celestialmonochord

Barack Obama: Secret Banjoist?

Obama interrupts "Hopalong Peter" at a New Lost City Ramblers concert

In another clear sign that his campaign is in financial trouble, presidential hopeful Barack Obama is now fundraising among devotees of the southern Appalachian stringband music known as "oldtime."

Apparently conceding bluegrass donors to his Republican rival, Obama's campaign is appealing directly to less affluent and less numerous oldtime contributors.

Senator Joe Biden, asked for comment while attending a joint New Lost City Ramblers concert / Obama rally, said "This makes perfect sense. I mean, you got the first mainstream oldtime stringband who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guys. I mean, that's a storybook, man!"

According to John Edwards, also in attendance, "This is a great idea! You know, Kelly Harrell was a textile worker, just like my fath — Ow! Hey! Ow! Not the face! Watch the hair! Security!"

The oldtime demographic has been ignored by major candidates ever since its support doomed the otherwise front-running candidacy of Henry A. Wallace in 1948.

Understandably, Obama's sudden embrace of the clawhammer banjo-playing set has left even some campaign staff puzzled.

"You know how you tell the difference between a bluegrass band and an oldtime band?" asked a high-level adviser to the Obama campaign on the condition of anonymity.

"The oldtime band is skinnier than the bluegrass band," he said, citing the previous testimony of Garrison Keillor.

To appeal to oldtime jammers, the campaign has even changed its official theme song more than forty-two times.

"First it was Sally Ann, and then we changed it to Sally Goodin, and then Sally in the Garden," said the exasperated campaign insider. "But the oldtimers didn't even notice! Apparently, they can't even tell their own songs apart!"

"Barack has got to put an end to this! He has to lift his foot up!"

Editor's Note: There is a (real-life, no joke) update to this article!

The Anthology as Tarot Deck

(a modern Tarot deck by John Coulthart)

Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music is so well established as a canonical text that you’d think Smith must’ve had tenure somewhere like Harvard … he didn’t. And it’s easy to miss how perverse an idea the Anthology originally was.

As Greil Marcus wrote in the book that launched a thousand ships, Invisible Republic:

… the Anthology was disguised as a textbook; it was an occult document disguised as an academic treatise … This was in Harry Smith’s grain. A polymath and an autodidact, a dope fiend and an alcoholic, a legendary experimental filmmaker and a more legendary sponger, he was perhaps most notorious as a fabulist. He liked to brag about killing people.

For generations before him, Smith’s family was deeply involved in the more marginalized traditions of American mysticism — the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Theosophists. Smith often claimed to be Aleister Crowley’s illegitimate son.

Smith brought this sensibility to the design for the Anthology, which comes across as having been ordered by some unknowable, arcane, lost cosmological system. His liner notes include the following quote meant to help the reader understand his decisions:

“In Elementary Music The Relation Of Earth To The Sphere of Water is 4 to 3, As There Are In The Earth Four Quarters of Frigidity to Three of Water.” — Robert Fludd

All of this matters desperately, for reasons I’ll mention in my series of posts on the first seven seconds of entry #41 of the Anthology, “Moonshiners Dance Part One.”

For now, I’m just pointing out that someone named Zac Johnson has invented a way of using the Anthology for something resembling a Tarot reading. Harry becomes your oracle.

You
use an ordinary deck of playing cards to generate a random number from 1 to 84, which
gives you an entry number for a cut on the Anthology, according to
Harry’s mysterious and iconic numbering system.

You then go to that corresponding song, and
use it as a basis for an interpretive reading. The extremely evocative recordings on the Anthology should serve as an endlessly rich source for readings by any reasonably sharp fortune teller who knows the collection. The Anthology for fun and prophet.

I think Harry would have loved
this. And then hated it. And then failed to understand it. And then forgotten about it. And then hated
it. And then dismissed it as
uninteresting. And then hated it. And then loved it …

Here’s a blog entry and podcast that explain the details of the card system.

Fake Headlines Mesmerize Music Geeks

When you first read the fake newspaper headlines in Harry Smith’s liner notes for Volume One of his Anthology of American Folk Music, you’re forced to stop what you’re doing, sit down, and read them all very closely.

Harry knew what he was doing.

Those headlines are great devices of seduction — or a fishhook through the mouth. In turn, his liner notes, as a whole, have helped make his 1952 collection of 1920’s records one of the most influential documents in American music.

