Alan Lomax. In his own words.

Alan Lomax is interviewed about Huddie Ledbetter, and about the Folk song Archive at the Library of Congress. When Alan first met Leadbelly, in the early 1930's, he was 17 years old and helping his father John Lomax collect songs and tunes in the Deep South.

Lomax - Leadbelly Interview: 1940

Interview with Huddie, recorded by Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax in Washington, D.C. in 1940. Huddie talks about a sukey jump, circa 1900. The conversation is recorded onto discs which contain perhaps three or four minutes each, and are spinning around at 78 revolutions per minute. There is no time for long pauses or considered answers. While the interview sounds a bit like a word association game, it does gives an impression of what the dances were like. Lomax opens the conversation.

I want Huddie to tell you about the way they put on the square dances down in Louisiana when he was a boy, growing up, in the backwoods. 

[Specifically, he's asking about the Caddo Lake region near Karnack, TX, and Mooringsport, LA. Harrison County, on the Texas side, was dry, while Caddo Parish, the Louisiana side, allowed alcohol sales.] Huddie, what did they call square dances?
Ledbetter: Called them sukey jumps.

Why did they call them sukey jumps?
Ledbetter: Well, because they danced so fast, the music was so fast, and the people had to jump, so they always called them sukey jumps. (It looks to me like Leadbelly is just improvising through here. He was always pretty fast with a comeback.)

Do you know what "sukey" means?
Ledbetter: Sukey - well, that's a cow sometimes when you tell her, "Sukey, sukey, sukey," you know, keeping the cow away.

Did they ever holler that at the dances when they had them?
Ledbetter: They'd just holler "Sukey jump!" and they'd holler, "One dollar bill, baby, won't buy you no shoes," just anything they feel like singing in there.

What kind of music did they have? 
Ledbetter: Well, they had a fiddler in them times; and accordions.

And what were the names of some of the tunes they played?
Ledbetter: The tunes was "Poor Howard," he was a poor boy and he played the fiddle. He was the first fiddler after the negroes got free from slavery time. Poor Howard was a negro used to play for them at the sukey jumps. And the number he played was "Poor Howard, Poor Boy."

How does that go?
Ledbetter: [Plays and sings.] "Poor Howard, Poor Boy" goes like this. 

Huddie, did they call the sets [as in square dance calls] at these dances?
Ledbetter: They called the sets all the time when they danced; they called "Shoo-fly," you could shoo-fly, and the square dance.

How did that sound? Give us a sketch of how they called the sets down there.
Ledbetter: When they called the sets, they holler, 
"Hey, man, you swing mine and I'll swing yours," 
but when they first get on the floor, they holler, 
"Grab your partners, step the right way round," 
they always drive right way, 
"Now, man, you know you're going wrong, 
now circle left way round, 
and when you get back to your home, 
grab your partner, 
the first man on the head, shoo-fly.
"When you get the shoo-fly, then they holler,
"Shoo-fly, Shoofly" 
then they come to the holler,
"One dollar bill baby won't buy you no shoes." 
[Huddie goes on singing and playing, calling the set "One dollar bill. . ."]

Huddie, did they have any real fast numbers at these dances? Do you remember any of those?
Ledbetter: They'd pick 'em up. 

When they'd do the hoedown and. . .
Ledbetter: They'd pick 'em up, you know, they'd have some fast ones when they'd just go, like, "Green Corn, Come Along Charlie," "Gonna Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In," and, "Tight Like That," sometimes they'd holler, say, "Tight like this!"
[They are both talking at once through here.]

What did they mean by that Huddie, really? I mean, tell us confidentially what they meant by "tight like that."
[Lomax may have been fishing for some sexual innuendo, but Huddie wasn’t playing along, perhaps realizing there was nothing "confidential" about this interview.]

Ledbetter: "Tight like that" means when you got your partner, grab and hug her tight, and keep her going, but when it comes time the boy grab his partner, he grab her and giving her a hug, he says, "Tight like this, it was tight like this, but now it's tight like this." And the boys'd be jumping on "Tight like that."

