The Celestial Monochord

Look for the Silver Lining

I’ve been working long hours on a ridiculously long entry, but I can’t quite get it “out there” just yet.

But aren’t blogs about “what I happen to be thinking tonight” anyway? Aren’t they? So while we’re waiting for that ridiculous masterpiece, here’s what I’m thinking tonight.

I’ve been listening to CDs from Archeophone lately.

Going into the Moonshiner’s Dance project, I knew more about southern Appalachian tunes for banjo and fiddle than anything else. Now, as I do my research on that Minnesota oompah record, I’ve often suffered from a lack of context.

That’s why, over the past two years, I’ve looked for ways to boost my familiarity with popular music that’s both pre-Moonshiner’s Dance and not necessarily from the South.

For one thing, my CD collection has taken on things like Jewface, and Avenue A to the Great White Way, and Archeophone, Archeophone, Archeophone.

The 1921 edition of Archeophone’s yearbook series includes Marion Harris singing “Look for the Silver Lining.” It turns out to be a bone-crushingly sad song, despite the encouragement it supposedly provides. It pretends to offer advice on how to keep the spirits up, but leaves you a sniveling heap instead.

Of course, I was reminded of the original Carter Family’s signature song, “Keep on the Sunny Side.” Its modus operandi is identical — while encouraging you, listener, to turn away from your troubles, it only emphasizes them and the pathos of your trying to soldier through them.

Archeophone’s 1922 yearbook includes Al Jolson singing “April Flowers.”

(Someday, I may write a post that asks the sticky question, “Al Jolson: Crap?” Anybody want to be a guest blogger on that?)

In any case, “April Flowers” proceeds in very much the same way, and was an attempt to duplicate the smash success of “Look for the Silver Lining.”

Archeophone’s inclusion of a rewriting of “Silver Lining” leaves me with the impression that “Keep on the Sunny Side” too was probably an attempt to score a hit by following a previous hit’s blueprint. If that’s the case, it was a hugely successful attempt, both commercially and artistically.

The book Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone portrays AP Carter as struggling, struggling, always struggling to come up with new material for Sara and Maybelle to perform — he was like a Brill Building songwriter without the benefit of a building full of brilliant creative people from whom to draw ideas and inspiration and a spirit of competition.

The Carter Family was as much a commercial act as it was a folk act — or better, they expose how wrong-headed the distinction can often be.

Another thing I hear in “Look for the Silver Lining” — in fact, for the first few listenings, it’s the only thing I can hear — is “Look for the Union Label,” the stirring theme song in 1970’s commercials sponsored by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

Marion Harris gave the melodic lines of “Silver Lining” lovely little paisley swirls and seagull dips befitting a great 1921 pop song. It seems “Union Label” took the tune and straightened it out and squared it off to serve as a rousing union sing-along.

As I say, “Silver Lining” outwardly keeps a stiff upper lip, but inside, it’s a song almost entirely lacking in hope for the future. So I don’t know if this was the right tune to borrow — union membership has crashed through the floor and Americans now buy foreign goods with such fervor that you’d think it was the American-made toys that were dripping with lead. Look for the lead lining?

It’s doubtful that I’m the first to consider most of this. That ridiculously long post? Now THAT nobody’s ever thought of before. But this is here, and that isn’t. No wonder blogs are always about what you happen to be thinking tonight.

Louis Armstrong in Minnesota, 1939

(used by permission of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
and the Minnesota Historical Society)

As a side trip from my regular research, I’ve spent a week or so of evenings and weekends looking into the facts surrounding Louis Armstrong’s appearance at the Coliseum Ballroom in St. Paul on Friday night, July 28, 1939. Please forgive any errors, and let me know what you think.

The 1939 show was advertised as Armstrong’s first appearance in the Twin Cities — a point repeatedly stressed in the twin African American newspapers, the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder.

But he might also have appeared in Minneapolis in the spring of 1931. That earlier show is mentioned in Jones and Chilton’s Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story but I haven’t been able to confirm it despite a grueling newspaper search.

Regardless, today we know Armstrong had visited the Twin Cities about 20 years earlier. From 1918 to 1921, he’d played for the Streckfus line of riverboats — paddle-wheelers that were still (or already) trading on nostalgia for the Mississippi’s 19th-century heyday with picturesque excursions up and down the river. That is the gig that first brought Armstrong to St. Paul-Minneapolis.

For Armstrong, then, his 1939 appearance in Minnesota might have been a kind of nostalgic excursion of his own.

The Coliseum

One of the only facts you might still hear about the Coliseum Ballroom is that a lot of famous acts played there — Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Jack Teagarden, Ben Pollack, Lawrence Welk, the Andrews Sisters.

During its 38 years, the Coliseum was a quirky, unavoidable, irreplaceable center of St. Paul’s nightlife, love life, and imagination. It’s rarely remembered today, but Garrison Keillor did provide a gratifying exception a few months ago 22 minutes into a speech for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

I started thinking about the Coliseum two years ago on my first day researching the Victoria Cafe, the orchestra of which recorded the strange “Moonshiner’s Dance” that eventually found its way onto Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.

It turned out that the Victoria Cafe Orchestra leader, Frank Cloutier, later acted as the leader of the house orchestra of the Coliseum, four blocks to the Cafe’s west. He worked at the Coliseum for thirteen years.

It must have been a good gig. The Coliseum boasted the world’s largest dance floor and offered $100 to anyone who could prove otherwise. Its floor was a rebuilt hockey rink with a 250 x 90-foot playing surface, so a packed house at the Coliseum Ballroom could mean more than 3000 dancers at one time. Leading the Coliseum Orchestra regularly put Frank Cloutier’s band on the radio across the Midwest.

The Coliseum’s owner — the husky, gregarious, and scrappy John J. Lane — often billed himself as “The Musician’s Friend.” He was also a Ramsey County commissioner at the time Frank Cloutier took the job.

Satch Returns Triumphant

In the late 1930s, major national stardom had just come to Louis Armstrong.

A front-page article in the African-American weekly Spokesman-Recorder credited Armstrong’s sudden popularity to his work in Hollywood films. An ad in the paper featured a photo of Armstrong goofing around with Bing Crosby.

