Spring 2002 Volume XXXI, No. 2

Meditations on Coltrane's Legacies by Salim Washington Reminiscing on Ruth by Bess Lomax Hawes New Music Notes by Carol J. Oja An Amy Beach Discography by Adrienne Fried Block ISAM Matters Reviews Celebrating Jelly Roll by Jeff Taylor Listening to Beach by Liane Curtis Transcribing the Folk by David Evans Our Singing Children by Jane Palmquist ISAM Home

Reminiscing on Ruth by Bess Lomax Hawes Bess Lomax Hawes, daughter of the renowned folk song collector John Lomax, was an original member of the Almanac Singers, a folk ensemble known for its politically charged renditions of “people’s music” in the 1940s. She went on to pursue a successful career as a folklorist, culminating in her appointment as the first Director of the Folk Arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1977. Below is an excerpt from the paper she presented at ISAM’s Ruth Crawford Seeger Centennial Festival held on 26-27 October 2001, in which she reflects on the collaboration between her brother Alan Lomax and Ruth Crawford Seeger in preparing the 1941 folk song collection Our Singing Country. As the jazz age spiraled into the Depression years and renewed focus on the situation of the “common man (and woman)” emerged, songbooks like Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag and my father and brother’s American Ballads and Folk Songs began to appear alongside the familiar hymnals, opera chorus excerpts, and the popular song collections of Gilbert and Sullivan, Berlin, and Gershwin. The typical songbook of the period included lyrics, an outline of the tune in musical notation together with full piano accompaniment, and occasionally guitar chords. The idea was to gather around the piano and sing the songs en famille and I remember when everybody I knew used to do just that on Sunday afternoons. The folk music collections contained a potpourri of Appalachian ballads, sea chanteys, African American spirituals, blues, and work songs, and now and then a Spanish dance tune and miscellaneous city song. While transcriptions of basic melody lines and harmonic accompaniments proved invaluable for us Sunday crooners who wished to sing the songs ourselves, the increasing popularization of the recording machine in the 1930s inevitably led to a teasing problem. What bits of the tunes got written down hardly ever really sounded like what you could hear with your own ears when you finally listened to the field recordings as performed by the original singers. And sometimes the written music seemed a pale reflection, or even a totally different version, from what was coming out of that Victrola horn. Composer Ruth Crawford Seeger was one of the first Americans to grapple with this problem in a serious and systematic fashion. Her marvelously descriptive musical introduction to the 1941 collection Our Singing Country is an early and admirable attempt by a classically trained musician to figure out how to cope with other peoples’ musical languages.1 The book itself was composed of songs gleaned from the original recordings of black and white singers made by my father and brother while they crisscrossed the southern states during the 1930s. For me it has always been my family’s purest, most creative work, and they themselves wanted very much to make it available. Selection of what to include in the final published volume—and what to leave out—was a painful process. Father, Alan, and Ruth formed the basic editorial committee though Charles Seeger was often there too. And I was always among them taking notes as we listened to hour after hour of field recordings in the old Library of Congress attics where the dust and the heat blew in and the painted friezes and gilded decorative panels filtered the roaring ax-chopping songs and the great crashing shaped-note hymns down through the prim and orderly library stacks below us. In the evenings string quartets would play Beethoven and Haydn in the Library’s concert hall; but in the attics the unsilenced and unquenchable voices of the southern working people sang on. I used to require students in my folk music classes to read Ruth’s musical introduction as it finally appeared in Our Singing Country. I had been personally privileged to observe at first hand what a tough job she had taken on and how hard it was to do. I was seventeen that year, and after the weeks of listening at the Library of Congress I worked as a messenger girl between Ruth, living in Maryland, and my father and Alan, living on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Every week I would go back and forth between them on the bus carrying bits of manuscript, alternate music transcriptions, copies of the original discs, critiques and messages, both passionate and hilarious. Ruth was a marvel. She tackled the presentation on paper of a fiddle tune like “Bonaparte’s Retreat” with the same precision, determination, and awe that she would have devoted to a brilliantly realized cadenza from a Mozart violin concerto. Ruth listened, and listened, and then listened some more. She used the recording for what she believed it to be—a true record of the music as played or sung. She took as her basic assumption that the music was sounding the way the player wanted it to sound—not like a failed imitation of something else. Most people at that time thought of the folk song as “simple,” “naïve,” “natural” and crude—indeed many people still do—but Ruth’s splendid classical education and democratic personality left her devoid of that snobbery. She believed her job was simply to move the music as performed into another form of communication—print—thereby allowing it to circulate in a different kind of way. Most people doing that kind of work at that time were content with an approximation of what they thought they heard; Ruth never was. When she had to approximate, she grieved over it and agonized and