The Celestial Monochord

Disk Sift Yields Smith-Newsie Link

(newsboy, 1921, Library of Congress photo)

I was wading through the Archeophone catalog yesterday, planning my next purchase.

… It's an incredible record label. Everything I've gotten from them has been a hoot to listen to, and has revolutionized my perceptions and tastes …

And I finally noticed their series of reissues of "Hit of The Week" records. As the Archeophone website describes them,

They sold on newsstands during the Great Depression for 15 cents and quickly
became the best-selling records of the early 1930s: the laminated flexible
cardboard records known as "Hit of the Week." Featuring the top songs of the
day, performed by some of the most noted jazz and dance musicians (often under
pseudonyms), Hit of the Week records provided just that — one hit, once a week — to
an American public with hardly a dime to spare but hungry for great music by
great artists.

As always, it seems, I thought of Harry Smith and the Anthology.

Back in July, I first realized that phonograph records were once distributed on city streets at newsstands and by newsboys.

Those tough, tragic little kids in short pants and floppy caps hollering "Extra! Extra!" sometimes sold 78's along with newspapers.

As William
Howland Kenney wrote in his brilliant Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930:

… the newsboys of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Defender
regularly carried copies of the latest records of the week along with
their newspapers. They sold the disks at $1 apiece; for many customers
the records were as important as the news.

Something now made real sense for the first time. The funny, fake headlines Harry Smith wrote for his liner notes to volume one of the Anthology of American Folk Music may have been based on actual experience.

Newsboys might really, in fact, have yelled something very much like "Georgie runs into rock after mother's warning! Dies with the engine he loves!"

Interestingly, two of the performers on Archeophone's "Hit of the Week" CDs — Vincent Lopez and Rudy Vallee — have loose connections to The Victoria Cafe.

Therefore, I might have to buy these … although, times being what they are, I may have to wait until this music is finally released on cheap pieces of Durium.

The Old French Weird America

Someone has started an amazing blog about Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. If he keeps going along these lines, it will end up being one of the most important things to happen to the Anthology since its reissue on CD in 1997.

Apparently the work of an obsessive French collector, The Old Weird America (TOWA) is posting at least one entry on each Anthology cut, with large zip files containing wonderful batches of mp3s. These mp3s are other recordings by each Anthology artist, as well as other “covers” of the same song.

TOWA also provides a little writing of his own about the Anthology artists, although that text is often the standard, sturdy, reliable consensus view of the subject. Very nice, but not usually new. The real eye-popping, one-of-a-kind value of this blog is the audio files.

Really, the project comes off a lot like the interactive, online version of the Anthology-with-notes that I dreamed of at the end of this post back in July — except for its, let’s say, “independent” attitude toward copyright law.

Two thoughts:

Of course, I’m dying to see what TOWA does with “Moonshiners Dance” … and whether he bothers to contact me to see what I have up my sleeve. He is not good about citing his sources of information or audio, so I don’t know if he swings that way.

Also, I’ve always wondered what I’d do after my Diamonds in the Rough series is finished. I guess I’ve dragged my feet about writing that last entry because I have no substitute for the series.

One idea has been to write one piece on each of the 84 entries in the Anthology. At my usual pace, the project would take nearly a decade.

Well, in a way, TOWA has beaten me to it.

Certainly, his contribution is these amazing audio collections he’s posting, whereas I would do my usual Carl Sagan meets Robert Cantwell routine.

I would really have new things to say about these cuts … long, dense, ponderous, new things to say …

North Country Blues

A mural in the library of Bob Dylan's high school depicts Hibbing's multi-ethnic iron miners. What did their music sound like?

Around 1965, Bob Dylan turned his back on folk music, confirming the break by "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival.

At once fact and fiction, the story has emerged as one of the more familiar parables from the 20th century.

But lately, I've been thinking about an earlier moment of decision when Dylan walked away from another set of folk music traditions — those of the Upper Midwest. Today, that decision seems more consequential in the long run, all the more so the longer it goes unrecognized.

When Dylan walked away from Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range and the rest of the Upper Midwest, he left behind what was then a dying economy, as portrayed in his song "North Country Blues". It was a dyin' town, it was a dyin' town, he chants in the album's liner notes.

But Dylan was also walking away from dying forms of music as varied and complex as any in the world, including those of the American South.

At the time, old musical ways of life were changing just as fast in the South, of course, but important elements of the Folk Revival were bent on preserving Southern traditional music — and Dylan was about to help out.

Suddenly, the critical difference between the traditional music of the North and the South hasn't turned out to be a matter of quality or inherent interest.

Instead, it's that the music of the South — against all odds, and to our inexpressible benefit — was resuscitated when it needed it most. Up North, in Zimmerman country, a comparable revival just never arrived.

•

I've been working on a study of the only recording on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music clearly representing northern music — "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Minnesota in 1927. It has never been studied before.

Early in my project, I knew I would eventually have to know — and I mean have to, and I mean know — the musical environment in the Upper Midwest before World War Two.

Consider the 1913 mural in the library of Hibbing High School depicting iron miners at work. Each of its 16 human figures represents another ethnic group that mined the Mesabi Iron Range — a deep diversity of cultures that, presumably, intermingled to create distinctive new American sounds.

