Shirley Collins collects songs with Alan Lomax
in the American South, 1959

“So where do you come from, young lady?”
“I’m from England.”
“What—England over the water?”

—Elderly mountaineer in Kentucky.

Having learned a little about the singing of Shirley Collins, I’ve been reading her splendid memoir

• America over the water (2004) (reviewed e.g. here),

evoking her three-month fieldtrip (later known as “Southern journey”) with Alan Lomax around the southern states of the USA in 1959—just as Chinese people were starving, and Miles Davis was making Kind of blue.

In her memoir she evokes her journey with Lomax around Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, recording mountain ballad singers, pentecostal choirs, blind fiddlers, and inmates of a state penitentiary. Lomax had already visited some of the venues and musicians with his father John in the 1930s and 40s. It’s most rewarding to read Collins’s book for the texture it provides on the excitement and challenges of fieldwork—all the more to do so while dipping into some of the audio material available online, as I do below. Some of her accounts are taken from letters she sent home to her mother and sister Dolly.

All these vignettes alternate with her account of her early life in drab post-war England. Her disappointing experiences working at Cecil Sharp House, the gradual blossoming of the folk music scene (rippling out from the Troubadour in Earls Court), singing trips to Warsaw and Moscow. And after she got to know Ewan MacColl, in 1954 he invited her to a party where she met Alan Lomax—just back from three years collecting songs in Spain and Italy—and they soon moved in together, Shirley working as his editorial assistant. At their home in Highgate they often hosted visiting American bluesmen. Shirley recorded her first two solo LPs.

After Lomax returned to the States in 1958, he invited her to join her on a fieldtrip around the south. So in April 1959 Shirley embarked on the five-day voyage by liner to New York. After the cloistered austerity of the British diet, food looms large in her account—starting on board:

French exotic fruit for breakfast, fruit that I’d never seen outside a tin, eggs cooked in ways I’d never heard of. […] thick beef steaks, turkey […] seafood… delicious dressings and sauces….

And once In New York, pizza, avocado, ice-cream…

I was unworldly and twenty years his junior. What I had in my favour was youth, energy, intelligence, a capacity for hard work, and an innately sound instinct and understanding of the music we both loved.

Driving to Chicago they stayed with Studs Terkel and his wife, before taking the train to California—Shirley still constantly amazed by the opulence of the food.

Shirley Collins with Alan Lomax at the Berkeley Folk Festival, June 1959.
Source.

Appearing at the Berkeley Folk Festival, she met some fine singers. But she had reservations about the Cali lifestyle:

Nothing seemed quite real, nothing had bite or zest. There seemed little that was robust about urban Californians, they were just too bland—extremely and instantly friendly, but insubstantial, and I couldn’t help but wonder what the pioneers would have made of it all.

Returning to Chicago (Shirley’s first flight), they set off by car for more folk festivals. She delighted in local radio stations (jaunty ads for family bibles, and country music, with songs like Let’s have a lot more Jesus and a lot less rock and roll—recorded by Wayne Raney that very year.

* * *

They now set off on their epic journey south, funded enterprisingly by Atlantic Records. Among their tribulations, they were often confronted by both severe poverty and racism. In the Blue Ridge mountain villages of Virginia

we drive up and down rough old tracks to tumble-down wooden shacks, decaying wood and furniture, and there’s always a couple of mangy hound dogs who race and bark at the car.

Arriving at the port of Norfolk, Alan drove off to the black quarter, telling Shirley to stay in the car (cf. David McAllester among the Navajo). In Suffolk and Belleville they visited churches:

Nobody was welcoming us; I could understand why people would be wary of white strangers, even though we were accompanied by a black man, but it was dispiriting.

In Salem they visited the ballad singer Texas Gladden, whom Lomax and his father John had already recorded in 1946, and they drove over to see her brothers Hobart Smith and Preston, also fine musicians. With the apologetic disclaimer “We ain’t got much to offer ye”, Hobe’s family presented a table

laden with yellow corn-bread, country ham, scrambled chicken, fried potatoes, apple sauce, cinnamon apple jelly, home-preserved beans, macaroni cheese, sweet country butter, salad, peaches, grape jelly…

Shirley was much taken by banjo-player Uncle Wade Ward of Galax (first recorded by the Lomaxes in 1939), 81-year-old Charlie Higgins, claiming to play on a 200-year-old fiddle, and Dale Poe on guitar. Here’s a taste of their sessions:

I loved watching Alan at work, building affection and trust. Recording in the field is a difficult task, but Alan brought to it his years of experience, wide-ranging knowledge, unfailing patience, humour, enthusiasm, judgement, and integrity. He could calm a nervous performer with his informal approach or give confidence to an anxious one.He had an infectious chuckle and a down-to-earth friendliness and warmth that charmed people. It was obvious that he loved them and their music, and they responded to him by giving their best. Strangers became friends.

Shirley’s own voice can be heard only in a few of the recordings on the archive.

They came across a gang of black railroad workers:

By now Alan had shaved off his beard so as not to draw more attention to his “foreignness”. Moving on to Kentucky, as they glimpsed hardship, deprivation, and feuds, Shirley started to feel afraid. At Mount Olivet the Old Regular Baptists were not exactly hostile—she just felt unnerved by their watchfulness and silence. Their voices were “harsh, strangled, and fervent” (audio e.g. here)—”people in torment”. They also track down old-timers of the Memphis Jug Band.

