celestialmonochord

Countdown to the Battle of the Jug Bands

The Celestial Monochord
(my card)

Alright, now that the Super Bowl is over, America can focus on its more pressing business — The Annual Battle of the Jug Bands!

As I described earlier, it takes place at the Cabooze in Minneapolis on the first Sunday after every Super Bowl Sunday, which I’m told was yesterday (I watched the Puppy Bowl instead). Like the equinoxes and solstices, the Battle of the Jug Bands will continue to happen on that Sunday even after the cockroaches have long ago taken over the world.

And that’s fine with me. One night last June, my wife and I had martinis and frickles at the Town Talk Diner. Afterwards, we drove north up Hiawatha and took the 94 West exit to get back to our Uptown pad. As you take that exit, you get a commanding view of the Cabooze, as if you were circling the bar in a helicopter. At the sight of it, I was suddenly very wistful — I yearned for the Annual Battle of the Jug Bands and I wished it was February right then and there. February in Minnesota. And I wished this in June.

The first year I attended The Battle, there was a jug band that had a toddler in its line-up. She was maybe 2, I guess, and during each song she sat on stage trying to out-shout the band with her high-pitched babbling. I believe she was singing. In any case, the sound almost exactly reproduced that of the old Skillet Lickers recordings from the 1920’s, with Gid Tanner singing his falsetto backup, all out of tune and off tempo. It was uncanny, as if something long dead had inadvertently been brought back to life.

In 2007, the Battle will be a quarter century old and it’s bigger than ever. And lately, it’s actually evolved into a real competition. For a long time, the 20 or so bands that competed over the 8-hour show were really more like 10 bands, with a lot of promiscuous recombination going on to make it seem like more bands. But the last two years, more real bands entered the competition than the Battle could accommodate, and they literally put names into a hat and randomly chose the entrants.

The judging has changed a bit, too. Now — for the first time — last year’s winning jug band chooses this year’s panel of judges. I gave those so-called “winners” multiple copies of my card at last year’s Battle, but they still have not contacted me. And, well … I will most definitely be judging them anyway, believe you me.

This year’s winners be forewarned: Choose me as thy judge, lest ye be judged with a can of genuine Celestial Monochord whoop-ass!

See you there …

Editor’s Note: This must be the hundredth installment … no, wait, it’s the 5th installment of The Celestial Monochord’s attempt to post one entry every day for an entire month. What was I thinking???

Crumb

Back in March, a magazine called Exclaim! (which I take to be sort of a Canadian Mojo) published an article about the rising popularity among young folks of collecting 78 rpm records.

It was written by Jason Schneider, who seems to be a little like me — a turn-of-the-century convert to early 20th Century blues and country. Schneider’s article is well worth the read, so I forwarded it to a Monochord reader who’s a very experienced 78 collector.

He and I enjoyed picking at the article, finding various things to admire and attack in it. In particular, my correspondent would like to urgently warn new 78 collectors NOT to play their records on old “gramophones.” You can, and should, buy a modern record player with a 78 rpm setting, instead of ruining your 78’s with 100-year-old technology. These are not floppy disks — you don’t need an out-dated playback device for this out-dated medium.

Another interesting passage in Schneider’s article is this:

Robert Crumb especially has had a profound influence since the acclaimed 1994 documentary about his life fully illuminated his obsession with 78 collecting and old time music’s ongoing hold on his psyche. In fact, the best introduction to the music is still Crumb’s series of blues and country “trading cards” that provide bios of his favourite artists. [link added]

I wouldn’t know where to start in confirming whether or not Crumb really has had any such profound influence … and I wonder whether Schneider can confirm it, and how. The main difficulty of Schneider’s article is his “authoritative” point of view. Instead of staying close to his experience, he wants to use an omniscient voice — and ironically, this can actually strip your writing of its most useful information.

So let me do what Schneider should have done, possibly, and ponder Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb — which I saw early in my interest in the old music — as I, personally, actually experienced it.

A girlfriend suggested I see Crumb because R. Crumb and his family were so much like me and mine. Someone else suggested this was a stupid and cruel thing to say. So, I saw Crumb in a questioning frame of mind — How is this like looking into a mirror? Does it represent me? Misrepresent me? What here should I embrace? But, to an extent, maybe that’s how we always go to the movies.

Over the previous year or two, I had bought a lot of CD reissues of old blues, but R. Crumb was the first 78 record collector I ever “met.” There isn’t much music heard in the film, the main exception being a moment with R. Crumb sitting on the floor listening to an old Geechie Wiley 78. But for me, that scene is the film’s most persistent memory. When I think of Crumb, that’s what I see.

Much more important, though, were his drawings of street lamps. At some point, R. Crumb says he and a photographer friend drove around taking photos of ordinary lamp posts and other municipal and commercial fixtures and structures — the only way he could later manage to draw them into his cartoons. We live in a civilization so soulless and ugly and forgettable that we can’t even remember what it looks like.

