The Celestial Monochord

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.

Barack Obama: Secret Banjoist?

Obama interrupts "Hopalong Peter" at a New Lost City Ramblers concert

In another clear sign that his campaign is in financial trouble, presidential hopeful Barack Obama is now fundraising among devotees of the southern Appalachian stringband music known as "oldtime."

Apparently conceding bluegrass donors to his Republican rival, Obama's campaign is appealing directly to less affluent and less numerous oldtime contributors.

Senator Joe Biden, asked for comment while attending a joint New Lost City Ramblers concert / Obama rally, said "This makes perfect sense. I mean, you got the first mainstream oldtime stringband who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guys. I mean, that's a storybook, man!"

According to John Edwards, also in attendance, "This is a great idea! You know, Kelly Harrell was a textile worker, just like my fath — Ow! Hey! Ow! Not the face! Watch the hair! Security!"

The oldtime demographic has been ignored by major candidates ever since its support doomed the otherwise front-running candidacy of Henry A. Wallace in 1948.

Understandably, Obama's sudden embrace of the clawhammer banjo-playing set has left even some campaign staff puzzled.

"You know how you tell the difference between a bluegrass band and an oldtime band?" asked a high-level adviser to the Obama campaign on the condition of anonymity.

"The oldtime band is skinnier than the bluegrass band," he said, citing the previous testimony of Garrison Keillor.

To appeal to oldtime jammers, the campaign has even changed its official theme song more than forty-two times.

"First it was Sally Ann, and then we changed it to Sally Goodin, and then Sally in the Garden," said the exasperated campaign insider. "But the oldtimers didn't even notice! Apparently, they can't even tell their own songs apart!"

"Barack has got to put an end to this! He has to lift his foot up!"

Editor's Note: There is a (real-life, no joke) update to this article!

The Anthology as Tarot Deck

(a modern Tarot deck by John Coulthart)

Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music is so well established as a canonical text that you’d think Smith must’ve had tenure somewhere like Harvard … he didn’t. And it’s easy to miss how perverse an idea the Anthology originally was.

As Greil Marcus wrote in the book that launched a thousand ships, Invisible Republic:

… the Anthology was disguised as a textbook; it was an occult document disguised as an academic treatise … This was in Harry Smith’s grain. A polymath and an autodidact, a dope fiend and an alcoholic, a legendary experimental filmmaker and a more legendary sponger, he was perhaps most notorious as a fabulist. He liked to brag about killing people.

For generations before him, Smith’s family was deeply involved in the more marginalized traditions of American mysticism — the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Theosophists. Smith often claimed to be Aleister Crowley’s illegitimate son.

Smith brought this sensibility to the design for the Anthology, which comes across as having been ordered by some unknowable, arcane, lost cosmological system. His liner notes include the following quote meant to help the reader understand his decisions:

“In Elementary Music The Relation Of Earth To The Sphere of Water is 4 to 3, As There Are In The Earth Four Quarters of Frigidity to Three of Water.” — Robert Fludd

All of this matters desperately, for reasons I’ll mention in my series of posts on the first seven seconds of entry #41 of the Anthology, “Moonshiners Dance Part One.”

For now, I’m just pointing out that someone named Zac Johnson has invented a way of using the Anthology for something resembling a Tarot reading. Harry becomes your oracle.

You
use an ordinary deck of playing cards to generate a random number from 1 to 84, which
gives you an entry number for a cut on the Anthology, according to
Harry’s mysterious and iconic numbering system.

You then go to that corresponding song, and
use it as a basis for an interpretive reading. The extremely evocative recordings on the Anthology should serve as an endlessly rich source for readings by any reasonably sharp fortune teller who knows the collection. The Anthology for fun and prophet.

I think Harry would have loved
this. And then hated it. And then failed to understand it. And then forgotten about it. And then hated
it. And then dismissed it as
uninteresting. And then hated it. And then loved it …

Here’s a blog entry and podcast that explain the details of the card system.

Fake Headlines Mesmerize Music Geeks

When you first read the fake newspaper headlines in Harry Smith’s liner notes for Volume One of his Anthology of American Folk Music, you’re forced to stop what you’re doing, sit down, and read them all very closely.

