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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.

Harry Smith, Freeman Tilden, and Revelation

When a Park Ranger gives you their schpiel about a petroglyph or battleground, think Freeman Tilden. He was That Guy — the one who first articulated an expansive vision for what the job of Public Service Interpreter ought to be all about.

Tilden was an outsider — not a professional teacher, park ranger, or naturalist, but a journalist and novelist.

He was born the son of a newspaperman in 1883 (Krakatoa blew when Freeman was four days old). Beginning work as a child under his father’s wing, he learned every gory detail in the production of turn-of-the-20th-century newspapers.

Gradually, his attention shifted to poetry, fiction, travel writing, and economics. He wrote his first best-selling novel at age 46. As a sought-after public speaker, Tilden grew to understand the visiting mind — the psychology of a person seeking an encounter with history and nature.

Freeman Tilden realized that people need a revelator.

—

Since 1987, the Anthology of American Folk Music, originally released by Folkways Records, has belonged to the venerable old Smithsonian Institution. This seems ironic to many who envision the 1952 six-album collection as an uncanny avant-garde semi-sacred text. And the set comes bundled with the soul of its editor, eccentric to the marrow.

You probably know the routine — Harry Smith shredded one of the only big rolls of cash he ever had and threw it down a sewer grate. He maintained vials of his semen, perhaps for their aesthetic value. By contrast, maybe, the Smithsonian used to welcome John Glenn into its Air & Space Museum after business hours so the senator could commune with his old space capsule.

Folkways founder Moe Asch (himself an oddball) understood his strange business and hired exactly the right editor for the Anthology.

Smith was a hypnotist collector and we are walking antiques. His Anthology has a way of snatching people up and hurling their lives into new trajectories. It achieves this partly via a deep and sprawling sense of a great unveiling (an apocalypse, for my Greek readers).

Harry Smith understood that people need a revelator.

—

In 1957, the National Park Service published Freeman Tilden’s landmark Interpreting Our Heritage. Its prose is a bit stiff for my tastes, but Interpreting Our Heritage is written as a handbook of insights to guide you through your long career as, for example, a Park Ranger.

The book’s “Six Principles of Interpretation” defined the modern practice of public service interpretation and its spirit can still be glimpsed today at the heart of the field’s mission.

I’ll leave it to others to check if Harry met Freeman or whether either was aware of each other. I’d bet against it, but it’s hard to imagine a more striking and prominent exemplar of Tilden’s 1957 “Six Principles” than Smith’s 1952 Anthology.

—

Below is the complete, unedited text of Tilden’s “Six Principles of Interpretation” from his book Interpreting Our Heritage. To put my thumb on the scale a bit, I’ve added the headings, written with Smith’s Anthology in mind.

Speak to the Listener’s Inner Reality
1. Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.

Interpretation is Revelation
2. Information, as such, is not interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based upon information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information.

Interpretation is Multimedia Art
3. Interpretation is an art which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.

The Aim is Provocation
4. The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.

The Whole Person Receives the Whole Revelation
5. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase.

We Owe Children Their Own Revelation and Provocation
6. Interpretation addressed to children should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best, it will require a separate program.

It would be a worthy task for someone (me, perhaps, if I ever retire) to chase down, one by one, good examples in the life of the Anthology of these principles in action.

—

The Whitney Museum produced a series of audio guides to accompany its exhibition of Harry Smith’s art early this year. Greil Marcus, who found the boxed set in 1970, spoke for the episode on the Anthology. I hope you listen to it.

I was at a reading in a Minneapolis bookstore early this year where Marcus read from his newest book, Folk Music — the first time I’d seen him in person since the 2007 Dylan Symposium in Minneapolis.

I’ve found that listening to him think in his own voice transforms how I hear his writing. His reading style and, it turns out, his writing style are disarmingly passionate, searching, and unguarded.

From the Whitney podcast, below are three Marcus quotes on the Smith Anthology’s message and effect:

It was a sensibility [the Anthology] passed on to people where it said to them that there’s more in this music — there’s more in this country—than you ever imagined. So seek and ye shall find. Go out looking.

There’s more to America than you ever suspected. There are different kinds of people than those you’ve ever met. There are different kinds of people hiding inside people you have met. You don’t really know this country and [Harry’s mission was] to show it to you.

And that opened the door. And I think that would happen to anybody who comes across this production, this art statement, this remapping of America.

—

If you buy my premise, it’s probably less Harry Smith and more the Anthology that exemplifies Tilden’s “Six Principles of Public Service Interpretation.” Rest a Smokey-the-Bear hat on top of your copy of the boxed set.

Smith himself wouldn’t have lasted long working at the Grand Canyon or, god forbid, the Statue of Liberty. For the best-documented part of his life, it was hard to predict how tolerant or tolerable Smith might be toward company. He was an artist, ethnographer, alchemist, and much else — a satirist, say — but not a docent.

So, who would be our exemplar of a Tilden-style American Folk Music Public Service Interpreter? Very likely, bloggers need not speculate, as surely the Federal Government already employs some excellent, under-recognized examples. I’d love to hear your suggestions.

