It wasn’t all Alan Lomax

NASHVILLE -- When people say John Work III had “big ears,” they are not being unkind.

Work, who died in 1967 at age 65, had a gift for finding and collecting black folk music. He traveled the South recording blues singers, work songs, ballads, church choirs, dance tunes, whatever struck him as showing the evolution of black music.

And yet what might be his greatest achievement went largely unnoticed for 60 years, stashed in a file cabinet at Hunter College in New York.

Now, with the opening of a new exhibit on Work’s life at Fisk University and a companion CD, some say Work is finally getting his due.

“He was seeking out music that many African American academics at the time had no use for,” said Evan Hatch, a professional folklorist who helped compile the Fisk exhibit, “The Beautiful Music That Surrounds You,” which runs through May 11. A classically trained musician and composer, Work taught at Fisk University, directed the school’s famed Jubilee Singers and ran its music department.

He came from a family of musicians and scholars (his father wrote the lyrics to the popular black spiritual “Go Tell It on the Mountain”), but unlike his family and some black academics of his day, he embraced secular music as worthy of study.

“To him, this raw, ragged music was as valid as Mozart,” said Bruce Nemerov, who teamed with Hatch to co-produce “John Work, III: Recording Black Culture,” a CD of Work’s field recordings released last year. Nemerov also wrote the disc’s Grammy-winning liner notes.

Work did most of his folk collecting on his own time and at his own expense. He had an exceptional ear and could transcribe into musical notation tunes he heard whistled on the street. Once, while waiting at a train station in Macon, Ga., he heard a man singing on the platform and captured an original lyrical blues called “Ain’t Gonna Drink No Mo’.”

Work and two other Fisk researchers joined the renowned folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress for a field study of the Mississippi Delta in 1941 and ’42.

The Coahoma County findings were to be published jointly by Fisk University and the Library of Congress, but Work’s manuscripts, along with those of the other Fisk researchers, were inexplicably lost or misplaced in Washington. Most of what was known of the landmark study came from Lomax’s papers and his 1993 memoir, “The Land Where the Blues Began.”

“If all we had was Lomax’s view of black culture of the 1930s and ‘40s . . . we would think that the only black music was in prisons or cotton fields being sung by black people oppressed by cruel white plantation owners,” Nemerov said of the book.