on “North Country: The Making of Minnesota”

An historian creates a new world for me to live in

My favorite Chinese take-out place has a map of its delivery area taped to the wall.

I’ve studied it at least once a week for years, waiting for my order to be up. Because I live just a couple blocks away, it’s a map of my Minneapolis neighborhood.

A few weeks ago, I was drawn into the map by the thrill of something truly new.  Suddenly missing its familiarity, the map was layered now with too many horrors and ironies and personalities to trace.

It now covers about half the area Major Plympton cordoned off in 1839 for the Fort Snelling Military Reserve. Deciding that an “era of good feeling” was at an end, the Major slapped a ruler across a map of what is now the Twin Cities, and carved out the area he would command.

Previous Fort Snelling commandants had encouraged French Canadians, mixed bloods, and various refugees to make their homes there, where I make mine today.  But in 1839, they suddenly had to vacate onto nearby land recently promised by treaty to the Mdewakantons.

Plympton cited military necessity, but he and his fellow officers and the Fort’s physician had all heavily invested in land claims within the boundaries of the new reserve.

Apparently, they failed to anticipate that economic activity would halt as soon as the area was cordoned off, so that the nearest point on the Mississippi River outside their reserve would become St. Paul — the new State Capitol and regional center of trade.

And then, my Hunan shrimp and egg rolls were ready.

I had just finished reading Mary Lethert Wingerd’s book, North Country: The Making of Minnesota.

I’d postponed reading it for a long time, partly because it’s 3 lbs 9 oz — like a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary — and it actually hurt a little to hold and read.  I think those months of handling the thing softened its edges enough for me to finally take it up.

But then, reading it was never in doubt. Wingerd’s only previous book was one of the best reading decisions of my life.

Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St. Paul was a history of St. Paul’s civic identity.  That is, it traced who the people of St. Paul saw themselves as being and how their identity evolved over time, shaped by economic, ethnic, and religious power.

After Claiming the City, the place I’d lived for 20 years seemed newer to me than the day I first arrived.  And the older the structures, the newer they seemed.

You can’t imagine the impact the book had on my Victoria Theater efforts and, especially, on my understanding of “Moonshiner’s Dance.”

Apparently, I wasn’t alone. North Country was commissioned to mark the state’s 150th birthday with A Big Serious History of Minnesota.  Such a tome hadn’t been written in over 40 years.

Given this grand opportunity to make a lasting mark, Wingerd chose the kind of modest approach that makes for good history.

North Country asks how the State of Minnesota emerged out of the vast woodlands and prairies of the Dakota people.  To find answers, Wingerd focuses intently on the Native American-European encounter.  Minnesota was the product of a series of evolving interactions.

In Wingerd’s telling, the particulars of those interactions dissolve any sense of inevitability in their outcome.

For example, the book traces the rise and fall of Minnesota’s border cultures, such as the Metis, who occupied a genetic and economic space between Native Americans and the French fur traders.  Such cultures flourished across North America for a little while, but Minnesota’s formed very early and persisted very late, evolving into an important force in the state’s making.

I was pretty struck by the Metis, who appear at first glance like some sort of forgotten 1700’s steampunk enclave, especially in light of Kirsten Delegard’s masterfully compiled and annotated illustrations.

Ultimately, the (real) Metis emerge as one of Minnesota’s many roads not taken — once-viable alternatives to either the domination of Minnestoa’s Native population by Europeans, or the preservation of some timeless prehistoric idyll.

This is a recurring theme of the book — the abandoned options for a Euro-Native encounter that could have benefitted everybody more than it did, including the supposed victors.

The book culminates with Minnesota’s war between the Dakotas and US forces, and the state’s subsequent genocidal reaction. By then, this lack of inevitability, those roads not taken, are a profound and agonizing subtext. “Cataclysm on the Minnesota” is the chapter title.

I’ve always been vaguely aware that various place-names in the city of Minneapolis came from Longfellow’s romantic poem Hiawatha. They’re printed on that map in my Chinese take-out restaurant.

But in North Country’s epilogue, the meanings of these place-names, and of the places themselves, telescope enormously.

I’d never quite appreciated that Minneapolis had used “a literary cult that attracted followers from all reaches of the globe” to help construct a new historical identity for the state.

The epilogue — “Pasts Remembered, Pasts Forgotten” — treats memory and amnesia about Minnesota’s past as active projects undertaken in the service of specific goals.

I worry about potential readers assuming North Country is a depressing litany of genocidal crimes.  On so many levels, it is another project entirely, likely to enliven your relationship with your immediate environment, as it has mine.

Mostly, I’m grateful for its becoming, maybe inadvertently, the final event in its own story of forgetting and remembering, and of the common good abandoned and reclaimed.

Notes on Frank Cloutier’s Grave

Finding the grave of a long-lost musician shakes my grasp of time and space

This past Thursday was the 55th anniversary of Frank E. Cloutier’s death.  He died just over 5 years after the release of the Anthology of American Folk Music, for which he’s marginally remembered.

