February 2007 – Page 2 – The Celestial Monochord

Hearts in Dixie

Hearts_in_dixie

Lately, I spend a lot of my time in university libraries, city and county libraries, and state historical societies, often looking through old newspapers from around 1925 to 1959. I now have no patience for anybody who ever feels “bored” — just pick up a newspaper from the 1920’s and go nuts.

I recently ran across the headline above in a July 1929 newspaper from St. Paul, Minnesota. “Hearts in Dixie” has been written about often by scholars working on media images of African Americans, and I can’t add much to that work. The main subject of interest, of course, is the racist nostalgia for the antebellum South to which the movie appealed and which it reinforced.

But for me, finding the particular article above drove home a few things. It appeared in a newspaper from one of the highest latitudes in America — Minnesota’s state motto is “The Star of the North.” The article reminds me again that these fantasies of blacks yearning for the happy days of slavery were not solely — in fact, not primarily — southern fantasies. A lot of northerners liked images of African Americans who wanted to go back where they came from.

Roughly the same preference gave rise, a hundred years before, to black-face minstrelsy, which was invented in northern cities like New York and Boston and remained more wildly popular there than in the South. I often think of the American vision of Ireland as a place where people are always covered with shamrocks and drink green beer — a total lack of familiarity is ideal for growing fantasies.

For our purposes, gentle Celestial Monochord reader, it’s the article’s musical content that’s most interesting. The short article consists almost exclusively of a list of 25 songs that appear in the movie. Presumably, the writer believed the Minnesota audience would recognize these songs and have an opinion about them. I have a relatively shaky grasp of the history of where that belief came from.

A few of the songs are familiar to me from simply being an American. I don’t know, I guess I heard them in grade school — “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen”, “Old Folks at Home”, and “Swanee River”.

But a surprising number of the listed songs were completely unknown to me until I started listening intensively to what’s known today as “Old Time” music — The New Lost City Ramblers, Tom Brad and Alice, and so on. Others may have been familiar before, but I now closely associate them with old time, bluegrass, or the Harry Smith Anthology. The article lists “Lonesome Road”, “I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray”, “Li’l Liza Jane”, “Shine On”, “Turkey in the Straw”, “Old Hen Cackle”, and “Oh Dem Golden Slippers”.

As a consumer of so-called roots music, one line of the article is all too familiar:

Some of the other numbers are noteworthy in that they are foundation stones, so to speak, in the structure of jazz music.

Of course, jazz, particularly if loosely defined, was the most popular new music of the day, and it’s funny to see that even back then, companies were using dubious claims of historical significance to move product.

I’ve written before, though, about newspaper stories that cited a kind of old time revival underway in the late 1920’s, and this article is further support. One of those articles featured record store owner Harry Bernstein, who discussed the revival entirely in terms of repertoire, as opposed to performance style — it was old songs that were popular, not necessarily old styles of playing. THAT revival had to wait for Harry Smith and the New Lost City Ramblers. I haven’t seen “Hearts of Dixie,” although I’m sure I’d find the performances rather disappointing, stylistically … at the very least.

I know vastly more about the history of performance styles and instrumentation than I do about repertoire (Benjamin Filene‘s chapter on it has helped a lot). This blind spot probably results from my being more directly a product of the revival of the 1950’s and 1960’s — which was so much about the rebirth of sounds — than a product of the various late-19th and early-20th century revivals, focused as they were on texts. If there had been an article about banjos in Minnesota, I would have had some good contexts in which to understand it, but this list of old songs is a little more mysterious to me.

Editor’s Note: This is installment 18 of The Celestial Monochord’s great February 2007 adventure — we are posting an entry a day all month long! JUST IMAGINE … magine … magine … THAT … at … at … at …

Observation — IRAS-Araki-Alcock

In May of 1983, IRAS-Araki-Alcock came closer to Earth than any comet since 1770 — about 12 times the distance to the Moon.

It was my first comet, and I saw it from the back yard of my family’s house in Palatine, Illinois. Although Palatine was small then, it was already a Chicago suburb on O’Hare’s flight path. I did a lot of complaining about the light pollution, but those turned out to be the darkest skies I’ve ever lived under.

IRAS-Araki-Alcock was a ghostly thing. It looked roughly the size of the moon, and spherical — it had no visible tail. You could see its nucleus, though … overall, the comet was like a round patch of smoke with a star caught inside. Aside from its pale blue-green color, it looked like one of the little fairy sprites that followed the UFOs around in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Because it was so close, you could almost see it move against the background stars, like the minute hand of a clock (and believe me, I know how the minute hands of clocks move). I would try to get a fix on where it was in relation to the stars, but what my eyes were seeing would never match the image in my mind, which was always already obsolete.

