all power the periphery the public folklore thought of alan lomax
TRANSCRIPT
“All Power to the Periphery”: The Public Folklore Thought of Alan Lomax
Robert Baron
Originally published in Journal of Folklore Research 49 (2012): 275-‐317 and in JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfolkrese.49.3.275
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ABSTRACT
Alan Lomax developed a global vision for the protection of traditional cultures at a time when
threats to cultural difference were accelerating – a problem he ascribed to centralized media
and entertainment industries, as well as government policies. His public folklore thought and
practice was informed by a cultural critique that viewed folklore as an alternative to the
alienation engendered by modern life. Lomax’s view of folklore can be characterized as
counterhegemonic, and he saw folklore as resistance effected both by explicit expressions of
protest and the existence of folklore itself. Anticipating – and shaping – contemporary public
folklore practice, Lomax created a repertoire of strategies for safeguarding traditions. These
included appropriating the technologies threatening small-‐scale cultures in order to maintain
and disseminate traditions, proposing government folk culture policies, developing modes of
presentation for new audiences, and creating conditions for traditions to be perpetuated
locally.
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Deep in folklore graduate student despair about making a living in the field I loved, I
sought out Alan Lomax. It was the mid-‐1970s, and the notion of public folklore as a career was
only beginning to be imagined. I had produced a folk festival, interned as a museum educator,
and presented occupational folklore at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife. These
experiences were at least as meaningful and fulfilling to me as purely academic pursuits,
providing opportunities to collaborate with practitioners of traditions to present their cultures
outside of their immediate communities, engage in public education for new audiences, and
apply folklore scholarship to new realms. However, I saw little prospect of working in an
ongoing way as a folklorist unless I became a college teacher. While several of my professors at
the University of Pennsylvania were experienced in public folklore practice and acted as
advisors for the development of federal folklife programs, I felt a sharp disjunction between
what I was learning in graduate school and the practice of folklore outside of the university.
Intimidated as I was about meeting the legendary Lomax, he was an exemplar for the practice
of folklore in the public arena, and I was eager to meet him.
My graduate advisor John Szwed, who was a friend and colleague of Alan’s, encouraged
a visit and contacted him for me. So I summoned up the courage to phone Lomax, and he
invited me to visit him in his studio – an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side stacked
floor to ceiling with shelves of field recordings, films and books. Walking through the rooms felt
like a cinematic experience, and I was awed knowing that they contained a patrimony of
humankind unavailable anywhere else. Alan had an imposing physical presence compounded
by the force of his personality and restlessness. He was welcoming and seemed interested in
my interests, but almost breathless in offering his opinions about applied folklore (as it was
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called then). In his typical interactive style, Alan would raise his voice from time to time with
strongly held opinions, but might quickly switch his tone and mood after making a point,
becoming gentler and more accommodating his interlocutor (who might still struggle to get a
word in edgewise). I immediately saw that I needed to subsume my personality to his and
accommodate his sudden fluctuations in mood, but I really didn’t mind all that much. Alan
convinced me that serving traditional folk artists and working to sustain folk culture was a noble
calling, the most important thing I could do with my life. Over the years, I came to be
saddened that many colleagues would avoid him because he could be ‘difficult,’ and I felt that
personalization of opinions about Alan occluded recognition of the significance of his ideas and
the magnitude of his achievements.
My first visit to the studio ended with an offer of a glass of bourbon, proffered in a
characteristically expansive Lomaxian manner. He asked me if I wanted my bourbon with
“branch water,” which I discovered meant spring water from the water cooler. I kept up a
relationship with him during the early years of my career, asking him for advice on a number of
projects. After some coaxing, I managed to persuade him to speak to a group of Haitian
interns working with me to develop education programs for a 1978 Haitian art exhibition at The
Brooklyn Museum, participate in its symposium on the Haitian Impact on the Caribbean World,
speak on a panel on the place of folklore in the public sector at the 1979 Conference on
Folklore in New York City, and serve on a folk arts advisory group at the New York State Council
on the Arts in the early 1980s. Knowing that Alan generally structured his schedule on his own
terms and was always consumed by multiple simultaneous projects, I was deeply grateful for
his participation in these events, and I remember with great warmth his support for me as a
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young professional. I was touched when Alan, who boasted that he’d done applied folklore
since I was “knee high to a bullfrog”, called me “born again” as an applied folklorist, and I felt
guilty when I heard he regretted that I hadn’t continued field research in the Caribbean after I’d
pursued an administrative course for my career.
Alan rarely gave me any specific career advice; instead, he offered aphorisms now and
then that revealed his views about how to safeguard folk culture and enable folk artists to carry
on their traditions. He told me that we need to make folk artists know that they should “feel
good about themselves” by recognizing the beauty and value of their artistry and their personal
worth. Alan spoke of acting strategically to safeguard folk culture, which meant finding the
places where we could intervene effectively, and then “hit.” And he also spoke of the “return”:
traditions collected by folklorists, he believed, needed to be returned to the communities from
which they originated so that they could flourish there anew. With the exceptions of his “Saga
of a Folksong Hunter” ([1960] 2003) and the highly programmatic “Appeal for Cultural Equity”
([1972] 2003), Lomax’s ideas about public folklore were expressed only diffusely in his
publications. Thus, it is necessary to consider a myriad of scholarly and popular publications,
conference proceedings, correspondence, program booklets, notes for recordings, speeches,
consultations and conversations like the ones he had with me in order to weave together the
strands of his public folklore thought.
While the term public folklore did not emerge until the 1980s, Lomax’s wide-‐ranging
writings and activities prefigured much of contemporary public folklore thought and practice.
Supplanting an older, unidirectional ‘applied folklore’ paradigm in which folklorists disseminate
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folkloristic knowledge beyond the academy, furthering social and political agendas while acting
in the presumed interest of communities, today’s public folklore stresses mutual engagement
with communities in developing representations of traditions (see Baron 2010, 71,88; Baron
and Spitzer 2007, viii, xv). As cultural brokers, folklorists facilitate access to domains that
tradition bearers might not be able to access on their own, such as government, the media,
funding sources, educational systems and new audiences (Graves 2005:150). Public folklorists
work in federal and state government agencies as well as in non-‐profit organizations, and in all
of these venues they shape and implement policies relating to folk culture. Following from
David Whisnant’s view that their work is “unavoidably interventionist” (1988:233), public
folklorists are reflexive about the inevitable impact of their field research and programming
upon traditions and communities, and about the ethical responsibilities associated with their
interventions. Contemporary public folklorists have developed multiple modes of presentation
designed to safeguard traditions within communities and represent them to new audiences.
These modes of presentation are often grounded in customary community presentational
contexts. Public folklorists also develop approaches for enabling communities to present their
traditions on their own terms while diminishing the folklorist’s mediative role (Baron 2010).
In this essay, I will begin by considering Lomax’s critique of the forces marginalizing and
destroying folklore and local cultures while generating alienation; this critique both shaped his
cultural policy ideas and motivated his practice. His views about policy and advocacy were
developed within a global framework in which he argued that practicing and sustaining
traditional culture was a fundamental human right. I will also consider Lomax’s view of folklore
as resistance, protest and resilience – as counterhegemony, with communities maintaining
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their traditions through their own agency and resources. Finally, I shall examine Lomax’s
strategies for intervening on behalf of, and in association with, communities in order to
safeguard their traditional culture through public presentation, broadcasting and new
technologies.
Cultural Critique, Advocacy, and Folk Cultural Policy
During the postwar period Lomax developed a global vision for protecting small-‐scale cultures
in the face of the ravages of centralized corporate power and greedy media and entertainment
monoliths. Recognizing the forces of globalization long before others, he saw the destruction of
local aesthetic systems and the creation of alienated, passive consumers of culture. Schools
failed to enculturate children to their local heritage, and the media and entertainment
industries purveyed a mass popular culture that largely neglected local folk culture of great
beauty and value. Lomax felt that folklorists should be on the front lines of protecting
traditional cultures, and he was critical of dispassionate folklorists who disdained an advocacy
role. He contended that folklorists should be actively engaged in revitalizing traditions,
proposed government policies to safeguard folklore, and argued that everyone had a basic
human right to maintain their local traditions.
At a session on “Making Folklore Available” at the Midcentury International Folklore
Conference held at Indiana University in 1950, Lomax sounded themes of cultural criticism he
had expressed over the course of his career. He decried a number of cultural changes,
including the advent of a
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profit-‐motivated society smashing and devouring and destroying complex cultural systems which have taken almost the entire effort of mankind over many thousands of years to create. We have watched the disappearance of languages, musical languages, the sign languages, and we’ve watched whole ways of thinking and feeling in relating to nature and relating to other people disappear. We’ve watched systems of cookery … disappear from the face of the earth, and I think we have all been revolted by this spectacle and in one way or another have taken up our cudgels in the defense of the weaker parties. ([1953] 2003, 115)
Folklorists, he asserted, “have become the champions of the ordinary people of the world who
aren’t backed up by printing presses, radio chains and B29’s.” Speaking of both the global and
fundamentally local character of folklore, he said that it “is international in its main implications
rather than regional or national. On the other hand, we see that culture produced and
consumed in a neighborhood or village situation seems to be a very healthy way for culture to
grow” (115).
Lomax engaged in spirited colloquy during this international gathering with participants
who questioned whether folklorists should act as advocates and intervene within communities
to revive and revitalize their traditions. Citing Malinowski’s position that “the role of the
ethnologist is that of the advocate of primitive man,” Lomax asserted “that the role of the
folklorist is that of the advocate of the folk” ([1953] 2003), 115). In response, some folklorists
at the conference argued against folklorists intervening in ongoing cultural processes to
safeguard traditions. Åke Campbell, for instance, claimed that the proper role of the folklorist
was to be an objective scholar engaged in interpretation and scholarship; he contended that
the “scholar must be the interpreter rather than the active propagator of the beauty that
comes from the past.” Stith Thompson felt that folklorists should not be cultural arbiters and
should not intervene in cultures to revive traditions no longer practiced (Thompson 1953:229,
221-‐2, 244; see Baron [1992] 2007, 312-‐19).
