The Celestial Monochord

The Illinois-Wisconsin Border

St. John's church, Christmas Day 2000
Johnsburg, Illinois

 

Tom Waits doesn't release songs like Day After Tomorrow, which is one reason people listened so closely when it appeared on his 2004 album, Real Gone.

The song's narrator is a 21-year-old combat soldier on a battlefield where he sees himself like "the gravel on the road," like an expendable resource in someone else's project.

It's what we might call a protest song, which is not Tom Waits' style. When the morning newspaper appears in a Tom Waits song, it's usually to complete a still life with eggs and weak coffee. But Day After Tomorrow is a beautiful anit-war song — politically disheartening, spiritually uplifting, and about as moving as anything Waits has ever done.

Like me, the narrator-soldier of Day After Tomorrow is from northern Illinois:

I got your letter today
And I miss you all so much here
I can't wait to see you all
And I'm counting the days, dear
I still believe that there's gold
At the end of the world
And I'll come home to Illinois
On the day after tomorrow

It is so hard
And it's cold here
And I'm tired of taking orders
And I miss old Rockford town
Up by the Wisconsin border
What I miss you won't believe
Shoveling snow and raking leaves
And my plane will touch down
On the day after tomorrow

On my first listening, the "Wisconsin border" passage clunked in my ears. For one thing, "Rockford-town" isn't an expression I'd ever heard, and the song doesn't tell us anything about Rockford beyond what can be guessed from Google Maps.

So, the soldier's hometown seemed to lack credibility, a little as if a blues song had referred to Avalon, Mississippi as "an unincorporated community in the extreme northwest corner of Carroll County, part of the Greenwood Mississippi Micropolitan Statistical Area." The soldier seemed to have a wikipedic knowledge of his own hometown.

Of course, on my second listening, I remembered that Waits' wife, Kathleen Brennan, grew up in Johnsburg, Illinois, which is close to Rockford and even closer to my own home town. Since the early 1980's — and increasingly, as time goes on — Waits and Brennan have worked as a team under the name "Tom Waits," much as Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have said that they are a band called "Gillian Welch."

So, thinking of the lines as having been written by an Illinoisan subtly changes the meaning of the words. If I and my family are any measure, referring to a town "up by the Wisconsin border" carries a meaning and significance you can't read off a map.

When I was a college boy in Tucson, Arizona, I went to at least a hundred poetry readings, including perhaps a half-dozen readings by a poet named Alberto Álvaro Ríos. Each time, he would tell the same old story about growing up in Nogales and playing a childish game of walking in two countries at once — literally, one foot in the USA, one foot in Mexico.

I quickly grew tired of the story. So what? So you grew up in a town that straddled the border! Today, of course, I'm able to see a significance I'd mostly missed as a callow youth. The border really does matter, even if it hadn't mattered much to me at the time.

Kathleen Brennan is from just this side of a border, a place where someplace else is always just over the horizon. Maybe such people know exactly where to locate their mythological worlds — over on the other side. Maybe they also tend to know exactly where myths are sorely lacking — here on this side.

So, in Day after Tomorrow, Waits and Brennan's soldier suddenly finds himself thinking of his hometown, old Rockford town, as if it were that mythical world on the other side of the border. He's displaced alright. His folks back home wouldn't believe how shoveling snow and raking leaves now seem to him like that gold at the end of the world.

It might seem funny that anyone would think of Wisconsin as a default location for some kind of Valhalla. I can't speak for Kathleen Brennan, rather obviously, but when I was growing up in Illinois, my family always had Wisconsin on its mind in a way. Not Indiana or Iowa, but Wisconsin.

For one thing, my parents were from there — they met during WWII while bowling in downtown Milwaukee. They still had siblings in Wisconsin towns both very large and very small. Even for those of us born in Illinois, going to Wisconsin was driving "back" as much as driving "up."

Mostly, we went back for holidays, weddings, and funerals. As a result, my parents' respective home towns seemed like bizarro worlds where people spent every day of their entire lives wearing clip-on ties, going to lengthy Catholic services, and then getting ecstatically drunk. In my mind's eye, John Prine's Wedding Day in Funeralville is always obviously about those places.

It's wedding day in Funeralville
Your soup spoon's on your right
The King and Queen will alternate
With the refrigerator light
There'll be boxing on the TV show
The colored kid will sing
Hooray for you
And midnight's oil
Lets burn the whole damn thing

Wisconsinites know about Illinoisans crossing the border to party. They were called FIBs (F**king Illinois Bastards). FIBs were known for driving drunk, littering, and being loud and disorderly — even more so on all counts than native Wisconsinites.

Once, a relative was bitterly complaining about FIBs, so I pointed out that the airwaves in Illinois were fully saturated with appeals to Escape to Wisconsin — constantly. Every Illinoisan who crossed the border was awarded an Escape to Wisconsin bumpersticker and encouraged to hurry back. He should, I said, contact his own state government about their success in attracting us FIBs ... his face took on a vivd expression of disillusionment.

I felt very uncomfortable about being seen as an outsider when my veins flowed with so much German-Catholic Wisconsin beer ... I mean, blood ... and when my mind was so invested in my Wisconsin roots. Like Alberto Álvaro Ríos, my family and I never quite got beyond straddling that border, growing up in two places at once.

John Prine's song "Lake Marie" is about a character like that — his body on the border, his mind so swimming with that border's past and present that it orders his world.

It's a very weird song, almost a nonsense song, that makes sense on a level no other song makes sense. The song has a mysterious power to make you hit the repeat button over and over and over again, endlessly. I suspect that power might derive from the song's evocation of place — it conjures the experience of occupying that particular borderland in a way you never thought possible.

For one thing, it confuses its facts as only someone thus conflicted can confuse them. Its inaccuracy is authentic.

Many years ago along the Illinois-Wisconsin Border
There was this Indian tribe
They found two babies in the woods
— white babies
One of them was named Elizabeth
She was the fairer of the two
While the smaller and more fragile one was named Marie
Having never seen white girls before
— and living on the two lakes known as the Twin Lakes —
They named the larger and more beautiful lake Lake Elizabeth
And thus the smaller lake that was hidden from the highway
Became known forever as Lake Marie

I see now that the song is apparently about Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, which was founded by a family that did indeed have twins — Elizabeth and Mary. But the twins were never abandoned to the Indians.

But two white sisters were held by a group of Potawatomi Indians in 1832 — one of the most famous and influential incidents in the nasty, confused series of massacres and skirmishes known today as the Black Hawk War. Both pairs of sisters lived within about a 10-mile radius of Johnsburg, Illinois.

