May 2005 – The Celestial Monochord

Mississippi John Hurt: Revival

drawing of Mississippi John Hurt by Robert Crumb

In the mid-1960’s, Dock Boggs told Mike Seeger that if he had his life to do over again, he’d learn to play guitar like Mississippi John Hurt. Around the same time, Dave Prine’s little brother asked him for guitar lessons, so he gave John Prine a Carter Family record (so he’d know what good songwriting was), and a John Hurt album (so he’d know what good guitar playing sounded like). A college student at the time reports that he’d go to John Hurt concerts because all the best looking girls flocked to them, but he soon found that their eyes and attentions were focused exclusively on this 71 year old black man.

It’s hard to grasp how profoundly unlikely all of this would have been only a few years before. John Hurt was a tenant farmer in Mississippi and considered himself an amateur musician. He’d recorded just 13 songs in 1928 and they didn’t sell particularly well. The record industry shrank as the Depression set in and Hurt continued farming, apparently thinking little of his brief recording gig.

After WWII, the old records cut by southern musicians in the 1920’s were not commercially available. They made the rounds mostly as bootleg tapes among a tiny subculture of obsessive, cranky collectors and a few college kids who took an interest in very obscure music. Hurt’s records were particularly rare, since few had been manufactured in the first place. But Harry Smith put two John Hurt cuts on his influential 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, causing some of these hobbyists to go looking for him. They always failed.

Then in 1963, Tom Hoskins and Mike Stewart, two young white folkies, got a tape of Hurt’s Avalon Blues through their informal network of tape traders. Hurt had recorded Avalon Blues at the end of a week-long stay in New York that spanned Christmas 1928. Homesick in the big city, Hurt slipped in a line about his home in Avalon being always on his mind.

Hoskins and Stewart figured Mississippi John Hurt might have meant an Avalon, Mississippi. So, they grabbed a current atlas and studied the state. There was no Avalon on the map. So they found an 1878 atlas and there, between Greenwood and Grenada, was Avalon. They packed some clothes, guitars, and a tape recorder and drove south to look for Hurt, though they figured he was probably dead.

When they arrived in Avalon, they found it was basically just a tiny general store. They approached the men sitting on its porch and asked if anyone knew a guitarist named John Hurt. One man lifted an arm, pointed a finger, and said, “Down that road, third mailbox up the hill.” Hoskins and Stewart drove, and found a little black man around 70 years old driving a tractor, looking startled by the sudden appearence of two white men who looked like they meant business. When they insisted he follow them back to Washington DC, Hurt decided he’d better go “voluntarily,” suspecting they were the “police or the FBI or something like that.”

Folk festival gigs back east were easily arranged for Hurt, and he was an enormous hit. Hurt played in a technically dazzling but graceful and gentle ragtime style, his thumb playing bass lines to take the place of a piano player’s left hand, and two fingers picking out melodies like a pianist’s right hand. Hurt’s voice and demeanor were witty and heartbreakingly sweet. The crowds literally lurched forward to be close to him. When Hurt played the Johnny Carson show, he had never owned a television himself.

He died in his sleep at home in Mississippi, only three years after being rediscovered.

“The Folk Revival” of the 1950’s and 1960’s was a revival of interest in certain songs or styles, but it was also a revival of many talented artist’s lives — or at any rate, of their music careers. Nobody is more closely associated with that aspect of the Revival than John Hurt. When I hear his recordings and wonder at the all-consuming benevolence of their sound, the generosity of Hurt’s presence, and his virtuoso guitar picking, I’m swept up in gratitude for the Folk Revival. It went out and found John Hurt, made him one of the most deeply (if not widely) loved Americans of his day, and was able to tell him so in the last months of his life.

Science Bass Ackwards

Science in the U.S. is taught backwards.

You generally start with biology, perhaps the most complex of all the sciences and the one that depends on every other science if it’s to be understood.

You then proceed to chemistry, which is little more than memorization and explosions without a good knowledge of physics.

If you keep taking science classes, you may get to take some physics, which is the basis for all other physical sciences — certainly, biology and chemistry make little sense without physics.