In Alabama Shirley found it thrilling and enthralling to hear the Sacred Harp Singers—a tradition that uses ”shape-note” notation. Here’s a diachronic compilation:

Reminding me of my experience in Hebei,

One of the older ladies expressed surprise that I spoke their language so well, evidence, not of ignorance, but of the isolation of their lives.

There, for once, they received a warm welcome—but they were soon jolted back to the racist reality, with KKK signs in evidence.

It pointed up the paradoxes of the South: cruel and kind, mean and hospitable, illiterate and witty.

They recorded a gospel competition and a baptism at a black church. And so on to Mississippi, and three days at the Parchman Farm state penitentiary, where the Lomaxes had recorded work-songs, blues, and field hollers since the 1930s—though Shirley wasn’t allowed out into the fields, having to stay inside. This programme discusses recordings at Parchman from 1933 to 1969—here’s a song later made famous by the Coen brothers’ film O Brother where art thou? (2000):

Note also Bruce Jackson’s excellent book Fieldwork, where he describes the importance of rapport, and his own visits to tough southern penitentiaries.

They drove to Senatobia to find the blind fiddle player Sid Hemphill (1876–1963), whom again Lomax had recorded in 1942 (click here for both sessions). He was also an exponent of a most remarkable genre, the ecstatic fife and drum music of the region, for which he directed them to Lonnie and Ed Young in Como (cf. later film clips in The land where the blues began [below], from 8.00; and e.g. this footage from 1966).

And then… Lonnie invited his neighbour Fred McDowell over, perhaps the most legendary of Lomax’s “discoveries” (wiki; YouTube channel, e.g. this playlist). Shirley recalls:

I am ashamed to say that at first I resented the intrusion by a younger man into the atmosphere made by the old musicians with their ancient and fascinating sounds. I didn’t want that spell broken. Fred started to play bottleneck guitar, a shimmering and metallic sound. HIs singing was quiet but strong and with a heart-stopping intensity. By the time he’d finished his first blues we knew we were in the presence of a great and extraordinary musician. [….] I shall never forget the first sight I had of Fred in his dungarees, carrying his guitar and walking out of the trees towards us in a Mississippi night.

In Arkansas they arrived in Hughes, Alan again leaving Shirley in the car while he got a lead to a gambling den with good blues singers—another place it seemed better for him to visit without her. Meeting up again in Memphis a couple of days later, they visited more black churches, whose music Shirley found “wild and terrifying”. They drove up into the Ozarks to meet Jimmy Driftwood, whose home “was full of fiddles, banjos, and mouthbows, most of them home-made, the finest of which he’d made from a bed-head, and the roughest from a fence-post!”. They also recorded 84-year-old Charlie Everidge accompanying his songs with a mouthbow:

Shirley Collins with Almeda Riddle. Source.

They sought out the ballad singer Almeda Riddle—here’s Lonesome dove:

(and by way of comparison with Aretha, her rendition of Amazing Grace).

They ended their field trip with a visit to St Simons in the Georgia Sea Islands, finding singers like Bessie Jones (audio here), with songs and folklore from the days of slavery—while witnessing further racism. The long trip back up north was eventful too.

Atlantic Records issued  the LP “Sounds of the South” in 1960 (playlist):

* * *

After Shirley returned to England in January that year, she and Alan went their separate ways. As outlined in my first post, in the 2022 edition she updates the progression of her life thereafter—teaming up with Davy Graham and her sister Dolly, with the folkies entering an alliance with the Early Music movement and David Munrow, her time with the Albion band; divorces, disphonia, and being rediscovered in her later years. The 2017 film The ballad of Shirley Collins is punctuated by reflections on the 1959 trip with Lomax, which remains a remarkable instalment in the history of song collection.

* * *

Chapter 10 of Michael Church’s book Musics lost and found makes a good introduction to the work of Alan Lomax and his father John.

John brought celebrated singers including Lead Belly into the limelight; the classic songs he collected and anthologised helped redefine American culture. Alan Lomax’s effect on that culture was seismic, as he made his own discoveries, and as a singer-collector-impresario led folk-blues revivals in both America and Britain. His books, plays, and radio programmes championed the music of the dispossessed; he played a leading part in the musical revolution which threw up Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. Meanwhile with his researches in Haiti, Spain, and Italy he opened up new fields in musicology. And drawing on his archive of films, videotapes, and sound recordings he promoted “Cantometrics”, a system of song-classification which he himself had created, and which he messianically believed could unify—musically at least—the world.

The Lomax Archive (1959–60 recordings here) has enough material to last us a lifetime (further material on YouTube, also here). While they could only make audio recordings for the 1959 trip, later projects were much enhanced by video. Among five films made from footage shot by Alan Lomax between 1979 and 1985, he makes an engaging host in Appalachian journey (1991):

And do watch the 1979 documentary The land where the blues began (which he adapted into a book of the same title in 1993)—e.g. here, as playlist.

The definitive biography of Alan Lomax is John Szwed, The man who recorded the world (2011). Beyond the States, having already recorded in the Bahamas and Haiti (1935–6, the latter trip with Zara Neale Hurston), Lomax went on to make celebrated trips collecting song in Spain (1952, coming into conflict with the fascist authorities) and Italy (1954–5).

I’ll end on a lighter note. As Michael Church relates in Musics lost and found,

a 1957 issue of the London magazine Punch carried a cartoon of a ragged farmer sitting outside his shack and disconsolately singing “I’ve got those Alan-Lomax-ain’t-been-round-to-record-me blues”.