It's troubling how little the schools I attended taught me about the pre-European history of this place so full of Native-American-derived place names, as well as cigar-store-Indian kitsch. But those place names and that kitsch and the beauty of the Wisconsin landscape swam around in my head my entire life.

John Prine's "this Indian tribe," who named lakes according to how well they could be seen from the highway, gets it exactly right. There was no telling how long ago any of this history happened, or whether it really happened at all, or whether it ever even stopped happening.

Later in the song, the Black Hawk War is somehow seen, if not quite recognized, on the evening news in the work of European settlers like Illinoisan John Wayne Gacy and Wisconsinite Jeffry Dahmer.

The dogs were barking as the cars were parking
The loan sharks were sharking, the narcs were narcing
Practically everyone was there
In the parking lot by the forest preserve
The police had found two bodies
Nay! Naked bodies!
Their faces had been horribly disfigured by some sssssharp object
Saw it on the news
In the TV news
In a black and white video —
You know what blood looks like in a black and white video?
Shadows. SHADOWS!
That's what it looks like

It's already been a quarter century since Tom Waits wrote the song "Johnsburg, Illinois". Back then, Brennan and Johnsburg were new to Waits, comparatively, and Brennan didn't yet have the kind of intimate involvement in the writing that she does today. Well, that's what I gather anyway.

Waits seems to have deliberately painted Johnsburg as a place that exists mostly in his imagination — the kind of Midwestern farming community any Californian might imagine. He plays a character who can't tell the woman from the photo, the community from the Rockwell painting.

She's my only true love
She's all that I think of
Look here, in my wallet — that's her

She grew up on a farm there
There's a place on my arm where
I've written her name next to mine

It's almost a joke, inviting us to say "No, that's a PICTURE of her." Through the song, just like the photo in his wallet, he's showing us the image of her that he carries around with him.

Of course, it could very well be that this confusion between the person, or town, and their image is what romance is all about. Who the hell wouldn't want such a song written for them? And what chamber of commerce wouldn't thank a writer for naming such a song after its town?

At that stage in Tom Waits' career, Johnsburg is not yet really recognizable. It's not Brennan's Johnsburg — the sleepy little grid of streets, the town here on this commonplace side of the border. After all, she didn't write the song. For that matter, she hasn't tattooed HER OWN name into his body. He has marked himself with his own understanding of her.

In a sense, the soldier in that oversees war in Day After Tomorrow has gone from thinking of his hometown as a resident would to thinking of it as an outsider might. The war experience has transformed him from a resident of the border town, like Brennan, to a dreamer of a mythical place, like the Waits of 25 years ago.

 

Look for the Silver Lining

I've been working long hours on a ridiculously long entry, but I can't quite get it "out there" just yet.

But aren't blogs about "what I happen to be thinking tonight" anyway? Aren't they? So while we're waiting for that ridiculous masterpiece, here's what I'm thinking tonight.

I've been listening to CDs from Archeophone lately.

Going into the Moonshiner's Dance project, I knew more about southern Appalachian tunes for banjo and fiddle than anything else. Now, as I do my research on that Minnesota oompah record, I've often suffered from a lack of context.

That's why, over the past two years, I've looked for ways to boost my familiarity with popular music that's both pre-Moonshiner's Dance and not necessarily from the South.

For one thing, my CD collection has taken on things like Jewface, and Avenue A to the Great White Way, and Archeophone, Archeophone, Archeophone.

The 1921 edition of Archeophone's yearbook series includes Marion Harris singing "Look for the Silver Lining." It turns out to be a bone-crushingly sad song, despite the encouragement it supposedly provides. It pretends to offer advice on how to keep the spirits up, but leaves you a sniveling heap instead.

Of course, I was reminded of the original Carter Family's signature song, "Keep on the Sunny Side." Its modus operandi is identical — while encouraging you, listener, to turn away from your troubles, it only emphasizes them and the pathos of your trying to soldier through them.

Archeophone's 1922 yearbook includes Al Jolson singing "April Flowers."

(Someday, I may write a post that asks the sticky question, "Al Jolson: Crap?" Anybody want to be a guest blogger on that?)

In any case, "April Flowers" proceeds in very much the same way, and was an attempt to duplicate the smash success of "Look for the Silver Lining."

Archeophone's inclusion of a rewriting of "Silver Lining" leaves me with the impression that "Keep on the Sunny Side" too was probably an attempt to score a hit by following a previous hit's blueprint. If that's the case, it was a hugely successful attempt, both commercially and artistically.

The book Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone portrays AP Carter as struggling, struggling, always struggling to come up with new material for Sara and Maybelle to perform — he was like a Brill Building songwriter without the benefit of a building full of brilliant creative people from whom to draw ideas and inspiration and a spirit of competition.

The Carter Family was as much a commercial act as it was a folk act — or better, they expose how wrong-headed the distinction can often be.

Another thing I hear in "Look for the Silver Lining" — in fact, for the first few listenings, it's the only thing I can hear — is "Look for the Union Label," the stirring theme song in 1970's commercials sponsored by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

Marion Harris gave the melodic lines of "Silver Lining" lovely little paisley swirls and seagull dips befitting a great 1921 pop song. It seems "Union Label" took the tune and straightened it out and squared it off to serve as a rousing union sing-along.

As I say, "Silver Lining" outwardly keeps a stiff upper lip, but inside, it's a song almost entirely lacking in hope for the future. So I don't know if this was the right tune to borrow — union membership has crashed through the floor and Americans now buy foreign goods with such fervor that you'd think it was the American-made toys that were dripping with lead. Look for the lead lining?

It's doubtful that I'm the first to consider most of this. That ridiculously long post? Now THAT nobody's ever thought of before. But this is here, and that isn't. No wonder blogs are always about what you happen to be thinking tonight.

 

Louis Armstrong in Minnesota, 1939

used by permission of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
and the Minnesota Historical Society

 

As a side trip from my regular research, I've spent a week or so of evenings and weekends looking into the facts surrounding Louis Armstrong's appearance at the Coliseum Ballroom in St. Paul on Friday night, July 28, 1939. Please forgive any errors, and let me know what you think.

The 1939 show was advertised as Armstrong's first appearance in the Twin Cities — a point repeatedly stressed in the twin African American newspapers, the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder.

But he might also have appeared in Minneapolis in the spring of 1931. That earlier show is mentioned in Jones and Chilton's Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, but I haven't been able to confirm it despite a grueling newspaper search.

