The Celestial Monochord

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 Arcadian 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.  

_

As Real As It Gets

The book reviews in next Sunday's New York Times (March 4) will include a review of Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor. The reviewer, Ben Yagoda, is disappointed in the book's prose — his own latest book is When You Catch An Adjective, Kill It — but he likes the book's ideas tolerably well. Certainly, the review is worth reading.

The book is about the ways American musicians have tried to convey their authenticity, often pushing back against powerful cultural currents challenging them on the point.

Especially interesting is Yagoda's discussion of the book's chapter on Mississippi John Hurt. His music was not black enough for Okeh's race records in 1928, even if his skin was too dark for their hillbilly line. Ironically, he was rediscovered in 1963 by white record collectors and introduced to contemporary audiences as a blues revivalist, although he didn't play blues. Or anyway, this is how I read Yagoda's reading of Barker and Taylor's reading of history.

As often as I wish I'd been there for that 1960's Revival of myth and legend, I'm just as often reminded that today's revivalism has great advantages over that gone paradise. I get the impression folk and blues people used to harbor fierce, malignant, withering resentments about the tuning of hammer dulcimers, whether you may use a plastic thumb pick, and whatnot.  They sometimes positively hated each other over such things. Or anyway, if so, it's pretty much a thing of the past.

A profile of Spider John Koerner makes it sound as if Koerner was hounded into giving up music and leaving the country because he wasn't deemed authentic enough (I think my reading of the article is a bit overly dramatic, actually). If this is at all close to correct, he really DID teach Bob Dylan a lot — as we all know, in July of 1965, Bob Dylan disappointed folk music purists by "going electric" at their annual gathering in ... somewhere. Can't remember.

But it seems everybody went through their own version of it — if Barker and Taylor are to be believed, even John Hurt got pushed out of, and stuffed into, various authentic closets. I know a guy who bought his first New Lost City Ramblers album in the mid-sixties, and he felt he had to hide it on the subway ride home — the Ramblers, apparently, weren't considered authentic enough in his neighborhood.

Back in 2004, between banjo seminars, I saw the subject of authenticity brought up in Mike Seeger's presence. He said various sensible things about it, including something like "You always have to wonder, an authentic WHAT? " I don't remember what he said exactly ... maybe it was "Everybody's an authentic SOMETHING."

My understanding is that the Carter Family, between around WWII and the mid 1960's, were considered by many folk music enthusiasts to be grossly inauthentic pop country recording stars — sort of the mid-century equivalent of ... well, I don't know who ... Faith Hill?

In any case, people like Ed Kahn and Mike Seeger (not to mention Harry Smith) helped articulate a "reading" of the Carters that brought them to their current reputation as more real than reality itself. Mike Seeger, and especially Ralph Rinzler, did the same thing for Bill Monroe. Of course, Maybelle Carter and Bill Monroe may have helped out a bit too.

The more I see and read, the less I worry about authenticity. There was never a time in some real down-home past when it was anything other than a pain in the ass. Elijah Wald's Escaping The Delta and and Benjamin Filene's Romancing The Folk are better educations in the matter than you'll receive here at The Celestial Monochord.

But you know ... we have it good, we who became interested in this music at the turn of this century, around the time of the complete Robert Johnson and the Harry Smith Anthology in CD box sets, of O Brother Where Art Thou, of The Old Crow Medicine Show, and so on. It literally took decades of fighting and arguing, going hungry and losing friends, writing and researching — not to mention playing and hearing and collecting a lot of great music — to bring me this long perspective I now (believe myself to) enjoy. In 1960, a lot of people would have sacrificed anything to read Wald, Filene, Cantwell, Marcus, Charters, and ... well, I don't know, maybe Barker and Taylor.

 

Editor's Note: Hey! Here I am! This is entry number 26 — count 'em, twenty six — in my 28-part mission to post something every day this month to The Celestial Monochord. And I mean, something Monochordum Mundi, not just any old thing. I mean, not my laundry list or something. Whatever a laundry list is ...