Here’s what his headstone looked like on my first visit, the first Saturday after Thanksgiving, 2006:

It’s in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which is a beautiful drive from the Twin Cities, especially if you take Highway 61 through the Mississippi River valley.

You pass through, or near, Red Wing and Rollingstone, Wabasha and Zumbro Bottoms, Frontenac and Trempealau.  There are often bald eagles, red-tailed hawks.

Frank Cloutier is buried “on a local heroes hill,” to borrow John Prine’s phrase, in La Crosse’s Oak Grove Cemetery.  Frank’s is one of about 200 headstones of veterans of each American war from the Spanish American through the Korean.

Though basically from Rhode Island, Frank happened to be working as a piano player in Manitowoc when the US entered World War One — hence the “Wisconsin” on his Army-issued headstone.

He arrived in France with the 311 supply train company in 1918, not long before the Armistice and too late to see fighting.

But France was pretty out-of-sorts and needed supply trains, so Frank’s company stayed on after the war for about 9 months in wine country.  Less than six months after Frank returned to the states, Prohibition took effect.

Knowing he was both Catholic and a Freemason, I was curious to see whether his headstone would have a cross or a masonic square-and-compass.

Frank Cloutier contributed the Anthology‘s only Upper Midwestern music. Here’s his headstone on March 1, 2009:

As the musical director of St. Paul’s Victoria Cafe, Frank and his band made a 78 RPM record in September 1927 — “Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One”.

It was released that January, but by then the Victoria Cafe itself was already in Federal court, fighting for its life.  From the start, the record always represented a gone world.

“Moonshiner’s Dance” seems to have utterly vanished from history almost as soon as it was released.  When Frank died in 1957, he apparently didn’t know the recording had been reissued 5 years earlier in New York as part of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

But even then, nobody would’ve been able to predict the Anthology would become as important to America’s self-image as it’s become.

Frank Cloutier couldn’t have foreseen that “Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One” would one day become the best known recording made in Minnesota during his lifetime.

Its hard to appreciate how deeply the country had changed between 1927 and 1957.  Indeed, much of the Anthology’s power derived from the way the alien sounds of Prohibition-era, pre-Depression, pre-WW2 America mystified young Cold War listeners.

Frank Cloutier died on a Friday morning in 1957.

That very same morning, the Vanguard TV3 exploded on its launch pad in Florida.  Meant to meet the challenge of Sputnik with America’s own first satellite, the Vanguard TV3 was an embarrassing, televised explosion.  Headline writers dubbed it Flopnik, Oopsnik, and Stayputnik.

The satellite itself was recovered from the wreckage and put on display at the National Air and Space Museum, where I took a picture of it in January 2005, not yet knowing the object was somehow about the Anthology.

(I was in Washington for Mike Seeger’s concert marking the “Picturing the Banjo” exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery).

Note the light trespass fogging the film in my old battered 1970’s camera.  More than any other single photo, this one finally convinced me to get a digital SLR camera. (In retrospect, I should have just replaced the light seals.)

In any case, that Friday morning in 1957 not many Americans were focused on the death of Frank Cloutier.

Even by the time the Smithsonian reissued the Anthology on CD in 1997, there was exactly zero research on Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe to draw from while writing the liner notes.

It wasn’t until Thanksgiving weekend 2006 that an Anthology listener finally showed up at Cloutier’s grave, wearing earbuds to listen to his record graveside.

In 2007, on the 50th anniversary of Cloutier’s death, I had planned to be in La Crosse, but an opportunity suddenly arose to go to Chicago instead.  It took me a while to choose Chicago, but I made the right decision … although I still do think about that now and then.

Let the Duquesne Whistle Blow

A song title in an upcoming Dylan album reminds me of my father’s birthplace

The tracklist for Tempest, Bob Dylan’s upcoming album, was released on Tuesday:

1. Duquesne Whistle
2. Soon After Midnight
3. Narrow Way
4. Long and Wasted Years
5. Pay in Blood
6. Scarlet Town
7. Early Roman Kings
8. Tin Angel
9. Tempest
10. Roll on John

In response, the armies of Dylan analysts went on red alert. The Expecting Rain discussion about the (as-yet-unheard) album suffered 500-posts in the first day.  With little to go on but song titles, I’ll mostly keep my powder dry for now.

Still … I have to note the first track, “Duquesne Whistle,” because my father was born in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, in 1925, according to his birth certificate.  My next earliest addresses for him are a couple miles up the Monongahela, in Clairton (where The Deer Hunter was set).

For me, the title of the song is great news.  For one thing, it confirms that Bob Dylan is indeed sending me — and not you — subliminal messages through his song lyrics.  What a relief!  I was beginning to think I was just imagining things.

