The Celestial Monochord

A Geography of the Anthology

Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music as a Google Map
by The Celestial Monochord



My rusted old pickup is in the shop, again.  That's the bad news.

On the bright side, I climbed yesterday into a rental car and was elated to find it equipped with XM radio.  YES!   For a few days, I can finally listen to Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, and that other stuff down along that long, lonesome dial.

Also yesterday, as if to elbow me into seeing the metaphors in this, the mailman delivered a copy of It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music.

It's hard to think of a more worked-over subject for a book — motoring along America's highways in search of its roots music.  The author, Amanda Petrusich, even includes her personal snapshots of roadsigns she saw along the way.

But who am I to say so?  My entire life has come to revolve around driving off to look for traces of my musical roots and yours.  If I ever got the Do Re Mi, my cubicle would instantly become a faint memory and nothing would keep me off that same highway until the day I died.

Unfortunately, high gas prices and my dying truck have helped keep me close to home this summer, even more than the cube usually does. 

At such times, I often think of my favorite recording of "Shenandoah."  Performed by the Ebony Hillbillies, it strikes me as a song about a guy whose day job is a wedge driven between him and what he loves most:

O Shenandoah, I won't deceive you
(Away, you rolling river!)
O Shenandoah, I'm bound to leave you
Away, I'm bound away
Across that wide Missouri.

I haven't sought out the standard interpretation, because this one suits me fine.  Almost the very day America was founded, someone sat right down and wrote an anthem about money bearing him away from his own heart. 

Which, in turn, brings me to my favorite photograph of any musician, a photo taken by Mike Seeger.  It's in the liner notes to Seeger's collection of field recordings, Close To Home, and is the size of a postage stamp.

In it, autoharp virtuoso Kilby Snow is taking a break from his construction job, in 1957, to play 19th-century tunes with his swollen, stained hands.  His intelligent, bespectacled, ironic eyes glance sidelong at the photographer. Snow's cut on Close to Home is the stunning "He Will Set Your Fields On Fire." 

And in that photo, he sits with his autoharp on the hood of a big, beautiful, Cold War American car. 

Maybe that's Mike Seeger's car, the same one he drove through the gathering gloom the night he finally found Dock Boggs, his restless wife and kids along for the ride.  Maybe it's Snow's own car.

Chatting recently with a friend-of-the-blog, Boney Ernest, I wondered what would've happened to our musical culture if Americans had always paid the real cost of their gasoline. 

What if, for example, Northerners couldn't afford to drive South in search of somebody else's grandparent's music?  What if we had to remain content with OUR OWN grandparent's music? 

And what if the next Folk Revival was finally, truly local? 

Maybe, at last, we would arrive at a better answer to R. Crumb's famous question: "Where has it gone, all the beautiful music of our grandparents? It died with them, that's where it went."

If we at least play along with this notion, the various "Americana" revivals of the 20th century were not fueled by a desire to discover the roots of rock-n-roll, or to explore America's collective unconscious.  They were not fueled by great music, nor even the lust to exploit it.  They were simply fueled by … fuel.

My rusty old truck not withstanding, I don't feel too bad about my carbon footprint.

For two and a half years, I've tried to explain to people why I'm dedicating so much time, energy, and earnings to researching "The Moonshiners Dance," recorded in Minnesota by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra in 1927. 

It's impossible to express in a few words.

Usually, I've waved my hands in the air, describing a hypothetical Google Map showing the geographical origin of each cut on Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music. 

On such a map, "The Moonshiners Dance" would stand out like a sore thumb, completely alone as the only selection from anywhere near "us" — me and the person I'm boring.  In the past week, I asked myself, seriously, why does it have to be hypothetical? 

And so, Google Maps and I present A Geography of the Anthology.

The Methodology of a Geography of the Anthology

In creating the map, I used the 1997 Anthology liner notes and some Wikipedia to choose a location that most shaped each Anthology selection.  This was not easy, especially limiting myself to one "pin" per recording. 

