Seegers and Lomaxes

Topic: Folk Music Revival
The folk music revival in the United States provided opportunities for generations of Seegers and Lomaxes. Charles Louis Seeger went to México soon after Porfirio Díaz opened the country to foreign investors. [1] He began as a journalist, then became a partner in an import-export business that sold machinery to sugar plantations. [2]

Charles Louis was not happy when his sons did not enter business. [3] To him the arts were the avocations of men successful in other areas. [4] The older boy, Charles, studied music at Harvard, then went to Germany to pursue composition and conducting. [5] The younger, Alan, majored in English at Harvard, lived in Greenwich Village, and migrated to Paris in 1912. [6]

Charles returned home unemployed, hindered, he said, by a hearing impediment that prevented him from detecting high pitches. He was hired by the University of California in Berkeley where he began focusing on music history. [7] His most important student was the modernist composer, [8] Henry Cowell. [9]

World War I ended his second career. Alan had joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914, and been killed in 1916. [10] His collection of war poetry was being reissued in 1919, [11] as Charles was announcing he was a pacifist. He took his pregnant wife and two sons back to his father’s home in New York. [12]

John Lomax, as was mentioned in the post for 27 January 2019, lost his first career when he was removed from the University of Texas in 1917 by James Ferguson as part of the governor’s purge of political rivals. [13] Some friends found him a position selling bonds in Chicago. While there, he became friends with Carl Sandburg, mentioned in the post for 5 May 2019. [14] After the governor was impeached, Lomax returned to the university to work with alumni relations. [15]

Charles’ wife, Constance Edson, was a concert violinist who found self-inflicted penury hard to accept. [16] She finally found employment for the two of them in 1921 at the Institute of Musical Art through Walter Damrosh. The school’s director was a close family friend. [17]

The marriage was rocky, and the boys were sent to boarding schools. The youngest, Pete, was four the first time he was dispatched. [18]

In 1925, John left the University of Texas, this time over the politics of football, and again sold bonds, this time in Texas. [19]

While Charles was teaching music history in a conservatory, Cowell was touring as the leading modern composer in the United States. [20] He met Ruth Crawford when he was in Chicago. [21] She also was introduced to Sandburg, who included the modernist composer in his family’s music evenings and had her transcribe some songs for The American Songbag. [22]

In 1927, Constance told Charles she had a private bank account, and he walked out with the children. [23] The memories Pete chose to share with his biographer are fragmentary. He recalled refusing his mother’s request to take music lessons, but did remember someone gave him a ukulele that he played constantly. He also said his mother gave him a collection of sea chanteys that he used with the uke [24] at the Spring Hill boarding school [25] in Litchfield, Connecticut. [26]

Cowell later urged Charles to take Ruth as a student. [27] After a year she went to Europe, [28] but returned when her fellowship wasn’t renewed. [29] Charles and Ruth became lovers, and Constance finally accepted a divorce. [30] The Institute had merged with the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in 1927, but the chairman of the board for the two schools refused to let Charles teach his new theories of musicology. [31] Damrosch cut his hours, then terminated his contract. [32]

John lost his bank job in the early 1930s. [33] Steady employment didn’t exist in the Depression, so he converted his salesman’s skills from bonds to promoting himself. He suggested his publisher sponsor a new collection of American Ballads and Folk Songs. [34]

His oldest son, John Junior, also lost a banking job, but found employment with Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He contacted the Library of Congress to get support for his father’s project. It was an honorary position that paid a token dollar a year, but provided John with the status needed to get cooperation from local officials. [35]

Charles began teaching at the New School for Social Research. Cowell had urged Charles to join the Communist Party’s Pierre Degeyter Club in 1931. [36] A group of modernist composers within the group formed the Composer’s Collective of New York in 1932. [37] Pete’s first contact with the party occurred that year when Charles and Ruth took him to a Collective meeting featuring Aaron Copeland. [38]