More importantly, Bob has thrown Duquesne to the Dylanologists like meat to ravening wolves.  Over the years, the song will provide an ongoing opportunity to know more about my dad’s native town and the history of this particular corner of America.

Picture on a blog of a picture on a shelf.
My dad’s on the right.

My father was the first child of immigrant workers, starting a family in a steel mill town full of other immigrant workers. His own father had just arrived two years before from Austria — aboard the SS President Fillmore, believe it or not.

The other families on my dad’s particular street had just arrived from Mexico, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Hungary, and Lithuania, according to the 1930 census.  Dad was an anchor baby, if you prefer.

Some time in the late 1930’s — that is, in the depths of the Depression — the family moved to Milwaukee, where dad met mom at a bowling alley.  She was a farm girl from just outside Port Washington, where Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded for Paramount.

It was a good move, I think, since the shock of the Depression seems to have been less sharp in Wisconsin.  Mom reports being largely unaware of it on the farm — they weren’t rich, but then, they never had been.  Prohibition made a much bigger impact on her because it brought a still into the house.

Dylan’s “Duquesne Whistle” will help illuminate my dad’s side of the story.  That seems natural since music was the main reason I got into family history at all.

I had focused obsessively on “Americana” or “roots music” for 15 years before I tried to do any original research on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Its “Moonshiner’s Dance” entry was the obvious place to start, as it was recorded right here in Minnesota.

But I soon understood it as the exception that proves the Anthology‘s rules — the only really Northern recording on the Anthology, for example, and the only cut making the sounds of recent immigration.

We are so satisfied by our dreams of a musical South that Duquesne and St. Paul (and even Hibbing) are a kind of terra incognita in America’s musical imagination — so much so that my own genealogy has emerged as a critical source of information.  Let the Duquesne whistle blow.

I’ve long postponed my Duquesne research for when I can visit it and Clairton myself — maybe when I finally attend the Harry Smith Festival in Millheim, PA.  But now, I might not have to see the place at all — Bob Dylan and the internet may have just rendered my personal voyage of self discover entirely pointless!  Hallelujah!

Of course, the song may not even turn out to be about Duquesne, PA.  It may refer, for example, to the Pennsylvania Railroad train route the Duquesne that used to run from Manhattan’s Penn Station to Harrisburg.  Or maybe it refers to the CSI Miami character, Calleigh Duquesne.  Bob likes the ladies, I think.

But I’m not concerned.  A Dylan song not being about something doesn’t mean that this something won’t provide plenty of fodder for research and analysis.

PS:  Note that Earl Hines was also from Duquesne, PA.  There’s a great chapter in William Howland Kenney’s book, Jazz on the River, that deals with the musical environment/cultural history of Pittsburgh and its environs.

The Return of “Temperance & Temptation”

A great ensemble tackles Moonshiners Dance and other music from Minnesota’s Prohibition history

Celestial Monochord readers will be glad to know that the Rose Ensemble’s upcoming season will include Songs of Temperance and Temptation.

The show will be back in November for an eight-city tour of Minnesota and, in abbreviated form, for a Mississippi riverboat cruise on October 23.

This is great news.  The three performances of Temperance and Temptation that closed the Ensemble’s previous season included the first known performances in over 83 years of a peculiar, foot-stomping composition known as “Moonshiner’s Dance Part One.”  This piece has been the axis around which my research, writing, and preservation efforts have revolved for more than five years.

Hopefully, the Rose’s upcoming November performances will give Minnesota another chance to catch an incredibly rare performance of “Moonshiner’s Dance,” a neglected and nearly forgotten landmark in the state’s musical legacy.

But even for me, the hope of seeing more of “Moonshiner” isn’t the best reason to look forward to this season’s revival of Songs of Temperance and Temptation.

The research is amazing: Research as Amazing

The show is very amusing — packed with fresh songs (that is, new-to-you and very alive), sung by skillful, versatile, and charismatic vocalists. The show is also informative, immersing you in a kind of cultural history of alcohol that’s likely to transform your understanding.

But the Ensemble’s marketing materials reprint a blurb from a local paper saying, “No one makes scholarly research more entertaining than The Rose Ensemble.” I think this subtly misses the main point, the best thing about the Rose and this show.

What I like most is the show’s unwavering confidence that its surest bet in amusing the audience is to tell them something they didn’t already know.  The Rose just assumes from the start, correctly and to great effect, that surprising information — learning something — is among the wildest experiences the stage has to offer.

To me, this approach felt courageous and just a shade radical in its sheer respect for the audience — a belief in the audience’s intelligence, but even more in its willingness to be game for something new. My frenzied notes taken during the single performance I attended in June have grown cryptic with time, but at one point I simply wrote, “The amazing research.”

I’m fairly well versed in the history of pop music during and just before Prohibition. But the Songs of Temperance and Temptation were almost all completely new to me. And the photographs projected behind the performers were mostly new finds. And the collection of sheet music cover art was fantastic.