Having spent so much of my youth with my developing brain focused on the sky, it felt a little perverse to have something new up there, especially something that moved so fast. I could feel in my bones why comets were regarded as disturbing omens of bad things to come.

Mostly, what it looked like was … and this was the most remarkable thing … it looked like an evaporating bit of ice about 12 times as far as the moon. Although I knew more than enough about astronomy to know why it had to be silent, I remember being amazed at its silence. It just slipped on by.

Editor’s Note: This morning, my wife got her copy of her latest publication, a poem entitled “We Seek a Shepard or a Sign” in Court Green #4, a literary journal from Chicago’s Columbia College. Check it out.

This is installment 17 of a 28-day experiment. The Celestial Monochord is trying to post once a day, sort of like a blog is supposed to do.

Achilles Is In Your Alleyway

When I first started hitting the old stuff hard, I mostly listened to blues from the 1930’s through the 1950’s. And some of my favorite recordings were things like Memphis Minnie’s “Keep On Eating”:

Every time I cook, looks like you can’t get enough
Fix you a pot of soup and make you drink it up

[chorus]
So keep on a-eating
Oh, keep on a-eating
Keep on eating
Baby till you get enough

I know you’re crazy about your oysters and your shrimps and crabs
Take you round the corner and give you a chance to grab

I’ve cooked and cooked till I done got tired
Can’t fill you up of my fried apple pie

I know you got a bad cold and you can’t smell
I ain’t gonna give you something that I can’t sell

And then there was another favorite, Sonny Terry’s spirited rendition of “Custard Pie”:

I’m gunna tell you something, baby, ain’t gunna to tell no lie
I want some of your custard pie.

[chorus]
Well, I want some of it
Yes, I want some of it
You gotta give me some of it
Before you give it all away.

Well, I don’t care if you live across the street
When you cut your pie please save me a piece

Now, when you listen to such songs metaphorically and creatively, if you read between the lines and against the grain, as it were, if you try to catch their double meaning … it’s almost as if these songs could also be about FOOD! And actually, they’re kind of sweet as food songs. Maybe it’s me.

Of course, my joke here is how these raunchy blues tunes supposedly fooled somebody at some point (who or when, I don’t know) into thinking they were only about food (or deep sea divers, or horse jockeys), when in fact they were also “secretly” about sex. Today, anyway, most of us have to use our imagination and concentrate to hear them literally. The literal and figurative meanings have switched places — the “vehicle” has become the “tenor,” as I’m supposed to say, sitting here with my masters degree staring down at me.

There’s some old songs about sex that are on the other extreme. They do such a good job of hiding their meanings that the metaphors barely take place at all. The literal (non-sexual, tenor) images and the figurative (sexual, vehicle) meanings are connected by gossamer threads so tenuous, thin, and indirect that they almost snap. You’re left with a set of nearly free-floating, abstracted images with little particular connection to anything — you’re left with something like modern poetry:

The Old Man At The Mill

Down set an owl with his head so white
Lonesome day and a lonesome night
Thought I heard some pretty girls say
Court all night and sleep next day

[chorus]
Well, the same old man sittin’ at the mill
Mill turns around of its own free will
One hand in the hopper and the other in the sack
Ladies step forward and the gents fall back

I spied a woodpecker sittin on a fence
Once I courted a handsome wench
She got saucy and she from me fled
Ever since then, well, my head’s been red

“Well,” said the raven as he flew,
“If I was a young man I’d have two.
One for to get and the other for to sew
I’d get another string for my bow, bow, bow.”

Well, my old man’s from Kalamazoo
He don’t wear no yes-I-do
First to the left and then to the right
This old mill grinds day and night

Like a lot of other 20th Century modern art, Bob Dylan’s poetics were inspired by “primitive” folk sources. Just as Picasso and T. S. Elliot and Brancusi and Stravinsky were inspired by folk art around the world (African masks, etc.), Dylan figured out the trick of modernism from folk music. He cracked the case of how to make a popular music (I mean music very large numbers of people wanted to hear) that was also modernist art — abstract, with unstable and open-ended, shared meanings. Set the raunchy “Old Man At The Mill” beside Dylan’s raunchy “Temporarily Like Achilles,” for example:

Well, I rush into your hallway
And lean against your velvet door
I watch upon your scorpion
Who crawls across your circus floor
Just what do you think you have to guard?
You know I want your lovin’
Honey, but you’re so hard.

