The Celestial Monochord

yeeee - HA!

Ralph


I started learning to play clawhammer banjo almost five years ago. I caught on to the basic stroke almost the instant it was shown to me, which was exciting since I'd never shown much musical aptitude before.

Soon after, I sat down at the dining room table and really played in the apartment for the first time. Immediately, our cat Ralph got up off the couch, walked directly over to me in a purposeful gait, and puked right in front of me. My first heckler.

I should note that Ralph always left the room as soon as he heard the voice of Johnny Cash. He was a very supreme cat and we miss him terribly ... but I'm sorry to say, his musical tastes WERE suspect.

Later, when I'd learned a few tunes well enough, I started frailing a little at family gatherings to entertain the troops. The instant I opened up my banjo case for the very first such concert, a boyfriend of a relative said, "yeeee-HA!" It was a sort of "stage" yeeee-HA! — at the volume of ordinary speech, but said in such a way as to suggest hollering very loudly. I just continued with what I was doing without acknowledging it.

But ever since, I've puzzled over why a person would say this, especially in this way. As when scientists say "So", I've wondered what it could possibly mean. I don't have an answer, but at least I can speak freely on the matter, now that the boyfriend has long ago been dumped.

First, it was not a sincere expression of joy, despite what's been suggested to me. I've expressed real joy with something like a yeeee-HA (a Shane MacGowen concert a few years back comes to mind), and my yeeee-HA's are entirely incomparable to his. Besides, would anyone issue such a yeeee-HA at the very sight of a piano or a trumpet?

No, this particular heeee-HA was not from anticipatory musical ecstasy — it was supposed to be joke. The best explanation I've heard for the origins of laughter is that it's a signal to a primate group that the sudden, unexpected, startling thing that just happened is OK — there's no danger, regardless of appearances to the contrary.

I think this heeee-HA was a joke intended to defuse a banjo-induced anxiety. It constituted a claim that, as an audience member presented with a banjo, he was not going to respond in the way the banjo supposedly demands. A possible way of responding — with a sincere yeeee-HA — needed to be invoked as a thing already refused.

The yeeee-HA sought to establish this fellow as a master of his own relationship with this banjo, but instead exposed the opposite. Karen Linn in That Half Barbaric Twang (which I haven't read yet), and Robert Cantwell in his chapter on Pete Seeger in When We Were Good, describe the banjo as persistently haunting and troubling the boundaries of social life:

The social connections of the banjo had been obscured by its repeated disappearances from popular music; it's marginality, its obdurate indissolubility in social meaning, gave it an eerily unlocatable quatity, a "signifier in isolation" ... As banjo music loiters on the edges of western musical categories, so it has tended to linger where sexual, social, and political boundaries are most ambiguous. [Cantwell, chapter 7]

Cantwell almost makes me feel sorry for the guy. Meeting our family for the first time, as a suitor of one of "our women," he would have wanted to be perceived as being well within a set of recognizably "safe" racial, economic, and sexual categories. And here he's presented with a friggin' BANJO, of all things. A banjo of black-faced minstrelsy, of folksinging HUAC-interrogated commies, of Deliverance.

... but in fact, it was just a banjo of MINE. Perhaps I'm too unforgiving and I have too long memory ... on the other hand, perhaps this incident foreshadowed reasons that he would some day be dumped. I don't know.

 

Editor's Note: This is day 20 of my 28-day marathon. I'm trying to post an entry of The Celestial Monochord every day in February 2007.

 

The Singing Swinging Banjo

I found "The Singing Swinging Banjo" in a used vinyl-record store in Minneapolis. Released in 1959 on the cheap, short-lived Riviera label, the album consists of studio musicians slogging through bland, quasi-Dixieland renditions of standards such as "Buffalo Gal," "Grand Old Flag," "Saints Come Marching In," and "Clementine."

But of course, I bought the album for the cover. The clerk at the counter shook his head, saying "A lot of records have a hot chick on the cover to get people to buy. What were these people thinking?" That's pretty much what I wondered — what were they thinking, how did this cover photo look to people in 1959? Today, it seems like the queerest thing I've ever seen in my life, but in 1959, could the record company or its customers have missed the sexuality-related content in the photo?

