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.

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

Kai Schafft: The Monochord Interview

A small-town Pennsylvania brewpub hosts an annual big-name festival dedicated to Harry Smith’s Anthology

The second annual Harry Smith Festival is this Sunday, November 15.  Eight bands from Ithaca, NY, and central Pennsylvania will perform songs from The Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by the late avant-garde filmmaker and record collector Harry Smith.

The Festival is held in a town with less than 800 people — and one inspired brew pub.  It’s organized by Kai Schafft of the band Chicken Tractor DeLuxe.

Kai is also an assistant professor at Penn State, and directs Penn State’s Center on Rural Education and Communities.  He’s got a Ph.D. from Cornell.

I emailed him questions, and he emailed me answers. Many sincere thanks to him!

The Celestial Monochord (CM): What happens at a festival about an anthology?  Please say there’ll be PowerPoint slides — I love lectures by experts!

Kai Schafft (KS): No powerpoints, sadly. Last year we did show an experimental film inspired by Harry Smith. I had found an old 20 minute 16 mm Maryland Game Commission film in a junk shop and rigged up a contraption that would allow me to mount the film reels and create some under-lighting. I re-animated the whole thing with Sharpies, frame by frame, turning it into a kind of psychedelic game commission film. Then I recorded a soundtrack – an audio montage of found sound, bird noise, gospel music recorded on old 78 records (naturally), Baba Ram Das giving spiritual advice by telephone, sex noise off a weird slab of vinyl, echoey ambient noise from the lobby of an interstate rest area in Maine, and so forth. We set up a screen and projector halfway through and showed the film. I was a little worried that it might seem too esoteric, but people loved it – another successful social experiment! Our friend Elody Gyekis (who is returning this year) completed a pair of oil paintings as the bands played. The place filled up, lots of people ate food and drank beer. They seemed to feel that something special was happening.

CM: What kind of audience showed up for this on the first year?  What’s the venue like?

KS: We didn’t know who would show up. The Elk Creek Café + Aleworks (www.elkcreekcafe.net) is located in Millheim, a small rural town located practically in the geographic center of Pennsylvania. It’s Amish country, with ridgelines and long flat farmed valleys. The venue is right in the center of town at the one stoplight in either direction for miles and miles. Amish buggies roll by. It’s an unlikely place for a craft brewpub and music venue, but the proprietor, Tim Bowser, is a pretty visionary guy and not afraid to take risks. He’s also a huge music lover and early on set his sights on establishing Millheim and the valley we occupy, Penns Valley, as a center of great (local) food, excellent craft beer, eclectic music and local culture. So he immediately took to the idea of the Festival. He didn’t need any convincing, and I knew he wouldn’t. And we ended up packing the place and not just with hipsters and folkies from State College (about 25 miles away), but all sorts of people from near and far. Tim books music at least 2 or 3 nights a week, so, especially now the place has quite a good reputation. But last year, it hadn’t even been opened for a year. So it was a bit of an experiment. But, like the film, it worked!

CM: The musical line-up sounds fantastic.  How do you rope all of these people into playing?  Are they all Anthology fans, or do they owe you money?

KS: They are all people that I know – or at least know of. Early on I thought about how great it would be to hand pick my favorite local-ish bands and musicians to play songs off the Anthology – turn it into a big benefit, have a happening, create a shared situation where really talented people are challenged to dig into the Anthology and reinterpret and re-encounter these chunks of American Collective Unconscious. Practically speaking, the only way to really do this was to turn it into a benefit. And really, this kind of thing should be done for love anyway. Everyone who I’ve asked, both years, has seemed genuinely honored to be asked and genuinely excited to participate. And, as a musician (albeit as one that doesn’t do it for a living) I know that some of the most boring, worthless and fucked up gigs have been the highest paying, while some of the craziest, most inspired and transcendent gigs have been those done for little or no dough. But maybe others have had different experiences. I don’t know. We do offer gas money for bands coming in from away. That was mostly or entirely turned down last year. I expect a similar thing will happen this year. The performers get free food and beer though and they can sell merchandise. The beer is great, so that’s a strong incentive. Plus the Elk Creek is a flat out special place to play. The vibe and the audiences are always tops. And, unless I am very much mistaken, Elk Creek will be packed this Sunday too.