But to give credit where credit is due, the idea really settled itself into my head while I was thinking about John Prine’s “Forbidden Jimmy.” It’s a bawdy song in which the sexual symbols are so unattached to their literal meanings that they’re free-floating, they operate as modern poetry:

Forbidden Jimmy, he’s got a mighty sore tooth
From biting too many dimes in a telephone booth
He’s got half of his bootlace tied to the dial
Thank you, operator, for getting Jimmy to smile
…
“Call out the Coast Guard,” screamed the police
Forbidden Jimmy, he’s got three water-skis
He put two on his wavelength and gave one to his girl
She’s a mighty fine person, it’s a mighty fine world
…
I got caught cooking popcorn and calling it hail
They wanna stick my head inside a watering pail
Ya know, they’re gonna be sorry, they’re gonna pay for it too
Forbidden Jimmy, he’s coming straight at you

John Prine and Tom Waits were from that first generation of songwriters to learn the trick of modernism from Dylan. Of course, both have also reached around Dylan … let me rephrase that … both have gone directly to the same source Dylan did, by listening to and responding to the old American blues and country.

Editor’s Note: This is the sixteenth installment of my frenzied attempt to post something or other to The Celestial Monochord every day for the entire month of February without winding up like Katerina Ivanovna. This thing is more than half done! It’s supposed to get up above 10°F in Minneapolis this weekend! There is light at the end of the tunnel! Go towards the light, Celestial Monochord!

Rocky Mountain Time

Time
(Watch photo from Watchismo.)

We begin with ringing, declarative chords as if introducing a rock anthem, but by the song’s first words the mood has already quieted:

Station’s empty
Trains were all gone
Reached in my pocket
Waited for dawn

It seems to be in waltz time, but it doesn’t feel like it — its rhythmic sense is more the ebb and flow of breathing or thinking. And gets that effect mostly from such changes in dynamics, loud here and soft there.

Those dynamics have a purpose, of course. They mirror the song’s emotional roller coaster, a volatility that rises in the narrator, but is unprovoked by the action in any plot. Literally, the song is just a description of the loneliness of a musician on the road. He even has to fantasize his own back-up band:

The clock played drums
And I hummed the sax
And the wind whistled down
The railroad tracks

In its own way, “Rocky Mountain Time” is a bit John Prine’s version of Langston Hughes’ famous poem, “A Dream Differed” — it’s a psychological study of what becomes of dreams and desires when they’re isolated, frustrated, and finally strangled. Emotionally, the song is as direct as anything else on Diamonds in the Rough. It almost seems to be Prine’s last chance on this album to look us right in the eye and connect with us directly — seeing as it’s the penultimate cut, and the album’s last Prine composition.

But in terms of its ideas, the song has always kept me slightly distracted by little logical puzzles, trivial calculations. Maybe it’s trying to keep me off guard while it prepares its punch. Consider the chorus:

Hey, three for a quarter
One for a dime
I’ll bet it’s tomorrow
By Rocky Mountain time

So … if it’s tomorrow according to Rocky Mountain Time, Prine’s narrator must be east of the Mountain Time Zone. Right? If you’re in New York and it’s 1:00 AM, it’s only 11:00 PM the day before in the Rockies. It’s tomorrow by Rocky Mountain Time. Unless he means tomorrow IN Rocky Mountain Time, in which case he’s WEST of the Rockies, in the narrow wedge of the planet from California to the International Dateline.

Time zone calculations — they’re the kind of thing your mind does when you’re far from home. Let’s see, three for a quarter and one for a dime, so if you get three, they knock a nickel off the price. You can see how it would get alienating after a while.

The waitress yelled at me
And so did the food
And the water tastes funny
When you’re far from your home
But it’s only the thirsty
That hunger to roam

In a way, these puzzles in logic alienate me from the direct emotional impact of the song. But that’s what the song itself is about — being stranded out there beyond your own emotions, trying to work out the logistics of getting along in a strange land. Again, it’s a traveling musician’s song.

Of the few cuts Henry Thomas recorded in his lifetime, a lot of them play this same magic trick on me, keeping me distracted with calculations while they prepare to hit me in the gut. Like most magic tricks, they use misdirection — Henry Thomas will sometimes keep me puzzling over celestial navigation until he’s got me in tears.

In Lovin’ Babe, a song that starts fast and accelerates, everything seems to be coming and going in every direction, while in the meantime, one of music’s most painful psychological portraits is taking shape:

Look where that evening sun has gone
Look where that evening sun gone
Look where that evening sun done gone
Gone, God knows where

The longest day, darlin, ever I seen
Yes, the longest day I ever seen
Well, the longest day ever I seen
The day Roberta died

That eastbound train come and gone
That eastbound train come and gone
That eastbound train come and gone
Gone to come no more

Got the blues, God I’m feeling bad
Yeah, I got the worried blues, feeling bad
Got the blues, I’m feeling bad
Feeling bad, God knows why

That eastbound sun come and gone
Now, the eastbound sun come and gone
Yeah, the eastbound sun come and gone
Now, babe I’m all out and down

Roberta, babe, gone away
Yeah, Robert has gone away
Roberta, babe, gone away
She’s gone to come no more

The most vexing question is “that eastbound sun,” given that the sun travels west every day. It would be a great name for a train, but I find no evidence of an Eastbound Sun. Besides a slip of the tongue, or bad information, the only explanation I have is that the sun DOES move eastward — through the constellations, slowly, from one season to another. It takes a bit of slightly arcane knowledge to know that it does, but it does.