To count as an AFM-PSI, I think you should actively decide to conduct yourself as something like an interpreter in public service focusing on the folk genre.

Greil Marcus seems an excellent candidate, but is he a folk guy or a rock guy? As a writer, is he an educator or an artist? Are these distinctions even close to meaningful? He absolutely would look great in the hat. Mike Seeger, of course, was born wearing that mountie hat and is almost surely who I’d pick. I miss that guy every day of my life.

More than anyone I’m aware of, Dom Flemons has been taking up Mike’s mission of educating, entertaining, and maybe most of all, converting audiences to the cause. I’ve had a post about him in the back of my mind for nearly 20 years. Maybe, ironically, old Freeman Tilden will shake it loose.

Otherwise, I’d consider Robert Cantwell — an American-folk-music-focussed public-sector teacher and professional mind-blower. Strangely enough, and for whatever it’s worth, it was Cantwell’s book Ethnomimesis that I had on me as I watched the towers fall on 9/11.

—

Pivoting around the annual Festival of American Folk Life held on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Ethnomimesis offers still more candidates for Tilden-style interpreters of folk music.

Most prominent is Ralph Rinzler, the “founder and for many years presiding genius of the Festival of American Folklife.” Rinzler distributed the work of revelation throughout the multi-medium folk artists and festival goers themselves. Stimulating the imaginations and bodies of everyone present made for whole-person revelatory provocations.

Interestingly, a passage in Ethnomimesis seems to suggest that Rinzler kind of … fired … the young Cantwell from his book contract. Maybe all this polymorphous stimulation didn’t sit well with Cantwell’s boss or his boss’s bosses. Perhaps someone saw Cantwell’s styles of writing and thinking as not quite public enough for Public Service.

Regardless, Cantwell’s contract, like Harry Smith’s life, remind me that there must surely be daily tensions between Tilden’s apocalyptic goals and the institutional agendas that public service interpreters must satisfy throughout their careers, day after tightly contained day.

Diamonds in the Rough

from Conflict Diamonds



The 13 tracks of Diamonds in the Rough take a lot of sharp turns in style, mood, and subject. Even so, its last track comes as a surprise. It’s different.

“Diamonds in the Rough” is the album’s only a cappella track, for example, and its the only song not written by John Prine. We depart the album via a departure, and the album is named for it.

For “Diamonds,” John, his elder brother David, and Steve Goodman sing in tight, intimate, family harmony between two siblings and their brother in business, music, and community.

—

I haven’t researched the origins of the song all that deeply — about enough to know that, if I didn’t look away quickly, it would launch me into yet another unfinishable book project.

I can say that the documented life of “Diamonds” seems to begin with an 1836 sacred music collection aimed at shape note singers. A copyright was gotten for a version of the song published during the Progressive Era, and the honorable Uncle Dave Macon recorded his version in September 1926.

Prine, Prine, and Goodman’s version of “Diamonds” was surely based on a 1929 recording by The Carter Family. But then, what wasn’t?

I’ve learned to judge The Carter Family’s impact on American culture for myself. Growing up, I saw “A. P. Carter” credited on the labels of quite a few of my older brothers’ LPs, and thereby became aware of a consensus that A. P. was quite the creative powerhouse. Today, I’m more cautious about that.

Certainly, Sara and Maybelle defined the core identity of The Carter Family, and they both made profound and vastly consequential contributions to American culture. Maybelle even helped The Man in Black survive withdrawal. By now, I hold her to be among the greatest artists of the 20th Century. Maybelle Carter was never called an asshole.

—

John Prine wasn’t one to exploit religion to pinch an audience — his songs and Prine himself were more than enough to win our loyalty.

Often enough, he’d sing about Jesus (the missing years), Christ (I’m so mixed up and lonely), the Savior (said pardon me), and the Father (forgive us, we’ll forgive you).

But Jesus wasn’t important to his business model, so I figure Prine must’ve had other uses for him. (See my entry on “Billy The Bum” for my best writing on this.) So, indulge me for a moment while I imagine the “Diamonds” cut as holding some sort of transcendental significance or other.

“Diamonds” is the album’s 13th track. So, what if the first 12 tracks are disciples and the 13th track arrives on a donkey as the Jesus song? However enthusiastic about this idea you surely must be feeling, it’s not a good fit. For one thing, the lyrics of “Diamonds” definitely make it the song of an apostle, not a savior.

So could, maybe, Track 13 instead revive the unsettled question of the identity of a Thirteenth Apostle? Candidates have been floated.

Some suggest Judas — but as one of the 12, sending him to the back of the line doesn’t change the count. As a Minnesotan, I like Saint Paul. Emperor Constantine is also a fine candidate with a strong resume — he became the Roman Emperor at a time when Christianity got you executed and then made Europe officially Christian. You can’t argue with results.

Some have suggested Mary Magdelyn as the 13th disciple, and that works best for me. I’ve probably seen Guys and Dolls too many times, but I always imagine women as the leaders of the now-moribund mission band phenomenon. When I hear Sara Carter sing “Diamonds” … sister, I believe it.

