The Celestial Monochord

Moonshiner's Parking Lot?

A piece of St. Paul's cultural history may be torn down for a parking lot.

The Victoria Cafe produced a recording of absolutely unique importance, as illustrated by this rough map of the origins of all 84 recordings on the seminal Anthology of American Folk Music.  Even the two Chicago recordings were by recent arrivals in the Great Migration from southern states.

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In May 2006, I realized that an internationally notorious recording from 1927 — "Moonshiner's Dance, Part One" — was the work of the house band of a nightclub at 825 University Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Nobody had understood this before, so I was astonished and overjoyed to find the building still standing 79 years later.  Since then, I drive by it often, and each time my heart skips a beat until I see that the Victoria Theater is still there.

But now, not even 4 years into my researchfor a book on "Moonshiner's Dance," the Victoria building is being eyed for demolition to make way for a parking lot. 

What disturbs me most is that, while my findings are enormously suggestive, the building's historical importance is not yet well understood.  Like a species allowed to go extinct before biologists are even able to describe it, the Victoria Theater may be destroyed in the near-total absence of knowledge. 

Other community members have great reasons to want the building saved.  

I have my own reasons.  Below, I've cracked my research notes wide open, in hopes of helping in the effort. 

These unpublished findings, focusing on the historical importance of this endangered landmark, show that the demolition of the old Victoria Theater for a parking lot would be shortsighted at best.

Minnesota and The Anthology of American Folk Music

The Anthology of American Folk Music was crucial in setting the terms in which American folk arts would be understood and institutionalized after WWII.  In particular, it was a founding document of the Folk Revival and of 1960s Rock. 

Countless influential and popular musicians have used it as their first music instructor, openly borrowed from it, and/or paid tribute to it — notably Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, The Byrds, Lou Reed, Marianne Faithful, Elvis Costello, Philip Glass, Wilco, Beck, Steve Earle, John Fahey, The New Lost City Ramblers, Dave van Ronk, and David Grisman. 

Poet Allen Ginsberg rescued the Anthology's editor, Harry Smith, from homelessness near the end of Smith's life.

Given its deep importance to America's cutlural history, it's striking that one — and only one — of the Anthology's 84 recordings was clearly from outside the American South.  That sole northern recording was "Moonshiner's Dance, Part One" by Frank Cloutier and The Victoria Cafe Orchestra, the house jazz band at 825 University Avenue.

Before 2006, when I began my research, "Moonshiner's Dance" had never been studied before by anyone. In their 1997 reissue of the Anthology, everything the Smithsonian Folkways had to say about the circumstances of its recording was this:

"The Frank Cloutier Orchestra does not appear in any jazz or dance band discographies but is assumed to have been from the Minnesota area."

Despite its unique status and high profile in American musical history, previous research has utterly ignored the Victoria Cafe.  Two separate, professional, officially commissioned historical surveys failed to even grasp that the building had ever been a nightclub at all.

Because its significance to national, regional, and local culture has never been understood, the demolition of the Victoria Theater would represent a reckless act of collective ignorance.

Polka and Jazz

"Moonshiner's Dance" is a strange record — difficult to grasp, especially when heard within the Anthology's original sequence. 

My research has led me to see it as a very early blend of ethnic oldtime music (in this case, polka) and "hot" 1920's dance (or jazz) music. 

Comparable blends of immigrant traditions and African American-inflected music became deeply consequential in the following decades.  Think of the Cuban jazz of Cab Calloway and Dizzy Gillespie, or the polka-swing blends of Minnesota's own Andrews Sisters or Whoopee John.  Such syntheses would also become critical to post-war jazz and rock.

"Moonshiners Dance" was the Anthology's only cut featuring either jazz instruments or immigrant ethnic music.  I think the multi-cultural complexities of American folk music might have been perused earlier and more often had Harry Smith more rigorously followed the train of thought implied by the moonshiners of St. Paul. 

The Victoria Cafe — founded by European immigrants and briefly known as the Casa Grande in the 1930's — clearly represents the richly multi-ethnic cultural history of St. Paul.