Regardless, today we know Armstrong had visited the Twin Cities about 20 years earlier. From 1918 to 1921, he'd played for the Streckfus line of riverboats — paddle-wheelers that were still (or already) trading on nostalgia for the Mississippi's 19th Century heyday with picturesque excursions up and down the river. That's the gig that brought Armstrong through St. Paul and Minneapolis for the first time.

For Armstrong, then, his 1939 appearance in Minnesota might have been a kind of nostalgic excursion of his own.

The Coliseum

One of the only facts you might still hear about the Coliseum Ballroom is that a lot of famous acts played there — Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Jack Teagarden, Ben Pollack, Lawrence Welk, the Andrews Sisters.

During its 38 years, the Coliseum was a quirky, unavoidable, and irreplaceable center of St. Paul's night life, love life, and imagination. It's rarely remembered today, but Garrison Keillor provided a gratifying exception a few months ago, 22 minutes into a speech for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

I began thinking about the Coliseum two years ago, on my first day researching the Victoria Cafe, the orchestra of which recorded the strange "Moonshiner's Dance," which eventually found its way onto Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.

It turned out that the leader of the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, Frank Cloutier, later acted as the leader of the house orchestra of the Coliseum, four blocks to the Cafe's west. He stayed there for thirteen years (1929-1942).

It must have been a good gig. The Coliseum boasted the world's largest dance floor, and offered $100 to anyone who could prove otherwise. Its floor was a rebuilt hockey rink with a 250 x 90-foot playing surface, so a packed house at the Coliseum Ballroom could mean more than 3000 dancers at one time. Leading the Coliseum Orchestra regularly brought Frank Cloutier to the radio all across the Midwest.

The Coliseum's owner — the husky, gregarious, and scrappy John J. Lane — was widely known as "The Musician's Friend." He was also a Ramsey County commissioner at the time Frank Cloutier took the job.

Satchmo Returns Triumphant

In the late 1930's, national fame had only just come to Louis Armstrong.

A front page article in the African-American weekly Spokesman-Recorder credited Armstrong's sudden wave of popularity to his film appearances. An ad featured a photo of Armstrong goofing around with Bing Crosby.

And indeed, in 1936, Armstrong had played a fairly substantial role in Crosby's Pennies From Heaven. The next year, he was in both the Jack Benny musical comedy Artists and Models and Mae West's Every Day's A Holiday. In 1938, Armstrong sang "Jeepers Creepers" to a horse in Going Places, with Dick Powell, Anita Louise, and Ronald Reagan. A New York Times film critic didn't think much of Going Places, but it left him wanting more of Satchmo.

On the day of the Twin Cities show, a wry editorial in the Spokesman-Recorder described how Walter Winchell himself, "the 'Patron Saint' of many an American column reader," had declared Louis Armstrong the King of Swing. The paper seemed to almost grudgingly agree that Armstrong "has brought something to modern music that defies definition, and reams of paper and tons of ink have been used trying to describe it."

Jazz was now being taken seriously as an art form and scholarly work had begun to appear about it. Scarcely three months after his show in St. Paul, Armstrong appeared at Manhattan's enormous Center Theater portraying Bottom in Swingin' The Dream, a jazz adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Benny Goodman co-starred, and Walt Disney designed the sets.

Things To Do Around The Twin Cities

There were plenty of other things to do around town without paying 80 cents to see Louis Armstrong on that clear, mild summer night.

Several area theaters were showing Dark Victory with Bette Davis for 25 cents. Or you could see Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, and Ann Sheridan in Dodge City, or the W. C. Fields comedy You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, with Edgar Bergen and the somewhat wooden Charlie McCarthy.

Alternately, there was the "Melodies Around The World" ice show at the St. Paul Auditorium — 25 cents in the bleachers, 50 cents to sit at a table. The Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus wasn't scheduled to arrive for another week.

And the Streckfus line ran the paddle-wheel steamer Capitol out of the dock at the foot of Jackson Street. You could take day trips down to the lock and dam at Hastings, or one of the "moonlight dance trips" leaving every night at 9:00 pm. Armstrong had worked on the Capitol in his youth — there's even a 1919 photo of him aboard that boat.

So far, I don't see that the Streckfus excursions were racially segregated in Minnesota in 1939 as they had been elsewhere, before and long after. Maybe, while he was in town for the Coliseum show, Armstrong could have taken a ride on the Capitol, this time as a passenger. Nor do I know for sure if the idea would have appealed to him.

In spite of these other temptations, the 1939 appearance was a rare opportunity for Twin Cities jazz fans. It was their chance not only to see Louis Armstrong, but also to vote with their dollars. On the day of the show, an editorial in the Spokesman-Recorder stated:

Somewhat off the beat theatrically, the Twin Cities seldom have an opportunity to see and hear internationally known Negro artists. When they do come along, we think we should support them.

The week after the show, the Spokesman-Recorder reminded its readers how lucky they were to have Armstrong play here.

In St. Louis, where there are 100,000 Negroes to draw a crowd from, the Missourians pay $1.10 to hear the same band Twin Citians heard for 80 cents.

It must have helped that jazz, and Armstrong in particular, had a fast-growing white audience nationwide — the 1940 census found fewer than 9000 African Americans in Minneapolis and St. Paul combined.

The Trio Club

The 1939 concert was sponsored by either the Trio Club or the Tri Club, depending on whether you believe a news article in the Spokesman-Recorder or ads appearing on the day of the show in St. Paul's mainstream papers. A Spokesman-Recorder columnist describes the club as "three St. Paul men who invested several hundred dollars."

Beyond that, I don't know much about the Tri or Trio Club. There's no entry for them in the 1939 St. Paul city directory — either in the yellow or the white pages, as we would say today — and my search of the records of Minnesota's Secretary of State showed no clear sign that they ever incorporated.

The Spokesman-Recorder did report that the three investors barely made a profit from Armstrong's appearance, thanks to a rumor circulating prior to the show.

Rumor Cuts Attendance

A thousand people saw Armstrong at the Coliseum that night, according to a follow-up article in the August 4 Spokesman-Recorder. Hundreds more would have attended, had it not been for an apparent act of sabotage:

Some irresponsible individual several days before the date of the dance spread the rumor that the Armstrong band would not appear. Attempts are being made to ascertain the guilty party.

On the day of the show, the Spokesman offices in Minneapolis and Recorder offices in St. Paul got more than 100 calls from people trying to find out if the show was really canceled.

We'll never know the motives behind the rumor. For me, the natural hunch would be racism and an accompanying hatred of jazz, although whatever I know about that isn't very specific to late 1930's Minnesota.

Certainly, Armstrong's sudden fame must have made his shows an obvious target for reactionaries along the tour's route. And two years earlier, a scene in Artists and Models with Martha Raye had drawn controversy for its hints that Armstrong's trumpet made the white actress horny.

