Word: lomax
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Choctaw-Chickasaw half-breed from Oklahoma, was engaged to tell Indian tales at the Hyde Park hot-dog fest. Her newspaper syndicate announced that she would describe Their Majesties' doings in her column My Day. She added Kate Smith and a cowboy-song singer named Alan Lomax to her team of Lawrence Tibbett and Marian Anderson for the musicale after the State Dinner. Gifts received for Their Majesties (newspaper clippings, photographs, U. S. flags, etc. etc.) had to be returned...
...Buick agency. Five years later, in 1930, Lead Belly was jugged again, this time in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, convicted of stabbing six Negroes in a fight over a can of whiskey. But again Lead Belly's minstrelsy came to his rescue. Texas' eminent Folklorist John A. Lomax, poking about the jails and slums of Louisiana in search of folk ballads, heard Lead Belly sing, found him a walking encyclopedia of salty Negro "sinful songs" and ballads. At Lomax' suggestion Lead Belly was pardoned again...
Taking Lead Belly north with him to Manhattan, Folklorist Lomax gave him a first shove up the ladder by presenting him in a concert before radio scouts, theatrical agents and pressmen. Lead Belly prospered, bought himself a new guitar, drawled his rhyme-sprouting improvisations in concert halls and over the air. In 1935 he sent for his best girl, swarthy Martha Promise, a Shreveport, La. laundress, and married her in one of the "shoutin'est" suburban weddings Manhattan's Negro colony had ever seen...
Early last year John Avery Lomax, crack compiler of U. S. folk songs, arrived in Manhattan with a big, wild-eyed Negro known as Lead Belly (real name: Huddie Ledbetter). John Lomax' protègé was a murderer, but he was also a natural-born minstrel. From a Texas jail he won his pardon by singing a petition to onetime Governor Pat Neff. In the Louisiana swamplands his knife made more trouble. Again he was imprisoned, again got out with a song when John Lomax made a phonograph record of it, submitted it personally to the late Governor...
Lead Belly was in Manhattan last week about to appear in a Harlem vaudeville theatre when Researcher Lomax again made news with another singing convict. This one was James ("Ironhead'') Baker, a Negro who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in Texas. At John Lomax' request Governor James V. Allred granted Baker a furlough to tour as a minstrel, visit penitentiaries in Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, sing his songs so that other convicts will understand what Lomax wants for his folk-song files in the Library of Congress...