The Celestial Monochord

Classifieds: The Yerkes Observatory

The Yerkes Observatory is for sale. Possibly one of the most beautiful observatories in the world, Yerkes is located on 77 acres of prime lakeside real estate in the charming resort community of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

To those who appreciate the history of astronomy, Yerkes is also one of their best loved shrines. Yerkes was the last observatory to be built during what I think of the first space race — a drive to build larger and larger refracting telescopes (those with a big lense in the front and a little eyepiece in back, like a sailor’s spyglass). Finished in 1897, Yerkes hosted some of the greatest astronomers and telescope builders of its era — E. E. Barnard, Ritchey, George Ellery Hale, Otto Struve, Kuiper, Chandrasekhar, and the young Carl Sagan.

Apparently, the University of Chicago (one of the most richly endowed universities in the world) thinks the most promising buyer at the moment is a New York developer who’d like to (at best) make Yerkes the centerpiece of a gated community of oversized suburban mansions.

If I were a rich man, daidle deedle daidle daidle daidle deedle daidle dum …

Banjos, Stars, and Creative Commons

In elementary school, when we sang "This Land is Your Land" and the teacher told us about Woody Guthrie, it seemed like Guthrie must’ve been around before the USA was founded. He must’ve been a contemporary of … of Paul Bunyan’s. But to my great surprise, it turns out Guthrie had just died when I was 3 years old — and when he was only 55. I won’t tell the whole story of how Guthrie came to hold such a mythical status so quickly — but if I were to tell it, it would mostly be a story about Pete Seeger. Seeger made building the Woody Guthrie myth into one of his major projects.

The more you know about Pete Seeger, the more you realize he wasn’t just "famous" or "influential," he really helped engineer what "folk music" means, and even the terms on which "the folk" themselves exist.

Anyway, here’s the point. His book, "How to Play the 5-String Banjo" has been known to virtually every banjo player in the world for about half a century. Seeger mimeographed the first edition himself while on the road in 1947, working for the Henry Wallace presidential campaign. He refused to copyright it, believing a copyright would hinder the spread of banjo-playing.

More recently, a guy named Pat Costello has written some excellent and entertaining instruction books, and declared them part of the "creative commons." According to Costello, sales of his books increased spectacularly after the books went copyrightless. The books are worthy successors to Seeger’s landmark book — and I think the writer of "This Land is Your Land" would have appreciated them as well.

Star map

A collection of fine star charts has also now gone online (here too) as part of the creative commons.

1969 and the Moon Landing
Part 1: MAS*H

Apollo 11

MASH

The first major Hollywood movie to use “the f-word” was Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. It was hard enough to get this past the studio, but the word was spoken by a gung-ho, frat-boyish soldier, whose buddies were smoking marijuana on the sidelines. Released during the depths of the Vietnam War, it was not exactly the kind of depiction of Our Troops people were used to seeing on-screen. It is said, though, that many state-side soldiers found a way to go AWOL from their bases for a few hours to see the film.

While editing M*A*S*H after filming was complete, Altman was disappointed in the results. He thought something was missing, and eventually decided the film needed a kind of Greek chorus — a detached voice that could comment on the action. So, he sent a camera crew back out to film many dozens of shots of a loudspeaker on a pole, and then he dubbed the 4077’s camp announcements over this footage. It was just what he was looking for.

One of those shots of the loudspeaker has a gibbous moon in the background. According to the DVD’s “special features,” that shot was taken the night Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first moon landing. There are people up there on that moon, behind the camp’s loudspeaker in the movie M*A*S*H.

I wan’t really there in 1969, so it’s not easy to imagine the impact M*A*S*H must have had on its first audiences (the more familiar TV series doesn’t help). What it must have meant for that moon landing to drop into the middle of 1969 is even harder to reconstruct. After all, when is it ever possible to grasp the mood of an entire nation in any year — much less America in 1969?

John Prine said recently, “If you want the big picture, you need a really small frame.” That shot of the 4077’s loundspeaker with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the background sometimes rests in my mind for a long time, like a shrine for contemplation or like some kind of worry stone.

Part 2

Orphan Songs, Part 5:
Row Us Over The Tide

Kelly Harrell, a Virginia textile factory worker, never learned to play an instrument. But when he heard Charlie Poole’s popular stringband records of 1925, Harrell decided he could sing better than Poole. He took some musicians with him to audition for the Victor label.