Armstrong had indeed played a fairly substantial role in Crosby’s 1936 Pennies From Heaven. The next year, he was in both Jack Benny’s musical comedy Artists and Models and Mae West’s Every Day’s A Holiday. In 1938, Armstrong sang “Jeepers Creepers” to a horse in Going Places starring Dick Powell, Anita Louise, and Ronald Reagan. A New York Times film critic didn’t think much of Going Places but he was left wanting more of Armstrong.

On the day of the Twin Cities show, a wry editorial in the Spokesman-Recorder described Winchell himself, “the ‘Patron Saint’ of many an American column reader,” declaring Louis Armstrong the King of Swing. The paper seemed to almost grudgingly agree that Armstrong “has brought something to modern music that defies definition, and reams of paper and tons of ink have been used trying to describe it.”

Jazz was now being taken very seriously as an art form and scholarly work had begun to appear about it. Scarcely three months after his show in St. Paul, Armstrong appeared at Manhattan’s enormous Center Theater portraying Bottom in Swingin’ The Dream, a jazz adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Benny Goodman co-starred and Walt Disney designed the sets.

Things To Do Around The Twin Cities

Capitol

There were plenty of other things to do around town without paying 80 cents to see Louis Armstrong on that clear, mild summer night.

Several area theaters were showing Dark Victory with Bette Davis for 25 cents. Or you could see Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, and Ann Sheridan in Dodge City or the W. C. Fields comedy You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man with Edgar Bergen and the somewhat wooden Charlie McCarthy.

Alternately, there was the “Melodies Around The World” ice show at the St. Paul Auditorium — 25 cents in the bleachers, 50 cents to sit at a table. The Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus wasn’t scheduled to arrive for another week.

And the Streckfus line ran the paddle-wheel steamer Capitol out of the dock at the foot of Jackson Street. You could take day trips down to the lock and dam at Hastings or one of the “moonlight dance trips” leaving every night at 9:00 pm. Armstrong had worked on the Capitol in his youth — there’s even a 1919 photo of him aboard that boat.

So far, I don’t see that the Streckfus excursions were racially segregated in Minnesota in 1939 as they were elsewhere, long before and long after. While he was in town for the Coliseum show, maybe Armstrong could have taken a ride on the Capitol, this time as a passenger. I wonder if the idea would have appealed to him.

These other temptations aside, the 1939 appearance was a rare opportunity for Twin Cities jazz fans. It was their chance to see Louis Armstrong while also voting with their dollars. On the day of the show, an editorial in the Spokesman-Recorder stated:

Somewhat off the beat theatrically, the Twin Cities seldom have an opportunity to see and hear internationally known Negro artists. When they do come along, we think we should support them.

The week after the show, the Spokesman-Recorder reminded its readers how lucky they were to have Armstrong play here.

In St. Louis, where there are 100,000 Negroes to draw a crowd from, the Missourians pay $1.10 to hear the same band Twin Citians heard for 80 cents.

It must have helped that jazz, and Armstrong in particular, had a fast-growing White audience nationwide — the 1940 census found fewer than 9000 African Americans in Minneapolis and St. Paul combined.

The Trio Club

The 1939 concert was sponsored by either the Trio Club or the Tri Club, depending on whether you believe a news article in the Spokesman-Recorder or ads appearing on the day of the show in St. Paul’s mainstream papers. A Spokesman-Recorder columnist describes the club as “three St. Paul men who invested several hundred dollars.”

Beyond that, I don’t know much about the Tri or Trio Club. There’s no entry for them in the 1939 St. Paul city directory — either in the yellow or the white pages, as we would say today — and my search of the records of Minnesota’s Secretary of State showed no clear sign it ever incorporated.

The Spokesman-Recorder did report that the three investors barely made a profit from Armstrong’s appearance, thanks to a rumor circulating prior to the show.

Rumor Cuts Attendance

A thousand people saw Armstrong at the Coliseum that night, according to a follow-up article in the August 4 Spokesman-Recorder. Hundreds more would have attended had it not been for an apparent act of sabotage:

Some irresponsible individual several days before the date of the dance spread the rumor that the Armstrong band would not appear. Attempts are being made to ascertain the guilty party.

On the day of the show, the offices of the Spokesman in Minneapolis and the Recorder in St. Paul got more than 100 calls from people trying to find out if the show was really canceled.

We’ll never know the motives behind the cancellation rumor. For me, the natural hunch would be racism and an accompanying hatred of jazz, although whatever I know about that isn’t very specific to late 1930s Minnesota. Certainly, Armstrong’s sudden fame must have made his shows an obvious target for reactionaries along the tour’s route.

Two years earlier, a scene in Artists and Models with Martha Raye had drawn controversy for its hints that Armstrong’s trumpet made the white actress horny.

Closer to home, I’ve found the St. Paul musicians union experiencing friction 16 years earlier over the popularity of jazz. I also stumbled upon a series of 1927 news articles detailing Klu Klux Klan meetings about a mile east of the Coliseum. These sightings are underscored — literally — by a note immediately below the Spokesman‘s article about the cancellation rumor. It reports that the front page of the major local paper The Minneapolis Star had used the word “pickaninny” a few days before.

Given all this, it’s interesting that the Coliseum’s owner, John J. Lane, had a strong ethic of inclusivity. According to his daughter, “there was no color line in our house, we had Fats [Waller] over for dinner.” Lane often loaned the Coliseum free of charge to organizations needing a place to hold fundraisers — the musicians union, the Knights of Columbus, the B’nai B’rith, the Urban League. Probably, he called in such favors during his successful bid for County Commissioner in 1926 and his abandoned campaign in 1938.

All this being said, in my experience, a reasonable hunch about history is usually wrong. I simply don’t know why the rumor started. Maybe the Tri or Trio Club had enemies we don’t know about. Certainly, John J. Lane had both friends and enemies in many walks of life, accumulated during his decades-long, high-profile life in the politics and economics of the Twin Cities. Indeed, one of Lane’s other nightclubs was bombed by mobsters a decade earlier.

