celestialmonochord

Orphan Songs, Part 7
We Are The Folk

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

The most electrifying book I’ve read about folk music is certainly “When We Were Good: The Folk Revival.” Sadly, I can’t bring myself to shove the book into the hands of anyone I know. It’s dense enough academic criticism that I don’t know who’d find it a “good read” without having studied the humanities recently. But I also don’t personally know any academics who like folk music enough to care. So, I have to enjoy it privately, like some kind of dirty book.

But it was Cantwell’s book that first made me think very seriously about Orphan Songs. So, I’ll try to gently summarize one short passage from the book, hoping to convey a little of why that might be …

Who are these “Folk” who make all this music, anyway? Louis Armstrong said, “All music is folk music — I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.”

Well, you have to consider the idea of “The Folk.” It derives and survives from feudalism, and so from before what we know as trade, the town, science, money, mechanization, and mass production. The idea of the folk can’t make sense without that other feudal principle, Nobility. The two ideas are inseparable, since the folk is what humanity looks like viewed from above — from the position of nobility gazing down upon its dependents.

This may sound disparaging, as if folk music is just an illusion in the minds of bigots. But remember that when feudalism gave way to more modern economic and cultural institutions, its principle of nobility was adopted with great romance by the new mercantile middle class — that is, by MY class — as an ideal to be aspired to. Ever since, the nobility ethic has shown itself in middle-class culture, philosophy, politics, spirituality, in our sense of Self.

What does this have to do with Orphan Songs? As long as there are folk to compare ourselves to, our nobility must be seen as an accident of birth. The things nobility implies — independence, gentility, fairness, being worthy of the folk’s dependence and so also of your obligations — none can be claimed or understood without knowing, experiencing, confronting, or perhaps even becoming the folk. (This chapter in Cantwell’s book is called “We Are The Folk.”)

Here, astonishingly, Cantwell considers the career and, I have to say, identity of folk revivalist Mike Seeger. Seeger is a complex character with a career running now more than 50 years. I can’t do Seeger justice here, so I’ll only say that Cantwell’s description is vividly, stunningly recognizable to me. He presents Seeger as a kind of self-orphaned nobleman whose nobility runs in the blood so that, as a foundling among the folk, he must discover his nobility.

I’ll end with excerpts directly from Cantwell:

Seeger is, through that music, in lifelong revolt against his class — and hence permanently exiled to that strange zone where the very phenomenon of social differentiation seems to have exhausted itself.

Like the returned Ulysses or the exiled Edgar in Lear, like the blackface minstrel, Mike Seeger can come most fully into possession of himself only in disguise. This is the classic Byronic gesture, that of the nobleman recovering through a reckless and brilliant condescension, choosing virtue over power, the essence of his nobility. To have it and to repudiate it, and thus to have it back again in its authentic form: of all the tales that nobles tell about themselves, this essentially allegorical and religious story has been, from Luke and John to the Wife of Bath, John Milton, C. S. Lewis, and Hermann Hesse, the one most loved by the people of the town.

This kind of analysis in “When We Were Good: The Folk Revival” has pretty fully reworked how I think about not only the Folk Revival, but most musicians I love (see the anecdote about Dylan at the end of Part 3), plus the Beats and the so-called 60’s counterculture, among other post-World War II cultural movements. Looking for Orphan Songs? You won’t have to look far.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Thank You Mr. Sagan

THANK YOU, MR. SAGAN

Oh, it’s nice to return
to the twentieth century
blockaded from invasion
and lame radio shows
about how Jesus
loves the athletes,
his rich children,
who can achieve
so much with a cleat.

In The Letters To
The Mount Wilson Observatory,
every day blazed
with irresistible keys
brandished by real citizens
with big sensitive heads
compelled to tell us
the almighty resided
in the Orion Nebula
or that humans used
to live on the moon
until it melted.

Oh, please can we
all be muscular
hummingbirds,
jeweled fools
beating our wings
at gaps in what passes
for understanding
in a vestigial wind.

The world is not
a polyphonic monster.
If possible, may we
refrain from eavesdropping
on erudite ancestors?

