Anyone interested in the history of American music should probably read this book.

Alan Lomax if you don’t know anything of him, was a music collector an ethnomusicologist and a lover of ‘Folk and Folksong’. His influence on American popular culture through his collecting of the ‘people’s’ music is unfathomable.

He virtually discovered Huddie Ledbetter, ‘Leadbelly’, in a Texas State Prison, he was key in the career and life of Woody Guthrie, and in so much as that is the case, Bob Dylan’s career too.

He recorded, archived, wrote about, translated, studied, transposed, annotated and spent his life creating a repository of knowledge about Folk Culture, mainly through that culture’s production of a musical history and heritage. Hence he was to be seen in the early days dragging heavy batteries and early recording equipment through the Appalachians, the Kentucky mining districts and the streets of New Orleans.

The book reveals his life’s history, through letters and first person accounts. The author John Szwed counted Alan Lomax as his friend and so we are treated to a knowing study of Lomax, not written in the first person, but edited so.

I learnt a great deal I didn’t know about the man, such as his difficult relationship with his father, the quality and depth of his education, the incredible level of collecting he did for the Library of Congress and the politically difficult negotiations and posturing required to be successful in a government department and to be able to continue the obsessive work of your life. I learnt of his doubts and worries, his whining and whingeing, his poor health and the singularity both of his character and of his purpose.

I learnt how involved he was with the early development of Radio as a creative and artistic genre in the 30s and 40s of pre, present and post war America, of his staunch defence of ‘the negro’ and of his political leanings and investigation by the USA’s federal forces. This included one scary moment when he is being frisked unknowingly by both the US and UK special forces at a concert he performed at for the English monarch!

The book can be somewhat dry at times and perhaps a little plodding, but given a basic knowledge of American Folk history you will find almost every step in the book exciting enough and certainly page turning.

His key involvement in the ‘movement’ towards an appreciation of America’s working people and their Folk music as Art of highest order makes this essential reading, and though you will wince at the innocence of early folk music posturing and middle class patronization of the working classes in America, you can forgive all that, because Alan Lomax virtually invented the terms we have now come to accept, albeit with some trepidation and turning of the collective stomach. He had to define styles, to grapple with the very nomenclature that we all require to describe something in order to begin to codify his subject of research and we therefore owe him a debt, if only for drawing the starting line in the sand, and once playing in a band with Jackson Pollock.

Just out from Soul Jazz, most recent purveyors of all that is Studio One related in the UK (music and otherwise) comes this coffee table booky wook, collecting some of the covers from Studio One’s catalogue for your viewing pleasure, though if you collect the Lps, you’ll have a significant amount of the artwork already.

No surprise there then?

It’s nice to have and there are a few you may not have seen before, such as the Tabernacle Gospel Lp covers or the Sri Chimnoy Lp (now legendary as a rarity) but there isn’t a lot here to stun an enthusiast for the label. Frankly that’s been the case with most of Soul Jazz’s output of Studio One material musically and so it is visually, also.

Odd

They (SJ) I think have missed a complete trick, in that on occasion they mention the sleeve notes and quote from them, they could have included many more, for the quirky nature of them are well-known and often amusing or enlightening. Including the cover of the Lp Pirates Choice (which has never it seems been reproduced as anything but a muddy turdish greeny brown of a poorly registered example of what NOT to do if you are a Litho printer) seems odd too. There are more Lps they could have chosen from, with more to offer the viewer, casual or otherwise.

I hoped for more

There is no logic or rhyme to the choices made and to the inclusion of some of the more recent Lp covers, which have little or no individually distinctive style whatsoever.

The forward by Steve Barrow is little more than yet another introductory level run through of Jamaican music history, though generally accurate for all that and still an engaging read for the newly converted. Though it should be mentioned that no Mento was ever to my knowledge released by Tewari on Down-Beat, only on sister label Caribou.

Yeah I know I know, those that are old enough have been here before, and you’re all bound to notice the Jurnior Murvin track in amongst this little list. I just thought that we could all do with a soundtrack, it’s one way of softening the blow, though I don’t suppose it will be any consolation to the children and parents and good people everywhere being terrorised by the bunch of self indulgent thugs currently on the streets of London and other UK cities. This is a trite idea at best, but given the way that Murvin’s Police and Thieves became the soundtrack to previous unrest in our beautiful capital, an obvious one to author.

Top 20 Tunes to listen to with Police Sirens wailing in the wind?