I wouldn’t put such knowledge past Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas, as he must’ve been pretty experienced in navigation. Every song of his entire recorded career is about moving from place to place — the freedom and hazards of traveling through America as a black musician during Jim Crow. The Road plays the same role in his music that the Gospels play in Blind Willie Johnson’s. It’s his grand theme, the concept through which his music is in conversation with the previous 4000 years, and the subsequent 80.

Songs like “Lovin’ Babe” and “Red River Blues” are easiest for me to understand when I hear them in the context of the Underground Railroad — they are urgently, desperately focused on celestial navigation and the clock, the technical cornerstones of both freedom and imperialist empire. And while Prine is of a different time and race (this is a hillbilly blues, after all), “Rocky Mountain Time” is part of a long lineage that passes back through and before Henry Thomas.

“Rocky Mountain Time” is Diamonds in the Rough’s way of beginning to say goodbye to us. With it, I find myself feeling a bit raw emotionally and alive intellectually. And I find Prine out there, fading, disappearing, puzzled and lost on the road, without a lot of hope of ever coming back.

Christ I’m so mixed up and lonely
I can’t even make friends with my brain
I’m too young to be where I’m going
But I’m too old to go back again

That’s yet another navigational paradox … the final cut on the album could easily be construed as resolving it, through Christ’s salvation. I haven’t written about that final cut yet, so I don’t know, but it’s never been in Prine’s character to offer an easy out. As he wrote about another song on Diamonds in the Rough, “I really love America. I just don’t know how to get there anymore.”

(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)

Editor’s Note: This is the 15th installment of my 28-day marathon. The Celestial Monochord is trying to post something every day for the entire month of February.

Let’s Talk Dirty

(a member of Slipped A Mickey plays a jug
mounted on a microphone stand)

It’s funny. Pat Donahue has been playing guitar on A Prairie Home Companion for over 13 years. He’s a world-class fingerstyle player, to my ears, and Chet Atkins and Leo Kottke (whose ears are better educated on the subject) agree. Playing for Garrison Keillor must be a bear, as you have to be ready to … you know, whatever … play in almost any genre, or play as if you were a freezing-cold drunken cowboy, or make your guitar sound like it was broken in half or …

Despite all this, my impression is that Donahue has not been especially well known in Minnesota. At least given the fine, difficult, consistent, high-profile labor he’s performed for us over a long time, it doesn’t seem we’ve ever really focused on the guy and appreciated him. Well, that’s been my sense anyway.

Until that sushi song. Back in 2000, Donahue played a song he’d written — a stupid song, really, but very funny — about getting sick from sushi. It was called “Sushi Yucki.” The response was kind of huge, and it seems to be raising his profile.

Tickets to an upcoming concert by Donahue were used this past Saturday to draw memberships during Minnesota Publc Radio’s pledge drive — and “Sushi Yucki” was aired in its entirety, as if to remind us who the guy is and how great it would be to see him perform. He’ll have no choice but to play “Sushi Yuki” at his concert:

They think it sounds so yummy
But, hey, I ain’t no dummy
I knew no way
It would stay
Down in my tummy
I took a bite
And I was right
No likee icky yucky sushi

A moral of the story, of course, is you never know what’s going to draw an audience.

Now, the 25th Annual Battle of the Jug Bands was on Sunday (the day after I last heard “Sushi Yucki” on the radio). One of the contestants was a band called Slipped a Mickey, which I enjoyed very much even if they just couldn’t compete with the winners, The Hump Night Thumpers — THE FIGHTIN’ THUMPERS!

Slipped a Mickey played John Prine’s novelty song “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian” as a kind raunchy, down-tempo, coffeehouse blues. Having heard the two songs so close together, I finally recognized their affinity.

Like “Sushi Yucki,” you want to listen to “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian” over and over until you feel like … well, like you’ve had too much sushi. Both songs begin in my stomping grounds, the Upper Midwest, and then travel to the islands of the Pacific, where the narrator’s bodily functions dominate the action:

I am from Minnesota
I went to Tokyo-ta
Visit the land
Of enchantment and quaint pagoda
I almost died
The night they tried
To make me eat that yucky sushi.

—

Well, I packed my bags and bought myself a ticket
For the land of the tall palm tree
Aloha Old Milwaukee, Hello Waikiki
I just stepped down from the airplane
When I heard her say
Waka waka nuka licka, waka waka nuka licka
Would you like a lei? Hey!

