American Folktales: from the Collections of the Library of Congress by Lindahl Carl;

Author:Lindahl, Carl; [Peggy A. Bulger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 2058298
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

7

The Nation's Most Celebrated Folklore Collectors

John A. and Alan Lomax

If any two people bear responsibility for shaping the Archive of American Folk Song (AAFS) into the preeminent storehouse of the nation's folkloric memory they are John Avery Lomax (1867-1948) and his son Alan (1915-2002), whose feats in collecting folklore are nearly as legend evoking as the names of the great folk artists they recorded: Texas Gladden, Woody Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson, Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter, Blind Willie McTell, Jelly Roll Morton, Henry Truvillion, and innumerable others.

Working with cumbersome and faulty equipment (including a mis-wired recording machine that weighed over 300 pounds) mounted on overburdened cars, they traveled barely navigable mountain, desert, and marshland roads in search of singers whose voices they would ultimately share with the nation. Particularly when attempting to cross the color barrier in the segregated South of the 1930s, they encountered social troubles as tough as the country they traversed. Having sent ahead word to a South Carolina prison that they were coming to collect music from the inmates, they were met by an angry warden who told them to leave immediately; the prisoners, believing the Lomaxes to befederal agents coming to save them from their jailors, threatening to riot. In order to collect folksongs from French-speaking blacks in Louisiana, Alan traveled in secret, avoiding the disapproving eyes of the whites. In preparation for one journey, he lay down with his 300-pound machine in a truckbed. Man and machine were then concealed under a pile of sugarcane stalks so they could be driven to a remote location where recording could proceed in safety.

In spite of many such technological and social adversities, the Lomaxes laid the foundation of the AAFS virtually by themselves. Of the first 3,000 recordings

Uncle Billie McCrea (right) with John A. Lomax (center), collector of stories 85–91, 98–101, and 111–113. (Library of Congress)

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