Those miners were silent as they watched the young Robert Zimmerman browse the library books — but they must've danced to something sometime.

During the early phases of my research into "Moonshiner's Dance," I often thought about them, knowing I would need to hear their music in my head, loud and clear.

Unfortunately, when I finally turned my attention to the problem, I saw there was going be trouble.

I had first committed myself to traditional music 14 years prior, when there were already mountains of products on the market vying to help me navigate pre-War Southern blues and country. But now, up North, even in 2008, I was pretty much on my own.

There is no such thing as, say, The Anthology of Northern American Folk Music (edited by Harry Smithovich). There's no O Brother Where Art Ya Once? There was no "Song to Otto Rindlisbacher" on Bob Dylan's first album.

Alan Lomax made a thousand recordings during fieldwork in the Upper Midwest in 1938, declaring it possibly "the most interesting country I have ever traveled in" with "enough material in the region for years of work". But unlike every other region where Lomax conducted fieldwork, no release in any format has ever been devoted to his Northern journey. The website of Lomax's foundation, its name apparently a bit of self-deprecating humor, makes no mention of it.

There is an amazing record store here in Minneapolis that sells only 78 rpm records, and it has hundreds of pre-War old-time ethnic recordings — cheap, in great condition, with unpronounceable titles. But what do I buy? And what sense do I make of it?

There's simply no … there's no …

There's no Northern canon. Or worse, and more exactly, the canon of "American roots music" has bypassed my part of the country entirely. There are no names from the Upper Midwest like Dock Boggs, or The Carter Family, or Robert Johnson — names of musicians whose work everybody knows is great, even if they haven't actually bothered listening to it.

How do you connect the dots when you have no dots to begin with?

•

I spent much of 2008 trying to crack the case.

I've camped out in university and historical society libraries, scouring the footnotes of academic journal articles. I've literally spent hours clutching photocopies of typewritten discographies while crawling on the floor in used vinyl stores — including one where the owner chain-smokes behind the register. I've found music that's never been issued, is out of print, is on formats I can't play, lacks any intelligible context.

So far, there appear to be no easy solutions. But I have found a few extremely valuable maps of this occult terrain — so valuable, in fact, that I hate to bury reviews of them this deep in an already too-long blog post.

If I could press only three things into your hands today, they would be: (1) a brilliant box set, Down Home Dairyland, containing 40 episodes of a radio show about the traditional music of the Upper Midwest, and (2 and 3) a pair of absolutely essential books with unfortunate titles, Victor Greene's A Passion for Polka and James P. Leary's Polkabilly.

They're hardly the only materials available, but taken together (including their footnotes, discographies, etc.) they allow an incipient canon to emerge — a list of things you probably should recognize if you want to be taken seriously on the subject. They also provide — most pointedly in the first and last chapters of Leary's Polkabilly — clues to explaining why these musicians and their work aren't more widely seen as part of the canon of American roots music.

•

Following various threads into and out of such material, I sometimes return to the mural in the library of Hibbing High School.

Like the rest of present-day Hibbing, the mural was once moved to its current location from the ghost town of North Hibbing, "where even the markin stones were dead, an there was no sound except for the wind blowin thru the high grass," as Dylan described it.

Slowly, as I've started to hear a few strains of music coming from those miners in that mural, what's begun to strike me most about the thing is how deadly silent it first seemed to me, and how silent it must have seemed to Dylan, there in that hushed library.

Why wasn't there a revival of Northern folk music for Dylan to join? And what would one have sounded like? Until 2008, I would have faintly assumed the answer to the first question was the answer to the second. The music down South was just better or more plentiful.

And maybe it was, I haven't quite decided. But the reasons for the historical neglect of the Upper Midwest turn out to be far more complex than that — so much so they deserve their own research institute … or at least their own blog post. I do know it certainly wasn't just about the music.

If we want to keep thinking that Southern music is better, that's ok with me. But shouldn't we be able to say, confidently and in specific detail, "Better than WHAT?"

Chilicothe Schottishe with Intro – Erick Berg

My Book Report About “On the Road” Which I Read By The Celestial Monochord

Kerouac playing football, 1938

I was extruded out the other end of the 2008 presidential election like John Goodman birthing himself from the mud in Raising Arizona. I clawed my way out, hollering, triumphant, relieved — but in the middle of nowhere, wondering "NOW what do I do?"

Much of my intellectual life during the Bush years has been an escape and a rummaging around for some kind of SENSE.

At the start of Bush's second term, I dove head first into trying to understand every last thing about "The Moonshiner's Dance," a recording from another time — practically from another planet — the main theme of which is alcohol delirium and the razzing of meaning itself. It had to be sorted out. Somewhere along the line, I even quit drinking.

Now, I will have to rejigger yet again somehow.

So with Palin sent back to Alaska, I felt it was time to clear my mind. Cleanse my palate. Get a little fresh air and perspective before beginning anew. It seemed a good time to finally read Kerouac's On the Road.

I'd recently started reading classics I hadn't read before, ones I now think I should've read before getting that Master's Degree in English Literature I have framed on my wall.

Last winter, for example, I'd finally read The Great Gatsby — oh, so THAT'S the answer to that GRE question!

Besides, I'd always liked the idea of it. Kerouac's sad and feverish and lost patriotism, his REAL "real America" Americanism. It looked good on the menu after nearly two years of 21st-century stump speeches and echo chambers.

