This episode was written and produced by Fil Corbitt.

Alan Lomax believed that the culture of poor Americans was important and worthy of saving. So he spent decades traveling the American South to record obscure musicians on their front porches, in churches, even in prisons. Today, he's considered an American icon, but the road to becoming a legend wasn't an easy one. Featuring Southern Historical Collection archivist Chaitra Powell, American Folklife Center curator Todd Harvey, and filmmaker Rogier Kappers.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Vacation (Instrumental) by Johnny Stimson
Wonder by Sunshine Recorder
A Run at Midnight by Dustin Lau
Reality by STVN
St. Augustine Red by Cafe Nostro
An Oddly Formal Dance by Calumet
Capering by Calumet
Three Stories by Skittle
Daymaze by Orange Cat
Spins and Never Falls by TinyTiny Trio

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Archival recordings in this episode came from the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity.

Check out Rogier’s documentary “Lomax the Songhunter” on Amazon.

For more information on the crowdsourcing project for transcribing Alan Lomax’s notes, visit crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/alan-lomax.

Subscribe to The Wind where ever you get your podcasts.

View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz…

[music in]

Chaitra: Where do you go to find out about yourself? Where do you go to find out about your community?

This is Chaitra Powell.

Chaitra: And if you say, "I talk to my grandmother” or “I go to the barbershop and ask a question," and then you ask yourself like, "Okay, so that knowledge that I'm gaining, where is that preserved?” How do you make that available for future generations?

Chaitra is the African American Collections and Outreach Archivist for an archive called the Southern Historical Collection.

Chaitra: And so, like at family gatherings, how I try to explain what it is I do is, I try to think of ourselves as memory keepers and the centralized place where you go to find out about fill in the blank.

[music out]

When you imagine “archives,” you might think of cabinets full of documents, but culture goes so far beyond just written words....

Chaitra: A lot of archives are built based on words on paper, and not every community writes words on papers to tell their story. And so can we think about oral history or sound?

[Music clip:“Love’s Worse than Sickness”]

[music in]

The unfortunate reality is that culture doesn’t last forever. The way people speak, the way they sing... these things change faster than you might expect.

As radio stations began to beam across vast landscapes in the early 20th century1, the unique sounds, the accents, and the music that people sang began to be replaced by a more popular… more homogenous culture.

Luckily, there was someone who recognized the importance of these sounds, and made it his mission to preserve them. His name was Alan Lomax.

Reporting this story is producer Fil Corbitt. This episode was made in partnership with their new podcast called, “The Wind.”

[music out]

Hey Fil.

Fil: Hey Dallas

So why Alan Lomax?

Fil: One day I was falling down a Youtube rabbit hole, and I clicked on this video.

[Music clip: Algia Mae Porch Party]

Fil: It’s this kind of shaky, grainy video of all these people on a front porch in North Carolina. Blues Musician Algia Mae Hinton is shredding the electric guitar while all these people, some of them looking very inebriated, just dance and stomp and clap around her...at one point this shirtless guy shuffles across the frame. And it’s just an incredible window into this moment.

So Alan Lomax recorded this?

Fil: Yeah, exactly. That Youtube video is from the 1980s, so it’s way later in Lomax’s career. There are a couple dozen videos from this party, another highlight is this guy named James Jr. Thomas singing and blowing into like, two Pepsi bottles at the same time.

[Music clip]

Fil: And if you start clicking around you realize there are hundreds if not thousands of videos and audio recordings like this.

[Music clip: scratchy guitar music]

Fil: Back when he got his start in the 1930s, Lomax saw these American micro-cultures and these region-specific genres of music and singing, and he realized that they were evaporating. So he made it his mission to capture all this stuff before it disappeared forever.3

Todd: Alan Lomax is the man who recorded the world.

Fil: This is Todd Harvey.

Todd Harvey: I'm a curator of the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, which is a special collection division at the Library of Congress4

Fil: Todd oversees the archives that Lomax recorded and collected starting in the 1930s.

Todd: The early part of his career is the most famous part. And that's when he was driving around the United States with a recorder in his car, meeting people who would later become famous, like McKinley Morganfield, who turned up as Muddy Waters a few years later, recording Woody Guthrie, meeting Pete Seeger.