changed it back and forth interminably, and finally wrote footnotes saying she was sorry and it wasn’t exactly what she had hoped for. In the meantime my brother Alan—as passionate and committed as Ruth to social needs, social justice, the importance and artistry of the especial messages of ordinary people, but with much more experience in the twisting and cramping effects of translating sound into print—was trying to make up in a different way for the separation of musician, music, and performance that we all observed occurring when songs were put into books. He thought a great deal about how to present the songs in Our Singing Country within their special place and time, how to bring their unknown singers into prominence, and how to convey his respect for their poetry, passion, and artistry. He grouped the songs in terms of their use and their place of singing rather than according to literary criteria, struggling in every way he could conceive to rejoin the artist with the art. These were truly radical years in our country and both Ruth Crawford Seeger and Alan Lomax were themselves conjoined in an attempt to change the basic assumptions that had underlain both the academic and popular attempts to understand American music. And if you are going to support the changing of things you must observe the small details for they will eventually lead you into the large. So like all the good New Dealers and left-wingers of that time they argued constantly with rage and humor, with anger and affection, and with unrelenting enthusiasm. To cite one example that has lasted in my mind, a mammoth battle over the blues song “Go Down, You Little Red Rising Sun” went on for weeks, the point at issue being whether in the second line the singer had sung “you redder than rouge rising sun” with a voice break or “redder than ruby rising sun.” Alan’s position was that no blues singer he had ever recorded would consider singing such an awkward and unpoetic line as “redder than rouge” while Ruth maintained that the only problem with that was that it was just what had indeed happened. And she had listened enough number of times to prove it—eighty-five, perhaps, or eighty-six? She kept a running tally on the number of listenings she had devoted to each song and she would enquire of Alan a report of how many times he had listened to something. By that time Alan had talked with, broken bread with, and contemplated the wonders of the world with hundreds of traditional singers. Ruth had not had that chance, and so they sometimes arrived at different though mostly complementary conclusions. Alan and Ruth represented very different human beings from different backgrounds with different ways of perceiving aesthetic systems, but they were trying together to do something new and honest, ground-breaking and important. And as I watched them struggle, I began at my tender age to absorb some of the subtleties of art and the complexities of change. I also began to shudder at the thought of the thousands of such difficulties that must be faced in the construction of a past reality. In every case there are the facts about what actually happened, the unassailable on-the-records rendition of the performance that Ruth held was the vital element, the almost holy data. But then there are the issues that she couldn’t really take into account because they weren’t immediately perceivable on the disc—things like the situation of the singer’s age and background, the health or sickness of the surrounding community, the intensity of a particular historical tradition or moment, the customary ways of telling a story in a particular community—all the surrounding information that can be summarized as context. And those are the things Alan tended to insist were vital. Where should the weight fall? Which was more important? Could some new amalgam of perspectives develop? Well, they struggled and they sweated and, to my mind, they came up with a volume that was worth all the work—not as final solution, but a pretty darned good beginning. And I am sure that, whether they recognized it or not, it was worth it to them. For if you really dig into something, all that energy comes back into you and makes you just slightly different than before. I believe that my brother was enormously influenced by Ruth’s firm and loving identification with the unassailable recording and the depth and capacity of the sound of the music. She in turn was deeply affected by my brother’s ever attentive focus on the uncharted and complex relations between aesthetics and life itself, especially the sophistication and depth of the transmitted message. To my mind, both Alan’s cantometrics research and Ruth’s three volumes of children’s folk songs stand as later independent creations giving testimony to the impact of those two intellectuals on each other.2 We are all fortunate that Ruth and Alan met at a time in our history when to be called truly “radical” was a glowing compliment and at a time when there was a project worth their combined efforts. And as a woman I feel especially lucky to have had the opportunity during my impressionable years to watch a healthy, passionate, intelligent woman undertaking a ground-breaking job. Ruth Crawford Seeger set lofty standards for herself, fulfilled her personal and professional responsibilities impeccably, and left at least one seventeen-year-old girl a noble goal to reach for. Notes Click on note number to return to its place in the text. 1 John A. and Alan Lomax, eds., Our Singing Country (Macmillan, 1941; repr. Dover, 2000). 2 Alan Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture (Transaction, 1968); Ruth Crawford Seeger, American Folk Songs for Children (Doubleday, 1948; repr. Turtleback, 1980), Animal Folk Songs for Children (Doubleday, 1950; repr. Linnet, 1993), American Folk Songs for Christmas (Doubleday, 1953; repr. Linnet, 1999).