April Features
A big problem in writing on Jelly Roll Morton in the 21st century is the sheer weight and volume of history, writing, received wisdom and wildly assorted misinformation littering the mental landscape. Contributing to my uneasiness is the giant figure of Alan Lomax looming over the whole Morton epic. Lomax (1915-2002) was a dedicated and vigorous researcher and proselytizer for African-American music, but his basic limitations and flaws left landmines in the path of understanding.
Unquestionably, Lomax's generalship of the 1938 Library of Congress recordings and his research that led to the publication of Mister Jelly Roll in 1951 was crucial in preserving Morton's achievements for posterity and focusing attention and scholarship on Morton as a central figure in early jazz. The hard work and ingenuity Lomax invested in Morton was repaid in the fame that redounded to him as Morton was rediscovered and revered by a generation of fans and musicians growing up with the worldwide jazz revival of the 1940s and '50s. Lomax received every bit as much as he gave to the epic story of Ferd Lamothe aka Jelly Roll Morton.
Like many self-taught, field-trained ethnomusicologists of his generation, Lomax was something of a freebooter who took possession of information and ideas too readily. He knew what he knew, and he often asked leading questions in interviews and put his own words, ideas and beliefs into his subjects' mouths (as with his tireless pursuit of "dirty blues" with Morton). In another musical autobiography he recorded in 1941 with folksinger Woody Guthrie, prepared as a radio series, he also often badgered Guthrie into giving the "correct" (i.e., Lomax-style) responses to important questions. More disturbing, Lomax's large-scale manipulation of research ideas and information is documented in a recent study, Lost Delta Found, edited by Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005). The book carefully reconstructs a field study of Coahoma County, Mississippi, in 1941-42, led by three African-American Fisk University researchers, John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones and Samuel C. Adams, Jr. Lomax became involved with this project and virtually hijacked it.
Without going into all details, it is a case of Lomax throwing his weight around (the weight of the Library of Congress's reputation), evidently undervaluing the three Fisk workers, all of whom were or would become important scholarly researchers into black music and who pioneered the study of local social and cultural conditions in the South. The eruption of World War II was one factor in derailing the study, but Lomax's intrusions also undermined it. Gordon and Nemerov note how Lomax used this aborted study for his own purposes in his autobiographical study The Land Where the Blues Began (1993), which places Alan Lomax squarely in the middle of the history of blues in the Mississippi Delta.
When Lomax published his book in 1993, John Work was mentioned three times: in the preface, he was mentioned in association with the musical transcriptions; in the sole text mention, he was present at the recording of Muddy Waters; in the acknowledgements, his name is listed with Jones and Adams. Adams is not otherwise mentioned; Jones, who is cited several times, is the only one portrayed as an actual participant in the research. (p. 24) So Lomax did his best to obscure the sources of much information in his writing, thus gaining credit for himself.
Some 50 years after the fact, Lomax silently included this Fisk research material as if it were part of his autobiographical story. Gordon and Nemerov continue, "Adams's text was available to Lomax who, in Land, used photographs of the Dipsie Doodle [a Clarksdale cafe] and a hand drawn map of a Clarksdale neighborhood, both of which first appeared in Adams's master's thesis. Lomax does not attribute his source." (p. 25) The authors then lay a more serious charge about Lomax's manipulation of ideas to fit his own preconceptions and preoccupations.
As Adams, Jones, and Work repeatedly make clear, Coahoma County was a diverse community that included educated black Southerners able to articulate their ideas about their home. By devaluing their contributions, by emphasizing the culture of powerful but less articulate artists that he (Lomax) is required to "explain" or "interpret" for mainstream America, by not citing the major contributions of black Southern scholars who helped him with his work, Lomax creates an appealing but static and nostalgic portrait of black Southern America. (p. 25)
To verify this, compare pages 84-85 of Lost Delta Found with pages 38-39 of The Land Where the Blues Began, to observe Lomax cutting and pasting, making the Fisk scholars' work his own.
These tendencies to silent appropriation run throughout Lomax's work -- on disc and on paper -- in his Jelly Roll project, and I found myself constantly fending off the sentimentalized Lomaxian view of the South and of Southern black people. He often comes perilously close to portraying himself as Ol' Marse, about to seize and colonize the music and culture he is purportedly studying. My feeling cycled rapidly from admiration of Lomax's hard work and dedication to revulsion over his blunt patronizing of a subtle and complex artist like Ferdinand LaMothe.
April 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag
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