Consider what we’ve done
to virgins, toasting on an open fire
or hosting that obsession with reptiles,
all sacred and chicane. Humans
are a moony crew, a ship’s list.
Still lost but stalking the location
of a true galactic home.
Neither frozen, nor crackpot,
not noble, not alone.

—–

This poem contains a reference to an online exhibit of very eccentric letters received from the general public by The Mount Wilson Observatory.

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

The Monochord has also published her poem “Your Wife As Krakatoa.”

My Dog Has Fleas: Review of the Ukulele Gala

For the little world of public radio, Minnesota Public Radio is a far-flung empire, built in no small meaure on A Prairie Home Companion. So when MPR held a Ukulele Gala, presided over by the hosts of “The Morning Show” (an excellent, eccentric, eclectic music show on one of MPR’s several stations, 89.3 The Current), it seemed like a good bet to me. The show was held at the venerable old Fitzgerald Theater, home of Prairie Home and a gorgeous place to see a concert — ornate and amazingly intimate.

I can’t say I was very disappointed, exactly. I’ve been spoiled recently by attending some transcendent gatherings of some of the best banjo players in the world, and I had imagined that a good cross-section of brilliant ukulele players would not be hard to assemble, if you know what I mean. What we got for our $31 a head (before Ticket Master) was two very entertaining local ukulele players and one flown in California, along with some dubious sketch comedy by The Morning Show’s hosts.

The audience itself was a good show — acres of Hawaiian-print silk, a Tiny Tim impersonator (with latex nose), many child ukulele students, a guy with yarmulke over here, some nose rings and tattoos over there. Dozens were armed with ukuleles of all vintages, shapes, and sizes. Fifty ukulele-playing Minnesotans onstage and sawing away at Aloha Oy is not something you see every day.

As for the professionals, local musician Kari Larson is one of Garrison Keillor’s “shy persons” and has a meager stage presence. But she earned great respect with some riveting instrumentals, most memorably a sweet, melodic piece exploring some variations on “When I’m Sixty-Four” and a ukulele/church pipe-organ duet on “Baby Elephant Walk.” Again, not something you see every day.

The Mullet River Boys, a local group that’s been known to play at a little pizza joint just up the street from my apartment, were unquestionably the Gala’s highlight. Hearing them was like finding 20 bucks in an old jacket. They made me wonder once again just how many thousands of virtually anonymous musicians there are across America who are profoundly more talented than anyone you will ever see on Amerian Idol.

Their repetoire is all over the place but well-chosen, drawing from early jazz, Oldtime string-band, vaudeville, and minstrelsy. There are shades of Oliver Hardy in frontman Jack Norton, who claims to have known Tiny Tim during childhood and who today plays one of Tim’s ukes. Sideman Jed Germond is more of a Stan Laurel, an exceptional jazz violinist, and a solid tenor banjoist. The third Mullet River Boy is a woman, Liz Draper, who, dressed in a high-collared long-sleeved white blouse, looked like The Church Lady, only sexy and with dreadlocks … if you can picture that for a moment. She seemed to be a classically-trained but very versatile doghouse bass player.

Jim Beloff was the guy from California, which is apparently an epicenter of an ongoing ukulele revival. Not my cup of tea, Beloff is an amiable geek whose repetoire is deeply rooted in Tin Pan Alley, which I’m afraid still seems like an oxymoron to me. I’m working on it. His originals were built around themes I would have rejected as bereft of real ideas (e.g., a trip to the dog park) and which he used mostly to mine rhymes (e.g., “bark”). When he and his wife Liz began singing duets with much simpering drama (“Love is a Many Splendored Thing,” for example) my own wife Jenny leaned over and whispered, “Waiting for Guffman.”

I did very much appreciate the Celestial Monochordy quality of writing a love song around a “sheetmusic moon” of the kind you see on old piano-bench songsheets.

The show ended with an all-cast audience sing-along of the ukulele national anthem, “Has Anybody Seen My Gal.” I left the theater thinking of the contrast between the Mullett River Boys and Beloff, remembering what Bob Dylan said: “Strap yourself to a tree with roots.”