The resulting 43 records over the next 4 years are wildly uneven. As I hear them, two-thirds just don’t stand up over time — not well chosen, awkwardly arranged, listlessly sung. But sometimes … sometimes something magical happens in the recording room. Everything comes together, and those recordings are some of the best ever recorded. It is a mysterious and wonderous thing.

On August 12, 1927, Harrell recorded “Row Us Over The Tide” as a duet with Henry Norton, a tenor he had never met before and would never meet again. They’re accompanied by banjo, guitar, and the strange and beautiful fiddling of Lonnie Austin. The vocals are corny and maudlin, even humorous. But I also find them uncannily moving.

The song seems to have been a widely-known gospel tune, dating from around the Civil War. In it, two children beg a mysterious boatman to row them over a mysterious tide. It’s hard to avoid the interepretation that the exhausted Orphans are begging to be taken to Heaven — that is, they’re begging to die:

Two little children were strolling one day
Down by the river side.
One stepped up to the boatman and said,
“Row us over the tide.”

Chorus:
“Row us over the tide,
Row us over the tide,”
One stepped up to the boatman and said,
“Row us over the tide.”

“Be kind to us, mister, dear Mother is dead;
We have no place to abide.
Our father’s a gambler and cares not for us,
Please row us over the tide.”

“The angels took Mother to her heavenly home,
There with the saints to abide.
Our father’s forsaken us, he’s left us alone,
Please row us over the tide.”

“Mama and Papa told Willie one day,
Jesus would come for their child.
We are so tired of waiting so long,
Row us over the tide.”

Thinking of this song, with its dream-like detachment from any specific time and place, I’m often reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s recurring dream. He talked about it at his last cabinet meeting, only hours before he was shot at Ford’s Theater. In the dream, according to Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, “he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.”

As a money-saving measure, record labels increasingly preferred to pay for solo acts instead of bands. But as a matter of pride, Kelly Harrell refused to learn an instrument, which ended his recording career.

On July 9, 1942, to show his co-workers how fit he was despite being 52 years old, Harrell hopped out of the first-story window of the textile factory where he worked onto the sidewalk below. He took a couple steps, collapsed, and died. According to his wife, Lula, “He never was a farsighted man.”

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Black Jug Bands: K. C. Moan

As I said before, some lines in the old songs seem to just keep ringing on and on in my head, providing hours of pleasurable work.

Take “K. C. Moan” from 1929, by the Memphis Jug Band. You have to hear it for yourself — the sound they achieve is sweet and relaxed and floating, but also very down-homey, mournful, and weighty.

“K.C.” refers to a train on the Kansas City train line. I think it’s a prison song, maybe a convict worksong. The first stanza goes:

I thought I heard that K.C. when she blowed
I thought I heard that K.C. when she blowed
I thought I heard that K.C. when she blowed
She blowed like my woman’s on board

The singer is not hearing the sound of the Kansas City train whistle. He is remembering a time in the past when he mistakenly thought he heard that train whistle. This imagined train did not have the woman he loves aboard — the sound he remembers having thought he heard was the sound a train might have made if it did carry the woman he loves.

Love, pleasure, freedom are removed from the here-and-now on one level after another, after another — deferred into desire, imagination, and memory.

Listening to this recording always reinvigorates that maybe too-familiar poem Langston Hughes wrote, I think in 1950:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Two Hundred Planets

When I was a kid, being stuck with just the Sun’s nine planets drove me half mad. Astronomers suspected there were planets circling other stars, but the brute fact was that nobody knew. The uncertainty made my skin crawl.

Carl Sagan made matters worse by vividly fantasizing about a future in which you could thumb through an “Encyclopedia Galactica,” a catalog of known worlds and civilizations. He wondered, ominously, what our entry would say.

Well, the first “extrasolar planet” was discovered about 10 years ago, and today something like 20 new planets are announced every month. Within a few weeks, the total number of known planets will hit 200. It’s almost impossible to keep up with these announcements (especially since a few don’t pan out and are later withdrawn).

The May issue of “Sky and Telescope” reports that a planet recently found circling a pulsar has a mass of 0.0004 that of Earth’s — that is, it’s basically just an asteroid. The rate and variety of discoveries is going to do nothing but accelerate, and fast. We’ll have our own page in an “Encyclopedia Galactica” sooner that Carl thought.

Deep Impact: NASA and Performance Art

On July 4th, NASA is going to bash a large plug of copper into a comet (discovered in 1867 by Ernst Temple). Nobody’s sure exactly what will happen — which is the main reason to do it — but it should make a sizable crater in the comet and generate a plume of ejecta.