This morning, for the first time, I read something that finally made real sense of these queer little jokey headlines. It was in William Howland Kenney’s description of the various ways record companies got records into the hands of consumers in the 1920’s:

… the newsboys of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Defender regularly carried copies of the latest records of the week along with their newspapers. They sold the disks at $1 apiece; for many customers the records were as important as the news. As one newsboy recalled: “You’d go to one customer and she’d get all excited over a new blues and start telling you all about her girl friend or some relative who was sure to buy one, too.”
— Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, p 123

It’s perfectly sensible, then, to suppose that a corner newsboy might literally have shouted something like “Extra! Extra! Mamie Smith’s man don’t treat her right! Has Crazy Blues!”

If so, the newsboys and Harry Everett Smith shared the same technique for drawing attention to the records, as does the Anthology itself to this very day.

Whether Harry understood this, I don’t know — but it would be worth looking into. He was born in 1923 in Washington state and grew up mostly in Bellingham, where I doubt corner newsboys were a common sight. This sales method appears to have been little-known among researchers until it was described by William Howland Kenney in his (mind-blowing) 1993 book. Harry Smith died in 1991.

Smith’s headlines have been posted by someone named Joshua, at someplace called “Dinner on the Molly.” He also helpfully includes links to the songs
at YouTube.

It would be great if, someday, a really well-made interactive replica of the Anthology, closely based on Harry’s liner notes, were legally available online. Joshua’s blog entry and the YouTube piracy are evocative how this might work.

See also my entry about the availability of the liner notes from Smithsonian.

Harry Smith’s Liner Notes Available for Download

The first time I went to a racetrack —
Canterbury Downs in Chaska, Minnesota around 1999 —
I picked up the horse-racing program and felt a jolt.

“So THIS is where Harry Smith got the design of his liner notes to The Anthology of American Folk Music!”

Wherever he got his ideas for them, those liner notes were so weird —
so peculiar and particular and captivating —
that listening to The Anthology without getting to know its liner notes seems a little perverse.

From the beginning, those liner notes have massively multiplied the force of the blast that’s slowly gone off in American culture thanks to Harry Smith’s Anthology —
a 1952 collection of old recordings from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.

Well, now the Smithsonian has put those notes online for download by anybody for free. Maybe this is just the first time I’ve noticed it, I’m not sure.

In any case, it’s a big honking 62 MB PDF, so watch out. Also note that they start with the new liner notes from the 1997 reissue before getting on to Harry’s original notes.

The posting of this PDF seems to be part of a site redesign, eliminating the Smithsonian’s old Anthology site and replacing it with a new one that looks rather like their Global Sound commerce site.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this change means that the individual entries of the Anthology will soon be available for purchase as mp3’s.

Of course, I think it’s time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself and get the box set on CD. You’ll never regret the expense, believe me.

The Anthology at Tom Waits Concerts

from "KPFK Will Air Folk Fest"
The Pasadena Star Bee, July 3, 1974

Tom Waits is on tour — a rare enough news story in itself.

But note that the music piped into the theater before and after the shows, to date, has been The Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith.

I've often pointed out the folk lineage of various Tom Waits songs, showing connections between:

Cold Cold Ground and Stephen Foster,

Georgia Lee and Blind Willie Johnson,

Swordfishtrombones and Bascom Lamar Lunsford,

Better Off Without A Wife and Chubby Parker, The Carter Family, and John Lomax, and,

Down There By the Train and Uncle Dave Macon and Henry Thomas (although I really "buried the lead" on that one — scoll down).

… I have a lot more of these up my sleeve and I may get some of them written up some day …

Anyway, it's interesting to see Waits tip his porkpie to The Anthology so explicitly.

But it would be absurd to say I've finally been "proven right." Waits has often been pretty generous in acknowledging his debts to other musicians, and folk has always been in the mix.

Thanks to Ray for pointing out the use of The Anthology at the recent concerts, and to TCCBodhi and Dave R. at the Raindogs discussion list for providing independent confirmations.

Milwaukee Soldiers Home

Maybe the Milwaukee Soldiers Home astounded me so because I was unprepared for it. I had no impression of the place, beyond a few lines on a map, until I found myself suddenly in the middle of it. Then I wanted to call everyone I knew and tell them to go there immediately.