The show’s stories of Minnesota’s temperance movement will surprise most Minnesotans — the city of Hutchinson’s founding, for example, by a family of protest singers dedicated to women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and men’s liberation from alcohol.

The Andrew Volstead story may also surprise a lot of people.

The Congressman from Granite Falls was seen across the United States as the primary villain of the Prohibition era — an incompetent, humorless zealot who drove the nation to (furtively) drink. He’s still remembered this way.

But the Rose Ensemble, perhaps following Daniel Okrent’s recent book, invites us to see him in a far more nuanced and sympathetic light.

(My own research has been hinting to me that both Okrent and Rose are going a little far in rehabbing Volstead’s reputation.  A proper assessment of Volstead isn’t really available, so I think the guy is ripe material for a thorough biography.)

“I’ve Got the Prohibition Blues”

The members of the Rose Ensemble are trained veterans of choral music, and the Rose’s seasons always lean toward a wide variety of “early music.”

The upcoming season, for example, includes one show on “ancient Mediterranean Jews, Christians, and Muslims” and another on “feasts and saints in early Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Bohemia.”

So, of course, there’s the question of how well they handle Songs of Temperance and Temptation — and the answer is pretty good news.

The show’s first half deals primarily with 19th century conflicts leading up to Prohibition, so a bit of reserve and formal training only improves the verisimilitude.  Rest assured, the show cuts loose early on and shows a lot of humor throughout.  When they approach something like a barbershop quartet style, they’re clearly well prepared.

The real challenge comes during Prohibition, when American pop music fell in love with Jazz and the blues, and searched for something like an authentic “street” credibility.  The Rose does very well with it, but it’s not surprising that swing and growl aren’t its most convincing assets.

But even in the slightly strained way the Rose Ensemble comes to grips with the 1920’s, they remain true to the history. One of the great pleasures of listening to, for example, Archeophone’s Phonographic Yearbook series is hearing the pop stars of the era grapple with those very same changes in public taste.

The blues and jazz revolution ended a lot of careers, just as Rock & Roll did decades later. Those who survived often did so by learning, with widely varying artistic success, the African American-inflected stomp and swerve in the era’s new sounds.

The more you hear what was recorded at the time, the more you appreciate the Rose’s mastery of this material today.

Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One

And finally, I know some folks will want to know how they did “Moonshiner’s Dance.”  So here goes.

It came late in a show filled with a lot of unfamiliar music, so to suddenly hear a band, right in front of me, strike up that familiar introductory riff followed by that oompah hopped up on goofballs … it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

The only recording of the piece in existence — the one I’ve heard perhaps a thousand times — is trapped in the antique shellac of scratchy, store-bought 78s.  It has no other existence.  Hearing the piece played anew by a live band immediately in front of me was mind-bogglingly rare, and I felt it in every note.

Their approach was to hew quite closely to the original recording. The band was a little light on the beat and lacked the dance band insistence I’d expect, but otherwise tried to “play the record” as closely as possible.

In the recording, the third segment of the medley consists of a harmonica vamping some chords, possibly noodling a bit with an indecipherable tune. The blog Old Weird America claims the tune is “Turkey in the Straw,” but this is almost certainly wrong. The Rose Ensemble went with this suggestion, enunciating the tune very clearly.

I think it was the right decision. “Turkey in the Straw” is familiar and rousing (as the whole medley would have been to its original audience), and fits the piece nicely.  It also dovetails (turkeytails?) with my thesis about the recording being something like a big-city parody of rural culture.

During the “At The Cross” segment of the medley, the fiddler took up a small American flag and waved it haughtily, which I loved.  For one thing, it provided a light suggestion of the satirical stagecraft that I think was the real point of the “Moonshiner’s Dance” recording.

What we’re hearing in the recording was the soundtrack to something we’re not seeing. The Rose’s performance, then, also necessarily missed the chaos of the recording’s laughing, indecipherable voices, and generally … thick atmosphere that gives the recording its particular and mysterious register.

Certainly, I think the Rose’s performance worked wonderfully on its own terms, and the piece is plenty sturdy to have a performance life of its own.

But the challenges of performing it anew also highlight what I’ve come to focus on in my years of research — that the original “Moonshiner” recording has the power it has because it is so bursting with its very narrowly specific moment and place. To understand what this peculiar thing really is, then, we need to reconstruct the time and community from which it arose.

The Rose Ensemble has gleefully run directly into the path of that time and place, seeking a new way to make a new kind of performance sense for this piece that so often seems bent on denying the very possibility of sense itself.

In a way, that reinvention of new senses from old contexts is what The Rose Ensemble does for a living. These are brave people, and I want to see more of them.

[See also my thoughts in advance of the show.]