But I gave it a shot and didn't much fret about it.

For example, Henry Thomas' work is a profound contribution exactly because it's so richly about being unstuck from any particular place — it's all about the road.  I put him in his home town in the state of Texas.

Many of the Memphis performers were from other communities in the same region, but it matters that the Memphis Jug Band is from Memphis, regardless of where its members were born.  So there they are on Beale Street.

I've made an attempt to be accurate but not precise.  Look very closely at Memphis.  Nine Anthology selections belong in Memphis, in all fairness.  I've stuck my pins every block or two all the way down Beale Street, even though I don't really know where in Memphis these people did their thing.

Sometimes, it was tempting to emphasize the isolation of "The Moonshiners Dance" by skooching my decisions southward. 

The leader of the Cincinnati Jug Band, according to the 1997 liner notes, "was apparently from around the Alabama-Georgia state border." But it would've been too absurd to follow such vague instructions just to keep the Cincinnati Jug Band out of Cincinnati.  

The two selections by Chicago church congregations complicated my visual argument.  Those congregations and their recordings are products of the "great migration" of African Americans from the South to the great industrial cities of the North.  In a sense, they illustrate how far north the southern culture represented in the Anthology managed to flow.

I could have placed those congregations in the southern states where their leaders were born, but that would have been so wrong on too many levels.  For one, the music came out of a very distinctly Chicago experience.  I decided to trust the viewer to understand what those pins represent.

Ken Maynard was probably the hardest to place.

He was raised somewhere in Indiana, but "claimed Texas as his home," according to the liner notes.  He traveled around as a rodeo and circus performer, worked as a real cowboy, and went to Hollywood in 1923, where he was billed as "the American Boy's Favorite Cowboy."  His photo makes him look like a little Midwestern kid playing dress-up.

So where do you put Ken Maynard?  A random spot in Indiana?  A random spot in Texas or in "The West"?  In Hollywood?  I decided that his song describes an image of the West in the mind of somebody who was from somewhere else.  I placed him as an Indiana boy dreaming of cowboys and Indians.  Maybe you have another idea.



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The Anthology as Tarot Deck

(a modern Tarot deck by John Coulthart)

    

Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music is so well established as a canonical text that you'd think Smith must've had tenure somewhere like Harvard ... he didn't.  And it's easy to miss how perverse an idea the Anthology originally was. 

As Greil Marcus wrote in the book that launched a thousand ships, Invisible Republic:

... the Anthology was disguised as a textbook; it was an occult document disguised as an academic treatise ... This was in Harry Smith's grain.  A polymath and an autodidact, a dope fiend and an alcoholic, a legendary experimental filmmaker and a more legendary sponger, he was perhaps most notorious as a fabulist.  He liked to brag about killing people.

For generations before him, Smith's family was deeply involved in the more marginalized traditions of American mysticism — the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Theosophists.  Smith often claimed to be Aleister Crowley's illegitimate son. 

Smith brought this sensibility to the design for the Anthology, which comes across as having been ordered by some unknowable, arcane, lost cosmological system.  His liner notes include the following quote meant to help the reader understand his decisions:

"In Elementary Music The Relation Of Earth To The Sphere of Water is 4 to 3, As There Are In The Earth Four Quarters of Frigidity to Three of Water."  -- Robert Fludd

All of this matters desperately, for reasons I'll mention in my series of posts on the first seven seconds of entry #41 of the Anthology, "The Moonshiner's Dance Part One."

For now, I'm just pointing out that someone named Zac Johnson has invented a way of using the Anthology for something resembling a Tarot reading.  Harry becomes your oracle.

You use an ordinary deck of playing cards to generate a random number from 1 to 84, which gives you an entry number for a cut on the Anthology, according to Harry's mysterious and iconic numbering system. 