And that was like looking into a mirror, so much so that I could almost feel my mind reorganizing itself to accommodate the experience of having these private thoughts so vividly projected onto the big screen. My previous experience with the old music had carried some of that sense — of these old musicians being forgotten by an ugly culture, of all the real greatness in the world collecting dust somewhere, of the lives of people like Harry Smith and the Crumb family being examples of what happens to the best minds of my generation and yours.

So it would be false, outright, to say Crumb introduced me to the old music. You might possibly say that the film made it “cool” to be into the music. It would be best to say that the film was one of several things that modeled for me a possible relationship with the music, a way of fitting the music into a worldview that mattered, a way the music could be employed in the job of making sense of things.

To make the strongest possible claim for it, maybe Crumb was the last straw — it aided and abetted, giving me permission to just go ahead and finally become that dusty old crank obsessed with old music who I’d begun to glimpse in the mirror.

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of my attempt to post something every damned day for a whole month … it is not a coincidence that I chose the shortest month of the year. But is it short enough to preserve my sanity? Stay tuned!

Also, anybody know where the photo from this post is from?

First Lady of the Air

The first review of a Bob Dylan concert ever published in the New York Times (maybe the first ever published anywhere) was written by Robert Shelton in September 1961, and it’s become a minor legend all its own. When Dylan first met producer John Hammond, Dylan immediately slapped the review into Hammond’s hand. By the end of that first meeting, Dylan was a “Columbia recording artist,” as they still declare at the start of his concerts today. Anyway, that’s a version of the lore.

I just realized today that, in that 1961 review, Shelton ends with a short description of the headliner of the bill that night — a Greenwich Village bluegrass band called The Greenbriar Boys. I got into them a few years go because the band’s mandolin player, Ralph Rinzler, went on to rekindle Bill Monroe’s career as his manager, and then went on to become one of the most important folklorists of the century.

Shelton even mentions one of the songs in the Greenbriar Boys’ repertoire, “Farewell, Amelia Earhart, First Lady of the Air” (the correct title is “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight”). The song is one of those tragic, tear-jerkin’ country ballads I always make fun of by adopting a phony southern accent and saying “That song always makes me cry!”

But in this case, it really does always make me cry. It’s become a real favorite of mine over the past two years — I even played it on the radio when I was on Dave Hull’s show in August. The Ditch Lilies, an all-woman Minnesota oldtime/bluegrass band, sometimes do their rendition of it at their gigs … if the audience is lucky. Here are the lyrics as the Greenbriar Boys sing them on their “best of” collection:

A ship out on the ocean, just a speck against the sky
Amelia Earhart flying that sad day
With her partner, Captain Noonan, on the second of July
Her plane fell in the ocean, far away

Chorus:
There’s a beautiful, beautiful field
Far away in a land that is fair
Happy landings to you, Amelia Earhart
Farewell, First Lady of the Air

Well, a half an hour later an SOS was heard
The signal weak, but still her voice was brave
Oh, in shark-infested waters her plane went down that night
In the deep Pacific, to a watery grave. [Chorus]

Well, now you have heard my story of that awful tragedy
We pray that she might fly home safe again
Oh, in years to come though others blaze a trail across the sea
We’ll ne’er forget Amelia and her plane. [Chorus]

OK now — here, at long last, is the real point. A biography of Charles Lindbergh’s wife has recently been released, and the author is making the rounds — I heard her on Minnesota Public Radio recently, for example. The book is called “Anne Morrow Lindbergh: First Lady of the Air.”

Hey! Amelia Earhart already has a claim on the knickname of First Lady of the Air! It’s right there, prominently placed as the hook in the chorus of a great song! Anne Morrow Lindbergh is a skunk! … why, if Anne and Amelia had met back in 1929, I’d imagine they’d have a tremendous wrestling match! The Lindbergh-Earhart SMACKDOWN! … maybe wearing jodhpurs and those boots …

Anyway, no, seriously, maybe Anne Morrow Lindbergh was called “the first lady of the air” too — possibly with the idea that her husband Charles was a kind of President of the air? And a little Googling suggests neither Earhart nor Lindbergh can claim to be the “first” First Lady of the Air. It seems one Harriet Quimby was given this title immediately upon becoming the first woman to fly across the English Channel back in 1913, at least 15 years before Lindbergh and Earhart became famous.

And so I … Is it only February 3? Thank God it’s not a leap year!

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of The Celestial Monochord’s historic attempt to post every day during the month of February — almost like a REAL blog!

Old Dog Blue

I often wonder what I’ll do when my song-by-song series on Diamonds in the Rough comes to an end. I’d love to work on another album, but the only one that seems worthy is Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. But given the pace at which I’ve run through Diamonds, I calculate The Anthology would take me about ten years. Besides, what can I say about something like “Old Dog Blue” that hasn’t been said before (and better)? For example, Robert Cantwell, in his book “When We Were Good,” writes beautifully about it.

