John Culpepper

I too read this book with great excitement as soon as I got a copy and couldn't put it down. It has so much surprising information and is so solidly researched, puncturing many myths and misconceptions. For example, who knew that Alan Lomax wanted to get Son House come up North to sing with the Almanac Singers. Also Lomax was involved in Martin Luther King's Poor People's March and got Muddy Waters to participate and sing for the marchers. About discographies, there are partial discographies of Alan Lomax’s recordings on his website: http://www.culturalequity.org/pubs/ce_pubs_cds_index.phpCulturalequity.org The Library of Congress has a hefty three-volume index of field recordings made under its auspices by John and Alan Lomax and others. About recording -- many collectors and composers used recordings to some extent. In the folklore profession, however, it was customary to collect written texts and their variants for a long time after sound recordings came into use. Record blanks or wax cylinders were expensive and could only hold a few minutes of sound and there were problems with portability -- and of singers singing into a large horn with no dynamic controls. Microphone technology was slow to develop and long playing tape only came into use in the late forties and early fifties. . For my part, I would like to see Dave Marsh, the paranoid slanderer of Lomax, make his transparent own his own financial arrangements and political interests (e.g., he give interviews to the Trotkyite Socialist Workers Party News Organ). Google him in this regard and you will find some surprising things. He is far from disinterested. And indeed has a reputation for off-the-wall combative statements. The same might be said about Counterpunch, which doesn’t make public where its funds come from. As far as Lomax as an “exploiter”, Rob Young in the current issue of The Wire Adventures in New Music (# 324, February 2011 http://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/current/) writes (in an long review that is not online) that: “ *** Szwed's account of the copyrights is here: http://books.google.com/books?id=sV48asr7T4MC&pg=PT438&lpg=PT438&dq=alan+lomax+szwed+copyrights&source=bl&ots=NwTAoOjxZ0&sig=RoUA3BhdH0NPem4VkBL8CIvMbsI&hl=en&ei=suwoTc7aEIT58AbvrMWyAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&sqi=2&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=copyright&f=false Note: Szwed writes, "Collectors copyrighting folksongs was not unusual at the time. Carl Sandburg, Zora Neale Hurston, Bela Bartok, Cecil Sharp, Percy Grainger, Ralph Vaughn Williams, and even Lawrence Gellert, the most politically leftist of all the collectors, all filed claims for copyright, though none of them shared earnings with the singers." You can go on the Library of Congress website to see the kind of agreements that they arranged and how scrupulous they were even though they had very little money to disburse. After he left the Library of Congress, Alan did share his earnings with the singers from whom he collected. Szwed also says that neither Alan Lomax nor his father ever filed claims for copyright on individual songs. This was done by a large music publisher, whom Alan Lomax sued in the 1950s, winning a partial settlement in which he was allowed a portion of the author's half of the earnings (contrary to his wishes) as collector and arranger. He would have preferred to have had publishers' credit. Thus, Lomax is being excoriated today for winning a settlement in a lawsuit with a large corporation. For an insight into how the music publishing industry works see: Rian Malan http://www.3rdearmusic.com/forum/mbube2.html and wikipedia “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. If your read this, it will become clear that Lomax, Seeger, and other scholars are being scapegoated for the unethical doings of the music publishers. The site reproduces Malan's original 2000 Rolling Stone article, which was the basis of a film documentary that was shown on PBS and is followed by an interesting discussion page.