You then go to that corresponding song, and use it as a basis for an interpretive reading.  The extremely evocative recordings on the Anthology should serve as an endlessly rich source for readings by any reasonably sharp fortune teller who knows the collection.  The Anthology for fun and prophet.

I think Harry would have loved this.  And then hated it.  And then failed to understand it.  And then forgotten about it.  And then hated it.  And then dismissed it as uninteresting.  And then hated it.  And then loved it ...

Here's a blog entry and podcast that explain the details of the card system.

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Fake Headlines Mesmerize Music Geeks

When you first read the fake newspaper headlines in Harry Smith's liner notes for Volume One of his Anthology of American Folk Music, you're forced to stop what you're doing, sit down, and read them all very closely.

Harry knew what he was doing. 

Those headlines are great devices of seduction — or a fishhook through the mouth.  In turn, his liner notes, as a whole, have helped make his 1952 collection of 1920's records one of the most influential documents in American music. 

This morning, for the first time, I read something that finally made real sense of these queer little jokey headlines.  It was in William Howland Kenney's description of the various ways record companies got records into the hands of consumers in the 1920's:

... 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.  As one newsboy recalled: "You'd go to one customer and she'd get all excited over a new blues and start telling you all about her girl friend or some relative who was sure to buy one, too."
— Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, p 123

It's perfectly sensible, then, to suppose that a corner newsboy might literally have shouted something like "Extra! Extra! Mamie Smith's man don't treat her right! Has Crazy Blues!"

If so, the newsboys and Harry Everett Smith shared the same technique for drawing attention to the records, as does the Anthology itself to this very day.

Whether Harry understood this, I don't know — but it would be worth looking into. He was born in 1923 in Washington state and grew up mostly in Bellingham, where I doubt corner newsboys were a common sight. This sales method appears to have been little-known among researchers until it was described by William Howland Kenney in his (mind-blowing) 1993 book. Harry Smith died in 1991. 

Smith's headlines have been posted by someone named Joshua, at someplace called "Dinner on the Molly."  He also helpfully includes links to the songs at YouTube. 

It would be great if, someday, a really well-made interactive replica of the Anthology, closely based on Harry's liner notes, were legally available online.  Joshua's blog entry and the YouTube piracy are evocative how this might work.

See also my entry about the availability of the liner notes from Smithsonian.

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Harry Smith's Liner Notes Available for Download

The first time I went to a racetrack — Canterbury Downs in Chaska, Minnesota around 1999 — I picked up the horse-racing program and felt a jolt.

"So THIS is where Harry Smith got the design of his liner notes to The Anthology of American Folk Music!"

Wherever he got his ideas for them, those liner notes were so weird — so peculiar and particular and captivating — that listening to The Anthology without getting to know its liner notes seems a little perverse.  

From the beginning, those liner notes have massively multiplied the force of the blast that's slowly gone off in American culture thanks to Harry Smith's Anthology — a 1952 collection of old recordings from the late 1920's and early 1930's. 

Well, now the Smithsonian has put those notes online for download by anybody for free.  Maybe this is just the first time I've noticed it, I'm not sure. 

In any case, it's a big honking 62 MB PDF, so watch out.  Also note that they start with the new liner notes from the 1997 reissue before getting on to Harry's original notes.

The posting of this PDF seems to be part of a site redesign, eliminating the Smithsonian's old Anthology site and replacing it with a new one that looks rather like their Global Sound commerce site. 

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this change means that the individual entries of the Anthology will soon be available for purchase as mp3's. 

Of course, I think it's time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself and get the box set on CD.  You'll never regret the expense, believe me.

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The Anthology at Tom Waits Concerts

from "KPFK Will Air Folk Fest"
The Pasadena Star Bee, July 3, 1974

Tom Waits is on tour — a rare enough news story in itself. 

But note that the music piped into the theater before and after the shows, to date, has been The Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith. 