But today is the 79th anniversary of the recording of Old Dog Blue on February 2, 1928, in Memphis, Tennessee on the Victor label. To commemorate that great event, here’s a couple notions …

When I first heard Jim Jackson sing Old Dog Blue, my reaction was to regret its sexism. In the first verse, the singer off-handedly mentions the recent death of his wife, and then goes on to mourn the death of his dog, movingly, in verse after verse after verse:

I’m going back where I come
I’m going back where I come
I’m going back to Giles County
My wife died and left me a bounty
Me and them pretty girls ganged around
That’s the reason I’m going to Giles County

Had an old dog whose name was Blue
You know Blue was mighty true
You know Blue was a good old dog
Blue treed a possum in a hollow log
You know from that he’s a good old dog

Do we take this as a joke about the relative importance of wives and dogs?

I’ve seen (can’t remember where) the explanation that the song is hard to sort out because it’s really two or more songs spliced together. The line mentioning his wife is like a vestigial organ, left over from some previous stage in the song’s evolution. There’s some support for this view. Later, in the middle of everything, we get this strange non-sequitur:

Blue treed a possum out on a limb
Blue looked at me and I looked at him
Grabbed that possum, put him in a sack
Don’t move, Blue, ’til I get back.

It rained, it rained, yeah
It rained, it rained, yeah

Who been here since I been gone?
Little bitty girl with the red dress on
Who been here since I been gone?
Little bitty girl with the red dress on

Is the dog wearing a dress? No, this verse about a girl in a red dress waiting for the singer appears often in old folk and blues songs — so, it’s what’s called a “floating stanza.”

But I think it’s slightly condescending, a little dismissive of Jim Jackson’s artistry, to think as if he’s just a passive antenna through which floating stanzas appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. I trust my own aesthetics here — this performance of this text is heartbreaking, and increasingly so each time I hear it, year after year. Jackson chose his words to move us, and it works.

Once you accept that the text is very deliberate, the song comes into focus as brilliant psychological observation. It’s a study of grief, the way it really works in a real brain. It hits with the force it does because it mirrors sorrow as we actually experience it. Do we really always mourn the most obvious things, or do we sometimes focus on proxies, fetishes, or symbols instead?

Jackson’s character’s wife has just died, so he’s decided to go back to a place of his youth, before he was married, to relive happier days. It seems rather optimistic, even desperate — Jackson’s character doesn’t sound so young now.

Blue, too, seems to have been gone for a long time — so long that you’d expect a grown man to have gotten over it a bit. And I suspect he has. What I hear is a mind returning to everything its ever lost, trying to reconnect with it all both physically and emotionally.

By so vividly recalling this dog, by revisiting that intense ENCOUNTER between species (“Blue looked at me and I looked at him”), the singer is tracing his own edges, the limits and contours of his own identity. He is refamiliarizing himself with his manhood and his humanity, through memory.

In this way, Jackson’s character is like the later folk revivalists of the 1950’s and after, about whom Cantwell writes so beautifully. They renounced their identities, abandoned all hope, denied their inheritances, and then — through song — rebuilt themselves. They invented themselves as a new cast of characters meant to inhabit a new world, which they then also built, on a foundation of reinvented memories.

Editor’s Note: This is the second … jeez, only SECOND? … installment of an experiment — The Celestial Monochord is posting one entry every day during the month of February 2007.

Also, note that the lyrics to this song are notoriously hard to get exactly right.

When My Willie Come Home

Recently, Hillary Clinton made a cutesy Lockhorns-ish joke about her husband Bill being a bad and evil man, presumably thinking of the Monica Lewinsky incident, among others. And, you know, all the pundits got busy on it.

Personally … maybe it’s me … what I thought of was a cut on Mike Seeger’s “Southern Banjo Sounds” — the one called “Last Night When My Willie Come Home.” It’s one of my favorite cuts on a CD full of brilliant recordings.

It’s a lively performance, sweet and funny, punctuated by quills — bamboo pan pipes, basically, which Mike wears the way Bob Dylan wears his harmonicas. At the same time, Mike accompanies himself on banjo, sounding absolutely effortless, natural. But the liner notes inform us that he’s alternating between SIX different styles of banjo picking based on the playing of Sam McGee, Virgil Anderson, Maybelle Carter, and Charlie Poole.

The lyrics begin:

Well, it was late last night when my Willie come home
Heard a mighty rappin’ at the door
Slippin and a-sliding with his new shoes on
Oh Willie, don’t you ramble no more

Of course, Bill Clinton was called “Slick Willie” back in 1992, and the Willie in Seeger’s song is “slipping and sliding”. Maybe that’s more than enough of an association.

But when Seeger refers to “my Willie” in the first line, it always carries an unfortunate penile image for me, and I have to remind myself that the speaker is Willie’s long-suffering woman. Then again, the Starr Report conjured a lot of similarly unfortunate images, and the experience of trying to shake them from my head only reiterates the association, in my twisted mind, between these Willies.

