“Folkloring,” she wrote, “in those days was a family affair.” Bess Hawes’ brother Alan (1915-2002), six years and some days her senior, became one of the foremost ethnomusicologists of the post-Second World War years in his own right. Lomax (1867-1948) and her name derived from her mother, Lomax’s first wife, Bess Baumann, née Brown (1881-1931). Her father was the folklorist and musicologist John A. And she may have helped colour yours.īess Hawes, born in Austin, Texas on 21 January 1921 came from a Texican family that boasted two of the most important figureheads in the new folk movement. The musician, songwriter and folklorist Bess Lomax Hawes, who died in Portland, Oregon on 28 November 2009, was one of those musicians and songwriters whose worldview coloured, most notably, the Almanac Singers – the template and forerunner for the United States’ first commercially successful and internationally influential folk supergroup, The Weavers. Like the next generation, the earlier one wrote new songs in various folk idioms, frequently darts with left-leaning barbs, dosed with class consciousness and social awareness. Its crop of performers included progressives such as Josh White, Woody Guthrie, Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter and Pete Seeger.
A generation before them another folk revival, that similarly had no truck with segregation along racial lines, had been under way. People’s appreciation of American folk music did not commence with the folk scare of the 1960s and the likes of the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Odetta, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Bob Dylan.