Reflections on Alan Lomax and Bill Labov
Language Log 2024-12-31
Below is a guest post by Corey Miller.
Alan Lomax was brought back to my mind through his appearance in this year’s holiday film A Complete Unknown, which is centered on Bob Dylan. I, a most unmusical linguist, wasn’t sure why the name rang a bell; my first thought was that he was (someone like) Milman Parry or Albert Lord, people who were interested in finding vestiges of the Homeric tradition in modern southeastern Europe. His portrait in the film is most unflattering (in contrast to the angelic Pete Seeger or a mute Woody Guthrie), culminating in a fistfight.
Last night I was delighted to find Lomax the Songhunter on the documentary-rich Ovid streaming service (where there are endless delights such as Avec André Gide and Cat City). The film begins with a short monolog by its creator, Rogier Kappers, explaining (in Dutch) how Alan Lomax was his hero. The filming then proceeds (where it will also later end) to Lomax’s retirement community in Florida, after a stroke has limited his ability to talk.
In between there is a magical journey via VW bus to locales in Europe (including the UK) retracing steps that Lomax had taken years before in his search for folksongs. I was immediately struck by similarities with the journeys taken by Bill Labov. One superficial connection: when I was at Penn in the early 1990s, I heard that there had been an earlier period where Bill carried students and colleagues to NWAVE conferences and beyond in a similar bus.
More significant was the object and purpose of the men’s journeys. Lomax sought to preserve the cultural diversity of common folk music traditions in the face of devaluation by proponents of highbrow culture and the homogenizing influence of industrialization and mass media. Similarly, Labov believed that the vernacular speech of ordinary people was worthy of study, as the key to understanding language variation and change.
Perhaps the race against time was more salient in Lomax’s case; but I do recall an element of concern that vernaculars might soon be standardized away. Lomax is quoted in a 1991 clip fearing that mass media and “big music” (my paraphrase) would stamp out folk traditions. I am curious how he would have reacted to our more fractured contemporary media environment and its effect on his object of study.
Kappers finds a few elderly people on his journey whom Lomax had interviewed decades earlier. They are shown with headphones on, listening to themselves or loved ones singing in Lomax’s recordings, and are often brought to tears. Similarly, Bill Labov spoke fondly of his “greatest hits” of talkers, vociferous women and talespinning men, permanently etched on his memory, and wrote about this in his recent book Conversations with Strangers.
Various talking heads in the Lomax film assert how Alan was a big, warmhearted man whose contagious personality broke the ice with strangers and allowed them to share songs intimate to their communities. Bill was similar—there is a certain fearlessness required to “cold call” talkers — something students of his class learned quickly, and only partially alleviated through 35 cent beers at corner taverns in South Philadelphia.
I found three papers that Lomax wrote on linguistics. The first, from 1964 in French, was “Phonotactique du chant populaire”. Interestingly, it was written in collaboration with Edith Crowell Trager, the second wife of George Trager. George Trager and Bernard Bloch’s (1941) “The Syllabic Phonemes of English” was the initial source of Bill’s “unusual” transcription system, featuring for example the use of æh for a tensed and raised /æ/.
The second paper, published in the second volume of Language in Society in 1973, “Cross cultural factors in phonological change”, continued this line of research:
In an earlier study (1964) Lomax and Trager drew phonemic maps of the vowel sequencies of standard folksongs from various areas of Europe and the United States. The object of this so-called Phonotactic study was to verify an observation of the first author that one of the dynamic formative elements in traditional song-lore was a preferential vowel grid – an ideal way of using the vocoid resources of the language – to which the folk verse of that culture is as closely conformed as possible. I chose the songs and, together with Edith Trager, transcribed the vowels as they occurred, syllable by syllable and line by line, in songs from fifty cultures. The vowel sequence in each line of poetry was traced in a distinctive color.
