I’ve always found it nearly impossible to blog about my research on the Victoria Theater in St. Paul, MN, or about my work to keep the building from being demolished to make room for condos, a cell phone store, or the like.
Yes, nearly impossible to blog about, despite that work’s obvious and vital relevance to The Celestial Monochord’s central theme — the Smithsonian-Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music.
So, that’s weird — a blogger posting nearly nothing about the most important work of their life, especially when that work is smack in the middle of the blog’s subject and premise.
My main problem was the Monochord’s firm policy of staying breezy, witty, irreverent, and completely irrelevant. For me, my decades-long Victoria project has always felt far too complex, stressful, and important for the Monochord universe. It was all too deadly serious to write about here.
Now, at last, a lot has changed. So here’s the quick poop.
During the 2024 election season, the Minnesota Historical Society came calling. MNHS wanted me for two days of interviews on the Victoria Theater and “Moonshiner’s Dance Part I.”
I took a two-day break from feverishly canvassing for Harris-Walz and met the media team at the Victoria Theater / Victoria Cafe. Since my last visit, the place had taken on its newest incarnation — 825 Arts.
The visit was, in itself, overwhelming and moving. Looking again at the resulting video, I look exhausted, rumpled, overwrought, fragile, in need of a haircut and a vacation.
I’d done many media interviews on the subject before, and they virtually never panned out well enough for my standards. This time was different. This time — at last — the result was the insightful, exciting, and spot-on accurate “Music Making History: How a Song Saved A Theater.”
The 17-minute film is an extraordinary example of getting the facts as well as their spirit exactly right — a vivid, smart, funny, impassioned, and original work of art and an exemplar of public history done properly. I couldn’t be happier with it. I felt this way as soon as I saw it.
And then the damned thing went on to win an Emmy Award — WHAT?
Nothing I could say here would add much to the MNHS media team’s act of non-fiction art. Watch it, and then watch it again — it’s that kind of filmmaking.
For more on the history I uncovered and developed, and on the effort to make it matter, I encourage you to read my (admittedly) long, dense, and (assuredly) highly original and cunningly funny essay, “Smith’s Amnesia Theater: Moonshiner’s Dance in Minnesota.”
That essay became a chapter in the book, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: America Changed Through Music, published by Routledge UK.
Finally, get yourself to 825 Arts and participate in the transformative work and play Frogtown is getting done there in the very here-and-finally-now.
It is funny how I arrive at certain discoveries through curiosity. This morning I am listening to my Townes Van Zandt station on Pandora. When “Acony Bell” by Gillian Welch was playing, it dawned on me that I had no idea what “Acony Bell” is. So, through the magic of the Internet I found out. In the process, I found the “Acony Bell” article on The Celestial Monochord blog. And that led me to the “Homestead Pickin Parlor Goes Quiet” article. Oh, this is a blog based in the Twin Cities! And how did I get to listening to this type of music, which led me to the Townes Van Zandt Pandora station? It is my struggling ambition to learn guitar. In trying to improve, I decided to enroll in a Bluegrass ensemble at MacPhail. All my life, I had ignored that genre of music. My notion is that playing with other musicians will improve my skills, so I enrolled in the ensemble class, not really knowing much about the music. It is panning out well. But enough of that. Bluegrass/Americana/Roots genres is a new world for me. So, that is how I became curious about Acony Bell, which led me to this blog–in the Twin Cities, where I live. I love serendipity. It is like discovering that Marshall Avenue turns into Lake Street.