Minnesota's Ethnic Groups and the Victoria Cafe

According to M. L. Wingerd's 2001 history of St. Paul's civic identity, residents of Minnesota's capitol city felt unusually strong ethnic ties, even across class lines. 

And yet, unlike Minneapolis, St. Paul was also remarkably tolerant across ethnic divides, in part because the city's Irish political machine preferred it that way.  Ethnic diversity could have a funny way of drawing this insular city even closer together.

The Victoria Cafe is emerging as a vivid case in point.  The Cafe was initially financed, managed, and staffed by German and eastern European Jews, and its advertisements were targeted primarily to the Jewish community.

Beginning in late 1926, I find hints that the Cafe may have been purchased by two powerful Irish brothers — a County Commissioner and a leading real estate developer — sons of a railroad worker from County Kerry.

Their new manager, Sammy Markowitz, then made deliberate appeals to the wider community in major newspapers.  The Victoria's top singer was a White Earth Native American woman, and its bandleader, Frank Cloutier, was a French-Canadian Catholic.  Indeed, "Moonshiners Dance" itself is a medley of tunes drawn from a variety of traditions, as well as being a stylistic fusion.

Nonetheless, researching the business history of this venue is slow and subtle work — the Victoria Cafe was a notorious speakeasy frequented by mobsters, after all, and its owners thus left a very slim paper trail.  Much careful research remains to be done.

St. Paul in a Regional Context

"Moonshiner's Dance" is more familiar to national and international roots music enthusiasts than to local historians, which might explain why its striking regional implications have gone unnoticed.

My research very strongly suggests that "Moonshiner's Dance" was essentially a vinyl flier — a 78 rpm record advertising the musical and theatrical offerings of the Victoria Cafe.

The target audience for this flier was potential visitors from outside of St. Paul, in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the Upper Midwest, where it was well known that Minnesota's capital city was ignoring Prohibition and enjoyed a strong vice economy. 

"Moonshiner's Dance" was thus an audio postcard for the rest of the Upper Midwest, a self-conscious statement of St. Paul's civic identity in a regional context.  

During 4 years of research, I've found the recording to be rife with references to the region's complex ethnic and urban-rural divides — most obviously in its jazzy urban approach to the rural polka form. 

Judging from my only visit inside the Victoria Theater (in near-total darkness), the surviving hand-painted murals and architectural details also strongly suggest deliberate commentary on St. Paul's role in the region.

The Politics of Prohibition and the Culture of St. Paul

Due to two controversial actions by Federal authorities, the Victoria Cafe twice made front-page headlines across the region and was the subject of editorials in multiple newspapers.

The first action occurred only weeks after the recording of "Moonshiners Dance" — a recording that, in a way, openly mocks Federal authority and the 18th Amendment.  In fact, "Moonshiners Dance" pretty overtly advertises the Victoria Cafe's frequent clientèle, gangster culture being the subject of intense fascination throughout the region.

A year later, a late-night raid resulted in injury to both a Federal agent and a former Assistant Ramsey County Attorney.  It also ignited a very heated political struggle between the U.S. Congressman from St. Paul's district and Federal authorities in Washington. The Mayor of St. Paul spoke at the Victoria Cafe before a gathering of University Avenue businessmen the very day the main Federal indictment was expected as a result of this raid.

Both Federal actions put the Victoria squarely in the middle of freshly exposed tensions between local opinion and the U.S. Constitution.  Further research on these incidents are proceeding very slowly, because they now require me to become a kind of paleo-paralegal. 

What is already obvious is that the Cafe is symbolic of the long history of brewing in the city of Pig's Eye.  Thanks to that symbolism, The Victoria Cafe found itself at the center of American musical history.  But beyond symbolism, the Victoria Cafe of St. Paul was an active player in one of that history's most pivotal moments.

Twin Cities Women, Victorian Values, and the Victoria Cafe

"The Victoria Cafe Orchestra" is the name given on the original 78 rpm record, and The Anthology followed suit.  But I have discovered that the band was otherwise always called by a different name — "The Victorians."

This would have been a rather obvious quip to make if you were the house dance band at the Victoria Cafe in 1927.

