celestialmonochord

Families of Trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dock Boggs: Revival

Dock Boggs, age 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiddlin’ Banjo Crap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What You’re Not Interested In

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

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

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

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

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

Billboards in Space

Advertising in Earth Orbit

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

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

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

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

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

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

Einstein Takes A Test

Bohr Einstein
Niels Bohr and Einstein think about it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 1

The Moon and Tom Waits: Part 2 of 2

Tom Waits Father
Tom Waits and his dad, Frank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Moon and Tom Waits: Part 1 of 2

Tom Waits Vineyard
Tom Waits in wine country.

In 1999, I made a partial list of references to the Moon in Tom Waits songs. Since then, I’ve seen a few others do the same, but I don’t think a complete list has ever been made. I estimate it would be about 100 entries long — averaging over 3 lunar references every year for more than 3 decades.

Below is only about 40% of the known references. I don’t know whether you can make it through this, but I hope it will vividly convey the way Waits returns to the Moon, over and over, sort of turning it around in his mind to see it from as many different angles as possible.

The moon’s all up, full and big — apricot pit in an indigo sky.

You wear a dress, baby, and I’ll a tie, and we’ll laugh at that old bloodshot moon in that burgundy sky.

Outside another yellow moon has punched a hole in the nighttime.

Looks like a yellow biscuit of a buttery cue ball moon rollin’ maverick across an obsidian sky.

The moon’s a yellow stain across the sky.

November only believes in a pile of dead leaves and a moon that’s the color of bone.

The Moon is a cold chiseled dagger and it’s sharp enough to draw blood from a stone. He rides through your dreams on a coach and horses and the fence posts in the moonlight look like bones.

And then they all try to stand like Romeo beneath the moon cut like a sickle, and they’re talkin’ now in Spanish all about their hero.

The moon’s a silver slipper, it’s pouring champagne stars.

Every time I hear that melody, something breaks inside, and the grapefruit moon, one star shining, can’t turn back the tide.

I know I’m gonna change that tune when I’m standing underneath a buttery moon that’s all melted off to one side (Parkay). It was just about that time that the sun came crawlin’ yellow out of a manhole at the foot of 23rd Street and a dracula moon in a black disguise was making its way back to its pre-paid room at the St. Moritz Hotel.

Everything has its price. Everything has its place. What’s more romantic than dying in the moonlight?

The Moon ain’t romantic, it’s intimidating as hell.

Cheater slicks and baby moons, she’s a-hot and ready and creamy and sugared and the band is awful and so are the tunes.

It’s 9th and Hennepin, and all the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes, and the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky like a tarp thrown over all this.

The moonlight dressed the double-breasted foothills in the mirror, weaving out a negligee and a black brassiere.

Just then Florence Nightingale dropped her drawers and stuck her fat ass half way out of the window with a Wilson Pickett tune and shouted “Get a load of this!” and gave the finger to the moon.

Now the moon’s rising, got no time to lose — time to get down to drinking and tell the band to play the blues.

And Zuzu Bolin played “Stavin’ Chain” and Mighty Tiny on the saw threw his head back with a mouth full of gold teeth and they played “Lopsided heart” and “Moon over Dog Street.”

I like to sleep until the crack of noon, midnight howlin’ at the moon, goin’ out when I want to, and comin’ home when I please.

They be suckin’ on Coca Colas and be spittin’ Day’s Work until the moon was a stray dog on the ridge and the taverns would be swollen until the naked eye of 2 a.m.

I talked baseball with a lieutenant over a Singapore Sling, and I wondered how the same Moon outside over this Chinatown fair could look down on Illinois and find you there — you know I love you, baby.

It’s funny you know, cause every now and then — yeah, every now and then, when the moon’s holding water, they say old Joe will stop and give you a ride.

Wasted and wounded, it ain’t what the moon did — I got what I paid for now.

I never saw the east coast until I moved to the west, I never saw the moonlight until it shone off of your breast.

And the evening stumbles home with his tie undone, and the moon sweeps 7th Avenue as usual. You lie awake at night, you remember when …

Well, Jesus gonna be here, he’s gonna be here soon. He’s gonna cover us up with leaves, with a blanket from the moon.