I've often pointed out the folk lineage of various Tom Waits songs, showing connections between:

Cold Cold Ground and Stephen Foster,

Georgia Lee and Blind Willie Johnson,

Swordfishtrombones and Bascom Lamar Lunsford, 

Better Off Without A Wife and Chubby Parker, The Carter Family, and John Lomax, and,

Down There By the Train and Uncle Dave Macon and Henry Thomas (although I really "buried the lead" on that one — scoll down).

... I have a lot more of these up my sleeve and I may get some of them written up some day ...

Anyway, it's interesting to see Waits tip his porkpie to The Anthology so explicitly. 

But it would be absurd to say I've finally been "proven right."  Waits has often been pretty generous in acknowledging his debts to other musicians, and folk has always been in the mix. 

Thanks to Ray for pointing out the use of The Anthology at the recent concerts, and to TCCBodhi and Dave R. at the Raindogs discussion list for providing independent confirmations.

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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.

 

I'm a Stern Old Bachelor

Over the past few months, I've bought nine inexpensive 78 rpm records — the first 78's in my music collection.

Most of my 78's relate to my research into Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, although I don't yet have "The Moonshiner's Dance" (Gennett 6305) — if you own it, please contact me. One of the "extracurricular" records is by Chubby Parker, which I bought just because he's a denizen of Harry Smith's Anthology.

It's an odd buy, since the label is the same on both sides. It claims to be two helpings of the B-side, "I'm a Stern Old Bachelor," although playing the record reveals it actually has the correct A-side, "Oh Suzanna." And in fact, the "Oh Suzanna" side is considerably more worn than the "Bachelor" side, so I guess Gennett chose their A's and B's correctly. Presumably, somewhere in the world, there's a Chubby Parker 78 claiming to have two sides of "Oh Suzanna."

"I'm a Stern Old Bachelor" is a comic novelty song, which celebrates the delights of being unbound by holy wedlock. (I wish I could make an MP3 for you, but I don't have the technology.) Parker recorded it for Gennett on February 26, 1927 ... in a couple weeks from now, it will be the 80th anniversary of that recording, but I need something to write about TODAY.

It seems to have been one of Chubby's signatures on the WLS Barn Dance radio show, although "Nickety Nackety Now Now Now" was really his theme. (You may remember "Nickety Nackety" better from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds). Both were later reissued on Slivertone, the record label of Sears Roebuck (the worlds largest store, hence the WLS call letters).

Next, "Bachelor" showed up in John Lomax's 1934 book, "American Ballads and Folk Songs." In June 1938, the original Carter Family recorded the song on their last recording session before taking off for Texas and Mexico to be on border radio with XERA. Because the Lomax and Carter texts share a couple extra verses not found on Parker's recording, I assume the Carters got the song primarily from Lomax. In any case, it's an uncharacteristically silly performance by Sara and Maybelle.

Here are the lyrics to "Stern Old Bachelor". The lines in italics are sung by the Carters, but not by Chubby Parker.

I am a stern old bachelor
My age is forty-four
I do declare, I'll never live
With women anymore

I have a stove that's worth ten cents
A table worth fifteen
I cook my gruel in oyster cans
And keep my things so clean

[chorus]
Oh little sod shanty
Little sod shanty give to me
For I'm a stern old bachelor
From matrimony free

When I come home at night I have no fear
I smile and walk right in
I never hear a voice yell out
Or say where have you been

On a cold and stormy night
In a cozy little shack
I sing my songs and think my thoughts
With no one to talk back

I go to bed when ever I please
And get up just the same
I change my socks three times a year
With no one to complain

At night when I'm on peaceful sleep
My snores can do no harm
I never have to walk the floor
With an infant [a baby] in my arms

And when I die and go to heaven
As all good bachelors do
I will not have to grieve for fear
My wife will get there too

When I first heard Parker's recording — despite his high nasal voice and crisp banjo picking — I immediately thought of the Tom Waits song, "Better Off Without a Wife." You know the one:

I like to sleep until the crack of noon
Midnight howling at the moon
Going out when I want to
Coming home when I please
Don't have to ask permission
If I want to go out fishing
Never have to ask for the keys

They're more or less the same song ... well, I should say that "Better Off Without a Wife" could easily be a thorough re-imagining of "I'm a Stern Old Bachelor." I believe Waits used to do this often — take a good old folksong, boil it down to the essence of whatever makes it good, and then build an entirely new song around that same essence. See my post on "Cold Cold Ground."