After all, a lively and persistent debate swirled in the press, relentlessly contrasting the current "Jazz Age" with the "Victorian Era." The debate constantly centered on women and changing gender roles, with Jazz Age flappers compared (always unfavorably) with that civilizing angel of the house, the Victorian woman. 

"Moonshiners Dance," as you might expect, sides with the flappers.  It is a medley of old-fashioned Victorian songs — mostly sentimental love songs — rendered in the ironic, worldly, intoxicating light of Prohibition jazz. 

The Twin Cities boasted a strikingly high percentage of working women living independent of families.  And as the author of Women Adrift writes, "Wage earning women who lived apart from family were a vanguard in the decline of Victorian culture." 

Considering that women bought the vast majority (by a wide margin) of Jazz Age dance records, music such as "Moonshiner's Dance" should often be heard with a woman listener in mind.

And so, my research shows that "Moonshiners Dance" advertised the glamor of the Victoria Cafe's gangster clientèle — and that it simultaneously took sides in a kind of early "culture war" by satirizing Victorian-era gender roles for a substantially female audience. 

Although this line of research is very new, it's already very clear that the Victoria Theater was a complex battleground in the cultural history of women in the Twin Cities.

Save the Victoria Theater

Saving the building will take more than just raising hell about tearing it down.  The community needs a long-term plan for finding a proper use for the Victoria.

But raising hell is definitely the first step. 

Please join the Save the Victoria Theater Facebook group, if you're into that — you'll be able to catch up on the background and the discussions there. 

Mostly, please contact anyone and everyone who you think can help. 

Particularly if you are a resident of the neighborhood, you could start with polite contacts with the following St. Paul City Council Member, as well as the CEO of the company that wants a new parking lot:

Melvin Carter III, Council Member
310-A City Hall
15 Kellogg Blvd., West
Saint Paul, MN 55102
EMAIL: ward1@ci.stpaul.mn.us
Phone: (651) 266-8610

Beverley Oliver Hawkins, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer
Model Cities, Inc.
Phone: (651) 632-8350

 

See also:

North Country Blues

The first — mostly outdated — entry on The Victoria Cafe

 

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Moonshiners Dance - On the Air

(a relief in the Hibbing High School Library)

 

 

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

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

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

http://www.kfai.org/thedakotadavehullshow 

Enjoy!

 

 

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

 

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Barack Obama: Secret Banjoist?

Obama interrupts "Hopalong Peter" at a New Lost City Ramblers concert

   

In another clear sign that his campaign is in financial trouble, presidential hopeful Barack Obama is now fundraising among devotees of the southern Appalachian stringband music known as "oldtime." 

Apparently conceding bluegrass donors to his Republican rival, Obama's campaign is appealing directly to less affluent and less numerous oldtime contributors.

Senator Joe Biden, asked for comment while attending a joint New Lost City Ramblers concert / Obama rally, said "This makes perfect sense. I mean, you got the first mainstream oldtime stringband who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guys. I mean, that's a storybook, man!"

According to John Edwards, also in attendance, "This is a great idea! You know, Kelly Harrell was a textile worker, just like my fath -- Ow! Hey! Ow! Not the face! Watch the hair! Security!"

The oldtime demographic has been ignored by major candidates ever since its support doomed the otherwise front-running candidacy of Henry A. Wallace in 1948. 

Understandably, Obama's sudden embrace of the clawhammer banjo-playing set has left even some campaign staff puzzled.

"You know how you tell the difference between a bluegrass band and an oldtime band?" asked a high-level adviser to the Obama campaign on the condition of anonymity.

"The oldtime band is skinnier than the bluegrass band," he said, citing the previous testimony of Garrison Keillor.

To appeal to oldtime jammers, the campaign has even changed its official theme song more than forty-two times. 

"First it was Sally Ann, and then we changed it to Sally Goodin, and then Sally in the Garden," said the exasperated campaign insider. "But the oldtimers didn't even notice! Apparently, they can't even tell their own songs apart!"

"Barack has got to put an end to this!  He has to lift his foot up!"

    

  Editor's Note: There is a (real-life, no joke) update to this article!

