“BACK WHERE I COME FROM”
Nick with Lead Belly and Josh White
ALAN LOMAX DESCRIBED NICK AS "the person I’d always dreamed of being. He was very powerful and gentle and wonderful to look at. He had a kind of a grin and a laughter that were the same thing. They were always playing on his face when he was discussing the most serious matters. I think I represented something equally splendid for him, the whole America that he didn’t know anything about and I had already explored by then. He was in charge of starting theater in rural America, he was just starting to think about what it was like, and I’d already been to all of those places and knew what kinds of music there was. So we could talk immediately about common problems. Where he was far ahead of me was in thinking that you could restore or support all of these many American working-class structures with the techniques and the dreams of sophisticated theater people. I was the only person who had been there with the Blacks, the Mexicans, The Cajuns and all the rest. Nick was one of those people who came and listened and took it seriously."
Alan Lomax spent his childhood accompanying his father, John, on road trips recording folk-blues musicians with a 500-pound recorder that engraved sound grooves onto aluminum discs. When Nick and Jean were traveling across country, a few years later, they used a Presto recorder to record the stories they would then turn into plays.
“John Lomax, one of the originators of song collecting, sat around campfires with the cowboys who were singing and playing guitar, and he took pencil and paper and wrote down the songs. He took them to Professor Kitteridge, a very famous English professor at Harvard, and Kitteridge said, This is American Folk Music. Go collect more of these songs. So, in the year of 1907, I think it was, John Lomax came out with a book called “Cowboy Songs” and that’s how we know “Home on the Range” and a batch of other songs.”
John Lomax made it his life’s mission to record and archive the black man’s music, “songs that in musical phrasing and poetic content are most unlike those of the white race.” His search led him to the Angola State Penitentiary where he heard Lead Belly playing the twelve-string guitar and singing Honey Take a Whiff on Me, Ella Speed, Angola Blues and Goodnight Irene. When Lead Belly was released from Angola State, thanks to the help of John Lomax, Lomax hired him to be his chauffeur and then declared himself Lead Belly’s manager.
Fast Forward to the late 1930s and Washington D.C. Alan Lomax is running the Archive of Folk Song for the Library of Congress and Nick is working for the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration in an office down the hall. The two hit it off immediately.
“Alan Lomax was full of enthusiasm. Just bouncing around. I can remember walking Park Avenue once and he’d just come back from a collecting trip and learned a new ballad and he sang it out! He had a beautiful tenor voice and he sang it out loud and it echoed between buildings. I remember people walking past, just looking, wondering who’s that singing. It was one of these tragic ballads about somebody being killed. ”
Alan Lomax and Nick became practically inseparable and when Lomax’s wife, Elizabeth, went to Mexico for several months, Lomax moved into Nick and Jean’s house in Alexandria, Virginia. Lomax brought with him a revolving door of musicians, such as, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson, Josh White and Pete Seeger.
Woody Guthrie stayed at the house for two weeks and in that time didn’t take his boots off once. “I’m a road man. I don’t want to get soft,” he’d say. He refused to sleep anywhere but the floor. “I ain’t used to those fancy feather mattresses.” One night, he was curled up on the front lawn when Will Lee, one of the actor’s from The Theater of Action, came to visit. Another time, Elia Kazan came to visit and a “defiant” Lead Belly was making rice and beans for everyone. “Rice and beans. Rice and beans,” Kazan said. “He sang Washington Water Tastes like Turpentine. He impressed me.”
At night everyone gathered in the living room and participated in sing-a-longs where Alan Lomax would throw out a topic like dogs, faithless women or the weather, and whoever happened to be visiting that night, be it Josh White, Lead Belly or Aunt Molly Jackson, would break out in song. These nights became the basis for the CBS Radio program, Back Where I Come From. Alan Lomax wrote each segment while Nick directed.
Woody Guthrie was the show’s first featured guest, singing his famous Dust Bowl song, So Long it’s Been Good to Know You, written in 1935 when the Dust Bowl hit and everybody feared it was the end of the world. A rift grew between Guthrie and Nick when Nick replaced Lead Belly with Josh White because audiences complained they were having a hard time understanding the Goodnight Irene singer. In a show of solidarity with Lead Belly, Guthrie, the show’s main narrator and performer, quit. Lomax was heartbroken, but ultimately understood Nick’s decision to use Josh White as a narrator in place of Lead Belly. “Everyone had to read lines in a script. Huddie [Lead Belly] couldn’t read his.”
CBS cancelled Back Where I Come From in the early months of 1941. Unable to secure sponsorship because black and white musicians shared the stage (a first) the show ran just 26-weeks. Nick, newly separated from Jean, was living in New York City, soon to be hired by John Houseman to head the Pop and Folk Music Division of the Voice of America.
Music had been Nick’s first love. When he was a boy, growing up just blocks from the Mississippi River, he’d run away from home, jump on a steamboat to listen to Louis Armstrong and Lil Harden play. He dreamed of being an orchestra conductor.
“What I remember Nick really, really in his heart caring about –from his stories—was music. He was passionate about segregation. He and Burl Ives would go into Café Society – He was secretly dating Billie Holliday at the time – and they would just sit there at the bar drinking themselves silly waiting for one of the white guys to make some kind of a crack about one of the black musicians and then taking him out and beating the shit out of him. Burl Ives was a big guy. And Nick was like 6’2”. He was pretty strong. And all that work he did with Back Where I Come From, that’s the first time black folk and blues musicians ever got on middle class radio. Ever. And Leadbelly and Lightning Hopkins and Sonny Terry and Ronnie McGee and all those people, Robert Johnson, The Golden Gate Quartet, and then the white guys, Woody Guthrie, and they were like major pioneers in terms of social revolution—all of them. Alan Lomax included. ”
In 1937, my father was a sparkly-eyed, curious adventurer who connected with his new best friend over records. “I had thousands of records, some of the first that were ever made,” Lomax said.
I learned of his massive record collection from Pete Seeger, who worked for him at the Library of Congress. “Driving up to Connecticut and picking up boxes and boxes of old rpm records. I’d get back to Washington, D.C. and Alan would have me listen to them first. He’d say, ‘Pete I can’t listen to all of these. You listen first and put in one pile the ones you think are halfway good that I should listen to.’ So, I did nothing from dawn to dark, but listen to hundreds after hundreds after hundreds of old records.”
The closest I have ever come to being in a room with that many albums were in my favorite record stores: Platter Puss Records on Hollywood Boulevard near Vermont Avenue, then, as a teenager, Tower Records on the Sunset Strip, and Rhino Records on Westwood Boulevard.
Excerpt from Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray © All Rights Reserved
Sources:All Pete Seeger quotes from interview conducted by myself and Stacey AsipTim Ray quote from interview conducted by myself and Stacey AsipAlan Lomax quotes from Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Bernard Eisenschitz, Faber and Faber, 1990Elia Kazan and Will Lee quote from Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Bernard Eisenschitz, Faber and Faber, 1990
