Blues in Blueprint:
the Record of Alan Lomax
and Zora Neale Hurston
(Excerpt)
When I die, they’ll bury the blues with me. But the blues will never die.
- John Lee Hooker
Tramping off the stage and into the high water rising in Wantagh, Long Island, the Boogie Man is thronged by peers and admirers eager to pay their respects. He holds his rakish homburg hat to his head as he wades through methodically, greeting the storm with a deep and resonant, “Huh-huh-how you doin’, young man?”, shaking hands and stepping evenly towards his trailer. With one foot in the door, he leaves a final well-wisher with one of his favorite lines, exuding a knowing mystique that not even Hurricane Bob could damper. In his half-century career of riding unpredictable blues revivals, Hooker was well-known to dispense such proverbial statements on the music that he lived and breathed. But here, it’s not the phrase’s insight that makes it so affective, but rather the indeterminacy of “the blues'' that he immortalizes. On the surface, Hooker is referring to the musical style that he honed and performed with sincerity and ambassadorial swagger. But in the promise of his passage, he evokes the genre’s characteristic mood of despondency which the term has come to signify--or perhaps the particular misery induced by the violent contradictions of diasporic experience that leads Franklin Rosemont to assert that for African Americans, the blues are “a way of life.” Or further still, Hooker’s intonation might be heard through Houston Baker’s imagining of “the blues” as a matrix--“a womb, a network, a fossil-bearing rock, a rocky trace of a gemstone’s removal, a principal metal in an alloy, a mat or plate for reproducing print or phonograph records”--a code conditioning the cultural signification of vast dimensions of African American experiences. “The blues” is overwhelmed by layers of meaning sedimented over a century of performance, resounding today from within a cacophony of echoes of past authors, archivists, and performers who have deployed it to distinct ideological and aesthetic ends. Hooker draws our attention to the unknown depths of significance expressed in the blues--and before we realize it, he’s moved along.
The blues emerged as a privileged subject of research in the early twentieth century, inspiring the first American “folk revival” in the 1930s and 40s that defined “the blues” as we recognize it today. Tremendous social, political, and cultural turmoil beset the nation in this period as it was thrust into a modern era characterized by uninterrupted and permanent change; all at once, the blues and other African American vernacular traditions were centered in myriad scholarly efforts to mitigate, rationalize, and enact such change--transforming their object in the process. This critical wellspring gave shape to the modern disciplines of folklorism and anthropology, which converged as a proto-ethnomusicology in projects determined to record and archive African American folksong before its supposed disintegration. The wealth of blues recordings produced in this period have been instrumental to subsequent scholarship--and yet, they are ultimately inseparable from the context of their creation. Although the seeming immateriality of sound recording (particularly in its digitized form) deflects inquiry into the conditions of its production, Baker observes that “all accounts of art, expressive culture, or culture in general are indisputably functions of their creators ’ tropological energies.” For early theorists of the blues, recordings figured into greater efforts to project untheorized political urgencies into historical memory and confirm novel modern identities through historical identification, employing archival power to “re-present” their subjects and themselves. Such efforts are apparent in the writing and recordings of Alan Lomax and Zora Neale Hurston--two prolific blues phonographers who, despite their proximity, advanced very different individual approaches to folksong collection and theorizations of Black vernacular music. When assessed with an eye for signifying statements, deviations from the norms of their context, and early resonances of present theorizations of the blues form, the works of these scholars communicate what they sought to archive within the blues. The distance that emerges between them reveals the racializing implications of these projects and how archives can historicize and recapitulate socially, politically, and historically contingent constructs of “Self” and “Other.”
There are several terms and concepts central to this examination that require prefatory explanation. My decision to capitalize Black follows Daphne Brooks, who does so to emphasize “the shared socio-historical and cultural conditions of various peoples of African descent resulting from systemic subjugation across space and time.” Relatedly, my use of the term “folk” regarding participants in vernacular cultures is sparing and conditioned by the understanding that it is not a self-evident dimension of cultural life, but rather a social, political, and aesthetic fiction that has taken recognizable shape through projects historically allied with the invention of the Black Other. This term and its racializing implications will be considered in greater depth in the following section. Finally, I use “archive” to represent repositories of historical knowledge, without referring to “the archive” as a collectivization of these sites of knowledge production. Dana Williams and Marissa López have problematized the way that this usage erases the distinction between white, European archives with traditional nation-centered methodologies and frameworks that affirm the fixity of the nation-state and what they term “the ethnic archive,” which “contest[s] the hegemony of the nation-state’s imagined pasts and futures” to “destabiliz[e] the ethnic histories and selves we thought we already knew.” It is precisely this distinction that I mean to foreground by comparing the work of Alan Lomax and Zora Neale Hurston; whereas Lomax invokes and reiterates primitivizing, romanticizing, and essentializing tropes to create a novel American national culture, Hurston stages an elaborate opposition to dominant myths of Black otherness by advancing groundbreaking conceptual frameworks for assessing Black sonic performance. With these considerations in mind, we can turn to the land where the study of the blues began.