 

Crumb

Back in March, a magazine called Exclaim! (which I take to be sort of a Canadian Mojo) published an article about the rising popularity among young folks of collecting 78 rpm records.

It was written by Jason Schneider, who seems to be a little like me — a turn-of-the-century convert to early 20th Century blues and country. Schneider's article is well worth the read, so I forwarded it to a Monochord reader who's a very experienced 78 collector.

He and I enjoyed picking at the article, finding various things to admire and attack in it. In particular, my correspondent would like to urgently warn new 78 collectors NOT to play their records on old "gramophones." You can, and should, buy a modern record player with a 78 rpm setting, instead of ruining your 78's with 100-year-old technology. These are not floppy disks — you don't need an out-dated playback device for this out-dated medium.

Another interesting passage in Schneider's article is this:

Robert Crumb especially has had a profound influence since the acclaimed 1994 documentary about his life fully illuminated his obsession with 78 collecting and old time music’s ongoing hold on his psyche. In fact, the best introduction to the music is still Crumb’s series of blues and country “trading cards” that provide bios of his favourite artists. [link added]

I wouldn't know where to start in confirming whether or not Crumb really has had any such profound influence ... and I wonder whether Schneider can confirm it, and how. The main difficulty of Schneider's article is his "authoritative" point of view. Instead of staying close to his experience, he wants to use an omniscient voice — and ironically, this can actually strip your writing of its most useful information.

So let me do what Schneider should have done, possibly, and ponder Terry Zwigoff's Crumb — which I saw early in my interest in the old music — as I, personally, actually experienced it.

A girlfriend suggested I see Crumb because R. Crumb and his family were so much like me and mine. Someone else suggested this was a stupid and cruel thing to say. So, I saw Crumb in a questioning frame of mind — How is this like looking into a mirror? Does it represent me? Misrepresent me? What here should I embrace? But, to an extent, maybe that's how we always go to the movies.

Over the previous year or two, I had bought a lot of CD reissues of old blues, but R. Crumb was the first 78 record collector I ever "met." There isn't much music heard in the film, the main exception being a moment with R. Crumb sitting on the floor listening to an old Geechie Wiley 78. But for me, that scene is the film's most persistent memory. When I think of Crumb, that's what I see.

Much more important, though, were his drawings of street lamps. At some point, R. Crumb says he and a photographer friend drove around taking photos of ordinary lamp posts and other municipal and commercial fixtures and structures — the only way he could later manage to draw them into his cartoons. We live in a civilization so soulless and ugly and forgettable that we can't even remember what it looks like.

And that was like looking into a mirror, so much so that I could almost feel my mind reorganizing itself to accommodate the experience of having these private thoughts so vividly projected onto the big screen. My previous experience with the old music had carried some of that sense — of these old musicians being forgotten by an ugly culture, of all the real greatness in the world collecting dust somewhere, of the lives of people like Harry Smith and the Crumb family being examples of what happens to the best minds of my generation and yours.

So it would be false, outright, to say Crumb introduced me to the old music. You might possibly say that the film made it "cool" to be into the music. It would be best to say that the film was one of several things that modeled for me a possible relationship with the music, a way of fitting the music into a worldview that mattered, a way the music could be employed in the job of making sense of things.

To make the strongest possible claim for it, maybe Crumb was the last straw — it aided and abetted, giving me permission to just go ahead and finally become that dusty old crank obsessed with old music who I'd begun to glimpse in the mirror.  

 

Editor's Note: This is the fourth installment of my attempt to post something every damned day for a whole month ... it is not a coincidence that I chose the shortest month of the year. But is it short enough to preserve my sanity? Stay tuned!

Also, anybody know where the photo from this post is from?