Now, you may ask whether, in 1973, Tom Waits was listening to Chubby Parker or Sara and Maybelle Carter, or reading song books by John Lomax. It's a little-known fact that Waits started out at California folk clubs like the Troubadour and the Heritage. Apparently, Waits and Ramblin' Jack Elliott would occasionally hang out together in the 1970's (one suspects a nightcap or two may have been involved).

In any case, although my evidence for a direct link between the two songs is slim — and there must be dozens of other comic bachelor songs for Waits to take some cues from — there's no reason to doubt that Waits and the music of the Carters or Chubby Parker could easily have crossed paths in the early 1970's.

 

Editor's Note: This is the 8th day of my 28-day experiment. I'm trying to post something every day for the whole month of February. If it's something worth reading, well ... all the better.

 

Old Dog Blue

I often wonder what I'll do when my song-by-song series on Diamonds in the Rough comes to an end. I'd love to work on another album, but the only one that seems worthy is Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. But given the pace at which I've run through Diamonds, I calculate The Anthology would take me about ten years. Besides, what can I say about something like "Old Dog Blue" that hasn't been said before (and better)? For example, Robert Cantwell, in his book "When We Were Good," writes beautifully about it.

But today is the 79th anniversary of the recording of Old Dog Blue on February 2, 1928, in Memphis, Tennessee on the Victor label. To commemorate that great event, here's a couple notions ...

When I first heard Jim Jackson sing Old Dog Blue, my reaction was to regret its sexism. In the first verse, the singer off-handedly mentions the recent death of his wife, and then goes on to mourn the death of his dog, movingly, in verse after verse after verse:

I'm going back where I come
I'm going back where I come
I'm going back to Giles County
My wife died and left me a bounty
Me and them pretty girls ganged around
That's the reason I'm going to Giles County

Had an old dog whose name was Blue
You know Blue was mighty true
You know Blue was a good old dog
Blue treed a possum in a hollow log
You know from that he's a good old dog

Do we take this as a joke about the relative importance of wives and dogs?

I've seen (can't remember where) the explanation that the song is hard to sort out because it's really two or more songs spliced together. The line mentioning his wife is like a vestigial organ, left over from some previous stage in the song's evolution. There's some support for this view. Later, in the middle of everything, we get this strange non-sequitur:

Blue treed a possum out on a limb
Blue looked at me and I looked at him
Grabbed that possum, put him in a sack
Don't move, Blue, 'til I get back.

It rained, it rained, yeah
It rained, it rained, yeah

Who been here since I been gone?
Little bitty girl with the red dress on
Who been here since I been gone?
Little bitty girl with the red dress on

Is the dog wearing a dress? No, this verse about a girl in a red dress waiting for the singer appears often in old folk and blues songs — so, it's what's called a "floating stanza."

But I think it's slightly condescending, a little dismissive of Jim Jackson's artistry, to think as if he's just a passive antenna through which floating stanzas appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. I trust my own aesthetics here — this performance of this text is heartbreaking, and increasingly so each time I hear it, year after year. Jackson chose his words to move us, and it works.

Once you accept that the text is very deliberate, the song comes into focus as brilliant psychological observation. It's a study of grief, the way it really works in a real brain. It hits with the force it does because it mirrors sorrow as we actually experience it. Do we really always mourn the most obvious things, or do we sometimes focus on proxies, fetishes, or symbols instead?