What were some of the dance steps, Huddie, when they were playing some of these fast tunes?

Ledbetter: Well, ain't no dance steps you could do but "breakdown," and that's a fast number. You can't dance no tap dance, I don't think, a fast breakdown number, course you might, but that's where all the tap dances [Huddie is talking very fast, as though he's afraid of being interrupted] . . . all the tap dances come from the old "buck and wing" what they used to do. Well, the breakdown dance, nobody do 'em now, but I don't guess nobody know nothing about it very much, but me, and I do the breakdown. When you do it you got to do it real fast, and when you breakdown you ain't tapping, you just working your legs. Now, a long time ago my grandfather, great-grandfather, say, "you ain't dancing til you cross your legs." So I guess now, nobody dancing because they don't cross their legs hardly ever. But when you do that old breakdown, and wing down, and green corn and that old ground shovel and, uh . . .

What about "knocking the pigeon wing?"
Ledbetter: . . . pigeon wing and . . .

. . . cutting the back step?
Ledbetter: . . . cutting the short dog, well, you got to cross your legs.

Huddie, play us one of those tunes, something like "Gonna Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In," and tell us what it means, too, you know. 
Ledbetter: "Gonna Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In" - long years ago, that was when they see the boss coming, you know? And the boys would see the boss coming, well, they didn't like him, you know, but they'd be together, nothing but negroes all piled up there together. When they'd see him coming, they'd say, "Well, we're gonna dig a hole to put the devil in," boy they'd start a-jumping. [plays "Gonna dig a hole. . ." with very fast accompaniment on guitar.]

Huddie, can you play "Green Corn" on the twelve-string guitar?
Ledbetter: I think I can. 

Let's hear a little of "Green Corn." [Huddie starts to strum his guitar. Lomax interrupts] Slow and easy and sweet, Huddie! [Huddie slows the tempo] What is green corn, anyhow? Tell us about it when you sing the song.
Ledbetter: [Strumming and explaining] Now, this is a fast sukey jump too, but the boys take it easy sometimes when they want to sukey jump; keep them dancing so hard and take it easy on the ground, shuffle around with your partner, [sings, but doesn't explain "green corn". Lomax tries to interrupt with "What is green corn?" but Huddie either doesn't hear, or ignores him. Then, just as the song ends] What is green corn? What is green corn, Huddie? [Lomax likely wants to hear that green corn is some form of white lightning, but, again, Huddie is not co-operating. He keeps it simple.] 

Ledbetter: Green corn is an ear of corn - when it's green. What they mean by green corn, they're just putting that in the words, you know, 'cause the man is green and they didn't know what they was talking about themselves. What they was speaking about is an ear of corn when it's green. Down south when the corn gets dry, why then that's corn - hard corn, then. But when they say "green corn", that means it's green, you can go out in the field and pull it and roast it. . .

I thought you meant green corn whiskey. (I agree with Lomax in thinking Green Corn refers to whiskey. Huddie is often just very contrary and it's hard to believe that songs would be sung about ears of corn.)

Ledbetter: No, not no green corn whiskey, they didn't know nothing about no corn liquor at that time. They had old-time liquor, you know, that's real good liquor, wasn't no bootleggers then. Couldn't make no liquor. How are they going to make liquor when they're all slaves? [Huddie sounds condescending] The old boss — they wouldn't get no liquor till the boss would give it to them.

Huddie, at these old-timey sukey jumps, did people dance in their bare feet, or with shoes on?
Ledbetter: Well, them that could get shoes, they would dance like that and lots of them didn't have — 'cause I know plenty boys in my time —

[interrupting] . . .what about the women? Would they wear shoes or not?
Ledbetter: Well, when they could get them. If they couldn't, they just go barefooted. 

Would they ever circle left in these dances, or
Ledbetter: They's circle left right, they'd start out right. . .

 . . .they'd start right first?
Ledbetter: That's right. . .

[talking on top of Huddie] How many times would they go around right?
Ledbetter: Well, you see, when they'd first start right, they'd go around right and then the man would holler, "Circle left way round,"

And they'd gone one time around?

