Pioneer of the people's music

BIOGRAPHY: The Man Who Recorded the World: A Biography of Alan LomaxBy John Szwed, Heinemann, 438pp. £20

IT’S LIKE a scene from a Coen brothers movie: a Model A Ford pulls up outside a prison farm in a remote corner of Louisiana in the 1930s and out step two men, one middle-aged, one teenaged, and brush down their clothes, creased from weeks of travelling and camping out. The man is John Lomax, a Texan folklorist on a field trip to collect prison songs, and the boy is his son, Alan, who has taken time off from his studies at the University of Texas to help his dad. The back seat of the Ford has been torn out to make room for the pair’s recording equipment, which includes a newfangled disc-cutting recorder, vacuum-tube amplifier, blank aluminium discs, microphone, mixing board and all the accoutrements of a mobile studio.

The prison farm, known locally as Angola, after the African country from which many slaves were shipped, is bordered on three sides by the Mississippi, and most of its inmates are there for life. Armed with a letter of introduction from the Library of Congress, in Washington DC, the Lomaxes get permission from the warden to begin recording the prisoners’ folk songs – their interest is in secular songs rather than spirituals – and they set up their gear and go to work.

One of the prisoners is a big, imposing man named Huddie Ledbetter, who is serving six to 10 years for assault, after he defended himself against three white men who tried to push him off the sidewalk. Known as Lead Belly because he’d been shot in the stomach during the course of his tough life, he’s also known for his prowess on the 12-string guitar and his vast repertoire of songs, which takes in blues, gospel, folk and even vaudeville. The Lomaxes realise they have hit a musical mother lode, and record as many of Lead Belly’s songs and stories as they can get on to 11 disc sides.

During this same trip, which takes the Lomaxes through Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, with a short detour into Kentucky, they record a song made up by a black tenant farmer, detailing the daily hardship he endures working the cotton fields. The 17-year-old Alan has an epiphany. He realises that his calling is not merely to collect songs for storage in a musty library, as his father has been doing, but to keep them alive and get them heard by as many people as possible. For Lomax, archiving had become a political act, and he would use his collected songs to lobby for change. “I saw what I had to do,” he said. “My job was to get . . . these views, these feelings, this unheard majority onto the centre of the stage.”

Over the course of his career as the US's best-known folklorist and ethnomusicologist, Alan Lomax uncovered the talents of Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Jelly Roll Morton, and compiled a vast archive of folk songs that might otherwise have been lost to the world. His influence stretches from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan to such modern pop artists as Moby, and some of the field recordings he made found their way on to the soundtracks of the Coens' O Brother Where Art Thou? and Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. He also helped to break down racial and cultural barriers, introducing black musicians to a predominantly white audience and encouraging the fusion of blues and folk that would evolve into rock'n'roll. He may not be the father of modern rock, but he probably wrote its birth certificate.

LOMAX DIDN'Tjust collect and record songs from the most obscure backwaters of the US: he also learned to play and sing them with an accomplished style, performing them on his own scripted radio shows and on lecture tours. He was an evangelist for down-home folk music, and wanted to bring the songs of sharecroppers, chain gangs, stevedores and railway workers into the schools and colleges. Like the English folk archivist Cecil Sharp, Lomax believed that the identity of the US was intertwined with the ballads and work songs of ordinary folk, and he saw it as his God-given mission to go forth and harvest as many of them as humanly possible.

Though he was constantly impressed by the raw talent he uncovered in the one-horse towns he visited, he was also shocked by the poverty and injustice he encountered. As a student at Harvard he was a radical, taking up the cause of labour organisers such as Edith Berkman, and toyed with the idea of becoming a communist; years later the FBI investigated him for alleged membership of the Communist Party, and he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and forced to move to the UK to find freelance work.

John Szwed’s biography is meticulous, measured and finely detailed – fitting for a subject who went to great pains to build up and collate his musical archive. Szwed first met Lomax in 1961, at a meeting of the newly formed Society for Ethnomusicology, got to know him and worked with him at various times over the next 10 years. Lomax was a colourful, commanding character with an educated Texan twang – one blues scholar recalls him crossing Oxford Street in London during rush hour in the late 1950s “without looking at the traffic and relying only on his height, his beard and a white raincoat with a tartan lining to get him across safely”.

Lomax was born in Austin, Texas, in 1915, and suffered from asthma and sinus infections as a child. During his early years he was schooled at home by his mother, Bess, using pioneering teaching methods established by Maria Montessori. When he eventually attended school he got consistently high grades, and was soon being groomed for Harvard.

While in his freshman year at the University of Texas Alan and some of his friends would risk expulsion by making night-time excursions to the wrong side of the tracks, into Austin’s black neighbourhoods, to drink bootleg beer, listen to local blues singers and visit black-owned record shops. He had a passion for the records of Blind Willie Johnson. “It wasn’t a matter of folklore,” he recalled. “It was the way I felt.”

He took that feeling into his work as an archivist and folklorist, tirelessly travelling the length and breadth of the US in search of songs, and going even farther afield, into the Caribbean, Haiti, Spain, England, Italy and Ireland. On his Irish jaunt he met up with the master piper Seamus Ennis, who agreed to help him find the right singers and musicians, and recorded the Queen of the Tinkers, Margaret Barry, singing She Moved Through the Fair. His recordings in Haiti, which lay undiscovered at the Library of Congress for decades, have just been released as a box set, and provide a timely window into Haitian folklore.

THE WOMEN INLomax's life usually travelled with him on his never-ending expeditions into uncharted musical territory. His first wife, Elizabeth, whom he divorced after 12 years, assisted him on several field trips. While living in London, Lomax was romantically involved with the English folk singer Shirley Collins, but Szwed dwells little on Lomax's love life.

Behind the tape hiss, Lomax had been listening for deeper cultural meanings in the music he was collecting, and he began developing his own theories of ethnomusicology, using his archive to draw connections between the music styles and social mores of different regions and cultures. It doesn’t seem so radical today, but in Lomax’s time such forensic attention to folk detail was considered ambitious if not pedantic.

This biography is essential reading for any amateur folklorist, giving insights into the working methods of a true pioneer, showing why musical diversity is always worth preserving, and proving that a nation’s true musical riches lie in the hearts and larynxes of its people.

Kevin Courtney is an Irish Timesjournalist