Modernity, Nostalgia, and Southern Folklore Studies: The Case of John Lomax
by Jerrold Hirsch
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 105, No. 416 (Spring, 1992), pp. 183-207
[In this carefully written article Hirsch explores John Lomax's attitudes towards black culture. R. Mattteson 2011]
Modernity, Nostalgia, and Southern Folklore Studies: The Case of John Lomax
[Jerrold Hirsch is assistant professor of history, Division of Social Science, Northeast Missouri State University, Kirksville, Missouri]
-------------------------------------------
John Lomax was a romantic nationalist who maintained that American folklore was the creative response of diverse American folk groups to their New World experience, not a vanishing remnant of Old World traditions. However, he was also a nostalgic white Southerner who revealed a conservative romantic's rejection of modernity. Implicitly, Lomax contended that anything that changed the African-American's place in southern culture would destroy their folklore. The path that American folklore studies followed in the 1930s from a conservative romantic nationalism to liberal and radical variations on that idea has not been adequately explored.
---------------------------------------------------
PROUD TEXAN AND HARVARD GRADUATE, lover of both cowboy songs and the traditional music of African-Americans, John Lomax received the patronage not only of distinguished literary scholars, such as Barrett Wendell and George L. Kittredge, but also of Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. In the course of a long career, Lomax had a profound impact not only on American folklore studies, but also on American popular culture. He was the compiler of collections of folksongs that deeply influenced the popular canon that defined American folksong (cf. Filene 1991).
Lomax was one of the greatest collectors of folksongs in American history (Wilgus 1959:188), and yet there are histories of American folklore studies that virtually ignore him (Bronner 1987; Zumwalt 1988). His approach to the songs he collected and the people who sang them raise significant questions about the cultural politics of folklorists, the role of outsiders and insiders in the study of a culture, and attitudes toward tradition, modernity, and pluralism. The cultural tensions and contradictions that characterize his work contributed both to its strength and to its weaknesses. But more important, these tensions reflect trends and issues that have been central to the way scholars and ordinary Americans have thought about the diverse folk traditions of their country.
To understand Lomax it is necessary to place him and his work in the broad context of American cultural history. Lomax was born in Goodman, Mississippi, in 1867, shortly after the end of the Civil War, and died in 1948 a few years after the end of World War II. In the first half of the 20th century almost every white southern intellectual, including modernist poets such as Allen Tate, sociologists such as Howard Odum, and folklorists such as John Lomax, had a view of southern folk culture that reflected the African-American presence in the region.
In response to the fragmenting forces of modernity, many, like Lomax, posited an idea of the South that drew on the heritage of romanticism (O'Brien 1980), and on an even older pastoral tradition. The southern variant of pastoralism idealized the plantation as a preindustrial Edenic alternative to an acquisitive commercial North (Gaines 1924; Singal 1982:11-33; Taylor 1957:145, 334-335). In the New South, white attitudes toward Black folklore as childlike, quaint, and humorous became part of an idealization of plantation society that justified slavery in the past, and provided a rationale for the creation of the caste system that replaced it (Hirsch 1991:167-172). From these traditions, conservative southern intellectuals created images of their world that gave them a sense of wholeness at the cost of rejecting or denying social change.
Historian Daniel Singal argues that the transition from Victorian to modernist thought took place more slowly in the South than elsewhere. In modernist thought, values are considered relative, knowledge provisional. The evolutionary cultural hierarchy Victorians saw in the world around them disappears in modernism. The firm distinctions Victorians drew between civilization and savagery did not exist for modernists, who acknowledged and sometimes celebrated the irrational aspects of human nature. Although Lomax sounded like a contemporary of today's folklorists when he talked about folklore created in America, his thinking remained firmly in the Victorian mode that dominated the South during the formative years of Lomax's education (Singal 1982:3-10).
Lomax's writings about Black southern folklore reveal that he was not as optimistic as the New South prophets of his youth and their successors were about the effects of industrialization. What came to disturb him was not their vision, but his perception that industrialization and southern tradition (a fixed social and racial hierarchy) might not be as easily reconciled as New South spokesmen had thought. As an early 20th-century folklorist, Lomax, unlike the New South spokesmen, was especially attuned to an outlook that believed industrialization destroyed folk traditions.
When Lomax was growing up in Texas in the post-Civil War years, New South spokesmen advocating industrialization had always been quick to argue that introducing factories would not threaten what they thought of as the South's ideal agrarian way of life, nor would it disturb the organic unity, inherent in their version of southern pastoralism. Everyone, they promised, would prosper while staying in their appropriate place--for Blacks this was a clearly subordinate position. This political and economic strategy was based on an alliance with conservative northern industrialists and the assumption of white Southerners that an indifferent federal government would allow them to handle race relations as they chose (Gaston 1970:54-79, 117-186).
In the 1890s, the radical Populist party formed an interracial coalition that offered an alternative economic strategy. The Populists were defeated with the help of intimidation and violence (Goodwyn 1976:110-131, 276-294, 323-337, 534-546). Although Lomax sometimes struck a populist pose, his writings show his commitment to a pastoral ideal and a conservative organic view of place, both of which he feared were endangered by modernity.
Unlike Henry Grady, the preeminent New South prophet of the 1880s, Lomax lived long enough to witness the New Deal. At times the New Deal seemed like it aimed to challenge the racial status quo and to offer a program of economic development intended to aid an impoverished South and ameliorate glaring economic inequalities (Sitkoff 1978:58-83; Tindall 1967:385-390, 532-574, 586-588). Lomax worked for the Roosevelt administration as folklore editor of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) from early in 1936 until his resignation in December of 1937. His worldview, however, remained significantly different from that of most New Dealers, including his colleagues on the FWP.
It would be easy enough, but hardly worthwhile, to simply detail Lomax's patronizing and paternalistic attitude toward southern Black folk culture, with the obvious but unstated goal of making the author and his audience think themselves superior to such limitations. Such an exercise would avoid serious problems of interpretation and would answer no important questions about the work Lomax has left us. The goal here is historical understanding, not an a historical critique of Lomax's assumptions. To understand Lomax it is necessary to examine the intersection between his outlook as a racially conservative white Southerner and his outlook as a folklorist. In both cases, his views are largely representative of his place and time.
Lomax's racial conservatism and his interest in folklore easily meshed because of the congruence he found between the dominant attitudes toward folklore and his own views of race. Yet, in studying Black folklore, he was choosing to cherish material many white Southerners (and white Northerners) did not value, and in the process of collecting and publishing this material, he pointed the way toward new directions in studying American folklore. Lomax held dominant white southern views on race and shared the position of many folklorists of his generation regarding the future of the folk and their lore. Yet in important ways Lomax's work transcended the conventional attitudes of his time.
It is not hard to place Lomax's attitudes in historical context. He can be classified as what historian Joel Williamson calls a southern racial conservative. According to Williamson, southern racial conservatism, still the mainstream of white southern thought on race, is characterized by the belief that Blacks have a place in the South-a defined and subordinate place befitting an inferior race--and are fine as long as they know and stay in their place. In sharp contrast, racial radicals, Williamson argues, believe(d) that outside of the bonds of slavery, Blacks reverted to savagery, and therefore had to be actively held down-and put down (1984:6, 107).
Lomax, born in 1867 during the conflict over Reconstruction, was raised in the Black Belt of Texas in a period when, as one historian has noted, "violence, whether threatened or actual, had the desired effect of reducing the political activities of Negroes" (Rice 1971:129). Although eastern Texas was a stronghold of racial radicalism, Lomax, at least publicly, never endorsed the racial radicalism that manifested itself in aggressive and violent behavior toward Blacks and reached its greatest frenzy between roughly 1890 and 1910.