Both songs could be seen as racist, of course, depending as they do on faux-foreign gibberish. But like a lot of parody that traverses sensitive terrain, the songs are careful not to over-clarify the object of parody. Are we laughing at how funny the Japanese and Hawaiian languages sound? Or at Minnesotans — unable, as we are, to keep anything down but tuna casserole? Or at the jejune mating habits of Wisconsinites?

When I saw Prine last year in Minneapolis, he made a rather deliberate show of trudging resignedly through “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian,” as if he had to do it whether he liked it or not. Three-quarters of the way through this surprisingly lengthy song, he vamped for a few seconds and warned us, “There’s more.”

Editor’s Note: I try to write these a day ahead, but given Valentine’s Day, I might be a little late with the February 15 post. Do I piss off my wife or the readers of my blog? Gentle reader, you just might lose that coin toss.

Anyway, this is the 14th installment of my 28-day attempt to post something every day in February. So, this entry is like Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra’s “Moonshiner’s Dance” — the mid-way point is marked by the silence immediately following. Be seated!

Land of Lincoln

I thought a lot about Abraham Lincoln while I was growing up, which I guess is not very unusual in Illinois.

Today (as I write this) is Lincoln’s birthday, and though his life is getting more important to me now, it was his death that mattered to me as a boy. It was by thinking about Abraham Lincoln that I first began to wrap my mind around the idea of death.

My dad spent decades working his way to the top of the hierarchy of the Knights of Columbus in Illinois, so our family criss-crossed the state constantly. Belleville, Peoria, Beardstown, Carbondale, Mattoon. It is a BIG state.

Around 1973, we saw the Dickson Mounds, a prehistoric earthworks containing a lot of Native American burials. They had the side of one of the mounds carved out to expose the bones, and they’d built a vast visitor’s center where you could stand behind a railing and look at the skeletons. It was dark and dramatically lit, and there’s a photo of a 9-year-old me standing at the railing, looking rather green in more ways than one.

Someone in our family also took some photos of the bones, and we came across them whenever we’d pull out the family slide projector. The last time we saw those slides, my mother talked about wrapping them up and sending them to the tribal government for proper disposal. She probably did, if I know her.

Anyway, it was on that same trip that we visited Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, and I half expected to see his bones, too. Of course, someone had stolen his body long ago and, when they got it back, it had to be locked firmly away so they’d stay put. But I remember imagining what his skeleton looked like.

Around that age, I read “The Death of Lincoln: A Picture History of the Assassination” by Leroy Hayman, from Scholastic. I still have it. One night, with that book at my side, I woke up around 3 AM thinking of Lincoln’s recurring dream, the one where he was traveling toward some “indefinite shore” in a “singular, indescribable vessel.” I freaked myself out, and couldn’t stop my limbs from shaking in my bed.

And then I thought the little bust of Lincoln on the shelf above my headboard was moving. It was made of white wax — my mother had given me a quarter to get it made by a machine in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

That’s when I woke up one of my brothers and told him what was happening. It was the night my child’s mind seized on death, finally understanding it was real, something truly in the world, a pervasive thing. He told me not to worry about it, rolled over, and went back to sleep. In retrospect, that was pretty much the right answer.

The night culminated when I heard a terrible groan that seemed to come from everywhere at the same time. It was undeniably a ghost — I can still hear it in my head, it was awful. Now that I’m older and things are starting to come back to me, I realize it was exactly the same sound my dad — who was a champion snorer — would make down the hall when he rolled over in his sleep.

Obviously, that was a long time ago and I’ve very much moved on. But I do occasionally feel a bit like spitting at the mention of John Wilkes Booth.

Editor’s Note: This is the 13th installment of my fool-hardy attempt to write something every day for the entire month of February.

Battle of the Jug Bands, 2007 Results

Gizmo
(Gizmo, a member of The Hump Night Thumpers)

The votes are tallied and authorized, and the winners of the 25th Annual Battle of the Jug Bands has been announced!

This year’s winners — the jug band honored with one year’s possession of the traveling trophy, a 1936 Holliwood-brand waffle iron — are The Hump Night Thumpers!

I’m proud to say that the Thumpers are from my sweet home, Chicago. The members of the band are the students of the Hump Night Thumpers class at the Old Town School of Folk Music — the band’s membership rotates, with the lineup at any given moment depending on who has enrolled in the class.

The fearless leader of this band — and indeed, the leader of the large expedition that has traveled two years in a row from Chicago to Minneapolis to compete in the Battle — is one Arlo Leach, guitar instructor at the Old Town.

Unfortunately, they performed near the end of the evening, by which time I had pretty much abandoned note-taking in favor of photography. I would love to give a song-by-song analysis, but I was frankly spacing out. They certainly were a compelling jug band, I remember that.

