The Man Who Recorded the World: A Biography of Alan Lomax by John Szwed

Author:John Szwed [Szwed, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Music, Social Science, Folklore, Memoir
ISBN: 9780434012329
Google: MhEjmqfTEhsC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-10-14T11:00:00+00:00

Alan returned to the Folklore Institute at Indiana University in midsummer 1946 to lecture on “Certain Directions in Folklore Studies” and “Techniques of Field Recording,” this time with Svatava Jakobson, with whom he was now having an affair, and who joined him in giving the lectures. In New York he returned to producing concerts with a new urgency, raising money, scripting, staging, doing nearly all the work himself. He aimed to present the performers under the best circumstances he could manage and, if at all possible, in support of some cause that he favored. Nothing daunted him, not even the high ground of Carnegie Hall. And why not Carnegie, which from its beginnings had been made available for all kinds of benevolent and partisan causes? Duke Ellington’s 1943 premiere of Black, Brown and Beige, for example, was staged on behalf of Russian War Relief, a group created to help with the famines that drove many Eastern Europeans into Russia, and one that would be labeled a Communist front organization before the year was up. That spring, Alan organized a People’s Songs concert for Russian War Relief, with sponsors such as Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, former New York governor Herbert Lehman, John Hammond, and actress Helen Hayes. Alan was the concert’s master of ceremonies, or “narrator,” as the radio generation dubbed him.

The success of the concert was such that when he heard that Town Hall could be rented cheaply after the regular repertory was finished for the evening, Alan proposed to People’s Songs that they back him for a series of midnight shows built around musical themes. It was a risk, but he was counting on the public’s willingness to come out for late Saturday night concerts of musics to which New York had not yet been exposed. He would call the series “The Midnight Special,” “the train that would bring folk singers of every race and nationality to New York City.” He knew how to pitch these performances to the press with the passion of an Aimee Semple McPherson and the shrewdness of a P. T. Barnum:We plan to cover the whole field of American folk music systematically in these concerts. Most of the people in the first few programs have been heard in New York before, but as quickly as possible we’re going to bring in unknown, unrecorded people who sing folk songs naturally just because they like to.... Right from the start these concerts are going to be different from anything that’s been heard in New York so far.... They’re going to be sort of conversation pieces. I’ll do the narration and explain the songs and the singers will tell stories and their life histories. And they’ll say the damndest things in the world on the stage. I know them. They’ve had experiences in the lost regions of American life. When the audience leaves they’ll know these people as human beings.

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