Armstrong on the Coliseum Stage

There are no detailed accounts of Armstrong’s show that night, so far as I know, but I’ve pieced together a few clues.

Identical ads in two of St. Paul’s mainstream papers on July 28 claimed that the “Trumpet King of Swing” would be backed by “17 Swing Artists.”

The Spokesman-Recorder repeatedly reported that the band would be led by Luis Russell — an arranger, pianist, and pioneer of Swing who was indeed leading Armstrong’s outfit at the time. Also mentioned is the innovative trumpet player Henry “Red” Allen. This squares with the personnel for Armstrong’s 1939 recording sessions for Decca, including those in New York on June 15 and December 18:

piano and arrangements: Luis Russell
trumpet: Shelton Hemphill, Otis Johnson, Henry Allen
trombone: Wilbur de Paris, Geo. Washington, J.C. Higginbotham
clarinet and alto sax: Rupert Cole, Charlie Holmes
tenor sax: Joe Garland, Bingie Madison
guitar: Lee Blair
string bass: Pops Foster
drums: Sidney Catlett

But the Spokesman-Recorder also names three other veterans of Luis Russell’s band. One of the great jazz drummers, Paul Barbarin, was presumably touring in place of Sidney Catlett. There was also the “romantic tenor” vocalist Sonny Woods and two articles mention the “petite song stylist” and “torch singer” Midge Williams — little remembered today, but a much-admired rising radio star at the time.

The number of backing musicians listed for the Decca recordings + Woods + Williams + Armstrong himself = 17, the number of swing artists given in the July 28 ad in the major Twin Cities newspapers.

The following week, a columnist for the Spokesman-Recorder wished “a million scallions” to the rumor monger who cut attendance but wished “orchids” for the audience that did attend, which he found refreshingly peaceable. “Maybe the presence of one of Chief Hackert’s skull-busters had something to do with it, but we think not.” Brawls and other unseemly behavior appeared to be going out of style, the columnist said. Another follow-up article in the Spokesman-Recorder comes to a trustworthy conclusion:

Armstrong Great Showman

Armstrong gave the crowd its money’s worth and the people left the Lexington Avenue dance palace in good humor feeling that they had enjoyed a treat.

— — —

Thanks

Thanks to the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder — this year celebrating its 75th anniversary — for kind permission to reprint the article up top.

The excellent staff of the library at the Minnesota History Center is forever essential to my work. Thanks also to the Minneapolis Public Library, and the University of Minnesota’s Wilson and Music Libraries.

My wife Jenny is unbelievably kind and patient, as you might imagine.

Selected References — More Than Any Other Blog!

St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 28, 1939 ad “Tri Club Presents Louis Armstrong” and “Moonlight Dance Trips” p. 9

St. Paul Dispatch, July 28, 1939 ad “Tri Club Presents Louis Armstrong” p. 8

“Moonlight Dance Trips” and other ads for rides on the Capitol were ubiquitous in the warm seasons of 1939 in the Twin Cities. The one above happens to be from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 28, 1939, from the University of Minnesota newspaper collections.

Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, 1939:

— July 21 “Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong Coming to Coliseum Ballroom, Friday, July 28” p 1
— July 21 ad with Crosby/Armstrong photo, p 3
— July 28 “Louis Armstrong and Band Play at the Coliseum Ballroom Tonight for Swing Fans” p 1
— July 28 “Hear a Noted Artist Tonight” p 2
— Aug 4 “Crowd Applauds Louis Armstrong Band; Rumor Cuts Attendance” p 1
— Aug 4 “Twin Town Talk” p 4

Bergreen, Laurence. 1997. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life. Broadway Books.

Jones, Max, and Chilton, John. 1988. Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, 1900-1971. Da Capo.

Kenney, William Howland. 2005. Jazz on the River. U of Chicago.

Maccabee, Paul. 1981-1995. Research collection for John Dillinger Slept Here. MN Historical Soc. library.

Rust, Brian A. L. 1978. Jazz Records, 1897-1942. Arlington House Publishers.

Interview with Arlo Leach

The Hump Night Thumpers (with Arlo Leach, singing at right)
Battle of the Jug Bands, Minneapolis, 2007

Arlo Leach is a musician, songwriter, and the leader of The Hump Night Thumpers, a class in jug band music at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. The class also acts as a gig-performing band.

The Thumpers won the 2007 Battle of the Jug Bands, an annual competitive goof held in Minneapolis. The Battle’s traveling trophy, a 1936 Holliwood-brand waffle iron, has been proudly displayed at the Old Town for the past year.

The winning band also chooses the next year’s judges, and Arlo responded positively to my ~~incessant whining~~ impressive application to be a judge at this year’s competition. YESSSS! The Celestial Monochord will help choose the winner of the 2008 Battle, which is this Sunday, February 10 at the Cabooze Bar.

I fired questions at Arlo in one email, and he fired back answers in another. Many sincere thanks to him.

— — —

CM: Your year as keeper of the waffle iron is coming to an end. How does it feel to be handing it over to the next winner?

AL: We tend to take our performances pretty seriously, so it’s actually a relief to know that a repeat victory is basically prohibited. We’re going to be a lot more relaxed and I’m looking forward to just enjoying a whole day of jug band music … a unique opportunity.

CM: Was there a ticker tape parade down State Street when you came back home with the waffle iron? What did the people at Old Town say?

AL: As the instructor of the class that is the Hump Night Thumpers, my credibility went way up! Everyone at the school was excited and I received spontaneous applause at staff meetings and performances for weeks. The school has a monthly First Friday event, and at the next First Friday, we hosted a jam session and served free waffles to all participants. I don’t think the Battle organizers realize just how excited we all were about this!

CM: It took me a while to understand what the heck your band, the Hump Night Thumpers, really is. How did it get started?

AL: The Old Town School is really great about letting teachers try out new classes, so I offered to teach a class on the Anthology of American Folk Music. To my surprise, nobody seemed to know what that was and the class wasn’t very successful. After a few sessions, I suggested focusing on just one style of music from the Anthology — jug band music — and we had an instant success. The class has been running for three years now and it’s sold out most sessions. I guess there was a lot of pent-up demand for jug band music here.

