Tag: Minnesota history

A Guide to My Amnesia Theater

My new essay on Moonshiner’s Dance, America’s musical geography, and how to revive extinct meanings: What’s the deal?

Monochord headquarters has been celebrating the publication of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: America Changed Through Music, a collection of new essays about the mesmerizing and influential 1952 boxed set of late 1920s and early 1930s recordings.

My contribution to the collection is the product of eleven years of research, thinking, re-thinking, and activism. It’s called “Smith’s Amnesia Theater: ‘Moonshiner’s Dance’ in Minnesota.”

I have oceans of stuff to say about it. For now, I’ll focus on the simple question, “What just happened?”

The new book and essay: What are they?

The book of essays is by a variety of writers, musicians, and scholars, some of whom attended a 2012 conference in London marking the 60th anniversary of Smith’s landmark boxed set.

My presentation at the London conference became the seed of my essay in the book. It focuses on one cut in the Anthology that had been otherwise neglected by historians and other researchers: “Moonshiner’s Dance — Part I,” recorded in 1927 in St. Paul, Minnesota, by the Victoria Cafe Orchestra.

That recording is the Anthology‘s only Northern cut — the only recording unambiguously by musicians from outside the American South. I once made a map of the Anthology — seemingly the only such map anybody’s ever made. It looks a lot like a map of the Confederacy.

For the first time, my essay releases a major chunk of my research into “Moonshiner’s Dance.” To my surprise, I found that answering the simple question “What is this recording?” required a wide-ranging investigation into geography, history, identity, and meaning.

All this new information, the essay argues, matters to how we understand the Anthology, and to how we might encounter any expression left to us by a gone world. The essay is an impassioned plea for open-minded and imaginative curiosity about America’s cultural geography.

“Although ignored, the 1920s recordings of Twin Cities musicians are folk music that, on myriad terms, consciously and sometimes emphatically testifies to the performers’ identities and what they understood to be at stake in their existence.” – Smith’s Amnesia Theater

I meant the essay to feel like a revue, a little like Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The curtain opens on a scene that turns out to be another curtain that opens to reveal a different scene that also becomes a curtain, and so on. If you get bored with my essay, don’t worry — it will take off in another direction soon.

So far, the most consistent comments I’ve received is that the writing is “beautiful” and the scholarship is original. I guess most people try to be kind. If you look for it, you may find humor in there, wisecracks, hidden Easter eggs, and certainly a lot of pictures.

Where can a person read this essay?

This is a scholarly publication, so the authors don’t get paid — I just want my truth out there, and I deeply appreciate your interest.

— Email me. The book’s cost makes this book (and my message) far too rare a commodity. So, if you email me for a copy of my essay, I will very gladly send you a PDF. There are other pieces in the book you’ll definitely also want to read, and holding the book in your hand, you can see a community thinking about the Anthology — it’s a pity it isn’t priced more democratically.

— Please ask your public and university libraries to get the book. Don’t be shy — do it! Providing you with materials that are difficult to get on your own is a big reason librarians exist. Besides, if they get the book for you, it will presumably be there for the rest of your community.

— Please buy the book. For now, Routledge priced the hardback ($152) mainly for university and public libraries, profs in the field, etc. I’m currently seeing buying options on Amazon for around $100. There are Kindle and eBook options for $38-$55.

— At the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, the book is now available for reading and photocopying at the Gale Family Library. That’s where this whole adventure started for me in May 2006, so I find this very satisfying.

What’s the deal with the Victoria Theater?

When I started all this, nobody who’d heard the Anthology could forget the sound of Moonshiner’s Dance. It was, in its own way and degree, infamous around the world, partly for having mysterious origins.

At the same time, nobody in St. Paul understood that the Victoria building (a familiar, vacant, and deteriorating old building down on University Avenue) was responsible for an utterly unique contribution to an influential American masterpiece. Nobody had ever researched the building beyond an architectural study and cursory literature searches.

I set about trying to reconstruct the meanings of the place. I soon believed St. Paul needed to understand what it had. And I wanted Anthology fans to understand that the mystery was solved, and the answers really matter. I wanted to reconnect the lines and let the power flow.

Then, in 2008, the Victoria Theater was threatened with demolition. The neighborhood association asked me to write the nomination to get the building named as an official heritage preservation site.

