Brilliant Songs We Wouldn’t Have Without Alan Lomax
By John Schaefer
The Alan Lomax centennial is a cause for celebration in many corners of the music world. In many others, it’s likely to go unnoticed. So let’s play a little game; we’ll call it the It’s A Wonderful Life game. Just like Frank Capra’s famous old movie, we’ll take a look at what the world might be like if a single person were removed from it. If the pioneering folklorist John Lomax hadn’t had a son named Alan, and hadn’t started taking him on field recording trips in the American South when the kid was a teenager (and probably supposed to be in school), a lot of music you know would probably not exist. And a lot more would exist, but it’s not likely that you’d know it.
So who would be affected by an Alan Lomax-less world? Fans of classic jazz, classic rock listeners for sure, but also the modern Mumford-flavored brand of folk rock, contemporary classical music… even whatever alien creatures stumble upon our old Voyager spacecraft now hurtling beyond the confines of our solar system. Yes, the famed “Golden Record” affixed to Voyager bears Lomax’s fingerprints. Well, not literally, but he was the one who brought to Carl Sagan all the traditional music recordings, from Azerbaijan, Peru, Central Africa and more, which shared space on the disc with classical music, an assortment of languages, and other sounds meant to document who we are as humans to any life-forms that eventually find and hear it.
Lomax himself traveled mostly in the United States, documenting every kind of traditional singing and playing that he could. He also went to Haiti, Spain, and Italy. He seems to have never gone anywhere without some kind of portable recording device, and his travels formed the basis for numerous groundbreaking books and recordings. He was the first to record Muddy Waters, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie, as well as hundreds of others whose names aren’t as immediately recognizable. Those recordings, in turn, found their way to musicians in the 1950s and 60s—musicians who were working at a time of incredible artistic ferment and were on the look-out for the next big thing. So without Alan Lomax, bands like The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin would’ve been missing some of their most formative influences, as you’ll see in the playlist that follows.
One more thing: in a field where the ethical practices of the (mostly white, reasonably well-off) producers recording the (usually poor, often black) musicians could be careless, or worse, Lomax seems to have been a stickler for crediting the people who played, the people who helped him and traveled with him, and when his dad and Lead Belly parted ways in a hostile and then legally contentious break-up, Lomax continued to champion the great bluesman and his music. Muddy Waters used to tell a great story about Alan Lomax traveling to Mississippi and recording two of his songs; it was the first time he’d ever been recorded. Lomax later sent him two copies of the disc and 20 bucks, and Waters recalled playing one of the discs on a local jukebox over and over and thinking “I can do this!”
So, in our little game, say there’s no Alan Lomax. Muddy Waters stays in Mississippi; never goes to Chicago; never meets the great Willie Dixon, who wrote many of Waters’ finest songs while playing bass in Waters’ band; and five young Englishmen, having never heard his song “Rollin’ Stone,” are left without a band name or one of their best early songs. Fortunately, there was an Alan Lomax, born 100 years ago (he was born January 31, 1915, and passed away in 2002), and all of these covers—some hugely popular, some quite obscure—are the result.
The Rolling Stones, “I Just Wanna Make Love To You”
One of several Muddy Waters songs on this list, this song was written for him by Willie Dixon, and it would become a hit for the band Foghat and the singer Etta James later on. But in 1964, this was the sound of the Rolling Stones finding their stride. The Etta James recording, by the way, was originally the B-side of her hit “At Last,” in 1961, but didn’t become a hit until it was used in a TV commercial in 1996.
The Rolling Stones, “You Gotta Move”
This was a Mississippi Fred McDowell song. McDowell was discovered pretty late in life—he was in his mid-50s when Lomax found him and recorded him for the first time. The Stones give a pretty authentic gutbucket flavor to this North Mississippi blues in their 1971 version.
Bruce Springsteen, “This Land Is Your Land”
Woody Guthrie’s anthem is a song that seems to belong to everybody (which was kind of the point), from a kindergarten class to The Boss. Alan Lomax used his position as archivist at the Library of Congress in 1939 to promote folk music, including Guthrie’s songs, to the schools through a CBS broadcast series; and in 1940 he oversaw the recording of Guthrie’s seminal album Dust Bowl Ballads. That album didn’t include this song, which came later, but it did include Guthrie’s Steinbeck-inspired “Ballad Of Tom Joad,” a thread that would be picked up 40 years later in Springsteen’s album The Ghost of Tom Joad.
Led Zeppelin, “You Shook Me”
Another Muddy Waters tune, although one from well after Lomax had set him on his path. Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and keyboardist-bassist John Paul Jones had previously played this tune when they were in the Jeff Beck Group, although they really stretch out on this version.
Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Midnight Special”
It is hard to overestimate the importance of Alan Lomax to Lead Belly’s career. John and Alan Lomax famously recorded the singer and musician—then still known as Huddie Ledbetter—while in a Louisiana prison, and legend has it that the Lomaxes’ petition, plus a copy of that recording, moved the governor to release Lead Belly early. After Lead Belly broke with the elder Lomax and found himself in jail again, Alan helped with his legal expenses and gave him a national platform on his radio show. (Lead Belly would later have his own radio show, right here at WNYC.) Lead Belly’s version of “Midnight Special” has been covered by everyone from The Beatles to Pete Seeger. I like this version, by CCR.
Miles Davis, “Saeta”
Lomax lived in London for a while, and took the opportunity to travel in Spain, recording folk music from the various regions of that country. Two of his recordings got into the hands of the legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and the extraordinary producer, arranger, and composer Gil Evans. One of them was this tune, “Saeta,” which appears on the brilliant Davis and Evans collaboration Sketches Of Spain.
The New York Dolls, “Hoochie Koochie Man”
Even the proto-glam-punk scene in New York was not immune to the charms of Muddy Waters. David Johansen and crew clearly responded to the song’s overt sexuality.
Mumford & Sons, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes, The Old Crow Medicine Show,
“This Train (Is Bound For Glory)”
Another song that seems to belong to everybody, because we don’t know who wrote it or when—but it was first recorded by John and Alan Lomax back in 1933. They popularized it by publishing it in their printed anthologies and it has been an enduring favorite ever since, as shown in this all-star folk-rock tour in 2011. Every concert in the tour ended with all the bands singing this song.
Luciano Berio, “A la femminisca”
Luicano Berio, the leader of the Italian musical avant-garde, was a major figure in 20th century classical music, and his suite called Folk Songs, written for his then-wife Cathy Berberian, is among his most popular works. The songs come from Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Anglo-American tradition, and of course Italy. But it wasn’t the American songs that Berio got from Lomax—it was the Sicilian and Sardinian tunes that Lomax had collected while traveling through Italy with the ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitello.
The Allman Brothers Band, “Trouble No More”
Just in case you thought I was running out of Muddy Waters covers, here’s one from Gregg and Duane Allman and company.
Nirvana “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”
Kurt Cobain does a killer version of this old American folk song which exists in several variants. (One of those variants, called “In The Pines,” is a classic Appalachian murder ballad.) Cobain got his version the way most musicians did: from Lead Belly.
Eric Clapton, “Walkin’ Blues”
Eric Clapton simply had to be on this list somewhere; with Cream and in his own solo work, Ol’ Slowhand has been an inexhaustible champion of a lot of the old bluesman that the Lomaxes originally recorded. “Walkin’ Blues” is originally by Son House, though Robert Johnson made the classic recording of it. Son House was not discovered by Alan Lomax—Paramount Records had actually recorded the blues guitarist back in 1930. This song was part of the session. But those tracks virtually disappeared, and it wasn’t until Lomax recorded House in 1941 that his reputation began to spread.
Chris Thomas King, “Revelations”
Funny thing about that Son House story: After Lomax recorded him (twice, in 1941 and again in ’42), House moved to Rochester, NY to work on the railroad. He was unaware that his reputation was growing and that eventually, people assumed he was dead. He was “rediscovered” in 1964 in upstate New York, to the surprise of all. This track is by Chris Thomas King, who combines hip-hop and country blues, and who is best known for starring as George Clooney’s black sidekick in the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? The sample that the song is based on is Son House singing his classic, apocalyptic blues, “John The Revelator.”
The Du-Tels (Gary Lucas and Peter Stampfel),
“Out On The Rolling Sea”
A song from the repertoire of Joseph Spence, the guitarist, and sponge fisherman, from the Bahamas. Wikipedia will tell you that Spence first recorded in the late 1950s, but Alan Lomax, unsurprisingly, got to him at least 20 years earlier. Some people mistakenly think Spence is responsible for The Beach Boys hit “Sloop John B,” but in fact Spence got that song from the same place as The Beach Boys, namely, a Kingston Trio record. This song, though, is from Spence and has been covered several times. This version was recorded live on my other show, New Sounds, back in 1995. Gary Lucas was Captain Beefheart’s guitarist, and discovered the late Jeff Buckley; Peter Stampfel is a member of New York’s original psycho-folk band The Holy Modal Rounders.
Hearn Gadbois,
“GAHT MAYH MOH8JOH3 WOYKIHN”
Our final cover is another from Muddy Waters. Yes, I know Elvis covered this song too, but come on, this is a mid-1980s computer, singing “Got My Mojo Workin’.” How awesome is that? The title is apparently the way Hearn Gadbois had to spell it so the computer could pronounce it right. Gadbois is a percussionist and composer who released this on an audio cassette magazine called Tellus in the mid-80s while he was working in New York City; he now lives in Prague.
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John Schaefer hosts WNYC’s @Soundcheck
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