Alan Lomax writes a bit like a hipster. When writing about jazz it's entirely appropriate, and in 1950 possibly unavoidable. He was a jazz fan, a blues fan , a folklorist and an archivist. "...Morton and the boys in the band tell the story their own way. Sometimes they brag; sometimes they remember exactly what was said or how things looked; sometimes they remember is the way they wished it; but somehow out of the crossing of misty memories comes truth— comes a hint at great secrets— how music grows— how artists can be pimps when they have to be and still set the world dancing with fiery notes."
Did he say pimps?
Yes he did.
Yes he did.
It gets better. He writes elsewhere in sleepy broken sentences expressing the pace of his own real experience. it's cleverly executed and shows he's no mere librarian. The ellipses are all his below.
". . . A gravel voice melting at the edges, not talking, but spinning out a life something close to a song . . . each sentence almost a stanza of a slow blues . . . each stanza flowing out of the last like the eddies of a big sleepy Southern river where the power hides below the quiet brown surface."
