A Chorus of Anguished Voices

Cue balls clink, thud, into a pocket. A door slams. Men banter, loose, cool. The pool hall is too noisy to make out their words. On a scratchy recording, a voice rises above the background rumble--26-year-old Alan Lomax, brisk, courtly, unemotional, hint of a Texas drawl: “Well, tell me about when you first heard about this war, and what you thought when you first heard it.” The day is Monday, Dec. 8, 1941.

Lomax, a now-storied folklorist, had headed for an African American neighborhood in Washington, D.C., to capture the thoughts of ordinary people following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In urgent telegrams Lomax enlisted a dozen or so fellow Library of Congress researchers nationwide to record raw emotions before the moment vanished.

The interviews--the only collection of its kind--are preserved at the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center in the Archive of Folk Culture. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, reference specialist Ann Hoog reminded the center’s staff of Lomax’s sharp instincts, the way he understood the richness of an ordinary voice in a time of historical importance. The staff decided to issue another plea, the first since Pearl Harbor, to folklorists, oral historians and other professionals around the country: Remember Lomax? they said. It’s time to go forth again.

On a Sept. 12 Internet posting, the center called for volunteers to document reactions to the attacks in New York and Washington; the unedited tapes will be deposited in the center’s archive of more than 2 million audio recordings that include songs, stories and oral histories from former slaves, an Appalachian fiddler and Dust Bowl migrant workers. (The center is asking for audiotapes, which can be converted easily into digital recordings for online use). The posting, on a discussion list for 350 folklorists, got passed around via e-mail and word of mouth. “This project has really taken off like crazy,” said Peggy Bulger, the center’s director. “We didn’t have any idea how much it would strike a chord.”

Sign-ups are not required, so center officials aren’t sure how many volunteers will submit tapes by the Dec. 1 deadline. Bulger hopes for at least 100 contributors. So far, among the efforts underway: Gee Rabe, a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at UCLA, who plans to target steel band players and other musicians. A team from the folklore department at Indiana University, which contributed tapes for the 1941 project, is planning to participate again. In Iowa, the state Arts Council and other agencies are working to provide equipment and guidelines so residents can record their own memories in Ft. Dodge, Davenport and elsewhere.

The Sept. 11 interviews will be sorted by time, the way the Pearl Harbor recordings are, so researchers can track the way reactions evolve, Bulger said. Initial reaction tends to spill from the gut, while those recorded a month or two later usually are more polished, shaped by other people, media coverage and the time to weigh thoughts. These days, interviewers are treading carefully, particularly in areas in which the hijacked jetliners crashed, mindful of fragile psyches, Bulger said. Some folklorists have declined to participate in the project, saying that it’s too soon to probe.

“While I sympathize with this call,” an unsigned subscriber wrote on Publore, the folklorists’ online mailing list, “I would need extensive training in dealing with tragic events. This is not the same as Pearl Harbor. Thousands of innocent people and their rescuers have died. I can’t begin to think about personal interviews until their loved ones can put them at peace.”

Part of their motivation, participating folklorist said, is to shake their feelings of helplessness. In New York City, after the World Trade Center towers collapsed, volunteers for a nonprofit group called City Lore made their way to the site but found that helpers were being turned away. So they refocused on the group’s mission. “Our whole role,” said director Steve Zeitlin, a folklorist, “is how to memorialize parts of everyday life people would ignore.” The group is documenting Sept. 11 through photographs and other means while contributing to the Library of Congress effort.

Zeitlin interviewed a Native American who had hitchhiked from Arizona to Union Square to perform a purification ritual. The man left eagle feathers at an altar and chanted to the beat of a friend’s drum. “He was talking in apocalyptic terms about how most of America was asleep and this was a giant wake-up call that he hadn’t seen since the days the reservations declined,” Zeitlin said.

In Maine, folklorists decided to let willing interview subjects approach them. Ten days after the attacks, at an organic foods festival that drew 40,000 people, the Maine Folklife Center set up a booth and a sign that invited people to help with the Library of Congress project. “People were curious and came up and asked about it,” said James Moreira, the center’s director. “Then everyone sort of crinkled up their face and said, ‘Sorry, too soon.”’ No one volunteered so the center plans to try again soon.

