passed away late last year. Her memorial will be next Sunday, on
the (lawn) quad of Cal State Northridge, 4-6 PM. Many of you knew
her or know of her, others will not, but all have been affected by her
cultural impact. The memorial will be dominated by singing, mostly
group singing, a tribute to her own bent and philosophy. Her 50 years
in our community will be noted by 5 sections, with 5 minutes devoted
to each; a challenge, to put it mildly. I'm honored and humbled by
being asked by the family to cover the 1960's era.
Here, Ross Altman gives us a more extensive accounting. I've added
Peter Drier's notes on her academic, NEA and Smithsonian Inst. legacy.
Ed
PS: I've attached the notice, but you couldn't miss it, if you get to CSUN
http://www.folkworks.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36267&Itemid=155
Bess Lomax Hawes RIP
January 21, 1921 - November 27, 2009
By Ross Altman, Ph.d.
Folfworks:
With the passing of Bess Lomax Hawes on the day after Thanksgiving, November
27, 2009, an era of the great folk song collectors started by America's
founding father of folklore, John A. Lomax, has come to a close. Bess Lomax
was the last of that extraordinary first family, who along with her father
and brother Alan defined the role of the folk song collector for the past
century. She was eighty-eight years old, and died of a stroke in Portland,
Oregon. As W.H. Auden once wrote about the Irish poet Yeats, "Earth, receive
an honored guest; Bess Lomax Hawes is laid to rest."
Where to begin? Let me tell you a story about a woman named Bess: Sixty
years ago, in November of 1949, a sound truck was rumbling through Boston
with loudspeakers blaring a campaign song she and her friend Jacqueline
Steiner had just written: The MTA Song:
Let me tell you a story about a man named Charlie
On a tragic and fateful day
He put ten cents in his pocket, kissed his wife and family
Went to ride on the MTA.
The song was really about another man-a man named Walter O'Brien, who was
running for mayor on the Progressive Party ticket and a campaign platform to
resist a proposed fare increase of a nickel on the MTA. The song did not
help Mr. O'Brien get elected, indeed he was fined ten dollars for disturbing
the peace, due to the volume at which their recording of the song urged
voters to "vote for Walter O'Brien, and get Charlie off the MTA." Ten years
later Bess Lomax Hawes' and Jackie Steiner's song for a suspected Communist,
as sung by The Kingston Trio, would shoot to the top of the Hit Parade.
But Bess was no one-hit wonder. Hers was one of the great careers in
American folklore and folk music, and there is much to be thankful for as we
look back on it now in the wake of her passing.
A founding member of the Almanac Singers, the group that paved the way for
the Weavers-who ignited the folk revival of the 1950's and 60's-Bess Lomax
Hawes was a rebel to the manor born, Alan Lomax's sister and the daughter of
folklore pioneer John A. Lomax, who alienated the entire English Department
at the University of Texas at Austin-the city where Bess was born-by
collecting the anonymous songs of the American cowboy and claiming that
their creations deserved mention alongside the acknowledged classics of
English and American literature.
When absolutely no one, not the academic establishment nor the local banks
would help to fund his field collecting in 1909, he lit out on his own, like
a modern Huck Finn with a microphone and acetate disk recording machine in
the back of his station wagon, to collect these cowboy songs before they and
the cowboys disappeared. Fortunately, the president at the time, Theodore
Roosevelt, was not so closed-minded and wrote a memorable introduction to
Lomax's book Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads when it was published the
following year.
Bess inherited his tenacity (documented in his book, Tales of a Ballad
Hunter), his creative independence and indifference to the establishment,
but like her brother Alan, she drew the line at his Republican politics.
They both preferred the politics of the American left, which began to turn
to folk music for its culture-first to Joe Hill, and then later to bards
like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson.
John Lomax's prodigal daughter wound up living with four men in the best
floating hootenanny in New York City, Almanac House. Her desperate father,
convinced she was living in sin, tried unsuccessfully to get her to return
home to Austin with him. But her course was set. It was there she met the
man she would later marry, fellow Almanac singer Butch Hawes.
In 1941, eight years before Simone de Beauvoir published the manifesto of
modern feminism, Le Deuxieme Sexe, in Paris in 1949, Bess Lomax was shacked
up in Greenwich Village with four horny male folk singers. The Second Sex
would not be published in English until 1953 (by Jonathan Cape), but Bess
did not need a manifesto to guide her road toward feminism-she found her own
path. Shortly after she moved in Woody Guthrie began teaching her mandolin
and then gave her his to keep. With Woody's reputation as a womanizer no
wonder her father was nervous.