Later Lomax

Ledbetter: That's right and then he'd holler, "Circle right way around again, and when you get back home, grab your partner," so when they first start out circling right way around he'd tell them to skip on up ahead and catch the next partner in front of them, and they'd keep on catching and he'd say, "Now, when you get home, circle left way around" and when they get home, they circle left way around, he says, "Now circle right way around, and when you get back to the spot, settle down. First man on the head, grab his partner and shoo-fly." That's the way they do that down there. (Library of Congress)

American Folk Instruments

Instruments of the Slaves

When blacks were shipped to America as slaves they were stripped of their language and culture. They were mixed in different language groups and crammed into slave ships with little more than some minimal clothing. They had to learn pidgin English just to have a common language, and their music became a hybrid as well, combining bits of the European with elements of various West African cultures.
In their new surroundings there were two possibilities available to the musically-inclined: they could make use of instruments provided by their white masters, or they could construct their own instruments. Of European origin were the band instruments: trumpets, tubas, trombones, clarinets, cymbals, snares and big bass drums; also the strings like violins and cellos, and the piano. Their own instruments were reed flutes, kazoos, gourd banjos and an amazing range of percussive rattles, sticks, drums and tambourines. In antebellum New Orleans, the slave population gathered in Congo Square, on their Sunday afternoons off, and had a good old-fashioned West African hoedown.

Benjamin Latrobe
“Going up St. Peters Street & approaching the common I heard a most extraordinary noise, which I supposed to proceed from some horse mill, the horses trampling on a wooden floor. I found . .  that it proceeded from a crowd of 5- or 600 persons assembled in an open space or public square. I went to the spot & crowded near enough to see the performance. All those who were engaged in the business seemed to be ‘blacks.’ I did not observe a dozen yellow faces. They were formed into circular groupes . . . the largest not 10 feet in diameter. In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands, & set to each other in a miserably dull & slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies. The music consisted of two drums and a stringed instrument. An old man sat astride of a cylindrical drum about a foot in diameter, & beat it with incredible quickness with the edge of his hand and fingers. The other drum was an open staved thing held between the knees and beaten in the same manner. The most curious instrument, however, was a stringed instrument which no doubt was imported from Africa. On the top of the fingerboard was the rude figure of a man in a sitting posture, & two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened. The body was a calabash.” (Latrobe 49)

Latrobe's drawing of the stringed instrument.

The above description of an afternoon in Congo Square comes from Benjamin Latrobe of Philadelphia who kept a journal of his travels in the 1820's. He has "no doubt" that the stringed instrument was "imported from Africa," which is to say that it was of African origin. Whether it physically made its way across the ocean is another matter. Latrobe also made note of three other musical instruments, and happily for us, made sketches of all six.
“One, which from the color of the wood seemed new, consisted of a block cut into something of the form of a cricket bat with a long and deep mortice down the center. This thing made a considerable noise, being beaten lustily on the side by a short stick. In the same orchestra was a square drum, looking like a stool, which made an abominably loud noise; also a calabash with a round hole in it, the hole studded with brass nails, which was beaten by a woman with two short sticks.” (50)
The banjo was a popular instrument in 19th Century minstrel shows and is often remembered in conjunction with plantation Negroes and Stephen Foster songs. Most literature on the banjo tends to describe a stringed instrument with a gourd resonator, like the one described by Latrobe.