However, in his account of his dealings with the Black folksingers he met in prison, such as Huddie Ledbetter, Lomax indicated that he thought whites had to be protected from the innate savagery of Blacks. Racial conservatives, Williamson maintains, were "not aggressively anti-Negro, unless the Negro deserted his assigned place" (1984:85). It is unlikely that anything in Lomax's education would have challenged his racial views. In 1895 Lomax received his B.A. from the University of Texas, and in 1907, after a year's study at Harvard, he earned an M.A. in English.
The anti-immigrant views prevalent among his Harvard professors complemented Lomax's own attitudes toward southern Blacks. Professor Barrett Wendell, who helped Lomax gain a fellowship to pursue his study of cowboy song, thought New England culture had flourished because it was homogeneous and Anglo-Saxon. Wendell felt that waves of inferior immigrants were threatening to destroy his world. He and other northern intellectuals reached the conclusion that the alleged threat the foreign-born constituted to good government in the North could be equated with the threat to white supremacy posed by African-Americans in the South (Solomon 1956:90-95).
Perhaps Lomax's Harvard studies did help shape his sensibility as well as his attitudes toward folklore. To some extent, Lomax's interest in Black folklore was a mild protest against both Victorian restraints and modern developments. As T. J. Jackson Lears has demonstrated, laments about modernity were not uncommon among turn-of-the-century New England intellectuals. Complaining about over-civilized bourgeois life, they turned to the study of such subjects as medieval knights or Oriental religion in search of an alternative to the modern world (Lears 1981:3-25, 141-181, 218-240). Lomax's published writings indicate that the study of African-American folklore played a similar role in his life. None of these forms of protest constituted any real or immediate challenge to the existing social order. "In most instances," Daniel Singal maintains, "these early rebels should be seen as post-Victorians rather than incipient Modernists" (1986:10).
At different stages of his career Lomax offered the public accounts of his fieldwork, of what he saw himself trying to accomplish, and of his views of the stories his informants offered in song or conversation. His own accounts were repeated so often in so many different versions that they too can be treated as narratives, as the lore about John Lomax that he chose to offer the public. My concern is with the public, not the private, John Lomax, with how he tried to shape the discourse about himself, Black folklore in particular, and folklore in general. The twofold challenge is to understand how Lomax interpreted the songs and stories he heard and to interpret the stories he told about himself.
The problems inherent in such a task have been well put in the cautionary note made by anthropologists Melville and Frances Herskovits in another context:
"Lacking a knowledge of the cultural matrix, the interpretation of narrative must rest on the surface of expression, since attempts to derive meaning inevitably follow standards set by the culture of the student rather than of the people being studied" (1958:8).
Perhaps there is an appropriate irony in quoting the Herskovitses, who in their studies of African-American and African folklore might be seen as outsiders relying on an anthropological methodology to help them get inside another culture. Their comment is directed against those who try to interpret aspects of another way of life without understanding the culture. John Lomax's major assumption was that because he was a white Southerner he understood southern Blacks. In his work, he frequently implied that no outsider could understand his region. He never directly saw himself as an outsider studying another culture, although his writings hint that he sometimes felt it. Although Lomax never refers to any anthropological theory, indeed seems innocent regarding the matter, it is possible to identify elements of the then-popular evolutionary anthropology in his writings. This outlook, one that was inherent in Victorian attitudes, was quite compatible with a belief in a well-defined racial hierarchy. One challenge is to understand the extent to which Lomax's comments on southern Black culture reflect his culture, not that of the people he studied. Another challenge is to interpret Lomax's stories within the matrix of his culture.
Perhaps for many white Southerners, like Lomax, a commitment to segregation was a way of claiming to be loyal to southern traditions even as they accepted change in so many other areas of their lives. Finally, a close analysis of Lomax's work can contribute to our understanding of a major transition in folklore studies that took place in the 1930s. Like many a pioneer, John Lomax could not fully see where the trail he had broken would lead.
What makes John Lomax such an interesting figure is the informative contradictions and tensions in his work. He sometimes portrayed himself as a Westerner, sometimes as a Southerner, having sometimes had a childhood on his father's small ranch on the Chisholm Trail (J. Lomax 1947:xi), at other times as the offspring of "the upper crust of the 'po white trash,' traditionally held in contempt by the aristocracy of the Old South and by their Negro slaves" (J. Lomax 1947:1).
He offered cowboy songs and Black folksongs as evidence of the contributions of his region to a national culture (McNutt 1982:1-166). As his career developed, he increasingly argued for the creative contribution of African-Americans to American folksong, but he could not fully accept the democratic and egalitarian implications of his argument that great art came from the lowest rungs of the social ladder. He used words like natural, unsophisticated, and rude as descriptions of folksongs he believed possessed positive qualities lacking in what he saw as an overly refined civilization. At the same time he maintained a distinction between the civilized and the savage, and placed southern Blacks on the other side of that line.
Trained in an approach that defined folksongs as ballads created in the past by a communal process, [Lomax got the communal process from Kittredge who taught at Harvard] he tried to stretch the definition of ballads to cover songs being created in the present and to account for the role of individuals in creating those songs (Wilgus 1959:79-81). Thus, unlike many academic folklorists of the time, he was pushed to read the songs he collected as reflections of contemporary life and recent history, rather than as survivals providing evidence about a distant past (Stekert 1968:226-232). He used the popular media and the latest technology both to collect and to disseminate what he had collected.
And yet he saw himself racing against the media and technology as he searched for isolated groups that maintained their lore in its "pure" form (cf. McNutt 1982:77-85, 124-127). Lomax's ideas about purity and isolation reveal his implicit evolutionary anthropology and his inability to see that folklore could grow from a process of acculturation-a process his popular-folksong books promoted, although he seemed unaware that he was contributing to the very kind of cultural change that he feared.
In the 1930s for the first time since Reconstruction the position of Blacks in American society emerged as a concern of the federal government and a major issue for liberals and radicals. Like most white Southerners, Lomax had had every reason to assume that the status of African-Americans was a settled issue. Even many of his white southern liberal contemporaries assumed that segregation would be a permanent aspect of southern life well into any foreseeable future. Their goal was to eliminate the most glaring injustices of a segregated society, not to challenge segregation itself (Sosna 1977:vii-xi, 53-87, 198-211).
In the 1930s, government-employed folklorists with backgrounds different from Lomax's tried to find solutions to many of the contradictions that he could not resolve. They accepted the democratic and egalitarian implications of his approach. They, however, would seek to reconcile romantic nationalism and cultural pluralism and they would find anthropological theories to buttress their values. The contrasting views of Lomax and his fellow national editors on the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project mark a transition from a conservative to a liberal romantic nationalism (Hirsch 1984:30-66, 291-381, 489-652, Hirsch 1988:46-67).
The same transition is apparent in the changing content of the introductions and editorial material in the folksong anthologies that John and his son Alan co-edited (1934:ix-xv, 1941:ix-xvi, 1947:vii-xiii). Alan Lomax took the work he and his father had done together in new directions. John Lomax's work challenged dominant trends in his field and eventually reoriented subsequent scholarship. Gene Bluestein has concluded that Lomax had "a democratic ideology which stressed the virtues of the common man and the dignity of the Negro" (Bluestein 1972:105). This thesis, however, needs to be modified. Bluestein treats John and Alan Lomax as if they had the same point of view. It is true they undertook major collecting trips together and co-edited important anthologies. Nevertheless, it is possible to treat them as separate individuals, pay attention to differences in outlook, and note a transition in the 1930s in the work of folklorists interested in reaching a popular audience.
Challenging the Canon of American Folksong
Despite an early teacher who allegedly dismissed his collection of cowboy songs, Lomax eventually found an audience. It was a story he was fond of repeating. It served as a symbol of the lack of appreciation Texas's educated elite had for the state's indigenous folklore. It was also a story told in connection with Lomax's subsequent education at Harvard and the interest of two of his distinguished professors, Barrett Wendell and George Lyman Kittredge, in his cowboy songs. Receiving the approval of representatives of the New England tradition for his assertions about the worth of materials from his region was very important to him (Kunitz and Colby 1955:591-592; J. Lomax 1947:31-33; McNutt 1982:18-19, 76-80).
Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads (1910) deserves attention as Lomax's first attempt to address many of the issues that would eventually be central to his work with southern Black folksong. He cast the work in terms of an East-West contrast when he could as easily have talked about the connection between the South and the West, or treated it all as central to Texas culture. He could also have given more attention to Mexican and Black cowboys, thus focusing on the interaction of cultures that went into creating the cowboy. Instead, he contributed to the creation of the image of the cowboy as a symbol of Anglo-Saxon virtues.
In this work he celebrated a traditional idea of the American character that was divorced from the realities of class differences. Folksongs, he argued, reveal "the character of life, the point of view, of the vigorous, redblooded American." Cowboys, he hought, "were bold young spirits who emigrated to the West for the same reason that their ancestors had come across the seas. They loved roving; they loved freedom; they were pioneers by instinct"-virtues that Theodore Roosevelt, whose letter to Lomax serves as a preface, thought were endangered (1910:xxi). Lomax's approach to American folksong reflects a nostalgia for the past as much as his colleagues' search for ballads from the British Isles reflects a nostalgia for their past-a past that was disappearing.
Lomax tried to make his cowboy materials fit the definition of ballad he learned at Harvard: a song telling a story, produced by a homogeneous group, without authorship or date, passed on by word of mouth, that is, impersonal in tone. It was difficult to make this definition fit much of his material, and it would become increasingly difficult as his interests turned to African-American song. Cowboys, Lomax held, were isolated lonely folk "cut off from newspapers and books." They lived "miles from places where the conventions of society were observed." And, except for the boss, they "lived on terms of practical equality." Any individual contribution would have to respond to the criticism of the entire group and thus become a "joint product" (1910:xvii, xviii, xix). The dominant assumption was that ballads were no longer being created and that the only ballads in America were survivals from elsewhere. Lomax's argument that the term ballad could be applied to living materials, therefore, was his most radical attempt to stretch the term.
Lomax's claim that folksongs were still being created in America addressed important issues that romantic nationalists faced. Accepting the idea that a rich national culture had to be built on an indigenous American folk culture, American romantic nationalists could either set out to discover such material, despair over its absence, or predict that it might emerge in the future after an American race or nation-the terms were often used interchangeably-had developed. In the meantime, all that Americans could do was import the best that Europe had to offer (Alexander 1980:1-70).
Lomax's work, beginning with the cowboy songs, contributed to a discussion of these issues. Lomax was, in effect, offering a solution to Van Wyck Brooks's lament that, unlike any other race, "the American type . . . has evolved in the full daylight of modern history . . . deliberately established by full-grown intelligent, modern men with a self-conscious purpose, in a definite year" (Brooks 1968 [1908]:4). Having had no childhood, Americans had not had the opportunity to develop the myths and lore that would provide the basis for a living culture. Another set of problems, however, would emerge in locating this indigenous culture among isolated, homogeneous, and rural groups living on the margins of American society-they were vanishing.
Lomax helped redefine the canon of American folksong to include more than traditional ballads from the British Isles (cf. Filene 1991). As early as 1915 he had determined he would not exclude the songs of miners, sailors, railroad workers, cowboys, Blacks, or the "down-and-out classes-the outcast girl, the dope fiend, the convict, the jail-bird, and the tramp" (J. Lomax 1915:3). According to Lomax, a major aspect of the nation's culture came from those groups that polite society dismissed (1915:1-17). The point was not ignored. Carl Engels, editor of the Musical Quarterly, complained in his review of John and Alan Lomax's American Ballads and Folk Songs that it "gives one at first the impression that America depends for its folk-song literature chiefly on 'Niggah' convicts and white 'bums.' This impression is not altogether pleasant" (1935:108-109).
For those, like Engels, who thought that folk poetry was a revelation of "the Spirit of America," large and serious cultural issues were involved. And many, like Engels, would, at best, find it difficult to be "entirely convinced that the Spirit of America, when it blossoms forth-as that of other nations' flowers in the treasures of epic and lyric folk-poetry-necessarily finds its truest and most telling expression in the songs of Black 'boys' who have exchanged their identity for a number and go by such picaresque nicknames as Iron Head, Clear Rock, Chin Shooter, Lead Belly" (Engels 1935:108-109).
In treating African-American folksong as part of the basis for a national culture, Lomax employed three strategies. He tried to make analogies between Western high culture and Black folk art. He further argued that African-American folksong had important virtues that were missing from the larger culture. Because, he contended, he was dealing with living traditions, he could not fall back on the argument of other scholars that folklore consisted only of survivals from an earlier stage of civilization that could be helpful in reconstructing a remote past. He had to try to offer an interpretation of folklore as part of life in the present. Nonetheless, the way Lomax employed each of these strategies blinded him to major aspects of African-American culture. Later folklorists have occasionally employed similar strategies, but they also have been more interested than Lomax was in trying to understand how African-Americans regarded the function of folklore in their culture.
Lomax tried to give African-American folksong the status he thought his audience gave to the artistic creations of Western high culture. Thus, an African-American convict Iron Head reminds Lomax of "blind Homer." Classical allusions are used to give classical status to Lomax's topic: "[Iron Head] had the quiet dignity and reserve of a Roman." And Clear Rock, another convict, "had a store of [song] probably equal in continuous length to the Illiad" (J. Lomax 1934:177, 179). Describing work songs, Lomax tries to disarm the criticism his readers might have: "When they are written out, these phrases often seem jumbled and disconnected, just as a page of Ulysses is at first confusing to an unprepared reader" (J. Lomax and A. Lomax 1934:xxxiv).
The disturbing power these analogies had for Lomax's audience may be lost to us today, but it is revealed in the comments of reviewers. And perhaps they were all the more effective because they were often introduced in a casual way in the midst of a narrative: "Certainly young Mozart was no more absorbed in music than young, black Huddie Ledbetter" (J. Lomax and A. Lomax 1936:6).
To some extent this strategy was a radical attack on the prestige attached to high culture produced in the Old World-a prestige that blinded Americans to the value of their own culture. However, it cut more than one way. One implication was that indigenous African-American folksong could only be regarded as art if it could be compared to true art-Western high culture. In this way, this strategy reinforced the prestige of high art forms while revealing hardly anything about the art of African-American folksong or the artists who created it.
In his approach to both cowboy songs and African-American songs, Lomax argued that the very qualities of refined art missing in these materials were their greatest virtue. The cult of the primitive, the idealization of the natural man were not new. Lomax was hardly alone in making this type of argument, although he had found new sources for materials to remedy what was lacking in "polite society." Barrett Wendell admired the cowboy songs Lomax collected for "the wonderful, robust vividness of their artless yet supremely true utterance . . the natural vigor of their surgent, unsophisticated human rhythm" (J. Lomax 1910:xiv).
Lomax thought there was "a Homeric quality about the cowboy's profanity and vulgarity that pleases rather than repulses." The cowboy lived a "big, open, free life . . near to Nature's breast." "So-called polite society," Lomax maintained, needed to hear the "simplicity, calm, directness," of expression that emerged from the cowboy's way of life. But this "knight of the twentieth century," this "animating spirit of a vanishing era," would not continue to provide a living source of material with which to revivify American culture (1910:xxv, xxiii).
African-American song provided another source that might serve the same function, and Blacks were not disappearing, although Lomax was concerned that the type of African-American who might provide this corrective for civilization would disappear. And, ironically, although Lomax thought the cowboy acquired this natural art in the free open air, he found it most often in African-American songs sung in prisons, levee camps, and other plantation-like situations.