The Thumpers were dressed in fine evening formal wear, circa 1930, bringing a bit of class to the Cabooze. In this, they joined the long tradition of elevating the reputation of marginalized musical forms through sartorial elegance and dignified personal conduct (recall Bascom Lamar Lunsford in his tux, for example).

I also remember that Arlo impressed both the judges and The Celestial Monochord by introducing their last song with this:

This next song was recorded in 1934 in Chicago, where we’re from. A lot of you know the song “Jug Band Quartet” — well, this was the B-side of that record, and it’s called “Little Green Slippers.” [approximate quote]

See, after you’ve heard the evening’s fifth rendition of that “Hey lordy momma momma, hey lordy poppa poppa” thing, you start to get the general idea. It was worth several extra points to hear some indication that the band knew jug band music had a life before the CD. And the LP. And the 45.

Congratulations to our jug-playing cousins to the south!

Saggy
(The feller and one of five grandmas
comprising Grandma’s Saggy Jug Band)

Now, I know you’re wondering how last year’s winners, Grandma’s Saggy Jug Band, performed this year. Grandma’s Saggy, as you know, was given the honor of choosing this year’s judging panel. Because they — no doubt unlike THIS year’s wise and talented winners! — never contacted me about serving as a member of the judging panel, I had no choice but to JUDGE THEM ANYWAY. And believe me, I was very judgy!

Grandma’s Saggy Jug Band mounted the stage looking quite well-fed and self-satisfied from an entire year of eating waffles made with their trophy waffle iron. Audience members were universally honored that they had even bothered to wipe the syrup from the sides of their mouths!

Now, I suppose a few of the drunker audience members were dazzled by their fancy musicianship — “Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild Wild Women,” especially, highlighted the rhythm section’s slick ability to maintain a driving, danceable momentum while also filling each measure with dense, intricate polyrhythms. It was breathtaking … to some.

And the less observant might have seen their finale — the band’s signature piece, “Cock-A-Doodle, I’m Off My Noodle,” originally by Harry Reser’s Six Jumping Jacks — as decisive proof that the band deeply understands and appreciates the “madcap” tradition in American dance music. Personal charisma and precise musical timing were the hallmark of great novelty bands like Spike Jones and his City Slickers and Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra. In the unlikeliest of venues, Grandma’s Saggy Jug Band resurrects this tradition with intelligence, respect, skill, and genuinely funny showmanship. Or so some might think.

But I saw through that. Their rendition of “Don’t Get Trouble in Your Mind” was an extremely close recreation of the New Lost City Rambler’s version — to the extent it deviated from the Ramblers’ recording, it was more danceable, more compelling, more fun. What a garish display — the Rambler’s version was plenty danceable, compelling, and fun to begin with, I assure you.

Most damning of all, their … over-determined ethnomimesis … failed to resolve the very contradictions inherent in the semiotics of the, uh, signs they were … signifying. Their very Bernoulli Effect elutriated their own mycotoxicosis!

One year can make a world of difference, of course, so we’ll see how this year’s winners fair next year. We’ll see if the fledgling Old Town School of Folk Music can withstand the treatment The Hump Night Thumpers might — or might not — receive from the Minneapolis blogging community.

Editor’s Note: This is installment 12 of our attempt to post something or other every day during the entire month of February. That’s about 28 times the posting rate usually maintained around these parts.

Your Wife As Krakatoa, 1883

For today’s entry of The Celestial Monochord, my heartfelt thanks to Minneapolis poet Jennifer L. Willoughby. Her first book of poems, Beautiful Zero, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2015.

The Monochord has also published her poem “Thank You Mr. Sagan.”

This is the eleventh installment in my mission to post one entry to The Celestial Monochord every day for the month of February.

—–

YOUR WIFE AS KRAKATOA, 1883

Did you hear that ravishing blast?
That was your wife.
Her explosion shocked even the smallest Australian sheep
eating green turf over 3000 miles away.

At Western festivities
languid relatives patted her head,
thinking she was pretty and backwards,
thinking she was alcoholic and strange.

Did you see wings of independence bobbing in her shoals,
did you see infants listening while she sang about England?

She being tame as cocoa,
a little armchair nation stationed next to Java.
Gentlemen whispered, inferred frigidity.

She being a slow colonial outpost
of the spice islands, shanghaied and traded,
her pepper and cloves seasoning putrefying meat.

Your wife was the kind of woman
who wore silk and went bare foot,
plumes of juniper spiking her hair.
Pye-dogs, the wandering mutts of Asia,
followed her whistles, lapped her salty knees.

She could tell time with a shadow & a pin.
She was good at falling in love with the peacock generation.