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Milwaukee Soldiers Home

Maybe the Milwaukee Soldiers Home astounded me so because I was unprepared for it. I had no impression of the place, beyond a few lines on a map, until I found myself suddenly in the middle of it. Then I wanted to call everyone I knew and tell them to go there immediately.

My only thought originally was to visit the grave of Frank E. Cloutier's son — Alden, a sergeant during World War Two. The soldiers home, where Alden died, is surrounded by the Wood National Veterans Cemetery, where he's buried.

I realized long ago I can learn a lot by visiting the graves of the various characters I encounter in my research. Often, the headstone's inscription teaches me about the person's military service, or relatives I hadn't heard of are buried nearby. Sometimes, I discover a musician was a dedicated Freemason. Occasionally, the adjacent plot for the widow never quite got filled.

Once, explaining all this to a coworker, he said, "Just imagine how much you'd learn if you dug them up." I thought seriously about this for a few more seconds then you might imagine before coming to my senses. I think it's possible he could have been making fun of me.

Anyway, the grounds of the Milwaukee Soldier's Home are mind-boggling. Approved by Abraham Lincoln, they have the most impressive Victorian (I guess) architecture I've ever seen — overly massive and extremely dramatic. After more than forty years of visiting Milwaukee, I somehow had no idea such a place even COULD exist there, much less that it actually did, and very deep in the heart of the metro area.

And the buildings are all dilapidated. I later learned that a concerted effort is underway to preserve and renovate the place, but it is currently in a surreal state of disrepair. Peeling paint, broken boards, shattered windows, yellow police tape everywhere. Any movie studio would gladly pay a small fortune to make pristine grounds look this neglected. Sadly, paying to make neglected grounds look pristine is a harder sell.

Strange and disorienting as the visitor's experience is, it's intensified by the overwhelming, looming presence of a cynical and majestically trite metaphor — Miller's Stadium. The unimaginable scale of the stadium, just across the street, gives the impression that you could almost touch it from every point on the grounds. The rows of headstones feel like the stadium's parking lot.

It's impossible to walk there, at this stage in the renovation project and at this stage in American history, and not see the irony. A crumbling veterans hospital shadowed by a violently expensive baseball stadium.  (According to my research, Miller's Stadium was built at a cost of 87 godzillion dollars. For the mathematically disinclined, that's an 87 followed by six ass-loads of zeros.)

The casual visitor will definitely be reminded of the scandal that put Walter Reed in the headlines a while back. Of course, it should be said — emphatically — that I have no clue about the medical care and other services currently offered veterans in Milwaukee. A knowledgeable veteran, for example, recently told me the veterans hospital in Madison is truly world-class. I was surprised to hear this because I know nothing about it.

Since visiting this veterans home, I learned that my father's mother volunteered there for many years, helping care for World War Two veterans around the time of the Vietnam War. Maybe my grandmother knew Alden Cloutier.

But I wouldn't have known any of this had I not made the effort. I've visited a lot of locations across the Upper Midwest for no reason other than some musician happened to pass through there 80 years ago. The effect is a little as if a Star Trek transporter beam had gone haywire and dropped me off at a random place and time. I highly recommend it.

Here is a Flickr set I took there (it begins with rather too many shots of Alden's headstone) and here are some shots by other Flickr subscribers.

When My Willie Come Home

Recently, Hillary Clinton made a cutesy Lockhorns-ish joke about her husband Bill being a bad and evil man, presumably thinking of the Monica Lewinsky incident, among others. And, you know, all the pundits got busy on it.

Personally ... maybe it's me ... what I thought of was a cut on Mike Seeger's "Southern Banjo Sounds" — the one called "Last Night When My Willie Come Home." It's one of my favorite cuts on a CD full of brilliant recordings.

It's a lively performance, sweet and funny, punctuated by quills — bamboo pan pipes, basically, which Mike wears the way Bob Dylan wears his harmonicas. At the same time, Mike accompanies himself on banjo, sounding absolutely effortless, natural. But the liner notes inform us that he's alternating between SIX different styles of banjo picking based on the playing of Sam McGee, Virgil Anderson, Maybelle Carter, and Charlie Poole.