During the summer of 1933, Sandburg was advising John Lomax on how to get bookings on the lecture circuit. In return, John’s son, Alan, was helping Sandburg find work in the South. [39] Before American Ballads and Folk Songs was published in 1934, Macmillan asked Charles and Cowell to review it. Charles remembered they found the transcriptions "god-awful," but were enthusiastic about the lyrics. [40]

Charles’ fourth career didn’t last long. New School should have been ideal: it was founded by men like himself who had lost their academic appointments for opposing the entry of the United States into World War I. [41] All he intimated in 1935 was "American universities do not yet recognize musicology as a respectable subject." [42]

A friend from the New School had gone to work as a painter for Franklin Roosevelt’s Work’s Progress Administration (WPA). He helped Charles get hired by the Resettlement Administration’s culture section in 1936. [43] The same year, John began working for the Federal Writers’ Project within the WPA. [44]

Soon after, the Resettlement Administration was transferred to the Department of Agriculture, [45] and Charles began moving from job to job in the bureaucracy. [46] In 1937, he became the deputy music director of the Federal Music Project. [47] The same year, John asked the vice-president, a politician from Texas, to help his son, Alan, get a job with the Library of Congress. [48]

Sometime in this period, John and his children, Alan and Bess, began work on a second volume of American Ballads. To avoid the criticisms leveled against the first volume, John asked Charles to do the transcriptions. He claimed he was too busy, but recommended Ruth do the work. [49]

In 1939, with infighting in Washington, the Federal Music Project budget was cut, and the agency absorbed by the WPA. [50] Charles moved to a State Department committee on Latin American relations. From there, he joined the Pan American Union in 1941. [51]

Alan Lomax was in New York City, working part time for the Library of Congress while taking graduate courses in anthropology. [52] He asked companies, like Columbia, Decca, and RCA Victor, for copies of records by folk or folklike musicians. [53] He got so many contributions, he hired Bess and Pete to help him sort through them. [54]

In the fall, CBS radio asked him to contribute to their School of the Air. This gave him an opportunity to provide paying jobs for people who had helped him, [55] including the Golden Gate Quartet, Burl Ives, Leadbelly, Molly Jackson, and Pete. [56] In each program, he asked listeners to send him copies of folk songs. As mentioned in the post for 30 January 2019, he gave the most interesting to his father to pursue.

In 1940, while still working for the Library of Congress, Alan performed at a New York concert for refugees from the Spanish Civil War. It was the first time he heard Woody Guthrie. [57] They both appeared a month later at a concert for John Steinbeck’s committee to aid farm workers. [58]

Such efforts were noblesse oblige by middle class whites who had no more job security than tenant farmers. Charles was a bureaucrat serving at the whims of politicians. John was constantly looking for opportunities "on the low-rent outskirts of academia." [59]

Their years of financial and familial security passed when their sons were young children. Alan still hadn’t held a full time job outside the government. Pete dropped out of college and failed to find work in journalism. He had yet to overcome his inherited view that music was for fun [60] and his rejection of practicing, to make music a profession. [61]

End Notes:
First names are used to make it easier to distinguish between members of the Seeger and Lomax families.

1. Ann M. Pescatello. Charles Seeger. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. 10–11.

2. Pescatello. 8.
3. "Alan Seeger." Poetry Foundation website.
4. Pescatello. 8.
5. Wikipedia. "Charles Seeger."
6. Poetry Foundation.

7. Mark Swed. "Behind Pete Seeger, A Formative Father and Mother." Los Angeles Times website. 6 February 2014.

8. Wikipedia. "Henry Cowell."

9. Joel Sachs. Henry Cowell. New York: Oxford University Press. 2012. No page numbers in online edition.

10. Poetry Foundation.

11. According to WorldCat, Alan Seeger’s Poems was published in London in 1916, in New York in 1917, and in Paris in 1918. A second printing was issued in London in 1919 and in New York 1920. The English publisher was Constable, the U. S. was C. Scribner’s sons, and the French was Payot.