Twenty-five years before women began to hyphenate their married last names
Bess Lomax Hawes continued to use her family name. Her husband Butch Hawes
had no problem with it either, showing that folk singers were ahead of the
curve in terms of evolving gender roles and equal rights for women. They
both performed in the Almanac Singers, with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger,
Millard Lampell and Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, who would later go on to
co-found Broadside Magazine. Before Peter, Paul and Mary, before the
Kingston Trio, and before the Weavers, there was the Almanac Singers, and
without them there may well have been no Weavers and other folk groups that
would feature great women singers like Ronnie Gilbert and Mary Travers.
But this was still the 1940s and Bess Lomax Hawes was blazing a trail even
she was not fully aware of. As the daughter of folklorist John A. Lomax and
sister of folklorist Alan Lomax she had her work cut out for her to make her
mark on some less-traveled road. But again she found one. Her father John
went south and discovered and championed the work of Huddie Ledbetter,
Leadbelly, "The King of the 12-String Guitar;" her brother Alan went left
and west to discover and champion the work of Woody Guthrie, who Alan dubbed
"The Dustbowl Balladeer."
So Bess turned east to find her road to folklore greatness and discovered a
small group of islands off the coast of South Carolina called The Georgia
Sea Islands. Off that coast, where lighthouses were and are still preserved
which had once lit escaping southern slaves Underground Railroad to freedom,
Bess Lomax Hawes found a true treasure trove of American songs, stories and
children's games performed by Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island
Singers.
At the time Betty Friedan was writing The Feminine Mystique, Bess Lomax
Hawes was traipsing through the carefully preserved African-American
touchstones of a woman whose repertoire was the equal of Leadbelly's-Bessie
Jones and her dynamic performing troupe, documenting songs that they had
inherited from their slave ancestors. Bess and Bessie literally wrote the
book on the single most important repertoire of Black American folklore
outside of Leadbelly's. Entitled Step It Down, it did not come out until
1972.
But nearly a decade before, Bess was filming a documentary of Bessie Jones
and the Georgia Sea Island Singers in Los Angeles, as a part of her work
teaching folklore in the Department of Anthropology at then San Fernando
Valley State College. Bess's film was made in 1964, a year after Ed Pearl
brought them to his great folk club The Ash Grove. (Bessie Jones and the
Georgia Sea Island Singers' concert from June 20, 1963, is available on The
Ash Grove web site.) *(Directly, on www.WolfgangsVault.com = Ed)
Bess later accompanied them to ISOMATA, the Idyllwild School for the Arts,
where I first met Bessie Jones in the early 1980's. I learned O, Dem Golden
Slippers (by African-American composer James Bland of New York), and the
traditional song I'm So Glad I'm Here directly from Bessie Jones, and sing
them to this day, another link in both Bess and Bessie's long chain of oral
transmissions. Bessie always introduced her opening song I'm So Glad I'm
Here by saying, "Children, at my age I'm glad to be anywhere!" Bess also
made sure their repertoire was preserved and transmitted on recordings, many
of which were released on Rounder Records.
But Bess, as I began by saying, was more than a folklorist who documented
other people's songs and culture. She was a creative artist in her own
right. In the aftermath of the Henry Wallace (losing) campaign for president
in 1948 she and her colleague Jackie Steiner co-wrote a song for Walter
O'Brien's Progressive Party run for mayor. Bess and Jackie took an American
folk song about a ship that never returned and turned it into a modern
classic about a man who rides the subway and never returns due to a fare
increase that O'Brien was running against. In the final verse a song of
whimsy becomes a timely protest and campaign song, urging Boston voters to
"vote for Walter O'Brien and get Charlie off the MTA."
The Kingston Trio's hit version of the song makes no mention of Walter
O'Brien, however, singing instead of a fictional "George O'Brien," in
response to a political backlash against the original version due to Walter
O'Brien's Progressive Party affiliation-that had already sunk Henry
Wallace's campaign for president. The original commercial recording of the
song by Will Holt had already run into the anti-communist red scare
headwinds of the 1950's, and The Kingston Trio found themselves at a fork in
the road: to stay true to the song's political origins or to clean it up for
the Trio's crew-cut college audience. The Kingston Trio took a hard look at
what had happened to their predecessors-the blacklisted Weavers-and chose to
stay resolutely a-political. Thus, faced with a choice between Bess and
Jackie's original lyric saluting "Walter" O'Brien and making up another
name, they marched to the middle of the road, and in its censored form the
song shot to the top of the charts.