CM: Every February, there’s a battle of the jug bands in Minneapolis.  There are 20 bands, and it lasts over 8 hours … by the end of the night, you can see into other dimensions.  Is the Harry Smith Festival like that?

KS: Yes. Or at least it was last year. The songs on the Anthology have some pretty heavy spiritual, emotional and aesthetic content. Eight bands playing this stuff for 6 hours can be a surprisingly affecting experience. I think a lot of people felt this way. It caught them off guard. It definitely was a case of the whole being way larger and more expansive than the sum of the parts. It’s a social, aesthetic and cultural experiment that makes all sorts of crazy stuff bubble up.

CM: The Anthology covers a huge range of southern music — blues, cajun, cowboy songs, sacred harp, square dance fiddling, etc.  It must be hard to match that kind of scope in the festival.

KS: Well, it’s always interesting to see what people pick. There are some obvious ones I think. And then there are some that I wish someone would step up to the plate and try to do. Like “Saut Crapaud” which almost seems to anticipate The Shaggs, albeit transported back 40 years and 40 time-space continua. Or, one of your favorites,”The Moonshiner’s Dance Part One.” Nobody’s picked those yet. We have some great bands this year, though. The Evil City String Band is doing “Indian War Whoop” which I’m very excited to hear.

CM: How did you discover the old American music?  Was it part of your upbringing?

KS: I grew up in Washington DC near the Walter Reed Hospital. When I wasn’t listening to the “album oriented rock” stations, I listened to bluegrass music on WAMU, and the blues shows on WPFW where I was introduced to artists like Tampa Red and Leroy Carr (and also tripped out on Louis Farrakhan sermons and other non-mainstream stuff). And my parents used to take me to the Folklife Festivals down at the Mall in Washington near the Smithsonian. So, you might say I always had “predilections.” But sometime in the early 1990s I came across the collection of field recordings John Cohen did in the mid-1960s that had been released on Rounder, “High Atmosphere.” That was really my gateway drug. I heard for the first time people like George Landers, Wade Ward, Gaither Carlton, and Estil Ball and I felt like my neural structure had somehow been re-arranged. Literally. Then I lived in Ithaca for a long while and got steeped in that music scene. Lots of old-time and roots music, and interestingly an actual local music culture where people share certain kinds of understandings and sounds and aesthetics – not as an orthodoxy, but as a shared framework, a culture. And that’s what Harry Smith was interested in too, those regional cultural expressions. When I was up there I DJ’d a Sunday morning radio show for a number of years, along with some compatriots, the Salt Creek Show, which is devoted entirely to American roots music of varying levels of obscurity. I still listen to it online. (wvbr.com/saltcreek). So that also was a huge influence and really introduced me not only to rural music of the 1920s and 30s but also straight up classic country and honky tonk which I also love.

CM: When did you find the Anthology?  How did it change things for you?

KS: Well, I was certainly familiar with the Anthology, but I didn’t actually break down and buy it until I started thinking about doing this festival. It’s a bit of an investment! And of course you can probably figure out ways of accessing the anthology, but ultimately, the print catalog Harry Smith pulled together is indispensable. It really does establish the fundamental point that the Anthology – or rather this collection of music – has cosmological, mystical qualities. If anyone doubts that, listen to Bascomb Lamar Lunsford’s “Dry Bones.” Or any number of other selections. Or the whole thing. Or whatever. You come away and you conclude, “This is not nothing. This is Something.”

CM: Fans of the Anthology seem to struggle to react to it.  They launch a thousand ships, go on fantastic voyages, build impossible contraptions.  You and I certainly have.  Why?

KS: Well, with the festival, really because I could, because I thought it would be fun. Because I thought it would help build community in a variety of ways. Because I thought it would help bring this great and largely forgotten music and expression back to the light of day. But mainly, to be honest, I just thought it would be a kick. As it happens though, the Anthology has some real juju. So it turned out to be a lot more than just a kick. But it’s that too.