As songs meant for a woman’s voice, I’ve sometimes thought of Prine’s, Prine’s, and Goodman’s rendition of “Diamonds in the Rough” as a companion piece to “Angel from Montgomery” from John’s debut album.

“Angel” is one reason I didn’t write a song-by-song series about that first album. How the hell can a person write anything worthy of a lyric (or a prayer) that goes, “Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery”?

—

Why did Prine record a century-and-a-half-old song in such a very memorable way, and why did he name his second album after it? Dunno.

But with art, religion, politics, or anything else, I often try to imagine the hour-to-hour lives other people live. Do they work in the shade and sleep in the sun, or the other way around? The Carter Family’s longer version is from a rather different phase of American life, but it provides some pretty confessional testimony about what life feels like as a missionary.

One day my precious comrade, you too were lost in sin,
And others sought your rescue and Jesus took you in.
So when you’re tried and tempted by the scoffer’s keen rebuff,
Don’t turn away in anger. There’s diamonds in the rough.

While reading through the Bible, some wondrous sights I see.
I read of Peter, James, and John by the Sea of Galilee.
And Jesus, when he found them, he found them very tough.
And they were precious diamonds he gathered in the rough.

When his second album was released, Prine was now a road warrior, evangelizing on behalf of his own skills, artistic vision, and economic prospects.

More so than the debut album, when I listen to Diamonds, it’s easy to hear Prine lost out there, trying to make a name for himself as a new act in the record business. Clocks and spoons, Rocky Mountain time, and great compromise. Take the star out of the window. Jesus, you look tired.

—

According to Prine himself, Diamonds rescues at least a few songs Prine wrote before recording his first album. He wasn’t even sure if maybe “Sour Grapes” and “Frying Pan” weren’t the first songs he ever wrote in his life. They certainly sound to me like very early efforts of a young genius.

So, some of the gems on Diamonds had gotten tossed into the rough during the making of Prine’s debut album, John Prine. When I listen to the debut today, as a real adult, a couple-few cuts don’t hold up for me quite as well as I would’ve expected when I was younger. Diamonds, on the other hand, still sounds like diamonds from start to finish.

To my ears, the Diamonds album sounds like Prine thinking about his life in the music business.

He liked to tell the (possibly true) story of (as I remember it) showing up at a specified place and time to get his picture taken. When he arrived, he was ordered to sit, for the first and only time in his life, on a bale of hay. The photographer snapped a picture and he was dismissed. That photo became the cover of Prine’s first album.

Diamonds just might be closer to the debut album Prine would’ve released if he’d been in charge of his own label — as he soon would be. And he turned out to be a pretty canny entrepreneur, having learned hard lessons early in his career, touring around, passing the hat, and making his first two albums.

—

It took 6780 days to write about the 13 songs of Diamonds in the Rough. The first installment of this series was posted 18 years, 6 months, and 2 weeks ago.

Around then, Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Sideways won an Oscar. The first YouTube video was posted. Honey Boo Boo was born. Granted, I didn’t work on this continuously — I had to sleep now and then.

The question confronting me now is what to do next. Should I take on the first album next? All of Prine’s albums?

If I worked at the same pace and wrote about the 17 other albums listed on the wikimonster as Prine’s “studio albums,” I would be finished around the year 2338. I think that’s an election year — presumably, Biden and Trump will be running against each other again.

Obviously, there’s more to life than song-by-song essays about Prine albums. For example, song-by-song essays about the Anthology of American Folk Music! At my current 521 days per song, writing up the 4-volume Anthology would occupy me through the year 2184.

If only I had started covering Bob Dylan’s 40 studio albums around the time Kubla Khan gave up trying to conquer Japan and about when the Mamluks crushed the last Crusaders in Syria, I’d be just about done already.



(This is part of my song-by-song series on John Prine’s second album, Diamonds in the Rough: Everybody  *  The Torch Singer  *  Souvenirs  *  The Late John Garfield Blues  *  Sour Grapes * Billy The Bum  *  The Frying Pan  *  Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You  *  Take the Star Out of the Window  *  The Great Compromise  *  Clocks and Spoons  *  Rocky Mountain Time  *  Diamonds in the Rough)

Dapples: Trees Create Images of the Sun

Dapples of sunlight are like arboreal religious art — depictions by trees of the star that created them.

Suns-rise: Dapples of sunlight through a linden tree

I’m not a religious or spiritual person — not in any way most people mean when they say such things. I think the Universe is a physical place. Nevertheless, I do ask you to join me in understanding and pondering this:

All trees need the nearest star, the Sun, to live. And on every sunny day, they create representations of the star that made them possible and sustains them. It’s more or less as simple as that.

Dapples of sunlight are images of the Sun.

A few people notice this now and then. When the Sun is being eclipsed by the Moon, dapples get moon-shaped chunks taken out of them. And, on even rarer occasions, when there’s a big enough sunspot on the Sun’s face, you can see the sunspot in the dapples streaming through the leaves of trees.

Trees make representations of the star that made them. You can see this on any sunny day wherever there are trees. As long as there are trees, they always will make images of the sun.

