Music: Folk Hunter

The prison is tucked in a barren bend of the Mississippi, looking toward fields of Louisiana sugar cane. Inside Angola’s cyclone fences are the lifers—men serving sentences for rape and murder. Periodically a short man in rumpled suit and bow tie moves into the prison toolroom, lugging a tape recorder, a six-string guitar, a twelve-string guitar and a fiddle. Around him gather the prisoners—”Guitar” Welch, “Hogman” Maxey, Robert Pete Williams—to shout out their songs.

Wonder why they electrocute a man, baby, Lord, at the one o’clock hour at night, The current much stronger; people turn out all the light.

Angola prison is a favorite hunting ground of Folklorist Harry Oster. A scholarly teacher of English at Louisiana State University, Oster roams the streets and backlands of his adopted state to record its rich musical patois—French, Cajun, Negro French, Anglo-Saxon. In four years he has spaded up material that many a folklorist would give his magnetized recorder heads to own.

A Little Priming. Massachusetts-born and Harvard-educated, 36-year-old Folklorist Oster picked up a doctor’s degree in English and Folk Literature at Cornell, dabbled in radio, eventually gravitated to L.S.U. because he was fascinated by the diversity of folk music in Louisiana. He follows the folk trail in a battered 1953 Mercury, tracking down leads with the persistence of a questing lepidopterist. Recently he heard of a mulatto woman named Madame Sam who lived in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, and supposedly sang a particularly unadulterated brand of old French. Sam, it turned out, was not up to her billing, but she sent Oster chasing downriver to Port Sulphur, where another ancient mulatto named Alma Bartholomew produced, on request, 60 different pre-17th century French songs.

The leads are not always so fruitful. Following one tip, Oster drove to St. Martinsville, where a fabulously gifted and ancient crone was supposed to live. Oster found not one, but two old women waiting for him on the front porch of a house that had a statue of the Virgin in the front yard and an oil well in the back. Neither of the old girls could sing a note. On the other hand, Oster has found that many a performer can be coaxed to song with a little priming. In French and Cajun settlements, he tries to build his listeners’ confidence by singing a few songs himself or posing some leading question about money and drink, life or death. He gets surprising answers:

Oh, when I die Bury me with my head under the tap So that if a drop of that very good wine falls I can get some good out of it.

Another Alumnus. Angola Prison remains Oster’s favorite folk source, and Robert Pete Williams, 42, his favorite singer. A lifer for shooting and killing a man, Williams has, in Oster’s view, the “tremendous drive and anguish” that characterized the fabled Lead Belly, another Angola alumnus. Williams recently improvised his own prisoner’s blues:

Sometime I feel like, baby, committin’ suicide . . . I got the nerve if I just had anythin’ to do it with. I’m gain’ down slow, somethin’ wrong with me. I’ve got to make a change while that I’m still young. If I don’t I won’t ever get old.