Goin’ Crazy With the Blues:
the First Folk Revival
If you knew what I gone through
You would feel the same way too.
- Mamie Smith
On August 10, 1920, Mamie Smith broke the sound barrier in the relentlessly anti-Black recording industry with the release of her “Crazy Blues.” On this track, the first blues recorded by a Black performer, Smith let loose a torrent of emotion that seized modern recording technologies to stir a change in the ocean, sending out a missive to the nation’s Black publics that expressed the depth of Black humanity. Okeh 4169 sold an unprecedented 75,000 copies in the first month of its issue at a dollar each--a small fortune for its mostly poor Black audience--opening the door for other Black women artists and offering the Black sonic as an avenue for expressing interiorized fury, desire, and dynamism in performances that unreservedly spurred convention. This was two years following the First World War, and one after the Red Summer that informed Black Americans that the equality systematically denied them since Reconstruction would not be an objective of the post-war “return to normalcy;” the urgency of Smith’s cry incited a blues craze that represented freedom in the more accessible terms of travel and sexuality and embedded beneath its realism layers of complex, freely associative meditation on common experience. Although the blues performers intervened in representations of the Other dominated by nineteenth-century minstrel shows, they would be consistently denied true recognition by Harlem Renaissance intellectuals in their efforts to establish African American identity--instead designated as “low” culture for their “vulgar” themes and defiance of white European standards for pure expression. Nonetheless, the blues rapidly became the most prominent secular genre in Black American music, reflecting the development of a new Black consciousness and destabilizing white hegemony over the representation of the Other.
The onset of the Great Depression ended the heyday of commercial blues, but its social, political, and cultural effects were indelible and lasting. Among these effects was the first American folk revival, an efflorescence in folklorism that directed its attention to the nation’s rural Black communities. The scores of researchers that scoured the South for decades in search of the blues assumed the mantle and methods of folksong collecting of a European literary tradition dating back to the eighteenth century--the vexed history of which illuminates the deeper purposes of American projects. John Szwed traces folksong collecting in the English-speaking world to James Macpherson, a Scottish teacher who published a collection of poems in 1790 suggesting that Scotland possessed a body of classical literature on par with the Homeric poetry of Ancient Greece, and further that Scotland’s “was a much older and more literate culture than that of the British who had defeated the Scots and then annexed them.” MacPherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland discloses the roots of the discipline in efforts to assert national culture for the sake of power and prestige, a sentiment echoed by Alan Lomax’s assertion that “America's stock of folk song probably matches that of any other country in the world for size and variety.” Such a nationalistic tendency bears particular significance in projects conducted through the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal agency that employed 40,000 artists, musicians, and writers--including Lomax and Hurston, who conducted some of their most important work on African American folk music under the agency’s auspices.
Although in the term’s broadest sense we are all “folk,” the locus of American folklorism in the early twentieth century tended to consist of regional or ethnic groups whose cultural traditions were carried out in relative isolation from the dominant culture. This delineation is a fiction, a way of framing cultural life that half perceives and half creates--in this case re-presenting its largely rural Black subjects through the primitivist and romantic lenses of European folklore theory as the idealized primal scene from which modern American culture developed. Redescribing blues performers as the folk was foundational to the WPA’s project of inventing an American national identity, mirroring Carolyn Steedman’s assertion that narratives of growth and development constitute the modern self. By representing the blues as a vestige of a pastoralized, historicized folk culture, WPA researchers and organizers invoked the assumption that “nothing goes away; that the past has deposited all of its traces,” and thus that a record of our folk roots is essential to understanding our modern condition. Although this association of African American vernacular music with national heritage was a purportedly inclusive gesture, Robert Cantwell understands it as the completion of the socio-psychological passage from the imagined Old World, “a symbolic embrace… of the old cultural identity--for this indicates precisely one’s emancipation from it.” This narrative was the expectation for the WPA’s writers and researchers, latent throughout its bureaucracy of appropriation and publication. For Alan Lomax and Zora Neale Hurston, these were the stakes of recording the blues; whether they recapitulated this multifarious othering or disrupted the fixity of the racial dialect altogether, their projects would become history.
Phonograph Blues: Lomax, Hurston, and the WPA
Every time I took one of those big, black, glass-based platters out of its box, I felt that a magical moment was opening up in time… For me the black discs spinning in the Mississippi night, spitting the chip centripetally toward the center of the table, also heralded a new age of writing human history--and so it proved.