The overlap and repeat of patterned movement within limited sectors of the phonemic map provided a spectacular confirmation of the hypothesis. The favored vowel biases of a folk tradition were not only heavily underscored in the patterns of vowel proportion in all the songs of each of the regions, but were doubly marked in the most frequent oscillations or axes between pairs of favored vowels. Moreover, the traditional lullabies of each area consisted almost entirely of the vowel axes most frequent in the most typical songs of their area. Soon we could recognize the regional source of a folk song by the shape of the diagram it made on the vowel map. There seemed, furthermore, to be a connection between the bias expressed in the differential frequencies of the vowels in one set of songs and the severity of sexual sanctions in that community. Front vowels appeared to be much more emphasized in songs from Mediterranean cultures, where the sexual code is generally strict, while back vowelizing was more frequent in Eastern and Middle European song texts, where sexual practices were less straitlaced. This finding called for further research.
American linguists were so focused on structural analysis that our dataoriented thesis on phonological symbolism had to go abroad to find a sympathetic publisher (L'Homme, Jan.-Apr., 1964). Meantime the author continued personal experiments in the phonotactics of American songs. He found that the favorite ballads of the Southern Appalachians, home of punishing Calvanist attitudes toward sex, were marked by extreme fronting of vowels. The vowel axis shifted toward the center in the ballads of the Northeast and Canada, where a more permissive sexual standard prevailed. Both these sets stood in strong contrast to Southern Black vowel style, which strongly emphasized back and low back vowels, perhaps a phonological witness of the comparatively permissive sexual standards prevalent in Black rural folk culture. I then ran the phonotactic patterns in the 'hit parade' of that day (1964) by miming the tongue and bucal cavity movements of the vowel sequences heard over the radio. I observed that back voweling still strongly marked the Black rock and roll hits, whereas front voweling was just as clearly favored by classical pop singers like Sinatra and Martin. Areas of acculturated style lay between these two extremes. I found I could spot two of the main trends of that day – Black singers trying out the favored WASP vowel terrain and White singers experimenting with Black patterns.
Needless to say, this hypothesis was controversial, and not only because structuralist linguists were focused on things other than socio-sexual cultural stereotypes.
Lomax's third linguistically-oriented paper, from Language in Society in 1977, was "A stylistic analysis of speaking". The abstract:
Stylistic analysis takes account of the dynamic continuities in communication behavior. It is concerned with how people talk or sing or move in relation to each other, rather than what it is they say or sing or do to or with each other. The presence of these styling qualities can, we discover, be reliably assessed; and, as they cluster together, giving each cultural tradition its distinctive performance models, they have remarkable stability through time. However, these patterns of style are not inflexible: they are models comprising a stable set of ranges within which performers can adjust their behavior to the demands of a genre, of a familiar situation, of sex, age or status roles, and to the unexpected. The comparison of these performance models, cross-culturally, reveals factors that tie communication to social structure on the one hand and to cultural traditions on the other.
The end of the abstract of Lomax's 1973 article seems to directly mirror Bill’s views on language: “collections of recorded song performances provide a world-wide resource of 'unselfconscious' and culturally validated language data that is simply unavailable for other kinds of speech activity”. I am glad that I am now better acquainted with Alan Lomax, and grateful for the memories of Bill that this has stimulated.
Above is a guest post by Corey Miller.
For more on Alan Lomax, see The Association for Cultural Equity, Alan Lomax's 1960 article "Saga of a Folksong Hunter – A Twenty-year Odyssey with Cylinder, Disc and Tape", and (especially) the Lomax Digital Archive.
And Lomax's 1973 paper has some possible overlap with observations in Niloofar Haeri's 1996 paper "'Why do women do this?' Sex and Gender Differences in Speech":
Examples of the kinds of sociolinguistic variables that seem to show iconicity with respect to sex are those involved in fronting and backing processes. Table 1 presents a survey of 19 variable processes that can be phonetically characterized as involving either fronting or backing. The results show that of 13 fronting variables, 12 are led by women, while 5 out of 6 backing processes are led by men. On the basis of these data, from 10 different speech communities, it is reasonable to generalize that fronting has the iconic value 'female,' while backing has the iconic value 'male'. Put differently, we could say that fronting is an expressive posture more often exhibited by women, while backing is an expressive posture more often exhibited by men.