The Celestial Monochord

Moonshiners Dance - On the Air

(a relief in the Hibbing High School Library)

 

 

Tomorrow morning, May 21, I'll be on the radio to talk about my research on "The Moonshiners Dance, Part One," from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.  

There'll be more music than talk.  We'll be playing records that put Moonshiner into some sort of context —  notably, the very rare and much speculated-about "The Moonshiners Dance, Part TWO."

The program is The Dakota Dave Hull Show, on KFAI from 9 to 11 central time.  You can listen live, and the show will also be archived online for two weeks ONLY:

http://www.kfai.org/thedakotadavehullshow 

Enjoy!

 

 

Update: The show went beautifully — it really couldn't have gone better.  Here's the direct link. Remember that the show will become unavailable on the morning of June 4.

 

_

Music for Moonshiners - Whoopee John

Part of a series wherein I propose musical contexts for
"The Moonshiners Dance Part 1," aside from The Anthology
of American Folk Music, and present illustrative sound files.

Older Minnesotans always seem to remember Whoopee John Wilfahrt — so much so that it's startling how little-known he is to everyone else.

Whoopee John made his first recordings in Minneapolis in September 1927 — just across the river and about a week before Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra recorded "The Moonshiners Dance."

He would later become hugely influential across the Upper Midwest, and because they circulated in a small world, Cloutier and Wilfahrt were probably aware of each other. Still, I don't see Whoopee John's influence in "The Moonshiners Dance." 

Instead, his early recordings can serve as a good example of the old time ethnic music being played across the region at the time.  "The Moonshiner's Dance" is also a good example of that music, and is partly a satire of it.

 • 

Explanations of Whoopee John's nickname differ, but it's pretty clear to my ears — Whoopee John whooped, just like Frank Cloutier's boys, except at very deliberately chosen moments in the performance.

Neither the whoops nor the nickname appear on Wilfahrt's 1927 recordings, but they're both firmly in place by 1933.  Perhaps "Moonshiners Dance" inspired Whoopee John to start whooping — but then again, similarly exuberant interjections were common across pre-War genres of vernacular social dance music.

Although Whoopee John's style doesn't sound much like "The Moonshiners Dance," it doesn't sound much different either.  To get from Wilfahrt to Cloutier, you mostly need a small shift in meter and tempo, and a huge change in attitude.  The Victoria Cafe Orchestra satirizes rural polka music like Whoopee John's from a cosmopolitan, Jazz-Age perspective. 

But keep in mind that old-time ethnic performers themselves relentlessly goofed on their own rustic, old-world personas.  "Whoopee John" was, in essence, a satirical character played by John Wilfahrt.  There's an economy of satirical exchange here ... with its liquidity provided by good times and bootleg alcohol.

Cloutier and Wilfahrt used similar instruments — after all, this is music from the "Brass Age" to which The Anthology otherwise turns its back. Both bands use instruments you'll also find in 1920s Chicago jazz bands, and most everywhere else at the time — trumpet, clarinet, bass horn, a little drum set.  A signature of Wilfarht's band was the addition of the German button accordion.

Wilfahrt's later stuff is much easier to find due to its great popularity. To my ears, it takes on a slightly slick big-band aesthetic that I find a bit bland and cloying.  I much prefer Whoopee John's early stuff from the 1920s and early 1930s — the New-Ulm, Knights-of-Columbus-hall-wedding Whoopee John. 

It's clearly played by a small, spirited combo of townspeople.  I like the hint of parlor, or even chamber music formality.  I don't know, maybe it's a DNA thing, given that this music's genealogy so closely mirrors my own.

 • 

The sound file is an MP3 of about 2.6 MB, and it chains together three abbreviated clips from early Whoopee John 78's.  I chose the cuts because I like them, and because they sound most like "The Moonshiners Dance."  Wilfahrt also recorded appealing waltzes, schottishes, marches, etc.

Download WoopeeJohn.mp3

 •  0:00 to 1:35 - "Old Time Polka #1" from October 1933.

 •  1:35 to 2:42 - "Kinder Polka" from September 1927.

 •  2:42 to 3:50 - "Linderman Polka" from October 1933.

The best source for Whoopee John's music seems to be his grandson, Dennis Brown.  His website has an order form you can print out, fill out, and snail-mail with a check or money order. 

I've done this several times with excellent results. It's great to have this music available in such a high-tech fashion — usually, I'm crawling around on the floor in the basements of used vinyl stores.

