After collecting songs in the Georgia Sea Islands and Haiti, in 1937 he was appointed director of the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress and immediately began his collecting travels through Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Vermont. He recorded hundreds of songs for the Library of Congress. He also launched a radio series for CBS’s American School of the Air in late 1939, aimed at children, which was quickly followed by the adult-oriented Back Where I Come From. Lomax introduced the public to Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Burl Ives, the Golden Gate Quartet, and Pete Seeger. Always on the go, with seemingly unlimited energy and a creative spirit, he recorded lengthy interviews with Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, and Aunt Molly Jackson, the wife of a Kentucky coal miner who wrote vivid songs about their terrible living conditions, for the Library of Congress. He was anxious to document not only the most traditional black and white performers, but also those using folk styles to explore contemporary topics,such as Guthrie, who captured the plight of the rural poor displaced from their farms in Oklahoma who moved to California. Born in 1912, Woody would become, with Lomax’s help, a significant composer and musical influence. His “This Land Is Your Land” eventually became the unofficial national anthem, but not until the 1960s, just before his death in 1967.
Lomax traveled throughout the country recording traditional songs and ballads from scores of singers, which he dutifully deposited in the Library of Congress. But he was also promoting and encouraging newly written topical songs that would advocate labor unions, civil rights, world peace, and generally challenge the status quo. He was part and parcel of the upsurge during the Depression of grassroots organizing as well as an increased interest, at all levels, in the country’s folk culture. Michael Denning (1996) has tried to capture this broad tendency in The Cultural Front: “The result of the encounter between a powerful democratic social movement—the Popular Front—and the modern cultural apparatuses of mass entertainment and education.” He continues: “For the first time in the history of the United States, a working-class culture had made a significant imprint on the dominant cultural institutions…. Vernacular musics like jazz, blues, and country resonated around the world.” That is, folk music had moved from the undercurrents of society into the mainstream, where it would continue, off and on, throughout the century.
Labor/activist songs had existed throughout the nineteenth century, from worker and abolitionist tunes to farmers’ laments and spirituals, and more overtly political songs connected with union and agrarian upheavals. They appeared in scores of songsters and broadsides, while others turned up in labor publications. By the early twentieth century there was a strong legacy of using songs for labor organizing purposes, although the connection to the folk was sometimes tenuous. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies), a radical labor movement, used popular song melodies, as well as familiar religious tunes, to carry their musical messages. The IWW first published Songs of the Workers: On the Road in the Jungles and in the Shops in 1909. Better known as “The Little Red Song Book”, it was small enough to fit into a shirt or back pocket and traveled the length of the land, spreading the songs of Joe Hill (“Casey Jones—The Union Scab”), T-Bone Slim (“I’m Too Old to Be a Scab”), Ralph Chaplin (“Paint ’Er Red,” to the tune of “Marching Through Georgia”), as well as “The Marseillaise” and “The Internationale.” (“The Little Red Song Book” is still in print.) The Socialist Party also printed songbooks, as did various labor unions by the 1930s, filled with a variety of labor-oriented tunes, old and new.
Alan Lomax
