Alan Lomax vs John Work

Follow up to a recent Tribune story regarding Muddy Waters' discovery by Alan Lomax and John Work.

Of course race has something to do with it. Lomax may not (or may) have been a racist, but regardless, if something like this had occurred in the modern day, John Work could have published his book via alternative channels, or even gone on the talk show circuit to discuss his findings. Not possible in the 1940s.

Powell's - Lost Delta Found, and books on Muddy Waters

Book Says Alan Lomax Neglected Black Scholars


A new book asserts that the American folklorist gave short shrift to the work of scholars who accompanied him on travels through the South in the 1930's and 40's.

According to “Lost Delta Found,” it was Work, the leader of the Fisk research team, who initiated the Mississippi study when he applied to the Library of Congress for money to support a recording trip to Natchez. Alerted to Work's interest in Southern vernacular music, Lomax, who ran the library's Archive of American Song, entered the picture and, Mr. Gordon and Mr. Nemerov say, diverted the project to Coahoma. Once the team arrived in Coahoma, they were told of a blues singer who worked as a farmhand on Col. Howard Stovall's plantation. That farmhand turned out to be McKinley Morganfield, a k a Muddy Waters.
Lomax wrote extensively of the Coahoma Country trips in “The Land Where the Blues Began,” published long after the fact, but the research was supposed to have been jointly published some five decades earlier by Fisk University and the Library of Congress. The Fisk scholars' manuscripts were somehow lost after they were sent to the Library of Congress in 1943 by Work, who died in 1967, and have been published for the first time in “Lost Delta Found.”
“Lost Delta Found” is an outgrowth of Mr. Gordon's research for his 2002 biography “Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters” (Little, Brown). Tipped off in the late 1990's by Mr. Nemerov to Work's contributions, Mr. Gordon sifted through Lomax's vast archive at Hunter College in New York, where, after much burrowing, he found a manuscript stuffed in the back of a file cabinet in a powder-blue cover with Lewis Wade Jones's name on it. Also written on the cover were the words “Property of Fisk University.” When Mr. Gordon matched up the document to the incomplete, hand-written manuscript that Mr. Nemerov had unearthed, he knew he had discovered a significant contribution to Southern folkloric scholarship.

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Lost Delta Found

In August 1941 during their remarkable field research trip in Mississippi, folklorist Alan Lomax and Fisk University music professor John Work interviewed and recorded local musicians who went on to blues fame. Among them: McKinley A. Morganfield, nicknamed Muddy Water (the 's' was added to his last name years later, in Chicago).

Muddy Waters was nervous.

In August 1941, he'd heard that two men were looking for him at his home on the Stovall plantation, north of Clarksdale, Miss.

“Uh-oh! This is it,” Waters remembered thinking. “They done found out I'm sellin' whiskey.”

But the two strangers weren't interested in his still.

Instead, they just wanted to hear his music and record some of his songs for the Library of Congress. Waters obliged and played a handful of songs for folklorist Alan Lomax and music professor John Work III. They recorded his songs -- including a proto version of “I Be's Troubled” -- and conducted an interview.

After the session, Lomax played the recording back for Waters.

“I really heard myself for the first time. I'd never heard my voice. I used to sing; used to sing just how I felt, 'cause that's the way we always sang in Mississippi,” Waters told one journalist. “But when Mr. Lomax played me the record I thought, man, this boy can sing the blues.”

It's that single, galvanizing moment that inspired Waters to have confidence in his abilities. He soon after moved to Chicago and signed with the Chess Records label. Waters' music later inspired the Rolling Stones' Keith Richard and Mick Jagger to make music, so much so that they named their band after one of Waters' songs.

and

Even when he found the manuscript jammed into the back of a filing cabinet, author Robert Gordon didn't recognize exactly what he had unearthed.

Wrapped in a powder-blue cover, it was a long-lost piece of blues history: the 1941-1942 field study manuscript that chronicles African-American music and culture in rural Mississippi. Adding to its historical mystique, the manuscript documents the discovery of blues legend Muddy Waters by Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax and musicologist John Work III, a professor at Fisk University in Nashville.

Sixty years ago, the original field study findings were meant to be jointly edited and published by the Library of Congress and Fisk University, a predominantly African-American liberal arts institution. But Work's manuscript was mishandled, lost, found, lost again and, eventually, forgotten.

Decades later, Lomax wrote “Land Where the Blues Began,” a prize-winning book that drew on his recollections of Mississippi Delta trips. Work was mentioned only three times in the volume.

This month,Vanderbilt University Press is releasing “Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942,” as written by Work, plus essays by his colleagues Lewis Wade Jones and Samuel C. Adams, who also took part in the research.

With the book's publication, editors Gordon and Bruce Nemerov are attempting to shed light on the famed ethno-music research and recast the contributions of Work.

“It's justice. What we're doing is justice,” Gordon says. “A guy who had incredible impact on these famous field trips who has been completely written out of them.”

“Lost Delta Found” also conjures up contentious issues about race, the interpretation of history and protection of legacies.

...There have been so many African-American artists or scholars of one sort or another that have either been discounted or hidden or just left out of the mainstream. From my viewpoint, this was a perfect example of that,“ says Work, a retired economist and author of ”Race, Economics and Corporate America.“

”I was delighted to see this come to light and see my father get credit for the substantial work he did,“ Work says. ”I do believe that Robert and Bruce did some great historiography here. They simply lay down the facts instead of editorializing. Those guys are detectives of the first order, as I see it.“

However, while neither Gordon nor Nemerov explicitly lay blame on Lomax for the manuscript's disappearance, implications permeate their introduction.

They write that the bound manuscript ”a noncirculating original, was found stashed in the back of a file cabinet drawer in the Alan Lomax Archives. . . . [It] had a soft powder-blue cover identifying it as the product of, and the property of . . . Fisk University. It has since been returned.“

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