celestialmonochord

Miniature “Interview” with John Cohen

(John Cohen — photo by Howard Christopherson)

Last night, John Cohen was at the opening of a new exhibition of his photographs in Minneapolis (at the Icebox until November 4). The lines to have Cohen sign his books for you were short and occasionally non-existant, so you could sit down with him for a minute or two and chat before somebody started hovering nearby.

When I sat down at his little table in the corner, the Icebox’s Howard Christopherson was making sure Cohen had a fresh round of hor d’oeuvres. Cohen seemed in good spirits — although I fired questions at him like a drunken Jack Webb, he was very patient and performed, like an actor, the emotional content of his answers.

Below is a pretty close transcript of what we said, furiously scribbled down immediately after the conversation. My apologies for any serious misquotes, and note that I did not identify myself as a blogger. Some clarifications follow the “interview.”

The Celestial Monochord: I think the photos I’m noticing most are the ones I’ve never seen before — the one with Dylan and the chicken, and especially the one with [ Rambling Jack ] Elliott and … and …

John Cohen: And Woody [ Guthrie ]. Can you believe I missed that? I didn’t see it until this show, and I’m so glad that I …

Monochord: YOU’RE KIDDING! I thought you held it back until now. It’s very intense, hard for me to look at … I couldn’t really, um … I got very …

Cohen: Yes, it is a very emotional picture. I just didn’t know it existed until I got ready for this show. It’s way over-exposed so I must have passed over it on the contact sheets until now.

Monochord: Oh, I see. I figured it was too personal so you didn’t use it until now.

Cohen: Well, there was a lot of emotion then about Woody and what was happening with him, but on the other hand, I did use that one on the cover of “There is No Eye”. [ he points at the book nearby on the table ]

Monochord: Yeah, that’s true. Hey, who are these two guys here and here. [ pointing at the two musicians playing for Woody Guthrie on the cover of the book ]

Cohen: They’re from The Tarriers — it’s Bob Carey and Erik Darling [ more pointing — and I’m not 100% sure I remember this info correctly. ]

Monochord: Ok, I have a question, and I wouldn’t ask you this question if I wasn’t somewhat eppifficated. In the DVD that came with Dark Holler — the Dillard Chandler documentary — was that a drag queen? Was that a guy in a dress? What was that about?

Cohen: That was the same guy who was in the cafe before — Dillard’s friend. Same guy. They knew I’d be filming at this party and they were putting one over on me. When I saw them coming through the door and he was wearing women’s clothes, I thought, MY GOD, what joke are they pulling on me? So I just thought, well …

Monochord: But he seems to be really into the clothes — he’s so meticulous, he keeps adjusting himself, he’s very into how he looks and making sure he’s … [ here, I’m pantomiming the guy in the film ]

Cohen: Yes, well, his wife is right there and his kids are there …

Monochord: Ok, I’ll leave you alone here, I’m taking up your time. I want to thank you for coming to Minneapolis and for everything you do. There are certain heroes of mine that I never got the chance to thank for what they did for me in my life, and I’m just glad I got to … like Carl Sagan … Oh I know — hey, just one more question! What was it like when you got that phone call saying, “Mr. Cohen, we want to send your recording of a Peruvian wedding song on a rocket ship into outer space.” What did you think?

Cohen: [ before answering, he squeezes his eyes closed, turns his head to one side, and presses the tip of his index finger to his right temple for a good four seconds ] No, it wasn’t like that. I found out about it in the New York Times.

Monochord: What, afterwards? When it was a done deal?

Cohen: Yes, I only read it … I found out about it reading the New York Times.

Monochord: Ok, thank you. Please sign my book. My name is Kay You Are Tee — Kurt.

Cohen: [writes “To Kurt, John Cohen” on the title page of “Young Bob: John Cohen’s Early Photographs of Bob Dylan”] Thanks.

Monochord: Thank you again. Nice to meet you.

Editor’s Notes: As of this writing, the Icebox has posted the three photos we discussed — the one with Dylan and the chicken and the one with Jack Elliott and Woody Guthrie, who was suffering from ~~Parkinson’s~~ Huntington’s Disease (thanks Bill B.!). Here’s the one with Woody and who I think are the Tarriers.

You get a free DVD of the documentary about Dillard Chandler, “The End of an Old Song” — with a cameo by a guy in drag — when you buy the Dark Holler CD.

For more on Cohen and Carl Sagan’s Voyager record (“a Peruvian wedding song on a rocket ship”), see my previous post at the Celestial Monochord. Among the best moments in the book about the Voyager Record are those in which the team assembling the photos and music for the record seek permission from puzzled copyright holders.

I had him sign “Young Bob: John Cohen’s Early Photographs of Bob Dylan” but unfortunately forgot to bring my copy of There is No Eye.

Jolie Holland and Elizabeth Cotton

Jolie Holland’s new album is released May 9

Nearly all Elizabeth Cotton’s work is on Folkways

Guitarist and banjoist Elizabeth Cotton was one of the most beloved figures of the 1960’s folk revival. Like Mississippi John Hurt, she played — and she somehow personally embodied — what Mike Seeger has called “black parlor music.” As a lot of folks know, she was “discovered” by the Seeger family while working in their home, a story which entirely loses the whiff of exploitation the more I learn its facts. I’m now more curious about whether Cotton seemed to take on a little of the role of mother to Penny, Peggy and Mike Seeger after their own mother died at the age of 52.

The best written account I happen to have seen of Cotton’s life is John Ullman’s moving liner notes to Shake Sugaree. Another great account, available as an mp3, is Mike Seeger’s early recollections of Cotton, which ends with one of the very first home recordings ever made of her. (The file is from “The Telling Takes Us Home.”)

Back on February 8th, the New York Guitar Festival held an event in honor of Elizabeth Cotton, featuring Mike Seeger and Taj Mahal — two of the world’s leading exponents of the African American banjo tradition, both of whom worked closely with Cotton. Also performing that night was singer-songwriter Jolie Holland.

