S. TEXAS MUSICAL TRADITIONS SAVED BY EARLY RECORDINGS

(Ed,'s Note: Before Chelo Silva and Selena, there were Manuela Longoria and Otilia Krausse. And before Ramon Ayala and Mana, there was Narciso Martinez and blind Jose Suarez. Traveling with his sound recorders in the trunk of his car, Texas folklorist  John Avery Lomax launched his Southern States Recording Expedition for Arhoolie Records to save the sounds of Mexican American musicians in South Texas for posterity. The following narrative - gathered from many  sources - tells of his stay in Brownsville.)

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

In the spring of 1939 John Avery Lomax, Texas folklorist, began his Southern States Recording Expedition as part of the Smithsonian Institute project covering Texas and Louisiana.

At the time, Lomax was curator of the folk song archives of the Library of Congress and one of the nation’s foremost collectors of folk songs and ballads of the American people

In that year, he spent five days tracing down and recording songs that delve deep into the lives of the people in the Rio Grande Valley.  His hopes were to record traditional songs that had not been influenced by the mainstream, commercial music of the time.

Although Lomax’s work is well known, minimal attention has been paid to his Spanish recordings in the Gulf Coast of Texas.

What Lomax uncovered and recorded was a long tradition of folk, love, and children songs that had been passed down for generations. On April 26-29, 1939 he made a stop n Brownsville, Texas where he would record over a dozen performers.

For Lomax, Brownsville would serve as a link between the Mexican/Mexican American people, America, old Mexico, and Spain. What Lomax recovered was a collection of songs and history that at the time even he could have not understood. Even now historians are studying his recordings.

Two women are at the center of his recordings in the Brownsville area: Miss Manuela Longoria and Mrs. Otilia Krausse. These two women embodied the long history of racial tension, division of citizenship, and Americanization on the Texas-Mexico Borderlands.

The Manuela Longoria family had been in the Brownsville area since the American Civil War. Longoria recorded 12 songs for Lomax’s Southern States Recoding Expedition almost all in Spanish. Manuela was the principal at Blalack School, a Mexican school located at Paredes Road and Coffee Port Rd.

The rural school served the many Mexican children that were only allowed to speak and write English when at school. Longoria did allow for children to sing songs and lullabies in Spanish.

Among songs sung for Lomax by an aged blind musician, Jose Suarez, blind since his was 10 months old, was the battle song of the troops of Mexican soldiers (corrido del soldado) who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Also, a song when entire families from this area immigrated each year to Mississippi to pick the 40-cent per hundredweight cotton of that day. Other songs were about the train robbery between Brownsville and Port Isabel, the Brownsville Raid of 1906 and recordings by Miss Longoria were songs of old ranchero music taught to her by father.

These were songs that told the social history of their time. The Longoria family had a long history of Americanization in their family. Manuela sung a song titled "La Chinaca," an old confederate song handed down from her father Crisostomo Longoria who passed in 1935.

Among the individuals that were recorded, Narciso Martinez, called “El Huracan del Valle,” an accordion playe and a professional musician credited with forming the conjunto style also debuted his style of music before Lomax’s microphone.

Others too were found—aged residents of the Valley who through their memories of songs of their youth, reached back a century and more into the history of this area.

The raw recordings by Lomax from his Brownsville visit, which had no background music, but just the plain voice of singer(s) are housed in the Library of Congress and/or the American Memory collection-Smithsonian Mosaic. He recorded a total of about 61 songs from the Blalack school site.

Bill Brewster, staff writer for the Brownsville Herald in 1939, wrote the following:

"The value of the songs as part of the history of a century alone is immeasurable. But now, as the people grow away for their ballads and folk songs, and as death is nearing for the aged minstrels in their midst, the songs are lost. It the work of Lomax and a few others to save these old songs from oblivion."

(Note) Recordings are posted on-line, Smithsonian Institute Southern Recording Expedition. And if you want to read the complete story of Lomax’s visit to Brownsville, you can find it in the Texas State University “The Journal of Texas Music History 2016—Volume 16.