Harry knew what he was doing.

Those headlines are great devices of seduction — or a fishhook through the mouth. In turn, his liner notes, as a whole, have helped make his 1952 collection of 1920’s records one of the most influential documents in American music.

This morning, for the first time, I read something that finally made real sense of these queer little jokey headlines. It was in William Howland Kenney’s description of the various ways record companies got records into the hands of consumers in the 1920’s:

… 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. As one newsboy recalled: “You’d go to one customer and she’d get all excited over a new blues and start telling you all about her girl friend or some relative who was sure to buy one, too.”
— Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, p 123

It’s perfectly sensible, then, to suppose that a corner newsboy might literally have shouted something like “Extra! Extra! Mamie Smith’s man don’t treat her right! Has Crazy Blues!”

If so, the newsboys and Harry Everett Smith shared the same technique for drawing attention to the records, as does the Anthology itself to this very day.

Whether Harry understood this, I don’t know — but it would be worth looking into. He was born in 1923 in Washington state and grew up mostly in Bellingham, where I doubt corner newsboys were a common sight. This sales method appears to have been little-known among researchers until it was described by William Howland Kenney in his (mind-blowing) 1993 book. Harry Smith died in 1991.

Smith’s headlines have been posted by someone named Joshua, at someplace called “Dinner on the Molly.” He also helpfully includes links to the songs
at YouTube.

It would be great if, someday, a really well-made interactive replica of the Anthology, closely based on Harry’s liner notes, were legally available online. Joshua’s blog entry and the YouTube piracy are evocative how this might work.

See also my entry about the availability of the liner notes from Smithsonian.

Harry Smith’s Liner Notes Available for Download

The first time I went to a racetrack —
Canterbury Downs in Chaska, Minnesota around 1999 —
I picked up the horse-racing program and felt a jolt.

“So THIS is where Harry Smith got the design of his liner notes to The Anthology of American Folk Music!”

Wherever he got his ideas for them, those liner notes were so weird —
so peculiar and particular and captivating —
that listening to The Anthology without getting to know its liner notes seems a little perverse.

From the beginning, those liner notes have massively multiplied the force of the blast that’s slowly gone off in American culture thanks to Harry Smith’s Anthology —
a 1952 collection of old recordings from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.

Well, now the Smithsonian has put those notes online for download by anybody for free. Maybe this is just the first time I’ve noticed it, I’m not sure.

In any case, it’s a big honking 62 MB PDF, so watch out. Also note that they start with the new liner notes from the 1997 reissue before getting on to Harry’s original notes.

The posting of this PDF seems to be part of a site redesign, eliminating the Smithsonian’s old Anthology site and replacing it with a new one that looks rather like their Global Sound commerce site.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this change means that the individual entries of the Anthology will soon be available for purchase as mp3’s.

Of course, I think it’s time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself and get the box set on CD. You’ll never regret the expense, believe me.

The Anthology at Tom Waits Concerts

from "KPFK Will Air Folk Fest"
The Pasadena Star Bee, July 3, 1974

Tom Waits is on tour — a rare enough news story in itself.

But note that the music piped into the theater before and after the shows, to date, has been The Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith.

I've often pointed out the folk lineage of various Tom Waits songs, showing connections between:

Cold Cold Ground and Stephen Foster,

Georgia Lee and Blind Willie Johnson,

Swordfishtrombones and Bascom Lamar Lunsford,

Better Off Without A Wife and Chubby Parker, The Carter Family, and John Lomax, and,

Down There By the Train and Uncle Dave Macon and Henry Thomas (although I really "buried the lead" on that one — scoll down).

… I have a lot more of these up my sleeve and I may get some of them written up some day …

Anyway, it's interesting to see Waits tip his porkpie to The Anthology so explicitly.

But it would be absurd to say I've finally been "proven right." Waits has often been pretty generous in acknowledging his debts to other musicians, and folk has always been in the mix.

Thanks to Ray for pointing out the use of The Anthology at the recent concerts, and to TCCBodhi and Dave R. at the Raindogs discussion list for providing independent confirmations.

