugo encouraged Lawrence in his work and
passed the material on to the journal's legendary managing editor, Mike Gold.
The leading proponent of "proletarian literature" in the American Communist
movement, Gold was quite taken with these examples of indigenous expression
of, by, and for the nation's working people. It was Gold, in fact, who
named the body of music "Negro songs of protest" upon its first appearance
in the journal in 1930.28 From this initial publication, interest spread within
the intellectual and artistic communities of the Left, and the collector inReds,
Whites, and the Blues I 187
creased the scope and intensity of his efforts. For the next ten years and into
the 1940s, Gellert's name and song material were a frequent presence in the
arts, culture, and politics of the urban folk-song revival.
The Communist Left and the American Folk-Song Revival
In its moment, Gellert's work resonated with the vital movement for black
self-determination that was emergent in the United States after World War I.
In the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance brought African American arts to the
attention of white America. Issues of black representation came to the fore in
this period of race consciousness and cross-cultural contact. The Great Depression
may have deflated some of the earnest dreams of black artists and
intellectuals in the era of the "New Negro," but it did not - quite the contrary-
put an end to foment and change from the margins of American society.
In recent years, scholars have traced how some of the emergent energies
that were released across lines of race and class in the 1920s continued to
crescendo into the 1930s, albeit with altered pitch and tenor. From varying
perspectives, literary historians have challenged the older critical consensus on
the renaissance as a failure, an ultimately hollow marriage of black delusion
and white primitivist patronage. They emphasize continuities where predecessors
saw division, drawing out the material and symbolic affinities between
black and white, the black arts and twentieth-century modernism, and the
"New Negro" and the "Old Left" of the 1920s and 1930s.29
The arrival of Lawrence Gellert, therefore, was certainly no aberration of
history. On the heels of the New Negro Renaissance, the white political Left
discovered black music as part of its own ascendance in the United States from
the revolutionary Third Period of the Communist movement, announced in
1928, through the more broad-based era of the Popular Front, commenced
officially in 1935. In the broad sense, this was a product of the profound shift
in the nations culture and politics precipitated by the Great Depression. In
more precise terms, however, the intersection can be understood as a part of
the genesis whereby New Deal cultural nationalism and the Popular Front
policy shift of the CPUSA coalesced in the "folk-song revival" of the 1930s
and 1940s.
My research is inspired in this regard by the pioneering scholarship of Richard
A. Reuss. In his influential doctoral dissertation from 1971, Reuss examined
the growth and development of radical attention to rural American
traditional music throughout the rise and fall of the Old Left in the first half
of the twentieth century. "In the United States," as he put it in an oft-quoted
188 I American Quarterly
summation, "no a priori stress was put on folklore materials by any political
group or protest movement until the 1930s, when the left wing, spearheaded
by the Communist Party, discovered intrinsic working-class values in folksongs
and other folklore genres."30T he mid-1950s and early 1940s, in particular,
were the key years in this modern folk-song revival. For the first time, white
northern urbanites turned critical attention (as distinct from the strictly commercial
investment of white record producers beforehand) to the vernacular
music of white and black rural communities in the South. As regards left-wing
politics, such a turn was "predicated on the discovery that in certain regions
the folksong idiom was a convenient musical avenue of transmitting revolutionary
propaganda," Reuss concluded. "Once this was recognized, the way
was paved for the extension of the Left's limited agit-prop concern into outright
aesthetic appreciation of traditional music and the further idealization of
other aspects of folk culture (tales, games, dances, arts and crafts, etc.)."31
Though it may appear a natural association to many observers today, the
original union of the American Left and American folk music was not immediate.
Well into the 1930s, the critical establishment of the Communist vanguard
in the United States in fact held a dim view of American vernacular
music. Party ideologues had, since the insurgent Third Period especially, been
in search of thoroughly "revolutionary" artistic mediums by which to raise a
thoroughly "revolutionary"p roletariat.I n 1928, Nicolai Bukharin announced
this new phase of Communist history at the Sixth World Congress of the
Communist International in Moscow. Certain of the imminent collapse of
global capitalism, party members in the Third Period were to abandon gradualist
movement tactics for a new push of sectarian intensity in the cause of
worldwide proletarian revolt. Accordingly, many composers, musicians, and
critics on the left in the United States in the late 1920s and early 1930s made
a determined turn toward the doctrinaire. With sponsorship from the Communist
Party, the Workers Music League was established in 1 93 1 to organize
the multiple workers' choruses still dominating left-wing musical activity in
northern cities. The following year, the Composers Collective was formed
under a league affiliate, the Pierre Degeyter Club, in New York City. Members
of the collective were committed to composing original material for just the
kind of formalized group singing exemplified by the most accomplished of
the workers' choruses. Some of the most renowned figures in American art
music were involved, including Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, Elie Siegmeister,
and Aaron Copland. Turning their classical training to alternative ends, such
artists sought to challenge expectations in a direct assault against the conventions
of "bourgeois" musical tradition. "Music is propaganda - always propaReds,
Whites, and the Blues I 189
ganda - and of the most powerful sort," declared leading emissary Charles
Seeger. The "special task" of the Workers Music League, he explained, was to
promote "the development of music as a weapon in the class struggle."32T o
that end, members of the Composers Collective produced difficult, technically
advanced works of jarring harmonic dissonance and acute rhythmic complexity.
As they found, such efforts were almost entirely unsuccessful for the
purposes of mass political organizing. At an event in 1934, one disapproving
listener captured the disjuncture between theory and practice in evocative language.
Such pedantic revolutionary music, he complained, was "full of geometric
bitterness," as if it had been "written for an assortment of mechanical
canaries" rather than any kind of human audience.33
The shift to the Popular Front signaled a major reversal in attitudes. In
1935, the Communist Party softened its hard line considerably when it announced
a new program of left-liberal unity in the international fight against
European fascism. In the United States, this action enabled a partnership between
American Communism and New Deal cultural nationalism. Within
the Communist movement, the search for an appropriate "peoples music"
shifted from the vanguard to the vernacular. If in the early 1930s, for instance,
Charles Seeger expressed the prevailing radical dismissal of traditional music,
he was by the latter half of the decade singing its praises. From 1935 through
the 1940s, Seeger established a reputation as one of the most prominent of the
"New Deal folklorists" that historian Benjamin Filene identifies among the
emergent establishment in Washington, D.C.34 In his roles with the Resettlement
Administration and the Federal Music Project, Seeger sought to promote
the simple democratic virtues of "people s music" as it currently sounded
in the vernacular cultures of the United States, rather than as theorists might
have thought it should sound. Like the broader Communist movement in the
later part of the decade, he became less concerned with propagating doctrinaire
ideology in the face of capitalist oppression than with building mass
unity in the face of growing international fascism.
Black Music in the Folk-Song Revival:
From the Third Period to the Popular Front
Following in the path of Richard Reuss, historian Robbie Lieberman confirms
that folk music started to receive widespread attention as progressive people s
music only in the late 1930s. This recognition, she shows moreover, moved
apace with the radical political discovery of African American expressive culture.