Other Banjo Stories
Between 1746 snd 1757 a slave dealer named Nicholas Owen reported an instrument played by the blacks "up Sharbro" in Sierra Leone, and instrument made of wood that sounded to him " like a bad fidle." It was called a Banjelo. (Epstein 213)
An even earlier reference is from Jamaica in 1740 by one Charles Leslie. He mentions a slave instrument called a "bangil" which was "not unlike our Lute in any Thing but the Musick." (Abrahams 282) In other words, the instrument itself was like a lute, but what the musicians were doing with it was something else. In 1793 Bryan Edwards reported from the West Indies, "they have the Banjo or Merriwong . . . [which] is an imperfect kind of violin cello (292), and in 1806 George Pinckard, also from the West Indies, mentioned the "banjar" as being "a coarse and rough kind of guitar." (294) In an article published in 1810, Fr. Richard de Tussac gives a detailed description of the making of a "banza" by French colonial blacks.
“They cut lengthwise through the middle of a calabash. This fruit is sometimes eight inches or more in diameter. They stretch upon it the skin of a goat which they adjust round the edges with little nails; then a piece of lath or flat wood makes the handle of the guitar; then they stretch three cords of pitre (a kind of hemp taken from the agave plant), and the instrument is finished. (Epstein 217)
Clearly, then, while the name "banjo" is of African derivation, Africans seem to have had a wide variety of instuments similar to European guitars, lutes and violins which used gourds or calabashes instead of wooden resonators, and went under a variety of names including banza, banjar, bangil or bonja.

Me envy not dhe white man dhen,
Me poor but me is gay;
Me glad at heart, me happy when
Me on my bonja play. (Abrahams 18)

Though the banjo was clearly an African invention, and through Minstrelsy and the image of the contented plantation Negro used to be associated with African-Americans, the banjo as we now know it is a white man's instrument. The last of the serious black banjo players were in the early Dixieland jazz bands; it was the only stringed instruments that could compete with the sound of the horns in the days before amplification. The only solo blues banjoist of repute was Papa Charlie Jackson in the mid-1920's. The fiddle, and most particularly the guitar, are much closer to the African musical style. As a percussive member of jazz bands,the banjo was four-stringed; now as a bluegrass and olde tyme country music instrument, it has acquired a fifth string.

Danny Barker circa 1990, New Orleans.

Danny Barker (1909-1994), at left, is in fact playing a 6-string banjo which is probably tuned like a guitar. Barker was a jazz historian and his own musical career reflects the use of the banjo in American jazz. He originally played a 4-string banjo in New Orleans bands but when he played for Cab Calloway in the 1930's he adopted the guitar. Later in life, when he moved back to New Orleans from New York and became a historian, he got himself a 6-string banjo so he could replicate the sound without complicating his life by using two sets of chord patterns.