One of my many brothers — the one who'd used Kerouac as a roadmap throughout his early adulthood — had given me a copy of On the Road when I was 18 and he was 30. I must've lost it during a move over the years.

I bought my current copy a few years ago as a tourist in San Francisco, when my wife Jenny and I stopped by City Lights bookstore. I knew it was the most obvious purchase to make, felt sheepish handing it over to the clerk.

I felt the urge to tell him I'd already taken varying-sized doses of Ginsberg, Borroughs, Ferlinghetti, Corso, even Bob Kaufman — just never really Kerouac. But it would've only made matters worse.

—-

I can't remember reading another book that relies so heavily on the reader to romanticize it, to buy into it. The presumption somehow gives it the feel of "young adult fiction" — my brother had given it to me at the right time.

At some point, for example, narrator Sal Paradise assures us that this next trip across the country was the gonest, most profound, most epically heroic yet! Yass yass, whoop, harumph!

That trip's high points, to my memory, turn out to be getting a speeding ticket, picking up a hitchhiker with one arm longer than the other, getting stuck in the mud, and stealing some cheese.

Ordinarily a quick read, it took me a month to get through, so evanescent was my romanticization.

One tension that's supposed to sustain interest is a kind of low-simmer debate — Dean Moriarty: saint or demon? But today, On the Road reads more like a muck-raker exposing the limited treatment options available to the mentally ill. It's angering to know there were no good pills for the guy.

Actually, a lot is angering.

Kerouac wonders faintly at his urge to murder gay men. The absolute greatest wife they encounter is the one who stays in bed and silently smiles when they rudely wake her up to drink until dawn with her husband.

"The Beats were single-handedly responsible for feminism," Jenny quipped. But I think measuring the exact distance from that quip to the unsnarky truth would be a good senior thesis topic, if you're looking for one.

Part 3 Chapter 4 details the performance of an African American jazz trumpet player in San Francisco — how he commits himself body and soul to his performance, transfixes his audience, eventually finds the essence of the global moment as embodied in the room at that instant, and everybody recognizes it.

Moriarty and Paradise get to hang with the guy for a few precious minutes, during which Moriarty wants the black musician to go find his wife and hand her over to them — these drunk white tourists — to fuck. The musician politely declines and the meeting comes to an end.

—-

My will flagging, I was close to giving up with only 30 pages to go, so Jenny offered to read the next chapter to me aloud. It turned out to be Part 4 Chapter 5 — the whorehouse chapter.

Wise wife. If you need to read On the Road, go with someone on a long car trip and take turns reading and driving.

When read aloud, of course, Kerouac's lyricism greases the skids a bit. His voice is unmistakable in the book's grander passages on the meaning of the land and the night and the road, but the more mundane plot points — how much money we had, who drove, where we found a pay phone — have a rhythm of their own.

And read aloud, the deadpan jokes are funnier. Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise are idiots, and Kerouac seems to acknowledge this more readily as you roll the language on your tongue. Ask your wife to help you.

"Man," said Dean to me, "ain't this a nice way to spend an afternoon. It's so much cooler than Denver poolhalls. Victor, you got gurls? Where? A donde?" he cried in Spanish. "Dig it, Sal, I'm speaking Spanish."

When it came out in 1957, this spoken quality of On the Road must've been one of its many startling elements that aren't as startling today.

As another survival strategy to get me through the reading, I went back to Tom Waits' early stuff, listening to that startle that so animated Waits in the 1970's. Foreign Affairs, for example, careens between Kerouac and Raymond Chandler — sometimes from line to line.

Jenny, who is vastly better read than I am, nodded. She noted that if you go back and read some of the books that got Pulitzers at mid-century, and the books they thought were The Great Novels of the past, they're often horrible. Unreadable, ponderous, stultifying. She always keeps some genre fiction around — mysteries, detective novels, horror.

The Beats and the pulp writers, Jenny reminds me, wrote books you actually want to read. I think Tom Waits and Bob Dylan before him were beneficiaries of that democratization of artistically ambitious writing. They also vastly expanded it beyond poetry and the novel.

Allen Ginsberg famously said Dylan took on "an artistic challenge to see if great art can be done on a jukebox. And he proved that it can." In some sense, it was Ginsberg and Kerouac themselves who had proved it can. The song "Jack & Neal" from Foreign Affairs is almost like Cliff Notes for On the Road set to music.

If you wanted to write an album for the ears of Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg — one that would actually impress those men personally — you could do worse than Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde. Then again, those albums have held up better than On the Road over time, so maybe their goal was to surpass rather than impress.

As soon as it hit the streets, On the Road was apparently made to carry more baggage than it could bear — like Kerouac himself, they say. He didn't know what he was unleashing when he typed it out and, like most books, it's better the more you can see it as a gesture made in its moment. It's an innocent thing, On the Road, for all its malfeasance.

It again brings me face-to-face with the mindset of young people after WWII, possessed as they were by the knowledge that the whole damned century so far had been badly muffed, a gutter ball, and the options looking forward were pretty vapid.

Everybody could see that young people's disillusionment was about to hit the fan, and the Beats were either lucky or unlucky enough to be there, trying to capture where their heads were at. Though they worked hard to get famous, they were more sucked into their fame by prevailing anxieties.