My only thought originally was to visit the grave of Frank E. Cloutier's son — Alden, a sergeant during World War Two. The soldiers home, where Alden died, is surrounded by the Wood National Veterans Cemetery, where he's buried.

I realized long ago I can learn a lot by visiting the graves of the various characters I encounter in my research. Often, the headstone's inscription teaches me about the person's military service, or relatives I hadn't heard of are buried nearby. Sometimes, I discover a musician was a dedicated Freemason. Occasionally, the adjacent plot for the widow never quite got filled.

Once, explaining all this to a coworker, he said, "Just imagine how much you'd learn if you dug them up." I thought seriously about this for a few more seconds then you might imagine before coming to my senses. I think it's possible he could have been making fun of me.

Anyway, the grounds of the Milwaukee Soldier's Home are mind-boggling. Approved by Abraham Lincoln, they have the most impressive Victorian (I guess) architecture I've ever seen — overly massive and extremely dramatic. After more than forty years of visiting Milwaukee, I somehow had no idea such a place even COULD exist there, much less that it actually did, and very deep in the heart of the metro area.

And the buildings are all dilapidated. I later learned that a concerted effort is underway to preserve and renovate the place, but it is currently in a surreal state of disrepair. Peeling paint, broken boards, shattered windows, yellow police tape everywhere. Any movie studio would gladly pay a small fortune to make pristine grounds look this neglected. Sadly, paying to make neglected grounds look pristine is a harder sell.

Strange and disorienting as the visitor's experience is, it's intensified by the overwhelming, looming presence of a cynical and majestically trite metaphor — Miller's Stadium. The unimaginable scale of the stadium, just across the street, gives the impression that you could almost touch it from every point on the grounds. The rows of headstones feel like the stadium's parking lot.

It's impossible to walk there, at this stage in the renovation project and at this stage in American history, and not see the irony. A crumbling veterans hospital shadowed by a violently expensive baseball stadium. (According to my research, Miller's Stadium was built at a cost of 87 godzillion dollars. For the mathematically disinclined, that's an 87 followed by six ass-loads of zeros.)

The casual visitor will definitely be reminded of the scandal that put Walter Reed in the headlines a while back. Of course, it should be said — emphatically — that I have no clue about the medical care and other services currently offered veterans in Milwaukee. A knowledgeable veteran, for example, recently told me the veterans hospital in Madison is truly world-class. I was surprised to hear this because I know nothing about it.

Since visiting this veterans home, I learned that my father's mother volunteered there for many years, helping care for World War Two veterans around the time of the Vietnam War. Maybe my grandmother knew Alden Cloutier.

But I wouldn't have known any of this had I not made the effort. I've visited a lot of locations across the Upper Midwest for no reason other than some musician happened to pass through there 80 years ago. The effect is a little as if a Star Trek transporter beam had gone haywire and dropped me off at a random place and time. I highly recommend it.

Here is a Flickr set I took there (it begins with rather too many shots of Alden's headstone) and here are some shots by other Flickr subscribers.

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (part one)

This is the first in a series about the first seven seconds
of "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Saint Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and the
Victoria Cafe Orchestra. It was included in the
Anthology of American Folk Music, sometimes called the Harry Smith Anthology.
See also Part Two and Part Three.

Alessandro Carrera, Minneapolis Dylan Symposium
Alessandro Carrera
Bob Dylan Symposium in Minneapolis
March 27, 2007

At the 2007 Bob Dylan symposium in Minneapolis, Alessandro Carrera, the leading Italian translator of Bob Dylan's lyrics and prose, told a story about his first awareness of Dylan. I keep remembering it as I think about Mister Larson.

The gist of the story was this:

When Carrera was a teenager in Italy in the late 1960's, he was obsessed with American music — even though it was very difficult to get a hold of, and he could count all the words in his English vocabulary on one hand.

Listening to albums by Joan Baez, and by the Byrds, and by Peter Paul and Mary, what excited him most on each album was always the one or two songs that had been written by this guy — one "Bobe Dee-lahn", as Carrera pronounced it.

Of course, he couldn't understand the lyrics at all — it was Bob Dylan's melodies that attracted him.

It took some doing, but Carrera finally got a hold of a recording by Bob Dylan himself — a 45 rpm single, one side of which was "Mister Tambourine Man." He put it on the turntable, and was elated to hear that the first word out of Dylan's mouth was one of the few English words that the teenage Carrera knew.

