Our Singing Country

John and Alan Lomax, Leadbelly, and the Construction of an American Past

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2729632
AutoresBenjamin Filene (0009-0001-9028-1146, autor de correspondencia)
Año1991
Volumen43
Número4
Páginas602
Fecha de publicación1991-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2713083
OpenAlexW2093195780
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10
Referencias citadas13

THE depression and his wife to illness.Needing to make a fresh start, Lomax returned to the vocation he truly loved, collecting American folk songs.In 1933 he persuaded the Macmillan publishing company to contract for a book of songs, lined up charitable foundations to support a collecting expedition, and enlisted the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song to provide recording equipment and to be the official repository of the materials he gathered.Then, with his seventeen-year-old son Alan to assist him and a 350-pound Presto recording machine built into the back seat of his car, Lomax set off to spend a summer collecting America's music. 1 The 1933 trip was only the first in a series of expeditions the Lomaxes made in the thirties and early forties, when they travelled tens of thousands of miles and made thousands of recordings. 2 One of the first people the Lomaxes recorded in 1933 was an African-American singer and guitarist named Huddie Ledbetter or "Leadbelly."The Lomaxes "discovered" Leadbelly while searching southern prisons for Negro work songs.Roughly forty-four years old at the time, Leadbelly was in Louisiana's Angola Prison for murder.He astonished the Lomaxes with the variety of songs he knew and the verve and virtuosity with which he played his twelve-string guitar.When Leadbelly was released in 1934, 3 the Lomaxes took him with them on their recording expeditions and, early in 1935, brought him to New York City.There they launched a barrage of publicity promoting him as the living embodiment of America's folk-song tradition.In addition to recording scores of Leadbelly's songs for the Library of Congress archive, the Lomaxes booked appearances for him at concerts and benefit performances, arranged commercial recording sessions for him, and even recreated the story of their "discovery" of him in a March of Time newsreel. 4though Leadbelly achieved only limited commercial success before his death in 1949, ultimately the Lomaxes established his place in America's popular music history.Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, another singer whose career the Lomaxes helped shape, are considered folk forefathers of rock, pop, and blues.In 1988, CBS Records made a video entitled A Vision Shared: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, based on an album on which rock musicians from Bruce Springsteen to Bob Dylan to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys covered Guthrie's and Leadbelly's songs.The video's narrator, folk-rock singer Robbie Robertson, describes Guthrie

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