There are agonies involved in reading On the Road, but the past needs more attention and explication as it recedes, not less.

The book broke open several crates of valuable material I'd almost forgotten I had — early Waits, Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound, Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good, and much else. My earliest toddler-memory of the public life of the nation pertains to the Funky Chicken dance craze, and I feel a need to revisit the lessons of earlier eras again and again.

It also turns out that Jack Kerouac and Frank Cloutier were born in the same town, and I'm now wondering if, God help me, the next book I read might be Visions of Gerard.

Rollingstone out on Highway 61

Along Highway 61 on your way out of Minnesota, you pass two towns called Minnesota City and Rollingstone. Their histories began with a Utopian crackpot and his followers, who soon became his victims in one of the more ghastly episodes in the state's history.

The Rollingstone Colony was a little like the Donner Party, if a lot less famous. It also reminds me a bit of the Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre, and certainly adds a new dimension to the song "Like a Rolling Stone."

In 1851, a New York printer persuaded a group of New York professionals to join a Utopian community. They would start fresh in a well-planned city out west in the health-promoting climate of the new Minnesota Territory. The town was to be called Rollingstone.

The leader went west first to found the beautiful city, and when 400 people followed him, they were surprised to find him stuck in a swamp. The women and children slept in a large tent, the men in gopher pits. About three quarters of them soon died in the epidemics that swept the settlement.

Wait. Come to think of it, that's more or less how I came to live here too …

Anyway, the survivors founded Minnesota City. A small village two miles away is today called Rollingstone. Pinning down which of the two towns was the location of the Rollingstone Colony and how exactly they relate to each other historically would take more digging than I've done.

In any case, I'm thinking more about Bob Dylan and the mid-1960's.

It seems hard to believe that a Minnesotan would write a song called "Like A Rolling Stone" — a song about what it's like to find yourself all alone and boondoggled out on the new frontier — and that he'd put it on an album called Highway 61 Revisited without knowing anything whatsoever about the story of the Rollingstone Colony.

But then, a lot of true things are also hard to believe. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that Dylan seemed preternaturally relevant — that his empathetic imagination would insinuate itself convincingly beyond what seems possible. I've written about that before.

Maybe it's all a coincidence, but it's worth doing the legwork to understand how well-known this incident could've been to Dylan in the early 1960's. My research time is booked at the moment.

I also don't know if anybody has ever asked Bob when, if ever, he first heard about the Rollingstone Colony down on Highway 61.

Sources:

Cathy Wurzer's just-published book, Tales of the Road: Highway 61, provides an efficient telling in two pages. She also talked about it today on Minnesota Public Radio.

Christopher M. Johnson's article in Minnesota History (49:140-148) provides much detail on how the community got to Minnesota.

Barack Obama: Secret Banjoist? – UPDATE!

In late July, I wrote a "fake news" item about Barack Obama trying to appeal to fans of Oldtime music.

Well … now Barack Obama really is, in fact, trying to appeal to fans of Oldtime music (my consulting fee is in the mail, I'm quite certain).

To wit, Ralph Stanley — best known as the elderly "Oh Death" guy on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack — has recorded a radio endorsement to run in southwestern Virginia.

The area is hotly contested in the presidential race, and was also the home of many pioneers of the style today called "Oldtime" — Tommy Jarrell, Henry Whitter, The Carter Family, The Stonemans, and many, many, more.

I wrote that dorky fake news item because I kept doing double-takes at photos of Obama at a meeting of NCLR, which looks a hell of a lot like NLCR, which to Oldtime fans is as immediately recognizable as NASA or FBI. After a little slap-dash Photoshop work (above), I was in business.

Several years ago, I drove to Moorehead, Minnesota, and stayed at a Red Roof Inn just to see my first concert by Mike Seeger, cofounder of the NLCR. At the end of the concert, Mike said he was going to go sit at the CD table and press the flesh.

He'd just been touring with Ralph Stanley, you see, who stays at the CD table until the last dog dies — and Seeger saw that Stanley sells a lot of CDs that way. After about 50 years in show business, Mike was apparently still learning from old Ralph Stanley.

Three Vignettes on Music and Geography

John Cohen signs his book of Dylan photos, Young Bob
Minneapolis, April 15, 2007

#1

I heard John Cohen tell a story. It was at a private party, so I'm not certain it's appropriate to write about here. But … but … it was such a GOOD story.

As I remember it, at least, he was teaching or lecturing a couple years back at a college in North Carolina. There, he discussed his work in the late 1950s, finding old people in the hills of Madison County, North Carolina, who still sang very old ballads without instrumental accompaniment. They just opened their mouths and sang 500-year-old songs, all alone. It had a spooky, lonesome, ancient-sounding effect.

And in those 1950's, that style seemed to be dying right before Cohen's eyes as the old folks themselves died and their grandchildren were passionately seized by jukebox rock 'n roll. Cohen, he felt sure, was capturing this music's death mask at the instant of its extinction.

After the lecture, a young woman in the class came up and told Cohen that her family was from rural North Carolina and was still singing these old ballads in this same way. The tradition had, in fact, survived and was thriving, having been passed down to her through many generations of her family. She even sang a little for Cohen to show him what she meant.

