Math and Memory in New Lost City

Paley Cohen Seeger New Lost City Rambler

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

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

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

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

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

The irony is this:

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

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

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

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

Math and Memory in Las Vegas

There’s a place on the New Strip across from the Monte Carlo where you can get your picture taken with a big fat Elvis impersonator in front of a Model A Ford.

Why a Model A Ford? I don’t know. The whole of “The Past” occurred simultaneously, at least in Las Vegas, at least apparently.

On the other hand, if you go to Vegas with your critical faculties fully intact, you miss the whole experience entirely.

————

Inside the Luxor pyramid, there’s a booth where tourists have videos made of themselves riding a “magic carpet” in front of a bluescreen backdrop.

They sit on an oriental rug and are superimposed into a pre-taped video of a rocking, reeling ride down Las Vegas Boulevard, while employees shout instructions at them about how to look like they’re careening around and reacting to stuff. They get to take home a video putting it all together, with a soundtrack consisting of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” (you know, “close your eyes, girl, look inside, girl … “).

All of this is entirely appropriate, of course, as you know, since there are pictographs inside the Grand Gallery of the Great Pyramid at Khufu in Egypt depicting tourists making a similar video.

————

What always amazes and attracts me about Vegas is that it’s a town devoted to a branch of mathematics — statistics.

The cold, objective, inescapable fact is that you will lose your money. It’s as hard and as mundane a fact as any in mathematics. So, the entire city grew up around this fact, like a pearl around a grain of sand.

All the lights, the sequins, the wedding chapels, the mythology and history of the place, the Brat Pack, Elvis impersonators, Elvis, Siegfried and Roy, the cheezy Waitsian low-rent romance, the fiberglass-hot-dog architecture, the access and denial-of-access to various VIP areas, the libido of the place, its boundless and peerless T&A — it’s all necessitated by the very rigor itself of the logic that demands that you will lose and the house will win.

So long as you’re dreaming, they know you’re asleep …

Everybody

Steve Burgh’s bass starts the album “Diamonds in the Rough” with a rising lead-in, and then its first song, “Everybody” comes to life as a toe-tapping 2-4 country jukebox tune.

David Bromberg, the great Chicago multi-instrumentalist, dances along the top with a clucking, snapping electric guitar accompaniment. His syncopation gives the recording a swing that I’m not sure you hear much in country music anymore. John Prine’s acoustic guitar provides the percussion — Burgh’s booming bassline frees John from his characteristic boom-chuck, allowing him to simply chuck with gusto.

The overall effect is what an African American roommate of mine lovingly called “chicken music.” You’d need a heart of stone to not love it.

The song tells the story of a sailor who happens along Jesus taking a stroll across the water. It turns out Jesus is troubled and lonesome, needs someone to talk to. The singer has troubles of his own, of course, and might have liked to talk about them too, but Jesus won’t shut up about his own problems long enough to do any listening. The singer just chalks it up as his good deed for the day.

In 2005, the lyrics are refreshingly blasphemous (as they probably were when they were written in 1972):

I bumped into the savior
And he said, “Pardon me”
I said “Jesus, you look tired”
He said, “Jesus, so do you”

A few years later, John would repeat the first joke more explicitly, in case we missed it:

Father, forgive us
For what we must do
You forgive us
We’ll forgive you

It’s a good joke — we pardon God. Maybe the Bible spends so much time teaching us to forgive because God knew there was gunna be a hell of a lot to forgive him for. The song doesn’t really tell us what’s troubling Jesus, but in the depths of the Vietnam War, it’s not hard to believe he’s feeling guilty.

This kind of “high concept” for a song wasn’t so unusual in country music in those days — “Everybody” is a novelty song like “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goal Posts of Life.” But John Prine’s approach is so sympathetic to the situation of the song that it comes off less as a joke than as a parable. You think about it when you’re done laughing.

Humor is a funny thing. It can release a songwriter or arranger from the rules of the game in ways that mimic — or explain — real artistic innovation. I’m thinking especially of Spike Jones and Frank Zappa, who would be more widely thought of as surrealists if they weren’t so widely thought of as silly. There might be a little of this in “Everybody.” It’s a novelty song, but it has a seriousness, maybe, that invites you to listen closely without listening literally. In this sense, it gently prepares you for the flashes of modernist poetry that you’ll hear in the rest of the album.

(This is part of my song-by-song series on John Prine’s second album, Diamonds in the Rough: Everybody  *  The Torch Singer  *  Souvenirs  *  The Late John Garfield Blues  *  Sour Grapes * Billy The Bum  *  The Frying Pan  *  Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You  *  Take the Star Out of the Window  *  The Great Compromise  *  Clocks and Spoons  *  Rocky Mountain Time  *  Diamonds in the Rough)

On Not Going To Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We’ve Moved

The Celestial Monochord now has its own domain and a better technology to work with.

However, its design is still up in the air (The Institute’s Advisory Council for Electronic Publications has degenerated into open warfare over the color scheme … you know how these things can get political). Anyway, let me know if you have any suggestions or requests about the new features or design.

