The Celestial Monochord

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.

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

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.

Kevin Moist and the Anthology as Collage

Revealing the divine in everything through sight and sound collage

The fetishized harmonica rack from the 1952 liner notes (detail)

Harry Smith approached his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music as a self-consciously avant-garde art project. Knowing that the Anthology was going to be commercially released as a set of LPs, he nonetheless compiled a proto-post-modern collage.

And this turned out to be a source of its power — a catalytic feature. The Anthology seduces you into hearing old-sounding, authentic-sounding poor-people’s music as tomorrow’s high art.

In the decade after its release, the early adopters and taste-makers in the small Greenwich Village folk music scene were staring deeply into this Anthology.

And they got to work building a small world that had learned from the Anthology, where the next waves of young folkies could, for example, sit at the feet of Roscoe Holcomb and Skip James — very old, weird southern musicians indeed.

Bob Dylan was one of those fresh new kids.

Of course, a wide variety of brilliant people in different fields were already chipping away at the separation between high art and low culture. But the most devastating blow to that barrier ultimately came from a veteran of this Greenwich Village folk scene, a fact that surprises us still.

Allen Ginsberg said it about his friend Bob Dylan, but he could have easily said it about his friend Harry Smith. “It was an artistic challenge to see if great art can be done on a jukebox. He proved it can.”

—

Kevin Moist’s article (“Collecting, Collage, and Alchemy: The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music as Art and Cultural Intervention”) starts from essentially the same premise — that the Anthology derives its power to influence from high art sensibilities, which it helped to democratize.

But Moist takes the next step. He opens up those sensibilities to see what they’re made of, at least as Smith used them in the Anthology.

Moist focuses on collecting, collage, and alchemy — not as “themes” or “conceits” in a work of art, or as Smith’s personal quirks, but as practical concerns that shaped Smith’s understanding of his task, as Smith would probably have wanted us to do.

Moist’s findings reveal that Smith’s interests in collecting, collage, and alchemy were actually part of his coherent focus on cultural transformation — on the problem of how to rework the world through the meanings we ascribe to it.

As a result, Moist’s article reads like an anatomy of the Anthology’s ability to change the perceptions of its listeners. Accepting his 1991 Grammy Award, Smith said “I saw America changed through music,” and Moist’s article is a natural history of that power to affect change.

An associate professor of communications at Penn State Altoona, Moist seems to have a long-standing interest in the religious ideas of the 1960’s counter-culture, and their role in the art and music of the era. It makes sense, then, that Moist would think this carefully about Smith’s very earnest interest in alchemical theory.

About the Anthology, two alchemical principles seem important, and Moist argues that the application of these two principles to culture, high and low, was a key element in Smith’s thinking.

First, alchemy holds that “as above, so below” — the patterns and structures in the highest spiritual spheres are reflected in the lowest material orders. If you want to know the mind of God, start with whatever common “stuff” happens to be at hand.

(Look at the image of the celestial monochord on the Anthology‘s cover, with its hand of God tuning a string extending down through the nested spheres of creation. It’s an emblem of this harmony across the high and low orders.)

Second, alchemists believe that by stripping stuff of its original context — purifying or distilling it — and rearranging it, nature’s true divinity can be exposed. The alchemist doesn’t turn lead into gold, but instead serves as “midwife” to an ever-present potential inherent in all of nature.

Smith’s interest in alchemy, it turns out, matters when we try to understand Smith as a collector — as we should, if only because every anthology starts with collecting.

Collecting, Moist explains, is a fairly recent phenomenon in which the consumer acts as curator. As such, the collector sees a larger cultural significance in his collection, and wants to intervene in the usual meanings that the broader culture ascribes to the objects he collects.

In this sense, Smith was a kind of super-collector. In multiple interviews, Smith describes his accumulation of objects as merely the first step in a larger reconsideration of culture as a whole.

So, as a collector and student of alchemy, Harry Smith sat down to edit his Anthology — although Moist finally convinced me to take literally Smith’s insistence that his Anthology was a collage. The “anthology” is really a metaphorical conceit of this collage artwork.

Moist points out that collage — another type of collection — works by isolating pieces of the world and rearranging them, thus reshaping the meanings they bring with them into the new collage. Collage is “a process of reconstructing reality by reassembling pieces of it.”

This vision of Smith’s cultural transformation through collage, collecting, and alchemy is convincing and useful and full of exciting possibilities. But the essay attempts a new reading of the Anthology that proves disappointing, maybe because a journal article just isn’t long enough to do the job.