35
190 I American Quarterly
Like most commentators, Lieberman places Alan Lomax at the center of
the left-wing folk-song revival and, more specifically, the movement's increasing
attention to African American vernacular song. In 1933, the seventeenyear-
old Harvard undergraduate accompanied his father, John A. Lomax, on a
car tour in the first of what were to become a series of landmark field trips.
Under the auspices of the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk-
Song, the pair visited sharecroppers' shacks, prison farms, work camps, and
juke joints in the black South equipped with the latest in portable recording
technology. The success of the expedition would lead to similar trips throughout
the 1 930s and 1 940s and the publication of a number of popular songbooks,
including American Ballads and Folksongs (1934), Negro Folk Songs as Sung by
Lead Belly (1936), Our Singing Country (1941), and Folk Song: USA (1946).
Ultimately, this literature would come to define a canon of North American
folk song that delimited a privileged place for both the Lomaxes and what
Alan came to call the "river of black African tradition flowing through Delta
life" and into the nation's cultural bedrock.36
Alan Lomax's politics were far to the left of his conservative father. Nevertheless,
as author Ronald Cohen puts it, the two found a common faith in
"the uniting and rejuvenating powers of folk music."37 In their formative partnership
in the 1930s, the Lomaxes emphasized this redemptive mission in
black folk-song collecting and American folk revivalism. Despite a superlative
contribution, however, they were not alone. Lawrence Gellert, as well, had a
crucial role - one that, for a time early on, may even have eclipsed that of the
legendary Lomaxes. This is where the scant attention paid to Gellert by scholars
has proven costly. To be sure, the folk-song revival did accelerate with the
advent of the Popular Front in 1935. Still, there are important ways in which
we might revise this periodization to account for Lawrence Gellert's role earlier
in the decade. In this sense, Gellert was a kind of Third Period exponent of
the revival with respect to Communist movement culture. For a period of
years starting in 1930, his work was taken as a definitive source within the
Left on black folk song and rural African American expressive protest. This
early attention had significant impact on the folk-song revival as it is conventionally
recognized, even if Gellert's role is widely unacknowledged. By the
same token, the Lomaxes were more clearly a product of the far less strident
culture and politics of the Popular Front of the late 1930s and 1940s. While it
is true that Gellert's greatest public recognition came in the years surrounding
1936, it is important to understand that this represented the apex of his prominence.
In the latter part of the decade, his star would wane while the Lomaxes'
was on the rise. In the shift from the Third Period to the Popular Front, the
Reds, Whites, and the Blues I 191
left-wing folk-song revival that Gellert helped influence would, in fact, come
to leave his kind behind as the emphasis shifted from overt revolution to a
more centrist populist nationalism.
These claims require a closer look. To begin with, we might note that
Lawrence Gellert s first songbook was far better received in the left-wing press
than was the Lomaxes' initial effort. In contrast to the favorable reviews that
greeted Gellert's Negro Songs of Protest, a New Masses review from 1934 of the
Lomaxes' first joint publication, American Ballads and Folk Songs, is unreserved
in its charge that "class-visioned Messrs. Lomax have become organically
incapable of 'seeing'" the expressive protest of the oppressed toward their
oppressors. "Just as tne real struggles of the American workers and farmers
have never been uncovered by orthodox American historians," the piece concludes,
"so the task of digging up our revolutionary folk-ballads remains a job
that has scarcelyb een started."38A dditionally, subsequent press comment contrasted
the success of Gellert's fieldwork with the relative failure of that of the
Lomaxes. In 1936, a Communist Party musical organ, Unison, reported that
"the recent publication of some of Lawrence Gellert's Negro Songs ofProtesthzs
introduced at this late date an entirely new field of folk music." Whereas the
Lomaxes had, in recent years, "toured the South, and gathered what they
thought to be 'representative' Negro folksongs," the piece explained, Gellert's
work "has convinced" them "that the songs they collected are 'white man's
songs,' sung under the surveillance of guards, foremen, and the 'bossman.'
The Lomaxes have been quick to benefit from Gellert's collection," it asserted
in the end, "and today they 'plant' Negroes in jails and on chain gangs to take
down the songs sung in the absence of the guards."39
In these early years, black vernacular song tradition had already gained a
privileged place in the Left's nascent discovery of American folk music. Ironically,
this was the case even despite the more direct encounter with white folk
aesthetics brought on by Communist organizing drives in the South at the
turn of the decade. In 1932, the Workers Music League published the Red
Song Book as part of its efforts in radical movement culture. The volume included
Aunt Molly Jackson's "Miners' Song," "On the Picket Line," and "Poor
Miner's Farewell" from out of the bloody National Miners Union campaign
in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1931, as well as Ella May Wiggins' "I.L.D.
Song" from out of the National Textile Workers Union strike in Gastonia,
North Carolina, in 1929. This material from local activist-singers merged
militant lyrics of radical unionism with southern white musical tradition, and
yet it did not seem to fire the imagination of the political Left in a way that
African American work songs and chain gang songs (rarely overt in their lyri192
I American Quarterly
cism) had almost immediately. The Red Song Book was panned in the Communist
press. In the midst of the Third Period, such music was dismissed by
the party'sa estheticv anguardf or its "immaturity"a nd "arrestedd evelopment."40
If these views on white folk music changed in the latter part of the 1930s
with the arrival of the Popular Front, they were clearly in motion in the early
part of the decade when it came to black vernacular music. Communist critics
had already begun to hear rural African American genres as "revolutionary."
In 1930, just a few months before publishing Lawrence Gellert for the first
time, the New Masses ran an article titled "Songs of the Negro Worker" by
Philip Schatz. In the piece, the writer alerted readers to the fact that "Negro
culture"- black southern "workadays ongs" in particular- represented "perhaps
the most genuine workers' culture in America."41S imilarly, in 1934, Richard
Frank contended in "Negro Revolutionary Music," that "one of the
greatest forward strides in the development of the American revolutionary
movement has been the policy of the Communist Party upon the Negro question.
... In the South," he continued, "the ideology of the international working-
class movement is beginning to be expressed in the native Negro music."42
Franks mention of the "Negro Question" and the party's landmark "Black
Belt Thesis" is crucial. In 1928 - concurrent, that is, with the announcement
of the Third Period - the Communist International had begun an abrupt
change of policy in Moscow with official resolutions endorsing African American
self-determination in the so-called Black Belt of the U.S. South. For the
first time, black workers in the appointed region were officially sanctioned in
their fight for racial justice as a cause, in and of itself, important to workingclass
liberation.
