All sorts of music flourished, from hard-bitten industrial songs to cowboy laments, from traditional ballads to new string-band compositions, blues with a political thrust, and just about anything else having to do with the “folk.” That is, a folk consciousness took hold, as the country survived the hard times, with great difficulty, while emphasizing its traditional democratic values and hearty spirit. In 1927 104 million records were sold, but only 6 million in 1932. The smaller record companies collapsed, and the larger ones barely survived, but folk music could easily be heard over the airwaves, in cowboy movies, at live concerts, on union picket lines, or picked up from sheet music, song folios, and the larger commercial songbooks. The government promoted the collection of field recordings from throughout the country. It was indeed a dynamic decade for collecting and disseminating the nation’s rich cultural legacy.
John Lomax had abandoned his folk music collecting and publishing through the 1920s, but in 1932 he again found himself giving lectures about cowboy songs and planning a new book. Indeed, assisted particularly by his son Alan, the elderly Lomax, now in his midsixties, had begun a grueling schedule that lasted through the decade. He was named “Honorary Consultant” to the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress in 1932, and while he had no salary, he could use the archive’s valuable recording equipment and the prestige of representing the federal government. Most of his time would now be devoted to collecting folk songs through the South. He particularly liked prison camps, thinking that black prisoners, in particular, cut off from modern society and hardly tainted by popular music, served as a unique repository of traditional songs. This was a romantic and exaggerated view, but nonetheless served Lomax well in his search for interesting singers and songs. For example, he first met the gifted songster Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, at Angola Prison Farm in Louisiana in 1933.
Despite his busy schedule, and with the assistance of Alan, John Lomax managed to publish American Ballads and Folk Songs in 1934 (a second volume, Our Singing Country, followed in 1941). This was a rich collection of songs that focused on work and survival. “A life of isolation, without books or newspapers or telephone or radio, breeds songs and ballads,” Lomax argued. “The gamut of human experiences has been portrayed through this unrecorded (at least until recently) literature of the people.” Upon Lead Belly’s release from prison in 1934, Lomax hired him as a driver and introduced him to northern audiences, where he performed the amazing repertoire of songs that would inspire generations of music fans. In 1936 John and Alan published Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly. As John Lomax explained, “Alan and I were looking particularly for the songs of the Negro laborer, the words of which sometimes reflect the tragedies of imprisonment, cold, hunger, heat, the injustice of the white man. Fortunately for us and, it turned out, fortunately for him, Lead Belly had been fond of this type of songs.”
Commercialization of Folk Music