I recommend getting either the Whoopee John Historical Music CD #1, or #2, or both.

_

Alchemist Transforms Breslin into Ace

Avid fans of Harry Smith will recognize the name of the Hotel Breslin.  For one thing, it was one of the many roach motels he called home until he was thrown out for lack of payment. 

Allen Ginsberg reported:

Then Harry went into a funny kind of amphetamine tailspin.  He got really paranoid and got moved out of the Chelsea, I think, or expelled or something.  He couldn't pay his rent, and wound up in a series of other hotels, including the Breslin Hotel, by 1984.  But he wouldn't talk to anybody, wouldn't talk to me, maybe because I didn't supply him with money, because I was broke at the time ...

I didn't see Harry for a long while and began visiting him again at the Breslin Hotel, on 28th Street and Broadway.  Same problem, still wanting money ...

In that room at the Breslin, the whole room was taken up with shelves of books and records, then a movie editing table, and a tiny bed.  I have some photographs of that, of him pouring milk, The Alchemist Transforming Milk into Milk. 

In that bathroom he had a little birdie that he fed and talked to, and let out of his cage all the time.  When his little birds died, he put their bodies in the freezer.  He'd keep them for various alchemical purposes, along with a bottle, which he said was several years' deposits of his semen, which he was also using for whatever magic structures.
[ introduction to Think of the self Speaking, pages 7-8 ]

His evictions from such places must have been difficult for Smith, of course, but they're also an on-going tragedy for all of us. 

They often resulted in catastrophic losses of Harry's original artwork, as well as his inspired collections of objects much more interesting than what he kept in that freezer.  We're all somewhat impoverished by Harry's housing problems.

In a sad irony, Harry's chronic homelessness also had a small upside. As I understand it, he sometimes sold his stuff to keep a roof over his head a little while longer — typically to buyers who preserved it better than Smith could have, or would have, given that he sometimes intentionally destroyed is own artwork.

He first approached Moses Asch of Folkways Records to try and pawn his 78 collection.  Asch had the idea of instead paying Smith to edit the Anthology of American Folk Music, using Smith's own collection as its basis.

Smith later sold that 78 collection to the New York Public Library, where Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler were allowed to copy the whole thing in exchange for cataloging it.  Those bootlegs were a wellspring for the repertoire of the New Lost City Ramblers, one of the most influential bands in history. 

Anyway, point is, the Hotel Breslin is now being opened as the "gleaming new super-hip Ace Hotel," according to the Observer.  If you have enough money, you can stay where Harry couldn't. 

My wife and I love to stay in old renovated hotels — most recently, the Palmer House in Chicago and the Biltmore in Los Angeles — in part because it's possible to get some surprisingly good prices in some of these amazing places at the moment. 

Therefore, I can't hold my snout too high about the Breslin/Ace project.  I would like to stay there. 

But if you have heretofore missed the ironies that gentrification sometimes presents, the Breslin/Ace project is a good place to get up to speed.

The hotel management is hoping to incorporate some of Smith's artwork into the interior design.  They also hope to offer his pioneering abstract animated films on the hotel's pay-per-view TV system. 

Some rooms feature turntables and selected vinyl, and the management hopes to get permission to press new vinyl copies of The Anthology for the enjoyment of guests. 

( This raises an intriguing question I've been wondering about too.  Could Smithsonian/Folkways re-issue The Anthology on vinyl to the general public? 

Vinyl is back, at least among a certain segment, and I think it's probably the same segment that would love to own The Anthology on LP. 

For the 1997 CD reissue of The Anthology, Smithsonian/Folkways worked hard to approximate, as much as possible, the experience of encountering The Anthology in its original form.  Well, what better way to approximate it than to actually, in fact, reissue The Anthology in its original form?  Eh?  Hello? )

The Breslin/Ace Hotel project has been controversial, in part because there are many "legacy" residents in the building, until recently a rent-controlled apartment building. 

Some residents haven't appreciated the hassles of living in a construction zone, and some presumably just don't like hipsters, tourists, rich people, and whatnot.  There's a little uncertainty over just how well residents and guests will mix in the building.

The same investors also recently renovated the Chelsea, where Harry Smith died on November 27, 1991. 

Disk Sift Yields Smith-Newsie Link

(newsboy, 1921, Library of Congress photo)

            

I was wading through the Archeophone catalog yesterday, planning my next purchase. 

