Transcript

7.23.26 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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Speaker 1: I will be reading from the special edition of Smithsonian
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Speaker 1: Magazine America at two fifty the Revolutionary Spark. As a reminder,
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Speaker 1: Radio Eye is a reading service intended for people who
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Speaker 1: are blind or have other disabilities that make it difficult
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Speaker 1: to read printed material. Please join me now for part
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Speaker 1: one of Alan Lomax spent years traveling the country to
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Speaker 1: record the sounds of America. The legacy of his obsession
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Speaker 1: will live forever. By letting Muddy Waters hear himself for
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Speaker 1: the first time, he unlocked a new confidence that set
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Speaker 1: the sharecropper on the path to superstardom. And that's just
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Speaker 1: the start of what he found in churches, prisons, and
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Speaker 1: even lumberjack camps by Chris Heath, One, Mississippi, a prequel.
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Speaker 1: On a small grass covered plot next to a quiet
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Speaker 1: country road a few miles northwest of Clarksdale, Mississippi, stands
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Speaker 1: a plaque identifying Muddy Waters House. The Blues pioneer lived
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Speaker 1: most of his first thirty years at a house on
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Speaker 1: this site. It proclaims the third sentence of for in total.
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Speaker 1: Further notes, quote Muddy Waters was first recorded here in
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Speaker 1: nineteen forty one by Alan Lomax, who was compiling songs
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Speaker 1: for the Library of Congress. That was the kind of
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Speaker 1: thing Alan Lomax did. In August nineteen forty one, Lomax
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Speaker 1: was traveling across northern Mississippi with some companions, busy doing
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Speaker 1: the work that would make him the twentieth century's most
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Speaker 1: famous musical folklorist, searching out and capturing for posterity the rich,
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Speaker 1: wild undiscovered diversity of expression through music and song to
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Speaker 1: be found across this country. When his inquiries brought him
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Speaker 1: to this house on the primarily cotton growing Stoveall Plantation.
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Speaker 1: The house's twenty eight year old occupant, whose real name
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Speaker 1: was McKinley Morganfield, though he also went by Muddy Water
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Speaker 1: the s would come later, earned his living driving a
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Speaker 1: tractor with a sideline bootlegging Ditchbank whisky. He had a
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Speaker 1: solid local reputation as a fine singer and guitarist, but
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Speaker 1: no prospective full time career in music. After Waters agreed
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Speaker 1: to perform some songs in his front room as requested,
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Speaker 1: Lomax played back the recording captured on the sixteen inch
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Speaker 1: discs of a Presto recording machine there and then. Waters
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Speaker 1: had never heard himself sing, and he would later explain
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Speaker 1: how hearing himself as he'd heard other musicians on the
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Speaker 1: local jukebox changed something. Man, he reflected, you don't know
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Speaker 1: how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that
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Speaker 1: voice and it was my own voice. Though nearly two
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Speaker 1: years would pass before Waters could quit his job and
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Speaker 1: head north to Chicago, this was when the seed was sown.
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Speaker 1: I can do it, he told himself. I can do it.
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Speaker 1: For Waters, it was a pivotal moment for Lomax. No
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Speaker 1: matter the historical resonance this encounter would come to have,
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Speaker 1: it was one more satisfactorily productive Saturday afternoon. By the
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Speaker 1: next morning, Lomax and his co workers would be recording
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Speaker 1: a baptism service at Calvary Baptist Church in the town
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Speaker 1: of Money. Later on, they'd capture songs of the evening
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Speaker 1: service at the Church of God in Christ at the
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Speaker 1: Mohead Plantation near Lulah. Sunday would be at least as
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Speaker 1: typical of what Lomax did as Saturday. In hindsight, Lomax
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Speaker 1: is sometimes spoken of as though he was some kind
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Speaker 1: of supremely successful talent scout, but although he would play
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Speaker 1: significant roles in many careers, including some celebrated ones. In
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Speaker 1: addition to Waters, he was involved in one way or
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Speaker 1: another with Woody guf Three Lead Belly, Jelly Row Morton,
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Speaker 1: Pete seeger Son House Aunt, Molly Jackson, and Mississippi Fred
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Speaker 1: mc dowell his core aim and priority as he explored America,
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Speaker 1: recording equipment at the ready with something else. Entirely, no
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Speaker 1: single magazine art could convey the full range of what
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Speaker 1: he recorded. A partial online database of documentation relating to
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Speaker 1: Lomax's field work runs to nearly twelve thousand pages, but
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Speaker 1: this story, by focusing on three contrasting geographical areas and
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Speaker 1: what he found in each place, and the ways in
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Speaker 1: which what he recorded there has or has not echoed
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Speaker 1: down the years, hopes to give a deeper sense of
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Speaker 1: his true achievement. The first locust is in and around
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Speaker 1: the Mississippi Delta fertile musical territory, where Lomax at times
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Speaker 1: did unearth and record the kind of blues pioneers he
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Speaker 1: is often associated with. Tellingly, he also did plenty else there.