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Advocacy has periodically resurfaced as a matter of contention among folklorists since the Midcentury International Folklore Conference. While there was widespread support among folklorists for the establishment of a national American Folklife Center in Washington, DC, Indiana University professor Richard Dorson testified against it at a hearing in Congress. Dorson believed, as Archie Green put it, “that folklorists working in public agencies would
debase the coin of scholarship” (Green [1992] 2007, 55) – that a folklorist could not be an
advocate and a disinterested scholar at the same time. At an applied folklore conference in
1971, for instance, Dorson argued “that it is no businesses of the folklorist to engage in social
reform, that he is unequipped to reshape institutions, and that he will become the poorer
scholar and folklorist if he turns activist” (Dorson 1971, 40). Yet, Dorson’s own
disinterestedness has been questioned. Green suggests that Dorson’s attacks on applied
folklore were associated with his own ideological interests in “American-‐Century policy” and
“state ideology” (Green [1992] 2007, 55); indeed, Dorson justified folklore studies as an
instrument of “national defense” in his own advocacy for reinstituting National Defense
Education Act funding for folklorists (1962). In her influential essay, “Mistaken Dichotomies”,
Barbara Kirshenblatt-‐Gimblett also questioned advocacy by folklorists, stating that “advocacy
can distort inquiry” in public folklore, while acknowledging that the “the folkloristic enterprise
is not and cannot be beyond ideology, national political interests and economic concerns”
([1992] 2007, 32). Indeed, if we accept a widespread view dating to Karl Mannheim (1936) that
ideology is socially constructed thought, any activity by folklorists (or anybody else) in
scholarship or in the public sphere can be viewed as shaped by ideology.
Echoing Lomax’s views at the Midcentury International Folklore Conference, folklorists
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have continued to see advocacy as a fundamental professional responsibility that entails the
representation of tradition bearers and communities on their own terms. The Statement of
Ethics of the American Folklore Society, for instance, indicates that the primary responsibility of
folklorists is “to those they study,” it further stipulates that when “there is a conflict of interest,
these individuals come first” (AFS 1988). In 2004, an entire issue of the Journal of Folklore
Research (41:2/3) was devoted to advocacy, with several authors arguing that folklorists are
obligated to advocate for the tradition bearers and communities they study. Carl Lindahl
asserted that it is the “goal of the folklorist … to discover, understand, and represent people on
their own terms,” which necessarily means that “the work of the folklorist is by definition a
work of advocacy” that “requires us to attempt to put another’s truth before our own, to try to
make that truth as credible and palpable to our readers and ourselves as our own subjective
truths are to us (2004, 175-‐76). Elliot Oring argued in response that advocacy should not be
“the mission of the profession as a whole”; it should not define “the work that folklorists do
and must do” (2004, 266). He claimed that folklorists should not be expected to advocate for
traditions morally reprehensible to them, and he asserted that there are situations where
advocacy for one community may conflict with advocacy for another. Nick Spitzer and I have
characterized Oring’s objections as overdrawn, since advocacy may consist of appropriate
representation of a community’s interests rather than explicit political advocacy and need not
only involve representing a community as it sees itself. Advocacy can also involve a kind of
conflict resolution when folklorists work with multiple communities with competing interests
(Baron and Spitzer 2007, x).
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Long before this twenty-‐first century debate, however, Lomax believed that it was an
ethical imperative for folklorists, as advocates, to protect communities from culturally
oppressive forces. At the 1950 Midcentury International Folklore Conference, he stated “[W]e
who speak for the folk in the market place … have obligations to the people whom we
represent.” Suggesting the significance of class divides and suspicions of the “folk” towards the
folklorist – while calling explicitly for intervention by folklorists on behalf of the practitioners of
traditions – he said,
[If] our obligation is solely to enrich a city, urban, middle-‐class culture, the suspicion that some of the folk have of us might actually be justified, that we are folklorists basically because we are enriching ourselves, either with prestige or actual money …. We have to defend them, to interpret to them what is going on in the world which they do not make, but which begins to move in upon them and crush their culture”. ([1953] 2003), 116-‐19).
Turning from the need to act on behalf of communities to consideration of how communities
might be equipped to present their traditions on their own terms, Lomax anticipated
contemporary public folklore’s emphasis on enabling community cultural self-‐determination
(see Baron 2010). In 1950 he critically discussed the use of folk festivals, schools and radio as
means of presenting local traditions both within communities and for broader audiences.
Lomax contended that folk festivals can be “dynamic” if local communities choose what will be
presented. He stated that folklorists should not “split” the folk festival “up into little pieces” in
order to make their “own potpourri in the city” or assert an “interfering” role with “country
people” who are told that they “can’t play a guitar because the tunes are modal”
([1953]2003,119).
Anticipating a premise of contemporary folklore-‐in-‐education programs, Lomax
suggested that schools should allow for the expression of local traditions rather than having
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“every child in the nation sing “Skip-‐to-‐my-‐Lou”. Teachers, he declared, need to know that
“children and their families are carriers of important literature and music and ways of living.”
During the Midcentury conference, he discussed his experiences in producing radio programs
on national networks, noting failed attempts to use folk music in symphonic works. He felt that
the presentation by others of local traditions on commercial stations had been a “mixed
blessing,” due to manipulation of the programs by the stations to determine what was to be
sung. Lomax contended that the ideal for radio is for “people to talk back.” He called for “two-‐
way bridges” and the formation of “two-‐way inter-‐communication systems” for traditions
presented in any medium (Lomax: [1953] 2003), 119,117,116).
Today, the Internet and social media have made it possible for local communities to see
and hear their own traditions, both within and outside of their own communities, in ways that
were practically unimaginable at a time when just a few radio networks dominated the
airwaves. Local communities worldwide easily upload moving images of their traditions to
YouTube; Spotify, iTunes, and Pandora address a wide variety of cultural preferences by making
recordings of traditional music far more accessible; and Facebook is widely used by community-‐
based traditional artists and performing groups. Towards the end of his career, Lomax
conceptualized the vision of broad access to community based traditional arts that he had
articulated at the Midcentury conference: his development of the Global Jukebox, as John
Szwed notes, would provide for computer users “the musical, dance, and speech styles of single
performances, whole cultures or regions of the world,” along with maps and descriptions of
cultural styles from Lomax’s cantometrics, choreometrics, parlametrics, and phonotactics
projects (2010,384). Developed in the early 1990s, the Jukebox drew support from Apple, Inc.
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and from Paul Allen’s Interval Research Corporation, but it never went beyond the prototype
phase. However, the Global Jukebox is being reborn through online streaming: the Association
for Cultural Equity’s website offers growing numbers of digital recordings, films, videos,
photographs, and manuscripts from the Alan Lomas Collection (Association for Cultural Equity
2012; Rohter 2012). 1
The realization of this vision of a “two-‐way inter-‐communication system” took more
than sixty years; in the meantime, Lomax’s experience at the Midcentury International Folklore
Conference contributed to his alienation from folklore as a discipline. I asked Lomax about the
conference after forty years had passed, but he was reluctant to speak about it, indicating that
he had come to feel a lack of shared interest and commonality with folklorists of that
generation. During the 1950s he was among an increasingly marginalized group of folklorists
who were applied folklorists and advocates. Writing in 1960, he recalled that he proposed to
“my technically innocent colleagues” the establishment of a committee to create “a series of
LP’s that would map the whole world of folk music,” drawing from “the best of our folk song
findings,” ([1960] 2003, 179) – but only one of the participants at the Midcentury conference,
Charles Seeger, voted in favor of his proposal. “They made me so mad”, Lomax recalled, “I
decided to do it myself” (Hentoff 1969, 73, quoted in Szwed 2010, 248). Subsequently, he
remarked that the “myopia of the academics became a favorite topic of mine,” and the World
Library of Folk Music was produced as a result of a chance coffee-‐shop encounter with Goddard
Lieberson, the president of Columbia Records in a Broadway coffee shop, who agreed “on the
spot” to the project ([1960] 2003, 179). Nevertheless, Lomax was deeply engaged with
academics at a number of stages of his career. He was enrolled as an anthropology graduate
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student at Columbia University for a brief period, studied with Ray Birdwhistell at Temple
University, and attended a number of meetings of academic professional societies (including
the American Folklore Society). In addition, he was the lead researcher for projects involving
scholars from various social science disciplines, projects that were funded by the National
Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Endowment for
the Humanities.
Throughout his career, Lomax remained critical of folklorists who lacked passion about
the traditions they studied and were not committed to maintaining cultural diversity through
safeguarding folklore and local culture. He viewed folklore as exceptional among the
humanities in requiring passionate devotion, asserting in Sing Out in 1961 “that in folklore,
more than in any of the arts, the performer or student must have a devotion to the material
that is akin to love, and a very selfless love at that.” Lomax felt that scholars for “whom folk
song has largely been a source for publication and thus academic advancement have gradually
fallen out of tune with a field which, in truth, presents perhaps the most difficult and subtle
problems of any branch of the humanities” ([1961] 2003, 211, 212).
Folklorists, in Lomax’s view, are obliged to take action to assist folk artists and foster the
preservation of traditions, underscoring that folklorists should do more than publish their
scholarship and amass archives. In a letter to Burt Feintuch in 1980, he noted that “our folklore
tradition, stemming from German scholarship, has piled up everything in archives and libraries
– and our magnificent and varied tradition is dying” (Lomax 1980). Writing to Aziz H. Isa of the
Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service two years earlier, he said that “as a folklorist, I
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have never been to a neighborhood, no matter how nondescript, nor worked with an
individual, no matter how unlettered or misfortunate, who did not have something original to
offer in the shape of song, story, dance, craft or game. Our task is to bring up this wealth of
orally transmitted, neighborhood-‐located material and give it scope and place for
development” (Lomax 1978).