I wouldn’t go quite so far, at least literally, but a person could be forgiven for thinking dapples of sunlight are like religious art projected by trees into the shadows — like cave paintings depicting their creator.

[ This is the first of a series on dapples of sunlight being images of the sun. ]

Go Johnny Go

Information lost and found, and connections between the Voyager record and Harry Smith’s Anthology

feature photo courtesy J. R. Rost

Until he died a week ago Saturday, the last time I’d thought about Chuck Berry had been a few weeks earlier. I’d thought about his lyrics, as usual, as my emblem for information efficiency — for conveying a lot with very little.

I was re-watching an episode of Carl Sagan’s 1980 show, Cosmos — specifically episode XII, “The Persistence of Memory.” In it, Carl has a dandelion hidden in his hand and plays a game of 20 Questions:

With 20 skillfully chosen questions we could easily whittle all the cosmos down to a dandelion. In our explorations of the cosmos the first step is to ask the right questions. Then, not with 20 questions, but with billions, we slowly distill from the complexity of the universe its underlying order. This game has a serious purpose. Its name is science.

And I remembered what Chuck Berry wrote:

Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans, way back up in the woods among the evergreens, there stood a log cabin made of earth and wood where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode, who never ever learned to read or write so well, but he could play the guitar just he’s like a ringing a bell.

In the first few lines of “Johnny B. Goode,” mostly without realizing it, we learn that Louisiana even has a Piney Woods at all, a bit about log cabin construction, the main character’s name and aspirations and his degree of literacy, and we’re told how to hear his guitar style in our imaginations (to prime us for hearing it in our ears immediately after).

While he’s at it, Berry situates you, the listener, on the song’s fictional map. Whether you’re actually listening to the song in Calabria or Tasmania, at McMurdo Station, or in the French Quarter, you are now somewhere from which Louisiana is “way down.”

Sagan’s “Persistence of Memory” episode ends with “Johnny B. Goode” becoming part of the music anthology on the 1977 Voyager Record, which so transfixed me as a kid. At some point during a more recent fixation, I realized Harry Smith’s earlier 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music had come to me later, out of sequence, like a prequel.

Reviewing the evidence — especially Sagan’s astonishing book, Murmurs of Earth — I see no reason to think the Voyager Record’s design team was familiar with Smith’s Anthology. (Otherwise, they surely would’ve included “Moonshiner’s Dance.” I mean, it would’ve taught the aliens to count to four in English, right?). They consulted Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress, but seemingly not Moe Asch of Folkways.

Blind Willie Johnson — I first heard his collected works as an astronomy student in Tucson in 1984 — appears on both the Smith Anthology and the Voyager Record, but there’s an even more surprising connection between the two anthologies. Appearing on the Voyager Record is a field recording made in Peru by John Cohen.

Cohen’s band, the New Lost City Ramblers, had Harry Smith’s sensibilities all over it — Smith’s twisted humor, his expressionist evocations, his taste for anything soulful but arcane, his ambivalent self-image as something that could be called a new, lost, city rambler.

If you found your first banjo or autoharp in the back of your parents’ or grandparents’ closet, they might never have heard Smith’s Anthology, but they almost definitely knew about The Ramblers. The band disseminated Smith’s attitudes about America’s musical identity more broadly than Smith himself did, by orders of magnitude.

After Smith’s vast personal collection of 78’s was acquired by the NYC Public Library, Cohen’s bandmate Mike Seeger and the Anthology’s key booster, Ralph Rinzler, spirited out the non-circulating disks, taped them, and then secretly returned them to the library. This cache became a key source for The Ramblers’ repertoire — their mother lode, as Rinzler called it.

Later, in 1969, Cohen interviewed Smith for Sing Out!, and the interview seems to have been the folk revivalist community’s first widespread introduction to the kind of mind they had followed over the cliff.

So, along with Willie Johnson’s, Cohen’s cut on the Voyager Record smuggled a bit of Smith’s spirit aboard that NASA rocket in 1977.

If an extraterrestrial civilization ever retrieves the Voyager spacecraft, the artifact of the vehicle itself would yield beautiful information about planet Earth and about the state of human technology as of the 1970s. To that civilization, the Voyager Record — with its technical textbook, ambient sound essay, spoken greetings, photos, and music anthology — would be a bonus, like the prize that used to come in a Cracker Jack box.

For them, the music portion would be easy to play back but challenging to comprehend and likely to initiate deep debates across hundreds of generations.

In that music, I’m sure they’d recognize strings being stretched and vibrated, and gas being made to resonate in tubes. They’d know it was some kind of communication, possibly more for us than for them, maybe communication we valued and thought was somehow good for us, maybe something we were proud of.

But I can’t see that they could ever grasp any those details in “Johnny B. Goode” — the fledgeling string-vibrator vying for wide-spread awareness within in his civilization. No matter how advanced the ET’s technology or philosophy, the contexts and meanings of the recording would be unrecoverable.