Featured image: Hutchinson Family Singers, 1845, www.metmuseum.org (founders of Hutchinson, MN, and abolitionist and temperance folksingers)

Rose Ensemble to Perform Moonshiner’s Dance

Perhaps for the first time in over 83 years, a piece of music that consumes my life is finally performed

The Rose Ensemble will perform “Moonshiner’s Dance” — for the first time, as far as I know, in 83 years

Thursday, June 16, 8 pm — Duluth, Weber Music Hall
Friday, June 17, 8 pm — Saint Paul, Fitzgerald Theater
Saturday, June 18, 8 pm — Saint Paul, Fitzgerald Theater

Minnesota’s own Rose Ensemble, an internationally acclaimed music group, has notified me that they will perform “Moonshiner’s Dance” at upcoming concerts called Songs of Temperance and Temptation: 100 Years of Restraint and Revelry in Minnesota.

This is stunning, partly because these just might be the first performances of Moonshiner’s Dance in more than 83 years.

After five years of work on the piece’s origins and reception, I’ve never heard so much as a rumor of any other performance since the original — the September 1927 performance by the house band of Frogtown’s Victoria Cafe, recorded by the Gennett Record Company and later reissued on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.

What the Rose Ensemble is about to do is rarer than any routine solar eclipse, black swan, or blooming corpse flower.

Moonshiner’s Dance is actually a medley of even older tunes, mind you, and those have been performed and recorded countless times. But right now, I have no evidence that anybody has ever put them back together through that peculiar alchemy that makes them “Moonshiner’s Dance.” (Please write me if you have info.)

Naturally, there must have been other performances over the years. After all, learning and playing the songs and sounds of Harry Smith’s Anthology has been a signature rite of passage for folk revivalists for half a century.

During the 1950s/60s Folk Revival, even those musicians who’d never heard, or heard of, the Anthology learned its songs and musical figures. That is, the Anthology supplied the Folk Revival with a canon — a repertoire of texts that everybody knew, even if they didn’t know why. In turn, the Anthology contributed heavily to the Revival’s influential ideas about America, memory, and meaning.

But Moonshiner’s Dance wasn’t performed.  It never made it from the Anthology into the collective performance repertoire. What could this performance history of Moonshiner’s Dance — the Upper Midwest’s sole contribution to the 84 recordings of the Anthology — tell us about how we choose to embrace or ignore our own cultural inheritance?

There’s a hell of a lot to say about that, and I hope to publish a book about it one day. These are questions just too big to blog.  They’re so profound, they’re almost … untweetable.

Still, here are a couple things I’ll be thinking about as I look forward to the Rose Ensemble’s performances:

The original Victoria Cafe Orchestra was not as different from the Rose Ensemble as you might think. My evidence indicates they were musically literate, sight-reading professionals, members of the Saint Paul Musician’s Union, and primarily big-city jazz musicians. So why, on Moonshiner’s Dance, were they playing the oldtime ethnic dance music — proto-polka — more associated with rural, outstate Minnesota?

The 1927 Minnesota State Fair had just ended a few days before the recording, and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra must have been playing for a lot of out-of-towners — or for city folk who had themselves been rubbing elbows with those out-of-towners. The band appears to be riffing on that. In Saint Paul, good-natured joshing about Lake Wobegon has deep roots.

If this is right, Moonshiner’s Dance is a product of Prohibition-era Saint Paul in its regional context — but it’s also self-consciously about Prohibition-era Saint Paul in its regional context.  Like the newspaper, it was truly a first draft of history.

It’s also clear from my research that the Victoria Cafe was a cabaret-style night club. And it was perfectly commonplace for performers on a cabaret stage to develop simple themes or stories, such as the intermingling of rubes and slickers.  That is, we should have expected, all along, that Moonshiner’s Dance might be programmatic.

Thus, we’re hearing only the audible portion of an experience for all five senses. It’s the soundtrack of a full American cabaret environment and, according to my findings, one very narrowly tailored to Saint Paul’s University Avenue circa mid-September 1927.

I can’t wait to see what the Rose Ensemble does with it. In a way, the ensemble’s mission is to provide vivid translations, restating music that was meaningful in a very different time and place and giving it new significance in our time and our place.

I don’t know how rarely they translate across such a long span of time but such a short spatial distance. While Moonshiner’s Dance is certainly a creature of a very different era, it represents a place less than two miles up the road from the Fitzgerald Theater.

If we could tell the Victoria Cafe Orchestra that we’d be watching their tomfoolery recreated by the Rose Ensemble in the 21st century, I imagine they might ask us … “What the heck do you see in it?”

[UPDATE: I’ve also posted a review of the show.]

Anthology’s Victoria Cafe Honored by Saint Paul

For the first time ever, a site gets official historic status due to a connection to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music


The Victoria Theater in winter.  Its 1927 house band recorded the only unambiguously Northern recording of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

 —

It’s official.  The Victoria Theater is now a Heritage Preservation Site of the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota.

As a primary cause, the city’s preservation commission cites the building’s role in Harry Smith’s influential Anthology of American Folk Music. The Victoria’s 1927 house band recorded “Moonshiner’s Dance Part One,” now familiar from the 1952 Anthology.