The Mount Graham Controversy, 1988

Squir1l

In the 1980s, I studied astronomy (actually, physics and mathematics was all it was) at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I also did a lot of hiking and camping in the mountains and deserts of the southwest, compelled by the same love of nature that brought me to astronomy.

So, I found myself in the company of both astronomers and environmentalists on a daily basis. I thought nothing of it, since so many amateur astronomers prefer to see dark, clean skies than strip malls, and often have to camp in the wilderness to escape light pollution. Similarly, environment-conscious hikers and campers always seem intensely aware of the night (and day) skies they get to experience.

But then came the Mount Graham controversy. In its early stages, the debate mostly revolved around a rare species of red squirrel that some feared would go extinct if a large observatory complex was built on top of the mountain. There was a lot to consider, and I tried hard to consider it. Unfortunately, I found no colleagues willing to help.

The environmentalists I met saw visions of chemical and radioactive spills, noisy research, great tracts of asphalt, and throngs of tourists in a pristine wilderness. I tried to explain that telescopes just bend light with mirrors and today require only electricity, not photochemicals. They also like native plants around them to absorb image-blurring heat, and tourists are only marginally tolerated at a serious research facility. Mount Graham already boasted a road system, a Bible camp, and an artificial lake. Nothing of the sort was in the least bit interesting to the environmentalists I discussed it with — this information was greeted as evidence alright, but only of the fact that my heart was not in the right place. The facts seemed to prove only that I didn’t care.

I will say that they were somewhat more willing to engage than the astronomy students I tried to talk to — at least when those students were in all-male groups. There was no hope of even suggesting that accomodations might be made for the observatory’s impact on animal habitats, or that a better understanding of the ecosystem up there might be interesting, or that mutual education between astronomers and environmentalists might lessen the tensions over the issue. I mostly remember one very brief, bruising conversation in which it was suggested that the group go squirrel hunting.

I eventually stopped paying attention to the Mount Graham debate, mostly because I doubted a real debate was possible. Being somewhat wet behind the ears, I was shocked that my interests could be aligned with people who were so obviously wrong and unwise. It would be many years before I really came to accept that even your ideological brethren can be routinely hostile to the truth and to the common good. I came to accept it as a fact, but I still find it rather unpleasant.

Classifieds: Biosphere 2

Biosphere2

Biosphere 2 was an attempt at creating a sealed-off, self-sustaining ecosystem of the kind astronauts would need for Moon or Mars bases, or for extremely long trips into deep space. The name implies that the Earth itself is Biosphere 1.

The $200 million venture was mostly funded by a Texas oil billionaire. With a lot of TV cameras aimed at them, the first crew was sealed up in 1991, but oxygen levels plummeted, crops failed, the isolated crew grew testy and weak, and no animals survived except abundant ants and cockroaches. It wasn’t long before outside food and fresh oxygen were quietly brought in.

After a flurry of mission changes and lawsuits, the complex just north of Tucson is now up for sale:

“This is not all about the highest bidder,” [general manager of company that owns Biosphere 2] said. “All things being equal, we’d certainly like to see an appropriate reuse of the Biosphere and associated buildings, but ultimately, it comes down to what the market will bear.”

I gather that some good science came out of Biosphere 2, and its certainly better to fail in Southern Arizona than halfway to Alpha Centauri. Still, Biosphere 2 may be best remembered as an especially bizarre example of America’s (and The American West’s) doomed utopianism.

It’s also a dramatic example of something I’ve mentioned before — the intimate and often troubling relationship between American space science and the mass media. I’ll do some exploring of that long history in future entries of the Monochord.

Einstein’s “Miracle Year”

Einstein

A hundred years ago this year, Einstein published a series of papers that reworked what scientists thought reality was. It was such a shocking gesture that 1905 is still sometimes called Einstein’s “miracle year.”

In science, advances and discoveries are almost always “in the air.” That is, everybody is working on the same issue and kind of knows what’s going to happen next — though usually not exactly how or when.