Richard Franks reference, therefore, points to the ironic turn whereby the
stringent racial politics of the insurgent Third Period might have been a factor
in the emergence of Popular Front folk revivalism. In other words, as the black
rural and industrial laborers of the South were, in effect, discovered for the
first time in Marxist- Leninist interpretation as among the most oppressed and
exploited of the nation's "native toiling masses," as Frank articulated it, their
music came to be accorded a privileged status among the vanguard of the
native revolutionary arts. After years of conflict and ambiguity with respect to
black nationalism and its perceived threat to universal working-class solidarity,
black culture was redefined as revolutionary culture - and perhaps of the
most accomplished sort at that.43
Before the white Left embraced white vernacular music in the folk-song
revival, therefore, we can trace a decisive early preference for black vernacular
song tradition at the movement's epicenter in the North. Lawrence Gellert
Reds, Whites, and the Blues I 193
played an important role. In 1936, the Communist-sponsored Workers Music
League was dissolved in favor of a reconstituted organization of less overtly
partisan emphasis. The American Music League, as the new association became
known, was established soon afterward with an explicit mission to "collect,
study, and popularize American folk music and its traditions."44A n early
example of this new orientation was the publication of Gellert's Negro Songs of
Protest. Two years before, even, Charles Seeger had been in correspondence
with the collector about "publishing your series of researches into the negro
revolutionary song in the first number of the Music Vanguard'
'45 In that same
year, composer Lan Adomian made favorable reference to "Negro songs of
protest," along with "work songs, railroad songs, cowboy and hill songs," in a
column asking "What Songs Should Workers' Choruses Sing?" in Daily
Worker}*I*n deed, as Richard Reuss concluded in his groundbreaking research,
Gellert s influence in the changing attitude toward American folk music was
considerable. In the early 1930s, Reuss wrote, "relatively few urban radicals
were exposed directly to black folk music. Mention of its 'new' revolutionary
qualities," therefore, "was confined principally to the discussion surrounding
Lawrence Gellert s 'Negro Songs of Protest.'"47
Lawrence Gellert and African American Blues Protest
Within the Gellert collection, there is a sizable body of music identifiable as
blues. In terms of musical structure, these items sometimes feature the standard
twelve-bar, three-line AAB pattern of harmony and verse, and even - in
a few cases - guitar or piano accompaniment in characteristic styles. In other
instances, they point to the blues not so much in their style of performance,
but rather in their lyrical familiarity. Whether the lines are sung in the manner
of an unaccompanied holler or a group work song, in other words, they have
clear parallels with lyrics represented in the long history of commercial blues
recording.48S uch evidence is striking. As Gellert was among the first to collect
and write in the field of black folk song, his blues documentation represents
some of the earliest available material on the vernacular traditions of the genre.
More important, it attests to a critical overlap between African American blues
music and the verboten tradition of "Negro songs of protest." If Lawrence
Gellert privileged politics in his documentary fieldwork, it seems he found it
not only in the work songs, chain gang songs, and hollers of postbellum black
tradition, but also in the blues of more modern, twentieth-century genesis.
Included within his collection of blues, then, are lyrics of explicit black disaffection,
rage, and rebellion with regard to white racial oppression and capital194
I American Quarterly
ist exploitation. These primary examples of what Michael Denning has usefully
called a "political vernacular" of African American blues music pose a
direct challenge to conventional notions that posit the genre as apolitical by
origin and nature.49
Two examples from the Gellert archive are representative. In 1936, the
collector published a selection called "How Long, Brethren?" in his first
songbook. The tune is included among his documentary sound recordings as
well in a vocal style characteristic of blues performance. To that point, it may
appear quite startling to popular blues audiences familiar with the commercial
standard "How Long, How Long Blues," recorded by Leroy Carr and Scrapper
Blackwell in 1928. In the first case, we have the Gellert transcription:
How long, brethren,h ow long,
Must my people weep and mourn?
How lone, how lone, brethrenh, ow lone?
White folks ain't Jesus, he just a man,
Grabbinb' iscuito ut of poor nigger'sh and.
Too long, too long, brethren,t oo long.
Nigger he just patch black dirt,
The raisin'p arto f the white man'se arth,
So long, so long, brethrens, o long.
("How Long, Brethren?")50
Compared against the Carr and Blackwell recording, the lyrical contrast is
suggestive :
How long, babe, how long
Has that evenin' train been gone?
How lone, how lone, yes baby, how lone?
I stood at the station, watched my baby leaving town
Feeling disgusting, nowhere could peace be found
Well, how long, how long, baby, how long?
And, it's someday you're gonna be sorry, that you done me wrong
But, it will be too late, baby, I will be gone
So long, so long, baby, so long.
("How Long, How Long Blues")51
Reds, Whites, and the Blues I 195
The verses documented in the Gellert title speak plainly to the tradition of
African American blues protest. There is sarcasm, social critique, and an implied
call to action in the singer's language. Moreover, it is important to note
that the song already had a long and revealing history before Gellert came
upon it. A version was recorded in the field as far back as the Civil War. In
1867, authors Allen, Ware, and Garrison published "My Father, How Long?"
in Slave Songs of the United States. They included a revealing annotation that
the "negroes had been put in jail at Georgetown, S.C., at the outbreak of the
Rebellion" for singing it. Lines like "We'll soon be free" were "too dangerous
an assertion," and "De Lord will call us home" was "evidently thought to be a
symbolic verse" which alluded to the "Yankees."[52]

Similarly, when it comes to race, class, and protest, we can compare the
lyrics of another song in the Gellert archive to another commercial blues. In
Me and My Captain, his second and final book publication in 1939, the collector
included "Work Ox," a song with lyrics that parallel Texas Alexander s
"Work Ox Blues," produced in 1928. First, let us look at the Gellert version:
I ain't gonna be your old work ox no more, (3x)
I done my due, ain't gonna do no more.
Up early in the morning, way Tore break of day, (3x)
Can'tf ind no breakfastg, ot to hurryo n my way.
Good God almighty, got it tough and hard, (3x)
The Captain I has never satisfied.
Well, I tell you people, and I tell you true. (3x)
You can never tell what your old work ox gwine do.
("Work Ox")53
In comparison to Alexander's blues, the overlap and discontinuity are revealing:
Mama, I ain't gonna be your old work ox no more, (2x)
You done fooled around, woman, let your ox get cold.
She will get up early in the morning, just a while 'fore day, (2x)
Then cook your breakfastm, an, rushy ou away.
"Come in, daddy, know my ox is gone." (2x)
You can never tell when your ox is coming back home.
io6 I American Quartertv
You can never tell what these double-crossing women will do, (2x)
That they will have your buddy, then play sick on you.
("Work Ox Blues")54
Whereas the dramatic persona in Texas Alexander s performance threatens his
romantic partner with leaving or worse, the anonymous singer informant in
Gellert s recording threatens his white overseer with militant retaliation and
radical labor insurgency. As opposed to the more familiar blues classic, then,
the protagonist evoked in this performance stands up against white power and
capitalist exploitation rather than an individual romantic antagonist. In this
alternate store of blues lyricism, sexual travai-l the fabled blues metanarrative
covering the so-called battle of the sexes - is substituted for evocations of race
and class struggle. The dirty, mistreatin' lover is replaced with the white captain
or boss. And this grievous adversary, in a critical turn, is the party subject
to desertion or violent reprisal.55
Such a link between blues expression and radical politics might appear incongruous
to many contemporary blues experts and enthusiasts. To begin with,
black popular audiences left traditional blues styles behind long ago. In the
latter half of the twentieth century, listeners shifted their allegiances to rhythm
'n' blues, soul, funk, and, after that, rap and hip-hop, in part because they
heard everything but a politics of pride, self-determination, and resistance in
the putatively self-pitying, accommodationist music of their parents and grandparents.