CM: How does your work in rural education connect to your Anthology interest?  I think of Bill C. Malone, who writes a lot about country music and southern working-class culture.

KS: I work in a university. A good friend of mine described universities as “temples of rationality.” I’ve never heard a more apt description, with all the positive and negative that that implies. The Anthology is in some senses a temple (or altar?) of irrationality. So, it’s a balance thing really, balancing a life of rationality with a world – or many, many inner worlds – of IRrationality. Actually although a lot of my colleagues and some of my students know about this other part of who I am, for whatever reason I generally don’t broadcast it. As for Bill Malone’s stuff, yeah I’ve read it and I like it, a lot actually. But as for my own practice, I’ll keep my irrationality irrational!

CM: How did you get interested in Gypsy, or Roma communities in Hungary?  And, of course, have you followed the resurgence of gypsy music?

KS: I lived and worked in Budapest in the early 1990s and then went back to work with rural Gypsy communities. I was interested in Hungary’s system of local minority self governments and what that meant for marginalized Gypsy communities. How they could use it as a leverage point for political and economic power and cultural autonomy. I spent a lot of time out in some pretty rural villages, living and working. But there wasn’t much music happening that I saw, at least where I was. A lot of the Roma music is associated with particular groups of Roma, especially in urban areas, wealthier, higher status groups. I was pretty far from that. But I imagine there are some analogies to be drawn, like Hungary’s Kali Jag is to the Carolina Tar Heels, as The Gypsy Kings are to Garth Brooks, as Muzsikas is to New Lost City Ramblers … ? But I don’t know. I haven’t followed Gypsy music that much.

CM: You live up there at the top end of the Appalachian range.  Do you think there’s a kinship with people living further down on the same range?  Have you explored music closer to Pennsylvania and New York cultural history?

KS: Well, I don’t know. Except in pockets, regionally-specific musical expression seems largely non-existent. But there are certainly pockets, and even very strong pockets of people tapping into local/regional musical expression, rural music and so forth, old time, and what have you. Ithaca has been a real hot bed. There’s good stuff around Morgantown and further south into West Virginia, North Carolina. I would like to be one of those people who goes to Clifftop and Mt Airy, but I don’t. And maybe I’m not looking in the right places, turning over the right rocks. Sifting through piles of 78s around here you find a lot of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. He used to have a banjo orchestra and was pretty popular for a while. He actually died at a show when he was in his 80s – a friend of mine was actually at that show! But he was more of a jazz guy I think. Much of my efforts these days seem to be more with creating, or reinvigorating, or strengthening a local musical-cultural presence than digging into what came before. But, then again, there’s not much evidence of what came before, at least as far as I can tell. It’s like a cultural amnesia, the Clear Channelization of popular consciousness. To that extent the Harry Smith Festival is a subversive act – and it’s meant to be.

CM: Did you attend any of the Harry Smith Project concerts — the concerts by Philip Glass, Wilco, Beck, Elvis Costello, etc?

KS: No, and in fact, I didn’t even know about these till we started planning the first one here in Millheim. I have the Harry Smith Project DVD. There’s some great stuff on that, although it’s a little hit or miss too.

CM: There’s something called the “Harry Smith Frolic” held annually in Greenfield, MA.  It seems to be a weekend of oldtime stringband jam sessions.  Have you been in touch with them?

KS: I didn’t know about this either. I’ll have to check it out.

CM: What’s your favorite ancillary Anthology-related stuff?  What book, CD, DVD, and/or movie?

KS: Well, the Celestial Monochord is actually a big favorite of mine, and the website run by that French guy is absolutely amazing! I also love the site you have linked with the visual art of the different anthology songs. Perhaps farther afield there’s a great Motorhead documentary, “Ace of Spades,” that I really enjoyed. I like Harry Smith’s catalog. One of these days I’ll get around to reading some of John Fahey’s stuff. I have read and re-read the booklet that comes with the High Atmosphere disc. I recently read a book called Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia. There’s an excellent CD that goes with it. I really enjoyed that. And most recently I’ve been really freaking out about Michael Hurley. Really, really freaking out. The next “fest” might have to be Michael Hurley themed, I don’t know. I’m still figuring that one out. And Karen Dalton has also recently left a pretty strong impression – “Green Rocky Road” (her robotic voice intro to Green Rocky Roads: “This * song * recorded * in * two * tracks”). So these are all ancillary to the Anthology in my mind.