 

Dixieland Jazz at Dupont Circle

Editor's Note (August 30, 2006): A lot of light has since been shed on the Dupont Circle musicians by readers submitting comments on this entry. I have now closed the comments seciton for this entry, but I invite you to write me at celestialmonochord@gmail.com. I will be posting a "New Updated Revised Edition" of this entry in the coming months.

------------------

I saw a Dixieland jazz band busking on the street in Washington, DC this early June. It was made up of about ten African American kids — all boys between 13 and 17 years, my friend thought. They played a kind of Dixieland I'd never heard before. It was apparently a sound all their own.

I wish I'd had a recorder, since all I can do now is describe the sound. In the center — physically and musically — there were a couple of drummers with a bass drum and snare, I think. They were beating out fairly complex polyrhythms, usually with a core tempo of a fast walk.

Next to the drummers was a tuba and a ... euphonium, maybe ... providing a pulsing bass foundation. Around them crowded about six trombone players. No sax, no clarinet, no trumpet or cornet, and certainly no banjo.

The trombones generally played slides and very short runs, often repeating brief phrases, intertwining with each other in keys and with a spirit that made the music Dixieland, without any doubt. But mostly, the trombones too were their own rhythm section. They pretty much stuck within the beat, and syncopated a lot more than they swung. It was Dixieland rendered from the perspective of James Brown.

The effect was sort of a long, uniform, jam-band stream of music. Often a given trombonist would stop, walk around a little, wipe the sweat off his face, and then raise his trombone again for a couple well-placed squawks — and then repeat the procedure. The music was built so that you could freely drop in and out without interrupting the flow.

So the music was "scalable" — that is, it could be played by a smaller or larger band without much harm to the overall feel. In that sense, they had rediscovered a trick at the core of the "Old Time" stringband sound usually heard today at Old Time jams.

In the late 1960's around Chapel Hill, Alan Jabbour and his Hollow Rock String Band had every instrument play in unison (except the guitar), so they could add a second or third banjo or a fifth fiddle — and the main effect was that the jam just got louder. In this way, you could have a single jam that was large enough for a whole "scene" or community to participate, something not possible with other stringband styles. This Dupont Circle jazz was a little like that — scalable, participatory, community-building, revivalist, and new.

But of course they weren't playing in unison — each was improvising. They were playing jazz. Around the 1950's, many amateur white Dixieland enthusiasts memorized the parts in old jazz recordings so they could reproduce them in their own band, sort of as a classical orchestra does. I don't know if they didn't understand, or if they just ignored, that the original recordings had been improvised. But what these white bands played wasn't jazz — it was an impersonation of jazz.

Improvisation, of course, is key. In several of the earliest articles written about bluegrass, the writers tried to explain the music in terms of Dixieland. Both forms involve an ensemble collectively, spontaneously composing a unique performance that "fills up" each measure with polyphony. Bluegrass, they said, is like Dixieland played on southern stringband instruments.

It was clear to me that the kids in Dupont Circle had been listening to Dixieland recordings and had vividly understood — and had been deeply impressed with — their essence, which is collective simultaneous improvisation.

Traditionalists who fixate on certain narrow views of authenticity would probably be disappointed in the music — particularly in the brief and simple lines they used and the featureless "architecture" of the numbers those lines added up to.

I was not disappointed. I was so happy and amazed that I couldn't believe my ears and eyes. First, these were children, damned near — born in the early 1990's around the time "Friends" debuted on TV — and they were intensely and joyously REVIVALIST in their approach. It was hardly something I anticipated seeing that night, coming from people so young of any race, any class, or any gender. Certainly, I'd seen little in Minneapolis to quite prepare me for it.

Lately, I've been studying the lives of several brass dance-band musicians of the 1920's. Most were World War One veterans, and found discipline and musical experience in the US military. Of course, these Dupont Circle kids haven't played for their countrymen during a World War (at least not yet). Nor can I imagine they were raised in a community that strongly and consistently nurtures the development of obsolete tromboning — I know I wasn't.