While critical of colleagues who did not share this vision, Lomax repeatedly spoke up for
the importance of integrally and substantively involving folklore in the work of federal cultural
agencies. His influence upon the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife has not been widely
recognized, but he was an important shaping force there, as he was for the development of the
Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, where he frequently advised his
sister, Bess Lomax Hawes, who was founding director of the program (Hawes 2008, 134, 151).
During the formative years of the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, 2 and in proposals
to federal cultural agencies for new folklife initiatives, he called for the central involvement of
folklorists with expertise and field research experience. When insisting to James Morris (head
of performing arts at the Smithsonian, with oversight of the Folklife Festival) that resources be
directed to qualified field researchers, Lomax asserted that it is the “fieldworkers and artists
who count, and not the administrators. Here you are suffering from the usual disease of
Washington, and you ought to correct it.” In no uncertain terms – Lomax never lacked for
certitude – he chastised:
You haven’t really got a proper field work structure yet. You are not yet working with the people who know the singers, the traditions, or how to find them in an expert way. Folklore, because all humans have it, is thought to be everybody’s business. The truth is just the opposite. Only very self-‐sacrificing and highly sensitized people can really do the professional folklorist’s job. It takes years of learning how, and now that I have been asked to look at your
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festival, I don’t know why, from the beginning, you didn’t bring in for wisdom and for practical work the guys who know their particular subjects and their people, and have contacts. (1975a).
Lomax’s call for folklorists to be employed at the Smithsonian in order to ensure
appropriate professional direction was paralleled in advocacy to other federal officials. Writing
to National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Joseph Duffy with a plan for a “Grassroots
Cultural Program,” Lomax stated that it would require “a sizeable body of the culturologists (i.e.
the anthropologists, folklorists and ethnomusicologists) who are trained to deal with cultures as
wholes and with oral and non-‐verbal traditions,” and he felt that their work would result in
“enormous profit for the human future” ( 1979).
In the 1970s, Lomax witnessed the gestation of public folklore as a distinct field of the
discipline, and in his 1975 letter to Morris he called it “a new profession, this folklorist work
with cultures,” which “can’t be carried out with show biz standards.” He felt that folklorists
could play a central role in stemming the tide of the loss of traditions and local culture, and at
the Smithsonian Festival, “the opportunity you have during those weeks is to strengthen the
carriers of all kinds of cultures for the bitter hard struggles they have at home, faced with T.V.
and indifference pretty largely” (1975a).
During the four decades following the 1950 Midcentury International Folklore
Conference, Lomax elaborated upon his views about a constellation of forces conspiring to
threaten and eradicate folklore and local culture. He was especially critical of mass
entertainment and broadcasting industries, calling for the decentralization of mass media and
broader access to national broadcasting outlets, which would guarantee opportunities for the
presentation of local cultures on the media.3 Public broadcasting was severely criticized for
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its elitism and neglect of American local and regional cultures. John Szwed notes that Lomax
felt that while the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) had been “designed” to “decentralize and
diversify American media,” it had succeeded at “bringing high culture and information to the
hinterlands, but had failed at … celebrating the regional and cultural resources of the country”
(2010, 369). Lomax used many of his most vivid and toughest metaphors to characterize how
mass media and entertainment induces passivity, alienation and diminished consciousness of
local culture. He contended that many millions in the world, with “no access to the main
channels of communication [,] … are being shouted into silence by our commercially bought-‐
and-‐paid for loudspeakers” ([1960] 2003,174). In proposing a number of ideas for PBS
programming, he proclaimed:
Away with the PBS that acts as a pipeline for Megalopolis and the mainstream and cultural mafias into the Hinterland. Up with the PBS that courageously and imaginatively takes advantage of the great reservoirs of images, talents, ideas and traditions in the American land and projects them across the country and out to the world ([197-‐? a],1) .
“All power to the periphery,” Lomax asserted, and he viewed the struggle against
centralized control of culture as an issue of center vs. periphery, where the center meant
Eurocentric, fine-‐arts-‐oriented elites and dominant, profit-‐obsessed culture industries (1979).
The notion that the relationship between center and periphery must be realigned informed all
of Lomax’s work, encapsulating his views about culture and power. While the advent of social
media and the Internet has contributed to the shifting and blurring of center and periphery,
and while today’s PBS is less elitist because it broadcasts more folk and popular cultural
programming, in the 1970s Lomax’s characterization of PBS as paradigmatic of a centralized,
Eurocentric, fine-‐arts domination of culture was well placed. And even today the overwhelming
majority of private and public cultural funding remains devoted to the ‘fine arts.’ The
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continuing centralizing biases of the commercial music and broadcasting industries are evident
in the scarcity of vernacular music on the radio and the recent elimination of Grammy awards
for a number of vernacular ethnic music genres.
In the United States, Lomax contended, the “urban-‐based amusement industry, our
civilization-‐oriented educational tradition, our European-‐oriented fine arts tradition have all
conspired to conceal America from itself ” ([197-‐?], 2). In a letter to President Nixon in 1969,
Lomax expressed alarm about the alienating effects of centralized communication systems,
which he saw as engendering a variety of social ills:
As communication has become centralized in terms of television, the wire services, the big movie chains, the national sports leagues, etc., etc., the American people have been awed into silence and passivity. They are unaccustomed to having opinions and to expressing them because the more impressive voices from the screen and the loudspeaker shout them down. This has produced in every part of our country – except in a few metropolitan centers – a spirit of apathy and anger which increases with every year the feeling of powerlessness which leads, I think, to the need for stimulants, for drugs, for violence, for escape, and in some for crime. (1969).
Alan Lomax always emphasized that folklore must live and thrive in local contexts. As
he stated flatly, “Nations do not generate music. They only consume it” ([1972] 2003, 291).
While he scoffed at the notion of a ‘national’ folklore and condemned manipulation of folklore
by extreme nationalists, Lomax felt that safeguarding local traditions is of great importance as a
matter of national policy and purpose.4 Advising Smithsonian Folklife Festival director Ralph
Rinzler about the Festival’s direction the year after its major two-‐month-‐long Bicentennial
program, Lomax remarked that “folklore really is a local, regional, traditional creature with little
or nothing to do with modern nation states.” Future festivals, he believed, should work to
bring about “network acceptance” so that “whatever it is that you achieve ideologically and as
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a presentation can be shared with the country. Otherwise, you are … aggrandizing Washington.
The festival’s focus should be on “support of the periphery, revivification of the locality” (1977).
Lomax’s concerns about the nation-‐state’s domination of representations of local
folklore are echoed today in critical writing about implementation of the 2003 UNESCO
Convention for the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Richard Kurin contends that ‘in
many countries, minority communities do not see governments as representing their interests –
particularly when it comes to their living cultural traditions. Historically, government efforts
have often been aimed at eliminating cultural practices – a native religion, a minority language,
particular rites, certain instruments, and so on” (2007,13). Michelle Stefano indicates that since
national governments have the authority to implement the UNESCO convention, “little
decision-‐making is taking place at the local level,” no matter the group or community whose
traditions are affected (personal communication, March 26, 2012).
Revivifying local folk culture was viewed by Lomax as the responsibility of a broad range
of social institutions, including schools, health care institutions and parks, as well as cultural
agencies. In a proposal to the Carter Administration for a Presidential Commission on Grass
Roots Culture, he advocated that a national folk cultural policy be implemented by agencies
from a variety of sectors whose actions shape culture in its broadest sense. He recognized that
cultural policy, as Caron Atlas indicates, is “embedded in decisions about other issues in which
culture is inextricable, such as education, health, environment, community building or
economic development” (Atlas 2001, 66). For Lomax, Eurocentric elitist curricula was “another
sad story of good intentions”:
19
[T]eachers who focused their poor-‐white-‐chicano-‐black-‐immigrant classes on the art and literature of Northwestern Europe, certainly did not see that their curriculum was culturally biased. They did not realize that they were, in a sense, estranging some children from parents who simply had a different kind of culture from the one in the school books” ([197-‐? b], 2).
As he had put it in his “Appeal for Cultural Equity,” the “educational system … is a system of
indoctrination in the cultural achievements and techniques of Europe and the United States”
([1972] 2003, 288). And in his proposal to the Carter administration, he called for the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare to make, in effect, folk cultural competence and
literacy a curricular requirement, where “every public school and high school graduate should
be knowledgeable in the history of his own family, his locality and his region; he should know its
songs, crafts, oral and written literature, and should be prepared if so inclined to carry on these
traditions” ([197-‐? b], 5).
Lomax also made recommendations to The National Institute of Mental Health in which
he discussed the value of folk belief systems and the importance of countering deracination.
He noted that successful instances of “native healers” working in “collaboration with doctors”
represented the “beginnings of a movement to sensitize mental health workers and physicians
to the widely divergent views, beliefs, and behaviors of different cultures relative to healthy
norms and illness.” In recognizing the “cultural connections of mental and emotional troubles,”
health care workers would see that “the root of many such problems is loss of identity – and
this is in good part due to the loss of or shame over cultural roots” ([197-‐? b], 6).
Looking at the longue durée of history, Lomax saw the erosion of cultural diversity as a
consequence of ubiquitous standardization damaging both the natural and cultural
environments. Writing to Joseph Duffy, Lomax viewed the “shrinking of cultural diversity
20
under the pressure of an over-‐centralized and over-‐standardized scheme of communication” as
“one of the most serious problems of the age.” He remarked that “our 19th century ancestors
imagined that because standardization was good for the development of engineering and
industry, that it was a universal process.” However, he noted,
If it has turned out to be a threat to the biological environment, it is a disaster for culture, that greatest of all human inventions…. Now because standardization is applied to education in all subjects, including unfortunately the expressive and communicative arts, now because a mono-‐directional, mainstream communication system has replaced all the separate and smaller communication systems that once existed, the variety of culture is swiftly declining and our planet is headed for cultural greyout” (1979).5
In “issue papers” included in a letter to Aziz H. Issa of the Heritage Conservation and
Recreation Service, Lomax discussed how standardization has affected play and recreation.