- Alan Lomax
One pictures Alan Lomax with his headphones on, gazing down the end of a microphone at his informant, carefully monitoring the minute changes in their rhythm, volume, and body language, only glancing away to flip the acetate disk or play it back for them to hear. Much of the tremendous photographic record of his fieldwork shows exactly this--the researcher hard at work with his typewriter on his lap and his hand on the dial--but just as much shows Lomax between takes, smiling and speaking with performers, following along on guitar, and thumbing through transcriptions in rapt contemplation. In the 1930s and 40s, Lomax made a name for himself not only as a folksong collector, but as a writer, a performer, a theoretician, an activist, and--crucially--a popularizer. He had followed in the footsteps of his father John, an early researcher of American folksong, but by the time the two sped and cut their way across the rural South from the University of Texas to the Library of Congress in 1933, Alan had become virtually his father’s equal. In 1937, at 22 years old, Lomax was appointed director of the Archive of American Folk-Song at the LOC, placing him at the center of the New Deal and allowing him not only to participate in but also orchestrate blues recording projects.
This prestigious position would also present exclusive access to new advancements in portable recording technology--a dynamic that had a profound effect on his approach to recording and understanding of its social potential. In his preface to Our Singing Country, Lomax praises phonography for its ability to let blues performers “have their say with the readers” by confining “the living song, without distortion and in its fluid entirety, on a disc,” demonstrating his belief that by recording and popularizing the blues he was promoting a kind of cultural equity that subverted Jim Crow prejudices. Beyond being the first to use the portable recording machine, Lomax was among the first American folklorists to incorporate an anthropological perspective into his writings, broadcasts, and concerts, analyzing the social implications of African American vernacular traditions and their bearing on contemporary political realities. Despite his prodigious talent for working with informants to produce unique and influential recordings, his analytical perspective took years to fully develop, and would ultimately be deeply influenced by his meetings with Zora Neale Hurston.
Way back there when Hell wasn't no bigger than Maitland, man found out something about the laws of sound… He found out that sound could be assembled and manipulated and that such a collection of sound forms could become as definite and concrete as a war-ax or a found tool.
- Zora Neale Hurston
By the late 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston had become a force to be reckoned with in the many disciplines that she engaged. This was the height of Hurston’s career, a decade of vigorous experimentation in both scholarly and creative works that gave rise to three full-length novels, myriad short stories and critical essays, and a tremendous--and nearly incinerated--archive of unpublished manuscripts. After breaking with infamously commanding and imperial Harlem Renaissance patron Charlotte Osgood Mason in 1932, Hurston culminated her experience collecting folk materials under the benefactor in a period of renewed and unfettered immersion in African American folksong, exploring the subject as an ethnographer, a critical writer, and a performer. Her meditations on the blues contradicted and often overtly critiqued dominant presuppositions about the Black vernacular of the Harlem Renaissance milieu that she had come to prominence within. Ever tough-minded and unpredictable, Hurston was notoriously undaunted by the authority of figureheads like John Locke and W.E.B. Dubois; her essays on folk culture from this period wage some of the author’s most pointed and powerful critiques of the Old Guard and their cultural uplift campaigns. In “Art and Such,” Hurston evokes a history of slavery and Reconstruction preserved in folk music to argue that Black life in all its beauty and complexity, not merely race relations, should be the focus of Black art. She views this restriction and the “respectable” African-American subject that it protects as a capitulation to white audiences, a form of subjugation that reduces Black individuality to “another tragic unit of the Race.” Her description of the “Race Leader” presents the Harlem Renaissance organizers as emblematic of this domination, writing, “Just let them hear that white people have curiosity about some activity among Negroes, and these ‘leaders’... [will offer] themselves as an authority on the subject whether they have ever heard of it before or not… try[ing] their practiced best to look sad.” By immersing herself in local vernacular cultures and recording and staging the blues, Hurston sought to intervene in this othering representation, imagining African American folksong as a mirror in which “people may see what we are really like.”
Despite her impressive scholastic experience--studying anthropology at Howard, Barnard, and Columbia and conducting research under noted anthropologist Franz Boas--Hurston’s presence in the field far exceeded the ethnographer’s traditional role. Just as she adamantly argued that “the better [one] is taught, the less there is of [their] nativity,” she dramatically skirted academic standards of objective distance to retain and honor her own “folk” past. To produce blues recordings that reflected the richness and dynamism of African American folk culture, Hurston immersed herself completely in the local cultures that she traveled to--“get[ting] in the crowd with the people” and “carry[ing] it in [her] memory.” Hurston’s unique research methods endowed her recordings of local blues performers with a sense of sympathetic understanding and self-conscious authenticity--an effect dramatized in her decision to perform the songs that she collected for the WPA’s Jacksonville recording project herself. On these recordings, Hurston operates as an archive, standing in for the memory of the people she sought to preserve and pronouncing her understanding that the blues is the key to Black life. In her work with the WPA, Hurston “forecast[s] and execute[s] the viability and potentiality of Black life,” using the blues to simultaneously refute myths of Black otherness and express the capaciousness of Black humanity through sound.
(Cont.)