Closer to home, I can say that 16 years earlier, the St. Paul musicians union experienced friction over the popularity of jazz, and I've stumbled upon a series of 1927 news articles detailing Klu Klux Klan meetings about a mile east of the Coliseum. These sightings seem underscored — literally — by a note appearing immediately below the Spokesman's article about the cancellation rumor. It reports that The Minneapolis Star, a major paper, had used the word "pickaninny" on its front page a few days before.

So it's interesting that the Coliseum's owner, John J. Lane, had a strong ethic of tolerance, according to his daughter: "there was no color line in our house, we had Fats [Waller] over for dinner." Lane often loaned the Coliseum free of charge to organizations needing a place to hold fund-raisers — the musicians union, the Knights of Columbus, the Urban League, the B'nai B'rith. Probably, he called in these favors during his successful bid for County Commissioner in 1926 and his abandoned campaign in 1938.

All this being said, in my experience, the "natural hunch" about history is usually wrong. I simply don't know why the rumor started. Maybe the Tri or Trio Club had enemies I haven't imagined. Certainly, John J. Lane had both friends and enemies in many walks of life, accumulated during his decades-long, high-profile life in the politics and commerce of the Twin Cities. One of Lane's other nightclubs had even been bombed by mobsters a decade earlier.

Armstrong on the Coliseum Stage

So far as I know, there are no detailed accounts of Armstrong's show that night, but I've pieced together a few clues.

Identical ads in two of St. Paul's mainstream papers on July 28 claimed that the "Trumpet King of Swing" would be backed by "17 Swing Artists."

The Spokesman-Recorder repeatedly promised Luis Russell — an arranger and pianist, and a pioneer of "swing" who led the band that Armstrong was indeed working with at the time. Also mentioned is the innovative trumpet player Henry "Red" Allen. This squares, so far as it goes, with the personnel for Armstrong's 1939 recording sessions for Decca, including those in New York on June 15 and December 18:

piano and arrangements: Luis Russell
trumpet: Shelton Hemphill, Otis Johnson, Henry Allen
trombone: Wilbur de Paris, Geo. Washington, J.C. Higginbotham
clarinet and alto sax: Rupert Cole, Charlie Holmes
tenor sax: Joe Garland, Bingie Madison
guitar: Lee Blair
string bass: Pops Foster
drums: Sidney Catlett

But the Spokesman-Recorder also names three other veterans of Luis Russell's band. One of the great jazz drummers, Paul Barbarin, was presumably touring in place of Sidney Catlett. There was also the "romantic tenor" vocalist Sonny Woods, and two articles mention the "petite song stylist" and "torch singer" Midge Williams — little remembered today, but a much-admired, rising radio star at the time.

The number of backing musicians listed for the Decca recordings, plus Woods and Williams and Armstrong himself = 17, the number of swing artists given in the July 28 ad in the major papers.

The following week, a columnist for the Spokesman-Recorder wished "a million scallions" to the rumor monger who cut attendance, but wished orchids for the audience that did attend, which he found refreshingly peaceable. "Maybe the presence of one of Chief Hackert's skull-busters had something to do with it, but we think not." Brawls and other unseemly behavior appeared to be going out of style, the columnist said. Another follow-up article in the Spokesman-Recorder comes to a trustworthy conclusion:

Armstrong Great Showman

Armstrong gave the crowd its money's worth and the people left the Lexington Avenue dance palace in good humor feeling that they had enjoyed a treat.

— — —

Thanks

Thanks to the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder — this year celebrating its 75th anniversary — for kind permission to reprint the article at top.

The excellent staff of the library at the Minnesota History Center is forever essential to my work. Thanks also to the Minneapolis Public Library, and the University of Minnesota's Wilson and Music Libraries.

My wife Jenny is unbelievably kind and patient, as you might imagine.

Selected References — More Than Any Other Blog!

St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 28, 1939 ad "Tri Club Presents Louis Armstrong" and "Moonlight Dance Trips" p. 9

St. Paul Dispatch, July 28, 1939 ad "Tri Club Presents Louis Armstrong" p. 8

"Moonlight Dance Trips" and other ads for rides on the Capitol were ubiquitous in the warm seasons of 1939 in the Twin Cities. The one above happens to be from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 28, 1939, from the University of Minnesota newspaper collections.

Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, 1939:

— July 21 "Louis 'Satchmo' Armstrong Coming to Coliseum Ballroom, Friday, July 28" p 1
— July 21 ad with Crosby/Armstrong photo, p 3
— July 28 "Louis Armstrong and Band Play at the Coliseum Ballroom Tonight for Swing Fans" p 1
— July 28 "Hear a Noted Artist Tonight" p 2
— Aug 4 "Crowd Applauds Louis Armstrong Band; Rumor Cuts Attendance" p 1
— Aug 4 "Twin Town Talk" p 4

Bergreen, Laurence. 1997. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life. Broadway Books.

Jones, Max, and Chilton, John. 1988. Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, 1900-1971. Da Capo.

Kenney, William Howland. 2005. Jazz on the River. U of Chicago.

Maccabee, Paul. 1981-1995. Research collection for John Dillinger Slept Here. MN Historical Soc. library.

Rust, Brian A. L. 1978. Jazz Records, 1897-1942. Arlington House Publishers.

 

Interview with Arlo Leach

The Hump Night Thumpers (with Arlo Leach, singing at right)
Battle of the Jug Bands, Minneapolis, 2007

 

Arlo Leach is a musician, songwriter, and the leader of The Hump Night Thumpers, a class in jug band music at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music. The class also acts as a gig-performing band.

The Thumpers won the 2007 Battle of the Jug Bands, an annual competitive goof held in Minneapolis. The Battle's traveling trophy, a 1936 Holliwood-brand waffle iron, has been proudly displayed at the Old Town for the past year.

The winning band also chooses the next year's judges, and Arlo responded positively to my incessant whining impressive application to be a judge at this year's competition. YESSSS! The Celestial Monochord will help choose the winner of the 2008 Battle, which is this Sunday, February 10 at the Cabooze Bar.

I fired questions at Arlo in one email, and he fired back answers in another. Many sincere thanks to him.

— — —

CM: Your year as keeper of the waffle iron is coming to an end. How does it feel to be handing it over to the next winner?

AL: We tend to take our performances pretty seriously, so it's actually a relief to know that a repeat victory is basically prohibited. We're going to be a lot more relaxed and I'm looking forward to just enjoying a whole day of jug band music ... a unique opportunity.