CM: Why jug band music? Why don’t you teach something else?

AL: I also teach general guitar classes at the school, but my motivation for teaching music is that I want to give people a creative outlet. Jug band music is much more accessible, so rather than spending months and years learning to play guitar, you can jump right in with a kazoo and join the band.

CM: What’s your teaching method? If I signed up to be a Hump Night Thumper, what would I experience?

AL: I have some warm and outgoing students who really make the class what it is. As soon as a new person walks in the room, someone hands them an instrument, and someone else gives them tips on how to play it. We find a song they’d like to sing; they get a nickname; pretty soon they’re up on stage at one of our gigs. I supply the songs and give direction on arrangements, but the other students provide the momentum that makes the class so fun.

CM: Do you use the one-room schoolhouse model, where the more knowledgeable kids teach the less experienced? Is it tough to decide when to intervene in what’s happening?

AL: This is the third question in a row where you anticipated my answer from the previous question! Yes, that’s the model. The only problem is that new people might find it hard to learn new instruments, and I like everyone to play a variety of instruments. So, we started an introductory class where I could focus on the playing technique for each of the instruments before students joined the main group … but that wasn’t very successful and we dropped it. In the big class, I’m not able to provide much one-on-one help, but we’ll stop and focus on different things from time to time.

CM: I imagine different classes have different personalities. I certainly hear a lot of different textures in the Hump Night Thumper CD, Hare of the Jug. It’s a varied collection.

AL: Actually, the overall tone of the class has been the same, but we’ve had some unique individuals in the group. The Members page at humpnightthumpers.com will give you an idea. Also, some of the songs have been sung by different people over the years, and it’s fun to see what style different people put into the songs. That CD was recorded over two years with something like 20 different members.

CM: What’s it like to bring the Hump Night Thumpers to Minneapolis for the Battle of the Jug Bands? That must be quite an expedition!

AL: We all leave the same place and arrive at the same place but by different routes! Some will fly and some will drive; some will go up and back the same day and others will make a vacation of it. My wife and I have friends that we’ll stay with, so I haven’t paid much attention to the logistics for the others, but they’ll be there with their sequins and bow ties.

It’s funny, by the way: we first heard about the Battle of the Jug Bands about a week before the event three years ago, when our class had just started. Everyone immediately wanted to go! At that time it was too late to register, but when it came around again the next year we were all over it. Going to Minneapolis in February is not a small undertaking, but I love how enthusiastic these folks are. Have jug, will travel.

CM: You’re teaching jugband music at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. I picture a lot of ghosts listening in — and not just the 60’s and 70’s, but the 20’s and 30’s, and beyond. What do you think about that? You make it part of the Humpnighter’s experience, don’t you?

AL: For me, jug band music is all about the 20’s and 30’s, and I love finding stories about the original musicians and sharing them with the class. Also, jug band music is a small niche, so it’s been fairly easy to meet the experts in the field and pick up stories from them. I’m just trying to collect all the knowledge I can because I love the music and the history so much.

CM: Among the many photos included with the Hare of the Jug CD is one of you standing next to Gus Cannon’s grave. I love that. Tell me about that photo.

AL: I think it’s kind of a blues fan tradition to try finding the graves of your blues heroes, so a couple years ago I made an expedition to Memphis to find a handful of jug band musicians. I had known about Cannon’s grave because Del Goldfarb organized a fundraiser about ten years ago to add a larger gravestone. He gave me directions, although it still wasn’t easy to find! Now you can zoom right in on a Google map I set up.

That trip is when I learned, by the way, that Will Shade is buried in an unmarked grave in a pauper’s cemetery. That inspired my own gravestone benefit project, which is well underway and will conclude with a ceremony in Memphis in April or May. You can read more about that at www.willshadetribute.com.

CM: I’ve enjoyed your disc Show Biz, about being a struggling singer-songwriter. You already sound like an old hand — there’s a lot of long hours of thought in that CD. What’s it like to think about Show Biz today, a decade down the road?

AL: I tend to look at my previous work and think, “Oh man, that is so amateur,” so I’m glad you liked it! In a way, the Ancestors CD is the flip side of that, because Show Biz was about trying to become a professional performer, and Ancestors was about realizing that you can make a lot of great music without giving up your day job. It was a good experience to spend a few years plugging myself and trying to make a career of it, but now my interest in music is to learn and get better, rather than to make money somehow.

CM: Your CD Music of My Ancestors is partly a response to The Anthology of American Folk Music. Obviously, so is The Celestial Monochord. When did you first hear Harry Smith’s anthology?

AL: I was reading a lot about Dylan and kept hearing references to the Anthology, so I finally ordered a copy and was instantly blown away. I’d heard pre-war music before, here and there, but this was such a great collection that I lost interest in my own stuff. I just wanted to play “Peg and Awl” at every gig! I still laugh when I read those little headlines in Harry Smith’s liner notes. What a treasure.

CM: You must have had a deep history with folk music growing up — your parents named you after Guthrie, after all. So, did the Anthology influence you beyond what you heard growing up? What did it teach you that didn’t already know?

AL: I was brought up on Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran, with a little Dylan and Joan Baez thrown in, but I didn’t have access to this earlier music for a long time. The pre-war music is a paradox, though. On the one hand, it seems ancient, from another era; but it’s actually just a few decades earlier than Buddy Holly. I haven’t wrapped my head around that yet, but I think it’s easy to romanticize this distant time and forget that maybe things weren’t that different then. The book Escaping the Delta addresses this topic a bit, by the way.

CM: Music of My Ancestors really looks the anthology right in the eye, responds to it directly. It seems to have come out of a lot of sincerely affectionate, playful time spent with the Anthology and its genres. Anyway, that what it sounds like, and I really enjoy that CD. Tell me about why you made this CD. What came out of it for you?

AL: I was so uninterested in my own music after hearing the Anthology that the Ancestors project was a compromise. It allowed me to keep songwriting, while also indulging in this new interest. My interest in original music has continued to wane, though, and now I’m playing virtually nothing but jug band music. The stuff is addictive.