Having spent two years editing historic and archaeological survey reports as an editor for a Cultural Resource Management company, I jumped at the chance. And I fought to get the city ordinance passed. Then, I got to work on this essay for the Anthology conference and book.

Although I had spent years in academia, it was this experience that taught me what Harry Smith surely knew—that scholarship matters, and that it can matter as much in its absence as in its presence. – Smith’s Amnesia Theater

Now, local neighborhood and global community would both get the chance to think about the kinship Harry Smith’s art had built between them. Despite some exhilarating successes, I still despair that my message will ever quite sink in. At least I’ve sung a little of my song.

Your questions, requests, or suggestions about the Victoria Theater’s future should go to the director of the Frogtown Neighborhood Association, Caty Royce at caty@frogtownmn.org.

What’s next? A book on “Moonshiner’s Dance”?

I wonder. I already look like “that guy” who won’t stop talking about his old polka record, but readers of my essay will hopefully appreciate that there really are worlds to explore here.

Only a tiny fraction of my findings made it into the essay. HAVE I GOT STORIES. If I died tomorrow, I’d be glad I got this essay into the world, but too many big connections and haunting details would die with me. And to my eyes, each aspect of the story magnifies and multiplies the meanings of the others. I’m not sure what to do about that.

For now, I just hope to go back to what I was up to before the Victoria Theater building, the London conference, and the essay took over my life. I hope I’ll try to write and research and get the stories to you, one way or another, before my time’s up.

Dry Manhattan in Minneapolis

Michael A. Lerner’s 2007 book, “Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City” and thoughts on geographies of memory

My parents were both born in 1925, so their earliest memories formed during Prohibition.

Mom’s father had a moonshine still in a room of their rural Wisconsin farmhouse, behind a door she was not allowed to open. Now 91, she can still smell the still’s awful stench and she associates it with the more traumatizing parts of what was often a very difficult childhood.

When I tell people that anecdote, I find they often have a hard time adjusting to the possibility that moonshine stills also existed outside of North and South Carolina. Yes, in the USA, Prohibition happened everywhere.

And it failed everywhere. I can almost guarantee that if you’re reading this within the United States and your digs were built before 1934, Noble Experiment moonshine was consumed between the walls of the room you’re in right now.

I’ve had Michael A. Lerner’s 2007 book, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, on my shelf for almost a decade during which I’ve been pursuing, often with great intensity, a Prohibition-related research project.

My procrastination in reading it was due to its geographic narrowness. Still, now that I’ve read it, I realize I hadn’t quite anticipated the book’s New York provincialism. It’s not just about NYC — it’s from a strictly NYC POV. Sometimes, it can barely see Hoboken from where it sits.

But point of view is a valuable tool for a writer (and even researcher). Dry Manhattan might be the best book I’ve read about Prohibition (I like it better than Okrent’s excellent Last Call) and I was foolish not to read it immediately in 2007. It’s provided me with a lot of research leads and context for my own findings. It also has me thinking fresh thoughts about my own work, what its own provincialisms are, and what the hidden value of them might be.

Lerner repeatedly argues for NYC’s importance to any understanding of Prohibition — i.e., that the premise of the book is valid. He does it often enough that he seems unsure we’ll buy the premise. (Not a bad instinct, it turns out.)

It’s easy to believe that New York helped set the cultural terms on which the rest of the country experienced Prohibition — at least in large cities. In defying the 18th Amendment, urbanites everywhere felt a specifically newyorkish sophistication. My own research on St. Paul’s “Moonshiner’s Dance” has produced many clear illustrations (a long essay to be published in the next six months or so will touch on this).

Lerner also argues for New York as perhaps the most important political turf for drys and wets alike. Just recall that Al Smith (who changed the national conversation) and FDR (who signed the national legislation) were both New York governors during their presidential bids.

And Lerner shows that the drys saw NYC as a test case. If they could make it there, they could make it anywhere — and inversely, if NYC didn’t sober up, Prohibition would flop nationwide.

His most transformative insight in that vein is that the drys failed to transform the USA because they could only conceive of it as a 19th century fantasy. New York City — with its energy, complexity, diversity, adaptability — was a better model for the real 20th century United States than anything the temperance folks could comprehend.