It’s not clear what Holland knows about Cotton — no published information exists other than her mere presence on February 9. Holland’s manager informs me that Daniel Lanois introduced Holland’s work to the Festival director, David Spelman, over two years ago and a chance to have her at the festival has been sought ever since.

In any case, whoever decided to associate Jolie Holland with Elizabeth Cotton knew what they were doing. As a devotee of the indispensably obsolete, Holland has the soul of a folk revivalist and is a musical heir of the New Lost City Ramblers and the Seeger family. More directly, Holland and Cotton are both parlor musicians, through and through. Their work is native to the living room — very small, close, antique, and feminine.

It’s common to associate privacy with concealing the truth. But Holland and Cotton remind us that it’s behind closed doors that the real disclosures are made. And when they sit you down in their parlor, we’re reminded that the supposedly traditional domain of women is at least as hard and gritty as the world outside.

That’s particularly surprising and endearing coming from kindly old Elizabeth Cotton. It’s bizarre that her best-known composition, Freight Train, came to be thought of as a “nice” child’s folksong:

Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Please don’t tell what train I’m on
So they won’t know what route I’ve gone

When I’m dead and in my grave
No more good times here I’ll crave
Place a stone at my head and feet
And tell them all that I’ve gone to sleep

In a very similar song, also structured as a Girl Scout Camp sing-along, Holland has similar requests for the listener:

Give me that old fashioned morphine
Give me that old fashioned morphine
Give me that old fashioned morphine
It’s good enough for me

Well, it was good enough for my Grandpa
It was good enough for my Grandpa
It was good enough for my Grandpa
It’s good enough for me

Sister, don’t get worried
Sister, don’t get worried
Sister, don’t get worried
Because the world is almost done

Cotton once oversaw her grandchildren as they composed a song, using the writing of each verse or two as a bedtime activity. The result is certainly a “rounder song,” and I even think of it as being about selling your ass once you’ve got nothing else left:

Pawned my buggy, horse and cap
Pawned everything that was in my lap

     chorus:
     Oh Lordy me, didn’t I shake sugaree
     Everything I got is done in pawn

Pawned my chair, pawned my bed
Don’t have nowhere to lay my head

     chorus

I have a little secret I ain’t gonna tell
I’m goin’ to heaven in a ground pea shell

     chorus

Chew my tobacco, spit my juice
I’d raise Cain but it ain’t no use

     chorus

This strange, hardass domesticity is in everything Jolie Holland does. Here’s another sing-along, sung with one of the softest, sweetest, most intimate arrangements on her album Escondida:

The smell of burnt exhaust drifts into the bar
It’s midnight in California, it’s high noon where you are
Motorcycles and booze and this dirty old perfume
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame
Is what it is
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame

I tried to go to sleep in my haunted little room
The shadows are churning in the passage of the moon
It’d break my heart to tell you I couldn’t come so soon
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame
Is what it is
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame

Holland’s next album, Springtime Can Kill You, is due out on Tuesday. The reviews I’m seeing are positive and seem to promise more of the same, at the very least.

John Cohen and the Voyager Record

The New Lost City Ramblers: John Cohen, Mike Seeger, Tracy Schwarz

Voyager Record
NASA technicians bolting the Voyager LP to the spacecraft

It has finally, really dawned on me.

The Voyager Record is a timecapsule, designed by Carl Sagan and friends, in the form of a long-playing phonograph record. Identical copies were bolted to the side of NASA’s two Voyager Spacecraft, which are now drifting in interstellar space. And this record contains a field recording made in Peru by John Cohen, co-founder of the New Lost City Ramblers.

Here at The Celestial Monochord, that’s one heck of a revelation. Let me think about this.

The Voyager Record (and the soundtrack to the Cosmos TV series, which borrowed heavily from it) was my first exposure to all sorts of music — not just Blind Willie Johnson, but also Stravinsky, Mozart, Beethoven string quartets, and a variety of non-Western musics like the Javanese gamelan and Japanese shakuhachi.

More often than you might think, 25 years later, the thought of the Voyager Record still occasionally overwhelms me with grief and wonder. It must be the strangest episode in the history of the US Government — for one thing, it was partly the result of Sagan’s stunning, awe-inspiring innocence. The record is Carl Sagan’s quixotic love letter to Planet Earth — Earth, which filled him with a grief and wonder of his own. To Sagan, the record expressed Earth’s “cosmic loneliness.”

And somehow, he arranged for this document to roar into interstellar space, riding like a stowaway aboard the federal government’s Cold War nuclear missile technology.

———

When the Voyager Record was launched, Carl Sagan saw it as a fitting tribute to the recently-deceased inventor of the LP, Peter Goldmark.

Sagan had become a young Ph.D. in 1960, about six months before Bob Dylan first arrived in Greenwich Village. His generation passionately loved the long-playing record, and they soon came to define themselves and their worldview through the LP.

They studied LP’s — such as Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music or The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper — with a reverence and creativity that previous generations reserved for The Bible. The social movements that defined the 60’s and 70’s were shaped and held together, to no small degree, by the LP format. It was The People’s Format, an invention that invented a generation.

So, by 1977, it wasn’t a big stretch for Sagan to envision a total summation of Planet Earth encoded into the grooves of an LP. But what should this record say? What would be its argument?

Above all, the Voyager Record is a global anthology. An anthology, because it juxtaposes diverse music, images, voices and sounds. And global, because it sees itself as unconstrained by national boundaries. Its varied elements belong together in a common space simply because they’re all the work of Earthlings.

The argument of the Voyager Record (at least for its human audience) is its humanism, set against the Cold War. It tries to show, by means of an outlandish and beautiful thought-experiment, that the differences separating us are trivial when viewed from a “cosmic perspective,” as Sagan liked to say. In the all-consuming milieu of the Cold War, now difficult to recall, that could be a very forceful vision.

It’s often said that the peace and environmental movements were deeply inspired by NASA’s photos of Earth taken from space. On the other hand, NASA was one of the USA’s primary Cold War weapons. The display of those photos also scored points in the Space Race.