CM: Was there a ticker tape parade down State Street when you came back home with the waffle iron? What did the people at Old Town say?

AL: As the instructor of the class that is the Hump Night Thumpers, my credibility went way up! Everyone at the school was excited and I received spontaneous applause at staff meetings and performances for weeks. The school has a monthly First Friday event, and at the next First Friday, we hosted a jam session and served free waffles to all participants. I don't think the Battle organizers realize just how excited we all were about this!

CM: It took me a while to understand what the heck your band, the Hump Night Thumpers, really is. How did it get started?

AL: The Old Town School is really great about letting teachers try out new classes, so I offered to teach a class on the Anthology of American Folk Music. To my surprise, nobody seemed to know what that was and the class wasn't very successful. After a few sessions, I suggested focusing on just one style of music from the Anthology — jug band music — and we had an instant success. The class has been running for three years now and it's sold out most sessions. I guess there was a lot of pent-up demand for jug band music here.

CM: Why jug band music? Why don't you teach something else?

AL: I also teach general guitar classes at the school, but my motivation for teaching music is that I want to give people a creative outlet. Jug band music is much more accessible, so rather than spending months and years learning to play guitar, you can jump right in with a kazoo and join the band.

CM: What's your teaching method? If I signed up to be a Hump Night Thumper, what would I experience?

AL: I have some warm and outgoing students who really make the class what it is. As soon as a new person walks in the room, someone hands them an instrument, and someone else gives them tips on how to play it. We find a song they'd like to sing; they get a nickname; pretty soon they're up on stage at one of our gigs. I supply the songs and give direction on arrangements, but the other students provide the momentum that makes the class so fun.

CM: Do you use the one-room schoolhouse model, where the more knowledgeable kids teach the less experienced? Is it tough to decide when to intervene in what's happening?

AL: This is the third question in a row where you anticipated my answer from the previous question! Yes, that's the model. The only problem is that new people might find it hard to learn new instruments, and I like everyone to play a variety of instruments. So, we started an introductory class where I could focus on the playing technique for each of the instruments before students joined the main group ... but that wasn't very successful and we dropped it. In the big class, I'm not able to provide much one-on-one help, but we'll stop and focus on different things from time to time.

CM: I imagine different classes have different personalities. I certainly hear a lot of different textures in the Hump Night Thumper CD, Hare of the Jug. It's a varied collection.

AL: Actually, the overall tone of the class has been the same, but we've had some unique individuals in the group. The Members page at humpnightthumpers.com will give you an idea. Also, some of the songs have been sung by different people over the years, and it's fun to see what style different people put into the songs. That CD was recorded over two years with something like 20 different members.

CM: What's it like to bring the Hump Night Thumpers to Minneapolis for the Battle of the Jug Bands? That must be quite an expedition!

AL: We all leave the same place and arrive at the same place but by different routes! Some will fly and some will drive; some will go up and back the same day and others will make a vacation of it. My wife and I have friends that we'll stay with, so I haven't paid much attention to the logistics for the others, but they'll be there with their sequins and bow ties.

It's funny, by the way: we first heard about the Battle of the Jug Bands about a week before the event three years ago, when our class had just started. Everyone immediately wanted to go! At that time it was too late to register, but when it came around again the next year we were all over it. Going to Minneapolis in February is not a small undertaking, but I love how enthusiastic these folks are. Have jug, will travel.

CM: You're teaching jugband music at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music. I picture a lot of ghosts listening in — and not just the 60's and 70's, but the 20's and 30's, and beyond. What do you think about that? You make it part of the Humpnighter's experience, don't you?

AL: For me, jug band music is all about the 20's and 30's, and I love finding stories about the original musicians and sharing them with the class. Also, jug band music is a small niche, so it's been fairly easy to meet the experts in the field and pick up stories from them. I'm just trying to collect all the knowledge I can because I love the music and the history so much.

CM: Among the many photos included with the Hare of the Jug CD is one of you standing next to Gus Cannon's grave. I love that. Tell me about that photo.

AL: I think it's kind of a blues fan tradition to try finding the graves of your blues heroes, so a couple years ago I made an expedition to Memphis to find a handful of jug band musicians. I had known about Cannon's grave because Del Goldfarb organized a fundraiser about ten years ago to add a larger gravestone. He gave me directions, although it still wasn't easy to find! Now you can zoom right in on a Google map I set up.

That trip is when I learned, by the way, that Will Shade is buried in an unmarked grave in a pauper's cemetery. That inspired my own gravestone benefit project, which is well underway and will conclude with a ceremony in Memphis in April or May. You can read more about that at www.willshadetribute.com.

CM: I've enjoyed your disc Show Biz, about being a struggling singer-songwriter. You already sound like an old hand — there's a lot of long hours of thought in that CD. What's it like to think about Show Biz today, a decade down the road?

AL: I tend to look at my previous work and think, "Oh man, that is so amateur," so I'm glad you liked it! In a way, the Ancestors CD is the flip side of that, because Show Biz was about trying to become a professional performer, and Ancestors was about realizing that you can make a lot of great music without giving up your day job. It was a good experience to spend a few years plugging myself and trying to make a career of it, but now my interest in music is to learn and get better, rather than to make money somehow.

CM: Your CD Music of My Ancestors is partly a response to The Anthology of American Folk Music. Obviously, so is The Celestial Monochord. When did you first hear Harry Smith's anthology?

AL: I was reading a lot about Dylan and kept hearing references to the Anthology, so I finally ordered a copy and was instantly blown away. I'd heard pre-war music before, here and there, but this was such a great collection that I lost interest in my own stuff. I just wanted to play "Peg and Awl" at every gig! I still laugh when I read those little headlines in Harry Smith's liner notes. What a treasure.

CM: You must have had a deep history with folk music growing up — your parents named you after Guthrie, after all. So, did the Anthology influence you beyond what you heard growing up? What did it teach you that didn't already know?

AL: I was brought up on Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran, with a little Dylan and Joan Baez thrown in, but I didn't have access to this earlier music for a long time. The pre-war music is a paradox, though. On the one hand, it seems ancient, from another era; but it's actually just a few decades earlier than Buddy Holly. I haven't wrapped my head around that yet, but I think it's easy to romanticize this distant time and forget that maybe things weren't that different then. The book Escaping the Delta addresses this topic a bit, by the way.

CM: Music of My Ancestors really looks the anthology right in the eye, responds to it directly. It seems to have come out of a lot of sincerely affectionate, playful time spent with the Anthology and its genres. Anyway, that what it sounds like, and I really enjoy that CD. Tell me about why you made this CD. What came out of it for you?