CM: It’s a painful fact that a man is rarely asked to talk about his banjo.  Please, Kai, tell me about your banjo.

KS: I used to live in an old farm house in Upstate New York. One day by happenstance I found an old gun in the wall of the house. It was a WWII German Mauser. We had it around the house for a while, and a friend borrowed it, cleaned it and got bullets for it. I went over to his house and we shot it a bunch and blew apart some old clay flowerpots. He got really excited about it and really wanted it for his own. He said, “I have an old banjo – I’ll trade you the gun for the banjo.” So we struck a deal and I took the banjo home. Some months later, with prodding from my wife, I screwed up my courage and took some lessons from Richie Stearns, a phenomenal musician and clawhammer banjo player from the Ithaca area who plays with The Horseflies, plus a ton of other projects, plus has played with a crazy list of musical luminaries from Mike Seeger and Tony Trischka to Natalie Merchant and Jim Lauderdale. But he’s also just a really nice and humble guy. A mutual friend said, “Oh Richie, he’s common as dirt!” So, I learned some stuff off him and started playing in a zydeco-electric old time band called The MacGilllicuddies, who I still play with a bunch of times a year, but these days I mainly play with my local band Chicken Tractor Deluxe, the band that’s hosting the festival. Last year we were preparing to record our CD, Tin Can Holler, and the Austin band The Gourds came through and played at Elk Creek. Kev Russell did an a capela version of Butcher’s Boy, which slayed everyone in the house. I talked to him about it afterwards and we geeked out about the Anthology. He told me that he played a gig in Arkansas where the audience pissed him off, and when they clamored for an encore he played them My Name is John Johanna! So we ended up playing Butcher’s Boy and John Johanna in last year’s Festival and they ended up on our CD, Tin Can Holler, along with I’m On the Battlefield for My Lord, and Country Blues. But I’m getting off track. About the banjo and all, Richie plays with Evil City Stringband, so I’m hoping that we can get him to sit in with us when we do the Coo Coo Bird. It all comes around in the end!

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Moonshiner’s Parking Lot?

 

A piece of St. Paul's cultural history may be torn down for a parking lot.

The Victoria Cafe produced a recording of absolutely unique importance

—

In May 2006, I realized that an internationally notorious recording from 1927 — "Moonshiner's Dance, Part One" — was the work of the house band of a nightclub at 825 University Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Nobody had understood this before, so I was astonished and overjoyed to find the building still standing 79 years later.  Since then — since early 2006 — I drive by it often, and each time my heart skips a beat until I see that the Victoria Theater is still there.

But now, not even 4 years into my research for a book on "Moonshiner's Dance," the Victoria building is being eyed for demolition to make way for a parking lot. 

What disturbs me most is that, while my findings are enormously suggestive, the building's historical importance is not yet well understood.  Like a species allowed to go extinct before biologists are even able to describe it, the Victoria Theater may be destroyed in the near-total absence of knowledge. 

Other community members have great reasons to want the building saved.  

I have my own reasons. 

 

[ NOTE: Most of the information previously presented in this space has been superseded by my subsequent writing and research efforts. For this reason, I've deleted the text. Please visit this more recent post for better information on my mission to express the many stories I've encountered while trying to understand the meanings of this place. ]

Original play brings Anthology’s mindscape to life in Madison, Wisconsin: “Minglewood Blues”

A play reflects the mythic American fever dream that haunts so many Anthology listeners

If you expect to be in Wisconsin in the next few weekends — or can arrange to be — I urge you to see Minglewood Blues at the Broom Street Theater in Madison.  Inspired by The Anthology of American Folk Music, this new play must be among the most amusing, heartfelt, and original responses to that influential document in quite a few years.

In the flesh-and-blood medium of the stage, Broom Street has made manifest the strange pleasures and confusing revelations most people go through after discovering this collection of early 20th
century recordings.