I’m actually planning to record some replicas of the classic jug band recordings, not for release, just for private study. Learning to play, and especially learning to record, definitely enhances your enjoyment of the music.

CM: What’s next for you? And what’s next for the Hump Night Thumpers?

AL: Will Shade! In Memphis! April 2008! You should come!

The Devil in the White City

… all his stories are decorated with flamboyant draperies, intended by him to strengthen the plausibility of this statements. In talking, he has the appearance of candor, becomes pathetic at times when pathos will serve him best, uttering his words with a quaver in his voice, often accompanied by a moistened eye, then turning quickly with a determined and forceful method of speech, as if indignation or resolution had sprung out of tender memories that has touched his heart.

This is a police detective’s description of H. H. Holmes, the masterful liar and serial murderer of Erik Larson’s book — one of the devils in his white city. The description comes late in the book, by which time it comes off as a wonderfully perverse joke shared between Larson and you, the reader who has by now come to think of Larson in exactly these terms. Larson is a very slippery and hypnotic liar. Like the guards who mourn when Holmes is executed for his murders, you wish Larson could go on lying to you much longer than he does.

Larson’s misdeeds are not serious, and I probably care about them only because of my own struggle to learn the lost details behind Moonshiners Dance. Often, I would sell my soul to the Devil to discover the level of detail Larson seems to have for events that took place 35 years before the subject of my own research.

Early in the book, Larson describes the first meeting between Holmes and one of his victims. As if to torment me personally, Larson places the meeting in a music shop in Minneapolis:

Minneapolis was small, somnolent, and full of Swedish and Norwegian farmers as charming as cornstalks. Holmes was handsome, warm, and obviously wealthy, and he lived in Chicago, the most feared and magnetic of cities. Even during their first meeting he touched her; his eyes deposited a bright blue hope. When he left the store that first day, as motes of dust filled the space he left behind, her own life seemed drab beyond endurance. A clock ticked. Something had to change.

A wonderful passage, but … but DID a clock tick? IS that what the dust did? Did ANY of this really happen? No footnote is provided. It is clear, though, that Larson has studied late 19th-century Chicago much more closely than Minneapolis, which was not “full” of farmers of any description. It was a pretty rough place, and about as densely populated with prostitutes, drunks, businessmen and laborers of all ethnicities as Chicago was. Ask anyone from Lake Wobegon — they’ll tell you about Minneapolis.

More substantial stretches of fiction get footnoted as such. Larson describes Holmes’ tour, with his wife and sister-in-law, of the Union Stockyards —

Holmes was unmoved; Minnie and Anna were horrified but also strangely thrilled by the efficiency of the carnage.

On the same day, they also saw the 1893 Columbian Exposition, known as the White City —

Minnie and Anna rapidly grew tired. They exited, with relief, onto the terrace over the North Canal and walked into the Court of Honor. Here once again Anna found herself nearly overwhelmed. It was noon by now, the sun directly overhead.

The footnotes acknowledge that the description, while long and detailed and vivid, is entirely bogus, except that it traces the SORT of tour that Chicago residents often gave to visiting relatives.

I love this book, and find the paperback edition’s blurbage to be mostly well earned. It is indeed a gripping page-turner, thanks to Larson’s use of every tool in the novelist’s bag. I have enough interest in urban geography to have taken a half-dozen graduate-level courses in the subject while I was in academia (which Larson seems to detest). Reading The Devil in the White City, I often wished I’d had it in grad school to get a much better feel for this Columbian Exposition that everyone thought was so important. Likewise, I grew up in the Chicago area and often visited the Museum of Science and Industry without ever grasping that it was the last remaining structure of a history-making fair [see Comments]. I wish The Devil in the White City had been published in 1976 and placed in my hands then.

As a developing writer of history, there’s a great deal to learn from Larson’s work that I haven’t often found in the, let us say, “less imaginative” histories I ordinarily read. Now and then, I wanted to slap myself on the forehead and say “Of course!” For example, I know very well what the weather was like on the night of Christmas 1924, when the Victoria Cafe opened in St. Paul, but Erik Larson reminded me that — and how — that weather matters.

The Devil in the White City, like any other measuring device, is useful precisely because it goes too far. You can use it to get a fix on how far you’d like to go in contriving history only because Larson’s dial leaves a few more tick marks to the right of your own level. To me, much of the drama in this very engrossing book is in watching as both Holmes and Larson get away with murder, and in following the details of exactly how they succeed so well.

Snapshots

For the first time in years, I’ve been spending some time in antique shops and second-hand stores — I just bought my first house, you see, and it needs stuff. Although I hadn’t even noticed it before, I’m now startled and saddened to see that the shops always have family photos for sale.

There are formal portraits of men in suits, group photos of people gathered around a bride and her groom, teenagers in living rooms holding brass wind instruments. Occasionally, in the back room of an antique shop, I’ll find a great groaning mass of photos, with landslides of first communions and summer days at the beach sloughing off its edges.

Naturally, I’m quite sensitive about it now, having dedicated myself to researching the lives of several obscure figures in the 1920’s music scene in Minnesota. There are people whose lives I’ve labored over for hundreds of hours — I’ve lost sleep fearing that their lives ended in despair — without even having any idea of what the people looked like.

Every time I see another orphaned photo, I wonder if it’s of Tom Gates, co-leader of a band with Frank Cloutier before Frank moved to the Victoria Cafe. Gates was 20 years Frank’s senior, and had been the leader of a concert band in Mason City when Meredith Wilson — writer of The Music Man — was a boy there. I don’t know what became of him, and I’ve never found a photo of him.

Maybe it’s of Marguerite Lane, daughter of John J. Lane who ran the Coliseum and the Boulevards of Paris dance halls. When she saw her dad arrive, he used to flick the lights on and off so the band knew to switch from jazz to the old-fashioned dance music the boss preferred. I have no idea what she looked like.

