Depression-era insights into America

John Szwed argues that Alan Lomax was one of the most influential men of the twentieth century not only because of how people listened to music but because of how they viewed America.

Lomax followed his father, John Lomax, collecting songs across the United States during the Great Depression. They collected folksongs from chain gangs, work crews, field hands, and others throughout the South and other regions. By collecting, preserving, and disseminating long-buried or forgotten songs, he was a messenger to the masses. Singers’ emotions emanated from their voices and physical performances, and they asked Lomax to take their songs straight to President Franklin Roosevelt.

Musical forms sweeping the country fueled Lomax, including white-diluted jazz and rock n’ roll, and he sought isolated pockets of communities to ensure cultural purity of songs. He sought to heal the nation’s injustices and racial and social rifts via the power of folksong. Under the aegesis of the Library of Congress, Lomax collection spanned the majority of his lifetime and brought the performances of Leadbelly, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Jelly Roll Morton to broader audiences. He was the first to raise questions about ownership and creativity in terms of copyright and royalties. He worked closely with Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead, who championed his work despite his outsider status in academia.

The Man Who Recorded The World chronicles Lomax’s life’s work, including the time he spent abroad during the Red Scare—when the U.S. went through a serious anti-Communist spell during the McCarthy Era. Lomax wasn’t a Communist, but was active in protest movements and with labor unions and therefore accused of being one. The FBI compiled a file on him and investigated him several times. The book sheds tremendous light on his contributions to folksong and ethnomusicology as well as his prescient imagining of the concept of predictive algorithms and his global jukebox idea that evolved into the Music Genome Project and Pandora Radio that now has over 80 million users. However, the book fails to reveal the complexity of Lomax’s true character.

Szwed offers occasional insight into Lomax’s personal life, such as the conflict he suffered regarding his life’s work: was it an extension of his father’s or was it truly his? There is some mention of his failed marriages and his daughter, but in the end, the book leaves one more curious about Lomax’s life, work, and legacy and than feeling all the questions have been answered—which perhaps is the point.

•••

A disused lodge by a lake in the North Carolina mountains is the setting for Frazier’s latest novel wherein Luce finds herself encumbered with her murdered sister’s twins, whom the state has foisted onto the reclusive woman. As caretaker of the lodge, she enjoyed a peaceful existence apart from town where she healed from childhood wounds and more recent abuses. Her work was limited to the landscape, the weather, animals, books from the lodge’s library, and music from the radio in the lobby, which—given its fireplace—she made into her bedroom.

Luce is not quite sure what to do with the twins, who are mute, chicken-strangling, pyromaniacs, so she occupies the girl and boy with nature walks and otherwise treats them with gentle care, allowing them to heal from witnessing their mother’s murder at the hands of their stepfather and whatever other abuses they suffered. She eases them into her daily routine, talks to them but they never respond, and tries to explain lessons such as cause and effect—if they kill the chickens, they won’t have eggs or chicken to eat. Eventually Luce seeks out her own teachers, three widowed sisters who reminisce about how smart, difficult, and troubled she was.

Luce’s estranged father, Lit, a WWII vet and the town’s deputy, fights crime and meets up with a new bootlegger come to town, Bud. Bud’s arrival in town coincides with the twins’. He thinks the twins know where his dead wife, Lily, and the twins’ mother hid a vast sum of money.

Frazier’s characters, whether you root for them or not, are complex, carry the story forward, and keep the pages turning. The degree of ambiguity in the story may trouble some readers. Yet, if tying up loose ends isn’t an issue, do give this book a go.

Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World by John Szwed. New York, NY: Penguin, 2011.

Nightwoods by Charles Frazier. New York, NY: Random House, 2011.