The play should interest anyone with a passing acquaintance with a few of the old American legends — maybe Casey Jones, or John Henry, or Stagger Lee, or the froggie who went a-courtin’ a mouse.  But the play’s depth and wit do “telescope” with audience knowledge, and it really excels as an introduction to the Anthology‘s strange mindset, and as a sort of luxury spa for Anthology veterans.

In Minglewood Blues, the events, images, and characters scattered throughout the Anthology rise up in Broom Street’s humble little space and take over the joint, much as they do in our minds — with birds and trains and mountains and murderers vying for our confused attention, exchanging gunfire and one-liners, exposing one another’s crimes and pleading one another’s case.

Becoming Anthology-obsessed makes you dizzy like that. Playwright Doug Reed has taken that dizziness seriously as part of the Anthology’s aesthetic and made it the basis of his play.

In bouncing motifs off one another and splicing narratives together, the script performs one illuminating stunt after another, proposing dozens of fascinating possibilities.

Why moles are blind is explained, as is the nature of lawyers. The deep geology and the whole ecosystem of a place called Minglewood are made to mingle with Scandinavian immigrants and Southern labor history. The sheer body count makes the play a kind of Hamlet-meets-Wisconsin Death Trip.

There are so many new angles to see, in fact, that a law of diminishing returns eventually sets in (even if rather later than you might imagine).  Once Minglewood Blues blows your mind many times, and then many more, and then some more, your mind is neatly blown.

Some moderate editing would be welcome in the second half — perhaps Frankie and Albert’s wedding could be deleted, or some bits about Alan Catcher’s business dealings.  I would hate to miss the rebellion of Free Labor, but the resulting sharper focus on John Henry’s regrets might be worth it.

A death-row scene between Alice Frye and Frankie, intended to be a culmination and summation, tries to accomplish too much on too many levels.  I wanted to see these two actors switch roles, but it’s unlikely the acting and directing are at fault for not quite carrying the weight loaded into the scene.

Incidentally, Harry Smith’s Anthology was history’s first great case of “color-blind casting” and I would have been interested to see this somehow integrated into Minglewood Blues. As things actually played out (perhaps out of practical necessity), I sometimes wondered if Broom Street hadn’t actually worked against the
progressive intent of Smith’s treatment of race, which remains ahead of its time to this day.

I was impressed with the quality of the actors, musicians,
direction, and production standards at this humble venue.  And any rough edges left on this particular material only served to magnify its meaning and emotional impact. I’d hate to see them sanded off in subsequent stagings.

The actors and operators of the Broom Street Theater are unpaid volunteers — the hat is passed for the cast before the show.  Still, ever since its birth in the cultural ferment of 1968, the theater has been a very small animal with big artistic ambitions.

As a result, an especially deep and moving kind of sense gets made when this particular group takes on Harry Smith’s Anthology, which achieved very high art through a collage of folk art.

And they’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to do it.  As a keepsake for the audience, the playwright himself has lovingly designed the program for this production by hand, borrowing elements of Smith’s original hand-made liner notes.

The theater has sacrificed perhaps a third of its already-scarce audience space to make way for a bandstand.  Its musicians competently play autoharp, clawhammer-style banjo, fiddle, accordion, jew’s harp, harmonica, two guitars, and jug.

Very appropriately, this music is intimately involved, top to bottom, in the play’s action and themes — not only punctuating and bridging scenes, but deeply involving itself in the action and meaning of the story.

In fact, the band is composed largely of cast members, and vise versa.  Its fiddler grows wings and accompanies a character to heaven.  After a young boy is lured to his death in a flower garden, he gets up and straps on the accordion.  And Satan, it turns out, plays a mean harmonica.

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Mike Seeger’s Legacy: To Be Continued

I've been out of town the last few days — at a funeral, coincidentally — so you presumably knew before I did that Mike Seeger has died. 

I don't see a heck of a lot on the web that seems to capture Seeger's significance, and it may take a long time before his true importance is widely and well understood.  Maybe Bill C. Malone's rumored biography will advance that project.

I like quoting what Bob Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles, says about Mike — not only to borrow Dylan's clout, but because nobody else has expressed it so vividly, before or since.  Buy Chronicles and read it. 

