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Bess Lomax Hawes, Sing It Pretty: A Memoir.

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Bess Lomax Hawes, Sing It Pretty: A Memoir (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2008)

BESS LOMAX HAWES has finally captured some of her fascinating story in this rich autobiography, although it is too short by half. Born in East Texas in 1921, the daughter of pioneer folklorist John Avery Lomax and Bess Brown Lomax, she has fond memories of growing up in a stimulating family environment. But much changed when her mother died in 1931, leaving the young Bess to move around from school to school, living partly with her older sister's family in Lubbock, until her father remarried in 1934 to Ruby Terrill. In 1936 they moved to Washington, D.C., where John worked for the Library of Congress and the Federal Writers' Project. Bess now did research for the folksong book her father and brother Alan were working on, as she became steeped in vernacular songs, while absorbing the hectic life of the nation's capital. She was particularly impressed by her father's close friends, Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger. And while John was politically conservative, she absorbed leftwing...

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