But Einstein’s papers were another matter — they were certainly not “in the air.” It seems like a batch of 21st century physics shot back not just into the 20th century — into 1905. I always picture a group of scientists gathered around discussing the details of some current sticking point, when suddenly a 26-year-old patent clerk clears his throat and asks, politely, “You know … time?”

There’s been so much written on Einstein, it seems silly to go on about him here. But to give a flavor of that year, let me draw an extremely quick sketch of what Einstein said:

Light occurrs in discrete “quanta.” Everybody had accepted that light is a wave, but now Einstein says it’s a particle too, and each light particle has a distinct, independent energy level. Nothing in quantum mechanics would be possible without this.

Atoms exist, and kinetic energy theory works. Einstein applied the idea that heat is ceaseless agitation of atoms to a phenomenon called Brownian motion — thus more or less simultaneously proving what heat was and that atoms exist.

The velocity of light is not relative, space and time are. The velocity of light isn’t just how fast light goes, it’s a number somehow woven into reality itself — that is, space and time organize themselves around “c”.

Mass is a form of energy. And if you transform that “stuff” into more familiar forms of energy, you know how much you’ll get using this equation: E=mc², where E is energy, m is mass, and c is that same number that’s woven into spacetime.

It may seem anticlimactic after all that, but to mark the year, 33 physicists are writing online diaries (apparently also known as “blogs”) all year long.

Orphan Songs, Part 6:
The Orphan Trains

Orphan train

Folksongster Utah Phillips wrote a song called “Orphan Train,” which I first heard at the American Banjo Camp 2004. I’d forgotten about it until Celestial Monochord reader Marjorie G. suggested I write about Orphan Trains. Today’s entry is based almost exclusively on the results of her research for the Monochord.

Once I had a darling mother, though I can’t recall her name
I had a baby brother who I’ll never see again
For the Children’s Home is sending us out on the Orphan Train
To try to find someone to take us in

Chorus:
Take us in, we have rode the Orphan Train
Take us in, we need a home, we need a name
Take us in, oh won’t you be our kin?
We are looking for someone to take us in

The UK had long engaged in various forced migrations of orphaned, delinquent, or just plain poor children. Since at least Shakespeare’s time, kids were kidnapped from the streets of London and shipped off to “people the colonies” of the Americas and Australia. In the form of the “farm school movement,” the practice continued in the UK through WWII.

I have stolen from the poorbox, I’ve begged the city streets
I’ve swabbed the bars and poolrooms for a little bite to eat
In my daddy’s old green jacket and these rags upon my feet
I’ve been looking for someone to take me in

The Children’s Home they gathered us, me and all the rest
They taught us to sit quietly until the food was blessed
Then they put us on the Orphan Train and sent us way out West
To try to find someone to take us in.

In 1854, the newly-formed Children’s Aid Society started running orphan trains out of New York and Boston, carrying children from what Society founder Charles Loring Brace called “the dangerous classes.” Conditions in these cities were indeed horrifying for homeless and orphaned children who had often immigrated from their native lands to escape similar conditions. Prominent businessmen funded Brace’s orphan train project in an effort to head off the social turmoil they feared would result from such conditions.

The Catholic New York Foundling Hospital joined in, sending thousands of its “foundlings” west. Believing a strict policy of anonymity would help to save the most children, the hospital set up a kind of turntable near the hospital entrance. An “unwed mother,” presumably, would place her infant on the table, ring a bell, and the baby would disappear into the hospital without mother and nun ever having to see each other.

Nobody knows how many orphans were shipped west. The 200,000 often quoted by the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America is considered very conservative. In 1910, the Foundling Hospital reported that it alone had sent 2700 children just to Wisconsin — and the Orphan Trains went everwhere there were railroad tracks.

The farmers and their families they came from miles around
We lined up on the platform of the station in each town
And one by one we parted like some living lost-and-found
And one by one we all were taken in

Now there’s many a fine doctor or a teacher in your school
There’s many a good preacher who can teach the Golden Rule
Who started out an orphan sleeping in the freezing rain
Whose life began out on the Orphan Train.