Almost ten years ago, I read Martin Gilbert’s A Complete History of World War One. A single passage sometimes comes back to me when I’m in an antique shop, confronted with an anonymous family photo. It relates an event from one of the earliest moments of the War, when nobody quite yet knew how to act or what they were supposed to be doing:

As Feuchtinger’s regiment reached the Russian trenches, the Russians turned to flee. One of them, being closely chased, and apparently without his rifle, stopped all of a sudden, turned around, held out his right hand and put his left hand into his tunic pocket. As he did so, Feuchtinger plunged in his bayonet. “I see his blood redden his uniform, hear him moan and groan as he twists with the bayonet in his young body. I am seized with terror. I pull my blood-stained bayonet from the dead body. Wanting to fold his hands, I see in the left hand a crumpled photo of his wife and child.”

A photograph, like a good war story, allows us to imagine the facts we thought we’d been taught. It turns data points — the sequence events in a battle, for example, or the branches in a family tree — into real knowledge.

By offering up his photograph, the Russian soldier was offering the one thing he carried that most reminded himself that he was still a person. He wasn’t so much asking Feuchtinger to look at his wife and child, he was saying look at me — look at ME. It was supposed to be his membership card to the human race.

I sometimes wonder where that very photo is today — is it bearing witness as it was made to do? Or has it rotted into the Russian soil? Or is it for sale in a Minneapolis antique shop? Somebody really ought to at least know.

Note: The photo was courtesy Square America, a defunct and brilliant exhibit of “vintage snapshots and vernacular photography.” As they said in Down By Law, it is a sad and beautiful world …

Is The Universe Expanding?

Library of Congress image, catalog no. Lamb 2272

This is the first — and probably last — in a series, Ask The Celestial Monochord, where readers get the answers they deserve, given that they asked The Celestial Monochord. A reader writes (without asking anything at all):

Just wanted to let you know about an article in the Sept.-Oct. 2007 issue of “American Scientist,” p. 383: “Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale?” by Michael J. Disney. I found it interesting because it agrees with my view that current theories do not form a stable paradigm, or, as I’ve said to people (who disbelieve me, of course), “In 20-40 years, the universe will no longer be expanding.” I have no idea, of course, what theory will take its place.

Well … you’re probably crackers, although I haven’t read the article. I did take a few classes in the philosophy of science in grad school, though, so my crackers have something your crackers haven’t got — a diploma, as Professor Marvel would say.

I see at least two ways that old ideas are abandoned in science. One happened to cold fusion. The idea is interesting for a little while, but sooner or later it just turns out to be BS, and is chucked overboard. You seem to be saying that will happen to universal expansion, and if so, I bet you’re wrong.

There’s another way, and there, you’re almost certainly right. I think of the “spiral nebulae.” They were noticed and listed and described alongside all the other fuzzy patches in the sky. Once it was realized that they were “island universes,” like our own Milky Way except millions of light years away, they increasingly got called galaxies, but the full transition in both terminology and mental image took decades.

Then galaxies were thought of as nice patches of stars interspersed with some dust and gas. But as time went on, they came to be thought of as dense areas of dark matter, with stars and gas and dust just “floating on top.” Today, a galaxy is no more stars and interstellar clouds than a pint of Guinness is bubbles. Probably, professional astronomers and younger amateur enthusiasts have trouble thinking about galaxies any other way.

It takes a historian of science to go back and try to recover exactly what people meant when they said “galaxy” in, say, 1970. A historian who shows that these “galaxies” have been abandoned might be widely regarded as a nit-picking dilettante among professional astronomers — a judgment that would have its own merits and limitations.

In any case, my point is that some scientific ideas suddenly go extinct, while the rest evolve into new ideas without most people really noticing. I bet universal expansion and the “big bang” (a term already used more in the company of cameras and microphones than other scientists) will meet the latter fate — as will almost everything in science. And that’s one of the things that recommends science as a way of making sense of the world — its thinking simply grows up in response to new information.

A Guest of Honor

King of ragtime

One night in Tucson in April 1988, on a whim, I turned on a TV. I hadn’t owned one for the previous four years, and wouldn’t for another six, so anything I saw that night would have made a strong, if dream-like, impression.

By chance, what happened to be on PBS was the Houston Grand Opera’s production of John Adams’ minimalist opera, Nixon in China.

I remember having no idea what to make of it. I was 23 and had recently seen Koyannisquatsi, with its score by Philip Glass — my first exposure to minimalism. My deepest immersion in opera to that point had been an afternoon at a University of Arizona production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte.

I no longer have any recollection from that night of Nixon in China‘s music — maybe I couldn’t make enough sense of it at the time to register an imprint. What I do remember was a colossal Air Force One taxiing onto the stage. Now THAT made an impression … which I guess is what Air Force One is for, no matter where it turns up.

Mostly, I recall feeling ill-at-ease with the idea of a grand opera about Nixon’s trip to China. Was the composer a Republican? Was this propaganda? Wasn’t high art a liberal thing? And wasn’t opera supposed to be about the olden times, not something that happened in 1972? I would have had no qualms about PBS airing Wagner’s Parsifal — but Nixon in China?

Today, I’m reading Edward Berlin’s great King of Ragtime, a biography of composer Scott Joplin. It’s not an ordinary bio. Before this book, much of what was known about Joplin was legend and assumption. Berlin conducted and collected the most minutely meticulous research available and his book catalogs the many questions raised by the new information. When Berlin takes a position, it is the most cautious, cool-headed judgment possible. I find the approach intensely gripping and beautiful … maybe it’s me.

Anyway, it turns out that Joplin wrote and staged the world’s first ragtime opera, entitled A Guest of Honor. Its subject was the 1901 visit of African American leader Booker T. Washington to the White House, where he dined with President Teddy Roosevelt. (Note: A reader suggests some controversy over the subject of this opera. See comments to this post.)

The visit was politically risky for the President, according to Berlin [euphemism added by me]:

Newspapers in the South condemned the invitation as an unwarranted attempt to place the black man on the same social plane as the white man; Roosevelt’s act put him in a category with Ulysses S. Grant, and he would never be forgiven. The Sedalia Sentinel printed a poem on page one entitled “[N-word]s in the White House,” which concludes with a black man marrying the President’s daughter.

Scott Joplin seems to have had kinder feelings toward the event. That a black educator would participate in that symbolic ritual of advancement, The White House dinner, seems to have meant a lot to the composer, who was then working to elevate ragtime — widely disparaged at the time as degenerate black noise — to a high art form.