Why is it like this? I don’t really know, but I gather that the arrangement was codified in the U.S. immediately after World War Two, when physics enjoyed an unchallenged status among the sciences. Physics in the first half of the century had triumphed in the terms that science itself values most — in its predictive capacity and its ability to sort out basic questions about existence — but American culture also saw physics as triumphant militarily and politically, and as the basis for atomic power and atomic weapons.

As a result, the attitude was that little tykes were not yet fit for the revelation of such a Great Secret. And teaching little children had (and still has) a low social status. Teachers trained in physics could just as well do other high-status jobs, unlike those with training in biology who would otherwise be doing various “helping professions” (women’s work, you might say). So physicists taught the young adults, and biologists dealt with the children.

Again, this is the story I’ve gathered. In any case, an “historical” or cultural explanation of this sort has got to be the right explanation. No more rational, functional explanation is likely, given that the current arrangement makes so little sense and its results are so damaging.

Families of Trees

After five years of working for a professional society of plant biologists, I am starting to get clearer notions about plants. My mother-in-law gave me The Golden Field Guide to Trees of North America. It is an excellent book, and I’ve spent many hours staring at the 1950’s-era color drawings of trees, leaves, fruits, bark, etc.

I’m struck by the “families” of trees. You may know about the classification systems for living things — the basic level being species, such as the Oregon crab apple (Malus fusca) or the Biltmore crab apple (Malus glabrata). The next highest level is genus, such as apple (Malus), ash (Sorbus), and hawthorn (Crataegus) — each having various species within them. Genus and species has always made sense to me.

The next level up (that is, the first of the “higher taxa”), the families, has always been something of a mystery to me — although I’ve heard of some families and I’ve even seen them mentioned in articles I’ve worked on for a living, it hasn’t mattered to me what family a living thing belongs to. Now I get it, thanks to a very small amount of study.

When you say a tree belongs to the family Rosaceae, you mean it’s part of a sprawling, dizzyingly varied, historically pivotal family of plants that includes more than 3,000 species and dozens of genera, including the roses we get on Valentines Day, all apples, cherries, plums, pears, almonds, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, ashes, hawthorns, and more.

When you say a tree belongs to the family Platanaceae, you mean it’s a sycamore, also known as a plane tree. The family contains only one genus (Platanus) and about six species.

Now I understand that when one biologist says that such-and-such is in this-or-that family, this may be hugely significant information to an informed listener. This confirms the assertion (of the movie Animal House) that “Knowledge is Good.”

Dock Boggs: Revival

Dock Boggs, age 9

Ever since banjoist Dock Boggs made his first recordings, people’s interest in him has often taken on a rare intensity, part revelation, part morbid compulsion.

In 2005, Rennie Sparks described his 1927 recording of Pretty Polly as “compassionless, cold as a cockroach.” Greil Marcus devoted a whole chapter to Boggs in his book about Bob Dylan’s Basesment Tapes — Boggs, he wrote, sang Oh Death with “the words jerking in his throat like a marionette.” The night in 1932 that Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger first heard Boggs’ recording of Pretty Polly, they realized that an American folk music was still alive and they dedicated the rest of their lives to it.

In 1963, Mike Seeger, Charles and Ruth’s son, sought out the long-lost Boggs while traveling with his wife and three pre-school children in a Studebaker Lark station wagon. When they finally realized they were really getting close to finding Boggs, it was getting dark and they needed to find lodging. Mike’s wife finally suggested they look in a phone book under “Boggs.” Seeger was amazed — “Look in the phone book for Dock Boggs?” Boggs was listed, they called, and Dock was in.

In the last eight years of Boggs’ life, Seeger became Boggs’ recordist, booking agent, best friend, confessor, and maybe in a certain unforeseeable way, demon. Seeger writes: “I’ve often wondered if his second — his 1960’s — music career was good for him.”

In 1910, Boggs had gone to work under the surface of the Earth, in the coal mines, at the age of 12. He spent 44 years digging coal in eastern Kentucky and western Virginia. In his youth, he supplemented a coal miner’s starvation wages the same way many others did — bootlegging whiskey. It was a violent existence, reflecting a disregard for people’s lives shared by the coal companies that dominated the region’s economy. Boggs was often arrested, carried a gun and used it, beat a brother-in-law almost to death, and at one point plotted in detail the murder of his wife’s entire family. “I’m talking about being set on it. I was set on it,” he told Mike Seeger’s tape recorder.