Jackson's character's wife has just died, so he's decided to go back to a place of his youth, before he was married, to relive happier days. It seems rather optimistic, even desperate — Jackson's character doesn't sound so young now.

Blue, too, seems to have been gone for a long time — so long that you'd expect a grown man to have gotten over it a bit. And I suspect he has. What I hear is a mind returning to everything its ever lost, trying to reconnect with it all both physically and emotionally.

By so vividly recalling this dog, by revisiting that intense ENCOUNTER between species ("Blue looked at me and I looked at him"), the singer is tracing his own edges, the limits and contours of his own identity. He is refamiliarizing himself with his manhood and his humanity, through memory.

In this way, Jackson's character is like the later folk revivalists of the 1950's and after, about whom Cantwell writes so beautifully. They renounced their identities, abandoned all hope, denied their inheritances, and then — through song — rebuilt themselves. They invented themselves as a new cast of characters meant to inhabit a new world, which they then also built, on a foundation of reinvented memories.

 

Editor's Note: This is the second ... jeez, only SECOND? ... installment of an experiment — The Celestial Monochord is posting one entry every day during the month of February 2007.

Also, note that the lyrics to this song are notoriously hard to get exactly right.

 

The Moonshiner's Dance — A Progress Report

 

In 1927, a Minnesota dance band called Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra made a recording entitled "The Moonshiners Dance." This freaky recording was little-noticed until 1952, when Harry Smith included it on his influential Anthology of American Folk Music. But unlike almost all the other performers on this influential collection, nobody had ever bothered to look into the story behind Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe.

Then, back in July, The Celestial Monochord published the first research ever made available about the story of "The Moonshiners Dance." It was the product of about 9 weeks of hard work.

In the subsequent 6 months, my research has continued, white-hot. In fact, I've been completely obsessed — a big reason for the low volume of entries here at the Monochord.

Since that entry in July, I've discovered two photos of Frank Cloutier, figured out the basic facts of his childhood, his life in Minnesota, the fate of his marriage and his children, and the circumstances of his death. The day after Thanksgiving, I drank beer in a bar he used to own and left flowers on his grave.

I've also seen many surprising revelations about the Victoria Cafe, its other entertainers, its owners and managers, and the jazz-age St. Paul dance band scene that gave rise to it. I've read about movie theater bombings, a suicide at a skating rink, the music of Whoopie John Wilfahrt, the draftees of the Black Hawk Division of WWI, and some Klu Klux Klan meetings held at the midpoint between Minneapolis and St Paul in 1925. I've driven over 2000 miles, spent a minimum of $1000, and clocked at least 500 hours of research time.

Perhaps the greatest revelation of all has been that of the existence of a second researcher looking into the life of Frank Cloutier. In early October, I was contacted by someone who, for several years, has been researching the life of Frank Cloutier in order to put a face, you might say, on "The Moonshiner's Dance." The few results this researcher has shown me (so far ... ) have been amazing, tantalizing, and helpful to my own work — which has the broader goal of understanding the total milieu of the recording.

Now, dear reader, here's the rub:

In a short time, this other researcher will unveil a mother lode of information to the general public. So far as I can tell, it's likely to be the most important event in the life of the Anthology since at least 1997, when it was reissued on CD. If you are a fellow devotee of the Anthology, I think you will be extremely pleased with the events of the coming months. I am pumped, psyched, and jazzed to help maximize the impact and reach of this project.

So, I've decided to keep pretty quiet about my research for a few more months ... but just a few. I find that every round of research I conduct results in startling new revelations, so the more work I do before I write, the better — right? Why not follow Bob Dylan's advice and know my song well before I start singing? As a bonus, I get to do a good deed for a project that (let's face it) will clearly be more important than my own, when all is said and done.

On the other hand, The Celestial Monochord remains a slow place for its readers. Like every other blogger on Earth, I vow to try harder in the near future.

