This book will speak most to us Baby Boomers who were formatively swept away by the music of the ’60s zeitgeist—the white folk revival leading to international rock renaissance; and the black country blues, R&B;, soul, and jazz uprise from American “race music” to comparably global anthem—about the historical ground and foundation on which it was built. It also reintegrates that history’s various narratives for scholars of music and culture from their more usually fractious disciplinary disconnects.
Szwed’s professional titles and background signal that interdisciplinary holism: he is Professor of Music, African-American Studies, and Anthropology at Yale; and of Music and Jazz Studies at Columbia. Those most familiar with his popular work in jazz—especially the two major biographies on a par with this one, of Sun Ra and Miles Davis—prize it for the deep grounding in its subjects’ historical and cultural contexts, and its erudite and savvy draw on his titular and other discourses.
This biography’s subject catalyzes even more potently with those strengths. While Szwed’s own work on African American culture and musicians bears, as did Lomax’s, the rapport with those subjects of a fellow Southerner and erstwhile working musician, it also reflects (adjusted for our better-integrated times) Lomax’s similar racial, social, and cultural remove. The match between author and subject is closer here, as between a torchbearer and the one to whom the torch was passed. Szwed’s closer kinship with Lomax’s story serves to amp up their shared investments in the lives and work of people such as Leadbelly, the peoples of the Caribbean and the Georgia Sea Islands, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jelly Roll Morton. These and other such names and legacies were still struggling for their later greater places in American cultural history when Szwed, as a young grad student pondering his own potential role in that struggle, first met Lomax in 1961. The tonal shift from glass half-etic to one half-emic is key to this palpably headier brew.
The book’s layered organization enriches it too. Its frame is a chronology starting with Lomax’s late-nineteenth-century parentage and moving straight through its eighteen chapters to his death at 87, in 2002. Szwed’s forte is to write like a storyteller, whether addressing the insider issues, history, and actors of the central academic disciplines (folklore, anthropology, ethnomusicology) or presenting the ethnographies generated by his interviews and research. This could make for a slumgullion of a read if not so judiciously sequenced between and within chapters in two-to-three-page sections selected to segment both reading and thought. The effect is a print version of a good and gourmet meal served in courses and combinations to optimize discernment of and variety for palate, the chance to compare and contrast the morsels consumed, and healthy digestion.
Each of those chapters is like a mini-biography or history itself, within the larger arc of Lomax’s (and the twentieth century’s). We start with Alan’s father John’s life and work as the family’s first famed collector, of songs drawn from his native Texas-regional cowboys, imprisoned ex-slaves, and generally the roughest and poorest of the working class. John was Alan’s mentor and role model, and his part in the biography is crucial and plays out well past the first half of the book (to 1948). His flamboyant personal style of self-invention/promotion, his conflict between academic-social climbing and pride in his country roots, and between racial paternalism and genuine love and respect for black culture tell a classic white Southern story, one which Lomax fils would grow and labor under, extend, and strive to transcend in his own life and work. John’s interests were initially shunned as trivial, vulgar, and derivative by his Harvard-pedigreed Texas teachers. Even so, as Szwed’s pithy scan of the discipline’s largely Scottish roots proves, Lomax père’s uniquely American Scots-Irish passion for the literary and musical in grassroots cultures both black and white reflected on its Old World lineage in a way the Harvard folklore community itself valued and supported—surprisingly, given their logocentric preference for text over performance. This mixed reception would be a trope Alan’s own life and work would replay with the institutional academics and culture brokers of his day, in different ways.
The work father and son did together was driven by the new technology of sound recording. That history roughly coincides with their discovery of Huddie Ledbetter (a.k.a. Leadbelly) in Louisiana’s Angola Prison. The story of their respective relationships with the singer-guitarist, of the relationship of their recordings and films of him with both academic archival and commercial broadcasting enterprises, and of the impact of those things for better and worse on Leadbelly’s life are both metonym and opening salvo of the same basic drama unfolding through successors such as Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy to the British and American rockers they inspired. The journey of their media wound through archived collections, radio, film, and TV projects to Lomax’s late-period Mosaic glimpse into the promised land of the worldwide web (his “Global Jukebox” project) that would have made his life’s work so much easier. Similar narrative arcs take us from Woody Guthrie through Pete Seeger to Bob Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival; from Jelly Roll Morton through John Hammond to the free-jazz/new-music hybrids of the ’60s; from fieldwork throughout Europe and the Caribbean to the world music scene of today; and from Hurston through Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Gilbert Rouget to Lomax’s own maverick and fertile theoretical work of canto- (later choreo- and parla-) metrics.
Szwed’s book is a visit to a seminal life that moved and shook so much of the last century’s culture of music, with so many of its other movers and shakers. It is a visit to an original wholeness, where distinctions between black and white, Old and New World, folk and jazz and art music, archival and commercial, public and “private” intellectuals no longer feel significantly meaningful. One feels approval, satisfaction, re-inspired by the possibilities implied.
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[Review length: 984 words • Review posted on September 14, 2011]