arsclist A different opinion of Alan Lomax

[Jeff <Jeff@xxxxxxx>]

> Subject: arsclist NYT: Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice of Folk Music in U.S.,
> Dies at 87
> 
> Alan Lomax, Who Raised Voice of Folk Music in U.S., Dies at 87
> New York Times, 2.7.20

After reading all this positive material on Alan Loman, I thought you might
like to see a different opinion.  I received the following from another list
that I subscribe to:

Subject: Debunking the Myth of Alan Lomax  By Dave Marsh

This column and others by Dave Marsh may also be found by going to
www.starpolish.com.
---------------------------
MR. BIG STUFF 
Debunking the Myth of Alan Lomax

By Dave Marsh/Starpolish

Seeing Alan Lomax's obituary on the front page of the New York Times
irked the hell out of me. Harry Smith syndrome all over again-the Great
White "Discoverer" as the axis of cultural genesis. Lomax, wrote Jon
Pareles, "advocated what he called 'cultural
equity: the right of every culture to have equal time on the air and
equal time in the classroom.'"

He did? 

In 1993, when Lomax published The Land Where the Blues Began, his memoir
of blues research in the deep South, Peter Bochan invited him to do a
WBAI interview. Bochan ventured to Lomax that Elvis Presley stood as a
great product of the Southern folk cultures. Lomax firmly denied this,
and said that Bochan couldn't even know that Presley had listened as a
boy to Sister Rosetta Tharpe's gospel radio show because "You weren't
there." He said this so persistently and adamantly-with all the stupid
"folklorist" purism that ruined the folk music revival-that Bochan went
home and intercut Lomax's prissy voice and dumb assertions with excerpts
from Beavis and Butthead. It aired that way.

Even sticking to the blues, Lomax cut a dubious figure. As a veteran
blues observer wrote me, "Don't get too caught up in grieving for Alan
Lomax. For every fine musical contribution that he made, there was an
evil venal manipulation of copyright, publishing and ownership of the
collected material."

 The most notorious concerns "Goodnight Irene." Lomax and his father
recorded Leadbelly's song first, so when the song needed to be formally
copyrighted because the Weavers were about to have a huge hit with it,
representatives of the Ledbetter family approached him. Lomax agreed
that this copyright should be established. He adamantly refused to take
his name off the song, or to surrender income from it, even though
Leadbelly's family was impoverished in the wake of his death two years
earlier. 

Lomax believed folk culture needed guidance from superior beings like
himself. Lomax told Bochan what he believed; nothing in poor people's
culture truly happened unless someone like him documented it. He hated
rock'n'roll-down to instigating the assault against Bob Dylan's sound
system at Newport in '65-because it had no need of mediation by experts
like himself.

The nature of the expert mattered, too. Lomax's obit made the front page
mainly because  he "discovered" Son House and Muddy Waters. But in Can't
Be Satisfied, his new Muddy Waters biography, Gordon shows that Lomax's
discoveries weren't the serendipitous events the great white hunter
portrayed.  Lomax was led to House and then Waters by the great Negro
scholar, John Work III of Fisk University. Gordon even shows Lomax
plagiarizing Work, and not on a minor point. (See page 51) In his book,
Lomax offers precisely one sentence about Work. He eliminated Work  from
his second Mississippi trip. He also burned Muddy Waters for the $20 he
promised for making the records.

Maybe the fact that Lomax served as a folk music "missionary" (to use
Bob Dylan's  term) offsets all this. Provided that it doesn't turn out
that Lomax used and discarded ethnic workers worldwide the way he used
Work, I guess there's a case to be made. But I do hope that people
understand that when Pareles says that "Mr. Lomax wasn't interested in
simply discovering stars," part of the meaning is that he didn't want
them to get in the way of his self-importance.

Sometime soon, we need to figure out why it is that, when it comes to
cultures like those of Mississippi black people, we celebrate the
milkman more than the milk. Meanwhile, every sentence that will be
uttered about Lomax this week-including these-would be better used to
describe the great musicians he recorded in the U.S., the Bahamas, and
elsewhere. Reading Gordon's book serves as a good corrective.

(c) 2002 Dave Marsh
=========================================================
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