Black LA Sings: the Bess Lomax Hawes Student Folklore Collection

by Alohie Tadesse, Digital Collections Specialist, CSUN Special Collections and Archives/Digital Services - March 04, 2025

Bess Lomax Hawes, of the famous Lomax family, was a folk musician and researcher, who taught at CSUN (then called San Fernando State Valley College) from 1963 to 1976. She was appointed by the chair of the Anthropology department, Edmund Carpenter, who wanted to move the discipline away from traditional textbook study, towards an interdisciplinary artistic practice. In particular, Carpenter was interested in incorporating a heavy emphasis on visual anthropology and artistic ethnography Still from Bess Hawe's short documentary, “Pizza Pizza Daddy-O,” filmed in 1967 to the department’s research and curriculum. It was in this context that Hawes taught classes like Anthropology 309: American Folk Music and Anthropology 311: Introduction to Folklore, where she enlisted her students to collect folk songs, lore, and other traditions from the local communities that surrounded them. These materials were eventually compiled and donated to create the Bess Lomax Hawes Student Folklore Collection currently accessible through CSUN’s Special Collections & Archives.

During her time at CSUN, Hawes became interested in recording and collecting folk musical traditions not only as a means of private academic study but to keep these traditions alive and accessible to the public. She was especially interested in the folk music traditions of African-American communities. In December 1967, she was able to create a film documenting schoolyard game and play songs sung by local black children in Los Angeles. Shot on two 16mm cameras with a single mic, Hawes and her collaborators shot the film on the playground of a local elementary school. Titled after one of the songs, “Pizza Pizza Daddy-O,” the film features a dozen black girls in the 4th grade playing and singing eight distinct song-games. Many of these songs were collected and analyzed by Hawes’s students from various other neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles. Title card from Spring 1969 student, Hilda Lerner’s, study entitled “Tuning in to the Black Child’s Play,” Box 18, Folder 32. One study, carried out by student Hilda Lerner on a group of school children in Pacoima, argued that these play songs were a tool for young black girls to help develop their own sense of self-concept while practicing group cooperation and cohesion. In particular, Lerner found the song “This Way Valerie,” to be a way the girls expressed their individual identities, as the game requires each girl to walk in between two parallel lines formed by their peers in a unique strut as they sing. The popular circle game “Pizza Pizza Daddy-O,” was found and collected by multiple students and, in one collection, a student found that the game encouraged children to work collaboratively and take turns assuming roles of leadership and direction.

In addition to children’s games, Hawes and her students collected blues, spiritual, religious, and other songs from the Los Angeles’s black community. However, the value of these reports is not only in the transcription of the songs alone but also in the memories and impressions surrounding these songs by the informants who chose to share them with Hawes and her students. In this way, the collection treats these traditions as more than just objects to be collected to serve the purposes of academia, but also as a way to honor and preserve the communities that keep them alive.