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While
the commercial recording of blues by black performers in the United
States in recognized as having begun with a session by Mamie Smith in
1920, field recordings of black folk songs had begun earlier, in the
first decade of the century. Most notable among these earliest projects
are Howard W. Odum’s pioneering studies in Mississipi and Georgia.
Made with a cylinder machine, none of his originals appear to have
survived, but song texts, both sacred and secular, were published in
contemporary articles and, later, in book form. In the secular field,
much of what Odum collected can be called “Proto Blues”. Some ten or
more years later, such songs stood beside and sometimes crossed over
into the repertoire of recordings made specifically for black
consumption,  especially
in the late 1920s. On
the basis of a somewhat doubful dating, the first recordings in this
survey were made by Lawrence Gellert in Greenville, South Caroline, in
1924. They comprise four guitar-accompanied blues on the theme of black
protest, relating to imprisonment. In this, they form part of
Gellert’s remarkable, almost unique, collection of this type of music,
pricipally unaccompanied hollers and group work songs, on the evidence
of available recordings. While Gellert undoubtedly began making field
recordings in 1924, like others during this period, he first used a
wax-cylinder acoustic machine. Aural and other evidence indicates,
however, that all items actually issued from his collection were
recorded electrically, using a semiprofessional portable disk cutter.
Reliable versions of the latter were first developed in the early 1930s,
and it is likely that Gellert’s surviving recordings date from that
time. They will be discussed subsequently in this context. In 1928,
Gordon was appointed to head the new Archive of American Folk Song at
the Library of Congress, a position he would hold until 1933, when
funding ran out. This, however, was not Lawrence Gellert’s purpose; he
saw black protest songs as a way to document otherwise hidden reactions
to injustice. In this he skillfully gained the confidence of his
informants, who remained anonymous, on chain gangs, prison farms, and in
other penal institutions in North and South Carolina and Georgia. About
the time that Gordon’s luck ran out with his Archive of American Folk
Song appointment, John A. Lomax, another collector of folk songs,
suggested to his New York publisher an anthology of
“American ballads and folk songs”. To his surprise, the idea
was accepted. This was in 1932, and Lomax, his fortunes at a very low
ebb, was galvanized by the good news. He set to work at
once and made an arrangement with the Library of Congress to provide
apparatus for a field-recording expedition. Like Gordon, Lomax was
seeking novel “American” material in an age when conservative
scholars believed ballads of European origin to be the only folk songs.
Secular black music, associated with what was seen as the tarnished
world of minstrelsy, ragtime, and jazz, was treated as worthless. The
Lomaxes, John A. and his son Alan, succeeded in sweeping such views
aside, establishing popular acceptance of American vernacular song. Alan
Lomax was seventeen when he set out with his father in mid-June 1933,
equipped with an Edison cylinder machine to make recordings of “the
secular songs of the Negroes”. He described these in 1934 as “work
songs, barrel-house ditties, badman ballads and corn songs”.
These kinds of music were “sought from particular locations:
the plantation, the lumber camp, and the barrelhouse were grouped in one
general category, while the prison farms provided a second. Starting
from their Texas home, the Lomaxes recorded at locations across the
spectrum of their interest. Prison-farm work song, reels, blues,
ballads, and barrelhouse songs were obtained from James Baker, Mose
Platt, Lightnin’ Washington and Wrnest Williams, among others. None of
the Texas cylinders, however, has ever been released , although songs
from most of these performers were published in American Ballads and
Folks Songs (New York, 1934). The disk recording machine provided by
the Library of Congress reached the Lomaxes on July 15, when they were
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They first put it to use during the next four
days when they visited the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. After
their success in obtaining material in Texas, the Lomaxes had become
convinced that the penitentiaries of Louisiana and Mississipi would
yield many songs. They were, however, somewhat disappointed at Angola
because of the officials of the Louisiana prison had decided all history
to the contrary, that Negroes work better when they are not singing. The
Lomaxes consolated with Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, who
claimed he was the King of the 12-string guitar players of the world. He
proved to be a highly skilled songster with a very wide repertoire, but
he was serving his second term in prison for a violent crime. Leadbelly
provided the Lomaxes with recordings of several songs they printed in
American Ballads and Folks Songs: Ella Speed, Frankie and Albert,
Honey Take a Whiff on Me, Western Cowboy, Julie Ann Johnson. After
discovery of Leadbelly at Angola, the Lomaxes pursued disk recordings of
black music at prisons in Mississipi and Tennessee. Most of these were
not blues, however. The Lomaxes concluded their expedition at
Washington, D.C., in September, and immediately began the compilation of
American Ballads and Folk Songs at the Library of Congress. On the
successful completion of this manuscript and with the encouragement of
the lIbrary, the Lomaxes were able to negotiate sponsorship for the
continuation of their folk-song collecting in the field: from 1934 until
1939 the Lomaxes travelled in all the South prisons and farms
discoverings musicians like Uncle Rich Brown, Rochelle French and
Gabriel Brown, Sampson  Pittman
and Calvin Frazier, Albert Ammons, Meade Lewis, Jimmie Johnson, Sonny
Terry and Blind Boy Fuller, Oscar Woods, Joe Harris, Kid West and many
others. One day, in Atlanta, Ruby T. Lomax (the wife) spotted “a negro
man with a guitar” stationed by a barbecue stand. This was the
celebrated bluesman-songster Blind Willie McTell, veteran of many
commercial recording sessions. The following day, Mc Tell made records
for the Library of Congress, including a selection of ballads,
barrelhouse songs, blues, and religious performances, together with
monologues on blues, his life, his recording career and old-time songs.
The most significant recordings in 1941 were those made in Mississipi by
Alan Lomax, John W. Work, and Lewis Jones, which form part of a
collaboration between the Library of Congress and Fisk University to
document “the musical habits of a single Negro community in the
Mississipi Delta. The region selected was “Cahoma and Bolivar
Counties, one hundred miles south of Memphis”, where the black
population was significantly high. During an exploratory recording trip
in late August, Lomax and his party located the blues singer-guitarist
McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters. Waters had learned
his bottleneck guitar-playing techniques from the eminent Delta bluesman
Son House. On being told this, Lomax immediately searched for House and
found him. Lomax recorded blues from House and his compatriots playing
in a small combo.
The
principal watershed in this era was world War II, which interrupted both
commercial and field recordings. Despite the interruption, there was
innovation in recording techniques. During the war, however, the Library
of Congress began producing its large repository of prewar field
recordings. Noncommercial black music, therefore, was more readily
accessible after the war. Thanks to Howard Odum, Robert Gordon, the
Lomax family, John Work, Lewis Jones
the black music was considered for the first time as a precious
heritage of the american culture giving dignity and worth to the black
community. |
