Alan Lomax Goes North
Finnish
Fieldwork Forgotten
By James P. Leary, University
of Wisconsin, Madison
Alan
Lomax in 1942
Excerpted from "Midwestern Folklore, Journal of the Hoosier Folklore Society", Volume 27, No. 2, Fall 2001, Indiana State University. Reprinted by permission. (See below for subscription information.)
That Alan Lomax, following his sojourn
among Michigan's French, also encountered more Finnish performers
than he could record is hardly surprising. The western Upper
Peninsula of Michigan forms a substantial part of the Finnish
American heartland which extends across northern Wisconsin and
Minnesota. From late September through mid October, Lomax captured
roughly 100 performances from sixteen men and eight women (Leary
2001). His documentation of their lives was typically sporadic
and sketchy, consisting of several on-disc biographical interviews
and subsequent correspondence with the Hjelmer Forster family
of Calumet, members of which evidently assisted as interpretors
and liaisons with Finnish musicians. Joyce Hakala eventually
gathered rich information on the singing, kantele-playing evangelist
Pekka Aho (Hakala 1997:125-126), but the stories of other performers
have yet to be told.
Even so, we have their names, whereabouts, and sounds. The Finns
Alan Lomax recorded ranged from unaccompanied vocalists to solo
instrumentalists on accordion, concertina, harmonica, and the
Finnish kantele. Predictably they rendered dance tunes, darkly
comic plaints of farm workers, ballads, hymns, and other survivals
of old country pedigree. Their collective repertoires likewise
brimmed with remarkable instances of musical fusion unacknowledged
by Lomax but strongly paralleling the hybrid performances he
encountered among the region's Ojibwes, Poles, and French.
The kantele-plucking lay preacher Pekka Aho, for example, sang a Finnish language
version of the Anglo-Protestant gospel standard "Abide With Me"
(AFS 2388A). (Editor's note: AFS numbers refer to Library of Congress files.)
Spurning the kantele's harp-like strains, Emil Maki nonetheless borrowed the
"Battle Hymn of the Republic's" tune and snatches of its chorus
to conjoin opposing Lutheran "church Finns" and socialist "hall
Finns" in heaven where they all might enjoy a friendly beer as accordions
played (AFS 2334BI). Frank Maki acquired tune and sentiment from cowboy balladry's
"When the Work's All Done This Fall" to express the feelings of
a merchant seaman from Savo far from his sweetheart (AFS 2363B). And Kusti
Simila mixed Finnish with English to transform "It's A Long Way to Tipperary"
into a lament for his Finnish home (AFS 2392B2, 2393AI).
The richness and range of traditional performances encountered
amidst Alan Lomax's 1938 fieldwork, coupled with the insights
they offer into an undiscovered, evolving musical region raise
intriguing questions. Among them: what do these field recordings
from the Upper Midwest's hinterlands reveal ahout the larger
processes of folk musical synthesis in pluralistic American life?;
and why did Alan Lomax and so many more-people who have otherwise
combed and celebrated the Archive of American Folksong's remarkable
holdings forget, neglect, or fail to discover his pathbreaking
1938 northern recordings? Such large and vexing questions cannot
be addressed fully here. Indeed the first demands another essay
altogether, but I will not shirk offering speculations for the
second.
Folk musical fieldwork, especially when undertaken by someone
working for a public agency, is never removed from the larger
political economy. Once back in Washington at 1938's end, Alan
Lomax was compelled by other work. The war in Europe was underway,
with America increasingly involved. Amidst a growing war effort,
the underfunded
Archive of American Folksong required broadbased public support
to survive. From 1939 - 1940 Alan Lomax wrote and directed American
Folk Songs, a popular American School of the Air radio series
surveying English language folk songs from the Archive's holdings.
By 1941, joining with the head of the Library of Congress's Music
Division, Harold Spivacke, to contend that the Archive of American
Folksong was a defense related institution worthy of increased
funding, Lomax undertook a series of war-related folksong and
radio projects that would eventually bring him to the Office
of War Information (Filene 2000: 145-158). Following World War
II, he left government employment entirely to become director
of folk music for Decca Records. Meanwhile Alan Lomax's involvement
with the left wing People's Songs and the 1948 Progressive Party
presidential campaign of Henry Wallace resulted in his inclusion
in Red Channels (1950), the handbook of conservative witch-hunters
bent on purging "un-American" Americans from the nation's
media (Filene 2000:161-163). Lomax left for England and, by the
time he returned, twenty years had passed since 1938. His northern
foray must have seemed a long way off.
Not everyone, moreover, can do everything and most who do undertake
research, despite veering onto occasional tangents, follow fixed
trajectories. As a southerner and westerner of Anglo-American
heritage, Alan Lomax was fascinated by Anglo-American music,
by southern music (including the musical traditions of African
Americans, Cajuns, Caribbeans, and Spanish-speaking peoples),
by the fusions of all these elements in the Americas, and by
the connections between American traditions and their old world
hearths. There was plenty of work to be done in these areas,
and Lomax was a persistent, productive worker. No wonder his
northern trip was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
But I will be more daring, inspired as I am by the bold pronouncements
that characterize Alan Lomax's own work and that are echoed in
the interests and aesthetics of most others who have been involved
with constructions of what is commonly recognized as American
folk music.
Contrary to northern-tending, racist evolutionary notions of
Aryan/Nordic military and scientific superiority (commendably
abhorred by the staunchly anti-racist, anti-fascist Lomax), pursuers
of musical prowess have embraced an opposing environmental determinism,
heading south to discover musical sensuality, passion, and power
supposedly lacking in northern climes. Why lavish time on John
Frederickson snow-bound in Calumet, Michigan, when you can record
New Orleans' Jelly Roll Morton?