In Black folksong Lomax heard evidence of an artistic "skill at once finished and unstudied" (1917:141). Praise for African-American song as "no studied art" is a recurring theme in Lomax's writings. This "artless simplicity" (J. Lomax 1934:177, 185) resulted in rough vital creations produced by "these children of nature," who often "seemed as contented and carefree as a group of children" (J. Lomax 1947:51, 38). Here is the note that is absent in Lomax's discussion of the cowboy, whom he never regarded as a child.
When writing about Blacks, Lomax's romanticism crosses over into what George Fredrickson calls romantic racialism. Lomax attributed an innate temperament to Blacks, reflecting the idea that each race had different gifts (Fredrickson 1971:97-102, 325-332). "Not the exceptional negro," Lomax maintained, "but almost all negroes handle melody and rhythm" with great skill; it was something they had been "endowed [with] by nature." Insisting that folksongs were being created in contemporary America, Lomax argued that songs reflected the singer's world. Lomax's racial ideology limited his ability to build on his perception that African-American songs were "living, growing organisms mirroring his mind as it is to-day," that the singer sings about his experience, and "that these sentences are often terse and epic summaries of his important life relations." With all the topics Blacks might sing about, Lomax wondered why, as he saw it, self-pity was the main theme. This puzzled him, for "there surely exists no merrier-hearted race then the negro, especially in his natural home, the warm climate of the South" (J. Lomax 1917:141). The African-American has "a nature upon which trouble and want sit but lightly" (J. Lomax 1917:141). Lomax often claimed that he understood the Black performer's mind better than the performer did: "The negro's self-pity is based on his feeling of race inferiority-a feeling of which he may well be only subconsciously aware" (J. Lomax 1917:141).
Repeatedly, Lomax proved a singularly imperceptive observer, and the clash between his observations and his analysis now makes for a shocking dissonance: "The melancholy in the prison songs comes doubtless from the Negro's desire, as one said, 'to git away f'om here. I jis' don' nachly like dis place.' . . . The Negro makes a model prisoner, as one guard said, easy to control, but in his singing he abandons himself to a brooding hopelessness, as though freedom were beyond reach." (Lomax and A. Lomax 1934:xxxii, emphasis mine).
Lomax's writings reveal the way white Southerners translated the popular Victorian dichotomy between the civilized and the savage into an argument for white supremacy. Blacks as savages or undisciplined children needed white tutoring and discipline (Singal 1982:9). Slavery, in Lomax's view, was "but a brief interlude--an episode-between many generations of barbaric freedom and the present status of liberty in a civilized land." (Lomax 1917:141). One reason Lomax wanted to collect songs in Black penitentiaries was that "a longtime Negro convict spends many years with practically no chance of hearing a white man speak or sing. Such men slough off the white idiom they may once have employed in their speech and revert more and more to the idiom of the Negro common people." (Lomax 1934:182, emphasis mine).
These remarks clearly reflect the model of an evolutionary cultural ladder. Cultural borrowing is unidirectional; Blacks starting at the bottom can move up, somewhat, by imitating whites-but then they risk losing their natural gifts. Lomax's loose, unstudied anthropological assumptions led to his search for the pure, uncontaminated folksong found only among an isolated group still living "under conditions more or less primitive" (. Lomax 1915:4). To find the "sinful songs" of the southern Blacks, Lomax thought one had to search for the isolated community, where the music remained "the least contaminated by white influence or by the modern Negro jazz." The problem, in Lomax's view, was that "the Negro, living among a people allegedly his superior, is always strongly tempted to imitate them," and "Negroes grow to resemble white folks where the models are sufficiently numerous." Cultural interaction, in his view, was a form of contamination resulting in impurity. New forms of lore do not develop from such a process.
Fortunately, in Lomax's view, new developments in recording technology made it possible to go directly to isolated prisons, cotton plantations, and lumber camps, for he thought it "nearly impossible to transport Negro folk-singers from the South and keep them untainted by white musical conventions." Purity and isolation are constant themes in his writings, and serve not merely as a rationale for fieldworkers in search of certain types of songs, but are central to his view of cultural processes (J. Lomax 1934:181, 185, 186, 182).
Modern life threatened the survival of folklore, Lomax maintained, for it threatened the pastoralism, the rural life, and the isolated communities he saw as the necessary conditions that produced folklore. He argued that "the spread of machine civilization is rapidly making it hard to find folk singers." He implied that only "a life of isolation, without books or newspapers or telephone or radio, breeds songs and ballads." From his point of view, the true Black folksong could only be obtained by finding "the Negro who had had the least contact with jazz, the radio, and with the white man." The old tunes were folksong; later developments were almost regrettable: "Daily association with the whites and modern education prove disastrous to the Negro's folk singing, destroying much of the quaint, innate beauty of his songs." He saw the old songs abandoned and replaced by what he thought of as "a flood of jazz and of tawdry gospel hymns." He approved of the thesis that jazz was "the debased offspring of Negro songs." Given these developments, he maintained, prison camps were the ideal place to collect Black folksong: "Here the Negro prisoners were segregated, often guarded by Negro trusties, with no social or other contacts with the whites, except for occasional official relations. The convicts heard only the idiom of their own race" (J. Lomax and A. Lomax 1934:xxvi, xxvii, xxx, xxxi, xxxii, xxx).
Lomax could write eloquently about the music he loved. Folksongs, he argued, "flourish best in freedom of remote mountain coves, the melancholy loneliness of windswept plains, the silence of river bottom regions, the quiet of far-away forest ranges, the monotonous dreariness of life in a prison camp." Here was a description of folklore that reflected a romantic "angst"-folklore was created to give voice to anxious, melancholy, lonely feelings. It provided compensating joys for the suffering in life. Thus Lomax agreed with W. H. Krehbiel that "the truest, most intimate folk music, is that produced by suffering." And, according to Lomax, "the songs of the Negro prisoners in convict camps furnished confirmation of this theory." Such an approach, however, did not offer much beyond a stock set of adjectives that reflected the sensibility of the collector. Lomax wrote little about the way people who sang the songs thought about their world, or the function song and lore played in the life of their culture (J. Lomax and A. Lomax 1934:xxxv, xxxii).
Lomax's nostalgia revealed a conservative romantic's rejection of modernity. In his romanticism, he looked backward to a lost world, not forward to a new one. His appreciation of cowboy songs and African-American songs was bound up with his feelings about his childhood. This and his acceptance of racial paternalism kept him from questioning the southern social order. Blacks and their songs appealed to his sense of beauty and aroused emotions in him that were deeply felt, but evidently impossible for him to analyze. Whereas he admired African-American folksong because it was "so unique, so pliable, that no other folk music in America approaches it in perfection," he also insisted that its major quality was "self-pity" (J. Lomax 1917:141). Thus, he wrote that he recorded Black convicts who "pathetically" sang songs full of "mystery and wistful sadness," but devoid "of self-consciousness or artificiality" (J. Lomax 1947:119, 124). Lomax liked to use stock romantic phrases about yellow moons and the "dirge of the dying pine" (J. Lomax 1947:119). To a large extent his comments about African-Americans reflect an acquired sensibility that had become a habitual way of writing about emotions.
The adjectives Lomax used to describe African-American folksongcharming, sad, picturesque, pathetic-are all words that distance him from Black people and their songs, place him in the superior role, and tell more about his emotional reactions to the music than about the meaning it had in the culture from which it emerged. For Lomax, the African-American was still a primitive who did not suffer from the self-consciousness Lomax associated with civilized life (. Lomax 1947:119, 124).
In Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, Lomax, perhaps unwittingly, portrayed himself as a folksong collector who could never vicariously enter into the culture whose songs he recorded, who always remained an outsider. Representative examples of his descriptions of Black songs tell what they meant to him: "depth, grace and beauty .. quiet power and dignity; and a note of weird, almost uncanny suggestion of turgid, slow-moving rivers in African jungles"; and what the experience of hearing these songs was like for him: "again I felt carried across to Africa, and I felt as if I were listening to the tom-toms of savage blacks." (Lomax 1947: 117).