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Speaker 1: The second is a small region of coastal Georgia where
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Speaker 1: Lomax first went song collecting at the age of twenty,
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Speaker 1: then returned many years later. The third is the area
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Speaker 1: of the Upper Midwest, leading up from industrial Michigan to
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Speaker 1: isolated islands of the Great Lakes, where Lomax found in
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Speaker 1: a colectic repertoire in a land of lumberjacks and sailors
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Speaker 1: and many different communities from the European diaspora on occasion.
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Speaker 1: What Lomax discovered quickly made its way into public consciousness,
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Speaker 1: but far from everything that he recorded became famous. Some
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Speaker 1: recordings have resonated more deeply as time has passed, Others
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Speaker 1: have resurfaced long afterward in unlikely ways, and much of
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Speaker 1: what he collected is still little known. Maybe that is
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Speaker 1: central to his achievement. Less the few choice moments that
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Speaker 1: quickly rose up and caught the bright sunlight, than the
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Speaker 1: deep and wide reservoir of song, in its full variety
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Speaker 1: of human expression, that is preserved for all time for historians, musicologists,
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Speaker 1: and any one else curious enough to examine and discover
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Speaker 1: at their leisure. That same year he first met Muddy Waters,
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Speaker 1: nineteen forty one, Lomax gave an interview to the Washington
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Speaker 1: Times Herald, which characterized him as quote the boy who
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Speaker 1: today days America's leading authority on balladiies. Quote. Lomax was
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Speaker 1: then twenty six years old, presumably invited to offer the
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Speaker 1: wider rationale for what he was doing. He posited that
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Speaker 1: America had the world's greatest wealth of songs because of
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Speaker 1: all the cultures colliding and concanatenating here, and he gave
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Speaker 1: a sense of his mission. Quote, you learned what Americans
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Speaker 1: have felt in their biggest moments of happiness and despair,
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Speaker 1: he said. You realize for the very first time what
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Speaker 1: the true history of this great country is, what America
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Speaker 1: actually stands for. In the future, these records will be invaluable,
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Speaker 1: and I am going to keep on collecting two beforehand
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Speaker 1: and probably for someone who is rightly regarded as making
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Speaker 1: such a singular mark on the world. When Alan Lomax
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Speaker 1: began collecting songs, he was actually going into the family business.
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Speaker 1: In nineteen o six, his father Lomax, a member of
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Speaker 1: Texas A and M's English faculty, took a year's leave
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Speaker 1: of absence from teaching to attend graduate school at Harvard,
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Speaker 1: where he was encouraged to formalize a childhood passion for
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Speaker 1: the cowboy songs he'd heard growing up in rural Texas.
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Speaker 1: To find examples, the elder Lomax wrote to newspapers across America,
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Speaker 1: asking them to print his appeal for unpublished songs handed
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Speaker 1: down through the oral tradition. Quote. They deal mainly with
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Speaker 1: frontier experiences, attempts, often crude and sometimes vulgar, to epitomize
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Speaker 1: and particularize the life of the pioneers who peopled the
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Speaker 1: vast region west of the Mississippi River. He wished, he
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Speaker 1: went on, quote to solicit your aid and preserving from
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Speaker 1: extinction this expression of American literature. End quote. In nineteen ten,
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Speaker 1: the results appeared in a book, Cowboy Songs and Other
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Speaker 1: Frontier Ballads, showing the same aim for the sky determination
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Speaker 1: that his son Alan would later exude. John Lomax managed
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Speaker 1: to persuade Theodore Roosevelt to provide the book's two page
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Speaker 1: handwritten introduction, something Lomax achieved by turning up at Roosevelt's
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Speaker 1: hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where they were both in town
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Speaker 1: for a Frontier Day's celebration, and asking to see the
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Speaker 1: former president. The words Roosevelt wrote for him on the
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Speaker 1: spot spoke of song collecting as safeguarding a vanishing resource.