You gotta roll out the carpet, strike up the band, break out the best champagne when I land. You gotta beat the parade drum, hit all the bars — I want the moon and stars!

I got the moon, I got the cheese, I got the whole damn nation on their knees.

My eyes say their prayers to her and sailors ring her bell, the way a moth mistakes a light bulb for the moon and goes to hell.

I’ll wait beneath a blood-red moon, a blood-red moon, a blood-red moon, ‘neath a blood-red moon. I’d rather die than part from you.

My baby ripped my heart out with every turn of the moon.

Every night the moon and you would slip away to places where you knew that you would never get the blues. Well, now whiskey gives you wings to carry each one of your dreams, and the moon does not belong to you.

There’s a golden moon that shines up through the mist, and I know that your name can be on that list. There’s no eye for an eye, there’s no tooth for a tooth, I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth.

When the moon is broken and the sky is cracked, come on up to the house.

When the weathervane’s sleeping and the moon turns his back, you crawl on your belly along the railroad tracks.

Well, the smart money’s on Harlow and the moon is in the street.

The Moon fell from the sky — it rained mackerel, it rained trout.

The moon in the window and a bird on the pole, always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal.

That’s the way the market crashes. That’s the way the whip lashes. That’s the way the teeth gnashes. That’s the way the gravy stains. And that’s the way the moon wanes.

The Crush Collision Trio

Crush Collision Trio

Recently, the Mullet River Boys, a trio of oldtime vaudevillean minstrels, saved what was, for me, an otherwise iffy show, The Ukulele Gala. I was surprised to find that they’re a local group I’d never heard of. In terms of the kind of music I love, I’m more familiar with Memphis 80 years ago than with my own town today. I need to do something about that.

I first realized this a few years ago when I stumbled across another Twin Cities group, The Crush Collision Trio fronted by Lonesome Dan Kase. Lonesome Dan (LORD, what makes that Dan so LONESOME?) is an oldstyle accoustic bluesman — I mean an even older style than you’re probably picturing.

The usual image people have of the accoustic “country” blues tends to come, I think, from people like Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, and Skip James as an old man. But when these guys learned to play the blues, they were kids in at least the late 1920’s or later, and they were playing what was, at the time, a new approach. It was slower, sadder, with sometimes irregular rhythms not meant for dancing. Their lyrics were often pretty grim.

But among the first round of solo bluesmen recorded in the 20’s were older men who played an older style that grew up in house parties, dance joints, and medicine shows. Their rhythms were more often steady and lively, their lyrics were geared toward crowds of mixed gender, age, and race, and they tended to play in a range of different styles, including religious tunes. I’m thinking of Charlie Patton, Mississippi John Hurt, Henry Thomas, and Jim Jackson. Many of their songs, verses, subjects and styles were shared by older white songsters recorded at the same time, such as Uncle Dave Macon. A few of these older black songsters were recorded playing banjos.

This is the terrain that Dan Kase has claimed for himself. His band includes a mandolin (by Matt Yetter) and a washboard (Mikkel Beckman), and when I corner these guys in bars, they each seem to confirm my admittedly shaky grasp of this storyline. (Still, I can’t speak for them, of course.) A high-ranking, unnamed source assures me that if I like the Crush Collision Trio, I’d love a guy who lives in Duluth named Charlie Parr. We’ll see — Dan’s music, with or without his Trio, always makes me feel pretty damned right with the world.

All these Minnesotans seem to be in their twenties or thirties. Clearly, this evidence from Minnesota — together with more familiar national acts like the Old Crow Medicine Show, Jolie Holland, Gillian Welch (etc., etc., etc.) — suggests that the “Folk Revival” that started in the 1990’s is bearing fruit. Suddenly, there’s a reason to see live music.

As an aside, The Crush Collision Trio named themselves after a publicity stunt. In 1896, William George Crush staged a head-on collision of two locomotives on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas train line (“The Katy”). Forty-thousand spectators watched the smash-up somewhere between Waco and Hillsboro, Texas. Unexpectedly, both trains’ boilers exploded shortly after impact, killing two spectators and mutilating several others. (Crush Collision Trio shows tend to work out a little better.)