Of course, the cover photo must be from Mardi Gras in New Orleans. (For one thing, the banjo is a Weymann Style 6, suitable for early styles of New Orleans jazz.) I believe that some people — especially back then — thought of Mardi Gras as a mere costume party, and its drag queens as something like the war-time skits in which soldiers wore drag, and this may have "protected" them from an awareness of the sexual context of the photo. But don't kid yourself — even during skits in WWII, people knew what drag was about. In any case, this is the basic problem in trying to see this album cover through 1959 eyes — what would have been consciously known, what was unknown, and what was known but repressed?

(Incidentally, let me point out a couple of details that may be difficult to pick out. Yes, that's a lighthouse motif in the middle of the structure like a peacock-tail attached to his back. It's hard to see here, but there are two seagulls made of gold glitter flying next to the lighthouse. Note the roiling seas at the foot of the lighthouse. Also, notice that the strap around his neck holding the banjo is made of the same silver-blue satin material that makes up the rest of his costume. Somebody really thought this through.)

 

Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of about three or four posts on banjos and the psychoanalytic idea of repression ... yes, really.)

 

Bunsen and Kirchhoff's Mystery Substance

Kirchhoff and Bunsen

In the mid-1880s, Robert Bunsen set fire to a lot of stuff. His students report having often "smelt burnt Bunsen" and seeing his fingers smoke. He was undaunted when a chemical explosion blinded him in one eye, and he reported with interest that the smell of arsenic produced tingling in the extremities and "even giddiness and insensibility."

One reason to set fire to stuff was the hope of being able to identify the make-up of materials by their color when burning. Bunsen was having little luck until his friend Gustav Kirchhoff suggested they pass the light of the flame through a prism, thus spreading the light out into the individual colors (that is, wavelengths) of which the light is composed.

The patterns of light and dark lines visible in such spectra proved to be perfect "fingerprints" they could use to identify substances. The two Heidelberg chemists set about identifying everything they could by setting fire to it, "reading" its spectrum, or measuring it when unfamiliar lines appeared. When they aimed their spectroscope out a window to analyze a fire 10 miles away, they realized they could just as easily figure out what the sun and stars were made of — a feat few had even bothered to dream of before.

Early on, they had trouble identifying a mystery substance. It needed identifying, since it was one of the most prominent features in most spectra and it was everywhere. Every sample seemed to be loaded with it, universally, as if the substance were some kind of common thread linking the world — a 19th Century "God particle," the underlying essence of everything. Or maybe not, who knew? They really wanted to figure out what the heck it was.

Finally, they realized the lines were due to sodium, which (with chorline) comprises ordinary salt. The element had appeared in every sample they burned because, basically, we live on Earth, 71% of which is covered with saltwater. Kirchhoff, Bunsen, and everybody else are basically just sacks of saltwater. Salt is a substantial constituent of household dust, which in large measure is made of skin flakes. We breath in salt with every breath we take. The realization imposed a much greater rigor in laboratory techniques to avoid contamination of samples.

In a sense, the substance did turn out to be a kind of universal material, a God particle that gave rise to us all and links the Earth together. Certainly, the story focuses my attention on what we are, where we came from, what kind of planet we live on. And maybe somewhere in the universe, pyromaniacal chemists on another planet are puzzled by the ubiquity of, I don't know, sulphur or rubidium.


Editor's Note: Thanks to go Alan W. Hirshfeld for his series of articles in Sky & Telescope on the history of astrophysics. It has stimulated my memory about a lot of great old stories like this.

Fiddlin' Banjo Crap

Martin Mull memorably quipped that he once looked up "folk music" in an encyclopedia, fervently hoping that the first music made in America "wasn't that fiddlin' banjo crap." I was really amused by it as a kid.

Decades later, I started studying up on folk music myself and found that there's a riveting, convoluted, and ultimately mysterious story to be told about fiddles and banjos — two instruments joined at the hip. I may not be the person to tell this story (quite yet), but it's clear that the fiddle and banjo have sustained a long marriage that has had its ups and downs.