More to the point, this is a rounder song — a song about a wastrel, “one who,” according to my desk dictionary, “dissipates resources foolishly and self-indulgently.” Willie’s slippery new shoes are the central theme of all rounder songs — he lives high, spends a lot of capital on all the wrong things, and is ultimately a tragic figure. His shoes are new, but he’s dangerously rootless.

Like a lot of these old songs, the point of view careens from one character to another recklessly and without warning. In the chorus, Willie speaks:

And it’s “Oh me” and it’s “Oh my”
What’s gunna become of me?
For I’m down in town just a-fooling around
No one’s gunna stand my bond.

The song is sympathetic to Willie’s wife, but also to Willie — it understands his fear and regret:

Well the last time I seen my own true love
She was a-standing in the door
She threw her arms all around my neck
Saying “Honey, don’t you go”

I don’t have a “message” here, at least not about politics. Seeger’s “Last Night When My Willie Come Home” is ill-suited to the politics you typically find today on TV and, come to think of it, in blogs. The point of view shifts (and is shared) among the characters, and the song doesn’t bother much to identify the guilty and innocent. The song’s affectation is light and comic, but the emotional lives of the characters are intense, sincerely felt (the inverse of what you might find on FOX chat shows).

Presidential candidates always promise to change the tenor of political debate and Hillary frames her campaign as a “conversation” — just the form in which this song comes at you. I wonder if she’s looking for a campaign song …

I’ll love you, dear girl, till the sea runs dry
Rocks all dissolved by the sun
I’ll love you dear girl till the day I die
And then, Oh Lord, I’m done

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a grand experiment! The Celestial Monochord will attempt to post one entry EVERY DAY during the month of February 2007. Pray for Mojo!

Square Dancing at Los Alamos

Brode Feynman
William A. Higinbotham, Bernice Brode, and Richard Feynman

While in Los Alamos this Christmas, I picked up Tales of Los Alamos: Life on the Mesa, 1943-1945, by Bernice Brode. It turned out to be a book in which music plays a central role.

Tales of Los Alamos is a light-hearted portrait of life as one of the Manhattan Project's young newlyweds, who lived somewhat like prisoners of war. For Brode and her colleagues, Los Alamos was like college or the military is for a lot of people — a golden time to work like hell and then explosively blow off steam. It was a safe place to get a little practice at being an adult. Really, the designers of the first atomic bomb were horny young party animals.

The average age of a Los Alamos resident was 26, according to Brode ("The Day after Trinity" says 29). The military brass tried (without success) to limit the number of babies were being born, while the single GI's on the mesa defended (with success) a prostitution ring against efforts to shut it down. Pure laboratory alcohol spiked the punchbowls.

Brode writes:

We had a good deal of music at Los Alamos, organized and unorganized. Walking along the roads in the evening, we heard the strains of Bach or Mozart that filled the air. High up in the mountains, radio reception was poor, but we had our own radio station in the last year. [The station used records from the collections of residents] and our otherwise quiet mesa was soon saturated with the world's best music.

A lot of physicists and their wives were classically trained musicians, so there were many recitals and an annual chorus Handel's "Messiah." Edward Teller's piano playing was particularly brutal on everyone's sleep cycle, with its odd hours, workmanlike style, and inclusive repertoire.

But the men and women of Los Alamos were generally too young and stressed out for much serious music. Besides, Brode writes, residents had "an instinctive knowledge that vigorous gaiety must be our tenor, and that we perhaps could not afford much emotional content and contemplation."

The mesa had a barber shop quartet and a jazz band, and the children mounted several ambitious musical revues. For one such revue, new words were set to the tune of the Marine's Hymn:

From the East Coast, from the West Coast
And the land that lies between
We arrived here at Los Alamos
Queerest city ever seen

Oh, we love our mountain stronghold
And our homes among the stars
It's the strangest story ever told
This mesa town of ours

From the plains of neighbor Texas
And the sidewalks of New York
We arrived here at Los Alamos
To learn, to play, to work

We have vision strong to guide us
Proud form of Liberty
Whatever is denied us
Is all for Liberty

When Los Alamos residents wanted to really cut loose and break a sweat, there was always square dancing. Its popularity on the mesa isn't surprising given that the dance style had been consciously popularized throughout the 1930's and 1940's by the likes of Lloyd Shaw, Benjamin Lovett, and Henry Ford. Online histories cite 1948 as the peak year of a square dancing fad in America. Apparently, the twenty-somethings of Los Alamos were only very slightly ahead of the curve.

"Calling" the square dances was initially handled by George Hillhouse, chief butcher at the Los Alamos commissary. Eventually, the job was taken over by accordion player and leader of the Electronics Division, William A. Higinbotham. His accordion playing was intensely energizing ("electric sparks went over the Lodge," writes Brode), but his square dance calling was even more compelling:

The time came when we could squeeze no more squares into the Lodge, and we reluctantly moved to the Mess Hall, a much larger floor space … It became increasing hard for George [the butcher] to keep order in so many squares, but Willie could out-shout any disorder. He said the bigger the mob, the better he liked it.