Removed from their original context, some of Lomax's comments about African-American folksong might suggest that he was an advocate of Black cultural pride. He thought white culture, modern life, and "prosperous members of the [Black's own] community, bolstered by the church and the schools, sneering at the naivete of the folk songs and unconsciously throwing the weight of their influence in the balance against anything not patterned after white bourgeois culture ... [were] killing the best and most genuine Negro folk songs." Lomax's version of "Black is beautiful" needs to be placed within the context of his romantic and paternalist views. For Lomax, admiration of aspects of Black culture seems to have been another argument in favor of accepting the status quo in southern race relations. Thus, he thought of Booker T. Washington as "wise, tolerant, a gifted orator, a gifted leader of his people" who had had the wisdom to urge Blacks not to merely imitate whites. (Lomax 1947:129, 114).
In Lomax's view of the world, modern life and folksong were in mortal competition, with the former in danger of winning: "The Negro in the South is the target for such complex influences that it is hard to find genuine folk singing." Implicitly, Lomax contended that anything that changed the African-American's traditional place in southern culture would destroy his folk traditions: "Education leaders, broadening the Negro's concepts" were a grave threat. Lomax was comfortable with the socioeconomic implications of his argument that only the poorest, most isolated and segregated Blacks could maintain a vital folk culture. Nevertheless, Lomax's racial views were not altogether typical. He had to deal with wardens who, he claimed, wondered " 'what is the human race coming to when a full-grown white man spends his time making records of "Nigger" singing?' " In the face of such attitudes he persisted (J. Lomax 1947:128-129, 145).
Within this type of society Lomax and other white collectors he knew functioned comfortably and did indeed make important cultural contributions. Ruby Pickens Tartt, according to Lomax, was able to do good work because "she knew her Negroes, and they loved and trusted her as they had her father before her." Lomax sketched the model of an enlightened paternalist, and in no way questioned the social order in which they both worked.
She had helped bury their dead, had repaired their shambling church buildings, counseled them in their troubles, enjoyed their stories, loved their songs, greeted them with smiles, always leaving a shining token of her affection when they shook her hand. [J. Lomax 1947:190]
Early in his memoirs Lomax tells the story of his boyhood friendship with an African-American named Nat Blythe. (The story may also reflect aspects of debt peonage in Texas.) At the end of the story, Lomax suggests that the relationship has a central place in explaining his career as a folklorist. Lomax was only nine, and Nat was 18, but Lomax, who could read and write, became Nat's teacher. In Lomax's recollection Nat was as much, or more, the child in this relationship as he was. On his 21st birthday Nat received the money he had earned as a bonded servant and disappeared. Black friends told Lomax they thought Nat was murdered for his money. Lomax concluded, on the sad wistful note he often found so moving, "As I have traveled up and down the South these recent years, I find myself always looking for Nat, the dear friend and companion of long ago. I loved him as I have loved few people." (Lomax 1947:9-12). There seems no reason to doubt him.
Placed in the first pages of Lomax's memoirs and given the importance he attaches to it, the Nat Blythe story invites interpretation as a text that explicates Lomax's racial views and his work as a folklorist-a story, he claimed, he constantly thought about as he went about his adult labors. In this story all the warm emotions of childhood friendship are clearly bound up with a racial system in which a white child plays the adult role and a Black twice his age plays the role of a child-or so Lomax remembered it. Whether Nat was actually murdered remains unclear. What is clear is that this childhood idyll came to an end for Lomax when Nat legally became an adult. The search for Nat was the search for a lost world. (Lomax 1947:11-12).
Lomax is not the only white Southerner who has written about an interracial childhood friendship. The idyllic aspect of these friendships, at least as whites recount them, is that race had not yet become a conscious barrier between friends. That hardly means that caste relationships did not structure the situation. The attainment of self-conscious awareness of the significance of race in southern society becomes the mark of lost innocence. Lomax suggests that all his adult life he welcomed relationships with Blacks that reminded him of his childhood friendship. The childhood world he nostalgically longed for was rooted in what many would call an oppressive social order, although it would never seem that way to Lomax. Modern life, Black education, and challenges to the racial status quo would mean that not only folklore, but also a childhood Eden, were irretrievably lost (J. Lomax 1947:11-12).
Lomax never questioned the justice, or lack of it, in the penitentiaries he visited. He was, however, startled on one occasion when he met a prisoner, also named John Lomax, who came from his own home county in Mississippi. The story suggests that Lomax entertained the possibility of kinship, and hints at the psychologically complex relationship between folk creators and collectors, in this case between the imprisoned and the free, between Black and white Southerners. On some level Lomax seems to acknowledge his Black double as fictive kin, as another side of himself and of his relations in the world of the South. Lomax, however, concludes the story on a note that, for him, restores personal, social, and racial order within an organic society: "Holmes County was also my birthplace. That boy's mother may once have rocked me to sleep." Here, too, Lomax returned to a loving childhood memory, but one that clearly reflected a paternalist society.'
Lomax also recounted a situation when the Black folksinger Lead Belly, who served as his chauffeur, was upset by a racial slight: Lead Belly was "angry probably at another instance of 'racial discrimination.' " Lomax's tone and the quotation marks indicated he did not take complaints about racial discrimination, or those coming from a Black, too seriously. In sharp contrast, his son Alan had an altogether different reaction to what he saw in the prisons when he accompanied his father on field trips. John Lomax recalled that "at every opportunity they told Alan and me their pitiful stories. Alan seemed to want to set them all free. "John offered his readers no comment on his son's reactions (J. Lomax 1947:142, 154).
It is possible to read John and Alan Lomax's Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly (1936) as the answer to John's search for Nat. Although the Nat Blythe story was published after the Lead Belly book, Lomax had been telling those around him the story of Nat Blythe since early in the century (McNutt 1982:29). What begins as an oral history of Lead Belly changes into John Lomax's account of his relationship with this Black folksinger, ex-convict, and convicted murderer. According to John, the relationship worked well as long as they stayed in the South. Helping Lomax record other African-American prisoners, Lead Belly had shown "how useful he might prove to be" (J. Lomax and A. Lomax 1936:38).
In New York, Lead Belly worked for John and Alan as cook and laundryman. John took Lead Belly on tour and noted that newspaper stories using "the term 'bad nigger' only added to [Lead Belly's] attraction."[2] But soon there were quarrels about money and performance schedules. Repeatedly, Lead Belly chose to give higher priority to performing and the night life in the Black sections of the towns they visited than to playing at concerts before white audiences (often at colleges), which Lomax had arranged for him. In southern prisons Lomax and Lead Belly had been together when Blacks sang. In the North, Lomax did not accompany Lead Belly on his trips to the urban ghettos. The quarrels over money were serious matters, and Lead Belly later hired a lawyer to contest the way Lomax had handled their contract. Lomax casts their differences in terms of his having "lost control." He had, he later recalled, given up, discovering that he "had neither the power nor the wish to discipline [Lead Belly]."
Lomax dreamed of a small farm for Lead Belly and his wife, but that was not their dream. In Lomax's version of pastoral agrarianism Blacks were kept in their place in a rural world, despite the industrial society developing all around them (J. Lomax and A. Lomax 1936:49, 63, 60, 63). An inability to deal with the cultural significance of an emerging Black population in the nation's large northern cities was hardly unique to Lomax. Folklorist Jeff Todd Titon argues convincingly that the record industry's growing interest in the 1920s in "downhome blues" reflected a "desire not to confront the image of the city Black," a profound anti-urban pastoralism that persisted even in the Jazz Age (Titon 1977:243, 246).
