Lomaxes-on-the-Brazos
My ancestors and the music they found in the prisons of Fort Bend and Brazoria counties.
(Text of a speech delivered tonight to the Fort Bend County Archaeological Society in Richmond, Texas.)
Thank you Jay and members of the Ft Bend Archaelogical Society. I can’t tell you how honored I am to speak here, and hell, to get out of the house and see some friendly strangers again.
Chances are you don’t know the name of my great-grandfather, John Avery Lomax Jr., or those of his sons, John Jr., my grandfather, or Alan, grandfather’s brother and the most famous of them all on his own merits…. but you almost certainly know the songs they discovered, collected, preserved, performed, and promulgated in the years between roughly 1880 and Alan’s death about 15 years ago.
Since, as they say, writing about music is akin to dancing about architecture, then it must follow that talking about song collectors is akin to paintings of bricklayers, I will, as often as possible let the music speak for itself.
Here is a sample of the songs you might never have heard were it not for their work>
John Avery Lomax was born in Holmes County Ms in 1867. Two years later his parents James Avery Lomax and Susan Frances Cooper Lomax put him on one of two ox-drawn wagons and headed out for Texas. In his autobiography Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, John characterized his family as members of the “upper crust of the po’ white trash,” and it seems apt. James was an illiterate sharecropper who had worked his way up to owning a tanyard.
James came to Texas in order for his children to get away from the wreck of the war and to be able “to grow up with the country,” as he put it. Though the bulk of his meager fortune had been swept away by the war, he’d saved enough to buy a farm near the town of Meridian, and there he and his wife and children raised corn and cotton, wheat and cattle, pigs and chickens.
Young John worked extremely hard but nevertheless had a childhood he would remember as idyllic. Bosque County is right on the edge of the epic Texas -- today it bills itself as the “top of the Texas Hill Country,” top meaning northernmost and not highest, and it fits that bill with its rocky, cedar spiked ridges and ample creeks and small rivers. On their arrival, Indian raids were still occurring, though with much less frequency than the decade before, but everyone went everywhere armed and on horseback.
And it was the heyday of the cowboy and the cattle drive, and young John’s house was situated on a tributary of the mighty Chisholm Trail. Though radio was decades in the future, he had music every night in the form of the lowing of the herds and the sweet lullabies the cowboys sang to them, both to alleviate their own boredom and, they believed, to calm the herds.
Young John took to writing down the words of these songs in notebooks he kept. And he also thrilled to see the cowboys in town on boisterous Saturdays when they’d blow their wages in Meridian saloons and then paint the town red with feats of drunken derring do astride their steeds. In those pre-rodeo days, they’d also demonstrate their riding skills in mock jousts and other such combats.
But as it would happen those days were coming to a close and he never had a chance to be a cowboy himself.
At the same time, the course of his life was being set back home on the farm, where his father had hired as a hand a young ex-slave by the name of Nat Blythe. Nat was not much older than John, but illiterate by dint of his station of life. Blythe and John formed something like a brotherhood, or at least as much of such as was possible in Jim Crow Texas, with John teaching Nat to read and write, and Nat teaching John sing slave songs such as "Big Yam Potatoes on a Sandy Land" and dance steps such as "Juba." Juba is believed to have been brought by Kongo slaves into South Carolina Drums were banned, so the body was used as a percussion instrument in slavery days, and and the juba dance later involved into hambone, the Bo Diddley beat, tapdancing and so on. It is also preserved in African American steps in fraternity initiations.
John later said that this relationship with Nat “gave his life it’s bent” -- it fostered in him a love of being an educator and another of Black music and culture. And in his own way, Black people. I wish I could say here that he utterly transcended his time and was not what we would call a racist today, but I cannot say that with any honesty at all. However, what can be said was that while his attitude toward Black people was condescending and paternalistic in the extreme, he held no hatred in his heart for them. (And truth be told, he was paternalistic to pretty much everyone, including his own family.)
The Nat Blythe story ends sadly, most likely. After departing the Lomax farm with a good sized bankroll, Blythe disappeared and was rumored to have been robbed and murdered, his body tossed in a river and never recovered. Nevertheless, through the remaining seventy years of his life, through all his travels back and forth across the southlands from Texas to DC, on arrival in the Black section of any town, he would inquire if anyone there knew of a man named Nat Blythe.
John spent his teens scratching his way up the primitive higher educational ladder of Central Texas, attending a patchwork of academies and teachers colleges in towns like Granbury and Weatherford, working on correspondence courses, and taking summer classes at the then famous Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York. Somewhere along the way, this necessitated him selling his beloved pony Selim to a glue factory, a heart-rending reminiscence in his book. He never quite forgave himself that betrayal, necessary as it might have been.