Brode once tried to calm the nerves of a British couple who'd been having trouble adjusting to the pace of Los Alamos. She took them to the quiet ruins of Bandelier National Monument, but was surprised to find 200 members of the Electronics Division square dancing among the ruins, driven by Higinbotham.

On occasion, when strangers visited, the residents of Los Alamos staged square dance demonstrations as a symbol of their group identity, an illustration of who and what they were. A few months after Nagasaki, the mesa's Tesuque Native Americans invited a group of Los Alamos residents to visit their pueblo for a celebration. The leader of the Tesuque contingent was Popovi Da (also known as "Po"), who was also an Army technician in the lab's Technical Area.

Next, Po called on us to put on a demonstration of square dances. We formed four squares, which we had practiced … we used our most experienced dancers to give a smooth performance and make the best impression. Most Indians had never seen square dancing before, but after we finished we asked Po to invite everyone to join in with us … They were natural dancers.

[Afterwards, the Tesuque dancers gave a demonstration] and took hold of some of us, indicating we should shuffle around with them. Po shouted in Tewa the directions, which we gathered were for a sort of serpentine style dance game … We formed circles and did any number of very fast movements, and, believe me, we had to keep our wits about us. The drummers went faster and faster. It seemed to be an endurance test so none of us dared give out. At the height of this excitement, with yells and shouts, Montoya [a Tesuque who oversaw care of the main Los Alamos dorm] got up on a chair and shouted above the din, "This is the Atomic Age! This is the Atomic Age!"

The stories of Richard Feynman's and Enrico Fermi's attempts to square dance at Los Alamos are fairly well known.

Feynman was the kind of physicist who could amuse classrooms by solving two complex math problems on the board simultaneously — one with the right hand, one with the left. Nevertheless, he was utterly defeated in his attempts to learn to square dance. "It's too hard, much too hard, I can't learn, I'll never learn," he said.

Fermi, on the other hand, refused to dance at all until he had spent many long hours staring intently at the steps of the dancers. Only after he had memorized even the slightest motion did he join in:

He offered to be head couple, which I thought most unwise for his first venture, but I could do nothing about it, and the music began. He led me out on the exact beat, knew exactly each move to make and when. He never made a mistake then or thereafter. I wouldn't say he enjoyed himself for he was so intent on not making a mistake, which the best of us did all the time.

After the war, square dance caller and accordionist Willie Higinbotham emerged as the leader of the segment of Manhattan Project scientists who wanted to aggressively use their new-found status for progressive politics. Their goals were to put atomic power under civilian control, prevent proliferation, and educate the public. Willie went to Washington to learn the art of lobbying. Brode writes:

By all reports, he had the Congressmen and newspapermen working so hard nights that he began to take along his "Stomach Steinway" and had them square dancing when they got tired of atoms. Willie later denied this, but those were the tales we heard [in Los Alamos] at the time.

(Incidentally, in 1958, Higinbotham created Tennis for Two, sometimes cited as the world's first video game.)

One Post Every Day in February!

Attention ladies and gentlemen! Hear ye, hear ye!

Next month, The Celestial Monochord will conduct an unprecedented experiment in the history of the internets!

We hereby announce and commit, against our better judgement as well as the laws of physics, that there will be ONE ENTRY posted to the Monochord EVERY DAY during the ENTIRE DURATION of the month of February in the year of 2000 and 7!

Neither your ears nor your eyes deceive you!

Never before has any proprietor of an electronic journal-keeping service attempted a feat of such dizzying blogospheric daring-do! Do not try this at home! Individuals of weak constitution such as ladies and nervous persons are forewarned!

Tell your friends and neighbors! It’s absolutely free! An event you will never forget!

[ Quality entries are not guaranteed. The publishers of The Celestial Monochord are not responsible for lapses in good taste, civility, research rigor, insight, nor any other editorial standard ordinarily aspired to by this blog. ]

Carl Sagan, Ten Years After

a telescope in Times Square, 1933

(Sorry for all the autobiography lately, but today is the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death. Bloggers worldwide are marking the date with remembrances.)

When I was 15, I thought a bit about becoming a priest.

My family was Catholic, and I loved the Catholic Church. I also had already been obsessed with astronomy for about six years, and now my thoughts were just mature enough to start worrying over some of the hard questions this background presented.

Astronomy made it obvious that the world was much older than the Bible claimed — the Bible was wrong. In fact, I saw there was no way to confirm virtually anything in the Bible. The Creator himself suddenly seemed mythical compared to the easily confirmed natural laws I was starting to understand.

But a universe without God, so far as I could tell, was a horrible place — meaningless, without beauty, amoral, loveless. The evidence seemed to be forcing me into a sad and frightening universe in which I certainly did not want to live.