Lomax became eager to see Lead Belly and his wife return to the South. In his view the experiment had failed, for according to Lomax, Lead Belly's stay in New York changed the singer "into an arrogant person, dressed in flashy clothes, a self-confident boaster." No doubt much of their conflict was due to the clash of two strong-willed personalities, but the expectations he had for Lead Belly reflect Lomax's view of race relations. Talk of discipline and control sounds a paternalist note. Lomax, who so easily claimed understanding of even the unconscious thoughts of southern Blacks, found that after their move to the North Lead Belly's face was an "ebony mask." He criticized Lead Belly for rejecting the small farm, the pastoral dream, he offered him, in favor of "a big, shiny automobile, [and] lots of flashy clothes."
Someone other than John Lomax might have read Lead Belly as choosing urban life, with its particular freedoms, over the rural world. Instead, Lomax thought Lead Belly had to return South, and that his stay in the North, although "an exciting and interesting experience," had proven a disappointment (J. Lomax and A. Lomax 1936:64, 59, 64). In effect, Lomax decided that southern Black folk did not belong in the city. Whether there was a connection between Lomax's inability to see folklore existing in the city (where the purity he associated with the isolation characteristic of rural life did not exist) and his personal relationship with Lead Belly can never be fully known.
One thing was certain: Lomax failed to establish a friendly relationship with Lead Belly in a nonprison, nonsouthern world. Lomax's story ends with Lead Belly returning to the South. But Lead Belly would later return North and often perform as a folksinger in left-wing circles.
John Lomax, the FWP, and Liberal and Radical Variations on Romantic Nationalism
When John Lomax became the national folklore editor of the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project in 1936, he was nearly 70 years old. His views of the world, and folklore, were well established. Lomax's romantic nationalist view of American folklore was clearly stated in the Folklore Manual given to FWP workers. The manual dismissed folklorists who valued "only what can be traced back to a past for which they have a nostalgia; a ballad, to interest them, must have an Elizabethan origin." Instead, it praised those folklorists who assume that "creative activity is still functioning."
Although the European origins of American culture could not be denied, the FWP was more "interested in the mutations and developments wrought by transfer to a new and pioneer land." They were primarily interested in "America, not in Europe." And they valued "a recital of the woes of Clementine and her forty-niner parent above those of the Lady Claire" (Federal Writers' Project 1936). Nevertheless, because Lomax saw folklore surviving and flourishing only when the folk who valued it were separated from the mainstream of modern life, the logic of Lomax's position led to the same conclusions as folklorists who thought that American folklore consisted only of survivals from elsewhere and, therefore, was bound to disappear. Lomax was determined to collect what he thought of as a distinctive American lore before it was too late. To some extent other national FWP officials shared Lomax's outlook. And, in regard to some types of lore, it was no doubt true. Yet, if one accepted Lomax's position, there was no relationship between collecting folklore and FWP director Henry Alsberg's interest in contemporary American life, especially the life of the working class and ethnic and racial minorities (Alsberg 1937, 1938a, 1938b, 1939).
B. A. Botkin, who succeeded Lomax as FWP folklore editor, urged creative writers to become imaginative listeners and ethnographers. He initiated programs in oral history and in the collection of living lore and he worked to see that social-ethnic and folklore studies were coordinated. Comparing Lomax's and Botkin's approaches reveals changes taking place in the 1930s in American folklore studies. For Lomax, occupational lore was associated with outdoor occupations and "with red-blooded, restless Americans, who could no more live contented shut in by four walls than could Beowulf and his clan"-cowboys, lumbermen, sailors, African-Americans (J. Lomax 1915:3). These were groups, in their isolation and separation from the dominant culture, whom Lomax could regard as the American equivalent of a European peasantry.
By not equating folklore with rural life and isolation, Botkin, unlike Lomax, was able to turn his attention to the folklore of pluralism, to urban and industrial lore (Hirsch 1987:3-38). Botkin's idea of "folklore in the making"- the continual creative response of various American subcultures (among the educated as well as the uneducated) to their world-was attractive to those FWP officials who saw the basis for revitalizing American culture in a diverse American folklore and song (Botkin 1937:469). Folklore provided insight into contemporary everyday life, to the way ordinary people responded to their world. Taking a functionalist approach, Botkin advised Federal Writers that rather than searching for the origins of a piece of folklore, the pure uncontaminated item, they should learn about "its history and use in relation to the past and present experience of those who keep it alive" (1938a). Botkin thought that both the life and lore of diverse groups of Americans could be understood through interviewing people, through collecting what he sometimes called "own stories"- what would later be called oral history (Botkin 1940).
Whereas Lomax saw modernity destroying the isolation that had created folklore, Botkin argued that in the modern world social structure created folk cultures the way geography once had created distinctive folk groups. Embracing the cultural pluralism and relativism of Franz Boas, Botkin could see much of the study of folklore as "a study in acculturation-the process by which the folk group adapts itself to its environment and change, assimilating new experiences and generating new forms" (Botkin 1937:464-465). Thus, rather than studying isolated groups, as Lomax did, Botkin wanted to examine the life and lore of Americans living in a state of transition: southern Blacks moving to northern cities; Eastern European immigrants and their children becoming urban industrial workers. Abandoning the idea of an evolutionary cultural ladder, Botkin did not see the efforts of minorities to participate fully in American life as a process that would lead, as Lomax believed, to the contamination of their identity and culture. Both Lomax and Botkin were actively bringing knowledge of the folklore of diverse groups into the public arena, but Botkin saw the process as a way of countering "the myth of pure national cultures and pure races" (1937: 464-465).
Lomax thought that the isolated folk groups he was interested in had lore that possessed qualities it would be helpful for the dominant culture to become familiar with, lore that could provide contact with the energy and raw vitality that was endangered by the achievements of civilization. Nevertheless, civilization (the culture Lomax was part of) was still the top rung of the ladder. Botkin was interested in folk literature because he thought it embodied an alternative form of consciousness for a civilization, he maintained, the Depression had shown was in many ways bankrupt. Botkin turned the Victorian notion of a cultural hierarchy on its head. For him individualism within a folk pattern was a healthy form of personal and cultural integration, whereas egoism in modern civilization reflected larger social ills (Botkin 1938b:134).
The similarities and differences between Lomax and Botkin illustrate that a transition in American thinking about national identity and culture was taking place during the 1930s. New Deal-sponsored folklore studies reflected this ferment. In all of this, John Lomax's work was a starting point, rather than part of the new thinking about folklore. Although Botkin and other key national FWP officials shared some of Lomax's positions, they tried to reconcile romantic nationalism with American pluralism and with modernity in ways Lomax could not. FWP officials maintained that a rich indigenous culture had grown out of the experience and history of ordinary Americans. They tried to document and celebrate a pluralistic American culture, not the culture of Anglo- Saxon Americanism, or the culture of an emerging American race (Botkin 1938b:126). Phrases such as "composite America" (Federal Writers' Project 1938), "the Negro as American" (Federal Writers' Project c. 1938), and "introducing America to Americans" (Federal Writers' Project c. 1936) embodied this point of view (cf. Roucek et al. 1940:86-89).
FWP officials did not use nationality and race as interchangeable terms. Instead, they aimed to broaden the definition of who and what was American. Rediscovering, acknowledging, and celebrating American diversity, national FWP officials thought, would offer a basis for national integration and help create an inclusive, democratic, and egalitarian community. Part of this involved giving former slaves, ordinary Southerners, members of ethnic groups, and urban workers an opportunity to speak to their fellow citizens. They held that while maintaining provincial regional and ethnic loyalties, Americans could also develop a cosmopolitan national identity through a cultural understanding of the diversity of their fellow citizens. Rather than embracing a particular region, ethnic group, or rural or urban life as representing an ideal American way of life, these officials celebrated the riches of diversity and explored the lives of individuals making the transition from one way of life to another. Out of this very pluralism and the disappearance of isolation, they argued, came a new folklore. They were finding ways to reconcile romantic nationalism with pluralism and modernity. Overseas they noted the rise to power of those who argued for "ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer," the results, they believed, of insisting on purity and isolation and of rejecting the increasing awareness of cultural differences, the increasing intercultural contacts characteristic of modern life. The FWP was part of the cultural component of the New Deal's program of political and economic reform (Hirsch 1988: 46-67).
