Apparently, Eleanor Roosevelt “liked” Lawrence Gellert’s Negro Songs of Protest, enough to keep the copy he sent her, something she might well have not done if she had been shy of his politics or indifferent to its contents. Gellert was a known communist, after all, and, communist associations were not a good image for the wife of a president already suffering public concern for his wife’s interests. Indeed, Mrs. Roosevelt’s possession of Gellert’s book--her personal copy is signed by Gellert and has her bookplate pasted on the inside cover--is a Popular Front success story made possible because Mrs. Roosevelt and the Popular Front willingly embraced each other. She was open to the idea of black songs of protest because they gave voice to millions of Americans whose daily lives were oppressed by ignorance and racism; they saw in Gellert’s collection evidence that even the most despised of American communities could make a positive contribution to an emerging struggle by ordinary people for a broader democratic life in America. Unfortunately, Bruce Conforth’s biography, African American Folksong and African American Cultural Politics: The Lawrence Gellert Story, tells readers none of these facts; and, that is the problem at the heart of this book, Conforth's revised version of his 1992 masters’ thesis.
Such is unfortunate because the appearance of Conforth’s book is an event, of sorts, especially because Conforth, once a great defender of Gellert’s work, is now insisting that Gellert’s collection of black protest folksongs is not genuine. Conforth bases his claim on a narrow academic definition of protest, folklore, and tradition, and, accordingly fails to see the impact of movements such as the Popular Front in terms of the cultural politics that Gellert and his collection so strongly supported. As a result, Conforth is unable to recognize that Gellert and other Popular Front supporters looked not to a folklore from the past, but to a folklore of the present, a folklore-in-the-making, as a contemporary creation contributing to the understanding of American class conflict, emerging class consciousness, and realization of liberal/Marxist radical ideals on the American left.
In consequence, Conforth has become to Gellert, much what Joseph Ritson was to Bishop Percy. Like Ritson, Conforth treats his subject, now opponent, as a hostile witness. It is not that the questions Conforth raises do not have to be raised, but rather that they cannot be adequately addressed in such constricted circumstances. As a result, Conforth ignores too many questions about how folklore is defined and collected that are implicit not only in Gellert’s work, but also in Conforth’s criticism. Moreover, Conforth begs the question of what the collector’s role is, and by not addressing this essential question, he severely limits what he could say about what he calls, as per the book's title, African American Folksong and African American Cultural Politics. In the end, he provides neither a helpful discussion of the cultural politics of his topic, nor a convincing explanation of who Gellert was and what his work meant to his era and could mean to us.
Conforth’s first misstep is his overly simplified psychological indictment of Gellert’s character. According to his reading, Gellert had a flawed identity, partly because his family came from Hungary, partly because they had experienced anti-Semitism, and partly because it was both Jewish and Catholic. Equally significant, according to Conforth, Lawrence, the youngest, felt inferior to his older brothers, particularly Hugo, who became a prominent leftist artist, and thus sought to overcome their “superiority” by outdoing their accomplishments. Thus, Conforth concludes that Lawrence, who went to Tryon, North Carolina, in 1922 for health reasons, and who previously had had little contact with blacks, more or less arrived at collecting black lore by “accident.” Conforth seems to think that his use of the word "accident” undermines the idea that Gellert had any real convictions, without acknowledging that what is important is how individuals respond to the “accidents” that life confronts everyone with. Out of an accident, if it was an accident, Gellert decided on his life’s work. Conforth goes still further arguing Gellert initially had no interest in protest songs. He only changed his focus during the depression to gain attention and esteem from Hugo and his circle at the New Masses.
Conforth’s second misstep is his weak analysis of Gellert’s political beliefs. He argues that because Gellert began his career as a stage actor, he was apolitical. He attaches great importance to the fact that Gellert said, “my political life is a romantic sort of thing” (78). In fact, romantic thinking, consider Shelley, was an entry point for many artists into left-wing politics. Neither can one take Conforth seriously when he charges Gellert with being a womanizer and of constantly reinventing himself (forget being an American if you want to turn the idea of self-invention into a sign of psychological problems) as evidence of an apolitical life. Womanizing seems a curious way of describing someone who had a series of relationships with women, but Conforth takes it to new heights. He refers to Nancy Cunard, the English shipping-line heiress, supporter of the arts and leftist causes, as a “nymphomaniac,” and her bringing together and editing of Negro: An Anthology (1934), a landmark work to which Gellert contributed a selection of black protest song with his commentary on them, receives very little comment from Conforth. All Conforth can say about this is that Cunard and Gellert “were perfect for each other. Cunard, the sexually exploitative and experimental bohemian who had already acquired a reputation as a nymphomaniac in Europe, and the womanizing Gellert” (73). Alas, Conforth offered a much more thoughtful and insightful analysis in his earlier thesis: “The relationship between Gellert and Cunard must have been one of mutual respect as well as love. Each one had been an outcast in their own society. Each one had become extremely interested in left-wing, even communist ideologies, and each one had found their creative outlet through Black art. Each one of them was probably the only person who could really understand the other.”