Milwaukee Soldiers Home

Maybe the Milwaukee Soldiers Home astounded me so because I was unprepared for it. I had no impression of the place, beyond a few lines on a map, until I found myself suddenly in the middle of it. Then I wanted to call everyone I knew and tell them to go there immediately.

My only thought originally was to visit the grave of Frank E. Cloutier's son — Alden, a sergeant during World War Two. The soldiers home, where Alden died, is surrounded by the Wood National Veterans Cemetery, where he's buried.

I realized long ago I can learn a lot by visiting the graves of the various characters I encounter in my research. Often, the headstone's inscription teaches me about the person's military service, or relatives I hadn't heard of are buried nearby. Sometimes, I discover a musician was a dedicated Freemason. Occasionally, the adjacent plot for the widow never quite got filled.

Once, explaining all this to a coworker, he said, "Just imagine how much you'd learn if you dug them up." I thought seriously about this for a few more seconds then you might imagine before coming to my senses. I think it's possible he could have been making fun of me.

Anyway, the grounds of the Milwaukee Soldier's Home are mind-boggling. Approved by Abraham Lincoln, they have the most impressive Victorian (I guess) architecture I've ever seen — overly massive and extremely dramatic. After more than forty years of visiting Milwaukee, I somehow had no idea such a place even COULD exist there, much less that it actually did, and very deep in the heart of the metro area.

And the buildings are all dilapidated. I later learned that a concerted effort is underway to preserve and renovate the place, but it is currently in a surreal state of disrepair. Peeling paint, broken boards, shattered windows, yellow police tape everywhere. Any movie studio would gladly pay a small fortune to make pristine grounds look this neglected. Sadly, paying to make neglected grounds look pristine is a harder sell.

Strange and disorienting as the visitor's experience is, it's intensified by the overwhelming, looming presence of a cynical and majestically trite metaphor — Miller's Stadium. The unimaginable scale of the stadium, just across the street, gives the impression that you could almost touch it from every point on the grounds. The rows of headstones feel like the stadium's parking lot.

It's impossible to walk there, at this stage in the renovation project and at this stage in American history, and not see the irony. A crumbling veterans hospital shadowed by a violently expensive baseball stadium. (According to my research, Miller's Stadium was built at a cost of 87 godzillion dollars. For the mathematically disinclined, that's an 87 followed by six ass-loads of zeros.)

The casual visitor will definitely be reminded of the scandal that put Walter Reed in the headlines a while back. Of course, it should be said — emphatically — that I have no clue about the medical care and other services currently offered veterans in Milwaukee. A knowledgeable veteran, for example, recently told me the veterans hospital in Madison is truly world-class. I was surprised to hear this because I know nothing about it.

Since visiting this veterans home, I learned that my father's mother volunteered there for many years, helping care for World War Two veterans around the time of the Vietnam War. Maybe my grandmother knew Alden Cloutier.

But I wouldn't have known any of this had I not made the effort. I've visited a lot of locations across the Upper Midwest for no reason other than some musician happened to pass through there 80 years ago. The effect is a little as if a Star Trek transporter beam had gone haywire and dropped me off at a random place and time. I highly recommend it.

Here is a Flickr set I took there (it begins with rather too many shots of Alden's headstone) and here are some shots by other Flickr subscribers.

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (part one)

This is the first 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 Two and Part Three.

Alessandro Carrera, Minneapolis Dylan Symposium
Alessandro Carrera
Bob Dylan Symposium in Minneapolis
March 27, 2007

At the 2007 Bob Dylan symposium in Minneapolis, Alessandro Carrera, the leading Italian translator of Bob Dylan's lyrics and prose, told a story about his first awareness of Dylan. I keep remembering it as I think about Mister Larson.

The gist of the story was this:

When Carrera was a teenager in Italy in the late 1960's, he was obsessed with American music — even though it was very difficult to get a hold of, and he could count all the words in his English vocabulary on one hand.

Listening to albums by Joan Baez, and by the Byrds, and by Peter Paul and Mary, what excited him most on each album was always the one or two songs that had been written by this guy — one "Bobe Dee-lahn", as Carrera pronounced it.

