Sing It Pretty: A Memoir

Sing It Pretty: A Memoir. By Bess Lomax Hawes. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Pp. 182, photographs, chronology, index. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper) In her retirement, Bess Lomax Hawes can look back on an extraordinarily rich life. As a musician, an educator, an administrator, and an arts advocate - not to mention a winner of the National Medal of Arts - she casts a long shadow. As a member of a remarkable family, populated with some very strong personalities, she more than holds her own. Sing It Pretty is her autobiography, told in a largely straightforward, sometimes disarming, way. Born in Austin in 1921, she was John Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman Brown's fourth, and last, child. Her mother home-schooled her, and her education ranged widely, from traditional academic subjects to sewing and quilting, to music-making. After her mother's death in 1931, life changed, and schooling became institutional. Hawes describes her father, who was in his old age by then, as feeling liminal professionally, wanting to be a "real scholar." This was at the moment that John Lomax was doing some of his most significant musical field research, bringing Leadbelly home, making field recordings to disks rather than impermanent media. One of the values of a memoir such as this, where the characters are widely known, is that they help us comprehend those subjects as flesh and blood, with their ambivalences, their values, their contradictions. Subjects - figures - become human beings. "Folkloring in those days," Hawes writes, "was a family affair, and I learned early never to appear unoccupied for there was no end of work to do copying notes, song lyrics, and miles of correspondence on the typewriter" (15). It continued to be a family affair throughout her life. The family left Texas, landing in Washington, where the Lomax and Seeger families worked together on editing Our Singing Country, an influential volume published first in 1941 (and still in print in a Dover edition, as well as available in an online version). Ruth Crawford Seeger did the musical transcriptions for that book, and Hawes was often the messenger, carrying paper back and forth between the Lomax house on Capitol Hill, their office in the Library of Congress, and the Seeger household in the suburbs. The principals - John and Alan, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Charles Seeger - were passionate in working out editorial processes and criteria, many of which resonate today. Whose voices should be privileged? How does one best represent the sound of singing and music? What is the primary audience for a book of grassroots song and music? Our Singing Country was published to a disappointing initial reception. The family left for a grand tour of Europe, and Bess began her undergraduate days at Bryn Mawr College. There's a lovely anecdote here about Carl Sandburg, who outed her as a Lomax while giving a singing lecture at Bryn Mawr during her student days. This is a life of intersecting circles. Politics, art, and social justice interacted, overlapped. From Bryn Mawr she moved to New York, where she became one of the loose amalgamation known as the Almanac Singers. At various times, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell participated. Leadbelly dropped by. Josh White was around. Burl Ives visited. They sang for labor unions. At the same time, Hawes worked in the music division of the New York Public Library. In 1943, she married Butch Hawes, an artist and illustrator, and she went to work for the Office of War Information. In her twenties, she'd already lived a remarkable life, where cultural discovery, research, artistry, public service, and advocacy were all of a piece. To Cambridge next, where she began a career as a music teacher, concentrating on the guitar and on songs. …