There's no arguing with success, but Bess had never traveled that safe road
in her life, and wasn't about to start now. If you want to hear her original
version of the song you will need to find the magnificent boxed collection
of topical and protest songs put out on Bear Family Records of Germany.
Their micro-history of the song adds some intriguing details:
"Will Holt, a sophisticated New England singer/composer who enjoyed folk
music, frequently performed the song in concert. It appeared on his 1957
Coral album, The World of Will Holt. According to some sources, the original
pressing of Holt's album mentioned Walter O'Brien. After right wing zealots
complained that Holt was glorifying a communist, Coral had the singer re-cut
the song. The Kingston Trio learned the MTA from the revised album. Their
version, which urges people to vote for George O'Brien became a hit single
in June, 1959...the original MTA acetate...is now part of the Smithsonian
Folkways collection."
Obviously, this leaves some delicate questions about what may or may not
have happened. According to Occidental Professor Peter Dreier, "From what I
can tell, Will Holt didn't use the name "George." He used "Walter" on the
first version of the record, then Coral Records recut it and simply removed
the offending line, which is sort of like the 18 seconds of the Nixon
tape-simply missing. If you listen to it, you can tell that something was
cut. In fact, Nick Reynolds, one of the Kingston Trio, told me that they
came up with the name "George," to avoid controversy during the Red Scare."
Readers who wish to learn more about the political and recording background
of this song may consult Professor Dreier's and Jim Vrabel's fine
article.Banned In Red Scare Boston: The Forgotten Story of Charlie and the
"MTA." It may be accessed at the web site for Dissent Magazine,
www.dissentmagazine.org, where it was published.
Bess Lomax Hawes was a major American folklorist, scion of the First Family
of American Folklore, a hit songwriter, a pioneering feminist and a great
teacher and educator as well. The late folk blues guitar great Steve Mann
got his start in her guitar class, which she taught at her UCLA Extension
course. Ash Grove founder Ed Pearl was another guitar student of hers, and
former member of the Weavers, folk singer Frank Hamilton, yet another.
Hamilton also credits her with teaching him how to teach guitar in a
classroom setting, which he then put to good use at Chicago's Old Town
School of Folk Music.
She passed on her fiercely independent spirit to her daughters and son as
well. According to Ed Pearl, "Her daughters, Naomi and Corey, called me from
occupied Wheeler Hall in 1964, where they were part of that action of the
Free Speech Movement, asking the Ash Grove to organize a bail benefit.
Likely leading the singing. Fruit of the tree. Bess graced our world." Her
son Nicholas Hawes of Portland, Oregon is also a folk musician.
Acknowledgement of the range and depth of her contributions was a long time
in coming, but come it did. In 1993 President Bill Clinton awarded her a
National Gold Medal in the Arts. Bess created the Folk and Traditional Arts
Program in the National Endowment for the Arts, which renamed their annual
National Heritage Fellowship Award in her honor. Sadly and
ironically, the Bess Lomax Hawes Award was given earlier this year to Mike
Seeger, who passed away before he could actually receive it, though he knew
about it. Her former employer (now Cal State, Northridge) also renamed their
Folklore Department in her honor. But long before all of these honors
started rolling in our own California Traditional Music Society, founded by
Elaine and Clark Weissman, awarded her their annual Lifetime Achievement
Award. Not to be outdone, The Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest and Folk
Festival honored several years ago with their annual Lifetime Achievement
Award, which we were all thrilled to see her receive.
She devoted a life-time to collecting, documenting,
preserving and defining the best in traditional music, both locally and
nationally, from LA to Boston, and is a hero to those of us in Los Angeles
who gamely try to walk in her giant footsteps.
In 2003 I did a four-part interview with her in FolkWorks,
where in her own words she covers a vast territory of her life and work,
from the early days in Austin to her teaching career in academia and her
performing career in the trenches of folk music. She still has much to
teach. These interviews can now be found under the Feature Articles section.
What better time to introduce you to one of the great
women of our time, or any time. There is no substitute for reading and
hearing Bess in her own words.
May she Rest in Peace.
Bess Lomax Hawes memoir, Sing It Pretty, U of Illinois
Press, was published in 2008.