Only in Dylan's writing about Mike do I really recognize the guy I encountered — maybe only Bob and I saw it, but I bet a lot of people have the same feeling.

Here's a small sample of the thirteen-page ode dramatizing the impact Mike Seeger had on the young Dylan's sense of himself as an artist:

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

He was extraordinary, gave me an eerie feeling. Mike was unprecedented. He was like a duke, the knight errant. As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula's black heart … It's not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them … it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns … the thought occurred to me that maybe I'd have to write my own songs, ones that Mike didn't know. That was a startling thought.

The main thing I want to add tonight (because it might otherwise go unsaid) is how much I admired Mike's ethics as an intellect. 

He understood that trying to understand and explain things is difficult, and carries an ethical burden.  You OUGHT to be careful and humble in drawing conclusions, and you SHOULD get your facts right.  Be mindful of what you know to be the case, and what you don't. 

When he spoke, and when he wrote his liner notes, you could hear his great care in selecting words that said exactly what he knew, nothing less and nothing more.  I respected that in him.

Here's a round-up of selected previous writings about Mike Seeger.

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Mike Seeger: Articles at The Monochord

Mike Seeger Southern Banjo Sounds

Mike Seeger has entered hospice care and members of his family are gathering at his home in Virginia, according to media reports. 

Over the years, the Celestial Monochord has written about Mike often, sometimes obsessively, because he's a hero of mine.

Below are links to my most substantial essays dealing with Mike Seeger. They're mostly in order of writing quality and/or relevance to Mike.

• How the Folk Revival affected Dock Boggs (indebted to Seeger's liner notes and Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus):

Dock Boggs: Revival  

• On innocence and experience, in the context of Mike Seeger:

The Young Musicologist

• A two-part screed in which I realize that Bob Dylan (and his generation) were not directly influenced by Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music as much as they were second-hand, through the New Lost City Ramblers:

Harry Smith, Dylan, and "The Rambler's Step"

• How Mike turned a simple love song into a contemplation about the relationships between art, and death, and love:

Little Birdie

• Thoughts about Hollis Brown, mentioning the version Bob Dylan did with Mike:

Hollis Brown's South Dakota

• Mike's version of a song about Slick Willie:

Late Last Night When My Willie Come Home

• With my facts a little rumpled around the edges, the vast importance and tiny reputation of the New Lost City Ramblers:

Math and Memory in New Lost City

• "Suggested listening" for fans of the Harry Smith Anthology:

Beyond the Anthology

• About my favorite cut on Mike's brilliant collection of field recordings:

A Talk on the World

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The Anthology and Carbine Williams

Jimmy Stewart movie reminds us what was at stake in the post-WWII folk revival

OK, I’m officially a Turner Classic Movies fan.

Lately, movies hardly seem worth watching if Robert Osborne isn’t there, just before and after, to give a cheery commentary about them. Bruno could be OK, but I’ll wait until it comes to TCM so Osborne can tell me who ALMOST played Bruno before they finally cast Sacha Baron Cohen.

More seriously, the relentless march of old films has mattered to my development as a cultural historian. I live much of my life in a pre-WWII “immersion program” of my own design, and it helps that movies carry a lot of dense and very palatable cultural information.

Consider the relatively obscure Jimmy Stewart movie Carbine Williams — a biopic about an inventor who helped create the M1 carbine rifle, a standard gun used in WWII.

Aside from this seemingly unpromising subject, TCM’s viewer guide said that Williams was a bootlegger in the 1920’s and created his invention while in a North Carolina prison. I figured hillbilly stringband music had to appear somewhere, right?

Also, the movie was released in 1952, the same year Folkways Records released Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Maybe the movie would shed light on … say, the prevailing attitudes about southern Appalachian culture that greeted The Anthology upon its release.

I hunkered down to watch TCM’s broadcast. What blew my mind turned out to be the way the filmmakers tried to compensate for the dry subject matter — how they tried to draw you into the biography.