Cohen was puzzled, knowing that he and people who took an interest in this work had scoured every inch of those hills, looking under every rock in all of Appalachia trying to find the last remnants of this folk tradition. Those hills had been picked absolutely clean decades ago.

On a wild hunch, Cohen asked her if anybody in her family had ever gone to the University of California at Berkeley, where Cohen's work on these ballads became very popular. Oh sure, she said. Everybody in her family went to Berkeley — her dad, all her aunts and uncles, her grandparents, her family pets, and so on and so forth, etc. I seem to remember she was about to go there herself.

This young woman and her family were indeed from North Carolina, and this style of singing was indeed a folk tradition from their part of the country. And it was indeed being passed down to her via her family, one generation to the next. Being young, and perhaps not a history major, she neither knew nor much cared that the singing style had gone into exile in Berkeley for a little while before coming back home to the North Carolina hills.

And she was not wrong. The authentic bearers of real folk traditions — if you wanna talk that way — almost never know exactly how the music comes down to them. In her case, this folk music is thriving in her family as a folk tradition, just as sure as it ever did in anybody else's family. She had plenty reason to be proud. She was not wrong. She was right.

In the 1950's and 1960's, Barry Ancelet grew up in Louisiana speaking Cajun French. He studied the French language in Louisiana high schools and colleges, where teachers always insisted that Cajun French wasn't French at all — that it literally had nothing to do with the French language. Ancelet accepted this without too much worry.

And he never paid much attention to Cajun music, even though (or because) it was always around. In many similar stories I've heard, the protagonists often think of the traditional music they grew up with as low — a weakness of ignorant country trash. In his article in the great collection Sounds of the South (which is where I get this information), Ancelet isn't explicit about his own early attitudes toward the music.

In any case, in the early 1970's he spent an academic year in France, where he felt homesick and isolated. One momentous night in Paris, at a concert of Cajun music, he underwent a shattering conversion experience. He realized that he'd been systematically trained to be ignorant of himself and his own surroundings. Everything he thought he knew about his own language and his own culture turned out to be crazy.

He immediately sensed what he should do with the rest of his life — he went back to Louisiana and ultimately became one of the founders of the academic study of Cajun and Acadian culture. Tonight, I see that Wikipedia tells us he's from Louisiana and what he does now, but doesn't mention any conversion experience — least of all in France.

In the past several months of my research into the Moonshiners Dance, the trail has finally led me to the mostly unknown, yet much-maligned traditional music of my various homelands.

In the past few weeks, for example, I've been listening with mounting enthusiasm to Down Home Dairyland. Originally a radio show, I know it as 40 episodes released on CD, with an accompanying listener's guide.

The hosts are Jim Leary and Rick March — the Gilbert and Gubar of polka music — two folklorists who've been exploring the traditional and ethnic music of the Upper Midwest since the late 1970s.

Their work, and that of other musicians and scholars in their field, is rapidly being hauled aboard here at the Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues.

For now, I draw your attention to program #21 of Down Home Dairyland, which deals with the ethnic music of Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Apparently, if you walked into a hall in Stevens Point today, you'd have a good chance of hearing polka that's audibly and vividly Polish, feeling a little like the crooked-metered concertina recordings made by Polish immigrants in the 1920's.

And why not? The area was heavily settled by Poles in the mid-1800's and again in the early 1900's. Wouldn't the ethnic music of Stevens Point sound pretty damned Polish?

Not necessarily, it turns out. In the mid-20th century, the sound that dominated among Stevens Point polka bands was the German-sounding oompah style popularized by Minnesota bandleaders Whoopee John Wilfahrt and Harold Loeffelmacher. Their styles influenced bands far and wide as Whoopee John, especially, became a kind of regional hero like Charlie Poole did in the southeast.

By the late 1950's, though, some younger Stevens Pointers grew weary of the "arranged and mannered" German sound and the sedentary stage presence of the bands. The more authentically European Polish styles they found among bandleaders from Chicago and Milwaukee were aggressive, improvised, visceral — they felt more like rock 'n roll, and more authentic at the same time.

So, there was a Revival — Leary and March call it a "resurgence" and a "revitalization" — of explicitly Polish music among Polish bands around Stevens Point. I imagine that, today, those mid-century revialists are easily old enough to have great grandchildren who might know only that their family came from Poland in the 1850's, and that they're learning to play Polish styles from great grandpa.

I won't try to squeeze my own sudden attentiveness to the ethnic-American styles of the Upper Midwest into a little vignette. Maybe that's for you to do. But I've been brought back north precisely because I wanted to contribute to the understanding of Harry Smith's influential collection of southern music.

I've seen that pattern over and over again in other people, and one of the things that surprises me most is my own surprise that it's happening to me.

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (part three)

This is the third in a series about the first seven seconds
of "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Saint Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and the
Victoria Cafe Orchestra. It was included in the
Anthology of American Folk Music, sometimes called the Harry Smith Anthology.
See also Part One and Part Two.

Tonight, the Bedlam welcomes the Republicans with a circus (link)

At the start of the Moonshiner's Dance, the leader of The Victoria Café Orchestra grandly calls out to you, the listener, and he renames you "Mister Larson."