Soon after this relationship first dawned on me, I attended a banjo Q&A session conducted by Mike Seeger and my own (long-suffering) banjo instructor, Rachel Nelson. I was just about to raise my hand and ask about the brotherly fellowship shared between the banjo and the fiddle, when another guy raised his hand and demanded to know why some people seem to think the banjo is nothing but the fiddle's lowly, bootlicking lackey. Seeger and Nelson looked like they might have preferred my phrasing of the question, but it made me realize I had more research left to do.

The start of this mutual tradition is unknown — folklorist Cecelia Conway is unable to trace the pairing back much further than minstrelsy, around 1840. But certain areas of Appalachia (Virginia and North Carolina, I think) have such an old, rich, complex, multi-racial tradition of fiddlin' banjo tunes that it couldn't have originated with the Northern, pop phenomenon of minstrelsy.

The banjo has sometimes been the fiddle's rhythm section. Listening to the 1920's recordings of Charlie Poole, the banjo played second fiddle to the fiddle, yet was crucial to Poole's sound. But in the case of the Skillet Lickers, the banjo is barely audible amidst sometimes three or more fiddles.

Certainly, a great solo banjo tradition was captured in 1920's recordings of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley and others. But the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music — hugely influential in the post-WWII folk revival — included a marathon of seven solo fiddle cuts, and I wonder if this spotlight on the fiddle in such a prominent document may have left some mark on the post-war relationship between the two instruments. Two of the finest living clawhammer banjo players — Ken Perlman and Mac Benford — each developed their distinctive styles by replacing the fiddle with the banjo, using the clawhammer stroke to coax out their instruments the complex melodic lines usually played by the fiddle. They clearly saw some need to give the banjo its own place in the sun, unshadowed by the fiddle.

The banjo originated in Africa, and the fiddle is the classic folk instrument of the British Isles, so their pairing is sometimes said to be a microcosm of what makes American music such an intense mixture. But at the Black Banjo Gathering, a presentation on African banjo ancestors included slides of African fiddles, constructed almost exactly the same way that early banjos were constructed, only much smaller. So perhaps the banjo and fiddle did not marry for the first time in America — perhaps it's more accurate to say that they were separated at birth.

My Dog Has Fleas: Review of the Ukulele Gala

For the little world of public radio, Minnesota Public Radio is a far-flung empire, built in no small meaure on A Prairie Home Companion. So when MPR held a Ukulele Gala, presided over by the hosts of "The Morning Show" (an excellent, eccentric, eclectic music show on one of MPR's several stations, 89.3 The Current), it seemed like a good bet to me. The show was held at the venerable old Fitzgerald Theater, home of Prairie Home and a gorgeous place to see a concert — ornate and amazingly intimate.

I can't say I was very disappointed, exactly. I've been spoiled recently by attending some transcendent gatherings of some of the best banjo players in the world, and I had imagined that a good cross-section of brilliant ukulele players would not be hard to assemble, if you know what I mean. What we got for our $31 a head (before Ticket Master) was two very entertaining local ukulele players and one flown in California, along with some dubious sketch comedy by The Morning Show's hosts.

The audience itself was a good show — acres of Hawaiian-print silk, a Tiny Tim impersonator (with latex nose), many child ukulele students, a guy with yarmulke over here, some nose rings and tattoos over there. Dozens were armed with ukuleles of all vintages, shapes, and sizes. Fifty ukulele-playing Minnesotans onstage and sawing away at Aloha Oy is not something you see every day.

As for the professionals, local musician Kari Larson is one of Garrison Keillor's "shy persons" and has a meager stage presence. But she earned great respect with some riveting instrumentals, most memorably a sweet, melodic piece exploring some variations on "When I'm Sixty-Four" and a ukulele/church pipe-organ duet on "Baby Elephant Walk." Again, not something you see every day.

The Mullet River Boys, a local group that's been known to play at a little pizza joint just up the street from my apartment, were unquestionably the Gala's highlight. Hearing them was like finding 20 bucks in an old jacket. They made me wonder once again just how many thousands of virtually anonymous musicians there are across America who are profoundly more talented than anyone you will ever see on Amerian Idol.