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Speaker 1: Quote it is therefore a work of real importance, Roosevelt
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Speaker 1: wrote to preserve permanently this unwritten ballad literature of the
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Speaker 1: back country and the frontier end. In the following decades,
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Speaker 1: John Lomax would intermittently pursue this career as a folklorist,
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Speaker 1: which is what led him in the early nineteen thirties
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Speaker 1: to the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song,
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Speaker 1: established in nineteen twenty eight. Folk in this wider use
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Speaker 1: often wouldn't refer to what is now considered folk music.
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Speaker 1: It would come to mean any distinct music or song
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Speaker 1: specific to a particular part of the population, whether categorized
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Speaker 1: by race, religion, heritage, field of work, or its economic, geographical,
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Speaker 1: or other localized situation. John Lomax, unimpressed by what the
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Speaker 1: Library had so far collected, arranged to conduct field recording
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Speaker 1: trips for it. That was when his son became involved.
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Speaker 1: In June nineteen thirty three, when the sixty five year
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Speaker 1: old John Lomax set out on his first Library of
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Speaker 1: Congress sortie across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. He
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Speaker 1: took the eighteen year old Alan with him. By now,
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Speaker 1: song collecting was no longer a matter of only transcribing
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Speaker 1: music and lyrics. It also involved using the earliest, hefty
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Speaker 1: but portable recording devices. Alan Lomax would later claim that
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Speaker 1: his father got hold of the first such device he
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Speaker 1: had directly from Tom I Edison's widow, though evidence for
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Speaker 1: this seems elusive. Within a couple of years, Alan Lomax
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Speaker 1: was off on his own, separate song collecting journeys, and
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Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty seven, at the age of twenty two,
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Speaker 1: he was hired to work full time for the Library
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Speaker 1: of Congress. His rather quaint formal title was Assistant in
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Speaker 1: charge of the Archive, but the main part of his
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Speaker 1: job was to travel the country, seeking out songs and
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Speaker 1: those who sang them, and urging them to allow him
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Speaker 1: to make recordings. Three Coastal Georgia. The younger Lomax's first
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Speaker 1: song hunting trip without his father took place in the
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Speaker 1: summer of nineteen thirty five, though he didn't travel alone,
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Speaker 1: instead enlisting the help of two much older women. One
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Speaker 1: Mary Elizabeth Barnacle, was a professor at New York University
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Speaker 1: who taught folklore and medieval literature. The second, Zora Neil Hurston,
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Speaker 1: was an anthropologist who had published her first novel the
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Speaker 1: previous year, though the wider acclaim of its follow up,
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Speaker 1: Their Eyes Were Watching God, was still a couple of
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Speaker 1: years away. Lomax had been impressed by Hurston's immersive account
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Speaker 1: of Afro Creole occult hudo in America and would describe
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Speaker 1: her as quote probably the best informed person to day
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Speaker 1: on Western Negro folklore. Hurston would later note that one
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Speaker 1: of her roles when working with Lomax would be quote
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Speaker 1: counteracting his tendencies to hasty generalization. This somewhat unusual traveling
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Speaker 1: party for nineteen thirty five, a young white man and
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Speaker 1: two older women, one white, one black. Hurston, at her
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Speaker 1: apparent suggestion driving a second car, met on June fifteenth
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Speaker 1: in Brunswick, Georgia, and for the first leg of their
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Speaker 1: journey headed east to Saint Simon's Island, a sight recommended
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Speaker 1: by Hurston as quote crammed with Negro song and lore
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Speaker 1: end quote. There they rented a house and sent out
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Speaker 1: they were looking for singers. The first evening Lomax reported,
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Speaker 1: our front yard was crowded. They spent the next few
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Speaker 1: days recording Lomax's excited inventory, which gives a sense of
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Speaker 1: just how much music could be found in one small,
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Speaker 1: unherralded spot on the map by someone determined enough to