Once again the loss of local culture went hand in hand with the development of social
pathologies. He saw the “history of recreation in this country” as entailing “standardizing
activity and playing down local and ethnic traditions so that we now have national pastimes,
sports, amusements and arts.” Violence at “mass sporting events” was viewed as a “symptom
of a severe problem arising from the loss of local and family initiative and personal fantasy
involved in sports and recreation.” He observed that national, state and local park policies
involved the removal of “all human residents,” who are replaced by “personnel with
standardized training, clothing, and information,” which “vastly reduced” the “cultural color of
the parks.” The parks provide “standardized food,” and maintain “too many rules” in effect
continuing “19th century Puritanism and regimentation and mak[ing] the areas boring for most
adults.” Lomax called for an initiative, to be supervised by qualified folklorists, that would
introduce to parks “the actual carriers of local traditions – the story tellers, craftsmen, cooks,
musicians, and custom leaders,” who would “inhabit and give zest and the precisely correct
21
cultural color” through “the aroma of folk cookery, the tang of local drinks, the sound of
regional accents and songs and the fantasies of local yarn spinners” (1978).
Though most folklorists associate Lomax exclusively with music and dance, he clearly
concerned himself with the totality of folk culture. The critiques and programmatic proposals
he offered to federal officials and agencies encompassed a wide range of genres, including folk
belief systems, customary practices, foodways, material culture and oral literature as well as
performing folk arts. Lomax’s visionary and far-‐ranging proposals were not taken up by
federal agencies, although he did succeed in producing the “American Patchwork” series of
cultural programs on PBS. His proposals still feel fresh and exciting today, suggesting an
agenda for an inter-‐agency, cross-‐sectoral, comprehensive national folk cultural policy which
remains relevant, even though its implementation is increasingly unlikely at a time of
contraction by the US federal government.
Analogies between damage to the biosphere and the effacement of cultural diversity
were central to Alan Lomax’s “Appeal for Cultural Equity,” first published in 1972. Gage Averill
has indicated that Lomax “thoroughly embraced the rhetoric of the environmental movement
in calling attention to the state of cultural diversity in the world” (2003:241). However,
Lomax’s comparisons involved much more than just environmentalist rhetoric. Writing at a
time when environmentalism had emerged as a major social movement and thrust for public
policy, Lomax equated the need to maintain biodiversity with the protection of cultural
diversity and suggested that the loss of cultural diversity might be “an even more serious
problem” than the “pollution of the biosphere “(Lomax [1972] 2003, 285).
22
Comparing the biological and cultural spheres, Lomax attacked a “false Darwinism
applied to culture,” which assumes that the “weak and unfit among cultures are eliminated,” as
he believed we have become “so accustomed to the dismal view of the carcasses of dead or
dying cultures on the human landscape, that we have learned to dismiss this pollution of the
human environment as inevitable.” Incorporating cultural carcasses, polluted human
environments, “extinction” and a “grey-‐out” which if “unchecked [,] … will fill our skies with the
smog of the phoney,” the essay “Appeal for Cultural Equity” is replete with metaphors from
biology and environmentalism that powerfully buttress its arguments ([1972] 2003: 286, 285).
Lomax apparently recognized that the growing, broad-‐based support for environmentalism and
the abundant empirical evidence for diminished diversity in the biosphere justified the use of
familiar terms from a semantic domain associated with a growing international movement.
Today, scholarship, activism and advocacy for “cultural sustainability” embody analogies
between environmental and cultural conservation like those articulated by Lomax, and the
term recognized their shared imperatives. Rory Turner sees cultural sustainability as “an
emerging movement that asserts a vital alignment of human action with a healthy biological
and social world” and flows from a spirit of ecological stewardship” (2010). In 2008, Turner
founded the Master’s Program in Cultural Sustainability at Goucher College, which has a strong
folklore focus and trains students for local activism and careers in cultural sustainability
(Goucher College 2012).
“Appeal for Cultural Equity” also served as a manifesto about national cultural policies,
viewed on a global scale. It urged government policy to halt its indifference to the destruction
of local musics and its misguided support of “national” musics that “generally stifled musical
23
creativity”; instead, Lomax argued, government policies should support endangered, and far
more diverse, local traditions. He lamented the favoring of “state-‐supported national musics”
rather than “the far more varied music-‐making of regional localities” ([1972] 2003, 290) .
For Lomax, “cultural equity” meant that rights to traditional cultural expressions should
be on a par with other rights protected by governments. He believed that human rights
included cultural rights, a notion that had been incorporated in international covenants since
the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirmed a universal
right of individuals to participate in cultural life, and in two subsequent covenants in 1966,
both of which focused on collective cultural rights as human rights (Weintraub 2009, 2, 5). In
his proposal for a Presidential Commission on Grass Roots Culture, Lomax would state that the
“dimension of cultural equity” needs to be added to the” humane continuum of liberty, of
freedom of speech and religion and of social justice” (Lomax [197-‐? a], 2). And his “Appeal for
Cultural Equity” suggested that Thomas Jefferson “was certainly thinking of cultural equity” in
the Declaration of Independence; Lomax also referred to laws instituted by Lenin to protect the
“autonomy of minority cultures” in the constitution of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, he
hastened to add, “the reduction in the world’s total of musical languages and dialects” has
accelerated, and their “eventual disappearance is accepted as inevitable” ([1972] 2003, 286-‐
87).
Rejecting the notion that the disappearance of traditional culture is inevitable, Lomax
discussed the resilience of several societies of the past in maintaining their traditions.
Emphasizing that cultures “do not and have not flourished in isolation,” he listed cultures that
24
developed “at the crossroads of human migration, or else at their terminal points,” and were
able to maintain independence, while permitting “unforced acceptance of external influences.”
These cultures included ancient Athens, the Central Valley of Mexico in pre-‐conquest times and
the Indus Valley. Inclusion of these examples demonstrates, as do other writings, that Lomax
did not hold the absolutist view of folk purity that some have ascribed to him. He did, however,
advance the view that the “total destruction of culture is largely a modern phenomenon.”
Reiterating concerns about the impact of cultural imperialism and unchecked capitalism he had
first voiced two decades earlier at the Midcentury International Folklore Conference, he said
that cultures are being destroyed as a “consequence of laissez-‐faire mercantilism, insatiably
seeking to market all its products, to blanket the world not only with its manufacture, but with
its religion, its literature and music, its educational and communication systems.” Again
analogizing environmental and cultural destruction, he insisted that we “must reject this
cannibalistic view of civilization, just as we must now find ways of curbing a runaway industrial
system which is polluting the whole planet” ([1972] 2003, 287-‐88).
As Gage Averill has noted, Lomax was “one of the first to introduce the concept of multi-‐
culturalism” ( 2003, 241). He viewed the creation of a “multi-‐culture, a world in which many
civilizations, each with its own supporting systems of education and communication can live,”
as an overarching objective of cultural equity (Lomax: [1972] 2003, 288). As multiculturalism
emerged as a cultural movement in the 1990s, the term cultural equity would resonate with
cultural activists advocating for equitable support of and respect for the culture of communities
of color, even though many may not have been aware of Lomax’s authorship of the term.
25
Although Lomax framed “Appeal for Cultural Equity” with a dire scenario of the
destruction of cultural diversity, he also acknowledged success stories of traditions revitalized
and made viable through private-‐ and public-‐ sector interventions. In the United States, two
important traditions found new audiences and thrived through commercial outlets. “The
flowering of black orchestral music in New Orleans” occurred because the “musicians found
good, prestigious employment” in the local “amusement district,” enabling them to record
music that would be distributed the world over, and American country music “got equal time
on the air” because of the receptivity of local and regional radio stations (Lomax: [1972] 2003,
289). Lomax pointed to enlightened government cultural policies, such as the Romanian
government’s decision to give the last panpipe master a chair at the Romanian Academy of
Music, and the “magnificent recrudescence of the many-‐faceted carnival in Trinidad [, which
w]as a result of a devoted committee of folklorists backed by the Premier” (298). Other
successes highlighted by Lomax had resulted from his own initiatives. Using advanced audio
technology in West Indian villages, Lomax played music he recorded on huge loudspeakers in a
“thunderous three-‐dimensional concert,” and the audiences were “simply transported with
pleasure.” On one island, a yearly festival was “revived in all its richness” (289). He also wrote
with pride of his success in bringing about the revival of the five-‐string banjo because he
“induced a talented young man named Peter Seeger to take up its popularization as his life’s
work” (298).
While Lomax was critical of the alienating dimensions of modern life, he should not be
viewed as an anti-‐modernist. He recognized, prophetically, that advanced technologies utilized
for the benefit of local cultures could help them thrive once again. Although mass media has
26
had a deleterious effect upon local cultures and folk traditions, it can be – and has been – used
to broadcast and disseminate traditions both within their originating communities and for mass
regional and national audiences. In the twenty-‐first century, relationships between center and
periphery in cultural matters are being realigned through two-‐way communication and easy
access to electronic dissemination of cultural products from local cultures anywhere in the
world, and two-‐way communication systems are enabled by the Internet and social media.
Local cultures now have airtime as never before. Lomax called for intervention to revitalize
and perpetuate traditions, but he also recognized that some conditions enable them to survive
on their own. While folklorists have a moral imperative to advocate for the traditions they
study and must do what they can to intervene to safeguard them, many traditions have proved
to be resilient and their practitioners have found their own mechanisms to maintain them.
Protest, Resistance and Resilience
Over the course of his career, Lomax discussed many cases of folklore maintained in
oppressive circumstances by practitioners who exercised their own agency in this regard, apart
from the intervention of folklorists. He brought these perspectives to wide audiences by
means of recordings, radio programs and publications. They demonstrated how folklore
serves as a means of protest and cultural survival in the face of extreme political oppression
and racist exploitation, as well as in contexts of less blatant oppression.