In 1902, he named his latest two-step, “The Strenuous Life,” after a phrase in one of Roosevelt’s speeches. He staged the ragtime opera A Guest of Honor in 1903 — barely two years after the events it depicted.

So this was an opera about events as contemporary as Katrina’s landfall is today, in a form about as new as gypsy punk. In comparison, Nixon in China was conservative, portraying events of 15 years before in a 20-year-old music genre.

Working out these comparisons in more depth might bare a little fruit. While A Guest of Honor was probably meant to elevate a “low” form, some might say Nixon in China went the other direction, increasing the public’s (including my own) awareness of minimalism, a high art “descending” into popularity.

And so on … when Booker T. Washington visited Teddy Roosevelt, who was Nixon and who was China?

But, for anyone seeking to compare the two operas, the biggest obstacle would be our collective amnesia — the same universal, maddening, heart-sickening forgetfulness I’ve encountered since beginning my own original research into music history.

Joplin brought A Guest of Honor to less than a dozen stages across the Midwest in September 1903, but — according to the best speculation Berlin can support — the production was robbed of its receipts in Springfield, Illinois. Unable even to pay the bill for the touring company’s stay at a Springfield boarding house, Joplin was forced to leave behind a trunk as collateral. It contained some of his personal effects, including unpublished manuscripts that may have included the score of A Guest of Honor. Those items were never recovered. Although a copyright for A Guest of Honor was applied for, the copyright office never received the customary copies of the score for its files.

In a book full of careful modifiers and provisional judgments, one sentence stands out for its disheartening brevity: “A Guest of Honor is lost.”

Of course, various productions of Nixon in China are available from Amazon and iTunes in a variety of formats. Its memory is safe, despite having been composed in what I think of as our forgetful era. John Adams himself seems on track to be long remembered as one of the 20th Century’s major composers.

Though we’re more likely to learn about him on Antiques Roadshow or History Detectives than on Great Performances, the researcher who stumbles across an overlooked copy of A Guest of Honor would be remembered at least as long as Adams. Like Berlin’s King of Ragtime itself, the thought puts me in the mood to work.

New Monochord World Headquarters

The Celestial Monochord world headquarters have moved.

The photo at left shows my view from the apartment we’ve occupied for the past six years (you can click on it for a larger image). I stared at this wall as I founded and developed The Celestial Monochord, as I learned to play clawhammer banjo, and as I became interested in the Minnesota music scene of the 1920’s. I quit drinking looking at this wall. I lost a cat and gained two. I got married. When I came home from my first Battle of the Jug Bands, I came home to this view. It all happened looking at this wall.

Now my tribe and I have moved into a real house, with great views to the east, south, and west. It has a yard in which to set up my telescopes (there’s a bright erupting comet in Perseus, by the way, which you should check out). It has a porch on which to play my banjo. And a dedicated office where I can write about fulgurite for you, and from which I can revive the memories of dance bands long dead. The sun and moon rise at the foot of my bed (see photo on the right).

Buying a house was very exciting — especially if you consider debilitating stress to be a form of “excitement.” Consider the mortgage crisis, just for starters. And the old apartment had beautiful woodwork and the best caretakers/friends you could hope for. But the new digs are a great leap forward, and The Monochord should be extremely well served by them.

Thanks for your patience and check back soon and often.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

(Robert Fludd's Celestial Monochord, 1618)

Who writes this stuff?
Kurt Gegenhuber. I live in Minneapolis and make my living as, essentially, the one-man Editorial Office for several science journals: tech editor, image editor, peer-review shepherd, advisor, marketing copywriter, webmaster. Before that, I edited and produced archaeological and historical survey reports for a Cultural Resource Management firm. I'm an amateur historian, and have degrees in astronomy (basically, a bachelor's in physics) and English (a master's). I can sort of play banjo, clawhammer style.

What is this blog about?
The Celestial Monochord tries to provide "think pieces" about history, music, and science. The original concept — which I still play with sometimes — was to write about astronomy and so-called "roots music." My best pieces are usually frank contemplations on what listening and thinking is like for me.

By early 2006, this blog became nearly impossible to write. I started doing history scholarship and preservation activism related to "Moonshiners Dance," recorded in St. Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and The Victoria Cafe Orchestra, a Minnesota dance band. Suddenly, seeming authoritative and legitimate felt very important and I was no longer free to make a fool of myself. That freedom was essential to the blog's very premise; I've been trying to recover that in recent years.

What is "The Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues"?
The IAHB was a spurious think tank I founded in March 2005. Back then, a fake scientific research institute seemed funny. These days, they are calling all the shots and the joke has slipped through my hands for now.

How do I know when something new is posted?
The Celestial Monochord now has a mailing list to alert subscribers when new content appears. Of course, everybody has their own way of following blogs — RSS feeds, Google Reader, checking back the old fashioned way, etc. If an email from me works best for you, let me know and I'll add you to the list. All the usual goodies apply — I'll try to keep your address hidden from other subscribers, I'll never share your info with anybody for any reason, you can unsubscribe at any time, etc. Typically, I'll send the alert about 24 hours after an entry appears, since I often pick at new entries until I'm satisfied with them. After about a day, they're aged to perfection. Whatever your method, thanks for reading The Celestial Monochord.

How do I cite this stuff?
The Celestial Monochord has been sited in a few published works, which I like. Check with the publisher (or professor) to see if they have their own format preferences. Otherwise, I suggest something like: Gegenhuber, Kurt. 2006. Scientists say so. The Celestial Monochord. (online blog.) January 23, 2006. http://www.celestialmonochord.org/2006/01/scientists_say_.html

What does "celestial monochord" mean?
A monochord is any one-stringed instrument. The "celestial" part ultimately goes back to Pythagoras (580-500 BC), who is said to have studied the mathematical patterns in a single, stretched, vibrating string, and saw evidence of underlying mathematical ideas in the Universe's functioning. Ever since, some people have believed the Universe is somehow rooted in music and that figuring out its harmonies mathematically is like reading the mind of God.