I argued in my recent “Amnesia Theater” essay that meaning without context and content takes on a special intensity. Maybe the lostness of 20th century Earth would lend a powerful aura to the recordings — music from outer space, music from a gone world, music from entirely other spheres of creation heard resonating in the celestial monochord. I bet they’d think those sounds were some of the best music in the entire universe.

Rare Medium: The Anthology on Cassette Tape

A cassette-tape reissue of the Anthology of American Folk Music raises curious questions

My last vehicle was a green & tan 1993 Dodge Dakota extended-cab pickup with a cassette player and somewhat blown-out speakers. I used that cassette player every day for years, generally without irony.

But you should’ve heard Tom Waits’ “Jesus Gonna Be Here” — the bassline was just a toneless rumble, and all you could really hear clearly was that monotonous slide guitar. It was beautiful.

That was a long time ago. Today, I’m not sure I still own a working cassette player.

But just last week, a label in the UK calling themselves Death Is Not The End (hereafter, DINTE) reissued the Anthology of American Folk Music on cassette tape. Of course, I’m tempted to pony up. It’s pretty affordable — £21 for the 3-volume set before transatlantic shipping.

But then, I don’t have anything appropriate to play them on. And if I had the equipment, I’d probably only use it to dub over to ones & zeros my tapes of some clawhammer banjo lessons from a decade ago.

Besides, I own two copies of Smithsonian-Folkways’ 1997 reissue of the Anthology on CD (since one set of CDs is apparently one too few). Plus, I’ve already bought more than a few other copies of that 1997 CD set as gifts for friends and for people who’ve been helpful in my research on “Moonshiner’s Dance.”

The 1997 CD set was the format in which I first met the Anthology.

I had stumbled across Greil Marcus’s book Invisible Republic at the Har Mar Barnes & Noble in late 1997. I read it voraciously, not quite realizing that the book was only a few weeks old. It convinced me to go buy the Anthology, so I hurried over to the Electric Fetus in south Minneapolis. There, I held the boxed set in my hands for the first time, again not fully appreciating that this had only been possible for a few weeks.

Because it was new, the Electric Fetus had it on sale. And I had an Electric Fetus coupon. And everything at the Fetus was 10% off that day. I remember asking a dude behind the desk which of these discounts would be applied. To my great surprise, they would all be applied. Still, it would be over $50, so I walked around the Fetus for an hour with the boxed set tucked under my arm before I screwed up my courage to pull out my wallet.

Looking back, I see they should’ve given me that first set *and* electrified my fetus for free. Folkways should’ve sprung my lizard for nothing. When I think of those fifty bucks now, after the countless tens of thousands in opportunity costs and hard currency I’ve blown thanks to buying that very first copy … damn! Still, of course, I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

I didn’t bother getting the LP reissue Mississippi Records put out a couple years ago. I didn’t want to discourage Smithsonian-Folkways itself from doing a proper job of it instead. Besides, from what I can assume judging mostly from the total silence on the subject from Mississippi Records, their LPs were just burned off the Smithsonian CDs that I already own.

Some vinyl partisans claim that old LPs sound better than typical CDs because down-sampling the music for CD deletes information contained in the original analog recording. Could be — but you sure as hell don’t get that information back by burning a CD back onto vinyl. I have no problem with the Mississippi Records release, but buyer beware if you think you’re buying vinyl sound integrity and not just an accessory for your handlebar mustache … not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The Mississippi Records LP release also would have been a different matter had they, for example, started with another batch of source 78s and reassembled the Anthology from scratch. What if Mississippi Records had been introducing us to dubs from completely different copies of the 78 RPM records that comprise the Anthology?

Now *that* would be something. Not only have various technologies been advancing since the mid 1990s, every 78 RPM disc — not every title, every physical disc — is a unique object. You know this if you’ve ever played the same recording from two ostensibly identical copies of a 78, one after the other. You don’t just hear more or less, you hear different things in the two copies. They have lived alternate lives between 1920-something and the day they arrive together again on your turntable. Quality is qualitative, not quantitative (that’s quantity).

More recently, I ponied up a Clydesdale for a pristine, very early copy of the Folkways LP boxed set. I don’t know but I’ve been told it’s from 1952, the very year Folkways first released the Anthology. That original release was practically made by the hands of Harry Smith, Moe Asch, and Peter Bartok by spinning on the turntable 78s in Harry’s personal collection and dubbing them onto the master.

Then, 45 years later, Smithsonian-Folkways used a lot of that 1952 master to make the 1997 CD reissue. But for some cuts, they swapped in cleaner, newly-located 78s. They also did some noise reduction and fussed with speed/pitch.

That’s why having a copy of the 1952 LP opens up the possibility of observing the handiwork of the 1997 reissue team. What exactly did they do to 1952 to get the 1997 results? I’ll write about that here when I think I’ve got something to say. For now, DINTE’s cassette reissue seems likely to have been recorded off the 1997 CDs and seems unlikely to provide that sort of new insight.

What really interests me about DINTE’s cassette reissue is that it nearly unbreaks the circle of the Anthology’s historic formats. With a cassette tape being made available, the job of format revival is almost done.