Culture – Stop The Fussing And Fighting

Junior Murvin – Police And Thieves

Johnny Clarke & U-Brown – Work For Your Money And Don’t Grudge Your Black Brother

Benjamin Zephaniah – Riot In Progress

Sons of Jah – Breaking Down The Barriers

John Holt – Police In Helicopter

King Tubby’s – Big Youth Fights Against Capitalism (??)

Jah Stitch – Cool Down Youthman

Prince Buster All Stars – City Riot

John Wayne – Call The Police

Peter Metro – Police Inna England

Joe Higgs – Wave Of War

Val Bennett – City Demonstration

Niney The Observer – Blood And Fire

Tappa Zukie – Stop The Gun Shooting

Pama Dice – Brixton Fight

Al Brown – Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City

Barry Brown – Politician

Congos – Children Crying

Roy Richards – Summer Time

Lilly livered get out clause…

As I begin to write this I have to say, that I, know bugger all of the ‘truth’ in this matter and my perspective can only ever be that of a listener and as a digester of whatever the media cared to throw at me during Ms. Winehouse’s career. Only her family and those close to her will ever know the truth. Everyone though has their angle.

Mourning

Many will not mourn the passing of Amy Winehouse. Many will see her as an average talent amongst much else that is jaw droppingly mundane in the scene of British popular music circa the 2000s. She was undoubtedly disturbed, self-indulgent, inward looking, tearfully sentimental in that way only the lost soul of a teenager can be, without a backward glance or self-critical say so; but she was one great singer, she was a talent I believe to rival the greats, or could have been, given the chance and the opportunity.

On an off day she could vocally out manoeuvre her nearest rivals and I believe probably leave them wishing she do something as stupid as fuck things up. She did this, most royally of course. Talentless ‘squeekers’ like Duffy could never fill the fissures now that a true star has fallen from the firmament.

Above all though, and depressingly so, once success hit, she was a commodity bought and sold and then personally let down I believe by family, friends and her management, by her record label, her minders and everyone else INVESTED in her.

27 and an adult?

Sure she was 27 and no doubt considered herself an adult and capable of making her own decisions when she passed away. Where were the management that professed love for her.. where was ‘love’ when handlers pushed her onto an Eastern European stage only half a month ago when SHE said ‘I don’t want to go on’ and was in no fit state to do so..? It seems as though those that should have cared weren’t there for her, or perhaps there was no opportunity to help. Whatever the true story behind the tradgedy of her addiction and struggle it seems to me, that she was let down.

So family have said that Amy was always a wild spirit who knew her own mind and couldn’t be controlled, I wonder if she was just looking, as young children do, for boundaries, for someone to love her enough to make up some rules, or someone to say ‘enough is enough’. No one did, and after her success no one wanted to dared, or could probably have got close enough to impose any single will upon her. However desperate the situation.

Of course there is always addiction, an affliction that she and many others have, but every addict I have ever known was in some way physically or sexually abused, or nurtured some deep schism in the dark recesses of their un-shared soul. It wasn’t so much the addiction in my experience as the need to plaster over the cracks that led to those that I have known harming and in one or two cases killing themselves as a result.

Devil at the Crossroads?

Many performers I believe are fractured people who ply their trade for more, much more, than financial reward. The average Joe doesn’t feel the draw or need to please other people and the love (supposed) that returns to them by way of this bargain. And will not understand the contract that Winehouse and others like her sign for themselves. Perhaps this is the contract, the very same one, that Robert Johnson who died at 27 years of age, or Jimi Hendrix who also suffered loss when his mother left the family home (and died at 27), signed with the Devil at the Crossroads.

Fractured

It is no surprise to me that she enrolled in Acting school in the same year as her father left home, one wonders what hole is created by loss and how it might be subsequently filled? The adulation associated with succesful performance seems a candidate fo gap filler. But no doubt, like many before her have found, once success comes your way, there is nothing real to fill the gaping hole of loss and sadness with, there is in the end, only you and if you have it, love for yourself. Is this who Amy Winehouse was? Only her family and friends will know, but I think it’s how I saw her and how I see her now.

But what I heard was someone with all the ability of Billie Holliday, (Tony Bennett likened her to Dinah Washington) but with the recorded output of a crowd pleaser. I think, had she lived to a ripe old age, circled by earlier successes and had re-negotiated the contract between herself and the World she might have had the opportunity to show us more than just a spark of genius.

She was that good. As it is, we’re left wondering and wishing.

Amy Winehouse was someone’s child, don’t forget that.