Sponging off the New Yorker

Folk-Song Collectors
text from "The Last Verse" by Burkhard Bilger
in April 28, 2008 New Yorker


Cecil Sharp suffered from gout and asthma
smoked heavily and ate no meat - a diet
so strange in parts of the South some took
him for a German spy. He toured southern
Appalacia three times, beginning in 1916,
never made recordings, though he could have.
"What I want more than anything else
is quiet, no children, no Victrolas, nor
strumming of rag-time and the singing
of sentimental songs. I am satisfied
with what I have done," he wrote.

John Lomax was sixty-five in 1933,
had already collected cowboy tunes
with a Harvard fellowship in 1907.
"Squeaky reproductions," he admitted,
made with a wax-cylinder machine.
He took his eighteen-year-old son,
Alan, with him, stuck to the back roads,
and looked for work farms, cotton
fields, lumber camps, and chain gangs --
wherever there was "the least likelihood
of the inclusion of jazz influences, as
he put it. They found Muddy Waters
on a Mississippi plantation, Woody
Guthrie at a benefit for migrant
farm workers, Leadbelly in a Louisiana
penitentiary. The prisoners had
"dynamite in their performances,"
Alan later told the Times. "There was
more emotional heat, more power,
more nobility in what they did than
all the Beethovens and Bachs could
produce."

The McCarthy hearings were on television,
duck-and-cover drills in the classroom,
and the frictionless pop of Perry Como
on the radio. And then, in 1952,
Harry Smith released his "Anthology
of American Folk Music." Smith
was an artist and record collector
from Seattle -- "a polymath and an
autodidact, a dope fiend and an alcoholic,
a legendary experimental filmmaker
and a more legendary sponger," as
Greil Marcus put it in his book.
Back then Seattle too was grittier.