But they understood Dixieland jazz well enough to try it out and fashion from the results of their experiment a new thing, suited to their skills, their aesthetics, and their time and place. I walked away without really understanding who I'd seen — I still don't quite get who they were or how they got there. But they were clear proof that we are still deeply in the midst of a full-on, all-out Revival.

 

Look Away From The Cross

Sara Carter (photo by David Gahr, from Dunson and Raim)

 

In early March 2004, I first heard the original Carter Family's 1940 and 1941 recording sessions — their final sessions together as a trio. By coincidence, Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" happened to be Number One at the box office that week. So, the Carter Family's "Look Away From The Cross" sounded to me like a sharp crack of thunder.

I can always count on the original Carter Family to send my mind reeling. They always seem to dissipate some thick fog of nonsense the world has become so accustomed to that we've forgotten it even existed. They seem to get directly into the core of something, though I'm never able to predict just what that something's going to be.

Of course, whether they're "really" getting to the heart of something is separate question, but regardless, their music powerfully projects that effect. No wonder the folk revival of the 1950's and 1960's — always seeking antidotes to American Cold War culture — so lovingly embraced the original Carter Family.

Anyway, I won't rehash the media noise generated by "The Passion of the Christ." I'll only mention that the Gospels themselves spill very little ink on the suffering of Jesus — they even emphasize that he suffered less that most people executed by crucifixion. What really interests the Gospels is the resurrection. As I understand it, the fetish for fluids, whips, and naked men is primarily Medieval.

I guess "Look Away From The Cross" is probably a Negro spiritual of the Holiness Church variety — it ain't German Catholic, I can tell you that from personal experience. Below, I've repeatedly written out the chorus instead of just writing "Chorus" in order to give you a feel for how insistently Sara Carter cries out "look away." In customary Carter Family fashion, Sara sings lead and plays autoharp, Maybelle plays guitar and "seconds" the lyrics with rejoinders (shown in parentheses), and A.P. Carter just kinda sings when he's good and ready. The overall effect is as bright and catchy as any advertising jingle.

LOOK AWAY FROM THE CROSS

Look away from the cross to that glittering crown
From your cares, weary ones, look away
There's a home for the soul where no sorrows can come
And where pleasure will never decay

LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(weary ones, look away from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown (glittering crown)
LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(look away, weary ones, from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown

Though the burdens of life may be heavy to bear
And your crosses and trials severe
There's a beautiful hand that is beckoning "Come"
And no heartache and sighings are there

LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(weary ones, look away from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown (glittering crown)
LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(look away, weary ones, from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown

Mid the conflicts of battles, of struggles and strife
Bravely onward your journey pursue
Look away from the cross to that glittering crown
That's a waiting in heaven for you

LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(weary ones, look away from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown (glittering crown)
LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(look away, weary ones, from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown

Recorded October 4, 1941, New York City

 

 

Don't Plug In — Bluegrass and the Folk Revival

  
(Gibson ETB-150 Model Electric Tenor Banjo, 1940)

 

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1970's and 80's, I knew some lovers and practitioners of bluegrass music. They all loved rock n' roll too, and seemed a lot more worried about electricity running microwave ovens than musical instruments. I remember laughter at the thought that folkies had turned on Bob Dylan for "going electric."

Still, I also remember sharing with bluegrassers a special affection, even reverence, for the acoustic quality of bluegrass instruments. I'm reminded of John Hartford's drawn-out, playfully grandiose introduction to his tongue-twister "Tater Tate and Allen Mundy":

Bluegrass music a-playin' in the park
Bluegrass music picking way past dark
Bluegrass music, it don't butt in
Don't need an amp and don't plug in

I thought of all this last night while reading the introduction to Neil Rosenberg's "Bluegrass: A History." In a section entitled "Bluegrass — What Is It?", Rosenberg insists on a paradox. Bluegrass has always been a commercial and professional form designed for radio and records, and its sound was shaped by a 20th-century electric invention: the microphone. Nevertheless, the non-electric stringed instruments of bluegrass are usually the first thing mentioned by its followers when trying to describe the genre:

... [as] can be seen from a joke told by Ricky Skaggs ... "How many bluegrass musicians does it take to change a light bulb? One, and three to complain because it's electric!" [taken from Rosenberg's book]

I've finally begun reading Rosenberg's history of bluegrass because, over the past year or so, I've become aware of a lot of such paradoxes and surprises. That's what good histories are always for — "the past" always turns out to be nothing like the way our presumptions lead us to believe.

