From the Jailhouse to the Jukebox: The Lomax Blues Collection

 Life in the Great Depression-era Mississippi was a world apart from typical America; a land of sorrow and suffering but also intensely resilient, even today one of the least understood parts of American history. Here, among levee workers, sharecroppers, and former slaves, the music known as “the blues” lived—blood, sweat, and tears. Without the work of pioneering musicologists John and Alan Lomax, the music and lives of these musicians would have been lost to history, erased for want of attention and interest by a people unable to make themselves heard.

Starting in 1932 and continuing until the early 21st century, the Lomaxes traversed the gravel highways of the Mississippi Delta, first in a converted Model-A Ford outfitted with a built-in Ediphone recording machine, and later with stereo recording gear, documenting everyday people singing everyday songs across “forgotten” parts of America. “They had the notion that the mass media was beginning to erase what Greil Marcus called ‘old, weird America;’ regional America. And in fact, that was occurring and has continued to occur for the last 80 years,” said Todd Harvey, Curator for the American Folklife Center’s Lomax Collection. “The archive itself was founded for that reason, to document American Folksong, American vernacular song, in all of its beautiful, regional diversity.”

Though the blues have been commercially recorded since the early 1920s, and the Lomaxes certainly were not alone collecting rural American music at the time, their surveys benefited from their unique connections to WPA workers, black scholars from Fisk University, and activists like Zora Neale Hurston, granting entrance to juke joints, community picnics, and places where whites usually were unwelcome. At a time when many African-Americans rightfully feared singing publically about their mistreatment by whites, the Lomax recordings were anomalous, even dangerous.

John Lomax’s connections through the government and the University of Texas gave them access to state penitentiaries and labor plantations, leading to crucial discoveries in the lyrical origins of the blues. “In addition to trying to understand the contemporary music culture, they were looking for vestiges of 19th century music culture, and they assumed—and I think rightly so—that they would find the most conservative music cultures in the prisons because the men had been in there for the longest time,” Harvey said. “That’s where they found the work songs and the blues and met Lead Belly and ‘Ironhead’ Baker, Mose Platt and all the other great singers.” 

 The elder Lomax retired from collecting songs in 1942, but Alan intensified the scope and breadth of his folksong expeditions, driving around the country in search of new cultures and new music. Harvey’s 2013 E-Book Michigan I-O: Alan Lomax and the 1938 Library of Congress Folk-Song Expedition, focuses on Lomax’s journey to the upper peninsula with a Presto instantaneous disc recorder to document the diverse musical communities of loggers, lake sailors, and European immigrants. Lomax continued to document music cultures up until his death in 2002, leaving behind a body of work in the Library of Congress that includes 350,000 pages of manuscript, 7,000 photographs, approximately 16,000 sound recordings, and 7,000 moving images on video and film. 

Never before released online, the complete Lomax collection will be made available through the American Folk Life Center across 2016; a massive and expensive effort, but one that Harvey believes will greatly expand the collective understanding of early African-American folk music and American vernacular music in general. Alan Lomax left the Library of Congress in 1945 to work independently in America and around the world, eventually founding his own organization, the Association For Cultural Equity (ACE), to finance his own expeditions in 1983. The end goal of Lomax’s expeditions was to create the “Global Jukebox,” an electronic database that allows listeners to hear American music side-by-side with its foreign counterparts and ancestors. Harvey said he expects the Global Jukebox to be made available within the coming year. 

The Association for Cultural Equity has been a digital archive since 2004 when the Library of Congress took over the burden of physical preservation of the original material, allowing the ACE to focus on “dissemination and repatriation,” explained Nathan Salsburg, research curator at the ACE. “[We’re] identifying and collaborating with regional archives and music centers to make Lomax’s recordings available in the locations where they were made, and also to make them relevant to the people who live there,” Salsburg said. “Right now we have some money from the Grammy foundation to digitize all 27 hours of Alan Lomax's 1941-1942 Mississippi Delta Recordings. Those include the first recordings of Muddy Waters and Honey Boy Edwards, but far more stuff than just blues. We’re raising money to basically catalog all of them and get them up online and do some projects with folks in the Delta, like Delta State University and the B.B. King museum.”

The ACE recently worked with the Panola County Library in the Hill Country of North Mississippi where Lomax made several recordings and hosted an event celebrating the music and culture of the area with the community. “We showed footage…we had tons of family members of the artists who were recorded originally, including one of the guys who was actually recorded by Alan as a teenager in 1959, that was pretty amazing,” Salsburg said. 

“Root Hog or Die: 100 years, 100 songs, An Alan Lomax Centennial Tribute,” a six-CD, 100-song compilation put together by Salsburg and released in 2015, features a diverse collection of Lomax recordings from the 1930s to the early 2000s, and covers everything from rural Mississippi fife-and-drum songs to choral arrangements from Anguilla and Haiti. Of the 100 songs, 55 have never been released before, Salsburg disclosed. 

The Lomaxes cannot be credited with “saving” the blues and American folk music from extinction, but the importance of their collection cannot be overstated. Commercial recordings may have introduced Robert Johnson and Son House to the world, but without the interest and humanity granted to everyday musicians, there would be no record of life in the land where the blues began.