The Anthology first appeared as a collection of LPs. Those eventually went out of print, but the Anthology never did. No Folkways recordings have ever been out of print — even when the company couldn’t afford to press new vinyl of a title, Moe Asch kept it in print by any means necessary. The Smithsonian agreed to the same policy as a condition of acquiring Folkways.

For many years, the only way Folkways could sell the Anthology was as cassette tapes made on demand. I wish I’d known enough to order it during that period — I’d like to see what those tapes looked like. Did they have cover art? Were they typed? Mimeographed? Handwritten? Did you get Smith’s booklet?

Already in the early 1960’s, Smith’s original cover art (featuring the celestial monochord) had been replaced with Ben Shahn’s Farm Security Administration photograph of a farmer — it took the 1997 CD set to restore the long-abandoned celestial monochord cover art. So, given the specific cover art that was current at the time Folkways started fulfilling orders with on-demand cassette tapes, DINTE’s choice of Ben Shahn’s photo makes serious sense. That level of thinking stuff through is a good sign.

In any case, those days of on-demand cassette tapes were the dark ages that the 1997 CD reissue was designed to end.

If you want new LPs of the Anthology, I think you can still find the Mississippi Records reissue. And of course, the CD boxed set is still available from the Smithsonian-Folkways website. And suddenly, that in-between era of on-demand tape is now also covered, thanks to DINTE’s cassette reissue.

The only period in the Anthology’s history not currently available as a reissue is its prehistory.

There was a time before Smith and Asch had even dreamed of creating such a collection. In that pre-Anthology period, all those 78s were just unrelated, scattered old records, even if today they look like scripture lost among dusty discs of apocrypha.

I’ve got to assume somebody is out there working to reissue the collection of 78 RPM records that Smith assembled to make the Anthology. I imagine each reissued disc would have to include its original B side, a subject often discussed by Anthology devotees.

I’d hope anyone considering such project would do it up right by starting from scratch and not simply burning to vinyl 20-year-old CDs from Document or the Smithsonian. And they could also consider comping some bloggers, or at least answering their questions.

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.

Outside Llewyn Davis

In anticipation of a Coen Brothers movie, I read the book that inspired it — “The Mayor of MacDougal Street,” by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald

I just read The Mayor of MacDougal Street, a memoir of the Greenwich Village folk scene of 50 years ago, written by the late Dave Van Ronk with engineering by Elijah Wald.

I bought my copy when it was published in 2005, and began the long process of moving it from one stack of books symbolizing my various intellectual ambitions to another. Now that a Coen Brothers movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, has been loosely inspired by the book, it moved to the stack symbolizing “read the damned book already, Einstein.”

To my surprise, I laughed my ass off reading Mayor — my wife was relieved I was finally reading something funny. I want to repeat certain of its stories the rest of my life, but several are chapter-length psychodramas that start funny, and build and build with running gags and all the trimmings.

A story about absinthe smugglers is one of those stories that’s almost too good to be told, never mind whether it’s true. A chapter about Van Ronk’s cross-country trip to California certainly seems smarter and funnier than anything in On the Road … maybe it’s me.

And then there’s that brief anecdote about a Greenwich Village rat.  Similar stories helped end my fantasies of having been there for the Golden Age. (I can’t remember how I know a story about Mike Seeger scrawling “roaches roaches roaches” on the wall in John Cohen’s apartment.) But Van Ronk’s vermin story is the best yet, maybe owing to his matter-of-fact delivery.

In essence, Mayor is an oral history of the mid-century Folk Revival.

The book shows just how good oral histories can be as literature, and how important they are to reviving the past as lived reality. Robert Shelton’s role in booking acts at Gerde’s Folk City, and John Mitchell dodging bullets from all directions … those stories reorganized my understanding of that time and place, and they could only have come to me through oral history.

And Van Ronk’s memories constitute arguments about the past that some readers will find challenging.

At some point over the past 20 years, I realized that there wasn’t one Folk Revival, but instead an ongoing, rolling revival impulse running through American culture, changing shape and location and agenda. New revivalists keep being born, always with fantastic notions in their heads about the past:

They all seemed to go to Music and Art High School, and their parents all seemed to be dentists. I remember once coming across a covey of them sitting cross-legged around a bespectacled banjoist who struck a dramatic chord and earnestly explained “This is a song the workers sing when they’re oppressed.”

Van Ronk’s street-level memories, refined over some very eventful decades, would make a great education on what it was really like, what people were really thinking about, and which romantic ideas you should abandon and which you should hold on to.

Not that Van Ronk couldn’t be full of it, or that Elijah Wald’s handiwork doesn’t occasionally shine through. But the quality is such that these function as layers of complexity a wise reader will appreciate.

Here Van Ronk is the stereotypical New Yorker feeling superior to fly-over country, but there he’s marveling at the depth of talent flowing into the Village from Hibbing and Detroit.

Here he insists that song lyrics need to make literal sense on the page (“along” a watchtower?), but there he praises Francois Villon specifically for using slang that no longer means anything.

Here he rolls his eyes at the insipid tourists who associated Greenwich Village with the horror genre (both were weird, he guessed), but there he argues that science fiction was a perfectly natural association (both are weird, I guess).