... It's an incredible record label.  Everything I've gotten from them has been a hoot to listen to, and has revolutionized my perceptions and tastes ...

And I finally noticed their series of reissues of "Hit of The Week" records.  As the Archeophone website describes them,

They sold on newsstands during the Great Depression for 15 cents and quickly became the best-selling records of the early 1930s: the laminated flexible cardboard records known as "Hit of the Week." Featuring the top songs of the day, performed by some of the most noted jazz and dance musicians (often under pseudonyms), Hit of the Week records provided just that — one hit, once a week — to an American public with hardly a dime to spare but hungry for great music by great artists.

As always, it seems, I thought of Harry Smith and the Anthology.

Back in July, I first realized that phonograph records were once distributed on city streets at newsstands and by newsboys. 

Those tough, tragic little kids in short pants and floppy caps hollering "Extra! Extra!" sometimes sold 78's along with newspapers. 

As William Howland Kenney wrote in his brilliant Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930:

... the newsboys of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Defender regularly carried copies of the latest records of the week along with their newspapers.  They sold the disks at $1 apiece; for many customers the records were as important as the news.

Something now made real sense for the first time.  The funny, fake headlines Harry Smith wrote for his liner notes to volume one of the Anthology of American Folk Music may have been based on actual experience. 

Newsboys might really, in fact, have yelled something very much like "Georgie runs into rock after mother's warning!  Dies with the engine he loves!" 

Interestingly, two of the performers on Archeophone's "Hit of the Week" CDs — Vincent Lopez and Rudy Vallee — have loose connections to The Victoria Cafe. 

Therefore, I might have to buy these ... although, times being what they are, I may have to wait until this music is finally released on cheap pieces of Durium.

_

The Old French Weird America

(the creator fondles his monochord)

   

Someone has started an amazing blog about Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.  If he keeps going along these lines, it will end up being one of the most important things to happen to the Anthology since its reissue on CD in 1997.

Apparently the work of an obsessive French collector, The Old Weird America (TOWA) is posting at least one entry on each Anthology cut, with large zip files containing wonderful batches of mp3s. These mp3s are other recordings by each Anthology artist, as well as other "covers" of the same song.

TOWA also provides a little writing of his own about the Anthology artists, although that text is often the standard, sturdy, reliable consensus view of the subject.  Very nice, but not usually new.  The real eye-popping, one-of-a-kind value of this blog is the audio files.

Really, the project comes off a lot like the interactive, online version of the Anthology-with-notes that I dreamed of at the end of this post back in July — except for its, let's say, "independent" attitude toward copyright law. 

Two thoughts:

Of course, I'm dying to see what TOWA does with "The Moonshiner's Dance" ... and whether he bothers to contact me to see what I have up my sleeve.  He is not good about citing his sources of information or audio, so I don't know if he swings that way.

Also, I've always wondered what I'd do after my Diamonds in the Rough series is finished.  I guess I've dragged my feet about writing that last entry because I have no substitute for the series.

One idea has been to write one piece on each of the 84 entries in the Anthology.  At my usual pace, the project would take nearly a decade.

Well, in a way, TOWA has beaten me to it.

Certainly, his contribution is these amazing audio collections he's posting, whereas I would do my usual Carl Sagan meets Robert Cantwell routine. 

I would really have new things to say about these cuts ... long, dense, ponderous, new things to say ...

_

North Country Blues

 
A mural in the library of Bob Dylan's high school depicts Hibbing's multi-ethnic iron miners. What did their music sound like?

Around 1965, Bob Dylan turned his back on folk music, confirming the break by "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival. 

At once fact and fiction, the story has emerged as one of the more familiar parables from the 20th century.

But lately, I've been thinking about an earlier moment of decision when Dylan walked away from another set of folk music traditions — those of the Upper Midwest.  Today, that decision seems more consequential in the long run, all the more so the longer it goes unrecognized.

When Dylan walked away from Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range and the rest of the Upper Midwest, he left behind what was then a dying economy, as portrayed in his song "North Country Blues".  It was a dyin' town, it was a dyin' town, he chants in the album's liner notes. 

But Dylan was also walking away from dying forms of music as varied and complex as any in the world, including those of the American South.

At the time, old musical ways of life were changing just as fast in the South, of course, but important elements of the Folk Revival were bent on preserving Southern traditional music — and Dylan was about to help out.  