The Victoria appears to be the first historic site— anywhere, at any level of government —protected by means of an Anthology connection.

Five years ago, I faced a different and rather depressing situation, being the only person alive who’d connected the dots between this building, “Moonshiner’s Dance,” and Harry Smith’s Anthology.

Nobody interested in the Anthology knew where the Victoria Cafe had been.  And Saint Paulites didn’t know about the recording — including the historians who’d been commissioned over the years to survey the Victoria building.  Worst of all, the very day I understood this, the building seemed to be under imminent threat from multiple directions.

Well … now, things have changed.

The point of my work has never been to save any old buildings.  My project has always been to deeply understand the cultural context of “Moonshiner’s Dance,” and to develop ideas about what this fresh history really means to us, now.

And yet, when the Victoria Cafe itself — the recording’s immediate context — was about to become a pile of bricks, I knew I had to set aside the microfilm and speak up.  I figured I could sleep at night if Saint Paul let the building be torn down — but only if I could have my say first.

In the past 18 months, I’ve attended dozens of hearings, written a slew of nominations and articles, been interviewed by journalists dozens of times, networked feverishly.  I’ve also thought a hell of a lot about Wordsworth’s “Happy Warrior,” and decided I am not he.

Now, after a unanimous city council vote and the mayor’s signature, I feel I’ve come out of a dark tunnel, blinking at the sunlight.  I intend to re-focus on my history research and writing, and on blogging.

Still, there’s more work to do on the Victoria’s future.  It’s a vacant building with an owner who doesn’t respect its history — a point he’s emphasized many times.  Until the building finds a respectful use, it will remain threatened.

I also can’t help wondering … would the Victoria’s working-class neighborhood still have this cultural resource if I hadn’t begun poking around at the Historical Society five years ago?

What other buildings, maybe in comparable neighborhoods down South, would benefit from somebody — particularly a fan of the Anthology — just showing up, doing some research, and doing a little writing?

It’s odd to consider how important, as tangible assets, “Moonshiner’s Dance” and the work of Harry Smith have become to a hard-working neighborhood in the capital city of Minnesota.

Here’s a little further reading:

History of the Victoria Theater — a short sketch at the Frogtown Neighborhood Association website.

Save the Victoria Theater — the Facebook group with nearly 700 members.

A Geography of the Anthology — a map of the influential Anthology, a reminder of the geographic element in the idea of American “roots music”.

North Country Blues — thinking about the American musical canon, and what it means that the Upper Midwest is too often neglected.

Moonshiner’s Parking Lot? — when the wrecking ball was coming for the Victoria, I shared a little of my thinking, at the time, on why I thought the building mattered.

Louis Armstrong at the Coliseum, 1939 — Frank Cloutier, the Victoria’s bandleader, moved to the Coliseum at Lexington & University, where he became Musical Director.

Harry Smith Archives — the Victoria’s preservation is announced at the Archives.

Email Me — if you have questions, or answers, about the Victoria or Moonshiner’s Dance, or anything else.

See also “Anthology of American Folk Music” links at the upper left of this blog.

_

Journal of American Folklore Features the Monochord

The Journal of American Folklore says we’re “an obscure but interesting midwestern vernacular music blog.”

Some weeks ago, we here at Monochord headquarters were pleased to find ourselves featured in the latest issue of The Journal of American Folklore.

The article, by Nicole Saylor (head of Digital Services at University of Iowa), surveys several blogs that are “interested in vernacular culture,” and are of interest to folklorists.

Among other things she says about the Monochord, Saylor describes us as “an obscure but interesting midwestern vernacular music blog.”

The article focuses on three sites — Community, and Celestial Monochord, and The Art of the Rural — and the sites they include in their virtual communities, such as friend-of-the-Monochord, Old, Weird America, and the excellent Excavated Shellac.

Getting ahold of the full text of recent academic articles is often a headache for those not in academia.  If you need help with this one, you might contact me personally or consult your friendly public librarian.

Of course, honors like this one — or the occasional fan letter — always make me feel guilty about not writing both more and better.  I’ve developed a blogger identity crisis the last year or so, and nothing’s duller to read (or write) about than a blogger’s identity crisis.

I suspect I’ll feel more free to express myself once the Saint Paul City Council is done with its deliberations about the Victoria Theater.

As the most prominent defender (possibly) of a whole neighborhood’s most valuable architectural resource (conceivably), it’s suddenly a little intimidating to just logon and go joshing blithely around about kitten astronauts and garbanzo beans named Dylan.

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Harry Smith Anthology Site Before Saint Paul Council

The city of Saint Paul officially takes up the question of its Folkways Anthology landmark

In May 2006, I was astonished to find the Victoria Cafe, still standing, right there in the Frogtown neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Apparently, nobody had figured this out before.