"Hey!"

Carrera didn't just know what the word meant — that is, he didn't just know its Italian translation — he also deeply recognized the word. He appreciated it. It spoke to him.

"Hey!"

It meant, "You! LISTEN TO ME." And that was cool.

—

"The Moonshiner's Dance" begins with a 7-second spoken introduction. A prologue.

Here's an mp3:

Download MoonshinerIntro.mp3

In its first two seconds, someone — almost certainly the leader of the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, Frank E. Cloutier — practically shouts "Hey hey, Mister Larson!"

In the next five seconds, in the same declarative voice, he rattles off about 20 more syllables. But because of some rasping and, maybe, needle-bouncing at start of the recording, all but a few of these syllables are completely indecipherable.

To just count the syllables in the introduction, I had to transcribe it phonetically, without worrying about its meaning. The words sound something like this:

Hey hey, Mister Larson! These boys geeky entwine anonymous spectacle play pen! That's it, go boys!

We may never know what Frank E. really said (and I doubt I've made a lucky guess). Maybe the Gennett recording engineer in 1927 used a blank wax disc that was rough or soft near the outer edge. Preparing the wax was skilled labor and results could be slightly uneven. If that's the source of the noise, every released copy of the 78 is similarly indecipherable.

On the other hand, the Smithsonian-Folkways' reissue on CD is the only version I've heard. It may be that their "source copy" of the 78 rpm record was damaged just there. Perhaps another copy of the 78 has a prologue that can be understood.

In any case, after this spoken introduction someone whoops "WAH hee!", and the band strikes up its reeling, careening medley of tunes played as one-steps.

—

I, and possibly you, listen to these old recordings to put our minds through an intense exercise. It's, like, mind-expanding.

We lean into the noise and try to tease out the delicate signal as it leaks across a divide as impenetrable as a world war, a depression, and a cold war. The Mason-Dixon line. The color line. Class and gender and religious and educational and technological divides. And, for us, those divides are not so much obstacles to our listening pleasure as they are at the root of the pleasure.

Among the recordings on the Harry Smith Anthology, Moonshiners Dance comes to me across the shortest distances.

The first seven seconds are in English, it seems. Frank E. would have had a Rhode Island accent, but his audience at the Victoria Cafe was an Upper Midwestern one — it still is, given that nobody is listening but me. In fact, the Victoria Cafe is still standing, just a couple minutes' drive from my house. Frank E. was even raised Catholic, like me — and unlike almost everyone else on the Anthology (except the Cajuns, who do not speak my language).

You'd think I'd have a shot at understanding Frank E.

Instead, I'm like Alessandro Carrera. There's a world between me and the speaker, and I can only pick out a few translatable syllables.

But I recognize something in the gesture. Hey hey, Mister Larson!

Frank could hardly have imagined our existence. We're eavesdropping on his message to Mr. Larson, but somehow the message seems intended for us. But what does it mean?

The Illinois-Wisconsin Border

St. John's church, Christmas Day 2000
Johnsburg, Illinois

Tom Waits doesn't release songs like Day After Tomorrow, which is one reason people listened so closely when it appeared on his 2004 album, Real Gone.

The song's narrator is a 21-year-old combat soldier on a battlefield where he sees himself like "the gravel on the road," like an expendable resource in someone else's project.

It's what we might call a protest song, which is not Tom Waits' style. When the morning newspaper appears in a Tom Waits song, it's usually to complete a still life with eggs and weak coffee. But Day After Tomorrow is a beautiful anit-war song — politically disheartening, spiritually uplifting, and about as moving as anything Waits has ever done.

Like me, the narrator-soldier of Day After Tomorrow is from northern Illinois:

I got your letter today
And I miss you all so much here
I can't wait to see you all
And I'm counting the days, dear
I still believe that there's gold
At the end of the world
And I'll come home to Illinois
On the day after tomorrow

It is so hard
And it's cold here
And I'm tired of taking orders
And I miss old Rockford town
Up by the Wisconsin border
What I miss you won't believe
Shoveling snow and raking leaves
And my plane will touch down
On the day after tomorrow

On my first listening, the "Wisconsin border" passage clunked in my ears. For one thing, "Rockford-town" isn't an expression I'd ever heard, and the song doesn't tell us anything about Rockford beyond what can be guessed from Google Maps.