Suddenly, the critical difference between the traditional music of the North and the South hasn't turned out to be a matter of quality or inherent interest.  

Instead, it's that the music of the South — against all odds, and to our inexpressible benefit — was resuscitated when it needed it most.  Up North, in Zimmerman country, a comparable revival just never arrived.

•

I've been working on a study of the only recording on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music clearly representing northern music — "The Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Minnesota in 1927.  It has never been studied before.  

Early in my project, I knew I would eventually have to know — and I mean have to, and I mean know — the musical environment in the Upper Midwest before World War Two.

Consider the 1913 mural in the library of Hibbing High School depicting iron miners at work.  Each of its 16 human figures represents another ethnic group that mined the Mesabi Iron Range — a deep diversity of cultures that, presumably, intermingled to create distinctive new American sounds.  

Those miners were silent as they watched the young Robert Zimmerman browse the library books — but they must've danced to something sometime.

During the early phases of my research into "The Moonshiner's Dance," I often thought about them, knowing I would need to hear their music in my head, loud and clear. 

Unfortunately, when I finally turned my attention to the problem, I saw there was going be trouble. 

I had first committed myself to traditional music 14 years prior, when there were already mountains of products on the market vying to help me navigate pre-War Southern blues and country.  But now, up North, even in 2008, I was pretty much on my own.

There is no such thing as, say, The Anthology of Northern American Folk Music (edited by Harry Smithovich).  There's no O Brother Where Art Ya Once?  There was no "Song to Otto Rindlisbacher" on Bob Dylan's first album.

Alan Lomax made a thousand recordings during fieldwork in the Upper Midwest in 1938, declaring it possibly "the most interesting country I have ever traveled in" with "enough material in the region for years of work".  But unlike every other region where Lomax conducted fieldwork, no release in any format has ever been devoted to his Northern journey.  The website of Lomax's foundation, its name apparently a bit of self-deprecating humor, makes no mention of it.

There is an amazing record store here in Minneapolis that sells only 78 rpm records, and it has hundreds of pre-War old-time ethnic recordings — cheap, in great condition, with unpronounceable titles.  But what do I buy?  And what sense do I make of it?

There's simply no ... there's no ...

There's no Northern canon.  Or worse, and more exactly, the canon of "American roots music" has bypassed my part of the country entirely. There are no names from the Upper Midwest like Dock Boggs, or The Carter Family, or Robert Johnson — names of musicians whose work everybody knows is great, even if they haven't actually bothered listening to it. 

How do you connect the dots when you have no dots to begin with? 

•

I spent much of 2008 trying to crack the case.

I've camped out in university and historical society libraries, scouring the footnotes of academic journal articles.  I've literally spent hours clutching photocopies of typewritten discographies while crawling on the floor in used vinyl stores — including one where the owner chain-smokes behind the register.  I've found music that's never been issued, is out of print, is on formats I can't play, lacks any intelligible context.

So far, there appear to be no easy solutions.  But I have found a few extremely valuable maps of this occult terrain — so valuable, in fact, that I hate to bury reviews of them this deep in an already too-long blog post.  

If I could press only three things into your hands today, they would be: (1) a brilliant box set, Down Home Dairyland, containing 40 episodes of a radio show about the traditional music of the Upper Midwest, and (2 and 3) a pair of absolutely essential books with unfortunate titles, Victor Greene's A Passion for Polka and James P. Leary's Polkabilly.  

They're hardly the only materials available, but taken together (including their footnotes, discographies, etc.) they allow an incipient canon to emerge — a list of things you probably should recognize if you want to be taken seriously on the subject.  They also provide — most pointedly in the first and last chapters of Leary's Polkabilly — clues to explaining why these musicians and their work aren't more widely seen as part of the canon of American roots music.

•

Following various threads into and out of such material, I sometimes return to the mural in the library of Hibbing High School.  

Like the rest of present-day Hibbing, the mural was once moved to its current location from the ghost town of North Hibbing, "where even the markin stones were dead, an there was no sound except for the wind blowin thru the high grass," as Dylan described it. 

Slowly, as I've started to hear a few strains of music coming from those miners in that mural, what's begun to strike me most about the thing is how deadly silent it first seemed to me, and how silent it must have seemed to Dylan, there in that hushed library.  