At long last he deemed himself ready for the big leagues and entered UT in his mid 20s and through heroic course loads graduated in only two years. While there, he tried to interest an English professor in his little bundle of cowboy songs, only to be told they were worthless trash, tacky relics a young gentleman best shed himself of. Heartbroken, he burned them that very afternoon.
His stellar performance at UT won him a grad school scholarship to Harvard, and there he resurrected his dream of a wider audience for those cowboy songs. He pieced together a second volume from memory and handed it bashfully over to Professor Barrett Wendell, and the reception was diametrically opposed to what he’s received back in Texas.
It’s a phenomenon known as the cultural cringe. We never treasure the homegrown. It must be validated first by outsiders from the elite in any society. America as a whole had this for more than a century in comparing its culture to Britain and Europe, and American provincials, especially Southerners and Texans, had it (still do, I’d argue) in comparing themselves to New York and New England and today Hollywood.
But it goes both ways, and the more discerning of the elites are ever seeking bold new currents from out in the sticks and Wendell found just that in John’s cowboy songs, which he compared to nothing less than the works of American Homers. His encouragement was of vital import to John and set him on the path to writing 1910’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, his first book, a smash hit bearing an foreword from no less than then former president and Wild West devotee Theodore Roosevelt.
You have done a work emphatically worth doing and one which should appeal to the people of all our country but particularly to its people of the west and southwest. Your subject is not only exceedingly interesting to the student of literature, but also to the student of the general history of the west." .
John’s timing was exquisite, Not for the last time, he would capture the melancholy of times just passing into history. The Wild West shows a la Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley were then ending, and cowboys were fading into the past as live attractions, and then he revived them via song on the printed page. He was ever an antiquarian with an uncanny knack for bringing the past back into the present at the exact right time: his work in preserving the allure of the cowboy bridged the decades between those Wild West shows and the rise of the Western movie and TV shows that dominated the culture for much of the first half of the 20th Century and more.
And that, belatedly, ends my intro to his life and brings us to the second half of his life, wherein Fort Bend and Brazoria counties played such vital roles.
After the success of Cowboy Songs receded, John went to work. By that time he had academic credentials enough to teach or work in administration, and he settled into a gig at his beloved UT as registrar, director of the fledgling ex-students association (today’s Texas Exes), and editor of the Alcalde, the alumni magazine. And perhaps there he would have spent the rest of his days were it not for the turbulent politics of the era. In those days, the running of UT was even more politicized than it is today, and each regime change in the governor’s office, often brought with it wholesale bloodlettings in the UT administration.
This happened twice to John -- as a partisan of the more liberal of the Democratic party’s two wings, any time Ma or Pa Ferguson swept into the governor’s mansion, he knew to pack his things and seek new prospects, which he found in the banking world, taking jobs in that field in first Chicago and later Dallas, which finally became his home.
And once more, that might have been the end of it, but calamity followed calamity. In 1929, the Depression came along and eventually cost him his job when the bank failed and in 1931 his beloved wife Bess died at the young age of 50, leaving him bereft and broke with four children to look after, three of them still minors. He sank into a tremendous funk, scarcely able to rise from bed.
That was when my grandfather John Jr came to the rescue, reminding him of the dreams he’d once had of resurrecting his old songhunting passion again. And he’d long wanted to preserve and discover and make famous the sorts of songs he’d heard from his old surrogate brother / pupil, the ex-slave Nat Blythe. And he’d made all sorts of important connections in the aftermath of the success of Cowboy Songs….
This was enough to get him back on his feet. Back in the day, he’d been a fixture on the lecture circuit, talking about and singing snatches of the cowboy songs, and that was where they started. The two Johns -- the elder, and Pops, as I knew my grandfather (pitctured below) -- hit the road in an old Ford and slept beside it on the roadside between talks, fleshing out big plans in the meantime.
In June 1932, they arrived at the offices of the Macmillan publishing company in New York City. Here Lomax proposed his idea for an anthology of American ballads and folksongs, with a special emphasis on the contributions of African Americans. It was accepted. In preparation he traveled to Washington to review the holdings in the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress, which he found lacking.
He therefore made an arrangement with the Library whereby it would provide recording equipment, obtained for it by Lomax through private grants, in exchange for which he would travel the country making field recordings to be deposited in the Archive of the Library.
In 1934, he was named Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song, a title he held until his death in 1948. His work, for which he was paid a salary of one dollar, included fund raising for the Library, and he was expected to support himself entirely through writing books and giving lectures. Lomax secured grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others, for continued field recordings.
Thus began a ten-year relationship with the Library of Congress that would involve not only John but the entire Lomax family, including his second wife, Ruby Terrill Lomax, Professor of Classics and Dean of Women at the University of Texas, whom he married in 1934. His sons and daughters assisted with his folksong research and with the daily operations of the Archive: Shirley, who performed songs taught to her by her mother; John Jr., my grandfather, who encouraged his father's association with the Library; Alan Lomax who accompanied John on field trips and who from 1937–42 served as the Archive's first paid (though very nominally) employee as Assistant in Charge; and Bess, who spent her weekends and school vacations copying song texts and doing comparative song research.