The Voyager Record inherited both poles of this irony. It was Carl Sagan’s ambition to resolve the contradiction in favor of peace.

———

That ambition had roots, of course.

The intensely humanistic Alan Lomax served as an advisor to the Voyager project — it was Lomax who recommended to Sagan’s group the inclusion of John Cohen’s 1964 recording of a young Peruvian woman’s wedding song.

Lomax himself had recorded folk musicians in many countries, partly to get out of the country during McCarthy’s red-baiting and to find a way around the blacklist. This episode, like the Voyager LP, is clear case of the Cold War leading directly to “world music.” Indeed, in a vivid echo of Sagan’s project, Lomax would later dream of a Global Jukebox representing all of human culture through one portal.

And then there was Moe Asch’s Folkways Records, for which The New Lost City Ramblers recorded exclusively. Back in the 1930’s, Asch proposed “a complete acoustic record of the human lifeworld” (as Robert Cantwell put it). He came closer to fulfilling that dream than you might expect, as a little time with the Folkways catalog will show. The Folkways vision first formed in a spirit of resistance to the early stages of WWII and the Holocaust — and, as such, it was endorsed by Albert Einstein (as I’ve described before). Asch’s company certainly became the most critical record label of the Folk Revival, a movement whose reason for being was the disillusionment of America’s children in the post-WWII, Cold War environment (see Cantwell’s brilliant book).

Asch and Lomax (both of whom vigorously pioneered the anthologizing potential of the LP) were the inventors of the Voyager Record’s very spirit. Sagan and NASA — by reframing Asch and Lomax’s vision in the contexts of the Cold War and the Cosmos — each appropriated the vision for their mutually contradictory, competing purposes.

———-

I will close with a few startling anecdotes about John Cohen — not so much to fit his life into the thesis above, but to show you that the guy actually makes sense, standing there on the corner of such mighty intersections.

Besides having co-founded The New Lost City Ramblers in 1958, and having made many recordings and award-winning documentaries about Andean culture, Cohen is also famous as the guy who coined the phrase “high lonesome sound.” In Bluegrass: A History, Neil Rosenberg provides a good summary:

John Cohen … contributed to the interest in bluegrass with his photography and through a short documentary film whose title has become closely associated with the music. In February 1963, when Cohen chose The High Lonesome Sound for his movie about Kentucky mountain music, he was seeking words to describe the high, intense quality of the singing which had impressed him during his research in the region … The film included footage of Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys in a free concert at the 1962 Coal Carnival, on the courthouse steps in Hazard, Kentucky. It was the first documentary film to include bluegrass and marks the beginning of the association of Bill Monroe with the term “high lonesome sound.”

This John Cohen is also the same John Cohen who Bob Dylan addresses in his liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited. In them, Dylan refers to Cohen’s rooftop where Cohen had taken perhaps the first photos of Dylan in New York. I once read that this rooftop was demolished to make room for construction of the World Trade Center. Here’s the passage [punctuation and capitalization are Dylan’s]:

you are right john cohen — quazimodo was right — mozart was right … I cannot say the word eye any more … when I speak this word eye, it is as if I am speaking of somebody’s eye that I faintly remember … there is no eye — there is only a series of mouths — long live the mouths — your rooftop — if you don’t already know — has been demolished … eye is plasma & you are right about that too — you are lucky — you don’t have to think about such things as eye & rooftops & quazimodo.

This is also the same John Cohen who provided what was, for many years, the only available interview with Harry Smith, eccentric editor of the influential Anthology of American Folk Music.

And finally, it appears that the Grateful Dead song “Uncle John’s Band” is about John Cohen and The New Lost City Ramblers.

Editor’s Note: One of many reasons it’s been so long since I’ve posted is that I’m working on an experimental news blog on The New Lost City Ramblers — The New Lost Times. Let me know if you think I should keep going or quit.

Community Radio

t-shirt designed by Saelee Oh

available from Lemonade Maid

Yesterday, on my morning commute, I was listening to KFAI, a community radio station in Minneapolis — not the local NPR station, mind you, but a real hippy-blues Hmong-issues reggae-ass CD-skipping community station.

The show was The FUBAR Omniverse, which is hosted by someone named Blanche and often features spacy art-house Brian Eno ambient I-don’t-know-what. But yesterday, being the week of the pledge drive, Blanche was reminiscing about old times.

She recalled the time, many years ago, that she played a 17th-century whaling sea shanty on the radio. She immediately got an angry phone call from a concerned listener who objected that The FUBAR Omniverse was “encouraging whaling.” Blanche wondered aloud whether the governments of Japan and Norway were listening to The FUBAR Omniverse … and if so, what the ominous consequences might be.

In fairness, I do recall, around that time, the Mississippi River down by the Federal Building being mobbed with frenzied KFAI listener-members waving make-shift harpoons, their eyes wild with blubber-lust. They must’ve heard that song.

And so, anyway … before we get our first nastygram, The Celestial Monochord strongly supports buying CD’s of sea shanties, being nice to whales, and giving money to community radio.

Little Birdie

If I hadn’t noticed it myself, I’m not sure I would have believed it either.

Mike Seeger recorded a common-enough old banjo turne, Little Birdie, for what might be his masterwork, Southern Banjo Sounds. Various other versions of the song exist and mix together in interesting ways, as these old Appalachian songs tend to do.

But Seeger’s choice of style and lyrics seems to bring out something profound in the old song. His version comes off as a densely woven little contemplation on how art and death, and art and love, and love and death can all seem to circle around each other, amplifying each other’s importance.

I’d heard the song plenty of times before, but this potential had never dawned on me. By comparing this version with an older one, I think I see hints of how he brought out these deep, far-ranging implications in the song, how he got that fledging bird to take flight.

Here’s the lyrics as Mike Seeger sings them, I think:

Little birdie, little birdie,
Come sing to me your song.
Got a short time to stay here
And a long time to be gone.

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes you fly so high?
Dissatisfied, dissatisfied
And a-caring never a bit to die.

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes your wings so blue?
It’s nothing else but grieving,
But grieving over you.