Why wasn't there a revival of Northern folk music for Dylan to join?  And what would one have sounded like?  Until 2008, I would have faintly assumed the answer to the first question was the answer to the second.  The music down South was just better or more plentiful.

And maybe it was, I haven't quite decided.  But the reasons for the historical neglect of the Upper Midwest turn out to be far more complex than that — so much so they deserve their own research institute ... or at least their own blog post.  I do know it certainly wasn't just about the music.

If we want to keep thinking that Southern music is better, that's ok with me.  But shouldn't we be able to say, confidently and in specific detail, "Better than WHAT?" 

    

    

    

_

My Book Report About "On the Road" Which I Read By The Celestial Monochord

Kerouac playing football, 1938

    

I was extruded out the other end of the 2008 presidential election like John Goodman birthing himself from the mud in Raising Arizona. I clawed my way out, hollering, triumphant, relieved — but in the middle of nowhere, wondering "NOW what do I do?"

Much of my intellectual life during the Bush years has been an escape and a rummaging around for some kind of SENSE. 

At the start of Bush's second term, I dove head first into trying to understand every last thing about "The Moonshiner's Dance," a recording from another time — practically from another planet — the main theme of which is alcohol delirium and the razzing of meaning itself.  It had to be sorted out.  Somewhere along the line, I even quit drinking. 

Now, I will have to rejigger yet again somehow.

So with Palin sent back to Alaska, I felt it was time to clear my mind.  Cleanse my palate.  Get a little fresh air and perspective before beginning anew.  It seemed a good time to finally read Kerouac's On the Road.

I'd recently started reading classics I hadn't read before, ones I now think I should've read before getting that Master's Degree in English Literature I have framed on my wall. 

Last winter, for example, I'd finally read The Great Gatsby — oh, so THAT'S the answer to that GRE question! 

Besides, I'd always liked the idea of it.  Kerouac's sad and feverish and lost patriotism, his REAL "real America" Americanism.  It looked good on the menu after nearly two years of 21st-century stump speeches and echo chambers.

One of my many brothers — the one who'd used Kerouac as a roadmap throughout his early adulthood — had given me a copy of On the Road when I was 18 and he was 30.  I must've lost it during a move over the years. 

I bought my current copy a few years ago as a tourist in San Francisco, when my wife Jenny and I stopped by City Lights bookstore.  I knew it was the most obvious purchase to make, felt sheepish handing it over to the clerk. 

I felt the urge to tell him I'd already taken varying-sized doses of Ginsberg, Borroughs, Ferlinghetti, Corso, even Bob Kaufman — just never really Kerouac.  But it would've only made matters worse.

----

I can't remember reading another book that relies so heavily on the reader to romanticize it, to buy into it.  The presumption somehow gives it the feel of "young adult fiction" — my brother had given it to me at the right time.

At some point, for example, narrator Sal Paradise assures us that this next trip across the country was the gonest, most profound, most epically heroic yet!  Yass yass, whoop, harumph! 

That trip's high points, to my memory, turn out to be getting a speeding ticket, picking up a hitchhiker with one arm longer than the other, getting stuck in the mud, and stealing some cheese. 

Ordinarily a quick read, it took me a month to get through, so evanescent was my romanticization. 

One tension that's supposed to sustain interest is a kind of low-simmer debate — Dean Moriarty: saint or demon?  But today, On the Road reads more like a muck-raker exposing the limited treatment options available to the mentally ill.  It's angering to know there were no good pills for the guy.

Actually, a lot is angering. 

Kerouac wonders faintly at his urge to murder gay men.  The absolute greatest wife they encounter is the one who stays in bed and silently smiles when they rudely wake her up to drink until dawn with her husband. 

"The Beats were single-handedly responsible for feminism," Jenny quipped.  But I think measuring the exact distance from that quip to the unsnarky truth would be a good senior thesis topic, if you're looking for one.

Part 3 Chapter 4 details the performance of an African American jazz trumpet player in San Francisco — how he commits himself body and soul to his performance, transfixes his audience, eventually finds the essence of the global moment as embodied in the room at that instant, and everybody recognizes it.

Moriarty and Paradise get to hang with the guy for a few precious minutes, during which Moriarty wants the black musician to go find his wife and hand her over to them — these drunk white tourists — to fuck.  The musician politely declines and the meeting comes to an end.

----

My will flagging, I was close to giving up with only 30 pages to go, so Jenny offered to read the next chapter to me aloud.  It turned out to be Part 4 Chapter 5 — the whorehouse chapter.