I've explained why I think Mister Larson was probably not a specific
person but a cultural caricature — a
generic audience member being welcomed into The Victoria Café.

He's a butter-and-egg man, in other words, getting a Texas Guinan routine in a 1920s speakeasy.

Hey hey, Mister Larson!

Thinking over questions like Mister Larson — trying to reconstruct the meanings the recording would have had in Minnesota in 1927 — has fundamentally rejiggered the Moonshiner's Dance in my imagination.

And those reconstructed meanings, I've come to decide, reverberate across the meaning and argument of the Anthology itself.

Today, as the Republican National Convention slouches toward Saint Paul, I insist that Frank Cloutier and the
Victoria Cafe Orchestra were definitely NOT "from the Minnesota
area," as the 1997 liner notes to the Anthology "assumed."

They were not even from Minneapolis. They were vividly, and
elaborately, and specifically from the city of Saint Paul. Should it surprise us that the Moonshiner's Dance is about its place and time, and that the geographical specifics matter to the music?

As with Dylan and Hibbing, if we want to understand the Moonshiner's Dance, we need to understand a little about the history of Saint Paul.

—

In the early 1900's, the city of Saint Paul operated under a semi-official policy called the O'Connor System. It's goal was to maintain the city as a safe haven for organized crime, with the understanding that major crimes would be committed outside city limits.

I've chosen these words carefully. They sound like they might be some sort of local jack-a-lope folklore of the sort fed to tourists visiting any city. They aren't.

The O'Connor System's method was this: protect all criminals from prosecution under the conditions that they (A) announce themselves upon arrival in the city, (B) pay protection money bribes, and (C) limit themselves to vice and conspiracy within city limits.

Violators of this compact were treated harshly, either by the city's legal infrastructure, or by its criminal infrastructure, or both.

And benefit they did, for more than 30 years. In 1932, for example, 21% of all bank robberies in the USA occurred in
Minnesota, but exactly zero occurred within Saint Paul's city limits.

Liquor,
prostitution, and gambling (and so, music) flourished within the city limits, and residents enjoyed them with gusto and relative impunity. So did
visiting tourists. Larry Craig could have tapped his foot all day and all night.

—

Chief O'Connor's system was not a huge break from the past.

Saint Paul began as a little
encampment on the Mississippi around Fort Snelling, providing the fort's soldiers with all the comforts not issued to them by the government.

In 1838, thanks to "beastly scenes of intoxication among the soldiers of this garrison," the fort's administrators had had enough — especially of a moonshiner named Pierre Parrant, known affectionately as Pig's Eye.

The little
village was burned to the ground and its residents were moved eight miles upstream.
The new location was called Pigs Eye for several years, until its first
Catholic priest proposed the name Saint Paul.

As it grew, the city continue to focus on trade and transportation, unlike industry-heavy Minneapolis. Brewing was the main manufacturing activity in Saint Paul, and a vice economy was supported by, and supported, these other sectors.

Prohibition, in particular, did not go well for the Feds in Saint Paul. The city — with its profoundly anti-prohibition population, its proximity to the Canadian border, and its great regional transportation system — was one of the wettest places in America.

Businessmen from all over the US knew Saint Paul was
a good destination for business trips. Truly, what happened in Saint Paul stayed in
Saint Paul.

—

It was Mister Larson, and not the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, who was from "the Minnesota area."

Saint Paul was insular — a cultural island — and thus a peculiar state capital. Most Saint Paulites had ethical qualms about
traveling and spending money beyond city limits, with Minneapolis in
particular being another planet, and a hostile one.

Larger and wealthier Minneapolis was, especially in the popular imagination, a straight-laced,
class-stratified, Republican town of Lutheran factory owners and non-union workers. The workers were
Scandinavian, even more so than the rest of the state, and the owners were old-stock Yankees.

By contrast, especially in the popular imagination, Saint Paul was an island of drunken, unionized, Irish-Catholic Democrats who were not enamored of the law.

And the popular imagination was tolerably close to the truth.

Saint Paul's political machine was overwhelmingly Irish, and the city's many Yankees, Germans, and Scandinavians figured they may as well be Irish
too, given the circumstances. In Saint Paul, ethnic diversity could have
a strange way of drawing the city even closer together, increasing its
insularity.

—

Hey hey, Mister Larson!

So Saint Paul welcomed a generic son of Lars — a pleasure-seeking visitor from the more culturally conservative city of Minneapolis or from the mining and farming communities across "the Minnesota area."

Here we are now — entertain us.

After one strong whiff of cultural history, the Moonshiner's Dance morphs into the shape of countless other recordings, one after another.

Viva Las Vegas, New York New York, I Love LA — the Moonshiner's Dance is an advertising jingle.

In the shadow of its richer and more sober neighbor across the
Mississippi River, Saint Paul knew its place and was not afraid to
advertise. The name of the Victoria Cafe is right there on the record label, as are the cafe's main attractions of moonshine and dancing.

Suddenly, I hear a lot of Rum And Coca-Cola — a lot of working for the Yankee dollar — in the Moonshiners Dance. Whether the Andrew Sisters' version or Lord Invader's, who's to say?

It's a cynical thing — a small, casual violence — to rename your listener with a cultural stereotype. Living and working in a place like Saint Paul, a satirical ear must've come easily to a cafe musician like Frank Cloutier.