[music out]

Fil: For instance, here’s Lomax interviewing a young Muddy Waters on a Mississippi farm in the early forties.

[SFX Clip: “Lomax: Tell me a little of the story of it, if you don’t mind, I mean if it’s not too personal, I mean I wanna know the facts, and how you felt and why you felt the way you did. That’s a very beautiful song.”

Waters: Well, I just felt blue and the song came into my mind, and it come to me just like that song, and I just start to singing, and went on.

And how do you have that guitar tuned? What’s the name of that tuning?

Waters: Spanish.

Lomax: Spanish. [SFX: Guitar strums]]

Fil: On these trips, Alan would simply drive around and record people in their own homes, their churches or on their front porch. He had this big instantaneous vinyl record recorder that fit into the trunk of his car.7

Todd: He had the ability to hook it to his car battery, although he could also use whatever electricity source he had if anybody had electricity where he was recording. And he had a long microphone cable, 50, 100 feet of microphone cable. So he could back his car up to your house and then pull the machine up to the porch so he could sit with you and write and make recordings and you'd sing into a single microphone...

[Music clip: I’m never to Marry]

Fil: Alan Lomax wasn’t just an archivist. He was also a musician who would learn to perform the songs he was recording. And he was a promoter. He’d throw concerts and what he became very well known for was his radio broadcasts. He would compile songs and interviews and turn them into radio shows, so the sounds of a house party in North Carolina [SFX: radio static, tuning into a station with sounds of a house party + music] could be beamed across the country.

[Music clip continued: Three Nights Drunk]

Fil: Alan Lomax didn’t stumble into archival work on his own. He was introduced to it by one of the world’s other most famous archivists... John Lomax. AKA, Alan’s dad.6

[Music clip: K.C. Blues]

Todd: John Lomax is an interesting guy. He was born in the 1860s and had worked for a little time in higher education and decided that he wanted to get a master's degree at Harvard, and his topic of choice was cowboy songs that he had heard when he was growing up in Texas. And so he wrote a book called Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads that came out in 1910.

Fil: When the depression hit, John Lomax found himself out of work and decided to take up an old hobby -- recording cowboy songs and traditional American music.6

Todd: And Alan was quite young at the time, only in his teens and went along with his father on these early field trips and himself got hooked.

[music out]

Fil: John Lomax landed a job as a curator for the Library of Congress. He, along with his kids, recorded musicians all across the American South. And when John left the Library of Congress to move back to Texas, Alan basically took over the archive.

[music in: An Oddly Formal Dance]

Fil: Lomax oversaw a small army of archivists that the federal government hired under the Works Progress Administration -- a federal arts program during the New Deal. As Todd Harvey puts it, the mission of the Library of Congress was to collect Knowledge and Wisdom.

Todd: And what they realized was, that they were doing a really good job with knowledge. They were collecting maps and books of politics and laws, but they were lacking in wisdom. And so they founded the Archive of American Folk Song and later, the American Folklife Center, because wisdom comes from the voices of ordinary people... And that is the stories of people, their songs, photographs of them working, of them dancing and of them talking about their religion, of them talking about their everyday life. This is the wisdom of the people, and it belongs in the National Library.

[music out]

Fil: So much of what we know about old American music comes from the Lomaxes.2

Fil: They saved prison labor camp songs:

[Music clip: Parchman Farm Prison, Berta Berta]

Fil: They recorded cowboy tunes:

[Music clip: Git Along little doggies]

Fil: They made collections of bluegrass music.

[Music clip: Fortune]

Fil: And they helped keep these styles from fading into obscurity. Like this recording from the Mississippi Hill Country:

[Music clip: Chevrolet]

Fil: I don’t know about you, but when I think of Mississippi folk music, I don’t normally think of fife and clapping. And had nobody been there to record it, it’s hard to say if we’d even know it existed.

[music out]

Fil: But what we have now is this incredible collection of unique songs recorded in intimate settings. The Alan Lomax Collection is a physical archive in the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress5.

Todd: This is one of my favorite things in the world to do, to go and be with the physical materials in the Lomax Collection.

[music in]

Todd: So you're walking down [SFX] this beautiful arched hallway that is marble up to your shoulder and with decorative paintings and in different bright colors, and the hallway is about a block long. So it's a really long hallway and there are the sounds of people coming and going [SFX], walking by you, book carts [SFX] and patrons and tourists [SFX].

