August 19, 1940: Alan Lomax's "Back Where I Came From" Premieres

August 19, 1940: Back Where I Came From premieres on CBS radio, hosted by Alan Lomax. Despite its success and high visibility, it never picked up a commercial sponsor. The show ran for only 21 weeks before it was suddenly canceled in February 1941.

On hearing the news, folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote Lomax from California, "Too honest again, I suppose? Maybe not purty enough. O well, this country's a getting to where it can't hear its own voice. Someday the deal will change."

Lomax himself wrote that in all his work he had tried to capture "the seemingly incoherent diversity of American folk song as an expression of its democratic, inter-racial, international character, as a function of its inchoate and turbulent many-sided development."

Lomax was born on January 31, 1915 in Austin, Texas. He went around America in the 1930s, and collected hundreds of folk songs, including white people's country music and black people's blues music, recording them for posterity, and perhaps saving them from being lost. He broadcast many of those recordings on his show, and donated them to the Library of Congress, where they have been protected.

This matches a point recently made by Cracked.com, only the humor website was being dead serious about it: 99 percent of all the musical pieces ever written have been lost.

We don't know what cavemen sang when they invented song. We don't know what music the psalms of King David were set to. We don't know what songs were sung by the laborers of ancient Egypt or the philosophers of Greece and Rome. We don't know the marching songs of the soldiers of King Arthur or Charlemagne or Genghis Khan. We know much of the poetry of Shakespeare's time (including his own), but we don't know the equivalent of the "hit parade" or the "Top 40" of Elizabethan England or the Russia of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, of Revolutionary America or Napoleonic France.

But thanks to Alan Lomax and his sometimes partner, John Henry Faulk, we know some of the oldest songs sung in America, by white people and black people alike. The recordings they made, long in the custody of the Library of Congress, are priceless.

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August 19, 1940 was a Monday. Singers Johnny Nash and Roger Cook, and actress Jill St. John, were born.

These 3 baseball games were played:

* The New York Giants beat the Cincinnati Reds, 9-2 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Mel Ott hit a home run, and Carl Hubbell outpitched Paul Derringer. The Reds went on to win the World Series, anyway.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Cleveland Indians, 16-7 at Fenway Park in Boston. Jimmie Foxx, Ted Williams and Jim Tabor hit home runs.

* And the Boston Bees beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 3-0 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Dick Errickson allowed 9 hits, but kept the shutout. This was the last of 5 seasons under the Bees name for the Boston franchise of the National League. The next year, they went back to being called the Boston Braves.