For example, I've recently realized how important the Folk Revival of the 1950's and 60's was to the survival of bluegrass. The first-ever bluegrass LP was released in 1957 by Folkways Records. It was recorded and compiled by Folk Revival future-heavyweight Mike Seeger, and its liner notes mark the first use in print of the word "bluegrass" to refer to a genre of music.

The author of these liner notes, Ralph Rinzler, would eventually found the Smithsonian's annual Festival of American Folklife in Washington D.C. — but first, he helped revive Bill Monroe's stalled career by becoming his manager. Some of Monroe's new band members were soon to be Northern "citybillies" who first encountered bluegrass in Greenwich Village coffee shops or at folk music concerts on college campuses.

This surprises me, both comin' and goin'. On the one hand, today's officianados of "Old Time" music think of Mike Seeger and his New Lost City Ramblers as champions of authentic folk alternatives to post-WWII commercial inventions like rock n' roll and bluegrass. It is definitely not widely known in the Old Time community that Seeger, Rinzler, and Alan Lomax helped rescue bluegrass from obscurity (if not oblivion) by forcefully asserting its legitimacy as an authentic American folk genre.

On the other hand, it's surprising coming from the other direction, too. An acquaintance from West Virginia once expressed suspicion about the fact that I, a Chicago native, have an intense interest in "her" music. From what I gathered, she might have been surprised to learn that Monroe's invention only dates from the mid-1940's, and that its commercial prospects nearly died a decade after they were born. Not only the finances, but the very values and identity of bluegrass were shaped by us Northern revivalists. Rosenberg writes:

Until the mid-fifties the acoustic aspect of bluegrass was not unique within country music, and in that sense the use of acoustic instruments in bluegrass is a historical accident. But because it was performed on such instruments, particularly the antique five-string banjo, it was virtually the only form of contemporary country music acceptable to the folk boom of the late fifties and early sixties, where electric instruments were considered inauthentic and symbols of the alienation of mass culture. Through the folk boom bluegrass gained new audiences and recognition as a distinct musical form [that is, became thought of as "bluegrass"]. Today the insistence upon acoustic instruments has become a philosophical position.

By the way; thinking about bluegrass and the folk revival, it's interesting that other branches of country music in the post-War years dealt directly with social problems facing southern expatriate "urban hillbillies," such as adultery, divorce, depression, and alcoholism. But bluegrass chose to deal with these same pressures by evoking feelings of an alternative — and idealized — place and time. Rosenberg:

Because the content of the bluegrass repertoire is so often clearly symbolic (rather than directly oriented toward current concerns), it is more accessible to people from very different cultural milieux who relate to the music as an art form, enjoying it as many enjoy opera sung in languages they do not comprehend.

I may report more about these and other matters as I get further into "Bluegrass: A History".

Those U.S. State Department Blues

I just read an essay by Paul Oliver, one of the best-known historians of the blues, about why it is that much of the best and earliest work on the blues had long been done by Europeans.

Swedes, Belgians, Germans, French, Englishmen and others wrote exhaustive studies of the meanings of blues songs, compiled 2000-page catalogs of blues 78s, founded some of the first magazines anywhere devoted to blues — all of this long before America had a "blues revival."

Charles Delaunay had to write "Hot Discography" secretly, on onion skin, because he was in the middle of the Nazi occupation of France. When Paul Oliver (a Brit) wrote "The Blues Fell This Morning," Martin Luther King wrote the introduction.