NASA seems to like to schedule landings and other such events to coincide with holidays (July 4, December 24, etc.). Not only are people at home and watching TV, but NASA’s copywriters often try to manage some sort of tie-in. The resulting headllines can be agonizing.

In 2000, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft arrived at an asteroid (basically, a large rock) named Eros. A 1999 encounter had failed, and the spacecraft had to take more than a year to swing around again, so I believe the February 14th date of the encounter was a coincidence. But it generated endless headlines about Romancing the Stone in a Valentine’s Day NEAR-Eros tryst, etc., etc. I shudder to imagine the headlines this year’s unprovoked Independence Day attack on Comet Temple might generate in the USA or abroad.

In part, NASA designs its missions as public performace art and then tries to spin the missions to appeal to headline writers — but the agency is simply an inept storyteller. NASA’s unmanned robotic missions are incredibly cheap, completely safe, visually and conceptually dazzling to the public, and hugely productive scientifically — especially when compared to the wasteful and dangerous manned space program. Nothing NASA has done in the last 30 years has inspired more interest and support than missions like Voyager, Viking, the Mars rovers, or the Hubble Space Telescope. The credit for these successes goes not to the cleverness of the PR department or the cuddliness of the astronaut corps, but to the skill and creativity of NASA engineers and scientists. Just go with what you do best.

Ezekiel Saw the Wheel
Part 2: Slave Culture

Slaves on American currency

Years ago, reading the arguments in the 1800s over the abolition of slavery, I was struck by how often the debate turned to the religious beliefs of the slaves themselves. Pro-slavery types argued that slaves could not possibly grasp the notion of God or appreciate the stories in the Bible — and so slavery was OK.

After a while, this concern sounded almost desparate and obsessive, growing from fear: If slaves know who God is and God knows who slaves are, and if they pray to Him and He can hear them praying to Him, and they know He can hear them and He knows that they know He can hear them … well … well, white folks are going straight to Hell.

I’m very knowledgable about neither the Bible nor Negro spirituals. But it’s clear even to me that African American slaves didn’t merely understand the Bible, they related to it with a personal, creative passion that produced one of the most relentless, intense, complex, and beautiful musical traditions on Earth. This must have been troubling to some people, to say the least.

Both the Bible and Negro spirituals are basically examples of "slave culture" — their authors naturally understood each other. That’s what I suspect. I came to the realization when researching the many and varied versions of the Ezekiel story in Negro spirituals. I even resorted to reading the Book of Ezekiel …

To make a long story short, God takes his reluctant prophet Ezekiel to a field of very dry human bones. He tells Zeke to get those bones to get up take a little walk, and Zeke isn’t sure he can get that done. So God tells him "Look, I’m God, and I ain’t kidding around":

Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.

So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.

Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.

My mind reels, imagining the impact such a story must have had for an African American slave. In comparison, their white counterparts must have found the story rather, I don’t know … interesting?

Part 1

Steve Robinson: Astronaut Banjoist

Banjo Player and Mission Specialist, Steve Robinson

Believe it or not, the next Shuttle mission will send a banjo player into space. I mean, how monochordum mundi is that?

I wonder if he’ll play us Well May the World Go (When I’m Far Away) from the launch pad. Anyway, check out NASA’s official pre-flight interview with Steve Robinson:

I still want to be a musician and an artist someday when I grow up. I play music and I play guitar in a rock and roll band, and I play banjo and mandolin and bass and a pedal steel guitar.

Remember, in space no one can hear you scream "Yowza!"

Black Jug Bands

Menphisjug

There’s so much to say about jug bands (believe it or not), it’s hard to know where to begin. Why not start with my own first impression — the thing that first made me realize there’s much more to the story than I thought.

Before my interest in old music, I’d thought string bands with jug accompaniment were a white thing — a really white thing. Well, don’t believe everything you see on the Andy Griffith Show, I guess. I purchased a two-volume compilation of early jug bands and was surprised to find that virtually all the performers were black … really black.

And although it’s turned out that the African American experience in the South in, say, the 1920’s was much more rural than I’d imagined (being a northerner), jug band music is an exception — the jug bands recorded in the 1920’s were usually urban, black, and southern. A few of these records do "sound rural" to me, but to that extent, these urban bands seem to be either making fun of country life, or tapping into a nostalgia for it.

I should also mention that the level of artistry was often extremely fine.

The whole thing is … well, not what I had expected.