In Baltimore, folklorist Rory Turner was turned down for an interview in an old neighborhood marketplace by a crisis counselor, who said he had been on the phone for three days straight and that the events of Sept. 11 were too close to him. About half of the people he approaches consent to an interview, said Turner, a program director for the Maryland State Arts Council.

From the 10 interviews he has completed so far, Turner has a sense--the way Lomax did--that he is working on a project that eventually will help to define the nation in the aftermath of Sept. 11. “I was struck by ... the way in that, as a national community, we all went through this and, in different ways, we could recognize the parts of our overlapping and common identities as Americans.”

Folklorists try to record extended narratives--the groping for words, a long path to fury, the sound of a person’s day--details that are edited out or not reflected in media stories, he said. In a collection of interviews, they comb personal narratives for emerging themes to “reflect back on who we are individually and as a nation.”

“We’re interested in stories, not in their news and informational aspect or even their human interest aspect, but in probing the way people communicate. How people use discourse to construct and reconstruct themselves and society .... These stories are one of the [folklore] genres that blossom from these kinds of collective experiences.”

In Columbia, Mo., the executive director of the Boone County Historical Society interviewed a genealogist in his 70s who recalled the last national event of this magnitude. But Pearl Harbor was different, an attack on a military target by a known enemy, the veteran told Deborah Slade Thompson. “He said something interesting toward the end of the interview that stuck with me,” Thompson said. “‘America has now grown up. We were naive and didn’t believe it could happen. What innocence we lost, we will never regain.”’

In Los Angeles, at the Japanese American National Museum, talk also turned to Pearl Harbor, said associate curator Sojin Kim. Volunteers and visitors said they feared possible discrimination against Muslims, the kind that led to the forced internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast during World War II. Kim, a folklorist, plans to ask older Japanese Americans: “How does this compare to what it was like when you heard the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor?” She plans to try to “relate those experiences and answers to what is happening to people today.”

These days, folklorists piece together theories by studying e-mails, CNN tapes and other material not available during Lomax’s time, Bulger said. But 60 years later, the interviews made by Lomax’s team still resonate--conversations with shoemakers, oilmen, homemakers, soldiers and others. The team contributed about 50 interviews, or nine hours of recordings. “There is something about hearing the voices, where you can hear the emotions of the voice and hear the inflection, and ... that is very, very powerful,” Bulger said. “You can envision what people look like. It’s just chilling to listen to voices on the street ...with the long narratives and background noises, it takes you to where that was.”

On that Monday in December 1941, Lomax buttonholed people in Washington, D.C. You hear in the voices of young and old the same bravado, the same patriotism that you hear now. What will you be fighting for? Lomax asks a couple of young men. “Well,” one says, “democracy, I reckon. Something like that, you know. Our forefathers fought for us, and we’ll fight for our [unintelligible].”

In the pool hall, an angry World War I veteran addresses the impending war with Japan. “The last time I went to fight for democracy,” the veteran says. “ ... but next time, I’m gonna fight with hate in my heart

Also in the pool hall, Lomax interviewed a 16-year-old named William Clark.

You picture Lomax in a white, crisp dress shirt with a skinny tie and fedora. You picture the teen with a pool stick in his hand, in a muscle T-shirt. William’s voice is loud and dogmatic. His cadence is plodding, as if he is conscious of being recorded and doesn’t want to mess up. He pronounces “I” as “Ah.” “When I first heard about the war, I said to myself: I hope the United States will fight until the last man go down

On a Washington, D.C., street, Lomax interviewed a group of four friends. They sound young, brash, carefree. In the background, cars honk--four quick ones, two long ones--and a train or trolley rolls by. Traffic is heavy. Since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they tell Lomax, those who were against war are now for it.

At the time, Lomax ran the library’s Archive of Folksong, which he took over from his father, the famous folklorist John Lomax. Alan Lomax also would become famous as an ethnomusicologist and record producer, recording Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and, with his father, the work songs of African American prisoners in the Deep South. Lomax’s influence extends to contemporary artists such as electronica star Moby, whose tracks have included excerpts from the folklorist’s field recordings of folks and blues music.

The Pearl Harbor project is part of his legacy. “[The recordings] will go down in history, and I am sure, some day, will be consulted by all the scholars,” Alan Lomax wrote in correspondence during that time. “[This material] will form, I think, part of the unique and priceless collection of statements from a loyal and united people.”

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Information on the Sept. 11 project: folklife@loc.gov or (202) 707-5510.