John Lomax's FWP colleagues shared his romantic nationalist sentiments to some extent, but Lomax did not share their egalitarian values, or their left-ofcenter politics. Among this group he was the most provincial. His assumptions about Black folksongs and folkways precluded a cosmopolitan outlook and demonstrated a parochialism that prevented him from imaginatively entering the life of another culture. Lomax's romantic nationalism was compatible with a hierarchical assessment of diverse American cultures and with the maintenance of the status quo. Romantic nationalist ideas did not automatically lead in the direction in which Sterling Brown (Negro affairs editor), Morton Royse (social-ethnic studies editor), or B. A. Botkin (Lomax's successor as folklore editor) took them. These individuals made their own synthesis, a synthesis that John Lomax never seems to have made or accepted.
In his folklore work on the FWP, Botkin hoped that by letting people speak for themselves he could create an encounter between reader and narrator in which the reader would see things from the perspective of the speaker. John Lomax's confident assumption that he knew and understood African-Americans often prevented him from doing this. Lomax's vision of a rich folk tradition menaced by modern developments had no place in it for the idea of America as a culture in the process of becoming. Any changes in the social order could only harm the folk tradition. Such a vision distinguished him from his FWP colleagues who, like Emerson and Whitman, linked the idea of America as a culture still in the process of realizing itself with hopes for achieving a more democratic and egalitarian society.
In the careers, publications, and correspondence of national FWP officials one finds no evidence that any were as rooted in their particular American subculture as Lomax was, or that they viewed the whole primarily from the vantage point of their own geographical or ethnic province. With the exception of Lomax, they almost all seemed more a part of the liberal intellectual community than any other; and thus, unlike Lomax, they approached the study of diverse American cultures as outsiders.[3]
True, Brown, an African-American, focused on the culture, history, and folklore of his own group, but he did so from a national and cosmopolitan perspective. Because of his unquestioned assumptions about the cultural life of his own province, and the subcultures within it, and their relationships to one another, Lomax, the insider, became a nostalgic outsiderin his study of Black folksong. Assuming they could not speak for others, his FWP colleagues turned their outsider status to advantage as they went about the task of introducing America to Americans.
Already in the 1930s, Alan Lomax was finding new ways of looking at the materials he and his father were collecting. His approach to jazz, to the stories of former slaves, and to Black folksong stressed the democratic and egalitarian meaning of the material. He began writing his oral history biography of Jelly Roll Morton, "inventor of jazz," in 1938, at a time when his father still saw jazz as a contaminating influence. For Alan, jazz was a study in the folklore of acculturation; jazz with its mixture of folk, popular, and western classical idioms was inherently opposed to any established sense of cultural hierarchy. It suggested, instead, the diversity and fluidity of American life, and demonstrated that life in a pluralistic society would produce new art forms, that cultures living through the momentous change from an agrarian rural way of life to an industrial urban world would generate new and valuable forms of selfexpression (A. Lomax 1950:xi-xvii).
For John Lomax "the main purpose of [the] detailed and homely questions" Federal Writers were instructed to ask former slaves was "to get the Negro talking about the days of slavery" (Federal Writers' Project 1937). Alan, along with other FWP officials, understood the larger implications of such work for the study of American history and contemporary life. National FWP director Henry Alsberg added questions about what the slaves had hoped freedom would mean, and what it actually did mean, to John Lomax's interview outline (Alsberg 1937).[4]
In an undated letter to Alsberg, Alan and Elizabeth Lomax focused on the radical implications of this form of documentary history and art: "Here for the first time in the history of literature, as far as I know, a group of poor and despised people are being given a chance to speak, to give their side of the picture. And the moral of the book should certainly be not that slavery, but exploitation is a nasty thing" (A. Lomax and E. Lomax n.d.). Alan Lomax, like John, was associated with Works Progress Administration (WPA) folklore programs. He served from 1937 to 1942 as assistant in charge of the Archive of American Folksong, and formed close ties with Botkin, Charles Seeger, and Herbert Halpert, all folklorists working on WPA arts projects (Hirsch 1984:355-362, Hirsch 1988:46-67; Williams 1975:211-239).
He shared their left-of-center politics, egalitarian values, and functionalist approach (cf. Botkin 1947:364-367; A. Lomax 1947:359-363).[5] Comparing the introductions of American Ballads and Folksongs (J. Lomax and A. Lomax 1934:xxv-xxxviii) and Our Singing Country (J. Lomax and A. Lomax 1941:ixxvi) offers further evidence of the changes taking place in the 1930s in the ways scholars viewed the types of materials John Lomax had been collecting for years. The earlier volume reflects both John Lomax's romantic nationalism and his belief that folklore was associated with uneducated and isolated groups. Romantic nationalist assumptions also characterize the later volume, but the emphasis is on a functionalist and pluralist approach to American folksong. At the end of the introduction to the first volume, John's name precedes Alan's; the order is reversed in Our Singing Country.
Conclusion
In his introduction to Folk Song: USA, Alan Lomax argued that in collecting and publishing folksongs his father was acting as the advocate of the "cowboy and the other pioneers of the great west," of the common man, in the way that, as Malinowski had argued, the anthropologist "has the duty to speak as the native's advocate" (J. Lomax and A. Lomax 1947:x). Alan does not mention John's work with Black folksong in this description. Yet, in recording and publishing African-American folksong, John Lomax made it possible for these singers to reach a broad audience, to become their own advocates. And some readers would take up Malinowski's challenge. John Lomax's attitudes toward Black culture, and his relations with African-Americans, were too much the product of the southern social order that he grew up in, and accepted, for him to act as the advocate of Black Americans.
Alan dedicated The Folksongs of North America (1960) "to my father John A. Lomax who broke the trail." And perhaps to have broken a path that he, himself, could not follow, or understand where it would lead, was John's triumph and tragedy.
Notes
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 1985 annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association, the 1986 meeting of the American Folklore Society, and as guest lectures in 1987 at the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas, Austin, and in 1989 at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies, Harvard University. I am grateful to Michael J. Bell, Burt Feintuch, Archie Green, Bruce Jackson, Charles Joyner, Jose Limon, and Wernor Sollors for their continuing interest in-and astute criticism of-my research on this and other aspects of the history of American folklore studies. At a crucial stage in the writing of this article, Jeff Todd Titon gave the manuscript a thoughtful and careful critical reading.
1. My interpretation of this incident has been deepened by reading Titon 1987. I, however, think that Titon's perceptive view of the incident-"this doppleganger or alter ego turns out to be a Black folksinger" (Titon 1987:23)-does not adequately place the event in the context of a patriarchal southern caste system in which the image of white babies being nursed by Black women was a symbol that was only half-consciously understood (cf. Smith 1949:123-131). I hope Titon's paper will be published so that readers can benefit from his insights into Lomax.
2. John Lomax and Lead Belly's 1935 tour deserves separate treatment. I have shared my ongoing research on this topic in " 'Sweet Singer of the Swamplands Here to do a Few Tunes Between Homicides,' John Lomax and Huddie Ledbetter on Tour 1935," a guest lecture at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies, Harvard University, April 1989, and in my presentation, "Recontextualizing Afro-American Folklore in Popular Culture: The Case of John Lomax and Huddie Ledbetter," at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society, in Philadelphia, October 1989.
3. On the relationship between pluralism and romantic nationalism among liberal intellectuals in the early 20th century, I have been influenced by Hollinger (1975:133-151).
