Transcribe The Alan Lomax Collection

Alan Lomax was and perhaps remains the most famous American folklorist of the 20th century. His detailed field notebooks, letters, manuscripts, and correspondence are held at the Library of Congress. Portions of his files are in Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, and French.

You can volunteer HERE to help transcribe this library.  I already have. Over 1,900 documents remain un-reviewed.

Radio Vs. VD

Section 11 of the 1927 Federal Radio Act stated that the Federal Radio Commission could deny broadcast licenses to stations that did not serve "the public interest, convenience and necessity."  However milk toast that sounds, it lacked clear guidelines. That year the NAB created guidelines more conservative than your grandma; forbidding the discussion of anything more risque than Christmas cookies. Looking at the state of broadcasting today obviously there has been significant change since then. Everyone knows about the infamous 7-words incident on Pacifica... but decades earlier there were events that eroded the guidelines for more pragmatic reasons.

In 1934, CBS radio told Health Commissioner Thomas Parran of New York State that he could not mention the words syphilis or gonorrhea during a scheduled radio address on public health. New York health commissioner John Rice wrote to NBC, CBS and 15 newspapers in protest. NBC responded that they thought such remarks might be inappropriate. WEVD-AM stepped in and put Parran on air.That same year the FCC succeeded the FRC but the new communications act did little to change the status quo.

In 1948 Erik Barnouw and Dwight Eisenhower [R] changed everything.  While Erik Barnouw was a professor at Columbia University (1946 - 1973, Dwight Eisenhower it's president (1948 - 1953). This was of course before Eisenhower was President of the United States (1953 - 1961). Eisenhower gave crucial backing to Barnouwwho wanted to produce a syphilis-education program for radio.

The idea game to Barnouw in a visit from Edwin Gurney Clark and Thomas Lefoy Richman of the U.S. Public Health Service. They invited him to apply for federal grant money to create a series of educational programs on Syphilis. Barnouw later won the grant as it's sole applicant. He made several test programs in the formats of soap operas, and hillbilly shows and screened them with Eisenhower who was reported to be "delighted." Creating the programming wasn't the problem... it was getting radio stations to air the content.  Despite protests from Catholic groups the first program aired on ABC April 19th 1948.

The federal program continued and Barnouw continued to get grant money for more programs. He hired Alan Lomax to help write rural dramas that would play better to people outside of the cities.Lomax was able to get the programs introduced by celebrities like Bill Monroe, the Maddox Brothers, Eddy Arnold,  Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Roy Acuff. Stations like WGN-AM, WNBC-AM, KFI-AM, WKY-AM, WPWA-AM, and WIP-AM all participated. Interestingly Columbia Universities' own radio station, 610 WKCR-AM, first licensed in 1941 was not listed among the call letters in news articles. But in November of 1948 they aired interviews with ex-VD Patients on syphilis treatments by George Hicks of ABC. More here.

In the end a broadcasting taboo ended. Where one had fallen others would soon as well. Perhaps that was the idea all along.

Back Where I Come From

It was hard at first for me to imagine but in this program, Burl Ives and Woody Guthrie had equal footing. We all know Alan Lomax did a lot of field recordings. Most of them are presently in the Library of Congress. But he also did radio programs. One of them was a nightly program for CBS called Back Where I Come From.

Lomax was involved in several programs over the years like School of the Air, on CBS, and Ballad Man on the Mutual Network in 1948. In 1940 he also did a series called American Folk Songs and Wellsprings of Music. In 1950 he was blackballed in America after he was accused of being a commie, he fled to England and brought his programming ideas to the BBC. In all these programs Lomax may have been a producer or a host but he always came to the mic to sing a little as well. More here. Damn you Joe McCarthy!

But Back Where I Come From was the first of his programs that went prime-time. It featured folk tales, proverbs, prose, and sermons, as well as songs. Burl Ives, Aunt Molly Jackson, The Golden Gate Quartet, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Pete Seeger all performed regularly on the program. This was the program that really introduced city-dwelling Americans to old-time music, folk music and world music. Sadly it was short-lived. I have found a very concise tale of the etymology of the program name and quote it here unabridged.

"The show’s title came from an incident they had observed at Barney Josephson’s Greenwich Village nightclub, Café Society, in which a tourist loudly objected to the club’s inter-racial atmosphere, saying that such things were unheard of “back where I come from.” It stressed the America is, on the contrary, a multi-cultural mosaic of people from different ethnicities and backgrounds; guests swapped stories and anecdotes as well as music."

In 1984 Ronald Regan awarded Lomax the national medal of Arts. In 1995 Folk Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award, in 1995 an honorary doctorate in philosophy from Tulane... the list goes on. He retired in 1996 and died in July 2002.