For the cover of his influential 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, eccentric record collector and mystic Harry Smith used a 1618 drawing by English mystic Robert Fludd. It shows the hand of God tuning the Celestial Monochord (see above, or go look at your own copy of The Anthology). To me, the Celestial Monochord symbolizes deep, idiosyncratic exploration of music and cosmology.

Who pays for this?
I do. It costs some money and I pay it out-of-pocket. In other words, at the moment, this site runs at a total loss as a matter of policy. My research into Moonshiners Dance is getting extremely expensive, however, and I'm thinking about adding a way to support it via PayPal. What to you think? (Someone once offered to give me a donation, but I turned them down.)

I have a suggestion for a Celestial Monochord entry. Do you want it?
Absolutely! I've written several posts in response to user suggestions, and I'd be happy to credit you. I have more ideas than I can get to, but it's stimulating to get suggestions, and I wanna know what people want to read about. So please send me your suggestion and I'll think it over carefully. Maybe include a link and why you think it fits The Celestial Monochord.

Where'd you get the design? Why isn't it better (or worse)?
The current design is intended to faintly evoke the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith. A blog inspired by an LP boxed set of 78 RPM records is not supposed to be cool, people. I mess with the look of the Monochord now and then, casually, as time permits. My priority is always content, content, content.

Is The Celestial Monochord copyrighted? Can I quote it? Can I link to it?
Please quote it and please link to it often, but please also credit The Celestial Monochord for the words and ideas you get from it. The illustrations at The Celestial Monochord are almost always from somebody else. Whether they're public domain, or used by permission, or even used in a way I consider legal, varies. (I really try very hard to be legal, scrupulous, or just, and usually some combination thereof.) Check with me if you want to use them and I'll help you figure out what's the right thing to do. I think of each Celestial Monochord entry as an idea for another, larger, more lucrative project — a documentary, an article, a book, a CD. If you wish to create a commercial work based on something from The Celestial Monochord, please secure my prior permission. To be more specific,
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

What’s In A Name?

Moe Thompson founded The Victoria Cafe

My article on the links between “Moonshiners Dance” — one of the selections on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music — and Minnesota’s Jewish communities has just been published at Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. None of that article’s information has appeared here at The Celestial Monochord, or anywhere else, so Monochord readers and enthusiasts of “Anthology-type music” may want to check it out.

It’s a little anxiety-producing to publish on a subject in which I am so inexpert — the history of Minnesota’s Jews — especially for what must be Zeek‘s fairly erudite audience. Also, because I’m constantly finding new insights, I’m painfully aware that anything I write will quickly seem outdated to me.

But as soon as I began researching The Anthology‘s “Moonshiners Dance” in early 2006, I saw that the Jewish aspects of the story I was uncovering would need to be told somewhere, by somebody. The Jewish connections to the recording made me sit up straight and listen, because of a certain hazy constellation of issues I’d already been toying with for some time …

In November 1963, Newsweek ran an infamous article “exposing” Bob Dylan as the middle-class son of a Midwestern appliance dealer. It included a photograph of Dylan with the caption “What’s in a name?” — a sardonic reference to the revelation that Bob Dylan started life as Robert Zimmerman.

Exactly why this was presented as scandalous is open to interpretation. The article attacks Dylan for portraying himself as real and authentic while simultaneously hiding and misrepresenting his past. But as I read it, the article treats the specifics of Dylan’s past as the real scandal, as what really undermined Dylan’s authenticity. The implication was that Dylan turned out to be the least authentic things you can be — Midwestern, middle class, and Jewish. If a folksinger is supposed to be one of “The People,” surely he can’t be THAT.

And it wasn’t just Newsweek. The post-War folk and blues revivals often seem to me pathologically obsessed with authenticity and commercialism, as abstractions, and the idea of Jewishness seems to have gotten drawn occasionally into those neuroses (in part, by conflating Jewishness and commerce — a conflation my own arguments have a habit of reproducing).

Those revered pre-WWII Southern musicians on The Anthology and so many other reissues actually played and loved quite a lot of Tin Pan Alley popular songs and tunes from the New York stage. Dock Boggs himself based much of his repertoire on “blues queens” who gave stridently commercial, nontraditional, and “inauthentic” performances.

Today, younger revivalists like myself have benefited from writers like Elijah Wald (Escaping the Delta) and Norm Cohen (Long Steel Rail) for whom boundaries between authenticity and artifice, between commerce and tradition, are pretty much gone from their world views. You might say it’s the new orthodoxy among today’s authorities. I think Bob Zimmerman and Elliott Adnopoz could have kept their birth names today.

I often think of Jon Pankake, who Dylan remembers unkindly in Chronicles Volume One (“a folk music purist … breathed fire through his nose”). But you should read Pankake’s liner notes to New Lost City Ramblers: Out Standing in their Field, dedicated as they are to showing a constant sloshing back and forth between professional popular music and supposedly pure amateur folk music — the permeability of those boundaries.

In a 2006 article in the New York Times, Jody Rosen wrote about his work to reassert the important influence that the professional and commonly Jewish music-makers of Tin Pan Alley have had on Rock n’ Roll. The “roots” of Rock, he argues, run through the Brill Building as much as through Robert Johnson and his supposed crossroads.

He even takes a jab at the “rock snobs” who would not be caught “without Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and an Alan Lomax field recording or two” in their record collection.

At least in the text of that particular article, Rosen takes the wrong approach. He’s absolutely right to assert the importance of Tin Pan Alley to today’s popular forms, but in doing so, he lets The Anthology keep its “authenticity,” the myth that it’s the pure product of amateur, oral transmissions stretching back to antiquity.

Instead of trying to sweep The Anthology (etc.) off the table and replace it with Tin Pan Alley as the proper source of Rock, why not keep The Anthology on the table, and show that it’s a much more commercial, worldly document than we’ve been told? To me, that’s the more deeply transformative insight.

And so … all of this, rightly or wrongly, was one of the threads running through my thinking on the day I first discovered that Moe Thompson, the Tin Pan Alley-style songwriter and vaudevillian, was behind the founding of The Victoria Cafe.