Bess Lomax Hawes | |
|---|---|
 in the 1960s | |
| Background information | |
| Born | (1921-01-21)January 21, 1921 Austin, Texas, U.S. |
| Died | November 27, 2009(2009-11-27) (aged 88) Portland, Oregon, U.S. |
| Genres | |
| Instrument | Guitar |
| Formerly of | Almanac Singers |
Bess Lomax Hawes (January 21, 1921 – November 27, 2009) was an Americanfolk musician,folklorist, and researcher. She was the daughter ofJohn Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman-Brown Lomax, and the sister ofAlan Lomax andJohn Lomax Jr.
Born inAustin, Texas, she excelled at classical piano as a child under her mother's tutelage. Later, she learned to play the guitar.She learned folk music from a very early age since her father, a former English professor and twice president of the American Folklore Society, was Honorary Curator of American folk songs at the Library of Congress from 1935 to 1948. He collected and published cowboy songs as early as the 1900s. He and her brother, Alan, traveled the South for the Library of Congress recording rural musicians who had not been influenced by the radio. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola during their first trip, they recorded Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”) who went on to become a successful and influential performer of traditional African-American music.
During the years that followed, her father and brother worked with many other folklorists, musicologists and composers from all over the world and recorded more than 10,000 records of vocal and instrumental music.
They were responsible for introducing American audiences to other folk musicians and blues artists such as Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie, Josh White and Burl Ives.
She entered theUniversity of Texas at fifteen and the following year assisted her father, John, her brother, Alan and modernist composerRuth Crawford Seeger with their book,Our Singing Country (1941). She went on to graduate fromBryn Mawr College near Philadelphia with a degree in sociology. Later, during the 1960s, she was among the first group of students to receive an M.A. in folklore at theUniversity of California at Berkeley, under the guidance of professorAlan Dundes.
In the early 1940s, she moved toNew York City, where she was active in the folk music scene. She was an on-and-off member of theAlmanac Singers She and fellow Almanac singer, Baldwin "Butch" Hawes, an artist, were married in 1943.[1] Another Almanac member,Woody Guthrie, taught hermandolin.
DuringWorld War II, Bess Lomax Hawes worked for theOffice of War Information preparing radio broadcasts for troops overseas. After the end of the war, she and her family moved toBoston where she wrote songs forWalter A. O'Brien's 1949 mayoral campaign including "M.T.A.," co-written withJacqueline Steiner. The song became a hit forThe Kingston Trio in 1959. While her children (Nicholas Hawes, Corey Hawes Denos, and Naomi Hawes Bishop) were attending a cooperative nursery school organized by graduate students at MIT and Harvard:
She frequently brought her guitar to the school to perform for the students. Some of the parents, mostly the mothers, asked her to teach them how to play guitar, banjo and mandolin. Bess agreed to charge them one dollar each for each lesson, which lasted several hours, what she called "a whole evening." She would keep 50 cents for herself to pay for a babysitter and she'd donate the other 50 cents to the nursery school. Word soon spread, and others began to join her classes.
That was how Bess developed her technique for teaching guitar to large groups of people simultaneously, a method for which she became well-known, and which accounts for the fact that over the years, especially after she moved to Los Angeles in 1951, she was able to teach many people to play guitar. Many of her students, in turn, became guitar teachers, spreading her method - and her enthusiasm for music - which helped catalyze the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Bess figured ... "students learning guitar individually can get intimidated because they can hear their own mistakes. In a group, the students feel bolder about playing, take more risks, enjoy it more, and feel part of something bigger, which sounds better, anyway."Peter Dreier,"Remembering Bess Lomax Hawes",Huffington Post, Nov. 30, 2009.
In the 1950s, she moved toCalifornia, where she taught guitar, banjo, mandolin and folk singing through UCLA Extension courses, at theIdyllwild summer arts program and, starting in 1963, atSan Fernando Valley State College. She also played at local clubs as well as at some of the largerfolk festivals such as theNewport Folk Festival and theBerkeley Folk Festival.
In 1968, she became associate professor ofAnthropology atSan Fernando Valley State College and later head of the Anthropology Department at what is nowCal State Northridge. In 1971, her husband, Butch, died.
In 1975, Hawes accepted a position in administration at theSmithsonian Institution, where she was instrumental in organizing the Smithsonian's 1976 Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife on theNational Mall. In 1977, she was named first director of the Folk and Traditional Arts Program at theNational Endowment for the Arts, and created theNational Heritage Fellowships, which recognize traditional artists and performers. During her tenure, funding for folk arts rose from about $100,000 to $4 million, and 50 state or territorial folk arts programs were set up:
"We're really honoring traditions," Mrs. Hawes toldThe Washington Post in 1983. "These individuals are the people who've been pushed up by the traditions. They're the lightning rods that we grab onto. It's extremely important for the psychic health and well-being of Americans to maintain all of these little regional distinctions, to establish a cultural pluralism. It's like my brother, folklorist Alan Lomax, wrote one time: 'If the cultural gray-out continues around the world, pretty soon there will be no place worth visiting ... and no particular reason to stay home, either.' "Patricia Sullivan, "Bess Lomax Hawes, 88, Championed folk arts as performer and NEA official".
She retired in 1992.
Bess Lomax Hawes was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from theUniversity of North Carolina and theNational Medal of Arts in 1993 awarded by PresidentBill Clinton. An NEA traditional arts award is named in her honor.
Her memoir,Sing It Pretty, was published by Illinois University Press in 2008.
While a faculty member atCalifornia State University Northridge, Hawes compiled an extensive archive of folk songs that were gathered by her students in Los Angeles and abroad. The archive is held in the Special Collections and Archives section of CSUN's University Library.[2][3]
She died in November 2009, at the age of 88, following astroke inPortland, Oregon.[4]