As black audiences moved on, a new white audience moved in, embracing
the music for the first time as a popular phenomenon in what has
come to be called the "blues revival of the 1960s." In this formative decade of
specialized blues research and promotion, white music collectors and aficionados
set the terms of the field as it largely remains in the mainstream today.
Surprisingly, Lawrence Gellert and the tradition of African American blues
protest went largely without notice.
In 1963, founding blues historian Samuel Charters told readers that there
was "little social protest in the blues." There was "complaint," he qualified,
but "little open protest at the social conditions under which a Negro in the
United States is forced to live." From across the Atlantic, his English counterpart,
Paul Oliver, concurred. He attributed the limited number of protest
blues that had come to light in part to "black acceptance" of historic stereotypes
of racial inferiority. "As surely as southern Whites intended them to
'keep their place' the majority of Blacks were prepared to accept it," he wrote.
Such a mainstream consensus generally holds to this day following the advent
of a second, even more popular, contemporary blues revival for the compact
Reds, Whites, and the Blues I 197
disc generation. As specialist Pete Welding informs newcomers, "The blues is
a lyric song form that, as any student of the music knows well, primarily has
concerned itself with interpersonal relationships. Most blues have been in one
way or another love songs."56
The problem is not primarily that such generalizations are inaccurate in a
strict sense; many of the blues on record (commercial and noncommercial, in
written transcription and on aural sources) have been about love lost and romantic
travail. The problem, though, is that such broad denials of protest in
blues music can too often translate into stereotypical denials of African American
agency in U.S. history and politics. They, in effect, reinforce notions of
black victimization and passive accommodation under slavery and Jim Crow.
This was critic James Cone s conclusion nearly thirty years ago in The Spirituals
and the Blues. He wrote that his "difficulty with Charters' interpretation
and others like it is the implied and often stated conclusion that the absence of
open attack upon white society means that black people accepted their oppressed
condition." Even more to the point, Paul Garon, in the updated edition
of his classic Blues and the Poetic Spirit, writes that prior to "the blues
revival of the 1960s, it was taken for granted that blues contained an eloquent
protest." In that formative period, he argues however, "professional pessimists,
hailing themselves as realists, declared that such protest could not be detected
in blues lyrics." Through the years, Garon, Cone, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka,
Lawrence Levine, and, more recently, William Barlow, Jon Michael Spencer,
Angela Davis, and Adam Gussow have issued provocative challenges within
the scholarly discourse on blues music and meaning. Even so, few among
them have realized the full potential of Lawrence Gellert's Negro Songs of Protest?
7
Gellert's song material chronicles black working peoples' disaffection with
racial capitalism in the United States. Songs with such titles as "White Folks
Want Nigger Just for Work and Sweat," "I Ain't Nothin' But Wages Hand,"
and "White Folks Take Your Money" are common to the archive and leave
little to question on the matter of protest with their open expressions of irony,
bitterness, cynicism, and defiance. As I have tried to indicate, moreover, the
blues among the archive are not distinct, but rather entirely consistent with
the preponderance of such expressive protest. Furthermore, they resonate with
evidence outside of Gellert's controversial body of material.
In the same era of development and discovery in which Gellert was at his
peak, Alan Lomax - some seventeen years younger - was emerging out of the
shadow of his aging father in American folk song. After more than ten years in
the field, the young collector finally made his own breakthrough with regard
198 I American Quarterly
to African American blues protest. In 1946, blues singer and pianist Memphis
Slim confided in Lomax that "blues is kind of a revenge. You wanta say something,
you wanta, you know, signifyin' like. That s the blues . . . We fellas," he
elaborated, "we had a hard time in life and like that," and there were "things
we couldn't say or do. So, we sing it." Slim, along with fellow bluesmen Big
Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson, had been assembled by Lomax in
New York City for a documentary recording session on "what the blues are all
about," as the folklorist prompted. The dialogue that ensued over the next
two hours was unique in its candor. For Lomax, it was a major milestone in
what became a decades-long course of investigation. He reminisced near the
end of his life that "it was a source of deep satisfaction to me that at last I, a
white Southerner, could penetrate the Southern facade and learn something
about what life was like on the other side of the Jim Crow line."58
Slim, Broonzy, and Williamson devote much of their talk in the session to
the topics of race, labor, and southern brutality. The blues, they all agree, is
"something that's from the heart," an emotional response that expresses one's
"feeling about how he felt to the people," as Broonzy puts it. Still, the men are
unequivocal at every turn in relating this music of individual emotion back to
the social history of black working people in the racialized political economy
of the United States. Personal experiences with the oppression, exploitation,
and violence of the Jim Crow South weigh heavily in their shared recollections
of working and singing on the "levee camps, extra gangs, road camps, rock
camps, rock quarries" of their younger days. Blues music-making, they make
clear, is a vernacular art and practice enabling - indeed, ennobling - "guys
that wanted to cuss out the boss" and "was afraid to go up to his face and tell
him what he wanted to tell him," as Broonzy states, to "sing words, you know,
back to the boss." Similarly, Memphis Slim recalls, "Well, like a friend of
mine, that I know, down working on the railroad long years ago. . . . Well, he
couldn't speak up to the cap'n and the boss" directly. While the white overseer
"wasn't doing anything" except "laying out sleeping," he "still had to work."
This "gave him the blues," relates Slim, "and he couldn't speak his mind. So,
he made a song of it. He sang." In the act, Slim reiterates, he was "signifying
and getting . . . revenge through songs."59
Such commentary attests to the verboten tradition of blues protest that had
to that time received little documentation outside of the Gellert archive. Unfortunately,
it also proved too sensitive for a full disclosure. As Alan Lomax
reports in his 1993 memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began, Slim, Broonzy,
and Williamson reacted immediately "in a powerful rush of words" upon initial
playback of their collective interview that Sunday afternoon in the quiet
Reds, Whites, and the Blues I 199
Decca recording studios in 1946. They "listened with mounting apprehension,"
Lomax recounts, and "attacked me for making the records, demanded
that they be destroyed, then finally asked me to promise that I would never
reveal their identities." Southern racial terror, it seems, was far from a distant
memory to these three successful artists relocated to Chicago. "When those
Deep Delta peckerwoods heard the records," Lomax remembers Broonzy and
Slim telling him, "they'd come looking ... If they couldn't find them, they'd
go after their families" that still lived in the South and "burn down their houses,
maybe kill them all out."60
Conclusion
In the late 1940s and 1950s, political dissent was forced back to the margins
of U.S. culture. The Old Left of the folk-song revival saw its movement collapse
under the weight of external suppression as well as internal disillusionment.