Fly down, fly down, little birdie,
And sing to me your song.
Sing it now, while I’m with you,
Can’t hear you when I’m gone.

Like everything else on Southern Banjo Sounds, it’s a solo performance, played on an old banjo, in an old style — in this case, an 1860’s resonator banjo with a curious hybrid of two-finger picking and clawhammer. The long instrumental passages between verses have the smooth, flowing feel of flying — I guess a little like “Flying” from Magical Mystery Tour or John Hartford’s song “Steam Powered Aereo Plane.”

Thirty-seven years before this recording, when he was only 26 (and maybe less experienced in love, art, and death), he performed the song with the New Lost City Ramblers during a concert in Boston. A recording of it is available on 40 Years of Concert Performances.

To my ears, the earlier version is unusually “folkie” for the Ramblers, with the kind of bright, proud, collegiate sound you find in someone like the Kingston Trio. But being the Ramblers, of course, the musicianship is excellent, with a taste of Mike Seeger’s mandolin skills and Tom Paley’s firm, syncopated, snappy banjo picking.

The text is a little elusive. Who is the narrator talking to, a bird or a woman? In fact, the identity of the narrator seems to move around from character to character without warning — first a young man speaks (he’s either a married woman’s lover or a bird watcher), and then at the end, the bird (or the woman) talks back.

Despite the marchy, declarative sound and the shifting viewpoint, the lyrics are touching — a snapshot of youthful need and loss.

(Chorus)
Little birdie, little birdie,
Come sing me your song.
Got a short time for to be here
And a long time to be gone.

Married woman, married woman,
Come and see what you done done
You have caused me for you to love you
Now your husband’s done come.

(Chorus, then mandolin solo)

I’m a long ways from old Dixie
And my old Kentucky home,
And my father and mother are both dead,
Got no one to call my own.

(Chorus)

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes you fly so high?
It’s because I have a true little heart
And I do not care to die.

In the later Southern Banjo Sounds recording, Mike has removed the married woman and the husband, the father and mother, and Kentucky — and with them goes any hint of a story line. He leaves us, then, entirely in the realm of abstracted notions, the imagination, and the pure emotional force of the music. The lyrics have been stripped down to nothing but a conversation between singer and bird — between artist (or lover, or mortal) and what matters most to him. What used to be a youthful complaint in the Ramblers version is now an older man’s contemplation.

I guess to take away a lesson from all this, you could do worse than the lesson taught in almost every writing workshop (and which, some day, even The Celestial Monochord might learn) — less is more.

Hollis Brown’s South Dakota

Hollissmall

When Bob Dylan was 13 years old, one of the century’s worst epidemics of black stem rust struck the upper midwest — particularly North and South Dakota and Minnesota. Up to 75% of the wheat harvest was lost to the disease, which blackens the crop with a powdery, sooty fungus. The economic consequences were severe, and the incident became legendary within the science of plant pathology. There’s no way young Bob Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota wouldn’t have heard about it.

But there were plenty of other diseases to blacken your crops, or kill your animals or you. I’m not an expert in any of them. Ergot can blacken wheat, barley, and other cereals and causes “bad blood” in cattle and humans — convulsions, gangrene, derangement. An invisible fungus in a common grass leads to tall fescue toxicosis, with grotesque symptoms like “fescue foot” and nasty birthing problems. Maybe Bob had heard of such diseases as well.

Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown” is an exercise in empathy — its power is in the vividness of its vantage point within the head of a desperately bad-luck South Dakota farmer, and in the way the song dares you to turn away. Having lived in Minnesota for almost 20 years, or about as long as Dylan did before he moved to New York, and I can almost see how the young songwriter might have found the empathy to write such a convincing song.

Even in fairly cosmopolitan Minneapolis and St. Paul, farming is always a presence — to this day, grain mills and breweries (or their ruins) are lined up along the Mississippi River. They’re a constant reminder that the cold climate used to limit the viable crops to stuff you could grind or brew, plus animal feed — wheat, barley, oats, alfalfa, sorghum, various kinds of hay. When you fill your gas tank in Minnesota, you have a good chance of being reminded that farmers have more options today, such as President Bush’s switchgrass. Fully 200 of the nation’s 600 ethanol (“E-85”) gas pumps are in Minnesota.

A few years ago, a friend of mine moved from the University of Minnesota to New York — just like Dylan, you might say, only forty years later. On her first day in Manhattan, a shopkeeper mentioned the lack of rain, and my friend, forgetting herself, asked if the farmers upstate were suffering. The shopkeeper gave her a look as if she’d just evidenced a severe case of Tourette’s Syndrome.

But that awareness and empathy, which so animated Dylan’s “Hollis Brown” in 1964, has its limits. In fact, “Hollis Brown” is primarily about those limits. For that reason, it’s convenient for Minnesotans that the song is set next door, in South Dakota.

South Dakota’s leaders have worked to make the state’s economy, and perhaps its conscience, better insulated from the booms and busts of farm life. In 1980, South Dakota was in desperate financial straits and took action by eliminating all laws against usury. Citibank, among other credit card companies, moved operations to the state almost immediately, leading to an explosion of growth in Sioux Falls and, some say, to a lot of South Dakota farmers declaring bankruptcy.

I happened to hear “Hollis Brown” on the same day the South Dakota governor (born the very year of the black stem rust epidemic) signed the bill designed to ban almost all abortions in the state, and ultimately, to overturn Roe v. Wade nationwide. That’s what got me thinking about the song again. It seemed like yet another example of Dylan’s uncanny foresight that he set the song in South Dakota even though, in 1964, Mississippi played the role in folksong that South Dakota now seems eager to play.

Dylan got the melody of Hollis Brown from “Pretty Polly,” as Greil Marcus has pointed out. “Pretty Polly” is about a young man named Willie who murders his girlfriend for reasons which the song leaves completely unaddressed and which therefore seem to take on a menacing profundity. But as Rennie Sparks points out, at least one of Pretty Polly’s 16th-century sources explains the motive simply and without ambiguity: She was pregnant and Willie doesn’t want the birth to take place. At least partly, this is the origin of “Hollis Brown” — a story about the murder of a woman as a de facto abortion.