12. David King Dunaway. How Can I Keep from Singing? New York: Villard Books, 2008 edition. 25–28.

13. Wikipedia. "James E. Ferguson."
14. John Szwed. Alan Lomax. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010. 13.
15. John Szwed. 14.

16. Dunaway. 26–27. Each Seeger has edited the past. I have not been able to find any information about Constance de Clyver Edson that did not come from a male Seeger.

17. Pescatello. 86.
18. Dunaway. 32.
19. John Szwed. 16.
20. Wikipedia, Cowell.
21. Pescatello. 102.
22. Pescatello. 102-103. The American Songbag was discussed in the post for 5 May 2019.
23. Pescatello. 85.
24. Dunaway. 33.
25. Dunaway. 35.
26. "Spring Hill School Collection, 1926-1939." Litchfield Historical Society website.
27. Pescatello. 104.
28. Pescatello. 107.
29. Pescatello. 108.

30. Pescatello. 108. Charles Seeger later said the divorce occurred in 1927, [62] which made his relationship with Ruth conform with bourgeois morality.

31. Pescatello. 94. The Institute of Musical Art merged with the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in 1927, and John Erskine was chairman of the board that oversaw both. [63]

32. Pescatello. 109.
33. John Szwed. 23.

34. John Szwed. 31. American Ballads and Folk Songs was discussed in the post for 12 May 2019.

35. John Szwed. 32.
36. Sachs.

37. Abigail Chaplin-Kyzer. "Searching for Songs of the People: The Ideology of the Composers’ Collective and Its Musical Implications." MA thesis. University of North Texas, May 2018. 1. The Collective was mentioned in the post for 28 July 2019.

38. Dunaway. 36.
39. John Szwed. 61.

40. Charles Seeger. Dictated to Penny Seeger Cohen, 22 April 1977. Cited by Pescatello. 135.

41. "Our History." New School website.

42. Charles Seeger. "Preface to All Linguistic Treatment of Music." Music Vanguard 1:17–31:1935. Quoted by Pescatello. 129. Earlier she noted a man active in the New York Musicological Society said it could not become a national organization "unless Charles Seeger (who must have ruffled a few feathers) agreed to step down from the leadership." [64]

43. Pescatello. 236. The friend was Charles Pollack, a student of Thomas Hart Benton. Charles had attended Benton’s weekly gatherings of musicians at the New School. [65]

44. John Szwed. 107. John Lomax’s work with the Federal Writers’ Project was mentioned in post for 23 January 2019.

45. Wikipedia. "Resettlement Administration." It later became part of the Farm Security Administration.

46. Pescatello. 150.
47. Pescatello. 154.

48. John Szwed. 104. Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president was John Nance Garner. He represented south Texas in United States House of Representatives from 1903 to 1933 when John Lomax was at the University of Texas. [66]

49. Pescatello. 162. Also, John Szwed. 109.
50. Wikipedia. "Federal Music Project."
51. Pescatello. 173.
52. John Szwed. 140.
53. John Szwed. 142.
54. John Szwed. 144.

55. John Szwed. 154. Alan said, "The whole thing was ridiculous so I took this job only on the basis that I could have guests on the program and could pay them." [67]

56. John Szwed. 156. Jackson was mentioned in the post for 21 July 2019.
57. John Szwed. 157.
58. John Szwed. 160.
59. John Szwed. 77.
60. Dunaway. 63.
61. Dunaway. 61.
62. Wikipedia, Charles Seeger.
63. Wikipedia. "Juilliard School."

64. Pescatello. 121. She was quoting Harold Spivacke, but gave no source. He later was head of the Library of Congress Music Division, and Alan’s supervisor.

65. Pescatello. 133.
66. Wikipedia. "John Nance Garner."
67. No source given.