Editor's Note: In January, I will write just a little bit about Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe, mostly to "clear the decks" for this other project's release. I'll clean up some little gaffs I later uncovered in my July entry — not everything there was strictly correct. Plus, there were a few things I hadn't sorted out yet in July, and after having untangled them later, they're now just a little bit of an embarrassment to me. Once the other project blows over, I'll revisit how, when, and where to publish the stuff I have up my sleeve.

 

The Harry Smith Project - Thoughts in Advance

In a lot of ways,The Celestial Monochord is a tribute to Harry Smith and the mesmerizing sampler of old recordings he edited in 1952, The Anthology of American Folk Music.

And so, this Tuesday will be an exciting day at Monochord headquarters. Four disks — two audio CDs and two DVDs — intended to pay tribute to Smith and his Anthology will be released on Tuesday (October 24). I don't have a reviewer's copy of the disks (unlike this putz, for example), so I'll review them after I've gotten them and had time to absorb them. You'll eventually get the Extra-Delux Straight Poop on what I think of them, so stay tuned.

And yet ... I've been thinking them over quite a bit, despite knowing very little about them. Isn't that what you come to the Monochord for in the first place?

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The bulk of the disks offer audio and video from a series of tribute concerts, called The Harry Smith Project, organized in 1999 and 2001 by a guy named Hal Willner. The performers — about half of whom are big stars like Lou Reed, Wilco, Steve Earle, Elvis Costello — do what might be thought of as "covers" of the songs on Smith's Anthology.

In exactly what sense such performances would constitute a tribute to Harry Smith is unclear to me. I can't get it sorted out in my head.

Smith's Anthology and the lessons it taught shaped the revivals that came after, and it defined the careers of some of the best musicians of the late 20th Century. The Anthology also became a milestone in the history of amateur musicianship in America. Those revivals, those careers, and we amateur musicians have paid tribute to Smith far beyond The Harry Smith Project's poor power to add or detract — the world will little note nor long remember what Sonic Youth says here ...

And there are other problems. Of course, Harry Smith was a mix-master, one of history's great juxtapositionists, so there's no such thing as a Harry Smith cover, per se. Thinking of the Anthology's songs as if they were Smith's babies only perpetuates the worship of the collector over the collected, the Lomaxes over the Leadbellies. Harry Smith himself was markedly dismissive of the Anthology and he considered his other projects, now largely forgotten, to be more important. I wonder how Smith would have felt about Tuesday's release.

In his strange interviews, Smith treats the songs on the Anthology as mere local embodiments of some larger patterns in the human collective unconscious. Although he clearly loved them (no matter what he might have said), he portrays the records in his collection as arbitrary, as if they may as well have been any other records, or even some tangled pieces of string, or some paper airplanes discarded in the gutters of Manhattan.

To me, the most immediately obvious way to pay tribute to Harry Smith is to carry on his work — to go on collecting little bits of culture that embody the most vital meanings animating human life. To work at becoming — ourselves — the embodied examples of such meanings. To investigate and love human culture independently, idiosyncratically.

But then ... what do you expect The Celestial Monochord to say?

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I knew about these Harry Smith Project concerts back when they happened, through a Tom Waits discussion list I belonged to. Although none of the list-members who attended the concerts knew or cared much about Harry Smith, their reaction to the concerts was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone seemed to agree something remarkable had happened there. And it's no wonder. Hal Willner seems to be the right man for the job of organizing these tribute concerts.

First, he's one of a smallish tribe of people who've had their lives overturned by this queer, bent little hypnotist, Harry Smith. At times, it seems there's about as many of us in the world as there are people who've walked on the Moon, or who've been struck by lightning more than once.

Willner personally knew Smith well enough to cast him as The King in a production of The Seven Deadly Sins, staged at the Naropa Institute. It was also Hal Willner who put together Allen Ginsberg's introduction to the catastrophically out-of-print collection of interviews with Smith, Think of the Self Speaking.

