When seeking to gain a greater
appreciation for farming in literature, the time of sharecroppers and tenant
farmers is important to look at. For them, life was the farm. They lived and
died with their crops. They depended on the land to give them everything it
could because that was all they got. Lucky for anyone who seeks a deeper
insight into the life of one of these sharecroppers, their feelings and
experiences live on through their folklore. One such example is Alan Lomax’s The
Land Where the Blues Began.
In his book, Lomax explores the importance of the
blues to farmers of that time in those bleak situations. He states how the
blues are the anthem for those victims of anomie and isolation, those who
became more of a commodity than a human. Lomax would know. He came from a
family of sharecroppers and in the 1930’s, when tenant farming was becoming a
thing of the past little by little; he and his father took to recording these
old blues songs as they were sung from the mouths of those who they represented.
He was a student of the victims of that time and learned some of life’s
greatest lessons from the people he met. Citing one sharecropper’s song, “Now
listen here, Mr. President, I want you to know they’re not treatin’ us right
down here…” he shares where he learned the importance of the New Deal program
and how powerful a group can be in getting things done in Washington, when they
have a united voice.
What
Lomax did was no small task. It wasn’t of small significance either. Carrying
around their 500-pound recorder, he and his father captured these farmers’
songs in their fields as they worked. With these recordings came the “complex
polyphony of the blacks, which notation could not represent.” He also captured
a neglected culture and gave us an incredible look into their perspective.
Perhaps
the most amazing thing we gain from all of his recordings is that we can hear
an exact copy of what those people were singing. Many of these songs have
evolved overtime, and the same song could be incredibly different from one
field to the next. Just as the sharecropper’s verse previously cited, which
spoke to the President of the U.S., their songs were a representation of the
struggles and feelings of the time they were in. To try to hear these songs now
from descendants would be impossible. Lomax made it a possibility to hear it
“straight out of the horse’s mouth,” and the value of that cannot be
underestimated.
There
is much we can learn from the past. Just as an almanac provides us with
imperative information learned by those who came before us, the folklore of these
times also bring a wealth of knowledge. We need to understand the damage we can
do to others through unfair practices if we are to be successful. Any long-lasting
business model must be fair to all parties and it is the same with farming. The
tenant-farming model proved this with its collapse.
Sources:
Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began. New York: Delta, 1993. Print.
Photograph: John Vachon, Office of War Information. Library of Congress Photographs and Prints, LC-USF34- 014000-Ef