Of course, he couldn't understand the lyrics at all — it was Bob Dylan's melodies that attracted him.

It took some doing, but Carrera finally got a hold of a recording by Bob Dylan himself — a 45 rpm single, one side of which was "Mister Tambourine Man." He put it on the turntable, and was elated to hear that the first word out of Dylan's mouth was one of the few English words that the teenage Carrera knew.

"Hey!"

Carrera didn't just know what the word meant — that is, he didn't just know its Italian translation — he also deeply recognized the word. He appreciated it. It spoke to him.

"Hey!"

It meant, "You! LISTEN TO ME." And that was cool.

—

"The Moonshiner's Dance" begins with a 7-second spoken introduction. A prologue.

Here's an mp3:

Download MoonshinerIntro.mp3

In its first two seconds, someone — almost certainly the leader of the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, Frank E. Cloutier — practically shouts "Hey hey, Mister Larson!"

In the next five seconds, in the same declarative voice, he rattles off about 20 more syllables. But because of some rasping and, maybe, needle-bouncing at start of the recording, all but a few of these syllables are completely indecipherable.

To just count the syllables in the introduction, I had to transcribe it phonetically, without worrying about its meaning. The words sound something like this:

Hey hey, Mister Larson! These boys geeky entwine anonymous spectacle play pen! That's it, go boys!

We may never know what Frank E. really said (and I doubt I've made a lucky guess). Maybe the Gennett recording engineer in 1927 used a blank wax disc that was rough or soft near the outer edge. Preparing the wax was skilled labor and results could be slightly uneven. If that's the source of the noise, every released copy of the 78 is similarly indecipherable.

On the other hand, the Smithsonian-Folkways' reissue on CD is the only version I've heard. It may be that their "source copy" of the 78 rpm record was damaged just there. Perhaps another copy of the 78 has a prologue that can be understood.

In any case, after this spoken introduction someone whoops "WAH hee!", and the band strikes up its reeling, careening medley of tunes played as one-steps.

—

I, and possibly you, listen to these old recordings to put our minds through an intense exercise. It's, like, mind-expanding.

We lean into the noise and try to tease out the delicate signal as it leaks across a divide as impenetrable as a world war, a depression, and a cold war. The Mason-Dixon line. The color line. Class and gender and religious and educational and technological divides. And, for us, those divides are not so much obstacles to our listening pleasure as they are at the root of the pleasure.

Among the recordings on the Harry Smith Anthology, Moonshiners Dance comes to me across the shortest distances.

The first seven seconds are in English, it seems. Frank E. would have had a Rhode Island accent, but his audience at the Victoria Cafe was an Upper Midwestern one — it still is, given that nobody is listening but me. In fact, the Victoria Cafe is still standing, just a couple minutes' drive from my house. Frank E. was even raised Catholic, like me — and unlike almost everyone else on the Anthology (except the Cajuns, who do not speak my language).

You'd think I'd have a shot at understanding Frank E.

Instead, I'm like Alessandro Carrera. There's a world between me and the speaker, and I can only pick out a few translatable syllables.

But I recognize something in the gesture. Hey hey, Mister Larson!

Frank could hardly have imagined our existence. We're eavesdropping on his message to Mr. Larson, but somehow the message seems intended for us. But what does it mean?

The Illinois-Wisconsin Border

St. John's church, Christmas Day 2000
Johnsburg, Illinois

Tom Waits doesn't release songs like Day After Tomorrow, which is one reason people listened so closely when it appeared on his 2004 album, Real Gone.

The song's narrator is a 21-year-old combat soldier on a battlefield where he sees himself like "the gravel on the road," like an expendable resource in someone else's project.

It's what we might call a protest song, which is not Tom Waits' style. When the morning newspaper appears in a Tom Waits song, it's usually to complete a still life with eggs and weak coffee. But Day After Tomorrow is a beautiful anit-war song — politically disheartening, spiritually uplifting, and about as moving as anything Waits has ever done.