I know from Lewis Erenberg that theme restaurants like the spooky Cafe Bizarre had been features of Greenwich Village at least as early as 1915. It raises the question of just how important selling “a version of Greenwich Village that never existed” has always been to the existence of Greenwich Village. Much of it was created by landfilling with garbage in the 1700s — its very ground was established by Clydes.

Rigorous peer-review might have cleared and screwed all of this up completely. Visions like Van Ronk’s — both observation and misperception — were driving forces behind the Greenwich Village Folk Revival and, for that matter, all historical events, past, present, and future. The fog of war *is* the real war, not a veil that obscures it.

As for my own fog, Dave Van Ronk had been one of those people I’d had a recurring appointment with, and I never managed to keep it. I knew his face, his voice, and his rap sheet, but he always was mostly the guy Dylan stole the “House of the Rising Sun” arrangement from.

Indeed, because I knew he was a key figure in a key time-and-place (maybe the in the), it meant there was no hurry. His story and music would always be around when I was finally ready for them. That attitude is one reason I’m not good at collecting oral histories.

Now, after Mayor, I have what feels like a relationship with the guy, and I get why people’s feelings about him are often profound in a full sense of the term.

His music seems urgent to me now, and I see the mark of his music and mind on a lot of people who understood him long ago. For example, his friend Dakota Dave Hull is a friend of mine, and I’ve always nodded sagely when he talks Van Ronk, which is often. Probably, I’ll do less nodding and closer listening in the future, when I get the chance.

on “North Country: The Making of Minnesota”

An historian creates a new world for me to live in

My favorite Chinese take-out place has a map of its delivery area taped to the wall.

I’ve studied it at least once a week for years, waiting for my order to be up. Because I live just a couple blocks away, it’s a map of my Minneapolis neighborhood.

A few weeks ago, I was drawn into the map by the thrill of something truly new.  Suddenly missing its familiarity, the map was layered now with too many horrors and ironies and personalities to trace.

It now covers about half the area Major Plympton cordoned off in 1839 for the Fort Snelling Military Reserve. Deciding that an “era of good feeling” was at an end, the Major slapped a ruler across a map of what is now the Twin Cities, and carved out the area he would command.

Previous Fort Snelling commandants had encouraged French Canadians, mixed bloods, and various refugees to make their homes there, where I make mine today.  But in 1839, they suddenly had to vacate onto nearby land recently promised by treaty to the Mdewakantons.

Plympton cited military necessity, but he and his fellow officers and the Fort’s physician had all heavily invested in land claims within the boundaries of the new reserve.

Apparently, they failed to anticipate that economic activity would halt as soon as the area was cordoned off, so that the nearest point on the Mississippi River outside their reserve would become St. Paul — the new State Capitol and regional center of trade.

And then, my Hunan shrimp and egg rolls were ready.

I had just finished reading Mary Lethert Wingerd’s book, North Country: The Making of Minnesota.

I’d postponed reading it for a long time, partly because it’s 3 lbs 9 oz — like a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary — and it actually hurt a little to hold and read.  I think those months of handling the thing softened its edges enough for me to finally take it up.

But then, reading it was never in doubt. Wingerd’s only previous book was one of the best reading decisions of my life.

Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St. Paul was a history of St. Paul’s civic identity.  That is, it traced who the people of St. Paul saw themselves as being and how their identity evolved over time, shaped by economic, ethnic, and religious power.

After Claiming the City, the place I’d lived for 20 years seemed newer to me than the day I first arrived.  And the older the structures, the newer they seemed.

You can’t imagine the impact the book had on my Victoria Theater efforts and, especially, on my understanding of “Moonshiner’s Dance.”

Apparently, I wasn’t alone. North Country was commissioned to mark the state’s 150th birthday with A Big Serious History of Minnesota.  Such a tome hadn’t been written in over 40 years.

Given this grand opportunity to make a lasting mark, Wingerd chose the kind of modest approach that makes for good history.

North Country asks how the State of Minnesota emerged out of the vast woodlands and prairies of the Dakota people.  To find answers, Wingerd focuses intently on the Native American-European encounter.  Minnesota was the product of a series of evolving interactions.

In Wingerd’s telling, the particulars of those interactions dissolve any sense of inevitability in their outcome.

For example, the book traces the rise and fall of Minnesota’s border cultures, such as the Metis, who occupied a genetic and economic space between Native Americans and the French fur traders.  Such cultures flourished across North America for a little while, but Minnesota’s formed very early and persisted very late, evolving into an important force in the state’s making.

I was pretty struck by the Metis, who appear at first glance like some sort of forgotten 1700’s steampunk enclave, especially in light of Kirsten Delegard’s masterfully compiled and annotated illustrations.

Ultimately, the (real) Metis emerge as one of Minnesota’s many roads not taken — once-viable alternatives to either the domination of Minnestoa’s Native population by Europeans, or the preservation of some timeless prehistoric idyll.

This is a recurring theme of the book — the abandoned options for a Euro-Native encounter that could have benefitted everybody more than it did, including the supposed victors.