Even Alan Lomax - despite all of his prominence, achievement, and
well-placed connections - was forced into a self-imposed exile in Europe in
the 1950s. If the disappointing showing of the progressive Henry Wallace
campaign for the presidency in 1948 was any indication, the foundation for a
left-wing singing movement in the United States was anything but assured.
Nevertheless, the legitimacy of American folk song, more generally, as a field
of research and scholarship had, to a relative degree, been secured.
In the Roosevelt years, folklore studies began to professionalize in the United
States in tandem with the currents of American cultural nationalism. The
field achieved a long-overdue legitimacy and was institutionalized as a federal
arts program and a subdiscipline in academia. New Deal progressives and leftwing
cultural workers labored inexhaustibly to move American folk song to
the center of American consciousness. In the war years, therefore, many found
themselves at an opportune juncture in the nation's cultural and political
mobilization against fascism. Alan Lomax, for instance, left the Archive of
American Folk-Song to assume a post at the Office of War Information (OWI)
in 1942. Gellert's contemporary in black folk-song research was without doubt
an outspoken and influential progressive, and the folk-song revival of the 1930s
and 1940s that he helped to steward was as well a left-wing movement. Nevertheless,
what the folk-song revival gained in legitimacy, it lost in political
stridency. There was a measured turn of emphasis from overt politics to a
muted progressive poetics in the war years and afterward.61
Lawrence Gellert, however, never relented in his own vociferous imperative
weighing politics over aesthetics in black music research. He was therefore
200 I American Quarterly
hardly safe in his standing as the climate for folk-song research shifted in the
1940s and 1950s. In the years of hot and cold war, Gellert saw a precipitous
decline in his professional fortunes. With no formal training or affiliations,
the collector had always been on the outside of institutional folklore. By his
own admission, Gellert was not "systematized" in his fieldwork. He recorded
no names - in order to protect the identities of his informants, he always said -
and little in the way of documentation aside from dates and places on the
sleeves of his aluminum discs. In a society stratified by dynamics of race, class,
and gender, the mediated transaction between ethnographer and informant is
inherently strained. From the first, the field of folk song was characterized by
varying degrees of authorial subjectivity.62L awrence Gellert was never alone,
therefore, in his less-than-scientific approach to folklore. In the midst of rising
anticommunism and conservatism, however, his strident political bias would
become an all too visible red herring for the charges of shoddy professionalism
and scholarly unreliability upon which his work was eventually dismissed.
In 1 937, Alan Lomax was appointed the first salaried director of the Archive
of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress. If he was just beginning
his ascendance at the institutional center of American folk song, Lawrence
Gellert had reached a pinnacle in his own career. In that same year, he both
won and promptly lost a prized grant for field research from the Rockefeller
Foundation. "Gellert is not interested in folksongs; he is interested in revolution,"
read the report revoking the award, as the collector still griped years
later.63W hile Popular Front folklorists moved to the center of American life,
Lawrence Gellert remained doggedly committed to the margins. In World
War II, as Lomax promoted folk culture and singing under the auspices of the
OWI, Gellert was collecting songs of disaffected black soldiers for a New Masses
article on "Jim Crow in Khaki." Following the war, he continued on the trail
of Jim Crow prejudice and discrimination, accompanying writer Earl Conrad
in an investigation of a quadruple lynching outside of Atlanta on behalf of the
Chicago Defender newspaper and the Communist-affiliated International Labor
Defense.64
In the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, Gellert continued to publish on
racism, civil rights, and black folklore in the left-wing press.65I n 1963, though,
he suffered censure by one among his own in the left-wing folk-song community.
Irwin Silber, editor of Sing Out! magazine66 and a one-time enthusiast of
Gellert s Negro Songs of Protest, declared his own profound change of opinion
with regard to the credibility and significance of the material. He wrote:
Reds, Whites, and the Blues I 201
Franklya, s a personf amiliarw ith folk musica nd folklorem aterialsf or considerableti me, I
find it veryd ifficultt o acceptt he materialp resentedb y Gellerta s folk songsw hich he really
collected.A sidef romt he facto f documentationw hich would let us knoww herea nd under
whatc ircumstancese,t c. the songsw erec ollected,t he factt hatn o one else hase verb eena ble
to collect similar songs or the same song in a different version, would tend to indicate that
this materiasl houldb e approachedw ith a greatd ealo f care
 I am stronglyo f the opinion
that these songs of LawrenceG ellerta rem ore likelyh is or someone else'so riginalc reation
rathert han materialw, hich by any stretcho f the imaginationc, ould fall into the domaino f
folk songs.67
Since at least the time of the slave narratives, questions of authenticity and
authorship have long shadowed the expressive output of African Americans.
In Silber's case, however, the charge of fabrication seems to have derived from
a suspicion from the inside, so to speak, of Communist Party propaganda. For
much of the 1940s and 1950s, he was, like Gellert, active within the CPUSA.
Thus, he was no stranger to the internal workings of the party or its devices
for propagandizing among organizers and the general public. In 1958, Silber
ceased his membership, although he retained his own independent radical
viewpoints. His eventual skepticism regarding Gellert's work involved what,
he says today, was the party's tendency to create "illusions" that Communist
influence was "greater than it really was." In that sense, the party was "painting
a picture that doesn't stand up ... The black masses weren't ready for
revolution, no matter how much I and others wanted to believe it."68
Gellert's material represented perhaps just another instance in a series of
false positives with which Silber became disillusioned in the Communist
struggle for hearts and minds. Through the years, the Gellert archive of songs
has been accepted as credible by many other respected authorities.69 In its
time, though, Silber's statement signaled a symbolic end to the collector's favorable
standing within the ranks of the folk-song revival community. For
Lawrence Gellert and, more importantly, the critical tradition of African
American blues protest, the profound shirts in U.S. culture and politics before
and after World War II were significant. Since the 1960s, blues and black folk
song, more generally, have gained in appreciation throughout the nation's
dominant culture. The Lomaxes' work, in particular, has been lauded as a
primary wellspring of this twentieth-century cross-cultural phenomenon. But
what of their one-time contemporary in the field? Certainly, the Lomax contribution
is unmatched in the annals of American folk music. Beyond the
impact of his pioneering father even, Alan Lomax's tireless efforts in cultural
progressivism and democratic musical outreach make him an outstanding
personage in this history. Even so, Lawrence Gellert - without formal educa202
I American Quarterly
tion, training, or institutional support - managed to compile an impressive
archive as well. His rise to prominence in the left-wing folk-song revival represented
a radical departure in the scholarly consensus on African American folk
song, a departure that has since gone for the most part unheeded.

Lawrence Gellert espoused the politics of the Communist movement in
the so-called red era of American history, and his archive of black vernacular
song featured lyrics of explicit race and class protest. Contemporary readers
might ask what it means, then, that the verboten tradition of blues protest
that he documented had a moment of recognition in the 1930s and 1940s,
but has since gone largely "off the record" in the dominant culture. The acceptance
and brief popular vogue of "Negro songs of protest" reflected both the
possibilities and foreclosures of a radical movement for social and economic
justice in the United States in the critical decades surrounding World War II.