Like me, the narrator-soldier of Day After Tomorrow is from northern Illinois:

I got your letter today
And I miss you all so much here
I can't wait to see you all
And I'm counting the days, dear
I still believe that there's gold
At the end of the world
And I'll come home to Illinois
On the day after tomorrow

It is so hard
And it's cold here
And I'm tired of taking orders
And I miss old Rockford town
Up by the Wisconsin border
What I miss you won't believe
Shoveling snow and raking leaves
And my plane will touch down
On the day after tomorrow

On my first listening, the "Wisconsin border" passage clunked in my ears. For one thing, "Rockford-town" isn't an expression I'd ever heard, and the song doesn't tell us anything about Rockford beyond what can be guessed from Google Maps.

So, the soldier's hometown seemed to lack credibility, a little as if a blues song had referred to Avalon, Mississippi as "an unincorporated community in the extreme northwest corner of Carroll County, part of the Greenwood Mississippi Micropolitan Statistical Area." The soldier seemed to have a wikipedic knowledge of his own hometown.

Of course, on my second listening, I remembered that Waits' wife, Kathleen Brennan, grew up in Johnsburg, Illinois, which is close to Rockford and even closer to my own home town. Since the early 1980's — and increasingly, as time goes on — Waits and Brennan have worked as a team under the name "Tom Waits," much as Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have said that they are a band called "Gillian Welch."

Thinking of the lines as having been written by an Illinoisan subtly changes the meaning of the words. If I and my family are any measure, referring to a town "up by the Wisconsin border" carries a meaning and significance you can't read off a map.

When I was a college boy in Tucson, Arizona, I went to at least a hundred poetry readings, including perhaps a half-dozen readings by a poet named Alberto Álvaro Ríos. Each time, he would tell the same old story about growing up in Nogales and playing a childish game of walking in two countries at once — literally, one foot in the USA, one foot in Mexico.

I quickly grew tired of the story. So what? So you grew up in a town that straddled the border! Today, of course, I'm able to see a significance I'd mostly missed as a callow youth. The border really does matter, even if it hadn't mattered much to me at the time.

Kathleen Brennan is from just this side of a border, a place where someplace else is always just over the horizon. Maybe such people know exactly where to locate their mythological worlds — over on the other side. Maybe they also tend to know exactly where myths are sorely lacking — here on this side.

In Day after Tomorrow, Waits and Brennan's soldier suddenly finds himself thinking of his hometown, old Rockford town, as if it were that mythical world on the other side of the border. He's displaced alright. His folks back home wouldn't believe how shoveling snow and raking leaves now seem to him like that gold at the end of the world.

It might seem funny that anyone would think of Wisconsin as a default location for some kind of Valhalla. I can't speak for Kathleen Brennan, rather obviously, but when I was growing up in Illinois, my family always had Wisconsin on its mind in a way. Not Indiana or Iowa, but Wisconsin.

For one thing, my parents were from there — they met during WWII while bowling in downtown Milwaukee. They still had siblings in Wisconsin towns both very large and very small. Even for those of us born in Illinois, going to Wisconsin was driving "back" as much as driving "up."

Mostly, we went back for holidays, weddings, and funerals. As a result, my parents' respective home towns seemed like bizarro worlds where people spent every day of their entire lives wearing clip-on ties, going to lengthy Catholic services, and then getting ecstatically drunk. In my mind's eye, John Prine's Wedding Day in Funeralville is always obviously about those places.

It's wedding day in Funeralville
Your soup spoon's on your right
The King and Queen will alternate
With the refrigerator light
There'll be boxing on the TV show
The colored kid will sing
Hooray for you
And midnight's oil
Lets burn the whole damn thing

Wisconsinites know about Illinoisans crossing the border to party. They were called FIBs (F**king Illinois Bastards). FIBs were known for driving drunk, littering, and being loud and disorderly — even more so on all counts than native Wisconsinites.

Once, a relative was bitterly complaining about FIBs, so I pointed out that the airwaves in Illinois were fully saturated with appeals to Escape to Wisconsin — constantly. Every Illinoisan who crossed the border was awarded an Escape to Wisconsin bumpersticker and encouraged to hurry back. He should, I said, contact his own state government about their success in attracting us FIBs … his face took on a vivd expression of disillusionment.