The best-known version of “Pretty Polly” (the version Rennie Sparks calls “cold as a cockroach”) was recorded by Dock Boggs in 1927. In 1963, Boggs was rediscovered by Mike Seeger who then recorded and traveled extensively with him. In 1993, Bob Dylan made a studio recording of “Hollis Brown” accompanied by Mike Seeger playing banjo in Dock Boggs’ very singular style. Really, the banjo part on the recording is basically just a sped-up version of Boggs’ “Pretty Polly.” The effect of the recording is to return “Hollis Brown” to its family tree, to explicitly situate it within its lineage.

In writing “Hollis Brown,” then, Dylan surely wasn’t looking ahead to 2006. He was looking back to the old Appalachian murder ballads, which the song so convincingly resembles. Marcus seems to claim the song was also inspired by a newspaper report of a mass murder in South Dakota, but I haven’t been able to track that down (Charles Starkweather?). Perhaps the more inspiring history took place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota’s most notorious mass murder and part of the Indian Wars in which Minnesota also played an unfortunate role. Given the history of this South Dakota farm — where the buffalo no longer roam — I wonder if Hollis Brown and his family aren’t merely the most recent seven people to have died there.

It makes little sense to try to enlist “Hollis Brown” in a contemporary political fight. Or anyway, that’s simply not The Celestial Monochord’s schtick. Besides, the song is striking as an early hint of the full-blown poetic strategies Dylan was about to unleash — strategies that revolve around undecided meaning, meaning as an unfinished art for the listener to complete, meaning not as autocratic rule but as democratic process. To claim that “Hollis Brown” is somehow against South Dakota’s new abortion law is to pretty much miss the song entirely.

Still, it’s in the character of Dylan’s art to keep coming around, over and over, asserting itself in new contexts. I think this uncanny relevence comes from reaching as deep into empathy as he can, and from his willingness to share with us the work of meaning. Or, maybe the more you’re able to encounter the world with the past very much alive in you, the more you’re able to anticipate the future. Maybe this is why Dylan continues to mystify, particularly in America where memory is notoriously short and empathy often runs thin.

Editor’s Notes: The following is transcribed from the 1993 recording with Mike Seeger. Also, the coyote is the official state animal of South Dakota.

THE BALLAD OF HOLLIS BROWN

Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children and his cabin breaking down

You looked for work and money and you walked a ragged mile
You looked for work and money and you walked a ragged mile
Your children are so hungry, man, that they don’t know how to smile

Your babies’ eyes look crazy there, a-tuggin’ at your sleeve
Your babies’ eyes look crazy there, a-tuggin’ at your sleeve
You walk the floor and wonder why with every breath you breathe

The rats have got your flour, bad blood it got your mare
The rats have got your flour, bad blood it got your mare
Is there anyone that knows, is there anyone that cares?

You prayed to the Lord above, “Oh please send you a friend”
You prayed to the Lord above, “Oh please send you a friend”
Your empty pockets tell you that you ain’t a-got no friend

Your babies are crying louder, it’s pounding on your brain
Your babies are crying louder, it’s pounding on your brain
Your wife’s screams are stabbin’ you like the dirty drivin’ rain

Your grass is turning black, there’s no water in your well
Your grass is turning black, there’s no water in your well
You spent your last lone dollar on seven shotgun shells

Way out in the wilderness a cold coyote calls
Way out in the wilderness a cold coyote calls
Your eyes fix on the shotgun that’s hangin’ on the wall

Your brain is a-bleedin’ and your legs can’t seem to stand
Your brain is a-bleedin’ and your legs can’t seem to stand
Your eyes fix on the shotgun that you’re holdin’ in your hand

There’s seven breezes blowin’ all around your cabin door
Seven breezes blowin’ all around your cabin door
Seven shots ring out like the ocean’s pounding roar

There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm
Seven people dead on a South Dakota farm
Somewheres in the distance there’s seven new people born

Take the Star Out of the Window

Take the Star Out of the Window seems to have a public face and a private life, and they’re fiercely at odds with each other.

On its face — that is, its overall sound — the recording is a catchy sea chanty, among the most gleeful and snappy guitar-mandolin duets I know of. But inside its head — that is, in the text of its lyrics — it’s a grim portrait of what the Vietnam War had come to feel like in America by 1972.

Take the lyrics first. The verses are written in the third person and in past tense. Prine’s narrator is a distant observer telling us a fairy tale or parable — but in telling it, he can’t hide his rage and grief. And if you can clear your head of the melody, this narrator has a very bitter sense of humor indeed:

Robert was a sailor for the best years of his life
His captain was his mother and the ocean was his wife
Only fresh out of the cradle, life’s one and only spring
He was sworn to do his duty and got blood on his high school ring

On the other hand, the chorus is written in the present tense, first person — Robert the sailor himself is speaking, and he has an problem. He’s faced with the soldier’s age-old dilemma of having to confront that blue star in his family’s window — that is, of trying to reassure a relieved family that its son is back safe and sound, while knowing that the son they raised didn’t really survive the war after all:

And it’s a hello California, hello Dad and Mom
Ship ahoy, your baby boy is home from Vietnam
Don’t you ask me any questions about the medals on my chest
Take the star out of the window and let my conscience take a rest

So the Vietnam War divides this sailor from his family and from himself — it even puts the song’s verses in another world from that of its chorus. I was a child during the Vietnam War, but Prine’s songs (and my own feelings about Iraq) suggest that a lot of people must have felt agonizingly estranged from their own country — which is to say, from themselves.

Most striking to me is that the SOUND of the song is at odds with its SENSE. The recording has the soul of sea chanty, played in up-tempo bluegrass time — it’s deliriously fun to hear, even if the lyrics are among Prine’s more bitter social commentaries.

But this public/private split is exactly what attracted me first and most to the old southern music of the 1920s and 1930s — like the stuff on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Its public face rarely matches its private thoughts. The first words Sara Carter ever recorded were “My heart is sad and I’m in sorrow,” but the song was an irresistibly jaunty jingle. Whether Prine knew it or not, Take the Star Out of the Window taps into the estranged character of American folk music to portray America’s mindset during Vietnam.