The accordion, which was developed in Central Europe early in the nineteenth century, was introduced to south Louisiana Cajuns by German immigrants in the 1880's (Ancelet 22) and was simultaneosly brought to north Louisiana and Texas by German settlers. Although the accordion continues to be enormously popular amongst the Cajuns and Mexican Americans, it is now an uncommon instrument in the north of Louisiana. It has become virtually extinct since the early 1950's, when some white country dance bands used piano accordions.
There is a windjammer in the Caddo-Pine Island Museum in Oil City, on Caddo Lake, and there is one at the Pioneer Heritage Center at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. The latter can be traced directly to German origins. A lonely written reference to the accordion in regional black folk traditions occurs in a 1950 article by a local artist named Don Brown. Brown, who taught at Centenary College in Shreveport, and had a camp on Caddo Lake, told of a black "concertina" player named Albert Vaughn. Marshall, Texas, attorney Franklin Jones, Sr., also remembers Vaughn and a group of black musicians who jammed together at his place on Caddo Lake. Don Brown also wrote that guitars and banjos could be found in most (black) homes in the region.
The accordion can be a very loud instrument, and in the era before amplification, it was well-suited to playing for dances. There is no doubt that electrification has in some part accounted for the increased popularity of the guitar in dance bands, and the decreased popularity of the banjo, the fiddle and the accordion. In the late nineteenth century, the instruments of choice amongst black musicians in North Louisiana were guitar, piano, harmonica, fiddle, and mandolin, but the latter two instruments have, since the early part of this century, joined the banjo in the domain of white musicians. It still seems odd that the accordion can have disappeared so totally from the traditional music of the area, while it has maintained its popularity and currency in the Cajun culture of South Louisiana and the Norteno culture of South and Central Texas. But that is what has happened.
The Caddo Lake region was slightly isolated from the mainstream; Franklin Jones calls it the outlaw country. Leadbelly's mastery of the accordion, mandolin, guitar, and twelve-string guitar, along with his dexterity on the harmonica, piano, and string-bass, attest to his considerable, though unusual, musical talent. He was quite at home around Caddo Lake, however.
It is worth noting that the twelve-string guitar is an uncommon instrument, so that claiming to be "King" is bravado mixed with a large dash of humor. There is only one other old-time blues player, Blind Willie McTell of Augusta, Georgia, who ever achieved fame on the instrument, which has not taken well to electrification. There are too many harmonic and, thus, discordant possibilities. However, the twelve-string is useful to a street musician because it can be louder than a regular, six-string guitar and can withstand a few broken strings before becoming unplayable.
The twelve-string guitar became established in Spain some time before 1780. It has much in common with the mandolin: in archaic terms, the twelve-string is a "six-course" instrument, really a six-string with two strings for each "course" instead of one (Turnbull 63). The mandolin, similarly, is a four-course instrument. There must have been something about the string arrangement that appealed to Huddie. It seems possible that he actually took up the twelve-string between 1925 and 1930 and not during an earlier sojourn in Dallas. The Stella guitar company produced most of its twelve-string models between the 1920's and the 1940's (Evans 258) and Huddie had one of them - painted green - when the Lomaxes found him in the Angola Prison Farm in 1933. But this idea is contrary to Huddie's own statements.
Guitars and fiddles supplied the music for the house dances, or "sukey jumps," that developed in the black community after the Civil War.
Where German settlers trod, in Louisiana and Texas for instance, accordions and harmonicas were introduced. In the white communities the square dance tunes were "Turkey in the Straw," "Bear Creek," "Nigger in the Woodpile," and "Arkansas Traveler." These same tunes were played in a more percussive style by blacks, though they might have inserted "Rats in the Meal Barrel" for "Nigger in the Woodpile."
While whites were "knocking the back-step," "cutting the pigeon wing," and dancing jigs, reels, hornpipes and Highland flings, blacks were doing the "cakewalk," the "grapevine twist," the "Delphi twirl," the "Eagle rock" and the stomp. These and other distinctive African American dances did not reach the ballrooms of polite white society until well after the turn of the century. Blacks were able to observe the goings-on in white society because they were often employed as musicians or domestics, but whites were generally ignorant of what was going on at the sukey jumps. Thus jazz took whites by surprise, and the blues was a revelation even to W.C. Handy, a black man with a formal musical training.

WC Handy.

“Then one night at Tutwiler [Mississippi], as I nodded in the railroad station while waiting for a train that had been delayed nine hours, life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start.
“A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly.
‘Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog.’

“The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. The tune stayed in my mind.” (Handy 78)

For Handy it was the birth of the blues. He'd spent his young life to that point playing sheet music for society dances, both black and white, and had little contact with the working class blacks. He was able to transfer the blues to sheet music, too, and come up with hit tunes like the "Memphis Blues" and "St. Louis Blues." But Huddie Ledbetter had heard that music all his life.
“We used to do the "St. Louis Blues," and that was before W.C. Handy, when I was just a boy. We used to do the St. Louis song, you know, way down in Louisiana, and that was when I was a boy. And it wasn't written, it was just a real song, just made up. But anyhow, when I come to New York, we find out that W.C. Handy was the man that writ the music, and the words - "made it up." But that was when I was a boy, we used to sing that song.” (Last Sessions)

A Great War Story

This video has nothing to do with Leadbelly so let us figure how he connects to the Great War. Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany in April 1917 and the war continued through November11th, 1918. Most of the American troops got "Over There" in 1918 and the active, "shooting" war, for Americans, took place in the Fall of 1918, the last three or four months before Armistice Day. Leadbelly had written a somg about the Titanic (1912) and he later wrote songs about the Second World War, (Hitler song) but I have no knowledge of Great War songs. During the American engagement in the GreatWar, however, Huddie was much involved with his own problems, which included being sentenced to prison in Texas for 30 to 35 years. Apparently he didn't even have his own name.