I felt very uncomfortable about being seen as an outsider when my veins flowed with so much German-Catholic Wisconsin beer … I mean, blood … and when my mind was so invested in my Wisconsin roots. Like Alberto Rios, my family and I never quite got beyond straddling that border, growing up in two places at once.

John Prine's song "Lake Marie" is about a character like that — his body on the border, his mind so swimming with that border's past and present that it orders his world. It's a very weird song, almost a nonsense song, that makes sense on a level no other song makes sense.

The song has a mysterious power to make you hit the repeat button over and over and over again, endlessly. I suspect that power might derive from the song's evocation of place — it conjures the experience of occupying that particular borderland in a way you never thought possible.

For one thing, it confuses its facts as only someone thus conflicted can confuse them. Its inaccuracy is authentic.

Many years ago along the Illinois-Wisconsin Border
There was this Indian tribe
They found two babies in the woods
— white babies
One of them was named Elizabeth
She was the fairer of the two
While the smaller and more fragile one was named Marie
Having never seen white girls before
— and living on the two lakes known as the Twin Lakes —
They named the larger and more beautiful lake Lake Elizabeth
And thus the smaller lake that was hidden from the highway
Became known forever as Lake Marie

I see now that the song is apparently about Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, which was founded by a family that did indeed have twins — Elizabeth and Mary. But the twins were never abandoned to the Indians.

But two white sisters were held by a group of Potawatomi Indians in 1832 — one of the most famous and influential incidents in the nasty, confused series of massacres and skirmishes known today as the Black Hawk War. Both pairs of sisters lived within about a 10-mile radius of Johnsburg, Illinois.

It's troubling how little the schools I attended taught me about the pre-European history of this place so full of Native-American-derived place names, as well as cigar-store-Indian kitsch. But those place names and that kitsch and the beauty of the Wisconsin landscape swam around in my head my entire life.

John Prine's "this Indian tribe," who named lakes according to how well they could be seen from the highway, gets it exactly right. There was no telling how long ago any of this history happened, or whether it really happened at all, or whether it ever even stopped happening.

Later in the song, the Black Hawk War is somehow seen, if not quite recognized, on the evening news in the work of European settlers like Illinoisan John Wayne Gacy and Wisconsinite Jeffry Dahmer.

The dogs were barking as the cars were parking
The loan sharks were sharking, the narcs were narcing
Practically everyone was there
In the parking lot by the forest preserve
The police had found two bodies
Nay! Naked bodies!
Their faces had been horribly disfigured by some sssssharp object
Saw it on the news
In the TV news
In a black and white video —
You know what blood looks like in a black and white video?
Shadows. SHADOWS!
That's what it looks like

It's already been a quarter century since Tom Waits wrote the song "Johnsburg, Illinois". Back then, Brennan and Johnsburg were new to Waits, comparatively, and Brennan didn't yet have the kind of intimate involvement in the writing that she does today. Well, that's what I gather anyway.

Waits seems to have deliberately painted Johnsburg as a place that exists mostly in his imagination — the kind of Midwestern farming community any Californian might imagine. He plays a character who can't tell the woman from the photo, the community from the Rockwell painting.

She's my only true love
She's all that I think of
Look here, in my wallet — that's her

She grew up on a farm there
There's a place on my arm where
I've written her name next to mine

It's almost a joke, inviting us to say "No, that's not her — that's a PICTURE of her." The song, just like the photo in his wallet, is how he shows us the image of her that he carries around with him.

Of course, it could very well be that this confusion between the person, or town, and their image is what romance is all about. Who the hell wouldn't want such a song written for them? And what chamber of commerce wouldn't thank a writer for naming such a song after its town?

At that stage in Tom Waits' career, Johnsburg is not yet really recognizable. It's not Brennan's Johnsburg — the sleepy little grid of streets, the town here on this commonplace side of the border. After all, she didn't write the song. For that matter, she hasn't tattooed HER OWN name into his body. He has marked himself with his own understanding of her.

In a sense, the soldier in that oversees war in Day After Tomorrow has gone from thinking of his hometown as a resident would to thinking of it as an outsider might. The war experience has transformed him from a resident of the border town, like Brennan, to a dreamer of a mythical place, like the Waits of 25 years ago.