The actions of Francisco Franco in Spain greatly affected Lomax, and during a field trip to
Spain that resulted in magnificent recordings he marveled at the survival of vernacular culture
27
amidst suffering. Lomax felt “faint and sick at the sight of this noble people, ground down by
poverty and a police state.” Franco’s dictatorial regime tried to alter folklore to its own ends.
As John Szwed notes, it attempted to ”standardize and rewrite local traditions and songs … and
save folklore by reforming it and teaching the proper versions” as a “means of fostering
nationalism” (2010, 273). For Lomax, folklore was “not mere fantasy and entertainment;”
rather, it “had been the spiritual armor of the Spanish people against the many forms of
tyranny imposed upon them through the centuries.” Through maintaining their inherited
folklore on their own terms, the Spanish found “models for … noble behavior” and a “sense of
the beautiful” despite oppressed circumstances (Lomax [1960] 2003), 181).
Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-‐Hit People, compiled by Lomax with annotations by
Woody Guthrie, included topical songs collected and recorded during the Depression. While
completed in 1940, it was finally published in 1967 after repeated attempts by Lomax to find a
publisher. The songs spoke to “how the underprivileged people, how the people on the picket
lines of America, felt about their times,” with folk songs giving voice to people who would
otherwise be unheard. They were “symbols of the fighting, democratic spirit of a whole sector
of the population that is too often viewed as faceless, voiceless, supine and afraid; …. as deeply
involved in social change as any politician, union organizer or social critic” (Lomax: 1967, 366).
When Lomax first collected African American music in the 1930s, he saw the “Southern
system of Black oppression” as comparable to fascism. He was struck by the casual brutality of
violence against Blacks, in a region where, as Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson told it
on the record Blues in the Mississippi Night, a prevailing attitude was, “Kill a Nigger, we’ll hire
28
another’n, kill a mule, we’ll buy another’n; … back in those days, a Negro didn’t mean no more
to a white man than a mule” (Lomax [1959] 2003a, Track 17; [1959] 2003b). For the African
American working class, according to Lomax , “the South enclosed them like a dark prison in
which they were lost and, in a very real sense, trapped” (Lomax [1959] 2003b, 2). Out of these
nearly unspeakable conditions, folklore served as a primary expressive means, offering a
vehicle for veiled protest, solidarity, fantasized triumphs and ridicule of the oppressors.
Lomax’s book, Land Where the Blues Began is the consummate expression of Lomax’s
research on African American folklore in the South. These traditions often artfully exhibited
what Herskovits characterized as the “principle of indirection”: “subterfuge and concealment”
as a “weapon” and “discretion” as a survival technique, drew upon behavioral patterns intrinsic
to an African heritage and well suited to immediate oppressive contexts (Herskovits [1941]
1958, 156, 158 see also Baron 1994, 658-‐66). In the church, Lomax saw preachers who,
capitalizing on the “relative immunity of the pulpit and employing biblical language to veil their
meaning, denounced the wickedness of Jim Crow.” Their “orally composed sermons … likened
their oppressed congregations to the children of Israel and the heroes of the Old Testament”
(Lomax 1993, 102). And folk tales enacted fantasies of revenge. Speaking of the trickster hero
John, Lomax contended that the “viewpoint implicit” in his “exploits helped Old John to survive
and to get the better of the all-‐powerful master. In that code, depredations against the master
were counted as acts of virtue since masters were viewed as the true thieves” (132). For
prisoners, work songs facilitated highly synchronized group work; performed in an
“intertwined, unified, overlapping style … peculiar to black Africa and African America”,
embodying a “group-‐involved approach to communication that allows everyone present to
29
have an input in everything that is happening” (261). Work songs provided pleasure in singing
amidst harsh physical labor and subhuman conditions. They served as means of solidarity and
group identity; this form of expressive culture “differentiated [African American prisoners] from
their guards and from the free world which was so cruelly punishing them” (267). The work
songs thus starkly functioned as what José Limón and William S. Fox see as a modality of
opposition to social and political domination. Limón, in discussing Fox’s (1980) view of folklore
as contestation, indicates that folklore of any kind “strengthens the internal cohesion of a
group and thereby maximizes its solidarity and survival against a dominant social order” (Limón
1983, 47).
Sometimes, when out of earshot of their target, Delta Blacks would ridicule poor white
behavior through “Yahoo songs,” more obvious in their referents than other genres. The poor
white was represented as gross and incompetent in these songs, which were sung in the “hard
nasal sound of rural Mississippi,” and viewed by the singers as “highly charged satire on poor-‐
white behavior” (Lomax 1993, 186-‐87). Hollers and blues also voiced complaint and protest,
rendering in sung poetry these sentiments when there was no recourse for injustices. Lomax
notes that unlike most places in the world, where “the individual could look to organized
authority as in some sense beneficent or protective, can ask for mercy and help in times and
distress and expect to receive it, … the laborers of the Deep South, floating from camp to camp,
often from prison to prison, came to feel that they had nowhere to turn.” In levee camp
hollers, they would cry: “Cap’n doncha do me like you do poor Shine,/ Drove him so hard till he
went stone blind,” and “Mister Cholly, Mister Cholly, just gimme my time./ Gwan, old bully,
you are time behind” (232-‐33).
30
The blues are especially rich in their use of metaphor and indirection to express protest,
anger and revenge. Once Lomax urged me to listen to Blues in the Mississippi Night if I wanted
to better understand what the blues were all about, and when I listened to the recording I
understood immediately that it was an indispensable document of native exegesis. Under the
condition of anonymity, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson and Memphis Slim spoke with
brutal frankness about the blues and oppression, and their names were not revealed until all
were dead.6 According to Memphis Slim, “The blues is a kind of revenge, you know. You
wanta say something, and you wanta, you know, signifyin’ like – that’s the blues … things we
couldn’t say … or do, so we sing it.” For Memphis Slim,
Whenever you hear a fellow singing the blues … it was really a heart thing … expressing his feeling about how he felt to the people – and that’s the only way he know to say those things. I’ve known guys that wanted to cuss out the boss and he was afraid to go up to his face and tell him what he wanted to tell him, and I’ve heard them sing those things – sing words, you know – back to the boss, just be behind the wagon, hookin’ up the horses or somethin’ or ‘nuther – or the mules or something. And then he’d go to work and go to singin’ and say things to the horse … make like the mule stepped on his foot – say, “Get off my foot, goddam it!” or something like that … and he meant he was talkin’ to the boss. “You son of a bitch, you.” Say, “You got no business on my … stay off my foot!” and such things as that … (Lomax[1959] 2003a:Track 6).
While Southern African American folklore of the early and mid-‐twentieth century are
paradigmatic expressions of protest and resilience under conditions of extreme oppression,
Lomax saw protest songs occurring in a variety of other kinds of circumstances and cultures. In
Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-‐ Hit People, he stated:
In a broad but very general sense, most of our traditional American songs can be considered songs of complaint or protest about the main economic and social problems that have always faced the mass of the American people as they struggled for a living, whether the scene of this struggle was on the bountiful but still harsh frontier, on a small farm, in a mine or a bunkhouse or – if the singer was a woman – in the kitchen of a little cabin or wooden shack somewhere” (1967, 365).
31
Szwed indicates that the collection vindicated Lomax’s approach to song collecting “by
revealing that protest against injustice could be found even among the older singers and the
hillbilly and race recordings sold across the South, as well as the repertoires of the younger folk
poets” (2010, 162). Hard Hitting Songs noted as well the protest component found in British
folk song, where labor songs and the folk songs of the urban working class included “sharp,
angry and self-‐conscious songs of protest” (Lomax 1967, 365). Situating the holler globally as a
protest genre, in The Land Where the Blues Began Lomax notes that “this song type, which we
might call the high, lonesome complaint, is one undercurrent of music in the whole of civilized
Eurasia – the ancient world of caste, empire, exploited peasantry, harem-‐bound women, and
absolute power – from the Far East to Ireland” (1993:232).
Using examples from all over the world, Lomax highlighted how folklore could be used
as a vehicle for contesting and resisting domination. Protest and resistance through folklore
may be overt, explicitly directed to oppressors and intolerable social conditions. Or folklore can
serve as a means of resistance, both by its very presence and as a means of expressing and
reinforcing group solidarity. It is counterhegemonic in all of these manifestations. In
Leteratura e vita nazionale, Gramsci stated that folklore is “a concept of the world and of life …
in contraposition … to the official conceptions of the world,” (quoted in Lombardi-‐Satriani 1974,
104-‐105), what Límon sees as “a kind of folk political philosophy – an initial and potentially
critical outlook on the world (1983, 4). Extending the Gramscian notion of hegemony as
“direct contestation” (Límon 1983, 42), Luigi Lombardi-‐Satriani states that folklore, as “other,
opposing testimony that the folk world provides against the ‘official’ ideology’ … sustained by
the dominant class,” also resists by “contesting at times only with its own presence, the
32
universality, which is only superficial, of the official culture’s concepts of the world and of life”
(1974, 103, 104). Folklore can be viewed among the “weapons of the weak,” those “everyday
forms of resistance” that avoid direct confrontation with authority while they “mitigate or deny
claims made by superordinate classes” (Scott 1985, 32). Whether by its mere existence or
through explicit contestation of the powerful, the kinds of folklore collected and analyzed by
Lomax embodies counterhegemonic resistance, contesting the powerful as it maintains the
integrity of a dominated culture.
Intervening and Safeguarding
Much of the folklore collected by Lomax was unknown outside of the immediate
communities where it was customarily practiced. While these traditions had not required the
involvement of a folklorist to survive, they became widely known and gained a new lease on life
through Lomax’s efforts as a public folklorist. By presenting traditions to wider audiences he
helped to safeguard them, providing new performance opportunities. Like contemporary
public folklorists, Lomax had a Janus-‐faced approach to those he served, with one side turned
to the bigger stage (presenting material to exoteric audiences), and the other side turned
inward (perpetuating traditions within the originating communities). These approaches
impact each other, as the wider visibility and prestige brought about by recording and
presentation to new audiences reverberate within the communities where traditions originate,
spurring revitalization.