She had a fling with the Wallace Line,
raising eyebrows over glasses of gin.
They got down to business
with the poison flowers,
the strangling weeds,
the scavenging avians.

Your wife was either a shrew or a shrewd captive of nature.

In one day,
your wife destroyed life as she knew it,
went cackling madwoman, breaking the stone gates
of her oceanic laboratory, boiling down your horded annual capital
to a glutinous stew of paper boats, torn orchids and molten bones.

No one could hold her.
The shock wave of your wife traveled the earth seven times.
Her ashes sat in the lungs of merchants in Singapore like black milk.
She hotwired barometers from Bogota to DC and flung her aerosol spray
of sapphire and emerald suns to tango with the equator.

Your wife killed 36,417 people.
Your wife sent corpses sailing to Africa on pyres of steaming pumice.
Your wife was 10,000 times as strong as Hiroshima’s atomic bomb.
Your wife was the mother of it all.

Some future tourist scouring the beach
for chambered shells or shiny tiki treasures
might know nothing about your wife.

Scientists have added your wife to their alphabetical jars
of formaldehyde, saline and amber. Etched her face on a fossil.

She fooled honest men in New York and New Haven.
They drove fire trucks to quench hallucinatory afterglows
as she rouged the sedate evening with mirrors of flame.

Forget your wife.
She was not beloved.
Her unusual sunsets continued for years.

The Young Musicologist

Today is the 39-year anniversary of Mike Seeger’s recording of Dock Boggs singing “Careless Love.” Last February 10, I marked the 38-year anniversary with a good entry about the song. That entry is one of the most-visited pages at The Celestial Monochord, and I won’t try to rewrite it today.

Thanks to Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus, I bet Mike Seeger is almost constantly asked about Boggs these days. His “rediscovery” of Boggs in 1963 and the short time they spent working together have taken on the qualities of myth in a lot of people’s minds, including mine. I always think of Mike and Dock alongside the story of Johannes Kepler at Tycho Brahe’s death bed. I’ve tried to interest a show-biz relative of mine in the idea of a movie about Seeger and Boggs (maybe with Kevin McDonald as Seeger and John C. Reilly as Doc Watson? Any ideas about Boggs?).

Anyway, in the few, very brief exchanges I’ve had with Seeger, I’ve tried to avoid the obvious topics like Boggs — I asked him about Maybelle Carter’s playing of melodic autoharp, for example. But I made an exception back in 2004, when I told him a story about Boggs. It seemed to go well — maybe it was good to be told something new about Boggs for a change.

Mike had just completed a workshop on picking styles and a few people hung around afterwards to talk to him. Someone mentioned Boggs, and I launched into the “conversion experience” story I tell now and then:

The first CD I got after The Harry Smith Anthology was the Folkways stuff you did with Dock in the 1960’s. I put it on the stereo for the first time, and when “New Prisoner’s Song” came on, I just burst into tears. I sobbed openly for a while. And then I collected myself and thought … “My musical tastes have CHANGED.”

And with that, Mike let out a big belly laugh. It seemed to me that he appreciated how bizarre and potentially intolerable Boggs’ music could sound to someone in their 30’s, as I was then, and understood my surprise at myself.

Among the other people in the room was a kid around 20 years old, I guess. He had the coolest, silliest haircut — sort of a cross between a mohawk and the coxcomb of a chicken. This young banjoist — who reminded me of a very young Bob Carlin — mentioned that he had an original Brunswick 78 of Dock’s “Sugar Baby.”

Mike was surprised. He said his “friend Greil Marcus,” who “loves to write about Dock Boggs,” had asked him to see if he could get him some of those 78s, but Seeger was unable to locate any at a reasonable price. The youngster said he’d payed less than a hundred dollars for his. About a half an hour later, during lunch, Mike and this mohawk kid were sitting together, engaged in some kind of intense discussion.

I’m finding that it matters, this getting up close to the people you write about.

Over the course of the long weekend of the “Black Banjo: Then and Now” conference, Mike slowly painted a portrait of himself as a young, inexperienced folklorist in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Around 1953, he briefly met a black banjoist named Sam (the one he describes in the liner notes to “Tie Your Dog Sally Gal” on Close to Home). Days later, he asked a shopkeeper in a black section of Kensington, Maryland where he might find Sam. Mike explained, with obvious regret in his voice, “I was green, and looking for Sam, and he thought it may not be good for Sam.” He never did find the banjoist.

That same weekend, Mike told a remarkable story about visiting Sewanee, TN, where he met the dean, Red Lancaster. Hearing that Mike was into the banjo, he invited Mike back to his house. This was OK, Lancaster said, because his wife was away. Young Mike wondered nervously what what this might mean, exactly. That night, Lancaster brought out some whiskey and began to drink it. Mike didn’t feel he had much of an option except to drink it too, although Mike was definitely not a drinker of hard liquor. His memory of the evening is very cloudy, but he was able to record the session, and the tape is now at Chapel Hill.