AL: I was so uninterested in my own music after hearing the Anthology that the Ancestors project was a compromise. It allowed me to keep songwriting, while also indulging in this new interest. My interest in original music has continued to wane, though, and now I'm playing virtually nothing but jug band music. The stuff is addictive.

I'm actually planning to record some replicas of the classic jug band recordings, not for release, just for private study. Learning to play, and especially learning to record, definitely enhances your enjoyment of the music.

CM: What's next for you? And what's next for the Hump Night Thumpers?

AL: Will Shade! In Memphis! April 2008! You should come!

 

The Devil in the White City

 

... all his stories are decorated with flamboyant draperies, intended by him to strengthen the plausibility of this statements. In talking, he has the appearance of candor, becomes pathetic at times when pathos will serve him best, uttering his words with a quaver in his voice, often accompanied by a moistened eye, then turning quickly with a determined and forceful method of speech, as if indignation or resolution had sprung out of tender memories that has touched his heart.

This is a police detective's description of H. H. Holmes, the masterful liar and serial murderer of Erik Larson's book — one of the devils in his white city. The description comes late in the book, by which time it comes off as a wonderfully perverse joke shared between Larson and you, the reader who has by now come to think of Larson in exactly these terms. Larson is a very slippery and hypnotic liar. Like the guards who mourn when Holmes is executed for his murders, you wish Larson could go on lying to you much longer than he does.

Larson's misdeeds are not serious, and I probably care about them only because of my own struggle to learn the lost details behind The Moonshiner's Dance. Often, I would sell my soul to the Devil to discover the level of detail Larson seems to have for events that took place 35 years before the subject of my own research.

Early in the book, Larson describes the first meeting between Holmes and one of his victims. As if to torment me personally, Larson places the meeting in a music shop in Minneapolis:

Minneapolis was small, somnolent, and full of Swedish and Norwegian farmers as charming as cornstalks. Holmes was handsome, warm, and obviously wealthy, and he lived in Chicago, the most feared and magnetic of cities. Even during their first meeting he touched her; his eyes deposited a bright blue hope. When he left the store that first day, as motes of dust filled the space he left behind, her own life seemed drab beyond endurance. A clock ticked. Something had to change.

A wonderful passage, but ... but DID a clock tick? IS that what the dust did? Did ANY of this really happen? No footnote is provided. It is clear, though, that Larson has studied late 19th-century Chicago much more closely than Minneapolis, which was not "full" of farmers of any description. It was a pretty rough place, and about as densely populated with prostitutes, drunks, businessmen and laborers of all ethnicities as Chicago was. Ask anyone from Lake Wobegon — they'll tell you about Minneapolis.

More substantial stretches of fiction get footnoted as such. Larson describes Holmes' tour, with his wife and sister-in-law, of the Union Stockyards —

Holmes was unmoved; Minnie and Anna were horrified but also strangely thrilled by the efficiency of the carnage.

On the same day, they also saw the 1893 Columbian Exposition, known as the White City —

Minnie and Anna rapidly grew tired. They exited, with relief, onto the terrace over the North Canal and walked into the Court of Honor. Here once again Anna found herself nearly overwhelmed. It was noon by now, the sun directly overhead.

The footnotes acknowledge that the description, while long and detailed and vivid, is entirely bogus, except that it traces the SORT of tour that Chicago residents often gave to visiting relatives.

I love this book, and find the paperback edition's blurbage to be mostly well earned. It is indeed a gripping page-turner, thanks to Larson's use of every tool in the novelist's bag. I have enough interest in urban geography to have taken a half-dozen graduate-level courses in the subject while I was in academia (which Larson seems to detest). Reading The Devil in the White City, I often wished I'd had it in grad school to get a much better feel for this Columbian Exposition that everyone thought was so important. Likewise, I grew up in the Chicago area and often visited the Museum of Science and Industry without ever grasping that it was the last remaining structure of a history-making fair [see Comments]. I wish The Devil in the White City had been published in 1976 and placed in my hands then.

As a developing writer of history, there's a great deal to learn from Larson's work that I haven't often found in the, let us say, "less imaginative" histories I ordinarily read. Now and then, I wanted to slap myself on the forehead and say "Of course!" For example, I know very well what the weather was like on the night of Christmas 1924, when the Victoria Cafe opened in St. Paul, but Erik Larson reminded me that — and how — that weather matters.

The Devil in the White City, like any other measuring device, is useful precisely because it goes too far. You can use it to get a fix on how far you'd like to go in contriving history only because Larson's dial leaves a few more tick marks to the right of your own level. To me, much of the drama in this very engrossing book is in watching as both Holmes and Larson get away with murder, and in following the details of exactly how they succeed so well.

 

Snapshots

 

For the first time in years, I've been spending some time in antique shops and second-hand stores — I just bought my first house, you see, and it needs stuff. Although I hadn't even noticed it before, I'm now startled and saddened to see that the shops always have family photos for sale.

There are formal portraits of men in suits, group photos of people gathered around a bride and her groom, teenagers in living rooms holding brass wind instruments. Occasionally, in the back room of an antique shop, I'll find a great groaning mass of photos, with landslides of first communions and summer days at the beach sloughing off its edges.

I'm naturally quite sensitive about it now, having dedicated myself to researching the lives of several obscure figures in the 1920's music scene in Minnesota. There are people whose lives I've labored over for hundreds of hours — I've lost sleep fearing that their lives ended despairingly — without even having any idea of what the people looked like.

Every time I see another orphaned photo, I wonder if it's of Tom Gates, co-leader of a band with Frank Cloutier before Frank moved to the Victoria Cafe. Gates was 20 years Frank's senior, and had been the leader of a concert band in Mason City when Meredith Wilson — writer of The Music Man — was a boy there. I don't know what became of him, and I've never found a photo of him.

Maybe it's of Marguerite Lane, daughter of John J. Lane who ran the Coliseum and the Boulevards of Paris dance halls. She used to flick the lights on and off when she saw her dad arrive, so the band knew to switch from jazz to the old-fashioned dance music the boss preferred. I have no idea what she looked like.

Almost ten years ago, I read Martin Gilbert's A Complete History of World War One. A single passage sometimes comes back to me when I'm in an antique shop, confronted with an anonymous family photo. It relates an event from one of the earliest moments of the War, when nobody yet knew what they were supposed to be doing:

As Feuchtinger's regiment reached the Russian trenches, the Russians turned to flee. One of them, being closely chased, and apparently without his rifle, stopped all of a sudden, turned around, held out his right hand and put his left hand into his tunic pocket. As he did so, Feuchtinger plunged in his bayonet. "I see his blood redden his uniform, hear him moan and groan as he twists with the bayonet in his young body. I am seized with terror. I pull my blood-stained bayonet from the dead body. Wanting to fold his hands, I see in the left hand a crumpled photo of his wife and child."

