Miserable but Exciting Songs

A father and his 18-year-old son--the father a scholar, the son a filial zealot--set out to record the folk songs of the U.S. When John Lomax had broken his son to the trail, young Alan went on alone. Between them the Lomaxes recorded 10,000 songs, many of which had never been heard more than five miles from the prisons, corrals or lumber camps where the Lomaxes found them.

This week the Library of Congress, a new entry in the record market, was selling, as fast as they could be processed, five unbreakable vinylite albums ($6 and $7 each) of Lomax-collected blues, "hollers," Appalachian ballads and sacred songs. As in the first six albums, released by the Library in February 1943, the voices had a native vitality that few nightclub singers could match, though some of the records had the noisy roughness of performances made far from recording studios.

In Perry County, Ky., a candidate for sheriff thumbed a banjo and sang a long ballad about a cabin boy on the ship Golden Willow Tree. The cabin boy had been promised the captain's daughter in marriage if he would sink a rival ship, The Roverie. The cabin boy "bored nine holes" in the Roverie and then:

He turned upon his breast and back swum he

Crying, O the lonesome land so low . . .

Captain O Captain, come take me on board,

And do unto me as good as your word,

For I sank 'em in the lowland lonesome low,

I sank her in the lowland so low.

The Captain failed to keep his promise, so the cabin boy

. . . turned upon his head and down swum he,

Crying O the lonesome land so low . . .

He swum till he came to the bottom of the sea,

Sank himself in the lowland lonesome low. . . .

The Lomaxes discovered that a Negro folk musician would sing either religious or "sinful" songs, but seldom both. To find the "sinful made-up" songs they had to go where there were plenty of sinful Negroes--the State penitentiaries. On a Mississippi prison farm Convict Joe Baker (alias Seldom Seen) told them: "I never had been in no trouble wid de law . . . but one fellow kept messin' up my homely affairs, so I blowed him down." Then he sang:

Heah I is, bowed down wid shame;

I got a number instead of a name,

Ninety-nine years, in prison fuh life,

All I ever done was to kill my wife.

Weevils & Bulls. The Lomaxes followed The Boll Weevil Song ("Boll Weevil done et my cotton, done started in on my corn") from Texas to the Atlantic, recording a different version of the little bug at each stop. They went to Tennessee for the sad saga of Coal Creek mine disasters ("No more pay days at Coal Creek").

In 1937 Alan was hired by the Library of Congress as a $1,620-a-year assistant in charge of the Folk Song Archive. He sent song-collecting expeditions into Mexico and South America, to the reservations of the Six Nations Indians. He and his wife Elizabeth were married in Haiti, recorded voodoo rituals on their honeymoon. Today the Library has 25,000 songs on discs.

In 1939 Alan Lomax went on the air, introduced Burl (Blue-Tailed Fly) Ives, Josh (One Meat Ball) White, Woody (Dust Bowl Ballads) Guthrie and Lead Belly, a Negro minstrel who had done time for murder, and was an encyclopedia of "sinful" songs (TIME, May 15, 1939). Lomax, now a hefty Army private, disapproves of his own twangy Texas voice, uses it constantly to "sell the Archive." At sings late at night in his Greenwich Village apartment, he is often joined by his sister, Bess Lomax Hawes, who has handled the music for OWI's overseas broadcasts. By last week the Library of Congress had employed four clerks to handle 30,000 inquiries about his records. He describes the albums as: "Plain and unadulterated folk song, usually about death, sweat, hard work, love. No fancy-pants stuff like Oklahoma!. Miserable people make the most exciting music I ever heard." When he gets out of the Army he hopes to take American folk songs to Russia, bring back Soviet ballads. The Russians, he says, use folk songs to make their minorities feel better and "we should do that too."

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