The film begins “now” — in 1952 — with the son of Carbine Williams having had schoolyard fights about his father’s criminal past. The son is otherwise a typical 8-year-old of 1952, with the greasy kid stuff in his hair, the rolled-up jeans, the horizontal-striped t-shirt.

To help the son understand him, Carbine Williams brings the boy to his old prison warden, who tells the boy — and us — the remarkable story of how a convict in his prison went on to win WWII for America.

In the end, the boy now understands and appreciates his father’s experiences as a Prohibition outlaw, a convict in the Depression, and finally an engineer of the military-industrial complex that won the war. A heart-warming hug closes the film.

The appeal of the framing storyline is direct: the events of the first half of the century will be incomprehensible, or at least misunderstood, by the baby-boom generation. The movie proposes and fulfills a dream that the catastrophic experiences of two World Wars and the Depression (if not the fiasco of Prohibition) could somehow be appreciated and acknowledged by the children of The New Prosperity.

That this yawning divide in experience could somehow be bridged someday was, and is, an entertaining fantasy.

•

About the musicians whose 1920’s recordings were reissued in 1952 on The Anthology, Greil Marcus wrote:

In 1952 [they] were only twenty or twenty-five years out of their time; cut off by the cataclysms of the Great Depression and the Second World War and by a national narrative that never included their kind, they appeared now like visitors from another world, like passengers on a ship that had drifted into the sea of the unwritten. “All those guys on that Harry Smith Anthology were dead,” Cambridge folkies Eric von Schmidt and Jim Rooney wrote in 1979, recalling how it seemed in the early 1960’s, when most of Smith’s avatars were very much alive. “Had to be.”

The Anthology derived some of its power from exploiting the same radical break in memory that Carbine Williams uses as a dramatic frame. To young people the age of the Williams boy — that is, Bob Dylan’s or Joan Baez’s age — the world that created their parents and the recordings on The Anthology alike seemed about as distant in time and place as any world could.

•

At some level, the cataclysms of the first half of the century were not only events Carbine Williams witnessed, they were projects he undertook. As a suggested path for the boy himself to follow, his father’s life could reasonably be seen as a nightmarish sentence.

Carbine Williams never hints at the possibility that the son might be less interested in the life his father had lived than in the world his father had created and would leave as the boy’s inheritance. And in 1952, that world looked like an awfully mixed bag.

A lot baby boomers came to see the entertainment industry that produced Carbine Williams — the one that failed to anticipate their perspective — as a purveyor of bad dreams thin enough to be transparent. They were drawn to cultural alternatives that were more opaque and thus less easily churned out by the efficient new systems for the manufacture and distribution of culture.

The most committed Folk Revivalists of the early 1960’s traded their father’s M1 carbine rifle for their grandfather’s banjo. Staging a kind of identity insurrection, kids like the Williams boy would try on identities that their fathers seemed to have abandoned to become architects of the Cold War — identities inspired by Woody Guthrie, Charlie Poole, Jessie James, or Henry Lee’s jilted lover.

Or Harry Smith — whoever he was. His Anthology was like a Ouija board for receiving and sending messages from and to the millions of souls Carbine Williams and his invention had left for dead.

Some of the Williams boy’s generation tried to reenact the Anthology‘s obsolete performances. Some tried to retrace the occult thinking that organized the collection. Many tried to discern, in the most obsolete songs they could find, the stories their fathers either didn’t know or had decided not to pass along.


Patty Hearst’s famous rifle was an M1 carbine.

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Moonshiners Dance – On the Air

This blogger makes an appearance on Twin Cities community radio

(a relief in the Hibbing High School Library)
Tomorrow morning, May 21, I’ll be on the radio to talk about my research on “Moonshiners Dance, Part One,” from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.
There’ll be more music than talk.  We’ll be playing records that put Moonshiner into some sort of context —  notably, the very rare and much speculated-about “Moonshiners Dance, Part TWO.”
The program is The Dakota Dave Hull Show, on KFAI from 9 to 11 central time.  You can listen live, and the show will also be archived online for two weeks ONLY:
Enjoy!
Update: The show went beautifully — it really couldn’t have gone better.  Here’s the direct link. Remember that the show will become unavailable on the morning of June 4.
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