This feature was first printed in the December 2009 issue of my column, Music Up Close with Janie at skopemag.com
We are reprinting it here because Haiti is still evermost on our minds, and because the Allegro Media Group and NAIL Distribution in partnership with Harte Recordings and the Alan Lomax Estate have banded together to do their part in assisting the disaster relief in Haiti. They are pledging $15 from each purchase of the Alan Lomax in Haiti Box set to the Red Cross International Response Fund to aid in the disaster relief via http://www.allegro-music.com/online_catalog.asp?sku_tag=HRT3103

You can also make direct donations to aid efforts via

http://american.redcross.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ntld_main

The world is a much better place because of the efforts of folklorists Alan Lomax and his father John A. Lomax who traipsed up the mountains of Appalachia, the bayous of Louisiana, the cotton fields of the Mississippi delta, and the stalked the halls of prisons in Texas to record roots musicians and singers. We know more about ourselves and about our rich heritage because of their efforts. Alan Lomax, in particular, was not only an observer but also a guitar player and singer. He often won his way into musician’s homes by sitting and playing music with them, singing the old songs with them, and asking in great detail where they had learned their particular versions of certain songs. Like an musical anthropologist, he was concerned with the song and its origins, as well as the singer in his or her environment.

I respect that keenly, coming from the foothills of Appalachia myself. My life has been made all the richer for knowing more about the old songs my family sang and for a decent respect that music was given by archivists like Lomax.

Several years ago, I had an assignment to write about another folk music archivist, and, frankly, the longer the interview went, the angrier I got. Only when I was struggling to write my article did I realize what was pushing my buttons. Unlike Alan Lomax, this archivist didn’t stop at merely recording to preserve the music of my people or even putting the music of these hill musicians in record stores so that these folks would get the exposure they deserved. This archivist started recording with these musicians, then recording their songs himself, then giving concerts about their songs, making his own changes as he attempted to recreate this music, saying it was all done in the traditional, old way.

What I finally realized that made me so angry was a certain smugness, an air of authority about something this city-bred, East Coast archivist really didn’t have a clue about. Mountain culture is far more complex than just music with its British and African roots. It has to do with isolation, grueling poverty, and a deep sense of pride and dignity—the context. Though I was born in a small town in East Tennessee, I don’t know if I would even be welcome on some of the picking porches far into the mountains, even if I could recite the line of my people who’d lived in those same hills.

I didn’t want to tell this folk icon that one of his “discoveries,” sounded just like my mother when she’d break out into song when cleaning other people’s houses. Though my mother was long dead, I was afraid that he would want to ferret her out and any of the few remaining singers in my family. I was afraid I’d hear Mama’s version of “Rose Connolley,” the one I’d heard all my life and the one she’d taught me to sing, on his next CD!

But Alan Lomax was never of that ilk. As Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress from 1937 to 1942, Lomax was bent on preserving this music. It was as if he knew that change would come far too quickly. He spent his younger years collecting music from the US, the UK, Spain, Italy, and the Caribbean, contributing a majority of more than 10,000 field recordings to the Library of Congress.

But that isn’t to say that Lomax didn’t produce folk music albums, concerts, and radio shows. He did in the 40s and 50s. But it was to showcase the musicians and the music he had found, to bring it to a wider audience. His recordings and concerts brought world music to Main Street, offering the music of Django Reinhardt, vaudeville Klezmer music, Finnish brass bands, jazzy pop tunes, bluegrass and mountain music, budding rock and roll music, and much, much more. Lomax was so devoted to this multicultural, multi-ethnic musical idea, he consulted with Carl Sagan in 1977 in the selection of music for the Golden Record that was sent into space with the Voyager spacecraft. Lomax included jazz, blues, rock and roll, classical music, indigenous music from the US and Peru, vocal music from the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, songs from Bulgaria, Sicily, and many other parts of the world.

His ideas on this music of the earth concept were extended in 2001 by UNESCO’s Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity. This edict safeguarded languages and culture (including music, art, dance, and practices) equal to the protection of individual human rights. This was considered essential to human survival.

So, this November, one of Alan Lomax’s untouched projects, a five-month archival project conducted in Haiti in 1936-1937, has been respectfully restored and offered to the world. Alan Lomax in Haiti is an incredible box set, containing 10 CDs of music and documentary footage and two hardcover books. One book is an extensive set of liner notes and essays written by Gage Averill, an expert in Haitian culture, with lots of photographs that Lomax had taken during his fieldwork. The other book is Alan Lomax’s Haitian journal that was carefully transcribed and annotated by Ellen Harold. The journal contains photographs and drawings that Lomax made about the instruments and people he observed.

Though most of Lomax’s other field recordings had made their way into the phonographs of the public long ago, this particular work was left untouched. When Lomax considered bringing this work out of storage in the 1970s, there was so much high level sound distortion and surface noise it was impossible to work with them to put them into a popular format. So, back into storage they went.

It wasn’t until new digital technology had surfaced that the Alan Lomax Estate, the Library of Congress, and the Association for Cultural Equity decided that perhaps now this work could be salvaged and presented in a form that world music enthusiasts and cultural scholars could easily access.

Sound restoration specialist Steve Rosenthall, who owns the Grammy award winning team at the Magic Shop in New York, cleaned up the recordings and brought a crispness to them. Gage Averill conducted painstaking musical, cultural, and linguistic archaeology in order to produce accurate transcriptions and translations of the lyrics and precise cultural contexts for phrasing, lifeway descriptions exposed in the songs, and use of the songs. Still, it took ten years to complete the project.

Finally, Alan Lomax’s personal mission to see that this great cultural work was returned to the people of Haiti. Fifty hours of restored, digitally cataloged, and pre-mastered recordings and film are being given to the Haitian Ministry of Culture and the Fondation Connaissance et Liberté. This is truly a national treasure for the Haitian people. And, a wondrous gift to the rest of the world.

Alan Lomax in Haiti

Harte Recordings

Released November 2009

Retails for $129.99

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 6:06 pm and is filed under February 2010, Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.