The lyrics begin:

Well, it was late last night when my Willie come home
Heard a mighty rappin' at the door
Slippin and a-sliding with his new shoes on
Oh Willie, don't you ramble no more

Of course, Bill Clinton was called "Slick Willie" back in 1992, and the Willie in Seeger's song is "slipping and sliding". Maybe that's more than enough of an association.

But when Seeger refers to "my Willie" in the first line, it always carries an unfortunate penile image for me, and I have to remind myself that the speaker is Willie's long-suffering woman. Then again, the Starr Report conjured a lot of similarly unfortunate images, and the experience of trying to shake them from my head only reiterates the association, in my twisted mind, between these Willies.

More to the point, this is a rounder song — a song about a wastrel, "one who," according to my desk dictionary, "dissipates resources foolishly and self-indulgently." Willie's slippery new shoes are the central theme of all rounder songs — he lives high, spends a lot of capital on all the wrong things, and is ultimately a tragic figure. His shoes are new, but he's dangerously rootless.

Like a lot of these old songs, the point of view careens from one character to another recklessly and without warning. In the chorus, Willie speaks:

And it's "Oh me" and it's "Oh my"
What's gunna become of me?
For I'm down in town just a-fooling around
No one's gunna stand my bond.

The song is sympathetic to Willie's wife, but also to Willie — it understands his fear and regret:

Well the last time I seen my own true love
She was a-standing in the door
She threw her arms all around my neck
Saying "Honey, don't you go"

I don't have a "message" here, at least not about politics. Seeger's "Last Night When My Willie Come Home" is ill-suited to the politics you typically find today on TV and, come to think of it, in blogs. The point of view shifts (and is shared) among the characters, and the song doesn't bother much to identify the guilty and innocent. The song's affectation is light and comic, but the emotional lives of the characters are intense, sincerely felt (the inverse of what you might find on FOX chat shows).

Presidential candidates always promise to change the tenor of political debate and Hillary frames her campaign as a "conversation" — just the form in which this song comes at you. I wonder if she's looking for a campaign song ...

I'll love you, dear girl, till the sea runs dry
Rocks all dissolved by the sun
I'll love you dear girl till the day I die
And then, Oh Lord, I'm done

 

Editor's Note: This is the first installment of a grand experiment! The Celestial Monochord will attempt to post one entry EVERY DAY during the month of February 2007. Pray for Mojo!

 

One Post Every Day in February!

 

Attention ladies and gentlemen! Hear ye, hear ye!

Next month, The Celestial Monochord will conduct an unprecedented experiment in the history of the internets!

We hereby announce and commit, against our better judgement as well as the laws of physics, that there will be ONE ENTRY posted to the Monochord EVERY DAY during the ENTIRE DURATION of the month of February in the year of 2000 and 7!

Neither your ears nor your eyes deceive you!

Never before has any proprietor of an electronic journal-keeping service attempted a feat of such dizzying blogospheric daring-do! Do not try this at home! Individuals of weak constitution such as ladies and nervous persons are forewarned!

Tell your friends and neighbors! It's absolutely free! An event you will never forget!

[ Quality entries are not guaranteed. The publishers of The Celestial Monochord are not responsible for lapses in good taste, civility, research rigor, insight, nor any other editorial standard ordinarily aspired to by this blog. ]

 

Hollis Brown's South Dakota

When Bob Dylan was 13 years old, one of the century's worst epidemics of black stem rust struck the upper midwest — particularly North and South Dakota and Minnesota. Up to 75% of the wheat harvest was lost to the disease, which blackens the crop with a powdery, sooty fungus. The economic consequences were severe, and the incident became legendary within the science of plant pathology. There's no way young Bob Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota wouldn't have heard about it.

But there were plenty of other diseases to blacken your crops, or kill your animals or you. I'm not an expert in any of them. Ergot can blacken wheat, barley, and other cereals and causes "bad blood" in cattle and humans — convulsions, gangrene, derangement. An invisible fungus in a common grass leads to tall fescue toxicosis, with grotesque symptoms like "fescue foot" and nasty birthing problems. Maybe Bob had heard of such diseases as well.