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Speaker 1: find it. Included quote chanties of the sort that the
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Speaker 1: Negroes sing and loading the ships in Charleston, Savannah and Brunswick,
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Speaker 1: probably the earliest type of Negro work. Song, ring shouts,
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Speaker 1: probably the earliest form of the Negro spiritual, widely current
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Speaker 1: in the days of slavery, but now all but forgotten
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Speaker 1: except in a few isolated communities, an archaic version of
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Speaker 1: a rhythmic guitar technique known as juking, and even quote
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Speaker 1: the shrill strange cries that these children used to signal
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Speaker 1: to each other across the field's end quote. They also
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Speaker 1: recorded an interview with a man Wallace Quarterman, who had
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Speaker 1: been born in eighteen forty four, who shared his memory
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Speaker 1: about the transition from slavery after the Civil War. Saint
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Speaker 1: Simon's Island was not technically an island, but until nineteen
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Speaker 1: twenty four it had been inaccessible by road, separated, Lomax
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Speaker 1: would write by sea marsh and Mangrove Swamp. As such,
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Speaker 1: it was home to independent communities of the formerly enslaved
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Speaker 1: who lived in relative isolation that was intrinsic to what
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Speaker 1: Lomax believed he was capturing. Quote, we felt when we
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Speaker 1: left Saint Simon's Island that we had turned back time
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Speaker 1: forty or fifty years. He would report and heard and
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Speaker 1: recorded some genuine Afro American folk music of the middle
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Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century. Lomax's most prolific source was John Davis,
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Speaker 1: a guitarist and singer who delivered so low guitar pieces,
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Speaker 1: roughshod harmony, singing with friends, and storytelling. Also, it perhaps
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Speaker 1: should be noted, a song called Nasty Butt Stinky Butt.
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Speaker 1: In the weeks after this visit, Davis wrote Lomax a
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Speaker 1: letter alluding to some suggested joint future plans quote, I
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Speaker 1: will be ready to go with you whenever you say end.
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Speaker 1: But as far as I can tell, they didn't meet
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Speaker 1: again for twenty four years. In the intervening period, Lomax
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Speaker 1: did plenty else. Lomax was already finding different avenues to
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Speaker 1: explore and proselytize about his passions, including writing, filmmaking, and broadcasting,
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Speaker 1: even before his tenure with the Library of Congress, effectively
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Speaker 1: ended in nineteen forty two. Later in life, he would
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Speaker 1: do a great deal of academic theorizing about music and
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Speaker 1: other expressive behaviors, structural and epistemological commonalities across cultures. In
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Speaker 1: nineteen fifty he moved to Europe, notionally to collect music there,
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Speaker 1: which he did with great energy. Though an FBI investigation
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Speaker 1: into possible communist associations may have played its part in
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Speaker 1: both his departure and his stand away, Lomax was never
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Speaker 1: formally accused of anything. Lomax returned to the United States
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Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty eight, and in the summer of nineteen
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Speaker 1: fifty nine he embarked on what would be his last
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Speaker 1: grand sweep of song gathering. This time, he traveled across
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Speaker 1: the Southern States with his then partner, the young English
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Speaker 1: folk singer Shirley Collins, and Ampak's stereo reel tape machine
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Speaker 1: recording equipment, a distinct upgrade on anything he'd been able
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Speaker 1: to use before on what would become known as his
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Speaker 1: Southern Journey. After visiting seven states, their penultimate stop was Georgia.
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Speaker 1: Arriving back on Saint Simon's Island, Lomax sought out Davis
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Speaker 1: Lomax's archives contained a photograph he took of Davis smiling
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Speaker 1: on his porch, and recorded him again, this time with
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Speaker 1: the group called the Spiritual Singers of Coastal Georgia. Among
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Speaker 1: them was a woman who had moved to the islands
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Speaker 1: since his previous visit, Bessie Joe Jones, a remarkable singer
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Speaker 1: whom Lomax would subsequently take under his wing. Two years later.