I hope to see a new life for the Monochord, of some sort. Although I try not to blog about blogging, the changes here seem like a good time to take stock. Start over and concentrate, as Gertrude Stein told Ernest Hemingway.

Years ago, I began reading Robert Cantwell, Greil Marcus, and a few others who’ve written about “roots music,” whatever that is. After quite a few unhappy years in an English graduate program, I found it intensely refreshing to read good writing and valuable insights from people who were writing about what they love, as opposed to writing about what they hate.

There’s a place for everything, of course, and I certainly have my own list of things I detest, but I think if I am capable of making a lasting contribution — or even a lasting impression — it is through The Way of the Monochord. There is no shame in loving things, even if they are just banjos and telescopes …

We’re Moving

After another frustrating battle with [Blogger’s] service, The Celestial Monochord is moving. The new arrangement will, I hope, be more reliable and will offer better tech support for yours truly. I hope to have my own domain, even!

Check back here soon. I predict the transition will take “noticeably less than a month.”

Many thanks for your patience.

Sun and Moon / Summer and Winter

The full moon in summer follows the same path across the sky as the sun in winter. The inverse is true, too. The sun in summer follows the same path across the sky as the full moon in winter.

About that full moon on hot, humid summer nights, all big and low and yellowy, Tom Waits sang, “looks like a buttery cueball moon, all melted off to one side — Parkay.” I love that … Parkay margarine starts to liquefy and skew on hot summer nights, and the moon on those very same nights looks like that — relaxed, too moist to hold its shape.

It looks like that because the full moon on summer nights rides low from east to west across the sky, down near the horizon, where you have to look through a lot of air to see it, and moist warm air at that. The further north you are, the stronger the effect.

Of course, the sun sort of looks a little like that on winter days — riding low, fuzzy, yellowish. On those days in the dead of winter, the sun streams sideways into the room and shines on parts of the house you’d forgotten the sun could ever reach. I remember that light especially well from my childhood, I suppose because it came so near Christmas and during the rest of long, house-bound winters.

Now, around midnight in those same winters, the full moon is almost directly overhead, like a bright blue eye, small and alone in the middle of the sky. It strains your neck to look straight up at the full moon in winter – it exposes your neck to the cold, and makes you a little dizzy without a horizon to keep you steady, and the moon is so stark and bright that it’s a little blinding.

In that way, it’s like the sun in summer, straight up and baring down on you from directly overhead around noon. No wonder people have called it merciless – bright, hot, featureless, colorless, and overhead. I think of sunshine in summer days, but not really of the sun itself – it’s too high and bright and dominating to really look into and see. Hart Crane simultaneously described the Manhattan skyline and the sun above it: “a rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene.”

The sun in summer follows the same path across the sky as the full moon in winter, and visa versa. I’m not sure how to explain why that’s true without waving my hands and drawing a lot of diagrams, so I thought I would try to remind you that its true. Maybe you’ll think about the “why” on your own. And maybe I’ll think of a way to explain the geometry some other time …

The Meaning of the John Henry Story

Steel Driving Kitten
my kitten Henry (is not a steel-drivin’ man)

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

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

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

Take this hammer and carry it to my captain
Tell him I’m gone
Just tell him I’m gone
“I’m sure he’s gone”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breakdown

As you’ve noticed, The Celestial Monochord is on a brief vacation. It will be back very soon, I promise! In the mean time, I’m upgrading my workstation so I don’t have to upload from work, nor from my wife’s computer. I also have two new kittens, and several other distractions … including …

I’m finally reading Robert Cantwell’s first book, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound. I haven’t read it before because I’m not very interested in bluegrass and when I did read the first two chapters, I found them somewhat peculiar. Now that I’m a little further, I realize the error of my ways. It’s great, a worthy predecessor to Cantwell’s brilliant When We Were Good: The Folk Revival.

Bluegrass Breakdown will no doubt get a lot of airplay here in the future. For now, I’ll briefly commment on the subtitle, “The Making of the Old Southern Sound.”

Bluegrass is not an old music, not an ancient folk form. It did not exist before 1945 or 1946, when it was unleashed by Bill Monroe. It’s the personal style of that one very original musician — but bluegrass was so widely, enthusiastically, and creatively imitated that it came to be seen as a genre unto itself. Monroe invented bluegrass at the same time others were inventing Rock & Roll.

Nor — in certain significant ways — is it particularly Southern. Monroe grew up on a Kentucky farm, but his family sent him north, in 1929 when he was 18 years old. It was during this long removal from the South, living among other exiles from Appalachia, working in a factory washing out barrels using gasoline, listening to Chicago radio stations, that Monroe began to dream of a contemporary sound that would thrive (or help him thrive) in the environment he occupied.

Bluegrass is nevertheless heard by its audiences as both old and Southern, so Cantwell’s book traces “The Making of the Old Southern Sound” — that is, how and why this thoroughly modern music came to be “about” certain times and places from which it did not arise and which it had never actually occupied.