Louisiana Lomax Recordings 1934

This talk examines the songs recorded in the summer of 1934 by folklorist John Lomax, with assistance from his son Alan, who was then a teenager. While the music they recorded there has often been described as Cajun or Creole music, what they actually found was much more complex: a diverse admixture of old medieval lays, Continental pop songs, blues ballads, round dance songs, traditional ballads in French, a Scottish jig, and much more. This talk coincides with the release of the book Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana, a study of the 1934 trip.

Speaker Biography: Joshua Clegg Caffery is a writer and musician. He is a founding member of the Red Stick Ramblers and a longtime member of the Louisiana French band Feufollet. Caffery was nominated for a Grammy in 2010 for his work on the Feufollet album "En Couleurs." He is currently the Alan Lomax Fellow in Folklife Studies at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress.

Jesse Thomas CD

  Jesse Thomas with his longtime partner, Peaches, is featured in a CD on Document Records (UK): "Another Friend Like Me."  https://youtu.be/erCuN8o5xXc?list=PLTyVaFS85Dtw0XXSTgonFBVX8io6on3n6

Jesse & Peaches at Nightwing Studios, Shreveport, LA. c1990. 

                 

Peaches

Engineer Ron Capone, Grammy winner for "Shaft."

  

 CD  "Another Friend Like Me," title of a Jesse Thomas original, is available from Document Records. Check out their incredible catalogue of Americana — blues, jazz & gospel music. 

Document Records

Interview with Harold Leventhal (b. 1919, d. 2005).           Leventhals' office 57th Street, NYC. Sept., 1992.

Harold Leventhal was closely involved with Pete Seeger, was the manager of the Weavers. Known as the 5th Weaver, he later worked with Joan Baez.

Q:  What about Leadbelly? You mentioned you knew him slightly.

 L:  Slightly. But that again was because I remember going to a concert he was part of at Town Hall, it might have been '48 or something, and I loved the way he was dressed, a debonair dresser with spats on and a bow tie and a very handsome man. But I wasn't used to that music, I didn't know much about that kind of blues, but I was taken by him. 

Q:  Did you meet at parties or anything like that?  

L:  I didn't, not until later on; but he died early on. Actually, when the Weavers recorded "Goodnight, Irene" he had been dead at least a year.  

Q:  Did they do any other music by him? 

L:  Oh yeah, "The Midnight Special," "Rock Island Line," they did a lot of his stuff. As they did Woody's stuff. And that's the first time that both Woody and Leadbelly earned money from their songs. 

Woody and Lead Belly (with bow tie.)

L: I originally came from the music publishing business, out of high school, and this is going back to 1939. When I left school, I worked for a while in the factory, gave that up and I was able to get a job with Irving Berlin music company. I was there for a number of years and worked my way up very rapidly, become what's called a "song plugger." And, after I left the Berlin outfit I worked for Benny Goodman's music company — music publishing — and I was one of the rare political guys in that scene at that time. When I came back from the army in 1946, I met up with Pete Seeger because what we had in common was political background, and also an interest in music. And it was that time — you had People's Songs going, which I was slightly involved with, and then it was later, in late '49, when Pete asked me would I take over and manage the Weavers, which I did, and that kind of led me into that area. And, you know, I worked with Woody Guthrie at that time although he was not really fit as a performer. He was pretty sick. I knew, very slightly, Leadbelly, at that time, and with the rise of the Weavers and the great interest in folk music, I branched out and began to manage other people.

Q: Were you in at the beginning of People's Songs?

L: No I wasn't. I became more involved, obviously, in 1950, because of my involvement with the Weavers.

Q: When you talk about being a "song plugger" — how did that work?

L:  At that time, we would go around with, say, an Irving Berlin song and bring it to the bandleaders, cause the swing bands were the big things of that day, and because they had radio time. See, records were not a big factor — it was radio time — and we would go around to them and try to promote the songs of the company we were with. This meant you'd go to Harry James or you'd go to the big name bands, Glen Gray etcetera, and they would see you and you'd plug your songs, exactly what it says.

Q:  Presumably, to be successful at this, you'd have to have some pretty good songs, and I guess people would rely on you?