Conforth’s third misstep, based on his “misstepped” readings of Gellert’s psychology and politics, is to accuse Gellert of fabricating many of his songs by inducing his informants to bring him protest songs. Conforth then argues that the songs Gellert offers as protest songs have no protest in them and that, if they do, the fieldwork of other collectors doesn’t support the idea that they were a part of the black oral tradition in the South. These are the two central issues that have dogged Gellert’s work from its initial publication, with most of the discussion turning on the definition of protest, the importance of collection by multiple scholars, the practice of their collection, and the role, if any, of individuals from outside the folk community in creating these songs.
About these matters, Conforth writes as if there are criteria for good scholarship and sound methodology that transcend history, culture, or intention. He assumes that collectors of folklore share a single, unified, atemporal, universally agreed upon methodological yardstick when in truth his preferred method is only one of the field’s formulations of acceptable practice. Conforth thus writes Gellert out of the history of folklore because he, Gellert, does not accept that practice. Unfortunately, this foray into the fallacy of Whig history eliminates the historical and cultural questions Gellert’s work challenged. For example, Conforth assumes that Gellert’s black protest songs cannot be folksongs because folksongs have to be collected from more than one informant separated, certainly by space and preferably by time. But, why assume that collection is the determining factor? If collection is the key, then it is almost guaranteed that the number of collected songs will be smaller than the number of community songs, unless we want to assume that all that was sung for a collector was all that a community knew. We know, however, that collectors often ignored community songs that did not match their criteria, and, more importantly, that community singers did not perform songs that might offend collector sensibilities. One of Gellert’s and his supporters’ compelling claims is precisely that blacks sang protest songs for him that they would not sing for other white collectors because of his explicit leftist politics.
Conforth also manages to damn Gellert for the popular lines from commercial recordings or well-known folksongs found in the protest songs he recorded, maintaining, on the one hand, that Gellert has slipped in new lyrics and merely surrounded them with traditional lines, and, on the other, that these protest songs cannot be part of folk tradition because they do not have more lines from oral tradition. As an aside, it is also worth considering what it would mean if Gellert had co-created songs with some of his informants. One can imagine scholars who would declare the resulting songs non-folk, indeed, merely evidence of an outsider contaminating a folk tradition. This point of view, however, privileges lore produced within isolated “folk communities” over lore produced in part by interaction between groups as the real, the true, the pure lore: it is a rejection of modernity.
Conforth details Gellert’s comings and goings on the New Deal art projects, but never captures the excitement or the ideals of the period. Like many other Popular Front artists, Gellert found employment working on the New Deal’s federal theatre, music, and writers’ projects. He was given work that allowed him to fuse his theatrical, musical, and folklore interests, especially regarding African Americans, as for example choreographer Helen Tamiris’s How Long Brethren, which explored African American life in dances set to Gellert’s songs, which were sung by an African American gospel choir.
When Conforth is not bashing Gellert for his alleged personality defects, he criticizes his financial motives. Evidently, using folklore for commercial purposes is to defile it. Of course, collectors can be and have been criticized for claiming ownership of songs they collected and for obtaining royalties from their commercial use. And, the fact that Gellert was not the only one is by itself no defense. Conforth, however, not only criticizes Gellert for this practice, but also demeans him: “Lawrence saw that this folk revival might be his chance for the kind of financial success that had eluded him, and he intended to make every attempt to cash in on it” (209). There are a few problems here, even beyond the use of the pejorative “cash in.” Gellert had to have known that publishing all his life in CP journals was not the road to financial success, given his constant scraping to make a living. Almost all of his choices about the use and publication of his collection showed that he made his greatest commitments to his political and cultural goals, not to economic ones. Struggling to survive economically, he tried to secure recognition and money from the work he had done. Even an only slightly more sympathetic student of Gellert’s life than Conforth would have noted that in the last quarter of his life he had no safe harbor, not even, say, in the Library of Congress or some university-related institute.
I am curious about what led to Conforth’s change of heart about Gellert and resulted in him rounding on poor Lawrence, who is not here to defend himself. But I don’t think we should bother to try and figure it out. The important thing is not to let Conforth slam the door shut on the Gellert story when there is so much more to explore and discuss.
--------
[Review length: 1912 words • Review posted on August 30, 2018]