The Celestial Monochord

NPR: Mike Seeger enters hostpice

According to NPR, Mike Seeger has entered hospice.  I hope they have this wrong, of course, but I know he's had health problems for some time. 

Here's a round-up of articles about Mike Seeger previously publish at The Monochord.

  

   

    

  

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The Anthology and Carbine Williams

    

OK, I'm officially declaring myself a Turner Classic Movies fan.

Lately, movies hardly seem worth watching if Robert Osborne isn't there, just before and after, to give a cheery commentary about them.  Bruno is probably fine, I guess, but I'll wait until it comes to TCM and Osborne can tell us who ALMOST played Bruno before they finally cast Sacha Baron Cohen.

More seriously, TCM has mattered to my development as a cultural historian.  I live much of my life in a pre-WWII "immersion program" of my own design, and it helps that movies carry a lot of dense and very palatable cultural information. 

Consider the relatively obscure Jimmy Stewart movie Carbine Williams — a biopic about an inventor who helped create the M1 carbine rifle, a standard gun used in WWII.

Aside from this seemingly unpromising subject, TCM's viewer guide said that Williams was a bootlegger in the 1920's, and created his invention while in a North Carolina prison.  I figured hillbilly stringband music had to appear somewhere, right? 

Also, the movie was released in 1952, the year that Folkways Records released Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.  Maybe the movie might shed light on ... say, the prevailing attitudes about southern Appalachian culture that The Anthology had to contend with upon its release.

I hunkered down to watch TCM's broadcast on May 3rd.  What blew my mind turned out to be the way the filmmakers tried to compensate for the dry subject matter — how they tried to draw you into the biography. 

The film begins "now" — in 1952 — with the son of Carbine Williams having had schoolyard fights about his father's criminal past.  The son is otherwise a typical 8-year-old of 1952, with the greasy kid stuff in his hair, the rolled up jeans, the stripped t-shirt. 

To help the son understand him, Carbine Williams brings the boy to his old prison warden, who tells the boy — and us — the remarkable story of how a convict in his prison went on to win WWII for America. 

In the end, the boy now understands and appreciates his father's experiences as a Prohibition outlaw, a convict in the Depression, and finally an engineer of the military-industrial complex that won the war.  A heart-warming hug closes the film.

The emotional appeal of this framing storyline seems rooted in a sense that the events of the first half of the century would be incomprehensible, or at least misunderstood, by the baby-boom generation. The fantasy proposed and fulfilled by the movie is that the titanic and wrenching experiences of two World Wars and the Depression could somehow be appreciated and acknowledged by the children of The New Prosperity. 

This yawning divide in experience could someday, somehow be bridged, and that is an entertaining dream.

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Writing about the musicians whose 1920's recordings were reissued in 1952 on The Anthology, Greil Marcus says:

In 1952 [they] were only twenty or twenty-five years out of their time; cut off by the cataclysms of the Great Depression and the Second World War and by a national narrative that never included their kind, they appeared now like visitors form another world, like passengers on a ship that had drifted into the sea of the unwritten.  "All those guys on that Harry Smith Anthology were dead," Cambridge folkies Eric von Schmidt and Jim Rooney wrote in 1979, recalling how it seemed in the early 1960's, when most of Smith's avatars were very much alive.  "Had to be."

The Anthology derived some of its power from exploiting the same radical break in memory that Carbine Williams uses as a dramatic frame.  To young people the age of the Williams boy — that is, people Bob Dylan's or Joan Baez's age — the world that gave birth to their parents, as well as to the recordings on The Anthology, seemed about as foreign as any world could, no matter how remote.

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At some level, the cataclysms of the first half of the century were not just events Carbine Williams witnessed, but also projects he undertook.  His son could be forgiven for viewing his father's life as a proposed path for the boy himself to follow, and that path must have seemed like a nightmare.

 

The movie Carbine Williams neglects the possibility that the young Williams boy might rightfully be less interested in the life his father had lived than in the world his father had created and left as an inheritance.  And in 1952, the world looked like an awfully mixed bag.

Many baby boomers came to see the entertainment industry that produced Carbine Williams — the one that failed to anticipate this perspective — as a purveyor of bad dreams thin enough to be transparent.  They were thus drawn to cultural alternatives that were more opaque, and therefore less available through America's efficient new systems for the distribution of culture.

The most committed Folk Revivalists of the early 1960's traded their father's M1 carbine rifle for their grandfather's banjo. Staging a kind of identity insurrection, kids like the Williams boy would try on identities that their fathers had either ignored or abandoned while growing into architects of the Cold War — identities inspired by Pete Seeger, Charlie Poole, Jessie James, or Henry Lee's jilted lover.

Or Harry Smith — whoever he was.  His Anthology was like a Ouija board capable of communicating messages from spirits the rehabilitated Carbine Williams, and his invention, had long before left for dead. 

Some of the Williams boy's generation sought to retrace the occult thinking that organized the Anthology's contents.  Others reenacted its obsolete performances.  Many sought, in the most obsolete available songs, the stories their fathers (or his wardens) didn't know or wouldn't tell.

Patty Hearst's famous rifle was an M1 carbine.

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