L:  Yes. Well they relied if you're coming from Irving Berlin company, if it was an Irving Berlin song they paid attention to it. Not all of his songs made it in that sense. A lot had to do with the quality of the song you had, as it always has to do. 

Q:  When did you find yourself interested in Pete Seeger's kind of music?

L:  Well, when I got involved with the Weavers. Up to then I was mostly involved with the jazz scene in New York or what you call the, er, Benny Goodman music, the pop stuff. TIn Pan Alley. I was marooned in Tin Pan Alley. 

Q:  The Weavers — Did they do any other music by Leadbelly?

L:  Oh yeah, "The Midnight Special," "Rock Island Line," they did a lot of his stuff. As they did Woody's stuff. And that's the first time that both Woody and Leadbelly earned money from their songs.

The Weavers

 The Weavers' records sold in the millions. As songwriters (before that time) they earned no money. They earned money, and it was very small at that, as performers. And that was limited at that point to the Union scene and the radical circles who kind of was more interested in that music. And the public at that point wasn't.

 Q:  So they were playing mostly for Union Hall gigs. . . ?

L:  That's right, for the Union rallies, meetings and so forth.

Q:  Which weren't necessarily the biggest paying gigs.

L:  No they weren't. I mean, I have references to Woody getting $15 if he went somewhere. Well [laughs] if you do make $30 a week, it ain't bad. I mean, I used to make $12 a week when I got out of high school, so if you made thirty, you were in the upper middle class [laughs].

Q:  You said that Woody Guthrie was pretty much out of commission as a performer by that time? 

L:  In the '50s and '51 he was showing the signs of the illness. Unfortunately, those of us around him, and myself included, were not quite aware that this was a disease, and, we used to berate him for being drunk all the time because that disease - he would waver in walking and tremble a little and we thought he's drinking again. There you go - drinking! And we were not, I mean that's given us a tremendous guilt

Q:  What did he answer to that?

L:  Well, he'd, er, it was probably partly drinking, it was partly drinking, but this continuous movement of his body was pretty much at all times.

Q:  You began to suspect something?

L:  Well his - Marjorie Guthrie looked into this and was gone in hospitals and it was diagnosed as Huntington's Chorea, for which his mother died of, years ago, and unfortunately he was the only member of his family to get it. He has two brothers and a sister, none of whom got the disease.

Q:  Were you familiar with him as a performer before that time?

L:  To a limited extent. A lot of us in the New York scene otherwise regarded him as a kind of an imported hillbilly. The New Yorkers couldn't quite take to that style of music. Some of us.

Q:  He was quite a character though, wasn't he? [Yep] When you say he was a "hillbilly," didn't he sort of put that on a bit, too?

L:  He would exaggerate all of that because he knew that New Yorkers would look at him and then wonder the kind of guy - we didn't see these guys! [laughs] and he'd go to Chicago and do the same thing. Put it on. Yeah. And it worked for him.

Q:  What sort of places did the folk music eveolve in - like it was in the VIllage?

L:  I think a lot of it began in the Village in these little clubs, little cafes, or what they would call coffee houses. I mean Dylan started there, Peter, Paul and Mary started there, Woody Allen started there. It was really in these areas and Philadelphia had one or two clubs and Chicago, and that began to spread, and in Colorado I remember a club where I first saw Judy Collins perform, so the major cities, each of them, so we had a circuit to work, which was very good.

Q:  Were you one of the main bookers then?

L:  I wasn't booking as much as I was actually managing, but at that point the so-called "agencies" didn't know where the things were anyway, and it was too petty for them, so I would get on the phone and I knew the guys in Philadelphia, and book them into these places. However the Weavers did have major booking - William Morris Agency booked the Weavers and then later on we went to Joe Glaser who booked Louis Armstrong, people like that, who booked the Weavers into night clubs or into these hotels that had big rooms which doesn't exist anymore.

Q:  But there's a big distinction here. You're the manager, they're the booker. Where do you draw the line in what sort of things you do?