In a few paragraphs, Moist takes on the entire “lost” Volume 4 (first issued in 2000) without unearthing any surprises about the music or the Anthology. The reader could conclude, I think incorrectly, that the exhilarating insights in the rest of Moist’s essay aren’t so useful after all.

The reading might have revealed much more with a much narrower focus, by dedicating those paragraphs to only one piece of Smith’s collage, or to one transition between pieces.

Let’s see, I don’t know which recording to suggest … I guess I’ll have to pick one completely at random here …

—

“Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One” is one of only two medlies on the Anthology.

Not a tune but a collection of tunes, it is an anthology in the Anthology, a collage incorporated into a larger collage.

Our understanding of “Moonshiner’s Dance” therefore benefits from some of the same thinking we apply to the Anthology itself — if, possibly, on a different scale. It’s, like, totally fractal, bro.

In the 4 years I’ve been investigating Moonshiner, I’ve come to understand it as a promiscuous set of juxtapositions, a collection of popular tunes that were mostly already old fashioned in 1927.

Clearly, some of the meaning Moonshiner held for its 1927 audience would have derived from its aggressive and multi-leveled recontextualization of these earlier tunes.

Like the Anthology itself, the pieces that make up Moonshiner trailed some of their meanings with them into their new assemblage, where these meanings served a new agenda in a new context — in this case, that of the Victoria Cafe, a cabaret-style nightclub and speakeasy in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul, MN.

Part of what maintains my interest over the long haul is tracing the way Moonshiner (and, subsequently, the Anthology) transformed meaning into meaning, agenda into agenda, context into context.

For example, of the 112 selections in the four-volume version of the Anthology, Moonshiner is the only one that’s unambiguously from outside the American South. Basically, you get 111 southern recordings, and one from the capitol of Minnesota.

Of course, the recording process always isolates (distills) music from its historical contexts. And Smith’s collage style maximizes this effect, which actually contributes to the Anthology‘s power and appeal.

Even so, the regional geography of the Anthology uniquely decontextualizes Moonshiner even from the context-free space Smith created for it.

Much of the pleasure of my project is in placing “Moonshiner’s Dance Part One” back into context, often shedding light on the sources of Moonshiner’s own power and appeal.

The work is slow going, in part because related scholarship, reissues, revival activity, etc., has been sparse. Indeed, I’ve found no evidence that anybody had even bothered to look up “Frank Cloutier” in the St. Paul phone book.

Thus, my interest in the Anthology‘s jazz-inflected Northern polka has me pondering the Anthology‘s contribution to the various chauvinisms of “roots music” and “Americana” — ironic, given Smith’s radical eclecticism.

The failure to follow up on this recording makes it seem prescient, to me, that the center of Smith’s Anthology is the silence that follows Moonshiner. I mean that mostly literally.

The mid-point of the original 3-volume Anthology falls between Moonshiner and the next cut, “Must Be Born Again,” the first cut of Volume 2’s second half. Frank Cloutier’s command to “Be seated!” introduces the silence at the center of the 1952 Anthology.

This placement also puts Moonshiner at the pivot-point between the secular and the sacred — by far, the most jarring transition in a collection of jarring transitions.

Moonshiner was clearly chosen to end the secular half of Volume 2 with a bang — to achieve a kind of final paroxysm for the sequence. Listen to it. With Moonshiner, the secular body of Volume 2 finally exhausts itself, and the spirit rises.

Hearing it this way, it’s not so surprising that Smith would find this break “elsewhere” — by reaching outside of the context the Anthology had established for itself, outside its system.

Given the Anthology‘s eclecticism, finding its “outside” isn’t so easy. So Smith reached out for Moonshiner, the exception that proves the Anthology‘s various rules. It’s intriguing that the piece chosen to play this role would itself be an anthology.

“Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One” is thus an excellent probe of the Anthology‘s meaning system, of Smith’s method, and of their sources and consequences and limitations. Then again … maybe the same might be said of each of the other 111 entries of the Anthology, each its own universe in a grain of sand.

I’
;m not sure, and given the time-consuming nature of the work involved, somebody else will have to confirm that hunch.

Gennett Gets Remembered in Indiana

I recently made a one-day pilgrimage to a place called Richmond, a small Indiana town (pop. 39,000) on the Ohio border.

My reasons to do it were complex, but above all else, I wanted to understand why the town hadn’t preserved the Gennett Record Company’s recording studio when it had the chance.

Richmond, after all, was the home of the legendary Gennett Records, which released the first real masterpieces of recorded jazz – the influential early records of King Oliver with Louis Armstrong, the game-changing piano solos of Jelly Roll Morton, the first recordings of Bix Beiderbecke and of Hoagy Carmichael.