During the boom of the late 1920’s, Boggs made several recordings and vividly glimpsed a chance to escape the mines through music. But the boom soon busted, and Boggs missed a last recording session because he was unable to scrape up any cash for a train ticket. He continued to play his banjo for a few years, but eventually had to pawn it during a run on the banks. Decades later, he would talk to Mike Seeger about these losses with acute pain.

When Mike and his family showed up in their station wagon, Boggs had just retrieved his pawned banjo no more than six months before. Members of his wife’s holiness church considered the playing of music to be a sin, and to both Dock and his wife Sara, the instrument was an ominous reminder of their darker days.

He travelled and recorded extensively with Seeger. Boggs deeply enjoyed his second music career, there’s no question about it. There’s also no question that it was emotionally challenging for him as well. He started to drink heavily, at least occasionally. On one such occasion, with Mike Seeger’s tape recorder rolling, Boggs threatened to buy a .38 Special and murder someone over legal issues regarding a cesspool, as well as the entire staff of an insurance office. One night, during a concert tour, Seeger and Boggs shared a sleeping room and at one point, Seeger awoke to find that Boggs had had a “rough wakening.” Dock said he’d dreamt of “burning hell.”

Boggs was a complex, intelligent, and sensitive person, so we’ll never fully understand the conflicts that troubled him in those final years. Surely, his 44 years in the mines had a lot to do with it. Boggs was a staunch advocate of the United Mine Workers union, and understood the brutality of an extractive economy. Boggs’ father had started life with 350 acres of land, but sold one farm after another to the coal companies until, “When he died, he never owned enough land to bury him on.” The chance to make money and fans through music must’ve produced regrets over the time Boggs had lost, as well as something like survivor’s guilt.

My copy of the double CD of Boggs’ music from the 1960’s is one of my most cherished possessions. Certainly, it’s one chapter in the life of Mike Seeger, which has taken on mythic proportions for me and, I’ve noticed, a lot of other fans of oldtime music. But the facts of what Boggs’ music meant to Boggs himself — how it framed, troubled, and gave meaning to his life — make his 1960’s work some of the deepest art I’ve ever known. In the end, what really make these recordings so valuable is something I’ve barely mentioned here — Boggs’ startling, touching voice and his exquisitely original and skillful banjo playing.

Fiddlin’ Banjo Crap

Martin Mull memorably quipped that he once looked up “folk music” in an encyclopedia, fervently hoping that the first music made in America “wasn’t that fiddlin’ banjo crap.” I was really amused by it as a kid.

Decades later, I started studying up on folk music myself and found that there’s a riveting, convoluted, and ultimately mysterious story to be told about fiddles and banjos — two instruments joined at the hip. I may not be the person to tell this story (quite yet), but it’s clear that the fiddle and banjo have sustained a long marriage that has had its ups and downs.

Soon after this relationship first dawned on me, I attended a banjo Q&A session conducted by Mike Seeger and my own (long-suffering) banjo instructor, Rachel Nelson. I was just about to raise my hand and ask about the brotherly fellowship shared between the banjo and the fiddle, when another guy raised his hand and demanded to know why some people seem to think the banjo is nothing but the fiddle’s lowly, bootlicking lackey. Seeger and Nelson looked like they might have preferred my phrasing of the question, but it made me realize I had more research left to do.

The start of this mutual tradition is unknown — folklorist Cecelia Conway is unable to trace the pairing back much further than minstrelsy, around 1840. But certain areas of Appalachia (Virginia and North Carolina, I think) have such an old, rich, complex, multi-racial tradition of fiddlin’ banjo tunes that it couldn’t have originated with the Northern, pop phenomenon of minstrelsy.

The banjo has sometimes been the fiddle’s rhythm section. Listening to the 1920’s recordings of Charlie Poole, the banjo played second fiddle to the fiddle, yet was crucial to Poole’s sound. But in the case of the Skillet Lickers, the banjo is barely audible amidst sometimes three or more fiddles.