Their repetoire is all over the place but well-chosen, drawing from early jazz, Oldtime string-band, vaudeville, and minstrelsy. There are shades of Oliver Hardy in frontman Jack Norton, who claims to have known Tiny Tim during childhood and who today plays one of Tim's ukes. Sideman Jed Germond is more of a Stan Laurel, an exceptional jazz violinist, and a solid tenor banjoist. The third Mullet River Boy is a woman, Liz Draper, who, dressed in a high-collared long-sleeved white blouse, looked like The Church Lady, only sexy and with dreadlocks ... if you can picture that for a moment. She seemed to be a classically-trained but very versatile doghouse bass player.

Jim Beloff was the guy from California, which is apparently an epicenter of an ongoing ukulele revival. Not my cup of tea, Beloff is an amiable geek whose repetoire is deeply rooted in Tin Pan Alley, which I'm afraid still seems like an oxymoron to me. I'm working on it. His originals were built around themes I would have rejected as bereft of real ideas (e.g., a trip to the dog park) and which he used mostly to mine rhymes (e.g., "bark"). When he and his wife Liz began singing duets with much simpering drama ("Love is a Many Splendored Thing," for example) my own wife Jenny leaned over and whispered, "Waiting for Guffman."

I did very much appreciate the Celestial Monochordy quality of writing a love song around a "sheetmusic moon" of the kind you see on old piano-bench songsheets.

The show ended with an all-cast audience sing-along of the ukulele national anthem, "Has Anybody Seen My Gal." I left the theater thinking of the contrast between the Mullett River Boys and Beloff, remembering what Bob Dylan said: "Strap yourself to a tree with roots."

The Mount Graham Controversy, 1988

In the 1980s, I studied astronomy (actually, physics and mathematics was all it was) at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I also did a lot of hiking and camping in the mountains and deserts of the southwest, compelled by the same love of nature that brought me to astronomy.

So, I found myself in the company of both astronomers and environmentalists on a daily basis. I thought nothing of it, since so many amateur astronomers prefer to see dark, clean skies than strip malls, and often have to camp in the wilderness to escape light pollution. Similarly, environment-conscious hikers and campers always seem intensely aware of the night (and day) skies they get to experience.

But then came the Mount Graham controversy. In its early stages, the debate mostly revolved around a rare species of red squirrel that some feared would go extinct if a large observatory complex was built on top of the mountain. There was a lot to consider, and I tried hard to consider it. Unfortunately, I found no colleagues willing to help.

The environmentalists I met saw visions of chemical and radioactive spills, noisy research, great tracts of asphalt, and throngs of tourists in a pristine wilderness. I tried to explain that telescopes just bend light with mirrors and today require only electricity, not photochemicals. They also like native plants around them to absorb image-blurring heat, and tourists are only marginally tolerated at a serious research facility. Mount Graham already boasted a road system, a Bible camp, and an artificial lake. Nothing of the sort was in the least bit interesting to the environmentalists I discussed it with — this information was greeted as evidence alright, but only of the fact that my heart was not in the right place. The facts seemed to prove only that I didn't care.

I will say that they were somewhat more willing to engage than the astronomy students I tried to talk to — at least when those students were in all-male groups. There was no hope of even suggesting that accomodations might be made for the observatory's impact on animal habitats, or that a better understanding of the ecosystem up there might be interesting, or that mutual education between astronomers and environmentalists might lessen the tensions over the issue. I mostly remember one very brief, bruising conversation in which it was suggested that the group go squirrel hunting.

I eventually stopped paying attention to the Mount Graham debate, mostly because I doubted a real debate was possible. Being somewhat wet behind the ears, I was shocked that my interests could be aligned with people who were so obviously wrong and unwise. It would be many years before I really came to accept that even your ideological brethren can be routinely hostile to the truth and to the common good. I came to accept it as a fact, but I still find it rather unpleasant.

Classifieds: Biosphere 2

Biosphere 2 was an attempt at creating a sealed-off, self-sustaining ecosystem of the kind astronauts would need for Moon or Mars bases, or for extremely long trips into deep space. The name implies that the Earth itself is Biosphere 1.