So Cloutier makes it seem natural to me, for the first time, that F. Scott Fitzgerald was from Saint Paul — both men must've seen the Jazz Age in something like the way a blackjack dealer sees Las Vegas.

Mister Larson now becomes Mister Jones, the unprepared square of Bob
Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man. In the Moonshiner's Dance, you, Mister Larson, have sneaked into The
Victoria Cafe the same way you, Mister Jones, were about to find yourself
squarely in the middle of Woodstock.

Suddenly, as Larson and Jones stroll into the Victoria Cafe together, Cloutier's Jazz Age
comes into view as Dylan's sixties, with their respective collisions of cultural
whiplash and bootlegged intoxicants.

—

But for now, obviously, much of this oversteps the evidence I've shown you. It's in the actual music later in the recording, for example, that you really get to know Cloutier's satirical cynicism. All in good time. For now, I think I know who Mister Larson is and what he meant in his place and moment.

Now I have to write about the meaning of the other, unintelligible part of the introduction — and about the first seven seconds as a whole. It has to be done before I put this series of entries to rest. In the last installment, I'll try to work out some of what I can say about what I can't understand.

Selected References (more than any other blog!)

Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place by Mary Lethert Wingerd — The best book on the Moonshiner's Dance so far, and she may not even know the recording exists. Hugely important. I've made Saint Paul sound more like a riot, but Wingerd emphasizes the compacts and balances and civic identities that made Saint Paul a great place to live.

John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks' Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936 by Paul Maccabee — The title makes it sound like it could be about any city. Every place thinks it was an Al Capone hangout. But Maccabee has written, in a sense, a chronicle of the consequences of the O'Connor System. Fun read, too.

They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State's Ethnic Groups edited by June Drenning Holmquist — An unbelievable, exhaustive treatment of every damned ethnic group that ever set foot in the state. That it was done at all is dumbfounding.

A Geography of the Anthology

Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music as a Google Map
by The Celestial Monochord

For two and a half years, I've tried to explain to people why I'm dedicating so much time, energy, and earnings to researching "Moonshiners Dance," recorded in Minnesota by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra in 1927.

It's impossible to express in a few words.

Usually, I've waved my hands in the air, describing a hypothetical Google Map showing the geographical origin of each cut on Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music.

On such a map, "Moonshiners Dance" would stand out like a sore thumb, completely alone as the only selection from anywhere near "us" — me and the person I'm boring. In the past week, I asked myself, seriously, why does it have to be hypothetical?

And so, Google Maps and I present A Geography of the Anthology.

The Methodology of a Geography of the Anthology

In creating the map, I used the 1997 Anthology liner notes and some Wikipedia to choose a location that most shaped each Anthology selection. This was not easy, especially limiting myself to one "pin" per recording.

But I gave it a shot and didn't much fret about it.

For example, Henry Thomas' work is a profound contribution exactly because it's so richly about being unstuck from any particular place — it's all about the road. I put him in his home town in the state of Texas.

Many of the Memphis performers were from other communities in the same region, but it matters that the Memphis Jug Band is from Memphis, regardless of where its members were born. So there they are on Beale Street.

I've made an attempt to be accurate but not precise. Look very closely at Memphis. Nine Anthology selections belong in Memphis, in all fairness. I've stuck my pins every block or two all the way down Beale Street, even though I don't really know where in Memphis these people did their thing.

Sometimes, it was tempting to emphasize the isolation of "Moonshiners Dance" by skooching my decisions southward.

The leader of the Cincinnati Jug Band, according to the 1997 liner notes, "was apparently from around the Alabama-Georgia state border." But it would've been too absurd to follow such vague instructions just to keep the Cincinnati Jug Band out of Cincinnati.

The two selections by Chicago church congregations complicated my visual argument. Those congregations and their recordings are products of the "great migration" of African Americans from the South to the great industrial cities of the North. In a sense, they illustrate how far north the southern culture represented in the Anthology managed to flow.

I could have placed those congregations in the southern states where their leaders were born, but that would have been so wrong on too many levels. For one, the music came out of a very distinctly Chicago experience. I decided to trust the viewer to understand what those pins represent.

Ken Maynard was probably the hardest to place.

He was raised somewhere in Indiana, but "claimed Texas as his home," according to the liner notes. He traveled around as a rodeo and circus performer, worked as a real cowboy, and went to Hollywood in 1923, where he was billed as "the American Boy's Favorite Cowboy." His photo makes him look like a little Midwestern kid playing dress-up.

So where do you put Ken Maynard? A random spot in Indiana? A random spot in Texas or in "The West"? In Hollywood? I decided that his song describes an image of the West in the mind of somebody who was from somewhere else. I placed him as an Indiana boy dreaming of cowboys and Indians. Maybe you have another idea.

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (Part Two)

This is the second in a series about the first seven seconds
of "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Saint Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and the
Victoria Cafe Orchestra. It was included in the
Anthology of American Folk Music, sometimes called the Harry Smith Anthology.
See also Part One and Part Three.

Early in my research into "The Moonshiner's Dance," I knew the identity of Mister Larson would be easy to uncover. It's the low-hanging fruit.

After all, Frank Cloutier addresses him the instant the recording begins. Hey hey, Mr. Larson!