Just as the channels for a trenchant critique of capitalist political democracy
were circumscribed in the nations culture and consciousness in the hot and
cold war years of the 1940s and 1950s, so went the grounds of acceptance for
an alternative stream of blues music and scholarship testifying to American
racial oppression and class exploitation. The Black Freedom Struggle did not
begin or end with Lawrence Gellert or the white Communist Left of his era.
Whether as blues, jazz, R&B, gospel, or soul, black songs of protest continued
to grow from the seeds of oppression in the postwar era just as people of color
continued to fight and organize. But, the rise and fall of a competitive discourse
on African American blues protest before and after World War II did
register a qualitative shift with respect to the dominant culture in the United
States. By the time of the popular blues revival of the 1960s, the fact of blues
protest, I suggest, was fated to fall on deaf ears as a result of more than ten
years of anticommunist repression, cold war cultural backlash, and rising
American conservatism. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the state sought to
decouple and domesticate questions of race and racism from broader critical
analyses of U.S. colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism.70 Following in this
wake, the emergent blues consensus of the white revival embraced the music
of the margins with an ear toward liberal pluralism and countercultural disaffection,
but not radical politics. In this respect, the denial of expressive protest
in African American blues tradition speaks to much more than simply a lapse
in a subfield of music criticism. Rather, it is symbolic of a larger denial of
social class and institutionalized racism that rose to orthodoxy in dominant
American culture in the postwar period.
Reds, Whites, and the Blues I 203
Notes
I would like to thank the followingi ndividualsa nd institutionsf or their assistance:L aryM ay, Dave
Roedigera, nd DavidW . Noble; LucyM addox,M aritaS turken,H illaryJ enks,a nd the editorials taffa t
AmericanQ uarterlyt,h e Archiveso f TraditionaMl usica nd LillyL ibrarya t IndianaU niversitya; nd the
BancroftL ibrarya t UC BerkeleyA. dditionalt hanksa reo wed PeteD aniel, CharlieM cGovern,A rchie
Green,I rwinS ilber,R onaldC ohen, IzzyY oung,P aulG aron,D eirdreM urphyJ, acquelineE llis,J ames
WechslerJ, amesG ellert,D onaldG ellert,D avidM argolis,B ob Neidich, MichaelT aft,M arkP umphrey,
Bill Nowlin, and Marian Leighton-Levy.
1. LawrenceG ellert,N egroS ongso f Protes(tN ew York:A mericanM usic League,1 936), 42-44, 10-11.
2. "Songso f Protest,"T ime,J une 15, 1936, 51; H. HowardT aubman," NegroF olksongs:N ew Genre
Dealingw ith EverydayL ife Produced,P articularliyn South,"N ew YorkT imesJ, uly 5, 1936, X5; Max
MarguliesD, aily WorkeJru, ne 17, 1936, 7; and LanA domian," BlackS kinC overin'P o'W orkin'M an,"
New MassesJ, une 23, 1936, 27.
3. To date, thereh ave been only threea lbumsc ompiledf rom LawrenceG ellert'se xtensivef ield recordings:
NegroS ongso f Protest:C ollectedb y LawrenceG ellert,L P,R ounder4 004, 1973; Cap'nY ou'rSe o
Mean:N egroS ongso f ProtestV, olume2 , LP,R ounder4 013, 1982; and NobodyK nowsM y Name:B lues
from SouthC arolinaa nd GeorgiaL, P,H eritageH T 304, 1984.
4. BruceM ichael Harrah-Conforthl,i ner notes, NobodyK nowsM y Name, Guido van Rijn, Roosevelt's
BluesA: frican-AmericaBnlu esa nd GospeSl ongso n FDR( JacksonU: niversityo f MississippPi ress,1 997),
xvi; and BruceB astin,R edR iverB lues:T heB luesT raditionin the Southeas(tU rbana,1 11.I:l lini Books,
1995), 64-67.
5. LawrenceG ellert'so riginalf ield recordingsa nd relatedm aterialsa rea vailablea t the Archiveso f TraditionalM
usic,I ndianaU niversityB, loomingtonh; is manuscriptsp, apersa, ndc orrespondencaer eh oused
at the LillyL ibraryI,n dianaU niversityB, loomington.
6. MichaelD enning, in TheC ulturaFl ront:T heL aboringo f AmericanC ulturei n the TwentiethC entury
(New YorkV: erso,1 996), for instance,h asb een criticizedf ors uch an overlye xpansivep urview.F ort he
classicr eadingo f the thirtiesa s ultimatelyc onservatives,e e WarrenI . Susman,C ulturea s History:T he
Transformationf A mericanS ocietyin the TwentiethC entury(N ew York:P antheonB ooks, 1984); for a
counterreadingp ositinga radical" cultureo f opposition"i n the period,s ee Robin D. G. Kelley,H ammera
nd Hoe:A labamaC ommunistdsu ringt heG reatD epressio(nC hapelH ill: Universityo f North Carolina
Press, 1990).
7. The firstm ajorc ollection,S laveS ongso f the UnitedS tatesw, as publishedi n 18 67.
8. LawrenceG ellert,l ettert o the editor,N ew MassesD, ecember1 1 , 1934, 22.
9. LawrenceG ellert,i nterviewb y RichardA . Reuss,M arch2 8, 1968, and September1 1, 1969. In the
1960s, folklorist Richard A. Reuss conducted some nine hours of taped interviews with Lawrence
Gellert.T he interviewsr epresentt he only primarys ourcee videnceo f its kind on the collector.S ee
"United States, 1966-1968," interviews of Lawrence Gellert by Richard A. Reuss, Israel Goodman
Young, and Margot Mayo (on six sound tape reels, analog, 3 3/4 ips, 2 track, mono), Archives of
TraditionaMl usic, IndianaU niversityB, loomington.R eadersw ill note that despitet he catalogl isting
these interviewsa ctuallye xtend to September1 1 , 1969.
10. Gellert, interview by Reuss, March 28, 1968, and September 11, 1969.
11 . LorenzoT homas," Authenticitayn d Elevation:S terlingB rown'Ts heoryo f the Blues,"A fricanA merican
Review3 1 .3 (autumn 1997): 413.
12. Quoted in BruceM ichael Harrah-Conforth", LaughingJ ust to Keep from Crying:A fro-American
Folksonga nd the FieldR ecordingso f LawrenceG ellert"( master'tsh esis,I ndianaU niversity1, 984), 60.
13. LawrenceG ellertP apers,B ancroftL ibraryU, niversityo f California,B erkeley.
14. LangstonH ughest o LawrenceG ellert,F ebruary1 932; Hughest o Gellert,J une 11 , 1933; and Hughes
to Gellert, February2 2, 1934. LawrenceG ellert Papers,B ancroftL ibraryU, niversityo f California,
BerkeleyT. he Russiane dition of NSP\s NegrityanskPiee sniP rotestat,r ans.G . M. Shneerson( Moscow:
GosudarstvennoIez dateil'stvo" Iskusstvo,"1 938).