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One reason for the long pause in this series on Diamonds in the Rough is that it’s taken me a while to decide what Take the Star Out of the Window really is, musically. Is it bluegrass stripped down to just John Prine’s guitar and David Bromberg’s mandolin? Jazz in the style of Django Rhinehart and Stephan Grappelli with the fiddle transcribed to mandolin? The closest recording I could think of was “Is It True What They Say About Dixie,” recorded by Steve Goodman and Jethro Burns five years later. Did Prine, Goodman, and his running buddies invent their own fully-developed genre of duet?

Reading Neil Rosenberg’s “Bluegrass: A History” has been the right thing to do. I now think Take The Star Out of the Window is in the tradition of the early country brother acts of the 1930s — The Delmore Brothers, The Dixon Brothers, The Rice Brothers, etc. Homer and Jethro inherited this tradition, making Jethro Burns a direct link from Prine and Goodman back to its beginnings in, I suppose, acts Burnett and Rutherford in the 1920s.

Ultimately, the most influential of all the brother acts was The Monroe Brothers, whose junior member would “invent” Bluegrass during and after World War II. But back in the 1930s, what mattered most about Bill Monroe was his fiddle-influenced handling of the mandolin, which almost immediately revolutionized the status of the instrument:

They sang higher and played faster than the others. Charlie’s bass runs on the guitar were snappy and attracted attention; Bill’s mandolin playing, with its speed and dexterity, was unique. He showed how versatile and potent it could be as a lead instrument. Bill Bolick, then just beginning his career with his brother Earl as the Blue Sky Boys on WWNC in Asheville, recalled: “People kept writing in and wanted me to play the mandolin more, so in a very short time, I discarded the guitar entirely and we did practically all the numbers with the mandolin and guitar. This I attribute to the popularity of Bill Monroe’s mandolin … Bill Monroe was making the mandolin a popular instrument.” [Rosenberg, pages 34-35]

(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)

Beyond The Anthology

Banjo_camp_rancher

A reader has asked:

I only recently discovered the Harry Smith Anthology but I’m already obsessed. Any further recomendations?

What a question! For the past eight years or so, my musical and intellectual life has revolved around my own discovery of the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music compiled and designed by Harry Smith. You could say The Celestial Monochord’s own reason for being is to provide such “further recommendations.”

But I also hesitate to answer. Much of the energy and diversity in a Folk Revival (which is what’s happening today) seems to come from everybody struggling to find their own way. When I ask like-minded people how they found the old folk and blues music — and where they went from there — the answers almost always surprise me.

At the 2004 American Banjo Camp in Washington State, I met the guy pictured above (I can’t recall his name). He was a rancher from arid eastern Washington near the Idaho pan handle. Several campers listened as he told about the time he traded his much sought-after banjo — an old Gibson Mastertone — for seventeen tons of hay. We all laughed and told him he’d been bamboozled. When the laughing died down, he said, “Do you know what seventeen tons of hay cost?” We all conceded that indeed we did not.

Anyway, point is, this guy seemed like a truly authentic folk character — The Genuine Article. So I asked him how he got into playing the banjo, hoping he’d say it was a family tradition going back centuries. Instead, he said “Well, when I was a kid, I was very heavily into the Rolling Stones. And their liner notes said they owed it all to Muddy Waters. So I got some Muddy Waters albums, and that got me into Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton records, and that got me to Harry Smith and Dock Boggs, which got me into bluegrass and … well, twenty years later, here I am at Banjo Camp.”

You just never know.

I’m happy to list some of the places I’ve been, but I wouldn’t think of it as a road map. It’s mind-boggling how much stuff is out there today, and how many paths there are into and out of The Anthology.

THE ANTHOLOGY

Harry_smith

Once you’ve memorized The Anthology and scoured its liner notes, you may want even more supporting material.

Anthology of American Folk Music is an invaluable but out-of-print book from Oak Publications. I found a hard copy from an online bookseller, but this electronic version at Tower of Babel will also do nicely.

Volume 4 was released in 2000 by Revenant, where it promptly went out of print (which is why I wish Folkways had done this, as nothing goes out of print there). Smith had long planned this fourth volume, but his attention span expired. It’s wonderful — maybe you can find it used somewhere.

Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus. In a way, it’s a book-length argument that the spirit of The Anthology deeply animates Dylan’s vision — even more so AFTER he “went electric.” I think you need to know this book to go any further. It’s been renamed and revised, but I only know this first version.

When We Were Good: The Folk Revival by Robert Cantwell — especially Chapter Six, “Smith’s Memory Theater.” Cantwell’s writing is often dense and difficult (in a postmodern cultural studies kind of way) but if you can figure out what he’s saying, he’ll change your life. I’ve returned to this beautiful chapter again and again over the years.

Think of the Self Speaking: Harry Smith — Selected Interviews is for the serious Smith-head. It’s easy to forget that the highly honored and influential Anthology was put together by a border-line homeless weirdo whose main source of income was often small-time dope peddling. This collection of interviews is frustrating, hilarious, tedious, inspiring, illuminating. Mostly, it’s a sad reminder that Allen Ginsberg was right about what becomes of the best minds of his (and your) generation.

THOSE ANTHOLOGIZED

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Find out what ELSE the people on The Anthology recorded — that is, find out what Smith chose from to arrive at The Anthology. Here are my favorites so far.

The Carter Family: In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain. The fact that I laid out the cash for this Bear Family box set suggests how important I think the Carter Family is (it sure as hell doesn’t mean I’ve got the money to spend — you might want to go for some of the box sets put out by JSP instead). You know … sometimes I walk down a crowded street and am suddenly saddened, thinking “Most of these people don’t know about the Carter Family.”

The Complete Blind Willie Johnson and its liner notes. Johnson is a gospel musician, so the central themes of his work go back to African American slavery, and back through all of Western literature, and ultimately to Jewish slavery and the Torah. This may be why his artistry can seem to take on layer upon layer upon layer. It’s DEEP. Don’t screw around with any “selected” collection — go for the Complete.