And very suggestively, Willner has used his time on Earth to collect amazing things and paste them together — giving him roughly as much insight into Smith's mind as we can hope for. The list of Willner's projects is dazzling, but he's best known for gathering together very dissimilar musicians for improbable tribute albums.

He's responsible for tributes to Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill, Charles Mingus, pirate ballads and sea chanteys, and music from Walt Disney's cartoons. Performers he's rangled together for these projects include Bono, Sting, Loudon Wainwright III, Rufus Wainwright, Dr. John, John Zorn, Sun Ra, Tom Waits, Ringo Starr, Keith Richards, and Elvis Costello. Along the way, he also collaborated with Robert Altman on Short Cuts and Robert Wilson on a show in Copenhagen.

To me, the drama of listening to The Harry Smith Project will be in watching Willner do battle with the poppycocky quality of his own project. He's in the best position anyone can be in to make a "tribute album" to Harry Smith actually pay tribute to Harry Smith. Given who he is, I don't much doubt Willner will succeed in some sense, and on some terms. But in what sense? On what terms?

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The fourth disk of The Project's 4-disk set makes easier sense to me. It's the hook that will snag me into plopping down my cash on Tuesday, although I suspect the reverse might be true for most buyers.

The fourth disk is a DVD with a documentary about the creation of the Anthology, along with selections from Smith's abstract films, which were influential in their own right. The documentary is by Rani Singh, the director of the Harry Smith Archives and Smith's friend and assistant in the last years of his life. It'll be interesting to see what kind of documentarian she is, but Singh's previous work perpetuating Smith's memory has been inspiring and important.

This last disk — the one with the best prospects for bringing us into communion with Harry Smith himself — brings me to something called The Harry Smith Connection ...

Willner's inspiration for the concert portion of this Project was, in part, two previous concerts marking the 1997 reissue of The Anthology on CD. From what I'm able to tell, the CD of those performances, The Harry Smith Connection, was widely disliked by critics. But if you judge solely by the "spin test" — how often it's in my player, spinning — it's one of my favorite CD's.

Perhaps my favorite cut is "His Tapes Roll On," which another reviewer has called "excruciating" and "unbelievably egregiously stinkerooin' nonsense." Unlike most of the other songs on the disk, "His Tapes Roll On" is not from the Anthology, but was written by Peter Stampfel, a Wauwautosa-born sometime member of The Fugs, whose first album was recorded by Smith. Stampfel's creaky, amateurish, stitched-together song is about Smith's obsession with recording sound — any, seemingly randomly chosen sound. Stampfel begins:

Harry recorded with a wire recorder
back in World War II
Harry recorded with a reel-to-reel
when the reel-to-reel was new
Harry recorded cassettes by the hundred
as the century rolled on
He even used a telephone answering machine
But Harry Smith is gone

Speed-rapping killers and jump-rope rhymes,
fireworks on the 4th of July
Complete early canon of Gregory Corso,
kittens, snowstorms, airplane trips
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
Where's tomorrow gone?
Most of his tapes are missing in action
And Harry Smith is gone

It's true that Stampfel's voice and guitar-playing will never rocket to the top of the charts, but neither will anything else Harry Smith chose to record — squeaking hinges, squealing brakes, the peyote songs of the Kiowa, or the death-rattles of bowery bums.

It's here, in Stampfel's "egregious nonsense," that we find the gravest contradictions and challenges in the concert recordings of The Harry Smith Project. At least on the face of it — again, sight unseen — the contradiction implied by bringing together popular, professional musicians to work up modernized, financially-viable, critic-pleasing versions of songs that (of all people) Harry Everett Smith collected ... well, that contradiction seems to unravel the very goal of paying tribute to him. That's what I'll be listening for — the drama, inherent in the very idea of the project, of how to resolve, or respond to, or transcend The Harry Smith Project's own contractions.

I'll try to have something written up in the next few months.