A photograph, like a good war story, allows us to imagine the facts we thought we'd been taught. It turns mere data points — the events of a battle, for example, or the branches in a family tree — into real knowledge.

By offering up his photograph, the Russian soldier was offering the one thing he carried that most reminded himself that he was still a person. He wasn't so much asking Feuchtinger to look at his wife and child, he was saying look at me — look at ME. It was supposed to be his membership card to the human race.

I sometimes wonder where that same photo is today — is it bearing witness as it was made to do? Or has it rotted into the Russian soil? Or is it for sale in a St. Paul, Minnesota antique shop? Somebody really ought to at least know.

 

Note: The photo is courtesy SquareAmerica.com, a brilliant and addictive exhibit of "vintage snapshots and vernacular photography." Even for me, it's too beautiful to look away.

Is The Universe Expanding?

Library of Congress image, catalog no. Lamb 2272

 

This is the first — and probably last — in a series, Ask The Celestial Monochord, where readers get the answers they deserve, given that they asked The Celestial Monochord. A reader writes (without asking anything at all):

Just wanted to let you know about an article in the Sept.-Oct. 2007 issue of "American Scientist," p. 383: "Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale?" by Michael J. Disney. I found it interesting because it agrees with my view that current theories do not form a stable paradigm, or, as I've said to people (who disbelieve me, of course), "In 20-40 years, the universe will no longer be expanding." I have no idea, of course, what theory will take its place.

Well ... you're probably crackers, although I haven't read the article. I did take a few classes in the philosophy of science in grad school, though, so my crackers have something your crackers haven't got — a diploma, as Professor Marvel would say.

I see at least two ways that old ideas are abandoned in science. One happened to cold fusion. The idea is interesting for a little while, but sooner or later it just turns out to be BS, and is chucked overboard. You seem to be saying that will happen to universal expansion, and if so, I bet you're wrong.

There's another way, and there, you're almost certainly right. I think of the "spiral nebulae." They were noticed and listed and described alongside all the other fuzzy patches in the sky. Once it was realized that they were "island universes," like our own Milky Way except millions of light years away, they increasingly got called galaxies, but the full transition in both terminology and mental image took decades.

Then galaxies were thought of as nice patches of stars interspersed with some dust and gas. But as time went on, they came to be thought of as dense areas of dark matter, with stars and gas and dust just "floating on top." Today, a galaxy is no more stars and interstellar clouds than a pint of Guinness is bubbles. Probably, professional astronomers and younger amateur enthusiasts have trouble thinking about galaxies any other way.

It takes a historian of science to go back and try to recover exactly what people meant when they said "galaxy" in, say, 1970. A historian who shows that these "galaxies" have been abandoned might be widely regarded as a nit-picking dilettante among professional astronomers — a judgment that would have its own merits and limitations.

In any case, my point is that some scientific ideas suddenly go extinct, while the rest evolve into new ideas without most people really noticing. I bet universal expansion and the "big bang" (a term already used more in the company of cameras and microphones than other scientists) will meet the latter fate — as will almost everything in science. And that's one of the things that recommends science as a way of making sense of the world — its thinking simply grows up in response to new information.

 

A Guest of Honor

 

One night in Tucson in April 1988, on a whim, I turned on a TV. I hadn't owned one for the previous four years, and wouldn't for another six, so anything I saw that night would have made a strong, if dream-like, impression.

By chance, what happened to be on PBS was the Houston Grand Opera's production of John Adams' minimalist opera, Nixon in China.

I remember having no idea what to make of it. I was 23 and had recently seen Koyannisquatsi, with its score by Philip Glass — my first exposure to minimalism. My deepest immersion in opera to that point had been an afternoon at a University of Arizona production of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte.

I no longer have any recollection from that night of Nixon in China's music — maybe I couldn't make enough sense of it at the time to register an imprint. What I do remember was a colossal Air Force One taxiing onto the stage. Now THAT made an impression ... which I guess is what Air Force One is for, no matter where it turns up.

Mostly, I recall feeling ill-at-ease with the idea of a grand opera about Nixon's trip to China. Was the composer a Republican? Was this propaganda? Wasn't high art a liberal thing? And wasn't opera supposed to be about the olden times, not something that happened in 1972? I would have had no qualms about PBS airing Wagner's Parsifal — but Nixon in China?

Today, I'm reading Edward Berlin's great King of Ragtime, a biography of composer Scott Joplin. It's not an ordinary bio. Before this book, much of what was known about Joplin was legend and assumption. Berlin conducted and collected the most minutely meticulous research available and his book catalogs the many questions raised by the new information. When Berlin takes a position, it is the most cautious, cool-headed judgment possible. I find the approach intensely gripping and beautiful ... maybe it's me.

Anyway, it turns out that Joplin wrote and staged the world's first ragtime opera, entitled A Guest of Honor. Its subject was the 1901 visit of African American leader Booker T. Washington to the White House, where he dined with President Teddy Roosevelt. (Note: A reader suggests some controversy over the subject of this opera. See comments to this post.)

The visit was politically risky for the President, according to Berlin [euphemism added by me]:

Newspapers in the South condemned the invitation as an unwarranted attempt to place the black man on the same social plane as the white man; Roosevelt's act put him in a category with Ulysses S. Grant, and he would never be forgiven. The Sedalia Sentinel printed a poem on page one entitled "[N-word]s in the White House," which concludes with a black man marrying the President's daughter.

Scott Joplin seems to have had kinder feelings toward the event. That a black educator would participate in that symbolic ritual of advancement, The White House dinner, seems to have meant a lot to the composer, who was then working to elevate ragtime — widely disparaged at the time as degenerate black noise — to a high art form.

In 1902, he named his latest two-step, "The Strenuous Life," after a phrase in one of Roosevelt's speeches. He staged the ragtime opera A Guest of Honor in 1903 — barely two years after the events it depicted.

So this was an opera about events as contemporary as Katrina's landfall is today, in a form about as new as gypsy punk. In comparison, Nixon in China was conservative, portraying events of 15 years before in a 20-year-old music genre.

Working out these comparisons in more depth might bare a little fruit. While A Guest of Honor was probably meant to elevate a "low" form, some might say Nixon in China went the other direction, increasing the public's (including my own) awareness of minimalism, a high art "descending" into popularity.

And so on ... when Booker T. Washington visited Teddy Roosevelt, who was Nixon and who was China?

