Lawrence Gellert (1898-1979?), was a music collector, who in the 1920s and 1930s amassed a significant collection of field-recorded African-American blues and spirituals and also claimed to have documented black protest traditions in the South of the United States.
Background
Lawrence Gellert was born László Grünbaum on September 14, 1898, in Budapest, Hungary. He came to America at the age of seven and grew up in New York City. His mother was Katica Schwartz, while his father was Ábrahám Grünbaum, was a skilled craftsman (tailor) by trade. Both parents were ethnically Jewish, but Lawrence's mother had converted to Catholicism while in Hungary and remained devoutly Christian all her life. The Grünbaum family had left Hungary in part to keep their five sons from being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. Lawrence's oldest brother, Hugo Gellert, was accepted into Cooper Union as an art student, won a scholarship to study in Paris, and was soon doing illustrations for The New York Times and later, The New Yorker. When Hugo adopted the surname "Gellert" after a Hungarian Catholic saint who had championed the poor, the family followed suit. When the United States entered World War I, another brother, Ernest (a pacifist and conscientious objector) received a 10-years sentence to a military prison in New Jersey. One morning in March 1918, Ernest was found dead in his cell of a gunshot wound to the head. This was a hugely traumatic event for the family, who were certain Ernest had been tormented and then murdered by the guards. The newspapers reported Ernest's death as a suicide. Hugo Gellert, an impassioned anti-militarist, had fled to Mexico for the duration of the war.
Career
Lawrence Gellert's education was spotty and he dropped out of high school after attending briefly. During the 1920s he found work on a newspaper but was stricken with lung and rib infections and possibly also suffered a mental breakdown. On the advice of his doctors, he maintained, he moved around 1924 to Tryon, North Carolina, in an attempt to recover his health, having originally intended to go to Florida. In Tryon he found friends, joined an amateur theater group, and at some point began writing down the words of African American spirituals and then making audio recording of them, using at first a makeshift, wind-up recording machine and paper-backed zinc discs (now inaudible), and, after 1930, a Presto disc recorder. Gellert's biographer, Bruce Conforth, relates that contrary to what has been written elsewhere, Gellert, who was fascinated with the striking beauty, especially, of African American religious music, was "very slow" to become interested in issues of racial justice and equality and was only pushed into it by his brother Hugo.
Folk song collecting
From 1933 to 1937 Gellert was back in New York City but made short trips through North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, collecting folksongs of black Americans. At one point, Gellert's automobile was "allegedly known as 'Larry's Nigger Hoo Doo Shack on Wheels'."