Wise wife.  If you need to read On the Road, go with someone on a long car trip and take turns reading and driving.

When read aloud, of course, Kerouac's lyricism greases the skids a bit.  His voice is unmistakable in the book's grander passages on the meaning of the land and the night and the road, but the more mundane plot points — how much money we had, who drove, where we found a pay phone — have a rhythm of their own.

And read aloud, the deadpan jokes are funnier.  Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise are idiots, and Kerouac seems to acknowledge this more readily as you roll the language on your tongue. Ask your wife to help you.

"Man," said Dean to me, "ain't this a nice way to spend an afternoon. It's so much cooler than Denver poolhalls. Victor, you got gurls? Where? A donde?" he cried in Spanish. "Dig it, Sal, I'm speaking Spanish."

When it came out in 1957, this spoken quality of On the Road must've been one of its many startling elements that aren't as startling today. 

As another survival strategy to get me through the reading, I went back to Tom Waits' early stuff, listening to that startle that so animated Waits in the 1970's.  Foreign Affairs, for example, careens between Kerouac and Raymond Chandler — sometimes from line to line. 

Jenny, who is vastly better read than I am, nodded.   She noted that if you go back and read some of the books that got Pulitzers at mid-century, and the books they thought were The Great Novels of the past, they're often horrible.  Unreadable, ponderous, stultifying.  She always keeps some genre fiction around — mysteries, detective novels, horror. 

The Beats and the pulp writers, Jenny reminds me, wrote books you actually want to read.  I think Tom Waits and Bob Dylan before him were beneficiaries of that democratization of artistically ambitious writing.  They also vastly expanded it beyond poetry and the novel.

Allen Ginsberg famously said Dylan took on "an artistic challenge to see if great art can be done on a jukebox. And he proved that it can."  In some sense, it was Ginsberg and Kerouac themselves who had proved it can.  The song "Jack & Neal" from Foreign Affairs is almost like Cliff Notes for On the Road set to music. 

If you wanted to write an album for the ears of Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg — one that would actually impress those men personally — you could do worse than Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde.  Then again, those albums have held up better than On the Road over time, so maybe their goal was to surpass rather than impress.

As soon as it hit the streets, On the Road was apparently made to carry more baggage than it could bear — like Kerouac himself, they say. He didn't know what he was unleashing when he typed it out and, like most books, it's better the more you can see it as a gesture made in its moment. It's an innocent thing, On the Road, for all its malfeasance. 

It again brings me face-to-face with the mindset of young people after WWII, possessed as they were by the knowledge that the whole damned century so far had been badly muffed, a gutter ball, and the options looking forward were pretty vapid.

Everybody could see that young people's disillusionment was about to hit the fan, and the Beats were either lucky or unlucky enough to be there, trying to capture where their heads were at.  Though they worked hard to get famous, they were more sucked into their fame by prevailing anxieties.

There are agonies involved in reading On the Road, but the past needs more attention and explication as it recedes, not less. 

The book broke open several crates of valuable material I'd almost forgotten I had — early Waits, Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound, Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good, and much else.  My earliest toddler-memory of the public life of the nation pertains to the Funky Chicken dance craze, and I feel a need to revisit the lessons of earlier eras again and again.

It also turns out that Jack Kerouac and Frank Cloutier were born in the same town, and I'm now wondering if, God help me, the next book I read might be Visions of Gerard.

       

_

Rollingstone out on Highway 61

Along Highway 61 on your way out of Minnesota, you pass two towns called Minnesota City and Rollingstone. Their histories began with a Utopian crackpot and his followers, who soon became his victims in one of the more ghastly episodes in the state's history.

 

The Rollingstone Colony was a little like the Donner Party, if a lot less famous. It also reminds me a bit of the Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre, and certainly adds a new dimension to the song "Like a Rolling Stone."

 

In 1851, a New York printer persuaded a group of New York professionals to join a Utopian community. They would start fresh in a well-planned city out west in the health-promoting climate of the new Minnesota Territory.  The town was to be called Rollingstone.

The leader went west first to found the beautiful city, and when 400 people followed him, they were surprised to find him stuck in a swamp. The women and children slept in a large tent, the men in gopher pits.  About three quarters of them soon died in the epidemics that swept the settlement.  

Wait. Come to think of it, that's more or less how I came to live here too ... 