The book culminates with Minnesota’s war between the Dakotas and US forces, and the state’s subsequent genocidal reaction. By then, this lack of inevitability, those roads not taken, are a profound and agonizing subtext. “Cataclysm on the Minnesota” is the chapter title.

I’ve always been vaguely aware that various place-names in the city of Minneapolis came from Longfellow’s romantic poem Hiawatha. They’re printed on that map in my Chinese take-out restaurant.

But in North Country’s epilogue, the meanings of these place-names, and of the places themselves, telescope enormously.

I’d never quite appreciated that Minneapolis had used “a literary cult that attracted followers from all reaches of the globe” to help construct a new historical identity for the state.

The epilogue — “Pasts Remembered, Pasts Forgotten” — treats memory and amnesia about Minnesota’s past as active projects undertaken in the service of specific goals.

I worry about potential readers assuming North Country is a depressing litany of genocidal crimes.  On so many levels, it is another project entirely, likely to enliven your relationship with your immediate environment, as it has mine.

Mostly, I’m grateful for its becoming, maybe inadvertently, the final event in its own story of forgetting and remembering, and of the common good abandoned and reclaimed.

Notes on Frank Cloutier’s Grave

Finding the grave of a long-lost musician shakes my grasp of time and space

This past Thursday was the 55th anniversary of Frank E. Cloutier’s death.  He died just over 5 years after the release of the Anthology of American Folk Music, for which he’s marginally remembered.

Here’s what his headstone looked like on my first visit, the first Saturday after Thanksgiving, 2006:

It’s in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which is a beautiful drive from the Twin Cities, especially if you take Highway 61 through the Mississippi River valley.

You pass through, or near, Red Wing and Rollingstone, Wabasha and Zumbro Bottoms, Frontenac and Trempealau.  There are often bald eagles, red-tailed hawks.

Frank Cloutier is buried “on a local heroes hill,” to borrow John Prine’s phrase, in La Crosse’s Oak Grove Cemetery.  Frank’s is one of about 200 headstones of veterans of each American war from the Spanish American through the Korean.

Though basically from Rhode Island, Frank happened to be working as a piano player in Manitowoc when the US entered World War One — hence the “Wisconsin” on his Army-issued headstone.

He arrived in France with the 311 supply train company in 1918, not long before the Armistice and too late to see fighting.

But France was pretty out-of-sorts and needed supply trains, so Frank’s company stayed on after the war for about 9 months in wine country.  Less than six months after Frank returned to the states, Prohibition took effect.

Knowing he was both Catholic and a Freemason, I was curious to see whether his headstone would have a cross or a masonic square-and-compass.

Frank Cloutier contributed the Anthology‘s only Upper Midwestern music. Here’s his headstone on March 1, 2009:

As the musical director of St. Paul’s Victoria Cafe, Frank and his band made a 78 RPM record in September 1927 — “Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One”.

It was released that January, but by then the Victoria Cafe itself was already in Federal court, fighting for its life.  From the start, the record always represented a gone world.

“Moonshiner’s Dance” seems to have utterly vanished from history almost as soon as it was released.  When Frank died in 1957, he apparently didn’t know the recording had been reissued 5 years earlier in New York as part of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

But even then, nobody would’ve been able to predict the Anthology would become as important to America’s self-image as it’s become.

Frank Cloutier couldn’t have foreseen that “Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One” would one day become the best known recording made in Minnesota during his lifetime.

Its hard to appreciate how deeply the country had changed between 1927 and 1957.  Indeed, much of the Anthology’s power derived from the way the alien sounds of Prohibition-era, pre-Depression, pre-WW2 America mystified young Cold War listeners.

Frank Cloutier died on a Friday morning in 1957.

That very same morning, the Vanguard TV3 exploded on its launch pad in Florida.  Meant to meet the challenge of Sputnik with America’s own first satellite, the Vanguard TV3 was an embarrassing, televised explosion.  Headline writers dubbed it Flopnik, Oopsnik, and Stayputnik.

The satellite itself was recovered from the wreckage and put on display at the National Air and Space Museum, where I took a picture of it in January 2005, not yet knowing the object was somehow about the Anthology.

(I was in Washington for Mike Seeger’s concert marking the “Picturing the Banjo” exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery).

Note the light trespass fogging the film in my old battered 1970’s camera.  More than any other single photo, this one finally convinced me to get a digital SLR camera. (In retrospect, I should have just replaced the light seals.)

In any case, that Friday morning in 1957 not many Americans were focused on the death of Frank Cloutier.

Even by the time the Smithsonian reissued the Anthology on CD in 1997, there was exactly zero research on Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe to draw from while writing the liner notes.

It wasn’t until Thanksgiving weekend 2006 that an Anthology listener finally showed up at Cloutier’s grave, wearing earbuds to listen to his record graveside.

In 2007, on the 50th anniversary of Cloutier’s death, I had planned to be in La Crosse, but an opportunity suddenly arose to go to Chicago instead.  It took me a while to choose Chicago, but I made the right decision … although I still do think about that now and then.