When a man becomes an icon, it is strange to consider his death. He is said to be dead, yet he's still around.
Icon Alan Lomax informed daughter Anna recently of his plans to be 100 years old. Struggling with language and gestures few could comprehend, he indicated he would soon return to his profession as the world's foremost folk music culturist. He would resume his Global Jukebox project, interrupted by his first stroke in 1995, and assist Anna in assembling his life's work into the 150-record deal signed with Rounder in 1996 — just before a second stroke sent him spiraling down to rehab retirement in Florida.
But when I saw him last week in Tarpon Springs, the Shakespeare of musicologists lay still beneath a blue velvet blanket, one hand gripped around a deck of cards, and the other hand clutching both his Sounds of the South CD and a tiny photo of Anna as a little girl. A folded American flag balanced on his knees and flower arrangements hung about him like stalled musical notes.
An acoustic guitar and bass were sentries at his feet; beyond his head, a table held historic photos and clippings — hastily gathered afterthoughts of legend from Alan's six-decade reign as American folklore's king. A stack of printouts cried e-mail tears and gave praise.com to this historic man, brought down by cardiac arrest July 19 in a Safety Harbor hospital.
Mourners were torn between grief for the passing of the man and celebration for the everlasting icon. Alan Lomax was dead at 87. Yet he was alive in the growls of old bluesmen playing murderous bottleneck slide shearing through the funeral home's stereo. He was very much alive, in the feral sounds of 1950s chain gang chants and Appalachian fiddles sampled from — oh brother! — thousands of recordings he made in isolated patches of our fruited plains. He lives on in the fandangos and saetas of Spain, the canzunis of Italy, the shakuhachi blowers of Japan, the rain dancers of Indonesia — live performances he froze before they vanished — CDs now at his funeral and in musical collections around the world.
Alan Lomax was the man who discovered folk music's Mount Rushmore: Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and Pete Seeger. He nurtured a reputation for providing the common man a voice to cut through Tin Pan Alley and the "homogenized mudslide of modernity," a term coined by friend and fellow raconteur, Florida author Stetson Kennedy.
After the priest blessed Alan in two languages, a sweet voice in the back of the room sang "Amarylli," the sort of tune Alan might have tweaked from a longshoreman on the Genoa docks or would just burst out singing, without warning, at the dentist's office. His dentist was there, by the way. So was the dental assistant. So were Alan's postman, his handyman and various nurses whose lives he'd touched. It was Nancy Wilson, his caregiver, who placed the deck of cards in Alan's hand. There were older Greek ladies wailing and tapping crosses on their foreheads and chests. Alan's dog Clara lay faithful and quiet a few feet from her master.
A schoolteacher who never met Alan Lomax told how she used his research techniques on playground songs to soothe and inspire students traumatized by the Detroit riots. Alan's 17-year-old grandson, Odysseus, described the old man's determination, his devotion to physical exercise, his lust and strength for swimming, his zeal in the twisted face of debilitating incapacitation "because he wanted to get back to work so badly."
Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center, founded and shaped by Alan and his father John, spoke through tears about the folklorist's dilemma of dealing with Sept. 11. "The day after Pearl Harbor, Alan called upon all folklorists to go out to the streets to record people's reactions. The result was an amazing historical collection still used all the time by National Public Radio and others. So we sent out word to 350 folklorists to conduct the same type of man-on-the-street interviews the day after 9/11. People were recorded from Nome, Alaska, to Orlando, Florida. This is the legacy of Alan Lomax."
Painter Harlan Frank traveled from Tallahassee to say goodbye to the friend who used to point and grimace and criticize his guitar playing. "I was there to help fix up the house when they first came to Tarpon Springs. I figured Alan might like to hear some music, but I was intimidated. Here was the guy who discovered Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie!" said Frank, who serenaded Alan for hours at a time. "People wondered about Alan and his inability to speak. But I know he could understand everything. He knew when I played the wrong chord. He had a hell of a time bringing out what was within. But he did it!
"Here was a man whose whole life was based on communication and he couldn't communicate. I said, 'Alan, let's devise some sort of technique, some button to push, where you can communicate better.' He shocked the hell out of me by saying, clearly: "It will be very difficult!'"
"He remained eternally optimistic he would be able to get back to work," says Anna Lomax Chairetakis, an accomplished anthropologist and fellow folklorist.
Alan Lomax loved Florida, but the feeling wasn't always mutual. He could not find a university in the state to take his precious collection (it went to Hunter College in New York) and last year he was denied the Florida Folk Heritage award. The shortsighted Florida Folklife Council Chairman Stephen Stuempfle didn't think Lomax had done enough for Florida; he scored Alan a zero on the voting sheet.
"What in the hell was he thinking?" roars author Kennedy. "Alan Lomax went all through this state, collecting folklore from Eatonville to the Everglades with Zora Neale Hurston. He painted his skin black to draw less attention to a biracial couple traveling together."
In California, string wizard John McEuen awaits the fall release of Will The Circle Be Unbroken III, the latest in his Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's series of Lomax-style folk recordings. The legacy lives on: "Alan Lomax and his diligent work gave all of us snapshots to times gone by, with descriptions for each song as if they were postcards from the era the songs were from," says Kennedy. "His extensive research opened the door to further inspection of the reality of times often misreported in our history books, but captured in the words of his collected songs. His Folk Songs of North America has been in my collection, and often referred to, since my teenage years."
After the funeral, Anna wonders what to do with her father's ashes. Alan never got back to her on that one. The answer may lie in a 1959 recording Alan made of the great bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell, who sings: Lord if I should die before my time have come/ I want you to bury my body down on Highway 61.
Highway 61 is the legendary road from Memphis to Baton Rouge, straight through the Mississippi River blueslands Alan Lomax loved and traveled so much. In his field log of that session, Alan wrote, simply: "Perfect!"
Peter B. Gallagher is a freelance writer living in St. Petersburg.
This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 6, 2002.