MUSIC
Jim Denham looks at the life work of musicologist Alan Lomax, who died last month.
When the great blues guitarist and singer Big Bill Broonzy toured Britain in the 1950s, he was accompanied by the man who had (supposedly) "discovered" him, Alan Lomax.
Audiences were dismayed to find that the price of hearing Broonzy included being subjected to a tedious, rambling lecture on the history of American blues and folk music, delivered by Lomax. George Melly describes how, at one point Lomax said "And when you hear Big Bill...", at which the bluesman, as bored as the audience, muttered "If they ever do!".
This incident typifies one aspect of Lomax's personality and role in American music, and why his recent death has provoked some controversy.
Dave Marsh, a historian of black American music, wrote in Counterpunch (a radical American publication): "Seeing Alan Lomax's obituary on the front page of the New York Times irked the hell out of me. Harry Smith syndrome all over again - the Great White 'Discoverer' as the axis of cultural genesis." Marsh goes on to accuse Lomax of "stupid 'folklorist' purism that ruined the folk music revival", and - worse - of exploiting the material of his "discoveries", notably Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter's song Goodnight Irene, which Lomax copyrighted in his own name because he knew that the Weavers (a white folk group led by Pete Seeger) were about to have a huge hit with it.
According to Marsh, Lomax "adamantly refused to take his name off the song, or to surrender income from it, even though Leadbelly's family was impoverished in the wake of his death two years earlier".
But there is another way of looking at Alan Lomax: after all, he did bring the music of Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters and many others, to public attention. He took pains to ensure that the music he recorded and documented was placed in its social context and frequently interviewed musicians, encouraging them to tell their stories of poverty and racism. Without him (or someone like him), the blues revival and the folk music movement would not have happened.
Sure, he was a prissy "purist" (he led the assault on Bob Dylan's sound system at Newport in 1965), and he hated the rock 'n' roll and r'n'b styles that, paradoxically, his work had done so much to bring about. But his love of blues, folk and all manner of other "ethnic" music was genuine enough. It would not be an exaggeration to describe him as the spiritual father of "world music".
Though not a particularly strong jazz enthusiast, Lomax also contributed to the traditional jazz revival of the 1940s and '50s, with his extraordinary series of recordings (for the Library of Congress) of the pianist, braggart, pool-shark, pimp and self-proclaimed "inventor of jazz and swing", Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton. These recordings, on which Morton plays, sings (in a strangely plaintive manner) and reminisces about his early days in New Orleans, are probably Lomax's finest achievement and represent an invaluable insight into the history of jazz.
For that alone, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. Or, as Arlo Guthrie puts it in a response to Dave Marsh:
"When we need to research certain songs we will be delving into Lomax's Folk Songs of North America for the next few hundred years. Sure he was an asshole...but he wasn't the only one. I loved Alan Lomax for the good he did, as I love many others whose sense of integrity may be somewhat different from my own".