The Complete Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas. Despite their wild differences, Thomas is like Willie Johnson in that a Great Theme gives his art a depth that opens up beneath you and swallows you up. Born less than a decade after the abolition of slavery, his theme is travel — the road’s promises of freedom and its ever-present threats of sudden terror.

Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years, 1963-1968. Boggs is like the greatest old Irish storyteller you’ll ever meet — you never know whether to laugh or cry. These years that Dock Boggs and Mike Seeger spent together have a mythic status in my mind — like Dylan and Guthrie at Greystone Hospital, or like Johannes Kepler at Tycho Brahe’s bedside. The difference is that Seeger made recordings.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford: Ballads, Banjo Tunes and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina. After many weeks of listening exclusively to this, I stood on the shore of Lake Superior and tried an impersonation of Bascom Lamar Lunsford. To my surprise, what came out was a terrible Lunsford, but a great Bob Dylan. I think not only Dylan’s voice, but his approach to imagery and meaning owes a large, mostly unrecognized debt to Lunsford.

Original Folkways Recordings of Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley, 1960-1962 documents one of the great moments of American music — Ralph Rinzler’s simultaneous rediscovery of The Anthology’s Clarence (Tom) Ashley, and his discovery of the young Doc Watson. The collection has the sound of music being reborn.

THE NEW LOST CITY RAMBLERS + ALAN LOMAX

Black_texicans

Reading a song as sheet music is like looking at a roadmap of a city, while hearing an actual recorded performance of a song is like visiting that city and eating its gumbo. That’s the big shift in which Harry Smith’s Anthology participated. Technology and imagination allowed The Anthology, The New Lost City Ramblers, and Alan Lomax to put the true sound of real folk music right into people’s ears — and it literally remade the world.

New Lost City Ramblers, 40 Years of Concert Performances. A great introduction to the Ramblers, with many stories told between songs, plenty of laughs, and brilliant musicianship. You can hear the guys grow to a venerable age right before your ears. Tracy Schwarz’s introductory comments about “I’ve Always Been a Rambler” are alone worth the price.

New Lost City Ramblers: The Early Years, 1958-1962. Selections from the Folkways albums before Tom Paley left the group. Particularly surprising for these Patron Saints of Oldtime is all the bluegrass they played so capably. Particularly amusing are all the bawdy and politically questionable songs such as “Sales Tax on the Women” and “Sal’s Got a Meatskin.”

Out Standing in Their Field: The New Lost City Ramblers Volume II, 1963-1973. Selections from the albums recorded with Tracy Schartz in the line-up. I love the ever-timely Roger Miller song “Private John Q,” the hilariously bad-news “Dear Okie,” John Cohen’s insanely shaggy shaggy-dog story “Automobile Trip Through Alabama,” and the worryingly moving Freudian parable “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake.” For more on the Ramblers see The New Lost Times.

Southern Banjo Sounds
Solo Oldtime Country Music
Third Annual Fairwell Reunion. I carry around these CDs by founding Rambler Mike Seeger like the American President’s nuclear football — they’re never far from my side. Mike has done more than any other living person to make the music of The Anthology a living reality in the hearts and hands of people like us. Like the Ramblers themselves, Mike is not a nostalgic impersonator of old records — he’s very much a new thing, a creature of today and tomorrow.

The Alan Lomax Collection Sampler. A brilliant way to get a sense of what Alan Lomax preserved in his journeys through America, and during his McCarthy-era exile in Europe. A good third of these performances by longshoremen, patrons of taverns, and prisoners in work crews just don’t seem possible — they’re too beautiful and strange.

Deep River of Song: Black Texicans. The reason I choose these recordings of black Texans over all the other Lomax recordings I own is that they just happen to blow my mind so consistently. Lomax recordings have a startling immediacy — you feel like you’re there watching the thing get recorded, every time you hear it. If I could sit down with you and spin some disks, I might just start you off with Butter Boy’s freaky “Old Aunt Dinah.”

INHERITORS OF THE ANTHOLOGY

Aereoplain

It’s silly to list performers influenced by The Anthology, since just about everybody’s world has been transformed by it, whether they know it or not. But here’s a few people I happen to like, and who just seem to smell like Harry Smith — they have The Anthology and/or Lomax and/or the Ramblers written all over them.

There’s a vast universe of incredible musicians who perform in old folk styles. They are world-class masters of their instruments, but when you see them in concert, you might be one of only a dozen people in the audience. It’s insane, but … hey, at least they do requests. I once told Ken Perlman that I’ve given his brilliant “Northern Banjo” CD to friends as gifts a few times. He gave me a puzzled look and said, “Where do you get them?” Lord help us all. I’m also crazy about Tom, Brad, and Alice, Mac Benford, and local boys Spider John Koerner, Charlie Parr, and Lonesome Dan Kase. (These last three are all fine songwriters, but I think of them as oldtime bluesmen.)

Then there’s all the more popular (for better or worse) singer-songwriter acts who Smith-ites might like. Recordings I really like and tend to associate with the Anthology are Jolie Holland’s Escondida, Gillian Welch’s Time the Revelator and Revival, John Prine’s John Prine and Diamonds in the Rough, John Hartford’s albums, the great and unavailable Aereo-Plain and the very strange Mark Twang, Tom Waits’ Mule Variations, and The Handsome Family’s Through the Trees.

Also, for all that can be said about Bob Dylan’s debt to The Anthology, Alan Lomax, and The New Lost City Ramblers, I think Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong are the Dylan albums that make the point most clearly. They’re also among Dylan’s best, it seems to me, and like his first album, they’re heard far too rarely.

Careless Love

The first version of Careless Love I knew was the one Dock Boggs did, recorded by Mike Seeger thirty-eight years ago today, just in time for Valentine’s Day 1968.