Certainly, a great solo banjo tradition was captured in 1920’s recordings of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley and others. But the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music — hugely influential in the post-WWII folk revival — included a marathon of seven solo fiddle cuts, and I wonder if this spotlight on the fiddle in such a prominent document may have left some mark on the post-war relationship between the two instruments. Two of the finest living clawhammer banjo players — Ken Perlman and Mac Benford — each developed their distinctive styles by replacing the fiddle with the banjo, using the clawhammer stroke to coax out their instruments the complex melodic lines usually played by the fiddle. They clearly saw some need to give the banjo its own place in the sun, unshadowed by the fiddle.

The banjo originated in Africa, and the fiddle is the classic folk instrument of the British Isles, so their pairing is sometimes said to be a microcosm of what makes American music such an intense mixture. But at the Black Banjo Gathering, a presentation on African banjo ancestors included slides of African fiddles, constructed almost exactly the same way that early banjos were constructed, only much smaller. So perhaps the banjo and fiddle did not marry for the first time in America — perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they were separated at birth.

What You’re Not Interested In

“It’s amazing, the human capacity to not notice things that you’re not interested in,” Bram Gunther said. He’s New York City’s deputy director of forestry and horticulture and recently gave reporter Andy Young a tour of NYC’s urban forest for an article in the May 23 New Yorker.

The city of New York has five million trees, a half million of which are “street trees” not associated with parks or yards. There are fowering cherry, honey locust, silver linden, pin oak, ginkgo, Japanese zelkova and pagoda, London plane, Kentucky coffeetree, dawn redwood — seventy species in all.

Beginning in June, more than 1,000 volunteer “tree stewards” — tree geeks, the article calls them — will take the first census of NYC trees in a decade. Driving along one block, Gunther points out to his reporter some of the reasons the tree population turns over so quickly: “Subway! Grate! Bus stop! Garage! Canopy! Grates! Vaults! Driveway! Awning! Light pole! Again with the canopy!” Along the way, they find injuries due to bikes chained to trunks, dog urine, lovers carving their initials, and Asian long-horned beetles.

Over the last few months, and after more than five years of working for an organization of plant scientists, I’ve finally begun learning to identify trees (so that’s what a maple leaf looks like!). If my eye for the various species ever develops, I know it’ll be one of those experiences that makes the world come alive for me all over again, much like when I learned about atmospheric optics.

I suppose learning about the urban forest has that same character that draws amateur folklorists, conspiracy cranks, poets in American, amateur scientists, certain varieties of bloggers. It’s a way of turning your back on cable news, American Idol, the runaway bride, publicly-funded stadiums, Clear Channel, and inventing your own culture, your own way of seeing the world. (“There are 8 million stories in the naked city …”) It often seems that simply controlling your own attention and finding your own stories to tell is, increasingly, an act of civil disobedience.

Billboards in Space

Advertising in Earth Orbit

The idea of creating very large advertisements and placing them into Earth obit has been very seriously considered. Such “space billboards,” it’s usually estimated, would be about the size and brightness of the full moon and would be visible for hours on end to something like a quarter or half the world’s population at a time. Potentially, no sky on Earth would lack an ad for something.

Current technology is more than enough to do the trick, and actual companies have offered the service (for example, Space Marketing, Inc. of Roswell, Georgia, proposed space advertising for the 1996 Summer Olympics).

It seems that the only obstacles to actual space billboards are:

(1) Public opposition. Any company making use of such advertising would probably (or hopefully) be subject to intense and widespread public criticism. Indeed, I myself can think of few other causes for which I would be willing to go to war.

(2) National laws. At least in the U.S., a law prohibits the deployment of space advertising. Whether, and for how long, the law would stand up to challenges brought to the World Trade Organization, as well as domestic First Amendment challenges, I can’t say. In any case, last week, the FAA asked Congress for the authority to enforce those existing U.S. laws (see CNN.com’s story in their “funny news” section). I believe this is happening now because private space ventures are making rapid progress in the U.S., and the FAA — not NASA — enforces laws relating to private space travel.

Around 1998, I toyed with the idea of writing a screenplay about an underground quasi-terrorist group that sabotage a mission to install some space advertising. They were not the bad guys, either …

Einstein Takes A Test

Bohr Einstein
Niels Bohr and Einstein think about it

In physics, there are often different equations for the same phenomenon, but you can usually do a little algebra and show that the different equations actually come from the same source. This is considered good and normal.