Another thorough and wonderful tribute to Bess can be found at:
www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/bess-lomax-hawes-1921-200_b_373423.html
--------------------------------------------------------------
Ross Altman has a Ph.D. in English. Before becoming a
full-time folk singer he taught college English and Speech. He now sings
around California for libraries, unions, schools, political groups and folk
festivals. You can reach Ross at Greygoosemusic@aol.com This email address
is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
© 2010 FolkWorks
***
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/bess-lomax-hawes-1921-200_b_373423.html
Remembering Bess Lomax Hawes
By Peter Drier
HuffingtonPost: November 30, 2009
(Excerpts)
Bess dedicated her life to preserving traditional American cultures and
spreading the gospel of folk music and folk arts. During the folk music
revival, Bess - who played the banjo, piano, guitar and mandolin --
occasionally performed at folk festivals and coffeehouses, but she preferred
teaching. "I never felt like a performance singer, by temperament," she
said.
Indeed, she became one of the most influential folklore teachers of the past
half century - through her courses, workshops, films, books, academic
papers, and her work at the Smithsonian and the NEA.
Bess taught popular courses on folklore and ethnomusicology at San Fernando
Valley State from 1964 through 1970. During those years she also made four
documentary films -- Georgia Sea Island Singers, Buckdancer, Pizza Pizza
Daddy-O, and Say Old Man Can You Play the Fiddle. With Bessie Jones, she
co-authored a book about African-American children's games, Step It Down.
She served as president of the California Folklore Society and vice
president of the American Folklore Society, and spoke frequently at
conferences.
In 1975, Bess was lured to Washington, D.C. to help organize the Smithsonian
Institution's summer-long Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife in
1976, which brought thousands of artists to participate in the nation's
200th birthday party. When that gig was completed, the NEA asked her to join
the agency as director of its Folk Arts Program. During her 15-year stint at
NEA, funding for the Folk Arts Program increased from about $100,000 to over
$4 million, and the staff grew from one to six. She helped create
state-based folk arts programs and, by doing so, built a network of folk
arts advocates around the country.
At the NEA, Bess started the Heritage Fellowships program to distribute
grants to little-known weavers, woodcarvers, songwriters, and other
craftspersons and artists whose work might otherwise be ignored. "Each
year," Hawes explained at its inception, "we will greet, salute, and honor
just a few examples of the dazzling array of artistic traditions we have
inherited throughout our nation's fortunate history."
The program she started has continued and over the years has honored such
artists as wood carver George Lopez, Cajun fiddler Dewey Balfa,
Irish-American singer Joe Heaney, North Carolina fiddler Tommy Jarrell,
cowboy singer Glenn Ohrlin, Georgia Sea Island song leader Bessie Jones,
blues artists Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, shape note singer Hugh McGraw,
saddlemaker Duff Severe, ornamental ironworker Philip Simmons of South
Carolina, bluegrass founding father Bill Monroe, Appalachian singer Hazel
Dickens, Appalachian storyteller Ray Hicks, conjunto accordionist and
composer Marcisco Martinez, marionettist Miguel "Mike" Manteo, Zydeco
accordionist Clifton Chenier, Eskimo maskmaker, dancer and singer Paul
Tiulana, French-American fiddler Simon St. Pierre of Maine, Hawaiian quilter
Meali'i Kalama, Irish musician Mick Moloney, Laotian weaver Bounxou
Chanthraphone from Minnesota, the African American gospel quartet Dixie
Hummingbirds, Afro-Cuban drummer Felipe Garcia Villamil from Los Angeles,
Puerto Rican hammock weaver Jose Gonzalez, Lindy Hop dancer and
choreographer Frankie Manning from New York, and many others.
The NEA's annual Bess Lomax Hawes Award recognizes an individual who has
made a significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of
cultural heritage. Mike Seeger, the musician and cultural scholar, received
this year's award shortly before his death in August. Like Bess, Seeger came
from a family of folklorists, and shared Bess' love for folk music,
particularly Appalachian tunes.
Bess is survived by her three children -- teacher Corey Denos of Bellingham,
Wash., anthropologist Naomi Bishop, and folklorist and musician Nicholas
Hawes, both of Portland, Oregon -- and by six grandchildren and two
great-grandchildren. Her husband Butch died in 1971.
Throughout her life, Bess was a political radical who fought for a better
future, but who also understood the importance of preserving the many
cultural traditions of America's past. During the post-World War 2 Red
Scare, Bess was fired from her government job and harassed by FBI agents,
but she never succumbed to cynicism or stopped believing that music could be
a force for social change and human understanding.
"I have always had the unshakable belief that every single human being has
some knowledge of important elements of beauty and substance," Bess wrote at
the end of Sing It Pretty, "whether everybody else knows them or not."
Peter Dreier is professor of Politics, and director of the Urban &
Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College.
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