Last Cavalier: the Life and Times of John A. Lomax 1867-1948 - Book Review

By Nolan Porterfield. (Folklore and Society.) Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996. 580pp. B/W illus. $34.95 (hbk), $24.95 (pbk). ISBN 0-252-02216-5 (hbk), ISBN 0-252-06971-4 (pbk)

In one sense, this review of Nolan Porterfield's magnificent biography of John Lomax is rather tardy, because Last Cavalier was first published in 1996. However, a paperback edition was published in 2001, and hopefully its appearance means that the book has enjoyed something of the success it certainly deserves.

The John Lomax of Porterfield's account is an individual of massive contradictions: a friend who could bear grudges for years and apologise for offence given long after it had been forgotten by everyone else; a Southern conservative, notably at odds with his son Alan's well-known political views, who championed black folksong even while its very authenticity was, to his mind, dependent on the continued separation of the black population from mainstream American society. Porterfield neither excuses nor condemns, but seeks to explain--and similarly with Lomax's alleged exploitation of black singers like Leadbelly and Iron Head.

Lomax, it seems, as both writer and collector, was constantly inventing both himself and his subjects. Yet he was not unique in this: the extent to which the collection and publication of folksongs (and folklore at large) in America after Child has represented an exercise in the invention of "authentic" American culture is something closely entwined with the John Lomax story. The making of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads can stand for all his work in this regard. It is a piece of myth-making that not only allowed Lomax to embrace a wholly romantic image of the cowboy, and even to project himself as one, but would see no lesser light than George Lyman Kittredge endorse, or at least give free rein to, Lomax's less than scholarly notions. The important thing, Kittredge had told him, was "to get the stuff" and Lomax, no theorist (despite his first wife's one-time ambition that he should aspire to become a scholar of the stature of Francis James Child), did just that--getting and compiling from a variety of miscellaneous sources in order to preserve and popularise, not just the songs of "a fairly narrow band of 'folk,' confined more or less by definition to those of a single gender and a single, rather minor occupation," but dozens of songs that have become deeply ingrained in the American imagination.

Notwithstanding Harvard's endorsement at the time, Lomax's lack of formal qualifications and the popular success of his publications (perhaps even more than his scholarly lapses) eventually earned him the antagonism of the American folklore establishment. Having co-founded the Texas Folklore Society and twice been elected president of the American Folklore Society, he was finally ostracised by the latter. His wry response was masterly: "... perhaps the collector must go out among the people dressed in cap and gown." At one time, Lomax was succeeded at the Library of Congress by Benjamin Botkin, whose qualifications were impeccable, yet he too would fall foul of the folklore elite (most especially in the person of Richard Dorson) for publishing folklore materials in a popular format.

Read from a British perspective (from which a number of allusions to Texan and American history, politics, and culture remain a little obscure), the resonances with the early history of folksong collecting in England are telling. Lomax had to fight hard for position and recognition, and he constantly had to reconcile his collecting activities with the need to make a living. The sorts of criticisms to which he has been subjected have also, in a different context, been levelled at Cecil Sharp, Sabine Baring-Gould, Janet Blunt, Kate Lee, and the rest. Implicit in Porterfield's biography is the way in which Lomax was a product of his time--which he was--and also the inadequacy of that sort of account, not least because "his time" is defined by "our time" and Porterfield is far too sensitive a historian to adopt the sort of simplistic arrogance that judges the past from a standpoint of moral superiority.

For all his contradictions, Lomax retained for most of his life a sure touch as collector that set singers (perhaps especially the black singers he has been accused of patronising) at ease, and in many cases earned their friendship. The book ends with Dock Reed's grief at the news of Lomax's death. Much of the John Lomax story now appears deeply ironic, as even the hegemonic American folklore academy is becoming aware of profound and inescapable issues of reflexivity and the like; if "cavalier" seems right, John Lomax was surely not the last. In 2000, a special issue of the Journal of Folklore Research took up some of these questions in relation to Lomax's relationship with and recordings of Henry Truvillion, and it includes some perceptive observations by Nolan Porterfield on the nature of biography. He does not say that Last Cavalier is five hundred pages of absolutely compelling reading--which it is.