Fil: Then you have to go through a locked door...

Todd: And suddenly you're in the hold of a ship is what it feels like. You're in concrete and cast iron stacks that were built, especially for the library. And you're on the ground floor and you have to go down to the basement. And so if you take the elevator a little tiny elevator down to deck 50, you'd go down and it's dark and it's cool. It's 68 degrees and 35% relative humidity. And there are cast steel doors that you have to open. It's a little bit intimidating. [SFX: Large double door opening]

Fil: And here, you see rows and rows of archival boxes.

Todd: And it smells like paper and it's clean, it's not dusty. And it's quite orderly. All the boxes are tan and they have labels on them in the same place. And so you see rows and rows of boxes. And in among these are the Lomax Collection.

Fil: Though the room is quiet, within its stacks sit the weird, the old, the sometimes forgotten sounds of America.

[music out]

Fil: I think what makes these recordings beautiful is that they show music as something that isn’t just a commercial good. People played these songs to bond with their communities, they used them to deal with prison labor, they used songs to pass family stories down, and they just sang to sing.

Rogier: I remember that my grandmother, she was always singing songs. She had a song to every little subject that you could imagine.

Fil: This is Rogier Kappers. He made a documentary called Lomax the Songhunter.

[music in]

Rogier: Everybody is music and music is in everybody. That is really what Lomax stands for. Music is not just about stardom and rock and roll and big music industry. it's real people singing…even if it's not completely in tune, it's not produced, it's not processed, it's raw and authentic. And that's what I found very inspiring about Lomax.

Fil: Rogier decided to follow in Alan Lomax’s footsteps and search for people that sung into Alan’s tape recorder.7 He too found a rich world of tradition and music, played by normal people. And that’s what Alan was all about.

Rogier: He was kind of a Robin Hood like figure who was hunting songs and then standing for normal people, for their culture, for their music. Always looking for the best song or good song. Yeah, it has something very romantic indeed.

[music out]

Fil: But similar Robin Hood, Alan Lomax did gain some powerful enemies.

[music in]

Todd: As the FBI became a little more of a political force in the United States under J. Edgar Hoover, so did their interest in his political activities grow.

That’s coming up, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Back in the 1930s, Alan Lomax traveled the country recording obscure musicians of all stripes for the Library of Congress. Lomax believed that the culture of poor Americans was important, and worthy of saving. And it was these same beliefs that led to an investigation by the FBI.

[music out]

So Fil, as one department of the federal government was paying Lomax to record music from everyday Americans, another part of the government was investigating him for doing his job?

Fil: Pretty much, yeah. So this started during his early work in the 1930s.8

[music in]

Todd: Certainly, the 1930s was a polarized political time, where actions even though they might've been benign were seen by others as dangerous or corruptive in some way. And being an advocate of poor people was a threat in some corners.

Fil: At the time, Alan was also hosting radio programs with racially and culturally diverse musicians, which was rare and even taboo back then.9

Todd: And kind of by chance, the FBI got interested in him and he was set to perform for the King and Queen of England at the White House...

Fil: But Alan’s career had even upset members of his own family. Before the performance, a relative in Texas called the FBI to report that Alan was a dangerous radical who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the White House, or the King and Queen of England.

Todd: And the way Alan told it was, he was in the green room and he was getting ready to go on and people kept bumping into him and in fact it was the secret service patting him down.

[music out]

Fil: The agents didn’t find anything on him, so the performance was allowed to proceed. But FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover still had it out for Lomax.

Todd: Hoover himself wrote to the Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, and asked him to fire Lomax because of his political beliefs. And MacLeish refused, but by October of '42, Lomax did leave the Library.

[music in]

Fil: Nobody really knows if it was a backroom deal that pushed Alan out of his post, but things only got worse from there. In 1950, the anti-communist journal Counterattack published a piece called “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.” The piece accused 151 actors, musicians, writers and journalists of being Communist sympathizers. It included people like playwright Arthur MIller, actor and director Orson Welles, and Alan Lomax.15

Todd: Because of his listing in Red Channels, Alan was blacklisted and had to leave the United States because he could get no work and he spent the 1950s in Europe scratching out a living, doing radio broadcasts and producing sound recordings. He was able to continue making a living, but it certainly impacted his perspective about the United States government and his politics.