Dylan's "Ballad of Hollis Brown" is an exercise in empathy — its power is in the vividness of its vantage point within the head of a desperately bad-luck South Dakota farmer, and in the way the song dares you to turn away. Having lived in Minnesota for almost 20 years, or about as long as Dylan did before he moved to New York, and I can almost see how the young songwriter might have found the empathy to write such a convincing song.

Even in fairly cosmopolitan Minneapolis and St. Paul, farming is always a presence — to this day, grain mills and breweries (or their ruins) are lined up along the Mississippi River. They're a constant reminder that the cold climate used to limit the viable crops to stuff you could grind or brew, plus animal feed — wheat, barley, oats, alfalfa, sorghum, various kinds of hay. When you fill your gas tank in Minnesota, you have a good chance of being reminded that farmers have more options today, such as President Bush's switchgrass. Fully 200 of the nation's 600 ethanol ("E-85") gas pumps are in Minnesota.

A few years ago, a friend of mine moved from the University of Minnesota to New York — just like Dylan, you might say, only forty years later. On her first day in Manhattan, a shopkeeper mentioned the lack of rain, and my friend, forgetting herself, asked if the farmers upstate were suffering. The shopkeeper gave her a look as if she'd just evidenced a severe case of Tourette's Syndrome.

But that awareness and empathy, which so animated Dylan's "Hollis Brown" in 1964, has its limits. In fact, "Hollis Brown" is primarily about those limits. For that reason, it's convenient for Minnesotans that the song is set next door, in South Dakota.

South Dakota's leaders have worked to make the state's economy, and perhaps its conscience, better insulated from the booms and busts of farm life. In 1980, South Dakota was in desperate financial straits and took action by eliminating all laws against usury. Citibank, among other credit card companies, moved operations to the state almost immediately, leading to an explosion of growth in Sioux Falls and, some say, to a lot of South Dakota farmers declaring bankruptcy.

I happened to hear "Hollis Brown" on the same day the South Dakota governor (born the very year of the black stem rust epidemic) signed the bill designed to ban almost all abortions in the state, and ultimately, to overturn Roe v. Wade nationwide. That's what got me thinking about the song again. It seemed like yet another example of Dylan's uncanny foresight that he set the song in South Dakota even though, in 1964, Mississippi played the role in folksong that South Dakota now seems eager to play.

Dylan got the melody of Hollis Brown from "Pretty Polly," as Greil Marcus has pointed out. "Pretty Polly" is about a young man named Willie who murders his girlfriend for reasons which the song leaves completely unaddressed and which therefore seem to take on a menacing profundity. But as Rennie Sparks points out, at least one of Pretty Polly's 16th-century sources explains the motive simply and without ambiguity: She was pregnant and Willie doesn't want the birth to take place. At least partly, this is the origin of "Hollis Brown" — a story about the murder of a woman as a de facto abortion.

The best-known version of "Pretty Polly" (the version Rennie Sparks calls "cold as a cockroach") was recorded by Dock Boggs in 1927. In 1963, Boggs was rediscovered by Mike Seeger who then recorded and traveled extensively with him. In 1993, Bob Dylan made a studio recording of "Hollis Brown" accompanied by Mike Seeger playing banjo in Dock Boggs' very singular style. Really, the banjo part on the recording is basically just a sped-up version of Boggs' "Pretty Polly." The effect of the recording is to return "Hollis Brown" to its family tree, to explicitly situate it within its lineage.

In writing "Hollis Brown," then, Dylan surely wasn't looking ahead to 2006. He was looking back to the old Appalachian murder ballads, which the song so convincingly resembles. Marcus seems to claim the song was also inspired by a newspaper report of a mass murder in South Dakota, but I haven't been able to track that down (Charles Starkweather?). Perhaps the more inspiring history took place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota's most notorious mass murder and part of the Indian Wars in which Minnesota also played an unfortunate role. Given the history of this South Dakota farm — where the buffalo no longer roam — I wonder if Hollis Brown and his family aren't merely the most recent seven people to have died there.