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Speaker 1: Jones lived for three months with Lomax and his new wife,
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Speaker 1: Tony at their house in New York as they recorded
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Speaker 1: jones stories and songs, and he helped push forward her
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Speaker 1: touring career with the group he had heard on the island,
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Speaker 1: now re christened the Georgia Sea Island Singers. In January
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Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, they performed at an inaugural concert for
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Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter, the first president from their state. Before Jones
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Speaker 1: died in nineteen eighty four, she made records both with
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Speaker 1: the group and on her own, and her distinctive hybrid
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Speaker 1: of folk and gospel received a fair amount of acclaim. Then,
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Speaker 1: some years later, her voice resurfaced in a different way,
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Speaker 1: one more directly related to Lomax. In nineteen ninety nine,
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Speaker 1: the dance music pioneer Moby released his album Play, which
16:59
Speaker 1: went on to sell to twelve million copies. The album
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Speaker 1: made prominent use of historical samples, three of which Moby
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Speaker 1: took directly from a CD set lent to him by
17:09
Speaker 1: a friend, recordings from Lomax's nineteen fifty nine Travels. The
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Speaker 1: album remains divisive. Did Moby's sampling represent a deft feet
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Speaker 1: of musical fusion casting a spotlight on neglected past glories,
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Speaker 1: or was it an act of opportunistic appropriation, blithely plucking
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Speaker 1: authenticity off the shelf. Either way, the very first voice
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Speaker 1: you hear on the album Till My Honey Come Back,
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Speaker 1: sometimes from the single Honey, is that of Bessie Jones
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Speaker 1: forty years earlier, singing into Alan Lomax's microphone one October
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Speaker 1: evening on the coast of Georgia four, northern Michigan. Sometimes
17:52
Speaker 1: the recordings Lomax made were destined to sit in the archive,
17:56
Speaker 1: waiting to be noticed. Often aside from the atat of
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Speaker 1: a few musicologists and academics, they are still waiting, but
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Speaker 1: in their own way. Some of these less fetid recordings
18:09
Speaker 1: are as important for what they show of Lomax's ongoing
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Speaker 1: mission and the story he captured. Such could be said
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Speaker 1: of all that Lomax found in the Upper Midwest, and
18:19
Speaker 1: the story of what he did there is one that,
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Speaker 1: even in summary, is quite something to tell. By nineteen
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Speaker 1: thirty eight, Lomax and his father had between them collected
18:29
Speaker 1: for the Library of Congress rich examples of what might
18:33
Speaker 1: be considered the more obvious regional American music. They had
18:37
Speaker 1: recorded Appalachian folk, the Cajun and Creole traditions of Louisiana,
18:42
Speaker 1: texted cowboy songs, and all kinds of gospel, blues and
18:45
Speaker 1: work songs, and had also searched widely for disparate traces
18:49
Speaker 1: of African, Mexican, Caribbean, and French musical traditions, particularly across
18:55
Speaker 1: the Southern States. Now Lomax set his sights on a
18:58
Speaker 1: summer trip to Michigan, particularly its Upper Peninsula. He explained
19:03
Speaker 1: his forthcoming journey's rationale and a letter to his seniors
19:07
Speaker 1: at the Library of Congress quote, the archive will be
19:11
Speaker 1: able to record what remains of the once vigorous Lumberjack culture,
19:15
Speaker 1: to explore the musical potentialities of the many foreign language
19:20
Speaker 1: groups of that area. Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Gaelic, French, Canadian,
19:25
Speaker 1: et cetera. And to observe what have been the results
19:28
Speaker 1: of the mixing of these cultures with the Anglo American
19:32
Speaker 1: matrix end quote. He loaded up a car with recording
19:36
Speaker 1: and filmmaking equipment and drove north from Washington. One way
19:40
Speaker 1: of reading the correspondence that exists from the next three
19:44
Speaker 1: months on a trip that kept being extended is a
19:47
Speaker 1: chronicle of desperation and disaster. Lomax was always on the
19:51
Speaker 1: verge of running out of money. A Western Union telegram
19:55
Speaker 1: to home base in Washington simply read, quote, please send
19:59
Speaker 1: my advance or voucher or something by wire. I'm not
20:03
Speaker 1: eating end quote. These money stresses were amplified by the
20:07
Speaker 1: demands of the people he was beseeching to record. Though
20:11
Speaker 1: he did not pay them to perform, he often had
20:14
Speaker 1: to meet other expectations. Quote songs in Michigan absolutely require beer,
20:19
Speaker 1: he explained. Worse, Lomax was robbed at least twice. The
20:24
Speaker 1: recording equipment and his guitar were taken from his parked
20:27
Speaker 1: car in Detroit. He had to wait days for replacement equipment. Then,
20:31
Speaker 1: later in the trip, film reels containing several weeks worth
20:35
Speaker 1: of footage were stolen. As for the car itself of
20:39
Speaker 1: Plymouth Sedan, Lomax had to pay for new brake linings.