Anyway, the survivors founded Minnesota City.  A small village two miles away is today called Rollingstone. Pinning down which of the two towns was the location of the Rollingstone Colony and how exactly they relate to each other historically would take more digging than I've done.

In any case, I'm thinking more about Bob Dylan and the mid-1960's.

 

It seems hard to believe that a Minnesotan would write a song called "Like A Rolling Stone" — a song about what it's like to find yourself all alone and boondoggled out on the new frontier — and that he'd put it on an album called Highway 61 Revisited without knowing anything whatsoever about the story of the Rollingstone Colony.  

But then, a lot of true things are also hard to believe. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that Dylan seemed preternaturally relevant — that his empathetic imagination would insinuate itself convincingly beyond what seems possible. I've written about that before.  

Maybe it's all a coincidence, but it's worth doing the legwork to understand how well-known this incident could've been to Dylan in the early 1960's. My research time is booked at the moment.

I also don't know if anybody has ever asked Bob when, if ever, he first heard about the Rollingstone Colony down on Highway 61.

    

     

Sources:

Cathy Wurzer's just-published book, Tales of the Road: Highway 61, provides an efficient telling in two pages.  She also talked about it today on Minnesota Public Radio.

Christopher M. Johnson's article in Minnesota History (49:140-148) provides much detail on how the community got to Minnesota.

_

 

Barack Obama: Secret Banjoist? - UPDATE!

In late July, I wrote a "fake news" item about Barack Obama trying to appeal to fans of Oldtime music.

Well ... now Barack Obama really is, in fact, trying to appeal to fans of Oldtime music (my consulting fee is in the mail, I'm quite certain).  

To wit, Ralph Stanley — best known as the elderly "Oh Death" guy on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack — has recorded a radio endorsement to run in southwestern Virginia.

The area is hotly contested in the presidential race, and was also the home of many pioneers of the style today called "Oldtime" — Tommy Jarrell, Henry Whitter, The Carter Family, The Stonemans, and many, many, more.

I wrote that dorky fake news item because I kept doing double-takes at photos of Obama at a meeting of NCLR, which looks a hell of a lot like NLCR, which to Oldtime fans is as immediately recognizable as NASA or FBI. After a little slap-dash Photoshop work (above), I was in business.

Several years ago, I drove to Moorehead, Minnesota, and stayed at a Red Roof Inn just to see my first concert by Mike Seeger, cofounder of the NLCR.  At the end of the concert, Mike said he was going to go sit at the CD table and press the flesh. 

He'd just been touring with Ralph Stanley, you see, who stays at the CD table until the last dog dies — and Seeger saw that Stanley sells a lot of CDs that way.  After about 50 years in show business, Mike was apparently still learning from old Ralph Stanley. 

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Three Vignettes on Music and Geography

 

John Cohen signs his book of Dylan photos, Young Bob
Minneapolis, April 15, 2007

  

#1
  
I heard John Cohen tell a story.  It was at a private party, so I'm not certain it's appropriate to write about here. But ... but ... it was such a GOOD story.

As I remember it, at least, he was teaching or lecturing a couple years back at a college in North Carolina.  There, he discussed his work in the late 1950s, finding old people in the hills of Madison County, North Carolina, who still sang very old ballads without instrumental accompaniment.  They just opened their mouths and sang 500-year-old songs, all alone.  It had a spooky, lonesome, ancient-sounding effect.  

And in those 1950's, that style seemed to be dying right before Cohen's eyes as the old folks themselves died and their grandchildren were passionately seized by jukebox rock 'n roll.  Cohen, he felt sure, was capturing this music's death mask at the instant of its extinction.

After the lecture, a young woman in the class came up and told Cohen that her family was from rural North Carolina and was still singing these old ballads in this same way.  The tradition had, in fact, survived and was thriving, having been passed down to her through many generations of her family.  She even sang a little for Cohen to show him what she meant.

Cohen was puzzled, knowing that he and people who took an interest in this work had scoured every inch of those hills, looking under every rock in all of Appalachia trying to find the last remnants of this folk tradition.  Those hills had been picked absolutely clean decades ago.

On a wild hunch, Cohen asked her if anybody in her family had ever gone to the University of California at Berkeley, where Cohen's work on these ballads became very popular.  Oh sure, she said.  Everybody in her family went to Berkeley — her dad, all her aunts and uncles, her grandparents, her family pets, and so on and so forth, etc.  I seem to remember she was about to go there herself.

