42 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Lost Delta Assassinated, January 6, 2006
This review is from: Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942 (Hardcover)
An edition of the writings of the joint Fisk University-Library of Congress Cohahoma project undertaken in the 1940s is long overdue and would have been most welcome. Unfortunately, Lost Delta Found is sloppily and tendentiously edited. Most disgracefully, Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, themselves white, create a highly biased, falsified frame for the valuable writings they present by means of omission of key information, selective quotations, and bogus insinuations of romanticism and racism against Alan Lomax that pervade their editorial apparatus. They fail to duly credit Lomax with courage in initiating an unprecidented bi-racial study of a hotbed of racial discontent in the heart of Mississippi Delta plantation country in the 1941-42 Jim Crow South. They omit mention of the fact that Lomax and his wife were arrested and briefly jailed for fraternizing with black sharecroppers. They also don't mention that the Dixiecrat US congress cut out all arts funding in spring of 1942 while the study was going on, specifically prohibiting federal arts workers from collecting statistical information and and making field recordings of folk songs. It is to be hoped that some day a fair and factually accurate edition of the Coahoma Project materials will appear - one that reproduces all the relevant historical documentation. Tragically, the publication of this book may prevent that from happening.
Claim [in Lost Delta Found]: The Coahoma study was composer John Work's idea and was appropriated by Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress.
Fact: In 1940, Fisk Professor John Work proposed a study of ballad origins after a disastrous fire in Natchez, Mississippi. The grant application to fund it (written by Fisk President Thomas Johnson, not John Work, to a foundation in New York) was turned down. A year later, during a visit by Lomax to present a concert at Fisk, President Johnson, Sociologist Charles S. Johnson, and Lomax proposed a different, joint Fisk-Library of Congress field recording project, centered in Clarksdale (in Coahoma), using sociology students to gather data. Alan Lomax wrote the application and questionnaire for the study. Gordon and Nemerov supply no evidence that Lomax knew of Work's earlier Natchez fire proposal much less "stole" it. (Funds for the Coahoma study came from Charles Seeger's Pan American Union, under the War Department - information they omit).
Claim: The Land Where the Blues Began is Alan Lomax's version of the Coahoma Study.
Fact: Land Where the Blues Began, a memoir written in 1993, when Lomax was in his seventies, covers Lomax's field recording experience from 1933 through the 1970s.
Claim: In Land Where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax slighted the contributions of his African-American collaborators on the Coahoma Study -- Lewis Jones, Samuel Adams, and John Work.
Fact: Alan Lomax thanked and mentioned them (especially Lewis Jones) over 18 times and at considerable length, including in the formal acknowledgements of Land Where the Blues Began.
Claim [In Lost Delta Found]: Alan Lomax was not a Southerner and therefore had "romantic ideas" about the South.
Fact: Alan Lomax was a Southerner and a life-long champion of civil rights. The editors of Lost Delta Found smear his character (there are over 70 mentions of Lomax in the introductions and index, all derogatory) when they insinuate that he was a crypto-racist and "romantic' who did not acknowledge his black co-workers (when in fact he did so over and over). They also don't mention the fact that Lomax and Lewis Jones collaborated again in the early 1960s.
Claim: [In Lost Delta Found] Alan Lomax's Land Where the Blues Began has many inaccuracies "the most important of which" was his omission of mention of the August, 1941, preliminary Coahoma trip undertaken by Lomax and Work.
Fact: Lomax's omission of the 1941 preliminary trip in the Coahoma study is arguably a narrative expedient, not an error. No other "inaccuracy" in Land Where the Blues Began is identified. That all of Lomax's Library of Congress Coahoma recordings are, and have always been, acurately dated, with full and proper credit to participants (including Work) is not acknowledged by Gordon and Nemerov.
Claim [in Lost Delta Found]: Lomax ought to have edited the Coahoma study after leaving the employ of the Library of Congress.
Fact: The study was interrupted by US entrance into World War II. Alan Lomax's ethical obligation to the study ended after he left the Library in 1942 to join the army.
Claim: After the war, Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress suppressed the results of the Coahoma study when they lost or "filed away" the one extant manuscript of John Work's essay about the project.
Fact: Letters in the Library of Congress state that in 1943 the Library sent John Work multiple copies of his unfinished Coahoma manuscript drafts (along with mimeographed copies) after he wrote that he himself had lost them. After 1945, study participants had permission from Fisk and the Library to use the Coahoma material in their own writings. Lewis Jones used the material in completing his sociology degree; and in December, 1947, participant Samuel Adams published an article (albeit brief) about his Coahoma work in 'Social Forces' (pp. 202-205). In 1958, John Work wrote to the Library of Congress asking for permission to write a book based his Coahoma essay and received a go-ahead. He did not mention that his manuscript was "lost" at that time, suggesting that at that time he possessed copies of his own writings. None of this information, all on public record and available to any diligent researcher, appears in Lost Delta Found.
Claim [made by a reviewer]: Alan Lomax's black colleagues urged him to record newer, gospel music rather than older call-and-response spirituals.
Fact: The only "evidence" for this is Robert Gordon's highly implausible suggestion in Lost Delta Found that John Work's classified index of 68 spirituals collected during the Coahoma project constitutes a coded "hidden message" (a' la Leo Strauss) criticizing the emphasis on collecting spirituals. It especially strains credulity, since Work himself was a noted enthusiast of (nearly extinct) black string band and sacred harp music.(There is little point in collecting material that is widely commercially available.)
Claim [in Lost Delta Found]: John Work "anticipated the blues as poetry movement by ten years."
Fact: Harlem renaissance writers Sterling Brown, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke championed blues as poetry ten years *before* John Work.
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20 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential Reading, August 29, 2005
This review is from: Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942 (Hardcover)
Lost research found, beautifully presented and edited, with hundreds of transcriptions of songs from Coahoma County in the 40's by John Work, the African-American researcher who assisted Alan Lomax in the recording of Muddy Waters' first recordings.
While the media has focused on the "scandal" that Alan Lomax slighted the contributions of his Afircan-American colleagues, like John Work, those of us who are familiar with the history of Delta Blues scholarship already knew that while, at the same time, acknowledging the truly great work Lomax did.The real value here, and the value is immense, is in the wealth of detail about black Coahoma culture.
Jukeboxes are catlogued,with numbers of plays per song in some cases. Obscure statistical studies are mentioned and summarized that clarify the nature of the milieu in which Muddy, Son House, etc etc, worked, drank, sang, played. And all those unknown songs!
Don't even think about not buying this book.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the songs, April 25, 2008
This review is from: Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942 (Hardcover)
To read some of these reviews, you'd think the introduction to the material was more important than the substance of the book - source material, copies of many previously unpublished songs in John Work's own handwriting, an essay that gives you the pulse and taste of life in the delta in 1941. "Down by the Green Apple Tree," a children's song collected from Sarah Teague, is worth the price of the book. I'm grateful to everyone who collected the songs, which to me are 99% of the whole point anyway. To give this book one star because you are quibbling with academic interpretations is to miss the whole point of the book - to revive the material itself, and to honor the people who created and sang it. The authors' intention is to celebrate John Work's contribution, not to denigrate Alan Lomax'.
"Down by the green apple tree, where the grass grows so sweet
Miss Julie, Miss Julie, your true love is dead
He wrote you a letter to turn back your head
Down by the green apple tree..."
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