20:43
Speaker 1: The car was literally falling to pieces, he reported, and
20:47
Speaker 1: yet Lomax's self ascribed mission clearly possessed him. Even amid adversity.
20:53
Speaker 1: You can feel his enthusiasm for what he called quote
20:57
Speaker 1: the most richly varied area for folk music that I
20:59
Speaker 1: am had ever visited. The music was as unfamiliar and
21:04
Speaker 1: as wide ranging as he'd hoped. For instance, in and
21:08
Speaker 1: around Detroit he found a particularly rich vein of Serbian
21:12
Speaker 1: musicians playing traditional instruments the dipple, a Balkin double pipe,
21:17
Speaker 1: the duduk, an Armenian double reed woodwind instrument, and the guzl,
21:22
Speaker 1: a one stringed bowed lute, detailing with evident pleasure in
21:26
Speaker 1: his note book that one session of Serbian shepherd's music
21:29
Speaker 1: had been recorded in the shadow of the Chrysler plant.
21:33
Speaker 1: Soon he moved north, away from the bigger cities, where,
21:37
Speaker 1: among many other sources, he found aging lumberjack singers and
21:41
Speaker 1: captured a catalog of songs sung by and two men
21:45
Speaker 1: who went into the woods in the fall and didn't
21:48
Speaker 1: emerge until the spring. A couple of weeks in, Lomax
21:52
Speaker 1: took a boat to Beaver Island in the middle of
21:55
Speaker 1: Lake Michigan, a location with the peculiar and particular history.
22:00
Speaker 1: In the nineteenth century, Native Odawa residents were joined, then
22:04
Speaker 1: largely displaced by a Mormon community led by its self
22:08
Speaker 1: styled King James Jesse Strang. After Strang was assassinated in
22:13
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty six, the Mormons were driven out and their
22:17
Speaker 1: place was taken primarily by Irish immigrants. The singer's Lomax
22:22
Speaker 1: met were the descendants of that influx, and he recorded
22:25
Speaker 1: as many of their songs as he could. Quote over
22:28
Speaker 1: a hundred come all yee ballads, forecastle, lumberjack, lake sailor,
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Speaker 1: Irish popular, et cetera, he related. Two weeks later, Lomax
22:37
Speaker 1: hit another rich scene in the community of Newberry quote
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Speaker 1: the toughest little town I have seen in Michigan end quote,
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Speaker 1: where he recorded seventy more songs, most in a variety
22:47
Speaker 1: of Northern European languages or in their evolved North American dialects.
22:53
Speaker 1: He also came across more lumberjack songs. These were typically
22:58
Speaker 1: working tales of heroism and struggle, but as in many
23:02
Speaker 1: other genres, a particular subset was obscene, often in extremely
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Speaker 1: anatomically specific ways. A singer named Bert Graham offered a
23:12
Speaker 1: song titled Joe Williams, which told the tale in searingly
23:15
Speaker 1: ribald language of a twenty one year old ox driver
23:19
Speaker 1: who goes into town and catches the pox, concluding that
23:23
Speaker 1: he'd have been wiser to stay in the woods in
23:26
Speaker 1: intimate congress with his favorite ox. This, too, Lomax garnered
23:31
Speaker 1: for the government archives. Lomax kept delaying his return. I
23:37
Speaker 1: want a chance, now that I have explored lumberjacks and
23:39
Speaker 1: lake sailors, a bit to take a whack at the miners,
23:42
Speaker 1: the Finns and the French, he wrote to Washington. He
23:46
Speaker 1: duly did that, recording a significant body of work from
23:49
Speaker 1: the Finnish diaspora, before finally packing up after driving eighty
23:55
Speaker 1: four hundred miles in three months. He declared that there
23:58
Speaker 1: was so much more to find than he planned to
24:00
Speaker 1: return the following summer. In the end, other priorities edged
24:06
Speaker 1: into place, and he would never return. Hundreds of albums
24:09
Speaker 1: have collected music Lomacs recorded over the years, but few
24:13
Speaker 1: contain recordings made during this Michigan sojourn. One album, largely
24:19
Speaker 1: based on a subsection of the trip songs of the
24:21
Speaker 1: Michigan Lumberjacks, was released in nineteen sixty, but it's been
24:26
Speaker 1: long unavailable. About four years ago someone posted the whole
24:30
Speaker 1: album on YouTube, where you can still hear it for free,
24:33
Speaker 1: and appended a rather despairing note. No one I've shown
24:37
Speaker 1: this record to cares about it in any way, but
24:40
Speaker 1: I think it's so sick. Since the album was posted,
24:44
Speaker 1: it has been listened to less than once a day,
24:47
Speaker 1: but it is there. The whole three months worth of music,
24:50
Speaker 1: in fact, sits on the Library of Congress website, a
24:54
Speaker 1: couple of clicks away from any one inquisitive enough to
24:57
Speaker 1: uncover these preserved moments. All the musicians he recorded are
25:01
Speaker 1: long gone. Many of the microworlds in which he found
25:05
Speaker 1: these songs either are gone to or are changed beyond
25:09
Speaker 1: all recognition. But these recordings will be with us for
25:13
Speaker 1: as long as people have ears to hear them. In
25:15
Speaker 1: the long run. Recordings like these what he captured when
25:19
Speaker 1: few others made the great effort both of action and
25:22
Speaker 1: imagination that was Lomax's hall mark may well prove to
25:26
Speaker 1: be the greatest treasure. Five Mississippi, in search of Lomax.