Although music fans around the world knew the 1927 recording made by the Victoria Cafe’s orchestra, the Cafe’s location was unknown. Meanwhile, the old building was familiar around the neighborhood, which seemed completely unaware of any recording associated with it  — much less what that recording represented, what place it held in American culture.

The Victoria — in which I see unparalleled significance for American music, and especially for the cultural history of the Upper Midwest — was just sitting there unnoticed, uncelebrated, and vacant, watching the traffic pass back and forth on University Avenue.

Now, about 5 years later, the City Council of Saint Paul will decide whether to finally recognize this building as an official Heritage Preservation Site. The city has an opportunity to protect this cultural resource and keep the demolition crews away from this landmark.

To my eyes, passing up this opportunity would reaffirm the Victoria’s decades of anonymity and neglect, instead of finally acknowledging an important cultural contribution made by Minnesota, Saint Paul, and Frogtown.

RESIDENTS of Saint Paul, please contact your City Council member and urge them to strongly support the Victoria Theater’s bid to become a Heritage Preservation Site.

NON-RESIDENTS of Saint Paul, please contact them anyway!  You should email the entire council, or just the Victoria’s councilmember, Melvin Carter III.

And please, spread the word!

Links:

Now that the Victoria has reached the City Council, I’m tempted to tell the whole story all over again — explain it all, get it right, pin it down.  But, well … the heart of the matter is out there in one form or another.  Here’s a sampling.

History of the Victoria Theater — a short sketch at the Frogtown Neighborhood Association website.

Moonshiner’s Parking Lot? — when the wrecking ball was coming for the Victoria, I spilled (some of) my guts about why I think the building matters.

A Geography of the Anthology — a map of the influential Anthology, and a reminder of the default Southern emphasis of the idea of American “roots music”.

North Country Blues — thinking about the American musical canon, and what it means that the Upper Midwest has been neglected too often.

Louis Armstrong at the Coliseum, 1939 — Frank Cloutier, the Victoria’s bandleader, moved to the Coliseum at Lexington & University, where he was Musical Director for 13 years.

Email Me — if you have questions, or answers, about the Victoria or Moonshiner’s Dance, or anything else.

Saint Paul City Council — please contact them!

Save the Victoria Theater — the Facebook group with over 600 members.

See also “Anthology of American Folk Music” links at the upper left of this blog.

   
an original copy of the 78 rpm record of the 1927 “Moonshiner’s Dance,”
which Harry Smith included on the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music

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Talkin’ Michael Gray

The Monochord rides a tour bus to Hibbing with one of the world’s top Dylan scholars


Gray contemplates Hibbing’s open-pit iron-ore mine

A noted Dylan expert and critic offers his home in France (and himself) for conversation.

Early one morning in March 2007, I was riding in one of those tourist buses that deliver senior citizens to casinos — tinted windows, plush seats, TV screens in the ceiling.  That foggy Minnestoa morning, this bus was filled to capacity with about sixty Bob Dylan scholars.

The trip, from Minneapolis to Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, was the opening event of the largest scholarly Dylan conference ever held.

In my aisle seat, I talked to the stranger in the window seat next to me.  He turned out to be an evangelical Christian Tennessean researching Dylan’s spirituality.  A smart guy — curious, thoughtful, and original.

Still, it was hard to concentrate on the conversation.  If the first guy I met was THIS guy, who else might be slouching toward Hibbing on this infernal bus?

Immediately across the aisle, an Englishman and an American were engaged in a lively discussion (about Bob you-know-who).  Eavesdropping, I gathered that the Englishman — proper accent, eccentric dress, soul patch — was Michael Gray himself.

In 1972, Michael Gray authored the world’s first critical study of Dylan’s work and, in 2007, had recently completed The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, offering as much obsessive Dylan knowledge as any book ever published.  A kind of paper cinder block, The BD Encyclopedia comes at you like an authoritative reference but winds up snaring you in an idiosyncratic maze — the strategy reminds me of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

Recognizing a once-in-lifetime opportunity, I turned to Michael Gray and asked the obvious question:  Who threw the glass in the street?

It was a rhetorical question and a bit of a joke — after all, the answer represents the quintessentially unknowable cipher that is the object of all Dylanology — so I was gobsmacked when Gray actually knew the answer, and offered a couple minutes of historiography contextualizing both the answer and the question itself.

We talked, excitedly and with a lot of laughter, most of the way to Hibbing. During the long days of the Dylan conference, I’m not sure what I would’ve done without Michael Gray — I kept seeking him out whenever I felt like a wallflower and needed a friendly conversation.

Not the kind of Dylan author who doesn’t suffer fools (I should know), he was generous with his time and knowledge, listened closely, laughed easily, gave useful advice when I asked for it, remembered my name.  I find myself repeating his anecdotes in my own conversations even today.

Days later, at the end of the conference, Gray gave the closing keynote address.