In the accounts given by the riders of the Orphan Trains, they universally thought they were sent out on the only Orphan Train. Only decades later did they realize there were at least hundreds of such trains.

The riders also consistently report that the scene at the train stops was terribly anxiety-producing. The Children’s Aid stops were highly publicized in advance to maximize the number of adopters, and the children were displayed, studied, groped and then usually rejected. But they feared being still on the train at the end of the line. Girls older than toddlers were the last to be picked.

Unquestionably, some riders didn’t do well, suffering beatings, neglect, and all manner of abuse while also being used on farms as chattel slaves. But the president of the Orphan Train Heritage Society objects that most writing about the riders emphasize horror stories, while it seems most riders did fairly well. Apparently, Utah Phillips’ hopeful song isn’t too unrepresentative. A lot of ordinary and extraordinary people in twentieth-century American towns started out riding the Orphan Trains.

Thanks, Marjorie, for your help on this. Thanks also for taking in a lot of strays over the years, on top of raising the rest of us yahoos.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

My Ferret Has Ticks

Last night, we went to see the Ukelele Gala at St. Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater. I will write up a full-fledged review of it soon. For now, one of last night’s running gags reminded me of a little quip one of the Canote Brothers (Jere or Greg) made at the 2004 American Banjo Camp.

He was showing the audience how he had tuned his banjo-ukelele. (Seeing as the audience was composed largely of Oldtime banjo players, he wouldn’t dare stick to a standard tuning.) He slowly plucked the strings, one after the other so we could hear the tuning, and said, “So instead of My Dog Has Fleas, he’s got some other kind of bug.”

Classifieds: The Yerkes Observatory

The Yerkes Observatory is for sale. Possibly one of the most beautiful observatories in the world, Yerkes is located on 77 acres of prime lakeside real estate in the charming resort community of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

To those who appreciate the history of astronomy, Yerkes is also one of their best loved shrines. Yerkes was the last observatory to be built during what I think of the first space race — a drive to build larger and larger refracting telescopes (those with a big lense in the front and a little eyepiece in back, like a sailor’s spyglass). Finished in 1897, Yerkes hosted some of the greatest astronomers and telescope builders of its era — E. E. Barnard, Ritchey, George Ellery Hale, Otto Struve, Kuiper, Chandrasekhar, and the young Carl Sagan.

Apparently, the University of Chicago (one of the most richly endowed universities in the world) thinks the most promising buyer at the moment is a New York developer who’d like to (at best) make Yerkes the centerpiece of a gated community of oversized suburban mansions.

If I were a rich man, daidle deedle daidle daidle daidle deedle daidle dum …

Banjos, Stars, and Creative Commons

In elementary school, when we sang "This Land is Your Land" and the teacher told us about Woody Guthrie, it seemed like Guthrie must’ve been around before the USA was founded. He must’ve been a contemporary of … of Paul Bunyan’s. But to my great surprise, it turns out Guthrie had just died when I was 3 years old — and when he was only 55. I won’t tell the whole story of how Guthrie came to hold such a mythical status so quickly — but if I were to tell it, it would mostly be a story about Pete Seeger. Seeger made building the Woody Guthrie myth into one of his major projects.

The more you know about Pete Seeger, the more you realize he wasn’t just "famous" or "influential," he really helped engineer what "folk music" means, and even the terms on which "the folk" themselves exist.

Anyway, here’s the point. His book, "How to Play the 5-String Banjo" has been known to virtually every banjo player in the world for about half a century. Seeger mimeographed the first edition himself while on the road in 1947, working for the Henry Wallace presidential campaign. He refused to copyright it, believing a copyright would hinder the spread of banjo-playing.

More recently, a guy named Pat Costello has written some excellent and entertaining instruction books, and declared them part of the "creative commons." According to Costello, sales of his books increased spectacularly after the books went copyrightless. The books are worthy successors to Seeger’s landmark book — and I think the writer of "This Land is Your Land" would have appreciated them as well.

Star map

A collection of fine star charts has also now gone online (here too) as part of the creative commons.