But there’s the rub. If New York City was too like everywhere else for Prohibition, then so was everywhere else.

Relentlessly, Lerner drops “in the city” or “in New York” into sentences that would’ve been about as true had they been said of any other American city (or, perish the thought, of any corner store at a farmland crossroads anywhere in flyover country). New York City, it often seems, is specified to keep the whole premise of the book from seeming moot.

Sometimes, there’s a blinding New Yorker’s vagueness about that big map “out there” in the middle of the country (where, incidentally, everybody is strangely familiar with New York).

After reading the chapter on Al Smith’s campaign, readers should google-up the 1928 presidential election results map. How that map and that chapter could coexist in the same universe is barely conceivable. What really happened in 1928?

And as a Twin Citian, I would also like to remind New Yorkers that the burning crosses greeting Al Smith were in Oklahoma. Even in Volstead’s rural Minnesota, such is scene is again barely conceivable. But that is a story for another book.

For my purposes, what the book does best also highlights the contradictions and missed opportunities of its premise. (Granted, that’s a universal characteristic of books, which one learns to exploit as a weapon in grad school).

At times, the book turns sharply to what I think of as good cultural history — resuscitating meanings that have long ago stopped breathing, stripping familiar symbols of the inevitability of their symbolism. My own work on “Moonshiner’s Dance” has increasingly poked around at this.

Dry Manhattan, both because of its successes and its not-so-much bits, has me thinking anew that something like an … experiential or signification history of Prohibition still needs to be written. Maybe it’s been done, and I just haven’t found it yet.

Lerner is vivid about how young women in the 1920s got tired of the presumptuousness of older Progressive-era women who had secured their voting rights and took away their drinking rights. The younger generation felt just fine about pursuing other, and even opposing, agendas.

Lerner “brings home” especially well how the dry movement got their Amendment by demonizing immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and city folk. Subsequently, when Prohibition itself instantly flopped, the drys blamed the failure on immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and city folk.

People — my people, really — knew when they were being scapegoated, and violating the Constitution by drinking booze made them feel part of a new, more plausible, more American way of life. And there were, and are, a lot of us around these parts … around-about here, locally … in this area.

My dad was something like an “anchor baby.” His father and mother immigrated separately from Austria and Prussia in 1924, met each other over here (both were German-speaking Catholics, so …), and they had my dad in 1925.

Of the many go-to stories my dad repeated too often, his favorite was about an incident in the early 1950s:

He and Mom and the first of their seven kids were living in Moline, Illinois, in a dense thicket of dry counties. The only way to get a drink was to join some kind of fraternal organization, so Dad joined the Knights of Columbus in Davenport, Iowa, just across the Mississippi River.

One Sunday morning, Dad was drinking in the crowded K of C clubhouse, when the parish priest walked in and told the entire bar that he had a message from the bishop of the Diocese of Davenport himself, the Most Reverend Ralph Hayes.

Henceforth, the K of C clubhouse would be closed on Sunday morning so the men could attend church services instead.

The bar was silent for a moment. Then the bartender shouted, “Alright, everyone in favor of closing the bar on Sunday morning, say ‘Aye’!”

Of course, the priest raised both hands, shouting “Hold on, hold on, wait a minute! This is not a democracy — the bishop says you’re closed on Sunday morning, and by God, you are closed on Sunday morning!”

My own relationship with booze was shaped by my upbringing, a fact that instantly and directly involves the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States in every hangover I’ve ever had. And I was born during the Johnson administration, just outside Chicago.

I’ve been thinking lately that it’s wrong, this belief that we should study history because it has “lessons” for us. No, we should study it because it ain’t over yet and everybody is involved.

Our identities are built in conversation with the built environment — and both persist longer than anyone’s awareness of their having been built at all. We are historic artifacts like those under glass in a history museum, and with memories about as good.

So, especially out here in the historic borderlands of the Upper Midwest, we are vulnerable to, and politely tolerant of, the standard narratives — the regionalist cliches of musical or literary tastes, say, or the full-blast stereo megaphones blaring our culture at us from the east and west coasts.

Good history may do what Dry Manhattan does in defamiliarizing the past, but it should also interrogate the book’s assumption that history starts in the center and radiates outward toward the frontiers over time. Just as often, whether we ourselves know it or not, history starts here.