In essence, it was Gennett that captured early jazz in exile in the Midwest. Without knowing it then, Gennett preserved many of the critical coming-of-age moments that jazz experienced as it found its voice in the wide world outside of New Orleans.

And jazz isn’t even my main interest. Gennett also recorded scads of other artists at the core of my sense of what the 1920s were musically all about – Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charlie Patton, Ernest Stoneman, Fiddlin’ Doc Roberts, Uncle Dave Macon.

The company also made a few experimental mobile recording trips. Their 1927 sessions in St. Paul, Minnesota, resulted in “Moonshiner’s Dance” by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra.

Visit Richmond if you can find the chance, and prepare by reading the work of Rick Kennedy, the guy who’s done much of the heavy lifting on the history of Gennett and jazz in Indiana.

In Richmond, I really saw how Gennett was a little side project of a major piano company in town.

In the office of the Starr-Gennett Foundation, they have a mind-boggling old photo showing the Gennett recording studio looking like a little rickety wooden shack tacked onto the ass end of the sprawling, brick factory complex of the Starr Piano Company.

At the site of the actual studio, you appreciate how inadequate the structure really was, especially for its intended purpose.

Simply too much imagination would’ve been needed, at the right moment, to envision the site as a global tourist destination, or to anticipate the strong sense of sacredness that many visitors experience as they approach the site of the studio.

This should be a challenge to our own imaginations as we contemplate the demolition of St. Paul’s comparatively palatial Victoria Theater.

The Starr-Gennett Foundation, along with various boards and booster types, have spent a lot of funds commissioning a series of mosaic emblems for a “Walk of Fame” at the former site of its famous studio.

And their Walk is a pretty effective example of public commemoration. It serves to take visitors the hundred yards or so from the remains of a factory building (stabilized and converted into a performance space) to the remains of the studio’s foundation.

A number of these emblems stand out as especially successful visually, and the Walk invites contemplation and discussion – even on the cold February day when I saw it.

Enlightened individuals will of course want to see the marker honoring Moonshiner’s Dance – so far, that noble effort is unrecognized. While the recorded output of Frank and his band totaled just two sides, one of those sides is the only Gennett-label recording on the Anthology of American Folk Music.

The Starr-Gennett Foundation estimates the still-expanding Walk could ultimately feature 80 artists, so we’ll see what happens. I imagine a scene in which the Walk features increasingly obscure artists – maybe a cow that once mooed on a Gennett sound effects record, say. Around that time, we would have to start a letter-writing campaign for Frank and his boys (although a check-writing campaign just might make a more lasting impression).

A member of the Starr-Gennett Foundation (you can join too) volunteered to take me on a whirlwind tour of Richmond, which was considerably more action-packed than you might imagine. In fact, one day was clearly not enough time.

I was often reminded of my reaction to first seeing Hibbing, Minnesota. Although Hibbing is considerably more disorienting, both places left me a little ashamed that I had expected so much less of them than I actually found.

Does the “anonymous little nowhere” in my imagination exist at all? The suburb I knew in my childhood certainly seemed like nowhere at the time, which might be my problem.

Anyway, I wish I had the time and stamina to write up the things I did have time to see in Richmond:

the Murray Theater, where this community has supported live performance continuously for more than a century;
the 1902 train station designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham;
the Gennett family mansion, which has recently seen a miraculous resurrection thanks to inspired restoration efforts;
the Starr-Gennett Gallery, a gift shop occupying donated space in a corner of a huge furniture store;
Little Sheba’s restaurant, which has a good Rueben sandwich – and where I lobbied for the addition of a “Carmichael Hoagy” sprinkled with some sort of stardust;
and the Wayne County Historical Museum is brilliant … I’ve seen my share of county historical societies, and none had a museum as impressive as Wayne’s.

My mind keeps returning to the Historical Museum’s beautifully preserved Conestoga wagon, emblematic of the period when Richmond was at the western frontier of American expansion.

I used to associate Indiana’s identity as the “crossroads of America” with the Indianapolis 500, but today I’m more likely to think of that Conestoga wagon in Richmond. I wonder if the Rollingstone Colony passed through there on the way to Minnesota.

Certainly, Gennett employees undertook a trip from Richmond to Minnesota in 1927. In the coming weeks, I’ll report a little of what else I learned about Gennett’s activities in St. Paul during the rest of my week-long stay in Indiana.

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

Featured image: The New Orleans Rhythm Kings on the Walk of Fame

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