It makes little sense to try to enlist "Hollis Brown" in a contemporary political fight. Or anyway, that's simply not The Celestial Monochord's schtick. Besides, the song is striking as an early hint of the full-blown poetic strategies Dylan was about to unleash — strategies that revolve around undecided meaning, meaning as an unfinished art for the listener to complete, meaning not as autocratic rule but as democratic process. To claim that "Hollis Brown" is somehow against South Dakota's new abortion law is to pretty much miss the song entirely.

Still, it's in the character of Dylan's art to keep coming around, over and over, asserting itself in new contexts. I think this uncanny relevence comes from reaching as deep into empathy as he can, and from his willingness to share with us the work of meaning. Or, maybe the more you're able to encounter the world with the past very much alive in you, the more you're able to anticipate the future. Maybe this is why Dylan continues to mystify, particularly in America where memory is notoriously short and empathy often runs thin.

 

Editor's Notes: The following is transcribed from the 1993 recording with Mike Seeger. Also, the coyote is the official state animal of South Dakota.

 

THE BALLAD OF HOLLIS BROWN

Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children and his cabin breaking down

You looked for work and money and you walked a ragged mile
You looked for work and money and you walked a ragged mile
Your children are so hungry, man, that they don't know how to smile

Your babies' eyes look crazy there, a-tuggin' at your sleeve
Your babies' eyes look crazy there, a-tuggin' at your sleeve
You walk the floor and wonder why with every breath you breathe

The rats have got your flour, bad blood it got your mare
The rats have got your flour, bad blood it got your mare
Is there anyone that knows, is there anyone that cares?

You prayed to the Lord above, "Oh please send you a friend"
You prayed to the Lord above, "Oh please send you a friend"
Your empty pockets tell you that you ain't a-got no friend

Your babies are crying louder, it's pounding on your brain
Your babies are crying louder, it's pounding on your brain
Your wife's screams are stabbin' you like the dirty drivin' rain

Your grass is turning black, there's no water in your well
Your grass is turning black, there's no water in your well
You spent your last lone dollar on seven shotgun shells

Way out in the wilderness a cold coyote calls
Way out in the wilderness a cold coyote calls
Your eyes fix on the shotgun that's hangin' on the wall

Your brain is a-bleedin' and your legs can't seem to stand
Your brain is a-bleedin' and your legs can't seem to stand
Your eyes fix on the shotgun that you're holdin' in your hand

There's seven breezes blowin' all around your cabin door
Seven breezes blowin' all around your cabin door
Seven shots ring out like the ocean's pounding roar

There's seven people dead on a South Dakota farm
Seven people dead on a South Dakota farm
Somewheres in the distance there's seven new people born

 

Darwin and Relativism

In a recent NPR segment on religious anti-Darwinism, a young person-of-faith declared that evolution could never be finally, completely proven, whereas Creationism has already been completely proven — "because the Creator," she explained, "is in my heart."

Of course, I puzzled over how this could be understood as proof. What if something else — Darwin, maybe, or perhaps The Destroyer — is in MY heart? Or what if her "heart" changes and she loses faith? How then are we supposed to decide how the biological world came to be the way it is? It would seem that proof based on "hearts" leaves us standing on awfully shaky ground.

The religious opponents of evolution frequently accuse evolution of encouraging "relativism," although I've never heard an explanation of just what this means, as if it were self-evident. It's not self-evident. Science has an awfully firm bedrock foundation for its knowledge — the world, the physical universe, the empirical field. Science changes its mind about things more often than, say, the Vatican because its understanding of the universe deepens and expands, and because it openly corrects its mistakes.

How is science somehow more "relative" than other forms of knowledge, particularly those based on faith (that is, "the heart")? Although Christianity has The Bible (actually, a wide variety of Bibles) to turn to for continuity, it's difficult to see that Biblical study has brought great consistency to Christian thought, either between sects or within a given sect over time. To base belief (that is, what one holds to be the case), on what amounts to culture and desire is relativism so extreme as to make me dizzy.

On July 9th, I had to re-read a paragraph on the front page of the New York Times three or four times.

It was in an article about an editorial written by the archbishop of Vienna, a close confidant of Pope Benedict XVI, in which he asserted, in essence, that Darwinian evolution is not true, and belief in it might not be compatible with Catholic faith. This assertion was apparently encouraged by Benedict, in a betrayal of Pope John Paul II's general friendliness to evolution and science.