In 1960 — the year "The Blues Fell This Morning" was published — Paul Oliver finally scraped up enough money to actually visit the United States, the birthplaces of the blues he loved so much. He traveled to Washington, New York, Detroit, Memphis, New Orleans, Shreveport, Dallas and various parts of Mississippi and Arkansas. He stayed with Muddy Waters in Chicago and traveled with Chris Strachwitz, who founded Arhoolie records using some of the recordings they made. The impact of the trip on Oliver's life and scholarship was incalculable.

The trip was made possible by a very small grant from the U.S. Department of State — a grant "for leaders and specialists."

I don't know whether such grants still come out of the State Department or from anywhere else in the U.S. government anymore. I do hear frequent stories of scholars having to give presentations to conferences in the U.S. via telephone or satellite hook-up due to difficulties getting temporary visas to travel here — and I mean British astronomers and Swedish music historians and the like. I often read about such incidents in left-wing rags like ... Sky and Telescope, for example. Bad times, bad times.

 

Editor's Note:  Paul Oliver's essay is in "Sounds of the South," a collection of papers from a conference celebrating the 1989 opening of the Southern Folklife Collection at Chapel Hill. It was edited by Daniel W. Patterson ... and I'm finding it really interesing. Also, thanks to reader Bill B. for, among other things, correcting my spelling of Chris Strachwitz's name.

Math and Memory in New Lost City

I finally bought The New Lost City Rambler's compilation of their later stuff, 1963-1973, which is titled "Out Standing in their Field." The cover art has a photo of them, you know ... out ... standing ... in their field. This is a very old joke, which is never funny — except in the case of the New Lost City Ramblers, where it really is funny.

One of the members of the band, John Cohen, tells another story that also isn't funny, but because it's the New Lost City Ramblers, it's really hilarious:

A few years ago at a literary gathering in New York City, I was introduced to a music publisher. He remembered the New Lost City Ramblers, he said, and then asked, "What was the band's big hit?"

When you read about the New Lost City Ramblers, you're told over and over that their influence has outdistanced their sales. But over the last half-dozen years or so, I've come to realize, with deepening amazement, just how true this is. It should always be written with exclamation points.

The band formed in 1958. By 1962, they had already broken up largely due to the fact that there was no money it. With three guys in the band (one of whom had a family to support), the math just didn't add up. They reconfigured, replacing one member, and proceeded to limp along, although for the vast majority of the last 43 years, they've been able to make more money individually being remembered as members of the NLCR than they could together performing as members of the NLCR. Of something like 30 original albums, I count about 5 that are in print as CD's.

The irony is this:

The Ramblers' influence on generations of young musicians who have followed in their footsteps is incalculable: it's difficult to imagine a revival of old-time music of any consequence without them. (MusicHound Folk: The Essential Album Guide)

Jerry Garcia, Ry Cooder, and David Grisman learned to play from their albums. Bob Dylan's recent autobiography includes a thirteen-page ode dedicated to dramatizing the enormous impact that Rambler Mike Seeger had on the young Dylan:

Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it ... But then something immediate happens and you're in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it — you're set free ... Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door — something jerks it open and you're shoved in and your head has to go into a different place. Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it. Mike Seeger had that affect on me.

There's little danger of over-stating the Rambler's influence — at least until somebody finally gets around to just stating it. Philip Gura, in a hair-raising essay in the journal Southern Culture, is one of the few who've tried. The essay leaves you with the impression that he may be over-stating the case. But is he? It's worth looking into the New Lost City Ramblers and giving it some thought. You may as well — they're out standing in their field.

On Not Going To Camp

I never went to camp — that is, until my wife sent me to Banjo Camp for my 40th birthday present. My mental images of summer camp come from Alan Sherman's "Camp Granada" (hello mudduh, hello faddah), from the movies (comedies and horror flicks, mostly), and from the stories friends have told me (typically about their earliest sexual awakenings).