The $200 million venture was mostly funded by a Texas oil billionaire. With a lot of TV cameras aimed at them, the first crew was sealed up in 1991, but oxygen levels plummeted, crops failed, the isolated crew grew testy and weak, and no animals survived except abundant ants and cockroaches. It wasn't long before outside food and fresh oxygen were quietly brought in.

After a flurry of mission changes and lawsuits, the complex just north of Tucson is now up for sale:

"This is not all about the highest bidder," [general manager of company that owns Biosphere 2] said. "All things being equal, we'd certainly like to see an appropriate reuse of the Biosphere and associated buildings, but ultimately, it comes down to what the market will bear."

I gather that some good science came out of Biosphere 2, and its certainly better to fail in Southern Arizona than halfway to Alpha Centauri. Still, Biosphere 2 may be best remembered as an especially bizarre example of America's (and The American West's) doomed utopianism.

It's also a dramatic example of something I've mentioned before — the intimate and often troubling relationship between American space science and the mass media. I'll do some exploring of that long history in future entries of the Monochord.

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My Ferret Has Ticks

Last night, we went to see the Ukelele Gala at St. Paul's Fitzgerald Theater. I will write up a full-fledged review of it soon. For now, one of last night's running gags reminded me of a little quip one of the Canote Brothers (Jere or Greg) made at the 2004 American Banjo Camp.

He was showing the audience how he had tuned his banjo-ukelele. (Seeing as the audience was composed largely of Oldtime banjo players, he wouldn't dare stick to a standard tuning.) He slowly plucked the strings, one after the other so we could hear the tuning, and said, "So instead of My Dog Has Fleas, he's got some other kind of bug."

Classifieds: The Yerkes Observatory

The Yerkes Observatory is for sale. Possibly one of the most beautiful observatories in the world, Yerkes is located on 77 acres of prime lakeside real estate in the charming resort community of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

To those who appreciate the history of astronomy, Yerkes is also one of their best loved shrines. Yerkes was the last observatory to be built during what I think of the first space race — a drive to build larger and larger refracting telescopes (those with a big lense in the front and a little eyepiece in back, like a sailor's spyglass). Finished in 1897, Yerkes hosted some of the greatest astronomers and telescope builders of its era — E. E. Barnard, Ritchey, George Ellery Hale, Otto Struve, Kuiper, Chandrasekhar, and the young Carl Sagan.

Apparently, the University of Chicago (one of the most richly endowed universities in the world) thinks the most promising buyer at the moment is a New York developer who'd like to (at best) make Yerkes the centerpiece of a gated community of oversized suburban mansions.

If I were a rich man, daidle deedle daidle daidle daidle deedle daidle dum ...

Banjos, Stars, and Creative Commons

In elementary school, when we sang "This Land is Your Land" and the teacher told us about Woody Guthrie, it seemed like Guthrie must've been around before the USA was founded. He must've been a contemporary of ... of Paul Bunyan's. But to my great surprise, it turns out Guthrie had just died when I was 3 years old — and when he was only 55. I won't tell the whole story of how Guthrie came to hold such a mythical status so quickly — but if I were to tell it, it would mostly be a story about Pete Seeger. Seeger made building the Woody Guthrie myth into one of his major projects.

The more you know about Pete Seeger, the more you realize he wasn't just "famous" or "influential," he really helped engineer what "folk music" means, and even the terms on which "the folk" themselves exist.

Anyway, here's the point. His book, "How to Play the 5-String Banjo" has been known to virtually every banjo player in the world for about half a century. Seeger mimeographed the first edition himself while on the road in 1947, working for the Henry Wallace presidential campaign. He refused to copyright it, believing a copyright would hinder the spread of banjo-playing.



More recently, a guy named Pat Costello has written some excellent and entertaining instruction books, and declared them part of the "creative commons." According to Costello, sales of his books increased spectacularly after the books went copyrightless. The books are worthy successors to Seeger's landmark book — and I think the writer of "This Land is Your Land" would have appreciated them as well.



A collection of fine star charts has also now gone online (here too) as part of the creative commons.