What made me stop and re-read, over and over, was the NYTimes article's seventh paragraph, which reads, in its entirety:

Darwinian evolution is the foundation of modern biology. While researchers may debate details of how the mechanism of evolution plays out, there is no credible scientific challenge to the underlying theory.

What's so startling is that these facts were printed in an American newspaper as facts. Most news venues would cut this paragraph on the grounds that "sounds" biased. But it only sounds biased because the facts it contains ordinarily go unreported, or are reported only as the assertions of an expert who is, in turn, contradicted by an opposing expert.

So American journalism has its own trouble with relativism in its tendency to "seem" objective while actually measuring that objectivity by its appearance. It would be better to BE objective regardless of appearance — as the New York Times has done in this case — or even to be openly biased. To be both biased and to pretend to offer objective journalism results in a relativism unlike anything Darwin would have tolerated.

Terri Schiavo and Science in the News

At some point during the Terri Schiavo fiasco, I saw a right-wing spokesmodel on CNN say something like, "I was in a coma once and I'm sure glad they didn't kill ME!" So, the neurologist she was debating pointed out that she didn't have the same condition that Schiavo had. CNN's host didn't bother to get this little confusion sorted out during the segment — not even close. But the science did matter, desparately.

Although the science of neurology was the core of the case, all the thousands of hours of coverage did not add up to America's education about the brain. That was a lost opportunity. A great thumbnail discussion of the science behind the Schiavo case was on NPR's Talk of the Nation's Science Friday, but I'm not sure Americans listen to NPR a heck of a lot ...

To my ears, the great unspoken core of the story was the anxiety most people seem to feel around the idea of the brain as the organ of awareness. I find most people dislike the idea that your awareness, wakefulness, personality, emotions, identity, spirituality, consciousness, and soul are all artifacts generated by the meat inside your skull. When the meat goes bad, there's no more "you." As neurology advances, I bet we're going to face increasingly counter-intuitive brain conditions and even more vexing medical and moral decisions. We better get ready, in part by facing the facts.

None of this is to say that the main conflict was between science and religion — after all, Americans of faith were mostly on science's side on this one. As I watched Shiavo's parents fight to keep Terry hanging around, I kept hearing the Carter Family sing "Don't you want to go to heaven? Don't you want God's bosom to be your pillow when the world's on fire?" Perhaps Pete Seeger's re-writing of a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes might have been more persuasive, but I didn't think of it until recently.

Star Pix Wow Space Fans

The Hubble Deep Field project uses the Hubble Space Telescope to take a kind of "core sample" of the Universe's development. It always comes to mind when I think of the tempestuous relations between science and journalism.

The project requires the Space Telescope to stare into a tiny part of the sky, chosen for its lack of foreground stars, for something like 10 days and nights — that is, it takes a million-second exposure. The result is a photo that looks, at first glance, like an ordinary field of faint stars, but when you lean in to look at the details, you realize the "stars" are all galaxies.

The Hubble Deep Field images provide random samplings of galaxies as they appeared in successively younger eras of the Universe, stretching back to when it was only about 6% of its current age. There are hundreds of ways to tease information out of such photos, and they've been a gold mine for astronomers interested in the evolution of galaxy structure and distribution, dark matter, the big bang, etc., etc., etc.

When the first such image was revealed to reporters in 1996, typical headlines were "NASA Discovers Thousands of Galaxies" or "New Galaxies Discovered, Wowing Astronomers." It's true that most of the galaxies in the images had not been seen before, but what happened was no more the discovery of new galaxies than the discovery of new pebbles would be when geologists take a core sample of interesting geological strata. Astronomy is not about increasing the count of known galaxies, but rather, understanding how the Universe works and evolved, so at least some journalists completely missed the most rudimentary facts of the story.

When you read a newspaper article about something you really understand well, it can make you very suspicious of the article next to it, about which you know almost nothing. On the other hand, I understood what had actually happened — what the news stories should have said — because some journalists actually did get it right. You just had to know where to find them.