This was near the end of Dock’s life, and so near the end of his second music career — his “Revival” career. As I’ve discussed at length before, Mike Seeger writes that Dock loved this second career but also found it unsettling in some ways. It apparently brought back memories of his misspent youth and its moonshine-fueled violence. Everything Boggs played in this second career could be heard as confronting this past, and as exorcising his decades working the infernal coal mines.

Careless Love is a fine example. To match Dock’s high, raspy, pinched voice, you’d have to sing and sob at the same time. Though the tempo is so fast — and accelerating — that Dock can barely get some of the lines sung clearly, he delivers every word as if speaking spontaneously. Like all great singers, his song feels immediate and new:

Oh when my money you could blow
Oh when my money you could blow, Lord Lord
When my money you could blow
You was always hanging around my door

I wish to the Lord this train would run
I wish to the Lord this train would run, Lord Lord
I wish to the Lord this train would run
To carry me back where I come from

Oh now my money’s all spent and gone
Oh now my money’s all spent and gone, Lord Lord
Oh now my money’s all spent and gone
You pass my door and sing a song

But it’s not one of Dock’s graveyard songs — it’s a party blues tune in good old open-G banjo tuning. In Boggs, I see the cliche of the theater’s masks of tragedy and comedy taking on a new life — his music projects so many intense facial expressions.

Into this mix, add the fact that Dock apparently learned this song — and many others — from recordings of female blues singers of the 1920’s. Oddly and movingly, Dock retains the original gender of the narrator:

Oh momma, oh momma, yonder he goes
Oh momma, oh momma, yonder he goes, Lord Lord
Oh momma, oh momma, yonder he goes
With a banded hat and a suit of clothes

Oh place this ring upon his hand
Oh place this ring upon his hand, Lord Lord
Oh place this ring upon his hand
To show the world he’s a married man

Oh take this ring and put it on
Oh take this ring and put it on, Lord Lord
Oh take this ring and put it on
And think of me when I’m gone

If I had listened to what momma said
If I had listened to what momma said, Lord Lord
If I had listened to what momma said
I’d been at home in momma’s bed

Given Careless Love’s subject — people gathering around when you’re doing well, dumping you when you’re down — there’s no wonder the song has drawn the attention of a lot of professional musicians, from Elvis and Janis Joplin to Pete Seeger and Dave Van Ronk. Since discovering the song through Boggs in 1999, at least two other versions have crept into my CD collection. Both are unbelievable in entirely separate ways — like Boggs’ version, they make me want to sit you down and say “Listen to THIS!”

One is on the first bluegrass LP every released, also recorded by Mike Seeger. It’s by Snuffy Jenkins, who inspired several generations of three-finger banjo players, including Earl Scruggs. His version is outlandishly cheerful and skilled, a virtuoso piece that Seeger describes as “much influenced by jazz, as if he were playing a trumpet or jazz guitar.” Follow the links above to get the Smithsonian CDs that the Jenkins and Boggs versions come from (I highly recommend them) or get the individual tracks from Smithsonian Global Sound.

The other version in my CD collection is a duet between Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, who probably know a thing or two about careless love. The track is available only as a bootleg. In this version, Cash and Dylan are mostly screwing around. Dylan seems initially lost until Cash comes to the rescue by feeding Dylan a verse he can sink his teeth into as a tool for improvisation — a reason for the recording to exist:

Cash: Love, oh love, oh careless love
Gimme some love, oh love, oh careless love
Love, oh love, oh careless love
Won’t you see what your love has done to me

Cash: Sing one now, Bob.

Dylan: Hmmm. Give me a verse.

Cash: I pass my window. [pause] Pass your window. [pause] Pass your window.

Dylan: Pass your window by.
I pass your door and your window too.
I pass your door and your window too.
Yes, I’m still very much in love with you.

Cash: Well, I pass your window, pass your door
You pass my window, pass my door
Woman, man, you pass by my window and you pass my door
But you’ll never get by my forty-four

Cash: Sing one now, Bob.

Dylan: Well, I pass your door, I pass your gate.
Well, you pass my door and you pass my gate
Yes, you pass my door and you pass my gate
But you won’t pass by my thirty-eight.

And so on. Louis Black describes the recording fairly well:

They do an overly long version of “Careless Love” … One of the lines refers to a gun that Cash identifies first as a .44 caliber, then Dylan labels it a .38, and then a .45. By the end of the song, Cash has identified it as a .30-ought-6 (a rifle rather than a pistol). At one point, however, in order to hit a rhyme, Cash calls it a .41 (which doesn’t exist). He’s so pleased with this that, just a bit later, he again refers to a .41, and you can hear the absolute delight at this silliness in his voice. Especially noticeable throughout the recordings is just how sweet and lovely Dylan’s singing and harmonies with Cash are.

John Glenn’s Capsule

John Glenn Spacesuit
John Glenn’s Mercury spacesuit
(from beercheesesoup.com)

I’ve often heard John Glenn’s Mercury 7 capsule is about the size of a Volkswagon Beetle, but this week, on a trip to Washington DC, I was still surprised to see it up close — it hardly seems bigger than John Glenn himself.

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has a great way of displaying its capsules, kind of shrink-wrapped in plastic allowing VERY close examination, especially on a slow day at the museum. Rivets, seams, little dings and burns — Glenn’s capsule really is just a tin can.

Its interior redefines “cramped” (and I thought my connecting flight to Chicago was tight!). Glenn was in a little can of human with only enough room for movement to touch a few controls. Just above his head, he had a window about four inches wide and twelve inches high.

Standing next to the capsule, the familiar facts about John Glenn now seemed strange and beside the point — the ticker-tape parade, the “hero” status, the eventual power and privilege of the Senate. Even the idea of his being “The First American In Orbit” fell away. What stuck with me was that, during the 4 hours and 55 minutes he was in orbit, he was alone up there in 1962, his bones as breakable and his flesh as flammable as yours.

Because fabric is very prone to degradation, the Smithsonian stuffs the old spacesuits on display with under-sized manikins. It gives the strange impression that all the Mercury astronauts were skinny 13-year old boys. It seems as if the astronauts were like wiry early hominids — Lucy’s younger brothers.