Built around a series of film clips of Dylan throughout his career, Gray described the “moment” that surrounded them — the atmosphere, the shocks and conflicts, the relationships and revelations going on in Dylan’s life and work, and in the life of the United States and the globe.  He was contextualizing the clips, breathing new life into them, and the effect was moving and revealing.

That reconstruction of gone significance is at the heart of my own efforts at cultural history. The question for me is no longer “what does it mean?” but rather “what DID it mean?”  The change in tense seems to transform the entire landscape of possibility and impossibility.

I haven’t had the opportunity to see him speak since, but Gray does speaking engagements — it would be interesting to see what he’s doing now.

Given all of this, I’ve been very amused to see that Gray has been offering himself up as a conversationalist to paying Dylan fans. You get to talk (and talk) about Bob Dylan with one of the world’s leading Dylanologists, and enjoy his wife’s gourmet cooking, in his lovely home in southwest France.

It’s one of those vacation ideas you read about occasionally in the “news of the weird” — it’s utterly cracked, but you would surely do it if you had the chance.

Mostly, I keep chuckling about the mindset that makes it possible. Are authors who aren’t assholes so rare that you can charge admission to talk to them?

During the conference, I sought out Michael Gray because his very presence relaxed me, amused me, made me feel smart and attractive, and — most of all — because he had very interesting things to say. Who recognizes having this effect on people and thinks, “Hey, I can charge for this”?

I mean, I’ve been thinking about charging people to NOT talk to me!

For more information:

bobdylanwinterlude.blogspot.com

Sight and Suds, 1927

Looking at Prohibition through the eyes of its moviegoers

Norma Shearer, as Kathi, introduces the central motif

Pardon this bit of throat-clearing.  Hope you had a good summer.

Twice in the past few weeks, TCM aired the 1927 silent film The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg.  Made in the same year the Victoria Cafe Orchestra recorded Moonshiner’s Dance, and sometimes just as sodden with alcohol, the film might still retain the world’s record for the most beers consumed in one movie — something like 500 steins worth.

There are scenes that almost play like beer porn — a “Girls Gone Wild” in which beers instead of breasts are fetishized to the point of self parody.  (Incidentally, I’ve run across 1929 newspapers ads for an actual Fox studio film called Girls Gone Wild, although it doesn’t yet appear to have been reissued.)  The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg even finds ways of involving alcohol in a wide variety of metaphors and plot points.

A clip from The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg is currently available on YouTube. It’s a well-chosen clip, featuring a bit of this beer-guzzling and illustrating some key plot elements.

In it, Prince Karl Heinrich watches from a balcony as his new love interest, Kathi the barmaid, delivers beer to grateful college students in Heidelberg.  A sheltered young prince of a fictional European nation, he longs to experience the pleasures and freedoms of normal life — and his time has finally come, now that he’s been sent to Heidelberg, a notorious party school.

The clip ends with Prince Karl pouring himself a glass of water and drinking it, but it ends a couple seconds too early to show the prince dashing the water glass to the floor in a fit of frustration.

The 1927 audience out there in the theater seats was living under Prohibition, of course — for them, beer-guzzling violated the Constitution of the United States.  It must’ve been easy to identify with Karl’s frustration, and with his voyeurism.

On the other hand, the audience wasn’t all that thirsty, since Prohibition had failed to keep virtually anybody sober.  In another scene, as the students hoist their steins and sing a drinking song, the song’s sheet music suddenly appears onscreen much like a silent-film dialog card.  The sheet music stays onscreen a good long time, giving the audience time to strike up a sing-along right there in the theater.

The scene leaves the impression that the audience could not only get a drink if they wanted one, but might have been actually drunk at the time of the screening.  Hip flasks were everywhere, of course, and I’m reminded that the largest theater firm in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area was partly backed by the area’s most prominent brewing family.  (I’ll have to look into this … anybody have info about movie theaters doubling as speakeasies?)

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg is set in both Germany and a fictional Old World nation.

The common folk in the film look a little less stereotypical than the lederhosen-clad townsfolk in early monster movies, but they are pretty quaint.  I’ve often seen such characters pictured in 1920’s newspaper advertisements — always for liquor-related items such as malt sold for home brewing of strictly non-alcoholic “Old World” beverages (wink wink, nudge nudge!).

It’s clear to me that the German peasant image immediately brought beer to mind for Prohibition-era viewers — the dirndl as the era’s “4/20.”  Notably, the German immigrants who dominated the brewing industry were among the fiercest opponents in the battle against the ratification of the 18th Amendment.

As the historian working on Moonshiner’s Dance, all of this has me jumping out of my seat during The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg.

Both documents are booze voyeurism — vicarious drinking binges for the already drunk — delivered with a Bohemian accent.  They both represent the way alcohol became much more than a drink during Prohibition.

By 1927, booze had evolved into a signature experience and an organizing metaphor of the era.  At least in a lot of the cultural texts the era left behind, it was a pervasive medium that oriented and disoriented everything — even, or especially, when it wasn’t around.