33
Safeguarding and sustaining traditions requires multiple approaches, as Daniel Sheehy
points out in delineating four principal strategies “aimed at affecting the community of origin of
a given music” (1992, 330). Frequently citing Lomax’s work as exemplary, he discusses four
“basic qualities for these strategies:
(1) developing new “frames” for musical performance, (2) “feeding back” musical models to the communities that created them, (3) providing community members access to strategic models and conservation techniques, and (4) developing broad, structural solutions to broad problems” (330-‐31).
Lomax created new performance frames through radio programs, concerts and development of
folklife festivals. Sheehy cites Folk Song Style and Culture as employing a feedback approach;
he notes that Lomax wrote about the “renewed sense of significance” generated for peoples
whose
artists, communicating in genuine style, appear on the powerful and prestigious mass media or begin to use them for their own purposes. Experience teaches that such direct feedback of genuine, uncensored native art to its roots acts upon a culture like water, sunlight and fertilizer on a barren garden; it begins to bloom and grow again” (Lomax 1968, 9, cited in Sheehy 1992, 333).
When discussing the strategy of “providing communities with access to strategic models and
conservation techniques” Sheehy again cites Lomax, who wrote to his sister Bess in 1987 that
he “equated the possession of knowledge of one’s own culture to an arming mechanism against
cultural aggression” (quoted in Sheehy 1992, 333). Lomax worked within communities to
provide techniques to safeguard traditions and thus act counterhegemonically. But he was also
an important influence in shaping the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the National Endowment
for the Arts Folk and Traditional Arts Program, and the traditional music components of the
Newport Folk Festival, while also indirectly influencing other American folklife programs. Thus,
34
he also pursued the fourth strategy discussed by Sheehy: the creation of institutions that
develop “broad structural solutions to broad problems,” forwarding the goals embodied in the
other strategies (1992, 331).
Lomax viewed the act of collecting folklore as an encounter that at once validated
neglected traditions, brought joy to performer and audience at the moment of documentation,
and promised tradition bearers that their voices would be heard rather than ignored. In
recounting his earliest collecting experiences with his father, he spoke of African American
prisoners and abjectly poor sharecroppers performing for recording devices that were seen as
portals to powerful people capable of providing redress for their suffering. Recording a group
of sharecroppers with his father John in a small country church on the Smithers Plantation,
Lomax related an “Aha!” moment that would forever shape his approach to folklore. Old Blue
demanded to sing into the recorder right away without singing the song in advance, as the
Lomaxes had requested of the group of sharecroppers gathered around them (Lomax [1982]
2003, 92-‐93). His text was
Poor farmer, poor farmer,
Poor farmer, they git all the farmer makes …
His clothes is full of patches, his hat is full of holes,
Stoopin’ down, pickin’ cotton, from off the bottom bolls,
Poor farmer, poor farmer.
When this “rhymed indictment” of the sharecropper system” was played back, one of the
sharecroppers shouted, “That thing sho’ talks sense. Blue you done it this time!” And the
35
crowd burst into applause (Lomax [1960] 2003, 174), in a response “wild with excitement and
happiness.” The teenaged Lomax knew from that moment that he would be a folklorist, and he
“realized right then that the folklorist’s job was to link the people who were voiceless and who
had no way to tell their story, with the big mainstream of world culture” (Lomax[1982] 2003,
92-‐93). In other field work experiences, playback would again and again act as an immediate
feedback mechanism, generating enthusiastic response to performances, validating the
tradition and opening a portal to a wider world. In Italy, fishermen who sang shanties
“applauded their own performance like so many opera singers” (Lomax [1960] 2003, 183), and
the “three-‐dimensional” concert of music he recorded in West Indian villages brought great joy
to audiences and set in motion the revival of an annual festival (Lomax [1977] 2003, 289).
Radio broadcasts on national networks scripted by Lomax during the early 1940s
enabled Americans to see themselves through their local traditions. Utilizing the most widely
disseminated mass media of the day – which was dominated by popular entertainment, world
and national news, sports and classical music -‐ Lomax offered a radical alternative. Listeners
heard about traditions “back where I come from” -‐-‐ the title of one of these radio series, which
Lomax scripted with Nicholas Ray. Along with productions for The American School of the Air -‐
Lomax sang, commented and advised on scripting -‐ the Back Where I Come From shows
presented a panoply of American traditions, entertaining and educating about American folk
culture (see Szwed 2010, 151-‐56, 165-‐67). Representing the local to the masses, these series
dealt with universal dimensions of the human condition through the particular expressive
means of local communities, at times incorporating the comparativist thrust of folklore
scholarship of the time. The opening remarks of the announcer on the October 21, 1940
36
broadcast of Back Where I Come From demonstrated the breadth of topics dealt with in both
series. He reminded listeners that in previous programs “we’ve talked of courting, war, the
weather, horses and quite a few other topics on which the American people have taken the
trouble of and enjoyed talking about, but we’ve confined it mainly to people from small towns,
hilltops and farm valleys,” as he introduced a show devoted to the topic of “work,” including
the song, narrative and experiences of urban workers (Lomax and Ray 1940, 2).
A broadcast of the American School of the Air about the “Games and Recreation of
Children” underscored that folklore is possessed by everyone. Lomax invited fifth graders
from a New York City public school, PS 41 in Greenwich Village, “to help me sing the songs, to
correct me when I’m wrong and to generally defend me.” The children followed scripts that
directed them to correct him as they shared their folklore with one another, and Lomax spoke
about time depth, distribution and variation in children’s folklore:
LOMAX: Game songs are the oldest, the stubbornest, and in many ways the most
mysterious of all songs. Let’s begin with this old rhyme: Onery, uery, ickery ee/
Huckabone, crackabone, tillibonee,/Ram pang muski dan,/Striddleum, straddleum
twenty-‐one.
1st CHILD: That’s not the way we do it down our way. We count like this:
eeny enny typ-‐a tunee/la la bomablini/otchee potchess doube otchee/one, two, three.
37
2nd CHILD: Well, Eleanor, you may like that one, but I like mine better: Ing wang way,
calisu, cabisay/Tafee, tafee ing wang way/Aroomiay – aromizay/ Ing wang way – one,
two, three.
3rd CHILD: Do you know this one? Eeny meeny miny mo/ Catch a rabbit by the toe/
If he hollers, let him go/Eeny meeny miny mo.
4th CHILD: Oh, everybody knows that. What’s the point of that old silly stuff anyhow.
Just a bunch of dopey words …
LOMAX: First of all, they’re fun, and they’re easy to remember. But the reason I
mentioned them at all was to show you something.
1st CHILD: Show us what?
LOMAX: That children’s poems and games and rhymes are usually very old. Now this
ena, mena, miny, moe rhyme that we have always known goes back to an old system of
counting in England, that comes from the part of England known as Wales. In the old
days in Wales you counted to ten this way: One, eina; two, mina; three, pera; four,
peppera; five, pin; six, chester; seven, nester; eight, near; nine, dickera, ten, nin.
CHILD: It certainly sounds funny to me. (Lomax 1941, 2-‐4).
In replying to the child, Lomax noted that American children still use such rhymes in choosing
sides for tag.
38
Lomax continued to be extensively involved with radio during the 1940s and 1950s. He
profiled American regions and examined issues in the lives of ordinary Americans in radio
broadcasts produced for the Office of War Information, and he explored musical traditions from
diverse American regional and ethnic traditions as well as other world cultures on a weekly
radio show broadcast nationwide on the Mutual Broadcasting System in the late 1940s. During
the years he spent living in Britain in the 1950s, he produced a number of broadcasts for the
BBC on American, British and other European traditions. As he had in his American broadcasts,
Lomax drew heavily from his own field research and presented folk musicians in live broadcasts,
while also producing theatricalized renderings of folk culture. He continued to combine
different approaches, presenting both scripted dramatizations and straight performances of
folk song, as in “Sing Christmas and the Time of the Year,” a live 1957 Christmas-‐day program
on the BBC Home Service. It originated from multiple locations and was rehearsed in studios by
participants who included English, Scottish and Welsh folk singers. During the 1950s, Lomax
continued to produce documentary films and began to venture into television, producing
television programs for the BBC and Granada Television .
When producing presentations for the concert stage during the first half of his career,
Lomax likewise used both theatricalized approaches and less mediated presentations featuring
traditional folk musicians performing their own repertoires. The theatre productions included
The Big Rock Candy Mountain, dubbed “A New American Folk Musical,” which was staged in
London in 1955, and American Folk Music, scripted by Lomax in the 1940s, which included
choreography by Sophie Maslow and songs by Woody Guthrie for a “Folksay” number based on
Carl Sandburg’s “The People YES.” As a central figure in the folk music boom of the early
39
postwar period, Lomax promoted participation by actively engaged audiences, and he viewed
these revivals as a major countervailing force to the alienation experienced by passive
consumers of mass entertainment. Along with Pete Seeger and Earl Robinson, he was one of
the driving forces behind the participatory hootenannies produced by People’s Songs at New
York’s Town Hall (Szwed 2010, 224). The hootenannies included both traditional folk
musicians and folk revivalists, in what was billed as “an outstanding array of folksinging, guitar-‐
playing, songwriting, harmonica-‐blowing, banjo-‐plucking people in New York and vicinity”
(People’s Songs, n.d.). People’s Songs backed Lomax for another series, The Midnight Special,
featuring folk musicians performing to audiences of as many as 1500 (Szwed 2010, 225-‐28).
While Lomax, himself a singer of folk songs, continued to favor broad participation in
the performance of folk music, during a subsequent folk revival which began in the late 1950s
he began to raise issues of authenticity and appropriation by the “city singer of folk songs”
(Lomax [1959] 2003c, 197). He contended that the “folkniks have been mainly concerned with
the formal aspects of folk song,” while generally unaware of the singing style or the emotional
content of these folk songs, as they exist in tradition” (195,196). While he recognized that
some of these revivalists were “tackling the … much more serious problems of style and
content,” Lomax’s interests had now turned to greater emphasis on the performance of
traditions possessed by birthright (197). He advocated more strongly for communities to come
to consciousness of their cultural heritage by respecting and participating in their own folk
traditions. This shift of emphasis was evident during Lomax’s last several years in England.
