Talk:Lawrence Gellert

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Bruce Conforth previews his forthcoming book on Lawrence Gellert's collection of African-American Protest Songs

In an personal e-mail published with the author's permision on folk music site Mudcat cafe in 2009, Bruce Conforth states:

... most of the personal data [formerly published about Lawrence Gellert] is wrong and much of my book is dedicated to setting the record straight. As you may know Steven Garadebian did an article on Gellert in American Quarterly called "Reds Whites and the Blues: Lawrence Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest, and the Left-Wing Folk Song Revival of the 1930s and 1940s". It was a portion of his doctoral dissertation, but he got a lot of information from me (again in the early stages and much of it inaccurate) and he makes some assumptions about Gellert's material, protest, and African American folk songs that are simply not true. His work on the Left-wing, however, is dead on. . . . . See, the thing is, most people think of Gellert (those who even heard of him) with regard to those books and his connection with the Left. But he really wasn't at all interested in that when he started out but was cajoled into it by his brother Hugo and Mike Gold. His collection actually contains hundreds of blues, some standard, some variants, most NOT protest. Only the tiniest portion of his material could be classified as protest, and even then I have problems with that word. As Lawrence Levine said, African American songs were never about protest in the usual sense of the word, and we need to find a new way to talk about them. Garabedian calls them "overt protest" when nothing could be further from the truth. They were about acknowledging their plight (sometimes) but even then we have to rethink what protest means. To the Left protest meant propaganda, which as Denisoff says has nothing to do with protest, but rather with propagating a movement. The Left's idea of using Gellert's material as a tool for agit-prop was WAY off base. But now I'm getting into the theses of my book. Also, almost everything we thought we knew about Gellert's life, and which has been published thus far is also wrong. Part of that was Gellert's fault. He was always inventing stories and even changing his name to try to get some "street cred."So, there you have a bit in a nutshell. Feel free to post this email on the site if you wish. Best,Bruce

and he adds:

...There are almost no songs in Gellert's collection that I haven't found earlier references for. His blues collection is a bit different and there are some unique things there. But basically Gellert didn't discover anything new and revolutionary, it was just the way his material was packaged and sold to the public. Now that does NOT negate the import of his collection. It still stands as one of the largest and earliest collections of its kind... those other collections I mention were not recorded collections, but songs just written down. BUT—then also comes the question of whether Gellert invented any of his songs in order to make his collection seem more important. That was one of the major charges against his collection at the time, and even after&mdashthat he invented some of his more definitively "protest" songs and that they were not truly part of African American culture. You'll have to wait for my book for the answer to THAT question, but I have definite proof one way or the other. ;)You may post this also if you wish.