Knowing no other alternative, I thought about entering the priesthood — that is, of handing myself over completely to faith. Evidence and reason were leading me where I didn’t want to go, so I toyed with the idea of turning a blind eye to them. If a “good” universe was the only tolerable kind, maybe I would have to simply assume one, regardless. I was deeply conflicted, and didn’t know what to do. I remember a lot of pain about this.

By an astounding coincidence — divine intervention? — Carl Sagan’s Cosmos debuted on public television exactly one week after my 16th birthday. The series turned out to be a 13-hour, carefully reasoned, gorgeously dramatized argument. And this argument was an elaborate answer to precisely the very question I was struggling with.

Cosmos argues that the universe is profoundly beautiful and meaningful, and it demands an ethical response from us — even, or especially, when we view it without the supernatural. Sagan argued that the only ethical response to the universe we know in the 20th century, given the challenges of that century, is to get the whole evidence thing, and the whole reason thing, right.

We’ve got see the world as it is and not how we wish it was.

The guy in the turtle-neck sweater spent 13 leisurely hours SHOWING why the character of the physical universe, and of our origins it it, oblige us to embrace a humane, ethical, rational, evidence-based world view. The evidence shows us a universe that is not only beautiful, but beautiful in precisely such a way that it requires from us an ethical, loving response.

For the next couple years, my synapses flowed with the greatest antidepressants on Earth. It was a mind-blowing and delicious religious experience.

I won’t go into every twist and turn of my intellectual and spiritual development since 1980 — there’d be a lot to dredge up. It will suffice to say that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was among the most important events of my life. The Celestial Monochord would certainly not have existed without it — surely among Carl’s greatest contributions to mankind!

I will add that Sagan’s importance has unexpectedly deepened since 2001’s dual attacks on Western Civilization — September 11 and Inauguration Day. Lately, I terribly miss Carl Sagan and what I think of as his ethics of epistemology, as I call it — his sense that we have a moral obligation to resist baloney.

I mourn his inability to be here to remind us of who we used to aspire to be — a humane civilization based on reason, evidence, and the universal rule of just laws. No one has taken his place.

A Brief Musical Memoir

Devo

A reader recently came across “Dreaming of the Hillbilly Blues” and commented:

Right on! But after sharing this with a like-minded friend, that like-minded friend wondered what on earth you were listening to *before* your “conversion.”

I’ve often thought about posting a brief musical autobiography, but it’s against our editorial standards. To distinguish The Celestial Monochord from most other blogs, I try to write as little about myself as possible. Besides, unless you’ve either killed a president or walked on the Moon, I don’t believe in memoir. I just don’t see how I, personally, am more interesting than your average sidewalk fulgurite or kitten astronaut.

Still … let it never be said that the editors of The Monochord are unresponsive to reader enquiries.

I was born the youngest of five boys and two girls, in 1964 in the Chicago suburbs. My older brothers were heavily into John Prine, Steve Goodman, David Bromberg, Leo Kottke, Dylan, The Beatles, Zappa, Simon and Garfunkel, Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon), King Crimson. We all started listening to Prairie Home Companion as soon as it hit Chicago public radio, around 1978, I guess.

One brother had played tenor sax and was thus into jazz and Chicago blues. Another was one of that tribe of fine amateur bluegrass multi-instrumentalists that seems to magically materialize at festivals. So Miles Davis, BB King, The Blues Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, John Hartford, and David Grisman were also in the house. That was my education.

My brothers, I eventually thought, tended to dismiss whatever was popular, almost without regard to what it was. They even got drawn into the xenophobic “Disco Sucks” fad. Looking back, they were somehow agressively closed-minded and yet very eclectic. All their music was before my time, in a sense, and I was uncomfortable with their distrust of one of the most pervasive aspects of life — contemporary American pop culture. Or anyway, that’s what I perceived at the time.

When I left home to go to college in 1984, I strove to develop my own musical tastes, to distinguish myself from my up-bringing. Tom Waits, Paul Simon, and Dylan were the only family heirlooms I held on to. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun that I would’ve missed had I not turned my back on my origins so decisively. But I also spent the years from about 18 to 32 kind of lost in the wilderness, musically.

I learned to dance during many years of aerobics classes, by tagging along with a gay friend to his favorite discos, and by hitting the college clubs. It turned out that knowing how to move proved helpful once I developed a deep enthusiasm for meeting women. I loved the music — Madonna, the Pet Shop Boys, Billy Idol, The Talking Heads. In the early 1990’s, I danced to Nine Inch Nails, Public Enemy, and whatever else the DJ’s happened to be spinning — mostly various “house” and one-hit dance groups like Black Box, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, Deee-Lite, and Greater Than One — whatever.