L:  Well, a manager literally does everything to see that his talent can function properly, always with the consent of the artist. We'll never book somebody into a place they don't like, they don't want to go or what have you, the manager has to be the co-ordinator of somebody's activities. 

Q:  You're almost like an extra member of the group that doesn't perform.

L:  I was called the "fifth Weaver." I shared in their income and all of that.

Q:  Did you have any thing to say about the songs?

L:  If I didn't like em I'd say it. [laughs] But I certainly respected them artistically. There were one or two things I never did care for, I'd say so, and they either paid attention or ddn't.

Q:  After you got involved with them, you didn't have much more to do with swing bands? Well, I guess swing bands were on the way out . . .

L:  They were on their way out, and also you have a change in the fact that the LP was beginning to function, and that revolutionized the communication of recorded music. Before that, you had breakable records, you know, nobody bought them to that extent. Then you had the transistor radio, you had a lot of elements of communication reaching, or even the airplanes to go to LA, we don't have to take the train anymore, made it easier to get the message out. 

Q:  Were you involved with Bob Dylan?

L:  I was when he came to New York because of his interest in Woody Guthrie. And we used to hang around a lot and I'd see him from time to time. Yes.

Q:  Cause he used to do Guthrie songs?

L:  He came to physically see Woody, and he did see him in Jersey, and of course Woody was getting worse and worse, and then we put a stop to him seeing outsiders. Only the immediate family or close friends cause it was a burden on him.

Q:  I have a recording of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly together, where Woody is kind of introducing Leadbelly, it sounds like a radio show?

L:  Probably taken off a radio show. Only I'm not too familiar with them - is that on a recording?

Q:  Yes - it's not Folkways, it's Biograph.

L:  Biograph is a label that took over some of the Folkways stuff that was not put out.

Q:  They might have recorded it from the radio, do you think?

L:  Unlikely. He was on radio, but when he was on radio, we have pictures of it here, Leadbelly was not with him. I don't know, unless it's WNYC, which was the public station in New York, and he might have been on that. He was on that, and he might have been with Leadbelly. Oscar would know. It was Oscar Brand's program. 

Q:  Oscar didn't know about that particular one - it seems to be a mystery as to where it comes from.

L:  There's a lot of mysterious things. Particularly in Woody. Every year somebody sends us something that he wrote, that he left behind, and we just recently, two years ago - for years, almost thirty years, Marjorie Guthrie had been looking for a manuscript of a children's songbook that she and Woody did. Woody did the drawings, all of Woody's songs, didn't know what happened to it. Two and a half years ago I got a call from a college, would I come up there and look at a manuscript of Woody's that they got, and that's the book we were looking for. Well, they gave it back to us and now it just came out as a, Harper put it out as a great book. I'll show you before you leave. And things like that, every time something crops up, he was a prodigious writer, never stopped. Whether songs or letters or memos, wherever he went, he wrote, either left them with people or what have you and they sent it to us. Some, some don't [laughs] I don't know what's there. We keep Woody's archive here - there's a lot of it there.

Published  in 1992

Q:  Has anybody ever used the archive to . . .

L:  We just got out a book called "The Pastures of Plenty,"  Harpers put out. A collection of his writings. Drawings, letters, stuff like that. And there can be ten more books like that. Course Woody had a tendency to be repetitious. If he'd write one song he'd do it ten different ways. So a lot of it, as I say, is repetitious. Try to pick the best of it. 

Q:  What are the favorite songs of his?

L:  Well I think the big song in this country is "This Land," and you have "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You," er, "Pretty Boy Floyd" is big,  those are the three biggest, but it's constantly played, all kinds of his songs, the children's songs. 

Q:  Do you get people from overseas enquiring about him?

 L:  No. That's interesting because I believe his songs are so rooted in America and they're forty to fifty years old at this point, no, Woody's songs in Europe are not big. Never have been. Whereas you take a Pete Seeger song, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" well that's a tremendous international song, whereas Woody's songs about the dust bowl or about unemployment became topical, and while they're of interest to this country, they're not to foreigners. It's never been a big market there.