Music: Just Folk

Whoopie ti yi yo, Git along, little dogies, It’s your misfortune And none of my own.

—Cowboy Song

A gypsy woman first sang the song to Folklorist John A. Lomax in Fort Worth, and in no time he made it one of the most famous cowboy songs in the land. Traveling in a model A Ford, with his young son Alan as an occasional companion, he took the song with him on his far-ranging folk-song safaris in the 1930’s, twanged it at campfires and from college platforms. Two decades later in Dublin, carrying on his father’s research, Alan Lomax heard Irish Folklorist Seamus Ennis sing an almost identical Irish lay about an old man cradling a newborn baby he half suspected was “none of his own.” Lomax tracked the song to County Cork, where the old people sang it in Gaelic, calling it simply “the oldest song.” Why? “Because that was the lullaby Joseph sang to the Infant Jesus.”

Hymns & Handel. For the past eight years, fringe-bearded Alan Lomax, now 43, has been tracking down such leads, fitting together musical jigsaw pieces of many a puzzle about the family of man. He has collaborated with leading folklorists the world over, listened to miles of music already on tape, added taped material of his own and edited the best into comprehensible form. Columbia so far has issued 16 remarkable annotated albums (covering almost as many areas) in a projected 30-to 40-album series, and Westminster this month releases the sixth of a scheduled eleven albums of Lomax material from Spain alone.

Music “Hunter Lomax has recorded Pygmies in the Middle Congo, basket weavers in France, geishas in Japan, Saturday night warblers in English pubs (but avoided Wales, which is “a tragedy; everything is Methodist hymns and Handel”). He has mapped the world folk-song families, found surprising links between them. The pinch-voiced, samisen-playing geisha finds an echo in the Spanish mountain-farm laborer thumping a ximbomba drum; “the lonesome, death-ridden American cowboy is a blood cousin to the raga singer in India.”

Life & Love. Although he is neither a trained musician nor an anthropologist, Lomax has arrived at some general conclusions. For example, people in remote (often Northern) parts of continental European countries tend to “take life and love easy”; they sing in choral groups with open throats, often using frankly sexual words and lyrics. As he moved to less remote areas, Lomax found increasing “frustration and melancholy,” accompanied by a nasal, constricted-throat, high-pitched style of singing that comes originally from the Orient.

Lomax aired his theories on England’s highbrow Third Programme in one of the most popular series in BBC history (commemorated by Punch in a cartoon of a down-at-the-mouth hillbilly singing: “I’ve got those Alan-Lomax-ain’t-been-around-to-record-me blues”). Now back in the U.S., Lomax would like to “turn the loudspeakers around” and convert Americans from a nation of audiophiles into folk performers. An eminently folksy sound—representing, according to Lomax, the “furthest intrusion of Negro folksong into U.S. pop music: rock ‘n’ roll.”