But, for anyone seeking to compare the two operas, the biggest obstacle would be our collective amnesia — the same universal, maddening, heart-sickening forgetfulness I've encountered since beginning my own original research into music history.

Joplin brought A Guest of Honor to less than a dozen stages across the Midwest in September 1903, but — according to the best speculation Berlin can support — the production was robbed of its receipts in Springfield, Illinois. Unable even to pay the bill for the touring company's stay at a Springfield boarding house, Joplin was forced to leave behind a trunk as collateral. It contained some of his personal effects, including unpublished manuscripts that may have included the score of A Guest of Honor. Those items were never recovered. Although a copyright for A Guest of Honor was applied for, the copyright office never received the customary copies of the score for its files.

In a book full of careful modifiers and provisional judgments, one sentence stands out for its disheartening brevity: "A Guest of Honor is lost."

Of course, various productions of Nixon in China are available from Amazon and iTunes in a variety of formats. Its memory is safe, despite having been composed in what I think of as our forgetful era. John Adams himself seems on track to be long remembered as one of the 20th Century's major composers.

Though we're more likely to learn about him on Antiques Roadshow or History Detectives than on Great Performances, the researcher who stumbles across an overlooked copy of A Guest of Honor would be remembered at least as long as Adams. Like Berlin's King of Ragtime itself, the thought puts me in the mood to work.

 

New Monochord World Headquarters

   

 

The Celestial Monochord world headquarters have moved.

The photo at left shows my view from the apartment we've occupied for the past six years (you can click on it for a larger image). I stared at this wall as I founded and developed The Celestial Monochord, as I learned to play clawhammer banjo, and as I became interested in the Minnesota music scene of the 1920's. I quit drinking looking at this wall. I lost a cat and gained two. I got married. When I came home from my first Battle of the Jug Bands, I came home to this view. It all happened looking at this wall.

Now my tribe and I have moved into a real house, with great views to the east, south, and west. It has a yard in which to set up my telescopes (there's a bright erupting comet in Perseus, by the way, which you should check out). It has a porch on which to play my banjo. And a dedicated office where I can write about fulgurite for you, and from which I can revive the memories of dance bands long dead. The sun and moon rise at the foot of my bed (see photo on the right).

Buying a house was very exciting -- especially if you consider debilitating stress to be a form of "excitement." Consider the mortgage crisis, just for starters. And the old apartment had beautiful woodwork and the best caretakers/friends you could hope for. But the new digs are a great leap forward, and The Monochord should be extremely well served by them.

Thanks for your patience and check back soon and often.

 

What's In A Name?

Moe Thompson founded The Victoria Cafe

 

My article on the links between "The Moonshiner's Dance" — one of the selections on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music — and Minnesota's Jewish communities has just been published at Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. None of that article's information has appeared here at The Celestial Monochord, or anywhere else, so Monochord readers and enthusiasts of "Anthology-type music" may want to check it out.

It's a little anxiety-producing to publish on a subject in which I am so inexpert — the history of Minnesota's Jews — especially for what must be Zeek's fairly erudite audience. Also, because I'm constantly finding new insights, I'm painfully aware that anything I write will quickly seem outdated to me.

But as soon as I began researching The Anthology's "The Moonshiner's Dance" in early 2006, I saw that the Jewish aspects of the story I was uncovering would need to be told somewhere, by somebody. The Jewish connections to the recording made me sit up straight and listen, because of a certain hazy constellation of issues I'd already been toying with for some time ...

 

In November 1963, Newsweek ran an infamous article "exposing" Bob Dylan as the middle-class son of a Midwestern appliance dealer. It included a photograph of Dylan with the caption "What's in a name?" — a sardonic reference to the revelation that Bob Dylan started life as Robert Zimmerman.

Exactly why this was presented as scandalous is open to interpretation. The article attacks Dylan for portraying himself as real and authentic while simultaneously hiding and misrepresenting his past. But as I read it, the article treats the specifics of Dylan's past as the real scandal, as what really undermined Dylan's authenticity. The implication was that Dylan turned out to be the least authentic things you can be — Midwestern, middle class, and Jewish. If a folksinger is supposed to be one of "The People," surely he can't be THAT.

And it wasn't just Newsweek. The post-War folk and blues revivals often seem to me pathologically obsessed with authenticity and commercialism, as abstractions, and the idea of Jewishness seems to have gotten drawn occasionally into those neuroses (in part, by conflating Jewishness and commerce — a conflation my own arguments have a habit of reproducing).

Those revered pre-WWII Southern musicians on The Anthology and so many other reissues actually played and loved quite a lot of Tin Pan Alley popular songs and tunes from the New York stage. Dock Boggs himself based much of his repertoire on "blues queens" who gave stridently commercial, nontraditional, and "inauthentic" performances.

Today, younger revivalists like myself have benefited from writers like Elijah Wald (Escaping the Delta) and Norm Cohen (Long Steel Rail) for whom boundaries between authenticity and artifice, between commerce and tradition, are pretty much gone from their world views. You might say it's the new orthodoxy among today's authorities. I think Bob Zimmerman and Elliott Adnopoz could have kept their birth names today.

I often think of Jon Pankake, who Dylan remembers unkindly in Chronicles Volume One ("a folk music purist ... breathed fire through his nose"). But you should read Pankake's liner notes to New Lost City Ramblers: Out Standing in their Field, dedicated as they are to showing a constant sloshing back and forth between professional popular music and supposedly pure amateur folk music — the permeability of those boundaries.

In a 2006 article in the New York Times, Jody Rosen wrote about his work to reassert the important influence that the professional and commonly Jewish music-makers of Tin Pan Alley have had on Rock n' Roll. The "roots" of Rock, he argues, run through the Brill Building as much as through Robert Johnson and his supposed crossroads.

He even takes a jab at the "rock snobs" who would not be caught "without Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and an Alan Lomax field recording or two" in their record collection.

At least in the text of that particular article, Rosen takes the wrong approach. He's absolutely right to assert the importance of Tin Pan Alley to today's popular forms, but in doing so, he lets The Anthology keep its "authenticity," the myth that it's the pure product of amateur, oral transmissions stretching back to antiquity.

Instead of trying to sweep The Anthology (etc.) off the table and replace it with Tin Pan Alley as the proper source of Rock, why not keep The Anthology on the table, and show that it's a much more commercial, worldly document than we've been told? To me, that's the more deeply transformative insight.

And so ... all of this, rightly or wrongly, was one of the threads running through my thinking on the day I first discovered that Moe Thompson, the Tin Pan Alley-style songwriter and vaudevillian, was behind the founding of The Victoria Cafe.