Biographical Note
Bess Lomax Hawes (1921-2009) was a folklorist, teacher, musician, writer, filmmaker, and folk arts administrator. Named for her mother, Bess Brown Lomax, Jr. was exposed at a young age to folk music performance and fieldwork through her father, John A. Lomax, and brother, Alan Lomax. As a teenager she transcribed music from field recording sessions, and provided assistance to her father, brother Alan, and composer Ruth Crawford Seeger during their work on Our Singing Country (1941), a collection of American folk songs and ballads. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1941, she moved to New York City, where she performed with the Almanac Singers, including Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, her future husband, artist Butch Hawes, and others. She moved with her husband to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she taught guitar lessons, wrote music and cared for her young children.
In 1952, Hawes moved with her family to California, where she taught guitar and courses in folklore and anthropology at San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge). As professor, she wrote a number of academic papers and was an active participant in the California Folklore Society, which she served as president from 1971-1973. While on the faculty at San Fernando Valley State, Hawes completed her M.A. in Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley, studying under folklorist Alan Dundes. She made four films while working in California: Georgia Sea Island Singers (1964), Buckdancer (1965), Pizza Pizza Daddy-O (1967) and Say Old Man, Can You Play the Fiddle (1970).
In 1977, Hawes moved to Washington, D.C. to serve as head of the Folk Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and stayed on for a fifteen-year tenure. At NEA she raised the public profile of the folk arts, establishing apprenticeship and other grant programs to support folk artists with skills as varied as music and dance, basketmaking, and pottery. A crowning achievement at the NEA was the establishment of the National Heritage Fellowship program to honor folk artists for lifetime achievement and contributions to traditional arts in the United States. Hawes traveled widely for her work at NEA, both nationally and internationally. She wrote several books: Step It Down (1972), co-authored with Bessie Jones; Brown Girl in the Ring (1997), co-authored with Alan Lomax and J.D. Elder; and Sing It Pretty (2008), a memoir. In 1993 Hawes received the National Medal of Arts from president Bill Clinton.