Today, I mostly hear about camp from my wife. Routinely, I turn to her to announce that I've made some fantastically paradigm-smashing ethnomusicological discovery — an obscure song long-forgotten in this age of mechanical reproduction, the tune and lyrics of which finally unlock some nagging mystery of the American imagination.

"Oh, sure," she says, "we sang that at camp!" At this point, she shout-sings all of the lyrics to my new discovery, complete with elaborate hand choreography, animal sounds, rhythmic clapping, etc. A field recording of Maybelle and Sara Carter's rendition of the "The Ship That Never Returned" was such a discovery.  The song turned out to have been reworked by the Kingston Trio as "M.T.A.", and was a favorite of the counselors at some Bible camp or other in Minnesota, where my wife heard it a couple decades before I did.

This experience is always a little deflating, needless to say. I begin to wonder what I could possibly have to contribute if all my greatest discoveries turn out to be well-known to every Brownie in the country. But I appreciate being reminded that these old folksongs are still alive, both in my wife's memory and in my curiosity.

Sometimes I think I really missed something by not having gone to camp. More often, I suspect that, had I learned more of these old songs back then, I would not have the fanatical zeal for them that I do today. And I enjoy my fanatical zeal ...

The Meaning of the John Henry Story

my kitten Henry (is not a steel-drivin' man)

I first heard the John Henry story from the public schools, I guess, or maybe from my family, some of whom were involved in the Scouts. And I'd gotten a very specific impression of what the story meant.

But once I grew up and started listening to the music of the 1920's, I found very little support there for the interpretation I'd grown up with. I had always thought it was a story of Man against Machine, where human virtues like bravery, nobility, vulnerability, and the work ethic did battle against technology and heartless Progress.

But that's not quite what I hear on the old records. Take the version Mississippi John Hurt recorded on December 28, 1928, on that same Christmas trip to New York when he recorded "Avalon Blues." It's called "Spike Driver Blues":

Take this hammer and carry it to my captain
Tell him I'm gone
Just tell him I'm gone
"I'm sure he's gone"

This is the hammer that killed John Henry
But it won't kill me
But it won't kill me
Ain't gunna kill me

John Henry was a steal driving boy
But he went down
But he went down
That's why I'm gone

Hurt's delivery isn't comic, it seems to me, but sweet, sincere, and thoughtful. There's no mention of any steam drill at all, just a killer hammer which the singer renounces.

J. E. Mainer and his Mountaineers did a version on June 15, 1936 in which the young John Henry issues a prophesy:

John Henry was a little boy
Lord, he sat on his pappa's knee
He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel
Said this hammer'll be the death of me
This hammer be the death of me

This version does mention the contest with the steam drill, but as always, it's the hammer that's the cause of John Henry's death.

When I first started listening to the old recordings, the biggest surprise about the message of John Henry was that there didn't seem to be much of a message at all — folk music, it turned out, isn't nearly as preachy as Folk Music. Stranger still was that insofar as there was a message, it seemed to be that hard manual labor just plain sucks and should be avoided.

The story of John Henry seems to have taken hold around, maybe, 1910 or so, and everybody seems to agree that Henry was a black man. So originally the story was, partly, a complaint against working conditions for African Americans during Reconstruction.

But when I encountered it in the post-WWII suburbs, the story was being made to reflect the conflicts and concerns of that time and place. It seemed to assure us of the dignity of hard work. At the same time, it seemed to reflect our middle-class anxieties over the idea of technology rendering our jobs obsolete. Maybe today John Henry would be in a steel-driving race with 30 tech workers from Bangladesh.

There's a lot of good information on the John Henry story. Check out Norm Cohen's Long Steel Rail for more on John Henry (I keep intending to do so myself). I recently discovered Brett Williams' interesting John Henry: A Bio-Bibliography at a used bookstore. And Harry Smith's anthologies of folk music (the original Volumes 1 though 3 from Folkways and now Volume 4 from Revenant) are crammed to the gills with songs about hammers.