While he had formed skiffle bands with Ewan MacColl, Shirley Collins and others (Szwed 2010,
291-‐92), and he applauded the skiffle music movement’s success in motivating Britons towards
40
“learning to make their own music,” Lomax expressed the hope that the skifflers would “get
tired … of their monotonous two-‐beat imitation of Negro rhythm and [,] … looking around [,] …
discover the song-‐tradition of Great Britain” which, he contended, “in melodic terms, is
probably the richest in Western Europe” (Lomax[1957] 2003, 137). However, as Szwed notes,
many in Britain “assumed there was not much left of folk culture in the first industrialized
nation” (Szwed 2010:262).
In his BBC series A Ballad Hunter Looks at Britain, the episode “Come Listen to My Song”
presented a “folk-‐song portrait of the British Isles.” Lomax spoke of the enduring majesty of
British folk song and the need to recognize and revitalize the tradition:
LOMAX: “The Bonny Bunch of Roses” – ever since I heard this old ballad, this is the
way I thought about the British Isles. In the last half dozen years we found more
varied and more beautiful tunes here than in any country west of the Balkans. This is
spite of the competing roar of factories and the radio and the cinema – in spite of
neglect and the snobbery that has driven your folksingers into the back country of
Britain.… When Napoleon reached out to pluck the Bonny Bunch of Roses a hundred
and fifty years ago, it must have been the richest garden of music in the Western
world.
RECORD: PIPES UP FOR A MOMENT AND OUT
LOMAX: My hope is that this day will come again. My purpose in this programme is to
show that the songs and the singers are at hand for a native musical re-‐awakening. Like
all art, British folk song waits only for appreciation and encouragement. In every county
41
there are folk artists ready to show the way. Listen now to a woman in County Cork, a
fair, tall girl with a voice as tender as her blue eyes, who sings THE AIRY GIRL (Lomax
1957:2).
Through all his manifold approaches to creating representational frames for folk traditions,
Lomax maintained an overarching objective of safeguarding local traditions by creating multiple
performance situations, both in community settings as part of everyday life and when reframed
for general audiences. Contemporary American folklife festivals often ground performances
in modes of presentationlike those practiced in their local, community based contexts, a
recontextualizing approach first envisioned by Lomax for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Writing to Olin Downes, the Fair’s Director of Music, Lomax proposed a “Folk Lore Midway,”
centered upon “night spots for American folk lore,” including “A down-‐Easter fish house with
the shanties and the ballads that have grown up along the New England sea coast, a Mexican
patio with hot tamales, tacos and tequila vendors” and the performance of “ballads and
religious festivals from Northern Mexico and Southwestern United States,” and a “Negro honky
tonk” (Lomax 1938).
Lomax envisioned re-‐created settings that would incorporate meticulously developed
staging as a way to accomplish a folk naturalism at the World’s Fair. For instance, he also
proposed a “break-‐down house” – an ideal type of a “mountain square dance hall” – that would
offer traditional foods; music by performers such as Aunt Molly Jackson, Pete Steele and Sara
Ogan, and a participatory square dance. Lomax described the proposed setting and scene in
considerable detail. The stage would be a dais “about eighteen feet in diameter,” raised so all
42
participants could view the singing, acting and dancing. In his description, a dance hall
“encircles the stage,” with “levels for tables” around it. “Back country life” is indexed by props
that include a “pot-‐bellied stove and a big lard can.” Lomax imagined performers who could
“step across the narrow well of the dance floor and bring the audience into the action of the
play by teaching them the square dance”; thus, the performers would “not feel themselves
isolated from their audience,” and they would be “working under conditions to which they are
accustomed to in their own environment.” Lomax insisted that the venue should serve “corn
bread, corn liquor, spare ribs, hominy, green corn, apple cobbler and all the other succulent
dishes of rural America” (1938). Apparently the break-‐down house, like the other nightspots,
would encompass the features of both a staged dramatic performance and a representative
folk performance in a ‘natural’ setting. A carefully planned verisimilitude to natural practice
was designed to trigger spontaneous performance and fully engage participation by the
audience.
In addition to the night-‐spots, Lomax proposed a “series of strategically placed open air
stages throughout the Fair Grounds” with performers drawn from the same wide spectrum of
regional and ethnic genres represented in the fair’s nightspots. Performances would be
unscripted, and artists would engage passers-‐by in the traditional manner of street performers.
As an example, Lomax advised that the “Mexican ballad vendor should actually vend his wares
throughout the Fair Grounds exactly in the fashion that he does on market day in Mexico,
where he holds hundreds of people entranced for hours on end with his chit-‐chat and his
sounding guitar” (1938).
43
By presenting street performers, Lomax felt that the World’s Fair would return to the
“ancient techniques of the strolling player, the Commedia del Arte, the wandering minstrel, the
medicine show and the parade,” which would “bring back the ancient feeling of gaiety that our
stream-‐lined commercialism has smothered.” In making his case for this approach, Lomax
spoke to the need to counter the hegemonic forces of mass entertainment, a position he would
return to again and again for the next six decades. “Driven into the back woods by the radio
and the cinema,” Lomax contended, “popular art has tended to become the monopoly of
professional virtuosos and big corporations.” (1938). 7
While Lomax’s proposals for the 1939 World’s Fair were never implemented,8 his ideas
for the recontextualization of folk performances were reborn at the Smithsonian Folklife
Festival. He was a mentor to the festival’s founder, Ralph Rinzler. As a Newport Folk Festival
board member, Lomax was instrumental in establishing Rinzler’s position as its director of field
research, and he shaped Newport’s traditional music program. Lomax also advised Rinzler
during the formative years of the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, underscoring the
importance of presenting folklore as customarily practiced, identifying participants through
field research, and engaging cultural professionals to prepare artists for the transition to new
venues and audiences. In an undated “Theoretical Points for Smithsonian” written in the mid-‐
1970s, he outlined “[t]wo big themes both of which have to do with the social and cultural
health of the United States:
44
1. Bringing into action the local community style models, whatever they are. Must be
very purist, not amateurist. The festival sums this up by digging under the surface
of every day and bringing to light the roots of all American cultures.
2. Accent on ancestries. Those people who are disadvantaged in our country are those
who have no culture or who don’t know what it is composed of. People need to feel
good about their own particular ancestries. (Lomax [1974?])
Unabashed in his advocacy for authenticity and purity, notions heavily deconstructed and
problematized in contemporary folkloristics, Lomax was outlining a case for the Folklife Festival
to showcase traditions representing an alternative to cultural alienation and deracination. On
another occasion, however, his notes for a festival planning meeting in January 1975 seemed to
question focusing upon cultures as self-‐contained entities, as he “questioned focus on
particular communities, a focus possibly too narrow to show the broader stream of tradition
shaping people’s lives” (Smithsonian Institution Division of Performing Arts 1975). While some
of his language in “Theoretical Points for the Smithsonian” is unfortunate, eliding such critical
matters as cultural creolization and the multiple ancestries of most Americans, this document
also succinctly states Lomax’s ongoing concerns about genuine and spurious culture and the
need to affirm roots traditions.
Indeed, the same year, in his capacity as a consultant to the 1976 Smithsonian Festival
of American Folklife, Lomax asked Yaskcko Ichioka of the Nippon Television Network to suggest
“a company of twenty or so genuine village dancers and singers who can present a
representative kind of Japanese Folklore.” The Festival, he wrote, would be presenting
45
“genuine and authentic American folkways,” and organizers would “match these living
presentations with groups of equally authentic signers from the many countries which have
sent immigrants to North America.” In this letter, Lomax underlined what was needed: “We
do not want students or city performers of choreographed folk music and dance, but real farm
laborers and fishermen, and so on, whose tradition goes back to their ancestors (1975b).
Here, then, is another shift in Lomax’s thought. For Lomax and for the Smithsonian
Festival, presenting traditions as they are traditionally practiced, with “local community
models,” came to mean avoiding choreographed and theatricalized presentations, approaches
which Lomax had himself employed earlier in his career. After the early 1960s, his own
presentations of folk traditions centered upon documentary films and television programs that
were not dramatized; notable among these were his “American Patchwork” series for PBS and
educational films exploring global traditions through cantometrics and choreometrics.
Lomax insisted that traditional performers be treated with “Cultural TLC” (tender
loving care) when they perform for new audiences; as he advised me in our first meeting, he
wanted to make sure artists felt good about themselves and their traditions. Writing to James
Morris in 1975 about the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, Lomax asserted, “[T]he
most important thing that the festival can do is to aid and strengthen the singers.” He insisted
that “there always needs to be somebody always on hand at the performances to take care that
these real and sensitive people that you bring from quiet places into noisy Washington are not
hurt.” The Smithsonian staff needs to treat the artists like “royalty”, with “each one an
important artist in his own genre.” He added that Cultural TLC “needs to go further than that”
46
to “help develop the confidence of the artist, his sense of his worth in comparison to other
artists and other aesthetic traditions, so that when we goes back home he can work more
confidently in his own community” (1975a). Since all folklore is local, presenting folk artists in
public programs to new audiences should affirm their self worth and the value of their
tradition, stimulating them to perform and perpetuate their traditions with new vigor.
Lomax spoke to me about “the return” with strong intonation when I first encountered
him, and I sensed that this concept had multiple meanings. I came to understand that in a
general sense, he meant the return of traditions to their originating communities, viewed as an
ethical imperative for all scholars who have intervened in a culture as researchers. The idea
resonates deeply with contemporary folklorists, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists, who
speak often nowadays of the need for reciprocity between scholars and communities they
study, as they question what these communities get out of their relationship. This kind of
reciprocity can involve returning documented materials to local archives and providing royalties
for recordings, as Alan Lomax’s daughter Anna Lomax Wood has done through the Association
for Cultural Equity, which her father founded. Another meaning of ‘the return’ could be
equipping communities to document their own traditions and making scholarship written about
them accessible. And ‘the return’ could also mean the return of artists to their communities
after performing elsewhere, affirmed and committed to revivifying their traditions.