What Mike does remember is that Lancaster consistently stroked the fifth string of his banjo with his thumbnail, flicking UP (not down, as everybody else does, regardless of style). He also remembers that Lancaster’s thumb was clearly bloody after an evening of banjo playing.

This is the tension that would be great to get into a film — the young folksinger/folklorist, green and nervous, suddenly immersed in the universe of men and women very much older than himself, people who had seen a lot and who had many decades worth of demons, resentments, desires, and regrets to contend with. It reverses the old myth still so emblematic of anthropology — the picture of a worldly, sophisticated representative of the wider planet who comes to study an innocent product of a tiny, insular culture. When Mike met Dock in 1963, who was like a lamb, and who represented a big, complex world?

Editor’s Note: This is installment #10 of The Celestial Monochord’s great and stress-inducing adventure in cutting-edge bloggery — we are attempting to post one entry every day during the month of February.

If You Can Blog A Better Post …

Still thinking, from yesterday, about Tom Waits and his adaptation of old folksongs …

He doesn’t really adapt them or arrange them to suit his style — as many a folksinger does — he strips them down to their “idea” and their “feel” and then writes an entirely new piece, beginning there, with the song’s essence.

During the years in which I followed and contributed heavily to a Tom Waits discussion list, I was always finding examples — ad nauseum, as was occasionally pointed out to me. Often, the connection was interesting but flimsy.

Among the more convincing examples I found was “Swordfishtrombones.” It’s the title song of the 1982 album in which Waits finally left behind the drunken beatnik routine (which he’d grown to dislike), and began to reach for something more explicitly artful. I think he and his wife Kathleen Brennan sought direction the way everybody else does — by digging up the roots.

Before the Dylan Era, the song “Swordfishtrombones” might have been called a play-party nonsense song, while today it’s impressionistic. It relates the wildly shifting fortunes and apparently supernatural misadventures of a soldier just back from a war:

He went to sleep at the bottom of Tenkiller Lake
And he said, “Gee, but it’ great to be home.”
. . .
He packed up all his expectations
He lit out for California
With a flyswatter banjo on his knee
A lucky tiger in his angel hair
And benzedrine for getting there
They found him in a eucalyptus tree

Now, I’ve witnessed people coming home from wars, and this sort of behavior looks sorta familiar. Certainly, half a pint of Ballentine’s each day is on the moderate side.

Anyway, in the end, the song acknowledges the far-fetched character of some of its claims by drawing attention to itself as a piece of writing. It’s just a tall tale:

Now, some say he’s doing the obituary mambo
Some say that he’s hanging on the wall
Perhaps this yarn is the only thing
That holds this man together
Some say that he was never here at all

Some say they saw him down in Birmingham
Sleeping in a boxcar going by
And if you think that you can tell a bigger tale
I swear to God you’d have to tell a lie.

When I first heard the woundrous Bascom Lamar Lunsford sing “On a Bright and Summer’s Morning,” I decided I knew where “Swordfishtombones” had come from. It turns out Waits’ soldier was once a hunter, and is now imbibing in some sex and alcohol, but the song is essentially the same sort of travelogue. Some stanzas from Lunsford, the guy who wrote “Mountain Dew”:

The money that I got for the venison and skin
I hauled it to my daddy’s barn
It wouldn’t half go —
It wouldn’t half go in

I went upon the mountain
Beyond the peak so high
The moon come round with lightning speed
“I’ll take a ride,” says —
“I’ll take a ride,” says I.

The moon come around the mountain
It took a sudden whirl
My feet slipped and I fell out
And landed in this —
And landed in this world

The clincher, of course, is the last stanza, which Waits has changed only slightly:

The man that made this song and tune
His name was Benny Young
If you can tell a bigger lie
I’ll swear you oughta be —
I’ll swear you oughta be hung

There are a lot of versions of this song, under a lot of names, so I can’t say what Waits was listening to — but he got it from one of em. I can come up with boat loads of these, given some time, but if my fellow Waits fans quickly got their fill, I’d imagine you would too.

Maybe, if you wanted a moral to this story, we could remember all the hand-wringing that went on about Bob Dylan’s supposed plagiarism of Junichi Saga and Henry Timrod, and wonder aloud whether there’s anybody left who hasn’t decided all that kurfluffle was a lot of horseradish.

Editor’s Note: This is the ninth installment of my attempt to post something half-way Monochordy every day for the whole month of February.

How’s it going? Am I slowing down here? … well, the important thing is that I’m still standing! Boo-ya! As T-Model Ford said, “I been shot! And I been cut! I been kicked in the head! I been hit with a chair! Nobody gets me down!”