I knew Larson would wind up being a musician in Frank's band, or the owner of the Victoria Cafe, and I'd write up a neat biography of this Larson guy and explain why he's so prominently placed at the start of Frank's only recording.

Today, deep into my third year of research, it hasn't turned out that way.

I've seen hundreds of thousands of advertisements, newspaper articles, obituaries, theater programs, union newsletters, graves, birth and death certificates, draft cards, photos, letters, and much else.

I'm a resident of the Twin Cities of 1927. Driving around St. Paul, I once saw a product of the WPA and caught myself thinking, "Hey, THAT'S new."

Living like this — hanging around the dance music scene of Prohibition-era Saint Paul— I keep encountering the same guys over and over. I notice when their wives have kids. I know when they finally get their own bands. I hear about it when a good pitcher joins their kittenball team.

And I'm sorry. I don't know any Larson — at least nobody associated with Frank Cloutier or the local dance scene or the management of the Victoria Cafe.

—

Maybe I'm not hearing the muffled 1927 recording correctly. Maybe it isn't "Mister Larson" at all, but something else. Here's an mp3 of the first few seconds.

I briefly considered whether Frank might instead be saying "Mister Nelson" as in Gordon Nelson, the drummer who seems to have played on "The Moonshiner's Dance." For a bit longer, I considered the Cafe's manager at the time of the recording, Sammy Markus.

But listening again to the recording, I find they just won't do. Hey hey Mr. Markus. Hey hey Mr. Markus. Hey hey Mr. Markus.

No. It's "Hey hey Mr. Larson."

As a last resort, I scoured the entries for "Larson" and "Larsen" in the St. Paul and Minneapolis city directories, which they started to call "phone books" once everybody got phones.

Ordinarily, I adore city directories, intimate and teasing as they are. But searching every Larson in the Twin Cities directories is tedious work — there are roughly 2700 entries in the 1927 editions and they have to be scanned line by line, by hand and eye.

St. Paul is striking for its lack of prospects. I found one music teacher named Bertha Larson who was presumably not a Mister.

There are more prospects in Minneapolis. There was a piano mover named Gustaf Larson and a piano tuner named Martin Larson — unlikely professions for Mister Larson, even though Frank Cloutier was a keyboardist. There was also a movie house manager, a cashier at a dance hall, a radio salesman, and another woman music teacher.

There was a family of musical Larsons, and I've done a longitudinal study of them — followed them around town like a shamus. So far, none of these Larsons seems to have a connection to Frank or to the Victoria Cafe or even to St. Paul. They were not well known, and other than their name, nothing seems relevant about them.

The 1930 census counted about 11,900 individuals named Larsen or Larson
in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, the counties of Minneapolis and St.
Paul. Limiting myself to the right age and gender brings the number down, but I have to face the fact that I may never find the Larson that Frank had in mind.

—

One last prospect has occasionally troubled my mind for about two years. In 1927, the leader of the Minneapolis Police Department's band was a cop called Curly Larson.

I've tried to find out more about him, but so far, he's been a tough nut to crack, probably because of that Curly nickname. We know he was probably bald. I'll keep searching.

But no matter the details, it's a delicious idea.

Smack in the middle of Prohibition, the leader of the Minneapolis policeman's band puts on his uniform every Friday and Saturday night, crosses the river into St. Paul, and plays "The Moonshiner's Dance" at the Victoria Cafe with Frank Cloutier and his boys.

Playing that soused polka in uniform on the bandstand … I desperately want him to have done this. There is exactly zero evidence that he did.

But could he have? Could a Minneapolis cop have played such a drunken, reeling tribute to bootleg liquor without being fired, or even arrested? Especially if he was prominently featured on a 78 rpm record? And might a St. Paul officer have made the same trip to Minneapolis, maybe in a pickled cop exchange program?

During many long days in archives and libraries, I've often bounced these questions about Curly Larson off my findings. Partly thanks to that habit, I've slowly evolved from being the archivist of "Moonshiners Dance" to being its cultural historian.

The shift felt complete the day I finally decided to trust my findings about all these Larsons. There's always so much more work to be done, but so far, nobody has presented himself as the likely Mister Larson.

Therefore, according to my current research results, there probably was no Mister Larson. Or rather, there were many thousands of him. I've come to suspect that Mister Larson is a product of Frank Cloutier's imagination. He's the generic audience member — just your typical Minnesotan off the street.

Hey hey Mister Larson!

If so, this would make him a founding citizen of Lake Wobegon. Like Garrison Keillor's townspeople, he's a caricature invented for the sake of Minnesota humor. To this day, Mister Larson still lives next door to Pastor Inkvist and across the street from Carl Krebsbach.

It would also make Mister Larson an ancestor of Mister Jones, Bob Dylan's main character in "Ballad of a Thin Man."

Just as with Dylan's character, the inclination is to imagine Mister Larson as somebody other than you. But Frank and Bob both address the listener — both are talking to and about you, no matter what name they give you. You are Mister Larson.

Something is happening, therefore, and you don't know what it is. To understand who Mister Larson was, we have to sort out what he might have meant to somebody like Frank Cloutier in a place like Saint Paul at a time like 1927.

We have to reconstruct a meaning that no longer exists. We have to do cultural history.

I'll present some initial findings in Part Three.