I learned from one girlfriend who The Smiths were, The Charlatans UK, The The, Joy Division, The English Beat, and strangely, Dwight Yoakam and The Knitters. A roommate from New Jersey turned me on to Springsteen’s Nebraska, and Marxist-Feminist grad students got me into the only “folk music” I thought I knew — Billy Bragg, Michelle Shocked, and Suzanne Vega. I eventually married the girl who introduced me to Joan Jett and the Pogues.

Along the way, I’d owned and (at least briefly) loved “Never Mind the Bullocks” by the Sex Pistols, “Survival” by Bob Marley, the banana album by the Velvet Underground, several albums by The Cure, a friend’s compilation of David Bowie hits, and I’ve always thought Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” is one of the best records EVER. I somehow soaked up a little Blind Willie Johnson, some Lee Morgan, and some Memphis Slim, but they didn’t seem to fit into my life any better the classical and medieval early music I’d also flirted with.

But by about 1994, I found myself walking into huge record stores that sold absolutely every kind of music imaginable, standing near the entrance for a few moments, and then turning around to leave. I was bored and saddened by the very idea of music. I knew there had to be something I wanted to hear, but couldn’t even imagine what.

Just then, a girlfriend dumped me — left me in just about the rudest, most damaging, and thoughtless fashion possible. She felt just barely guilty enough to buy me a guitar as a parting gift. She owed me an entire orchestra … Anyway, I wondered what I might learn to play on this new guitar, and the blues seemed to fit the circumstances.

I figured I should start at the beginning, reasoning that the earlier stuff must be easier to play. Right? So, I bought the CD that I felt marked The Beginning — Bob Dylan’s first album, the one with House of the Rising Sun and See That My Grave is Kept Clean. And there, in Song To Woody, he mentions Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too.

So I went and found out who they were, and soon found myself listening to Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Sonny Boy Williamson (the first), Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy. After about two years, I bought Greil Marcus’ book about Dylan’s Basement Tapes, and marched off to the record store to buy the Harry Smith Anthology on CD (not yet grasping that it had only been reissued a few weeks before).

The Anthology reminded me of my brothers’ music, the music I’d grown up with. But it was the music BEHIND the music, which my brothers had never heard. It was like turning to the back of the textbook and finding the answer to every excercise. It was as if I’d had some book laying around all my life and had only looked at the few pages of pictures bound into the book’s middle — but now, I had finally sat myself down and read the book from cover-to-cover, at last making deep sense of its pictures.

Since then, I’ve never been at a loss for music to listen to — in fact, I always have a list of about $2000 worth of music I’m dying to get my hands on, from almost every genre from all corners of the Earth. Everything makes sense. Ironically, it turns out that my mother had taken a few lessons in Hawaiian-style slide guitar in 1935 or so — a fact she never bothered to mention until I got heavily into the music of that very era.

As Harry Truman said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”

Tom Paley in the Twin Cities – November 5

Tom_paley
Tom Paley in 2005
(Detail from photo courtesy Woodland Dunes Concert Series)

Editor’s Note (6 September 2007): For my review of Paley’s new CD, see Beware Young Ladies!

Tom Paley, a founder of The New Lost City Ramblers, will perform in the Twin Cities on Sunday, November 5. This is a rare opportunity that no fan of old American music should miss. Strangely enough, the concert is from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at the Marriott Minneapolis West located at 9960 Wayzata Blvd. Admission is $15.00 at the door. Please help spread the word.

The Minneapolis concert is part of a small national tour, although few details seem to be available about it. Perhaps check with your local acoustic instrument shop or concert venue, or see if there’s a local folk, oldtime, or bluegrass music association. Here’s the remaining dates, as published in early October on a fiddle-player’s discussion list:

Fri: Nov 3: Duluth, MN
Sun: Nov 5: Minneapolis, MN
Sat: Nov 11: Evanston, IL
Thu: Nov 16: Columbia, MO
Mon: Nov 20: Reeds Spring, MO
Wed: Nov 22: Eureka Springs, AR
Sun: Nov 26: Tampa, FL
Thu: (?)Nov 30: Workshop, Tallahassee, FL(?)
Fri: Dec 1: House-Concert, Tallahassee, FL
Sat: Dec 2: House-Concert, Gainesville, FL
Sun: Dec 3: Workshop, Gainesville, FL

There may also be something coming up in the
Washington, DC area, sometime between Dec 4 and Dec 18.

The Ramblers and Tom Paley
The better I understand the importance of The New Lost City Ramblers, the harder it gets to explain. The band formed in 1958, when folk music had a massive audience in the USA. Unlike other folk groups, the Ramblers didn’t make the music slick and simple, but instead focused on getting the sound “right” — on knowing how to play, sing and arrange in the real traditional styles of the Appalachians.

They also understood that playing in an “authentic” and “traditional” way meant constantly experimenting, sometimes “making do,” and always having the biggest laughs and the best party you could manage.