[music out]

Fil: In 1959, after the Red Scare had calmed down, Lomax returned to America. He continued his recording trips through the American south, and also started recording in the Carribean. This was recorded in Trinidad, in 1962.

[Music clip: The Rain Is Falling Very Hard]

Fil: In the 70s, Lomax got the chance to broadcast the music of the world farther than ever before.

[music in]

Todd: In the mid 70s, Lomax is very well known among intellectual circles and cultural circles in the United States. And he came to the attention of Carl Sagan who had been tapped to create the playlist for the Voyager Gold Record, this disc of humanity's statement to the Cosmos that will be launched, and even now is winding its way past the edges of the solar system to whatever awaits it. 12

Fil: Much of the first group of songs on the Golden Record were Western art music. [SFX] So Bach, Beethoven, stuff like that. Sagan asked Lomax to help bring some songs that would better represent the human experience.13

Todd: And when he asked Lomax about it, Lomax said, "Oh my God, Carl, what do we do? And this is not representative of people of Earth at all."

Fil: So Lomax talked Sagan into including over a dozen songs, including a Peruvian panpipe tune [music out] [SFX], a Navajo chant [SFX], and Azerbaijani bagpipe song [music clip: Azerbaijani bagpipes].

Fil: Lomax wanted to make sure the Golden Record included the broadest range of music possible. Because when you start looking, you realize that there are just endless styles of music, and Lomax’s recordings prove that. Take for example traditional music of the American south. It sounds like a pretty cohesive genre, but even within that, there is so much variety.

Fil: Like this banjo tune from northern Alabama:

[Music clip: Alabama banjo tune]

Fil: But just one state over, here are the Georgia Sea Island Singers:

[Music clip: Georgia Sea Island Singers]

Fil: Well -- one is instrumental and the other is an acapella religious song. So of course they sound different. But here is another acapella religious song from the south that sounds totally different.

[Music clip: Kentucky acapella song]

Fil: That one was from Kentucky...then here’s another song from West Virginia.

[Music clip: West Virginia song]  Fil: And finally one Lomax recorded in Tennessee.

[Music clip: Tennessee song]

Fil: So even within that general region, there is so much variation in culture. And Lomax believed that America’s strength -- and the world’s strength -- came from honoring these cultures and treating them with the respect, the curiosity and the care that we afford our own.10

[music out]

[music in]

Fil: Lomax devoted his life to recording communities that had been largely ignored by the outside world. Many of these people had never heard their own culture represented in recorded music. In a 1991 interview with CBS, Lomax explained that just hearing your own music played back for the first time can be life changing.

[SFX clip: Lomax: The incredible thing is that when you could play this material back to people, it changed everything for them. They realized that their stuff and they were just as good as anybody else.]

Fil: Lomax continued to record folk music well into old age, and was an early advocate of sharing songs through the internet. He died in 2002, at the age of 87, leaving us thousands of recordings and a powerful philosophy about the value of sound.

Any sound can be worthy of saving. And because people have recorded these songs, we as citizens of earth have the ability to pull them up and listen closely. And if we listen close enough we might just learn something about ourselves, and about each other.

[music out]

[Music clip: Chilly Winds]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Hear more at defactosound.com.

This episode was written and reported by Fil Corbitt, who is the host of a brand new podcast called The Wind. Subscribe to The Wind right here in your podcast player, or, visit TheWind.org. This episode was story edited by Casey Emmerling, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound edited by Soren Begin, it was sound designed mixed by Nick Spradlin.

Thanks to our guests Chaitra Powell, Rogier Kappers and Todd Harvey. You can stream Rogier’s documentary “Lomax the Songhunter” on Amazon. And if you’d like to take part in a crowdsourcing project for transcribing Alan Lomax’s notes, you can find a link in the episode description.

Archive recordings in this episode came from the Lomax Archives, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Finally, what would you put in your personal audio archive? Take a minute and think about what sounds define your life… we’d like to hear some of them. You can reach out on Twitter, Facebook, or send them to hi at 20k dot org.

Thanks for listening.

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