4. Botkin's Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (1989[1945]) was published several years after the demise of the FWP. The book was a fulfillment of Henry Alsberg's hope that hiring Botkin would lead to the Writers' Project putting together an edited volume of ex-slave interviews. As Lomax put it, these would not only encourage slaves to talk about the old days, but would also call attention to the experience of African- Americans who were the last generation of slaves and the first generation of freedmen.
5. Alan Lomax and B. A. Botkin were both involved in the People's Artists, a by-product of the Popular Front era. Lomax wrote the foreword, and Botkin the preface, for Waldemar Hille et al.'s The People's Songbook (1948).
References Cited
Alexander, Charles C. 1980. Here The Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth-Century merica. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Alsberg, Henry G. 1937. Letter to all state directors, 9 June 1937. Box 56, Federal Writers' Project files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
............. 1938a. Letter to Lewis Mumford, 4 October 1938. Box 195, Federal Writers' Project files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
............. 1938 b. Letter to all state directors, 1 December 1938. Box 69, Federal Writers' Project
files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
............. 1939. Letter to all state directors, 15 February 1939. Box 69, Federal Writers' Project
files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Bluestein, Gene. 1972. The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory. Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press.
Botkin, B. A. 1937. The Folkness of the Folk. The English Journal 26: 461-469.
............. 1938a. Manual For Folklore Studies, 15 August 1938. Box 69, Federal Writers' Project files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
............. 1938b. The Folk and the Individual: Their Creative Reciprocity. The English Journal 27:121-135.
............. 1940. Old and New in New England; section I. Yankee Folk. As part of the series "Background of Social-Ethnic Studies," unpublished. Box 210, Federal Writers' Project files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
..............1947. Folklore American. In 10 Eventful Years. Vol. 1, ed. Walter Yust, pp. 364-367. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.
............. ed. 1989 [1945]. Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Bronner, Simon J . 1987. American Folklore Studies: An Intellectual History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Brooks, Van Wyck. 1968 [1908]. The Wine of the Puritans. In Van Wyck Brooks, The Early Years: A Selection From His Works, 1908-1921, ed. Claire Sprague, pp. 2-59. New York: Harper.
Engels, Carl. 1935. Views and Reviews. Musical Quarterly 21: 107-112.
Federal Writers' Project. c. 1936. The American Guide and the American Guide Manual: Their Task-To Introduce America to Americans. Box 74, Federal Writers' Project files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
............. c. 1938. Portrait of the Negro as American [a book proposal outline]. Box 210, Federal Writers' Project files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
............. 1936. Supplementary Instructions No. 9 to the American Guide Manual, "Folklore and Folk Customs." Box 69, Federal Writers' Project files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
............. 1937. Supplementary Instructions No. 9E to the American Guide Manual, "Folklore, Stories from Ex-Slaves." Box 69, Federal Writers' Project files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
.............. 1938. Manual for a Guide to Composite America, Social-Ethnic Studies. Box 191, Federal Writers' Project files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Filene, Benjamin. 1991. "Our Singing Country": John and Alan Lomax, Leadbelly, and the Construction of an American Past. American Quarterly 43: 602-624.
Fredrickson, George. 1971. The Black Image in the White Mind: The D ebate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper.
Gaines, Francis P endleton. 1924. The Southern Plantation Tradition: A: Study in the Development and
Accuracy of a Tradition, New York: Peter Smith.
Gaston, Paul N. 1970. The New South C reed: A Study i n Southern M ythmaking. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Goodwyn, Lawrence. 1976. Democratic Promise: The Populist M oment in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Herskovits, Melville, and Frances Herskovits. 1958. Dahomean Narrative. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Hille, Waldemar, Herbert Haufrecht, Alan Lomax, et al., eds. 1948. The People's Songbook. New York: Boni & Gaer.
Hirsch, Jerrold. 1984. Portrait of America: The Federal Writers' Project in an Intellectual and Cultural Context. Ph.D. dissertation. Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
.......... 1987. Folklore in the Making: B. A. Botkin. Journal of American Folklore 100:3-38.
.......... 1988. Cultural Pluralism and Applied Folklore: The New Deal Precedent. In The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector, ed. Burt Feintuch, pp. 46-67. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
........... 1991. Toward a Marriage of True Minds: The Federal Writers' Project and the Writing of Southern H istory. In The Adaptable South: Essays in Honor of George Brown Tindall, ed. Elizabeth Jacoway, Dan T. Carter, Lester C. Lamon, and Robert C. McMath, Jr., pp. 148-175. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Hollinger, David. 1975. Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia. American Quarterly 27 :133-151.
Kunitz, Stanley J., and Vineta Colby, eds. 1955. Twentieth Century Authors: First Supplement. New York: H. W. Wilson.
Lears, T. J. Jackson. 1981. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lomax, Alan. 1947. Folklore. In 10 Eventful Years. V ol. 1, ed. Walter Yust, pp. 359-363. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.
........... 1950. Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton: New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz." New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce.
........... 1960. The Folk Songs of North America: In the English Language. New York: Doubleday.
Lomax, Alan, and Elizabeth Lomax. n.d. Letter to Henry G. Alsberg, National FWP Director. Box 192, Federal Writers' Project files, Works Progress Administration records, Records Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Lomax, John. 1910. Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. New York: Sturgis & Walton.
........... 1915. Some Types of American Folk-Song. Journal of American Folklore 28:1-17.
........... 1917. Self-Pity in Negro Folk-Songs. Nation 105: 141-145.
........... 1934. "Sinful Songs," of the Southern Negro. MusicalQ uarterly2 0:177-186.
........... 1947. Adventures of A Ballad Hunter. New York: Macmillan. Lomax,J ohn, and Alan Lomax, eds.
............1934. American Ballads andFolksongs. New York: Macmillan.
........... 1936. Negro Folk Songs As Sung By Lead Belly. New York: Macmillan.
........... 1941. Our Singing Country. New York: Macmillan.
........... 1947. Folk Song U.S.A. New York: Macmillan.
McNutt, James. 1982. Beyond Regionalism: Texas Folklorists and the Emergence of a Post- Regional Consciousness. Ph.D. dissertation. American Studies, University of Texas at Austin.
O'Brien, Michael. 1980. The Idea ofthe South: 1929-1941. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rice, Lawrence D. 1971. The Negro in Texas: 1874-1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Roucek, Joseph S., Caroline F. Ware, and Morton W. Royse. 1940. Approaches to the Study of Nationality Groups in the United States: Summary of the Discussion. In The Cultural Approach to History, ed. Caroline F. Ware, pp. 86-89. New York: Columbia University Press.
Singal, Daniel. 1982. The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
........ 1986. Towards a Definition of American Modernism. In Modernist Culture in America, ed. Daniel Singal, pp. 1-27. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.
Sitkoff, Harvard. 1978. A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue. Volume I: The Depression Decade. N ew York: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Lillian. 1949. Killers of the Dream. New York: W. W. Norton.
Solomon, Barbara. 1956. Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition. Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press.
Sosna, Morton. 1977. In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue. N ew York:
Columbia University Press.
Stekert, Ellen J. 1968. Tylor's Theory of Survivals and National Romanticism: Their Influence on Early American Folksong Collectors. Southern Folklore Quarterly 32: 226-236.
Taylor, William R . 1957. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and the American National Character.
New York: Harper & Row.
Tindall, George B. 1967. The Emergencoef the New South: 1913-1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Titon, Jeff Todd. 1977. Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
.............. 1987. History and Fiction in Blues Biography: The Case of John Lomax and Huddie Ledbetter. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Philadelphia.
Wilgus, D. K. 1959. Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Williams, John Alexander. 1975. Radicalism and Professionalism in Folklore Studies: A Comparative Approach. Journal of the Folklore Institute 11: 211-239.
Williamson, Joel. 1984. The Crucible of Race: B lack-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zumwalt, Rosemary. 1988. American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.