Then there is accordion phobia. Besides John Shawbitz, more than
a few Finns and Poles played squeezeboxes-instruments that Alan
Lomax has persistently disdained as mechanical, lacking in soul,
unless transformed by people of color and their neighbors: the
black French or Creoles of Lousiana, Cajuns, Haitians, and Chicanos.
Preferring that European Americans maintain more ancient musical
traditions, and referring to the accordion as "this pestiferous
instrument," Lomax has argued that "during the 19th
century the accordion has done . . . severe damage to the old
folk music of Central Europe" (Lomax 1989). Despite Alan
Lomax's erstwhile solidarity with America's immigrant working
class, he likewise manifested the elitest's mingled embrace of
primitive, static, peasant folk culture and disdain for anything
polluted by bourgeois popular culture-preferring instead what
Benjamin Filene has called a "cult of authenticity"
(Filene 2000:47-75). In 1938 the jukebox hit "Beer Barrel
Polka," not only as recorded by the German Will Glahe but
also by the schmaltzy Andrews Sisters, topped America's pop charts
and tainted all accordionists by association.
Then there are the old implicitly xenophobic ruts of received
scholarship, the discipline of folklore's intellectual Chisholm
Trails. In 1888 the first president of the American Folklore
Society, William Wells Newall, opened the innaugural Journal
of American Folklore with a statement "On the Field and
Work of a Journal of American Folklore" that declared the
"principal object" of the American Folklore Sociely
to be the collection of the fast-vanishing remains of Folk-lore
in America, namely: a. Relics of Old English Folk-Lore . . .
b. Lore of Negroes in the Southern States of the union . . .
c. Lore of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . d. Lore of
French, Canada, Mexico, etc. (Newall 1888:3)
European Americans, not only recent immigrants but also abundant
and musically influential longtime citizens of German heritage,
were given no mention whatsoever, no place in the canon. Nor,
with a few exceptions, did such thinking alter substantially
in the ensuing century (Bronner 1998:243, 270-273). Hence there
was no place in America's notion of folk music for regions like
the Upper Midwest where non-Anglo-Protestant peoples predominate.
Finally, the ideology of consensus, embraced by the Folk Revival
that was gaining force in the 1930s and is sustained in the simplistic
and dominant wing of the current and otherwise laudable multicultural
movement (that so often homogenizes the musical world into AMERICAN
SONGS, AFRICAN SONGS, LATIN AMERICAN SONGS), had little place
for the Upper Midwestern cultural complexity of Slovenian accordionists
inspired by Italian vaudevillians, of Ojibwes playing "squaw
dances" on fiddles, of Poles singing about American factories
and cowboy heavens, of Franco-American musical jaunts to Marquette
or along rocky roads to Dublin, and of Finns fusing cowboy songs
with seagoing experiences while reimagining the "Battle
Hymn of the Republic" as a beer-drinking accordionist's
anthem. Certainly public minds boggled even blanched-at such
category-blurring cultural practices in the late 1930s when,
as former Archive of Folk Culture archivist Joe Hickerson observed,
"there was some reluctance . . . to publicize the recordings
of foreign-language singers in the United States. Congressional
philosophy was not strongly pluralistic, and the melting-pot
persuasion was prevalent" (Hickerson 1982:77).
No wonder Alan Lomax's 1938 northern sojourn remains fieldwork
forgotten, except by a few like myself who, despite complaints
about its neglect, are nonetheless-given all the obstacles-astonished
and profoundly grateful that it happened at all.
References:
Leary, James P. 2001. The Discovery of Finnish American Folk
Music. Scandinavian Studies
Hakala, Joyce. 1997. Memento of Finland, A Musical Legacy. Pikebone
Music, St. Paul
Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and
American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
Lomax, Alan. 1989. Italie: Chants & Dances/Songs and Dances
of Italy. Arion, ARN 62083. Compact disk and booklet.
Newall, William Wells. 1888. On the Field and Work of a Journal
of American Folklore. Journal of American Folklore 1:1,3-7
Bronner, Simon J. 1998. Following Tradition: Folklore in the
Discourse of American Culture. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Hickerson, Joseph C. 1982. Early Field Recordings of Ethnic Music.
In Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage, ed. Judith
McColloh. Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office. Pp.
67-83.
Subscribe to Midwestern Folklore by sending $7.00 to: Ronald L. Baker, Department of English, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana 47809.
Who was Alan Lomax?
In the early 1930s, Alan Lomax and his
father, pioneering folklorist John A. Lomax, first developed
the Library of Congress' Archive of American Folksong as a major
national resource.
Lomax, "The Father of the American Folksong Revival,"
first presented Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Burl Ives, and Pete
Seeger to a national audience on his radio programs in the '30s
and '40s. He also assembled the first recorded overview of world
folksong for Columbia Records. "The main point of my activity,"
Lomax once remarked, "was...to put sound technology at the
disposal of The Folk, to bring channels of communication to all
sorts of artists and areas."
From 1933-1942, working alone and with his father and others,
Alan Lomax recorded folk and traditional music for the Library
of Congress throughout the Southern United States, as well as
in New England, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, Ohio,
Haiti, and the Bahamas.
The author/producer of many books, scientific articles, films, and record
releases, Lomax has been a passionate advocate of "cultural equity",
a principle which proposes to reverse the centralization of communication
and give equal media time to the whole range of human cultures. After six
decades of "folk song hunting" Lomax retired in 1996. He was born
in Austin, Texas in 1915.