So, it’s a lot more than a bit embarrassing that the two most important ideas in modern physics — quantum mechanics, which are used to describe teeny tiny things, and General Relativity, which is used to describe big-ass things — have no connection at all. They don’t match. To go from one to the other, you have to close one book, put it away, and open another.

For example, Einstein showed that gravity is really just geometry. Mass warps space, and so objects tend to slide down the geometrical warps that other objects create, moving closer together. When we look at this, it looks like gravitational attraction. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics thinks of gravity as an effect generated when masses pass little particles back and forth between them. These ideas are no more compatible to physicists than they are to me or you.

Generally, the conflict can just be ignored, but in certain cases, the two worlds collide. When you want to talk about teeny tiny spaces with HUGE gravitational fields — like black holes, or the Big Bang — you’re in real trouble. You need physics that hasn’t been invented yet — you need “quantum gravity” or a “Grand Unified Theory”. People are working on some interesting ideas (like string theory) in trying to develop this new physics, but it’s not clear whether anyone is on the right track or not.

Check your local bookstore for a good article in the July 2005 Sky and Telescope, describing experiments designed to help break the log jam. In terms of the margin of error, quantum mechanics has been confirmed with a lot more precision than General Relativity has. If Einstein’s work could be confirmed way, way down to the umpteenth digit, and if this work revealed some difficulties with the theory, it might help unravel the curtain separating the physics of the very large and the very small. Astronomy is at the forefront of the effort, hence the article in Sky and Telescope.

1969 and the Moon Landing Part 2: Alice’s Restaurant

Alice’s Restaurant is a long, rambling, very funny song about a lot of things — particularly the absurd way that its author, Arlo Guthrie, got out of the draft.

A film version of the song was rushed to the theaters soon after the song became a hit. In Arlo Guthrie’s fascinating audio commentary for the “special features” of the film’s DVD, Arlo describes the writing of the song, and then its first public performance:

I went to the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, and they said, “Oh, Arlo Guthrie, you know, aren’t you Woody’s kid?” And they put me out in this field — you know, I was just 18 or 19 years old, I was a real young guy — and I remember playing Alice’s Restaurant standing on a box in a field with about 300 people.

They got such a response that they put me on some other program later on that afternoon with, you know, about a thousand people and that got such a respsonse that they put me on at the very end of the festival, and that evening there were probably about twenty, thirty thousand people in the audience.

They were afraid to put an unknown person like me at the end of a big festival. It’d be really chancy, I mean, what if I was terrible? What if it was horrible? …

And so Judy Collins came out, Joan Baez came out and then other people came out, and Pete Seeger came out. And by the end of the evening, all the performers were onstage singing Alice’s Restaurant.

And that was the day that Man first walked on the Moon. I remember being onstage and telling everybody, you know, “There’s people walking around up there.” And looking at the moon. And it was a big day. Big day for me, big day for everybody. The next day, I started getting the phone calls from all the record companies and the execs and stuff.

It’s true that the song made its public premier at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1967. But “Man first walked on the Moon” two years later, in July 1969. There were no astronauts in space during the 1967 festival.

Part of what fascinates me about the film, and Arlo’s commentary, is that they are both constantly haunted by endless coincidences, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and mysteries — some of which Arlo points out, and some of which he seems to miss. The moon landing the night of his great triumph at Newport, for example, happened only in Arlo’s memory.

The timing of the song and the film interests me. Hollywood in the mid-60s was in pretty bad shape and the studios were desperate to get people into theaters. Bonnie and Clyde (produced by 28-year-old Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn) was a surprise success and helped encourage bolder movies by sometimes by younger artists, oriented toward younger audiences.

Alice’s Restaurant was Arthur Penn’s next directing job after Bonnie and Clyde, and has a disorienting strangeness that seems to come from being a weird hybrid of countercultural documentary and studio pandering. So, Alice’s Restaurant feels like it catches Hollywood in mid-morph, trying to figure out how to do a new thing. The movie is one key to understanding Hollywood at that moment.