“The return” speaks to a movement that gathered steam in the last quarter of the
twentieth century; as Lomax noted in a letter to Burt Feintuch in 1980, the “new groundswell in
anthropology, folklore and the humanities is concern about the RETURN of tapes, photographs,
47
information of all sorts to its sources -‐-‐-‐ the tribes and villages of the planet from which our
centers of learning have enriched themselves.” He indicated that he was developing a plan for
ethnomusicologists to return copies of documentation they collected in
various third world countries, to set up recording and filming centers and then to work with all sorts of media and living event modes to feedback the collectanea to the cultures from which it came, in order to give them media status, the educational standing, and the sense of professional competence in the arts that will enable them to face the pressure of the media and to grow from their own roots” (1980).
His 1987 “Micro-‐Polynesian Folk Arts Plan” outlined in detail a schema for “the return” in that
region. He stated that the “role of the scholar … should be in sharing what has already been
learned and collected with the peoples involved.” Scholarly products of this sort could include
ethnographic and archaeological handbooks, maps, photographs, “tapes of the music recorded,
videos of the dances and ceremonies filmed … to enable people of the area to share the
rhythmic and non-‐verbal arts of their ancestors, to reacquire items where moribund and add to
these audiovisual records.” His plan called for all field work teams “to be equipped with a tape
recorder, a tape duplicator, a video camera and a video tape duplicator, which might be left on
site having been cooperatively used to record as much of the expressive behavior as possible.”
He indicated that ‘the return’ entails mutual engagement in research and presentation of
culture, with the outside scholar “providing media training … setting up oral history activities of
the sort the communities want and designing the kind of museums that might be required”
(1987, 1-‐3).
As in so much of what he wrote and accomplished, Lomax was prescient in this
comprehensive schema for mutual engagement, suggesting an ideal yet to be realized – even
48
by himself. Lomax certainly had his share of contradictions, and his relationships with others
were shaped by his overwhelming personality and a distinctive vision that he pursued
relentlessly. Both by conviction and by necessity, anthropologists and folklorists are now
engaged in ‘the return’ and attempt mutual engagement; efforts in this regard include
reframing ‘informants’ as ‘collaborators’ and training ‘community scholars’
to document and present their own traditions. However, intellectual appraisals are still shared
too rarely between ethnographers and the communities they study, and the scholar too often
maintains academic privilege. Scholars who equip communities to document their own
cultures are likewise all too uncommon. Power asymmetries are always intrinsic to the
relationships of ethnographers and the communities they study, although these power
imbalances may be diminished when the folklorist shares authority for representation. At
times, folklorists have disempowered themselves by turning over responsibility for
representation entirely to local communities (see Baron 1999, 2010). Self-‐documentation is
proliferating as communities take care of their own business using inexpensive recording
technology and the Internet, placing the onus on scholars to demonstrate the value of
systematic ethnographic documentation.
Alan Lomax had a massive impact upon small-‐scale cultures and the world at large. He
helped awaken America and Great Britain to their folk heritage with broadcasts, concerts and
recordings based upon his field research. He was a major catalyst for folk revivals and helped
lay a foundation for a worldwide revolution in popular culture through recordings of great blues
singers and other musicians who greatly influenced rock music. As a prototype for the
folklorist as cultural broker, he connected artists to audiences and markets beyond their own
49
communities by means of the mass media, recordings, public presentations and the
development of cultural policies. He shaped the development of American national folklife
programs and articulated a remarkable, comprehensive vision for a national folk cultural policy.
Long before the emergence of public folklore as a major focus of the field of folklore studies,
Lomax contended that all folklorists should be advocates for traditional artists and their
communities. While recognizing that communities can safeguard their traditions through
resilience and resistance to the hegemony of mass culture, he showed that it is often necessary
for folklorists to intervene in order to sustain folklore by documenting it and enabling traditions
to be presented anew. With one eye on endangered traditions and the other on broad
audiences, Lomax combined the two with parallax vision, conceptualizing and experimenting
with feedback loops of two-‐way communication and presentation methods grounded in
customary modes of performance that engaged new audiences while also reinvigorating
traditions within communities. He was a maverick in folklore studies, an outsider in a field that
specializes in the marginal, though his substantial influences upon the field as both a theorist
and practitioner have not been fully acknowledged.
Today, relationships between center and periphery are being reconfigured, placing into
question some of Lomax’s concerns about the marginalization and fragility of local cultures.
Individuals and groups from cultures anywhere in the world can now readily upload traditional
performances on YouTube, thousands of formerly difficult-‐to-‐find recordings of traditional
performances are available online, and community members can easily and accessibly record
traditional events with smart phones and sophisticated mass-‐produced digital cameras.
Multiculturalism is far more accepted nowadays (due, again, in no small part to Lomax’s
50
influence), to the point where it has become problematic to locate what is culturally normative.
Communities everywhere are interested in recovering and promoting their heritage, just as
individuals are trying to connect to their ancestral roots. But academic and cultural
establishments still devalue the local, and American commercial entertainment industries
maintain a strong hegemony that shuts out local vernacular expressions. While electronic
media easily facilitate community self-‐documentation, they also enable rapid appropriation of
traditional cultural practices by outsiders, engendering new threats to small-‐scale cultures. As
Lomax might say, cultural health is one of the great public health issues of the day. Folklore, as
always, is a potent antidote to alienation, and there needs to be much more power to the
periphery.
New York State Council on the Arts
New York City
Acknowledgments
I presented an earlier version at this essay at “Crossovers: Conversations in Celebration of John
F. Szwed”, at Yale University in May 2008. That presentation drew from my remarks
moderating the session “Equity and Cultural Policy” at “The Lomax Legacy: Folklore in a
Globalizing Century,” a symposium at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in
January 2006. Research for this essay was carried out while I was a Non-‐Resident Fellow of the
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-‐American Research at Harvard University. I am
grateful to Guha Shankar, John Szwed, and Anna Lomax Wood for their advice and
51
encouragement. Photocopies of documents from the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of
Congress were viewed at the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) in New York City. Anna
Lomax Wood facilitated access to the copies held by ACE, and Todd Harvey generously located
citation information about the original materials at the American Folklife Center of the Library
of Congress.
Notes
1 Writing in the New York Times, Larry Rohter noted that “Lomax’s use of personal computers to help develop
criteria to identify and classify” commonalities in musical styles worldwide involved “creating something very much
like the algorithms used today by Pandora and other music streaming services” (2012). For the Association of
Cultural Equity’s online archives, go to http://research.culturalequity.org/ . More information about the Alan
Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress is available at http://www.loc.gov/folklife/lomax/ .
2 The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife is now known as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and the Folk Arts
Program of the National Endowment for the Arts is now known as the Folk and Traditional Arts Program of the
National Endowment for the Arts.
3 For instance, Lomax proposed that the Carter administration create a Presidential Commission on Grass Roots
Culture and suggested that the Federal Communications Commission “might assign staff to implement the
regulations under which licensees are required to devote a reasonable amount of air time to local affairs and local
cultural activities” ([197-‐? b] ), 5).
4 At the Midcentury International Folklore Conference, Lomax wrote that folklore in its “nationalistic or even its
regionalistic form … can be not only ugly but downright dangerous” ([1952] 2003, 114).
52
5John Szwed indicates that Lomax’s proposal reached Carter “through Andrew Young, who passed it on to Stuart E.
Eizenstat, of Carter’s campaign, and later Carter’s chief domestic policy advisor.” Eizenstat “urged” Lomax to
“apply for a job within the incoming administration.” Though Lomax never submitted an application, he did attend
Carter’s inauguration, “where he introduced the Georgia Sea Island Singers” (Szwed 2010:370).
6 Blues in the Mississippi Night was recorded in 1946 following a concert produced by Lomax in New York CIty, but
it was not released until 1959. The bluesmen initially asked for the recordings to be destroyed, but the artists
eventually agreed that the recordings could be retained under the condition that Lomax never reveal their
identities.
7 The proposal for the 1939 World’s Fair also recommended that lectures by leading folklorists and performers be
presented at the fair, on topics which included a “Symposium on American Folk Music,” (including Charles Seeger,
George Pullen Jackson, and Robert Gordon), “Hot Jazz” (with John Hammond, Benny Goodman and Louis
Armstrong, among others), “Regional Literature” (including J. Frank Dobie, Frances Densmore, Benjamin Botkin,
and Sterling Brown); “The American Folk Tale” (to feature Franz Boas, Stith Thompson, Martha Beckwith and Zora
Neale Hurston), and “the Ballad in America” (including Louise Pound, George Lyman Kittredge, Herbert Halpert,
Reed Smith, and John A. Lomax). Szwed notes that Lomax wanted the symposium to occur in the “American Folk
Theatre, a concert hall and educational center for the popular arts” which would “ease audiences into folk culture
and avoid the chaos of the typical folk festival” by offering both “academic symposia” and “carefully scripted
concerts that would put folk music in historic and aesthetic context” (Szwed 2010, 132)
6 Szwed indicates that “a series of bureaucratic tangles and turf wars resulted in the musical events either being
appropriated by the director of entertainment’s office or not being approved at all.” For example, “The African
American juke joint was made a concession for the owners of the Savoy ballroom” (133).
53
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Robert Baron directs the Folk Arts Program and Museum Program at the New York State
Council on the Arts and teaches in the Goucher College Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability
Program. His publications include Public Folklore (with Nick Spitzer, 1992) and Creolization as
Cultural Creativity (with Ana Cara, 2011). Baron holds a PhD in Folklore and Folklife from the
University of Pennsylvania; he has been a Smithsonian Fellow in Museum Practice and a
Fulbright Senior Specialist in Finland and the Philippines. ([email protected])
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