This young woman and her family were indeed from North Carolina, and this style of singing was indeed a folk tradition from their part of the country.  And it was indeed being passed down to her via her family, one generation to the next.  Being young, and perhaps not a history major, she neither knew nor much cared that the singing style had gone into exile in Berkeley for a little while before coming back home to the North Carolina hills.  

And she was not wrong.  The authentic bearers of real folk traditions — if you wanna talk that way — almost never know exactly how the music comes down to them.  In her case, this folk music is thriving in her family as a folk tradition, just as sure as it ever did in anybody else's family.  She had plenty reason to be proud.  She was not wrong.  She was right.

#2

In the 1950's and 1960's, Barry Ancelet grew up in Louisiana speaking Cajun French.  He studied the French language in Louisiana high schools and colleges, where teachers always insisted that Cajun French wasn't French at all — that it literally had nothing to do with the French language.  Ancelet accepted this without too much worry.  

And he never paid much attention to Cajun music, even though (or because) it was always around.  In many similar stories I've heard, the protagonists often think of the traditional music they grew up with as low — a weakness of ignorant country trash.  In his article in the great collection Sounds of the South (which is where I get this information), Ancelet isn't explicit about his own early attitudes toward the music.

In any case, in the early 1970's he spent an academic year in France, where he felt homesick and isolated.  One momentous night in Paris, at a concert of Cajun music, he underwent a shattering conversion experience.  He realized that he'd been systematically trained to be ignorant of himself and his own surroundings.  Everything he thought he knew about his own language and his own culture turned out to be crazy.

He immediately sensed what he should do with the rest of his life — he went back to Louisiana and ultimately became one of the founders of the academic study of Cajun and Acadian culture.  Tonight, I see that Wikipedia tells us he's from Louisiana and what he does now, but doesn't mention any conversion experience — least of all in France.

#3

In the past several months of my research into the Moonshiners Dance, the trail has finally led me to the mostly unknown, yet much-maligned traditional music of my various homelands.

In the past few weeks, for example, I've been listening with mounting enthusiasm to Down Home Dairyland.  Originally a radio show, I know it as 40 episodes released on CD, with an accompanying listener's guide. 

 

The hosts are Jim Leary and Rick March — the Gilbert and Gubar of polka music — two folklorists who've been exploring the traditional and ethnic music of the Upper Midwest since the late 1970s. 

Their work, and that of other musicians and scholars in their field, is rapidly being hauled aboard here at the Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues. 

For now, I draw your attention to program #21 of Down Home Dairyland, which deals with the ethnic music of Stevens Point, Wisconsin.   Apparently, if you walked into a hall in Stevens Point today, you'd have a good chance of hearing polka that's audibly and vividly Polish, feeling a little like the crooked-metered concertina recordings made by Polish immigrants in the 1920's. 

And why not?  The area was heavily settled by Poles in the mid-1800's and again in the early 1900's.  Wouldn't the ethnic music of Stevens Point sound pretty damned Polish?

Not necessarily, it turns out.  In the mid-20th century, the sound that dominated among Stevens Point polka bands was the German-sounding oompah style popularized by Minnesota bandleaders Whoopee John Wilfahrt and Harold Loeffelmacher.  Their styles influenced bands far and wide as Whoopee John, especially, became a kind of regional hero like Charlie Poole did in the southeast.

By the late 1950's, though, some younger Stevens Pointers grew weary of the "arranged and mannered" German sound and the sedentary stage presence of the bands.  The more authentically European Polish styles they found among bandleaders from Chicago and Milwaukee were aggressive, improvised, visceral — they felt more like rock 'n roll, and more authentic at the same time.  

So, there was a Revival — Leary and March call it a "resurgence" and a "revitalization" — of explicitly Polish music among Polish bands around Stevens Point.  I imagine that, today, those mid-century revialists are easily old enough to have great grandchildren who might know only that their family came from Poland in the 1850's, and that they're learning to play Polish styles from great grandpa. 

I won't try to squeeze my own sudden attentiveness to the ethnic-American styles of the Upper Midwest into a little vignette.  Maybe that's for you to do.  But I've been brought back north precisely because I wanted to contribute to the understanding of Harry Smith's influential collection of southern music. 

 

I've seen that pattern over and over again in other people, and one of the things that surprises me most is my own surprise that it's happening to me.  

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