(Two of those kids would eventually receive Presidential Medals for the Arts; Alan from Reagan, and Bess from Clinton. My grandfather would preside over the Houston Folklore Society for many years, perform a cappella blues and cowboy songs, and manage Lightnin’ Hopkins and discover Mance Lipscomb.)
Because I’ve talked long enough for now, I’ll treat you to some of my grandfather’s singing. And if any of y’all brought a flask, take a nip:
And so the great field recording trips began. Time doesn’t allow for much on the physical hardship they endured -- tens of thousands of miles on rutted roads in primitive cars and sleeping rough often as not, nor the technical limitations of a persnickety 400 pound tape recorder mounted in the trunk. (It boggles the mind when I think of how my iPhone weighs about an ounce and can access a million Libraries of Congress as well as make pristine sound and video recordings and send them to the entire planet instantaneously.)
And this time he was looking for African American music, and African American music of a particular sort. By this time, popular music had developed an infrastructure quite unlike that of 1910. Sheet music had been eclipsed by sound recordings. Radio was everywhere. New music stars came and went. Where once the only stars were composers of sheet music and certain opera tenors and sopranos, now you had jazz bands, country stars, blues singers, and so on. John wanted as little of that as possible -- he wanted to capture the rare old sounds of his youth before they were gone forever.
And he knew his last chance to find those would be way back in the sticks, and that he could find perhaps the greatest concentration of these old “untainted” songs in the prison farms of the south. There he would find long-timers still innocent of pop charts and radio trends and the hits of the day. There remained a folk tradition unspoiled. And yes, there also remained remnants of the songs sung by slaves in the fields, as the prison farm convict leasing system was slavery by another name.
To record these songs he had to seek permission from wardens at each prison and after being turned away at Huntsville, he turned his attention to the Central Unit in Sugar Land and the patchwork of prison farms in Brazoria County -- Retrieve, Darrington, Ramsey and others -- where he had better luck.
And it was there he hit a goldmine, and Alan would too in subsequent trips.
Most famously, today, perhaps, was Midnight Special, which he didn’t find in Texas, but whose lyrics, as sung by Leadbelly, mention Houston and the song is set in Sugar Land prison. (It confuses some people, but Leadbelly, whom John met at Angola Farm in Louisiana, probably never lived in Houston nor did time in Sugar Land; however, the lyrics circulated among convicts freely from prison to prison, verses added and subtracted and edited as they went.)
John and Alan Lomax, in their book, Best Loved American Folk Songs, told a credible story identifying the Midnight Special as a train from Houston shining its light into a cell in the Sugar Land Prison. Interpretations vary as to whether that light was of salvation or that it pulled behind it the train that could end the convict’s suffering by running him over. (That was the interpretation of poet and family friend Carl Sandburg.)
And despite his belief that he was finding songs unadulterated by pop trends, he was wrong about Midnight Special. It had been printed as sheet music in 1905 and had passed through many obscure recordings since then. Versions older than Leadbelly’s come from North Carolina, Florida, all over the place.
But he did found plenty of what he was looking for as well.
One such is Good God A’Mighty, a field holler sung by woodcutters led by a convict named Lightnin’ Washington at Darrington Farm down the road in Sandy Point in 1933:
And closer to y’all’s home, there was this harrowing and immortal sugar canecutter’s lament, since covered by everyone from the Band to Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen:
“Ain’t No More Cane”
These were the sweet and resilient and uplifting echoes of a brutal bygone era he sought to protect and preserve. Not through any nostalgia for the plantation days -- he was born after it was over, and his own po white trash father loathed the plantation class with every fiber of his being and taught him the same, but as links back to the eternal, all the way back to Africa, the source of all mankind. It was said of his father, James Avery Lomax, that he “loathed all sham and pretense,” and in these raw field hollers, sham and pretense are in scant supply.
Here is another, from inmates at Ramsey and Retrieve, recorded by Alan in 1951:
They saved those songs before they were all long gone like turkeys through the corn with his long clothes on…
.And they live on today. Moby made a fortune sampling some in the 1990s, and he was not the last.
Here is one called “Rosie” Alan captured at Mississippi’s Parchman Farm way back when.It’s another woodcutter holler.
And in 2015 it was reborn like this:
1,424,363,482 views. Wow.
And at risk of lowering the tone, these songs have turned up in the strangest places.
I’ll end with the one I started with, albeit in the much less musically capable throats of the fans of Bristol Rovers Football Club of England, for whom this has become their official chant.
Just kidding, I’ll leave you with a happier version, and we will end on the sunny bounce of early ska: Toots and the Maytals of Kingston, Jamaica