15 . As citizenshipp apersi ndicate,G ellert'sf atherA, dolph,b roughtt he familyf romB udapestt o New York
City in 1905 and changedt he surnamef rom" Greenbaumt"o "Gellert."A dolphG reenbaum", Petition
for Naturalization,"D epartmento f Commercea nd Labor,N aturalizationS ervice,U nited Stateso f
America, filed May 20, 1909.
16. Gellert, March 28, 1968. Also, Donald Gellert, phone interview with author, September 7, 2002;
James Gellert, phone interview with author, September 10, 2002; and Bob Neidich, email message to
204 I American Quarterly
author,S eptember7 , 2002. ForT ryonh istory,s ee MichaelJ . McCue, TryonA rtists,1 892-1942: The
First Fifty Year(sC olumbus, N.C.: Condar,2 001), and Anna Pack Conner and Ronald Mosseller,
TryonA: n Artistsa nd Writer'Ssk etchboo(kC hapelH ill, N.C.: TryonP ublishingC ompany,2 001).
17. Gellert, March 28, 1968; August 31, 1966; and September 11, 1969.
18. Brown employs the term, with specific reference to Gellert, in his article "Negro Folk Expression:
SpiritualsS, eculars,B alladsa nd WorkS ongs,"P hylon1 4.1 (1953): 58-59.
19. Gellert, March2 8, 1968. As readersw ill note, these lines appearq uite similart o those includedi n
"CauseI 'm a Nigger,"o ne of the two Gellertt ranscriptiontsh at open this article.
20. LawrenceW . Levine,B lackC ulturea nd BlackC onsciousneAssf:r oA- mericanF olkT houghftr omS laveryto
Freedom(N ew York:O xford UniversityP ress,1 977), 205. For the originala ccount,s ee HowardW .
Odum and Guy B. Johnson, TheN egroa nd His Songs( ChapelH ill: Universityo f North CarolinaP ress,
1925), 2-3.
2 1. JamesC . Scott writest hat the "circumspecstt rugglew agedd ailyb y subordinateg roupsi s, like infrared
rays,b eyondt he visiblee nd of the spectrumT. hat it shouldb e invisible. .. is in largep artb y designa
tacticalc hoice born of a prudent awarenesso f the balanceo f power."R obin Kelley has usefully
appliedt he concept of "infrapoliticst"o AfricanA mericans tudies.S ee Scott, Dominationa nd Artso f
ResistanceH: iddenT ranscrip(tNs ew Haven:Y aleU niversityP ress,1 990), 183; and Kelley,R aceR ebels:
CultureP, oliticsa, nd the BlackW orkinCg lass( New York:F reeP ress,1 996), 8.
22. Gellert,p refaceN egroS ongso f Protes[tu npaginated]I.n Mulesa nd Men,p erhapst he best majorc ollection
of southernA fricanA mericanf olkloreb y a blackc ommunitym ember,G ellertc ontemporaryZ ora
Neale Hurstoni ssueda n importantw arninga long these lines. "Folkloreis not as easy to collect as it
sounds," she wrote. "The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people,
being usuallyu nder-privilegeda,r e the shyest.. . . And the Negro, in spite of his open-facedl aughter,
his seeminga cquiescencei,s particularleyv asive.. . . The Indianr esistsc uriosityb y a stony silence.T he
Negro offersa feather-bedr esistance"(2 -3). Zora Neale Hurston,M ulesa nd Men (1935; New York:
Harper Perennial, 1990).
23. A precised atingo f Gellert'se arliestf ieldworki s difficultt o establish.O f his availables ound recordings
at the Archiveso f TraditionaMl usic,t herea re8 6 ten-incha cetatesa nd moret han 15 0 seven-inchd iscs.
While the ten-inch recordingsc learlyd ate from a period of activityr unning from the early 1930s
through the early 1940s, the seven-inch discs have been placed back as far as the early 1920s by archivists.
T hese recordings(m ostlya luminuma nd sufferingf romc onsiderabled eteriorationa) rec onsistent
with the collector'so wn recollectionst hat he beganw ork between1 9 22 and 19 24.
24. Gellert,A ugust3 1,1 966; September1 1,1 969; and Gellert,i nterviewb y IsraelG . Young,M ay7 , 19 68
(in the same collection).
25. Gellert, September 11, 1969, and March 28, 1968.
26. Gellert,p reface,N egroS ongso f Protes(tN ew York:A mericanM usic League,1 936) [unpaginated].
27. Gellert, August 31, 1966.
28. Gellert,M arch2 8, 1968. Gellert'sa rticles eriesu ndert he title "NegroS ongs of Protest"a ppearedi n
New MassesN, ovember1 930, 10-1 1;J anuary1 931, 16-17; April 1931, 6-8; May 1932, 22; and May
1933, 15-16.
29. For this literature,c lassica nd contemporarys, ee Harold Cruse, The Crisiso f the NegroI ntellectual
(1967; New York:Q uill, 1984); Nathan IrvinH uggins, HarlemR enaissanc(eN ew York:O xfordU niversityP
ress, 1971); David LeveringL ewis, WhenH arlemW asi n Vogue(N ew York:K nopf, 1981);
George Hutchinson, TheH arlemR enaissancien Blacka nd White( CambridgeM, ass.:B elknapP ress,
1995); and WilliamJ . Maxwell,N ew Negro,O ld Left:A frican-AmericaWn ritinga nd Communismb etweent
he Wars(N ew York:C olumbiaU niversityP ress,1 999).
30. RichardA . Reuss," The Roots of AmericanL eftwingI nteresti n Folksong,"L aborH istory1 2 (1971):
259.
31. RichardA . Reuss," AmericanF olklorea nd LeftwingP olitics,1 927-1957" (Ph.D. diss., IndianaU niversity,
1971), 15. The influential study has only recently been published. The book varies in some
slight but usefulw ays from the original.S ee RichardA . Reussw ith JoAnneC . Reuss,A mericanF olk
Musica nd LefiwingP olitics,1 9 27-1 957 (LanhamM, d.:S carecrowP ress,2 000). Citationsi n this article
are drawn from both sources.
32. Quoted in Reuss," AmericanF olklore,"5 7-58.
33. Quoted in Reuss," AmericanF olklore,"8 9.
Reds, Whites, and the Blues I 205
34. Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000), 133-82.
35. Robbie Lieberman, "MyS ong Is My Weapon":P eoples Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of
Culture, 1930-1 950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 110-11.
36. For a detailed account of the Lomaxes' joint fieldwork and publishing, see Nolan Porterfield, Last
Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1867-1 948 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
37. Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1 940- 1 970 (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 9.
38. Alan Calmer, review of American Ballads and Folk Songs, by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, New
Masses, November 6, 1934, 23-24.
39. "Negro Songs of Protest," Unison: Organ of the American Music League (May 1936): 4.