The Ramblers were never a commercial hit, really, but they inspired armies of young people to take up the fiddle, banjo, mandolin, autoharp, and guitar, and learn to play them in a dizzying array of formerly obsolete styles. I’ve heard many stories of people starting out on banjo or fiddle, under the Rambler’s influence, and then realizing that their own ethnic heritage — Scottish, Native American, Polish, Jewish from various places, Senegalese, Gambian, whatever — was worth reviving as well. There is no meaningful way to calculate the influence the Ramblers have had on almost every form of traditional music worldwide.

Today, Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music is usually credited with inspiring the various waves of revivalists to come — and it did deeply inspire the Ramblers themselves. But I find that the Ramblers usually “came first” for people. For many listeners, it was the Ramblers who taught the lessons that the Anthology had to teach. For many, it was the Ramblers who disseminated the varied techniques and rich shades of expression that make the old pre-war Southern recordings such a revelation to people who were familiar with the Anthology.

As just one example, it seems that the Harry Smith Anthology was an important influence on Bob Dylan, as Greil Marcus has famously pointed out. But as I’ve discussed before (at tedious, bone-crushing length) Dylan heard the Anthology’s message mostly second-hand — in translation — most significantly through the Ramblers. Maybe we can think of the Ramblers as a thick pipeline for messages running between Dylan and the Anthology.

Of the three original New Lost City Ramblers, Tom Paley seems to have had the best-developed music career at the time the group formed. Still, he wanted the group to be a part-time pursuit while he held down other positions — teaching mathematics at Rutgers, for example. Paley left for Europe in 1962, ending his work with The New Lost City Ramblers. Tracy Schwarz joined the group shortly thereafter.

After leaving the Ramblers, Paley lived in Sweden until 1965 and has lived in England ever since. From what I can tell, I think he’s had a “real life,” making good use of his technical training to pursue a career. But he’s also continued to work as a musician, making a record with Peggy Seeger, and then working with the Old Reliable String Band, the New Deal String Band, and with probably with masters of the Swedish music Paley loves so well.

What is a Tom Paley concert like today?
The only Tom Paley concert I’ve seen was on the night Katrina made landfall, August 28th, 2005. It was part of a folk concert series held at a Nature Center outside of Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The concert series features world-class acts playing concerts as intimate as you’re ever likely to experience. I drove 350 miles to see Paley and was very glad I did.

The concert venue could seat about 120, I suppose, but was about two-thirds empty. Not far from Paley was the Nature Center’s poster about proper tree pruning. Next to that was a stuffed tundra swan shot in 1906. To get from the Center’s front door to the concert venue, you walk down the stairs, through the kitchen, and past fish tanks occupied by live turtles. Really, it’s a wonderful atmosphere for a concert, but it’s truly a pity that any Tom Paley concert could have such a small audience. On the other hand, American culture’s loss was definitely the audience’s gain — I even got to exchange a few words with him during intermission.

The most recent Tom Paley recordings I’d heard came from his New Lost City Ramblers days. They were nearly 45 years old. But the voice at Woodland Dunes was that same familiar voice — high, tight, unpretentious and capable of surprising changes of expression. One moment, he was singing the oldtime country murder ballad “Down in the Willow Garden (Rose Connelly)” in waltz time, and the next moment, he gave an extremely compelling blues vocal performance of “Sportin’ Life Blues.” Even with a head cold, Paley was really nailing the high notes.

He played guitar, fiddle, and banjo with all the versatility and power you’d expect from a founder of the New Lost City Ramblers. In “Sportin’ Life,” he showed himself to be a very sweet, effortless blues guitarist. On “Virginia Girls” (which you may know as “West Virginia Gals” by Al Hopkins) he played dazzlingly, in an oldtime raggy waltz style, in a menacing key, on a small borrowed guitar.

What attention Paley has gotten lately has mostly been for his fiddling. He surprised me deeply by playing a very touching fiddle instrumental solo of — of all things — “Fishing Blues” by Henry Thomas. My notes from that night read:

makes you realize that it really is a blues. Feels to me, now, like a white hillbilly blues. LOVELY as an instrumental

Other fiddle highlights were Paley’s playing of Swedish polskas — waltz-time dances with a curious little hopping double accent. He reworked, as a vispolska or a song polska, “The Lazy Farmer” or “The Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn,” which you may know from Harry Smith’s Anthology. After singing one particularly lovely vispolska, Paley translated the lyrics from their original Swedish:

There’s not much booze that I can give to you
My bottle’s nearly empty
If you drink too much
You’ll end up on the floor and so will I
Along with all the pastor’s servants

Paley’s word-play and goofy sense of humor have not let up since the days they enlivened concerts by the New Lost City Ramblers. At Woodland Dunes, he apologized for his relentless retuning, and claimed that:

Back in the Ramblers days, we would get on stage and then tune for the first 20 minutes. Then when we began playing, a lot of the audience would get up and leave. So we figured they must’ve showed up just for the tuning. But of course, the joke was on them — there was going to be plenty more tuning later! [quoted from memory]