25:32
Speaker 1: From everything I'd read, I knew that on Saint Simon's
25:35
Speaker 1: Island and in places like Beaver Island, there were likely
25:39
Speaker 1: to be few, if any, remnants of what Lomax did.
25:43
Speaker 1: Mississippi promised to be a little different. So I traveled
25:46
Speaker 1: there in search of whatever traces might still linger. That's
25:50
Speaker 1: how I found myself standing on the spot where once
25:53
Speaker 1: was Muddy Water's front room. Apart from the plaque, there
25:57
Speaker 1: isn't much else to day, just a vacant grassy lawn,
26:01
Speaker 1: some shrubs, and one gnarled tree trunk that must have
26:04
Speaker 1: heard it all. But to know exactly what happened on
26:08
Speaker 1: that day in nineteen forty one, once the recording equipment
26:11
Speaker 1: was switched on. Even now we can just listen. First,
26:15
Speaker 1: Waters runs through a song called Country Blues, and then,
26:19
Speaker 1: after its final words, yeah, I've been mistreated baby now baby,
26:23
Speaker 1: and I don't mind dying. You can hear the sound
26:26
Speaker 1: of Lomax's footsteps walking cross the porch toward where Waters
26:30
Speaker 1: sits inside. I wondered if you'd tell me, Lomax asks
26:34
Speaker 1: him in a voice that manages to be both deferential
26:38
Speaker 1: and insistent. If you can remember when it was that
26:41
Speaker 1: you made that blues, tell me a little of the story,
26:44
Speaker 1: if you don't mind, if it's not too personal. I
26:47
Speaker 1: want to know the facts and how you felt and
26:49
Speaker 1: why you felt the way you did. It's a very
26:52
Speaker 1: beautiful song. And you hear Waters explain how he had
26:56
Speaker 1: been fixing the puncture of a car tire and thinking
26:59
Speaker 1: about a girl who had treated him badly. I just
27:02
Speaker 1: felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and
27:05
Speaker 1: I started to sing and went on with it. Eventually,
27:08
Speaker 1: Water's readies to play a second song. Just a minute,
27:12
Speaker 1: Lomax tells him, I'll tell you when I'm ready. Once
27:15
Speaker 1: Lomax has set a fresh side of an acetate disc recording,
27:19
Speaker 1: Waters begins, well, I feel tomorrow like I feel to day.
27:24
Speaker 1: Gonna pack my suit case, make my get away woman.
27:27
Speaker 1: I'm troubled. It's a blessing that we have both these
27:30
Speaker 1: recordings and some surviving field notes, because, somewhat perplexingly later
27:35
Speaker 1: in life, Lomax himself wasn't always the most reliable witness
27:38
Speaker 1: to the events of his own and others passed. In
27:41
Speaker 1: his nineteen ninety three memoir The Land Where the Blues Began.
27:44
Speaker 1: For instance, Lomax wrote plenty about these Mississippi adventures, but
27:48
Speaker 1: a fair amount is verifiably askew. He conflated two Mississippi
27:52
Speaker 1: journeys in consecutive years, nineteen forty one and nineteen forty two,
27:57
Speaker 1: into a single nineteen forty two visit. This concludes readings
28:01
Speaker 1: from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader has been
28:04
Speaker 1: Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and have a great day.