40. Reuss and Reuss, American Folk Music, 52, 81-93.
41. Philip Schatz, "Songs of the Negro Worker," New Masses, May 1930, 6-8.
42. Richard Frank, "Negro Revolutionary Music," New Masses, May 15, 29-30.
43. Robin D. G. Kelley, "Afric's Sons With Banner Red': African American Communists and the Politics
of Culture, 1919-1934," in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free
Press, 1996), 103-21. See also Harry Haywood, Black Bobhevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American
Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978); James S. Allen, Organizing in the Depression South: A
Communists Memoir (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 2001); Richard Iton, Solidarity Blues: Race,
Culture, and the American Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Kelley,
Hammer and Hoe.
44. Quoted in Reuss, The Roots or American Lertwing Interest, 277.
45. Charles Seeger to Lawrence Gellert, December 24, 1934, Gellert Manuscripts, Lilly Library, University
of Indiana, Bloomington.
46. Cited in Reuss and Reuss, American Folk Music, 66, 78.
47. Reuss and Reuss, 95. More recently, an article speculates that Sistren and Brethren was a probable
inspiration behind Abel Meeropol's famous "Strange Fruit." Nancy Kovaleff Baker, "Abel Meeropol
(a.k.a. Lewis Allen): Political Commentator and Social Conscience," American Music20. 1 (spring 2002): 46.
48. In the early 1980s, Bruce Conform compiled some of this material for public release. See Conforth,
Nobody Knows My Name, 1 984, LP.
49. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, 358. He discusses Gellert directly, 355-57.
50. Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest, 16-17.
51. Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, Vocalion 1191, 1928.
52. William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United
States (New York: Peter Smith, 1951), 93.
53. Lawrence Gellert, "Me and My Captain" (Chain Gangs): Negro Songs of Protest (New York: Hours Press,
1939), 7.
54. Texas Alexander, Okeh 8658, 1928.
55. For incisive evidence and arguments on this point, see Paul and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar:
Memphis Minnies Blues (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 137.
56. Samuel Charters, The Poetry of the Blues (New York: Avon, 1963), 152; Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This
Morning: Meaning in the Blues (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1 960; 1 990), 272-7 73; and Pete
Welding, liner notes, News and the Blues: Telling It Like It Is, Columbia CK 462 1 7, 1 990, CD, 4.
57. James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (1972; New York: Orbis Books, 1991),
118-19; Paul Garon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit (Sin Francisco: City Lights, 1975; 1996), 199-200. See
also William Barlow, "Looking Up at Down": The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1989); Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey,
Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Adam Gussow, Seems Like Murder
Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); LeRoi
Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963; New York: Quill, 1999);
Levine, Black Culture and Black ConsciousnessJ-,o n Michael Spencer, Blues and Evil (Knoxv'iWeU: niversity
of Tennessee Press, 1993); and Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power
in the Mississippi Delta (New York: Verso, 1998).
58. For the original audio, see Blues in the Mississippi Night, CD, Rykodisc RCD 90 1 55, 1 990; for the text,
see Lomax, "Blues in the Mississippi Night," in The Land Where the Blues Began, A^-l*). Lomax
quotation comes from The Land, xviii.
206 I Amencan Quarterly
59. Bluesi n theM ississippNi ight,C D, 1990.
60. Lomax,T heL and,4 73. Lomaxk ept to his word,a nd the recordingw aso nly releasedfi nallyi n 19 90. In
1948, however,h e did fictionalizet he exchangew ith changedn amesa nd settingi n "I Got the Blues,"
CommonG round( spring1 948): 38-52.
61. Fora n illustrationw, hen Alan Lomaxr eestablishedh imselfi n the United Statesi n the 1960s afterh is
self-imposed exile in Europe, he undertook his - from then on - life-long research endeavor in
"cantometrics,a" c omparativec ross-culturaslc hemaf or processinga nd systemizingf olk musicw orldwide,
in the AnthropologyD epartmenta t ColumbiaU niversityF. ilene,R omancingth e Folk,1 74-76.
62. In the nineteenthc entury,f oundingf igureF rancisJ amesC hild was knownt o censort he bawdym aterial
he deemed "tastelessi"n his Anglo balladr esearchI. n the 1920s, more to our points, Zora Neale
Hurstonc riticizedG ellertp eersH owardO dum and Guy Johnsonf or their own unreliablem ethods.
EvenG ellert'sn ow-esteemedc ontemporariest,h e Lomaxes,c ame in for criticisme arlyo n for recombining
lyricsi n theirs ongbookst owardm orep opulare nds. See Filene,R omancintgh eF olk,1 5, 11 -12,
and Kaplan,e d., ZoraN ealeH urstonA: Lifei n Letters1, 51.
63. Gellert, March 28, 1968.
64. Gellert,S eptember1 1, 1969; Gellert," JimC rowi n Khaki,"N ew MassesM, arch1 9, 1946, 12-13; and
EarlC onrad,J im CrowA merica( New York:D uell, Sloan,a nd Pearce,1 947), 224-26.
65. LawrenceG ellertw as said to have passeda way in 1979. Actually,h e had ratherm ysteriouslyd isappearedf
rom his long-timea partmentin New YorkC ity'sG reenwichV illage.T o this day,f amilym embers
and police are at a loss to explain this disturbing end; there are some who suspect suicide or foul
play, and others who simply believe Gellert may have wandered off back south to live his remaining
years in peaceful anonymity.
66. From 1950 to the present, Sing O«f/has remained the flagship folk music magazine in the United
States; Irwin Silber was chief editor until 1967.
67. IrwinS ilber," Dubious,"l ettert o the editor,M ainstreamJ,u ly 1963, 61.
68. Irwin Silber, interview with author, June 13, 2002.
69. As we haves een, SterlingB rowna nd LangstonH ughest ook the archivea s genuinei n Gellert'sh eyday.
Since then, scholarsL awrenceL evine,B ruceC onforth,B ruceB astin,J ohn Cowley,a nd MichaelD enning
have drawn on the material with confidence. In a phone interview with Pete Seeger, the folksingert
old me thath e and his fatherC, harles,n everh adc oncernsa boutt he credibilityo f the collection.
For my part, I have undertakena thoroughc omparativea nalysiso f lyricsi n the Gellerta rchivea nd
materiapl ublishedb y the LomaxesH, owardO dum and GuyJ ohnson,N ewmanI veyW hite, and other
contemporariesA. s I conclude in my doctoralt hesis, the claim that Gellert'ss ong finds are wholly
unique, and thus suspect, is simply not accurate. It was not that other white collectors did not document
"Negros ongso f protest"s imilart o Gellert'sb, ut rathert hat they failedt o identify,a nd publicize,
them as such. See StevenG arabedian", Reds,W hites, and the Blues:B luesM usic,W hite Scholarship,
and American Cultural Politics" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2004). Peter Seeger, phone
interview with author, June 28, 2002.
70. See Penny M. Von Eschen, RaceA gainstE mpire:B lackA mericanas nd Anticolonialism1, 937-1957
(Ithaca:C ornell UniversityP ress,1 997), and Mary L. Dudziak, ColdW arC ivil Rights:R acea nd the
Imageo f AmericanD emocrac(yP rinceton:P rincetonU niversityP ress,2 000).