But I want to understand the year 1969 and how the The Moon Landing fit into it. One lesson of Arlo’s mistaken timeline is that the recollections of the major players — whether astronauts or folksingers — are 36 year old, and are bound to be cloudy.

Certainly, any drugs used at the time are unlikely to help, but they’re not the only thing that can make things “run together” — young people in 1969 had a lot on their minds, what with a draft, a war, assassinations, Nixon, and such. I often remind myself that between 1965 and 1970, there were … well, just five years.

But the main lesson of Arlo’s mistake is that it wasn’t some other mistake — it was about the Moon Landing. It is testimony to the importance of the landing not just as a technological feat, but as a reflection and contributor to the headiness of the times.

The 1967 Newport Folk Festival was certainly one of the most important events in Arlo Guthrie’s life. It changed everything for him, and it was inextricably wrapped up in momentous national events (just listen to the song). It really was a big day for everybody — every day seemed to be.

So, it makes sense that memories would get pegged to Apollo 11 as a way of expressing their own intensity and, especially, to express the way those memories were shaped by various dramatic displays of American power.

Part 1

The Moon and Tom Waits: Part 2 of 2

Tom Waits Father
Tom Waits and his dad, Frank.

Ever since I first noticed in 1999 how often Tom Waits refers to the Moon, I’ve wondered what else could be said about it, other than Tom Waits likes to refer to the moon. At least one valiant attempt to really get something said has been made, but I don’t think a “big picture” has ever been drawn. I’ll give it a try.

Waits has said he likes his songs to have some weather, a map in case you get lost, and something to eat in case you get hungry. This strategy — of, sort of, getting enough furniture into his rooms that you can live them — winds up being crucial to how his fans react to his work. People who love Waits clearly love doing the work involved in sorting out his references. They ask, what’s Mulligan stew? Where’s Murfreesboro? What’s a big black Mariah? Who’s Wilson Pickett? And the moon is part of this same song writing strategy — often, Waits even gives you the phase of the moon, maybe so you can find your way around in the dark.

Reading over the list of moon references, I’m reminded of my own aim for The Celestial Monochord, which is like the challenge some artists set for themselves — if you only stick to one medium and one theme, you could explore the whole world through them. It hardly matters what you choose — you can pull the entire universe through a little buttonhole. The iterations, the returning to the subject over and over again, eventually polishes the subject into a mirror that will reflect whatever you put in front of it. The moon face is ever-changing but repetitious, and seems to invite an artistic project like that. Waits chose the moon as one of his Great Themes — but really, it could have been anything.

Waits has always been an outlandishly romantic writer. Of course, especially lately, I mean romantic in the sense that the love notes he sings to his wife Kathleen can be heartbreakingly sweet. But, especially early in his career, I also mean that other romanticism — an unrestrained belief in impractical fictions, a body-and-soul dedication to lovely baloney. For example, Waits has said that he’s embarrassed by his early work, when he pursued the romance of the Great American Drunk (and he made sure that life and art did uncanny imitations of each other). And so, what could possibly be a brighter sign spelling “romance” (in both senses) than the moon? In a recent song, Waits asks, “What could be more romantic than dying in the moonlight?”

Waits is one of those musicians I mentioned earlier in the context of Mike Seeger — a middle class adventurer in revolt against his class, one who “can come most fully into possession of himself only in disguise.” As a young man, in the name of searching for his own true nobility — the diamond in his mind — he fashioned himself into one of The Common Folk that lived in his imagination. He renounced his Nobility in order to find it again.

In this context, I think about a line from “Shore Leave,” in which a sailor on leave writes home wondering “how the same Moon outside over this Chinatown fair could look down on Illinois and find you there.” It’s a reminder that the moon really does have a “universality” to it — it’s leveling, a commonality. The very same moon has been seen by Plato, Genghis Khan, Galileo, Hitler, Shakespeare, George Bush, Regis Philbin. It’s the ultimate folk image, because it’s been independently, organically rediscovered by everybody who ever had eyes.

I think Waits has used the moon’s commonness, it’s dailiness (actually its nightliness, which suits Waits better) to insinuate himself among us, among the ordinary — something he has needed both artistically and personally. The image of the moon — with its powerful combination of romance and ordinariness — is an emblem of that transcendent quality which Waits has always sought in being just plain folk.