So, the soldier's hometown seemed to lack credibility, a little as if a blues song had referred to Avalon, Mississippi as "an unincorporated community in the extreme northwest corner of Carroll County, part of the Greenwood Mississippi Micropolitan Statistical Area." The soldier seemed to have a wikipedic knowledge of his own hometown.

Of course, on my second listening, I remembered that Waits' wife, Kathleen Brennan, grew up in Johnsburg, Illinois, which is close to Rockford and even closer to my own home town. Since the early 1980's — and increasingly, as time goes on — Waits and Brennan have worked as a team under the name "Tom Waits," much as Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have said that they are a band called "Gillian Welch."

Thinking of the lines as having been written by an Illinoisan subtly changes the meaning of the words. If I and my family are any measure, referring to a town "up by the Wisconsin border" carries a meaning and significance you can't read off a map.

When I was a college boy in Tucson, Arizona, I went to at least a hundred poetry readings, including perhaps a half-dozen readings by a poet named Alberto Álvaro Ríos. Each time, he would tell the same old story about growing up in Nogales and playing a childish game of walking in two countries at once — literally, one foot in the USA, one foot in Mexico.

I quickly grew tired of the story. So what? So you grew up in a town that straddled the border! Today, of course, I'm able to see a significance I'd mostly missed as a callow youth. The border really does matter, even if it hadn't mattered much to me at the time.

Kathleen Brennan is from just this side of a border, a place where someplace else is always just over the horizon. Maybe such people know exactly where to locate their mythological worlds — over on the other side. Maybe they also tend to know exactly where myths are sorely lacking — here on this side.

In Day after Tomorrow, Waits and Brennan's soldier suddenly finds himself thinking of his hometown, old Rockford town, as if it were that mythical world on the other side of the border. He's displaced alright. His folks back home wouldn't believe how shoveling snow and raking leaves now seem to him like that gold at the end of the world.

It might seem funny that anyone would think of Wisconsin as a default location for some kind of Valhalla. I can't speak for Kathleen Brennan, rather obviously, but when I was growing up in Illinois, my family always had Wisconsin on its mind in a way. Not Indiana or Iowa, but Wisconsin.

For one thing, my parents were from there — they met during WWII while bowling in downtown Milwaukee. They still had siblings in Wisconsin towns both very large and very small. Even for those of us born in Illinois, going to Wisconsin was driving "back" as much as driving "up."

Mostly, we went back for holidays, weddings, and funerals. As a result, my parents' respective home towns seemed like bizarro worlds where people spent every day of their entire lives wearing clip-on ties, going to lengthy Catholic services, and then getting ecstatically drunk. In my mind's eye, John Prine's Wedding Day in Funeralville is always obviously about those places.

It's wedding day in Funeralville
Your soup spoon's on your right
The King and Queen will alternate
With the refrigerator light
There'll be boxing on the TV show
The colored kid will sing
Hooray for you
And midnight's oil
Lets burn the whole damn thing

Wisconsinites know about Illinoisans crossing the border to party. They were called FIBs (F**king Illinois Bastards). FIBs were known for driving drunk, littering, and being loud and disorderly — even more so on all counts than native Wisconsinites.

Once, a relative was bitterly complaining about FIBs, so I pointed out that the airwaves in Illinois were fully saturated with appeals to Escape to Wisconsin — constantly. Every Illinoisan who crossed the border was awarded an Escape to Wisconsin bumpersticker and encouraged to hurry back. He should, I said, contact his own state government about their success in attracting us FIBs … his face took on a vivd expression of disillusionment.

I felt very uncomfortable about being seen as an outsider when my veins flowed with so much German-Catholic Wisconsin beer … I mean, blood … and when my mind was so invested in my Wisconsin roots. Like Alberto Rios, my family and I never quite got beyond straddling that border, growing up in two places at once.

John Prine's song "Lake Marie" is about a character like that — his body on the border, his mind so swimming with that border's past and present that it orders his world. It's a very weird song, almost a nonsense song, that makes sense on a level no other song makes sense.

The song has a mysterious power to make you hit the repeat button over and over and over again, endlessly. I suspect that power might derive from the song's evocation of place — it conjures the experience of occupying that particular borderland in a way you never thought possible.

For one thing, it confuses its facts as only someone thus conflicted can confuse them. Its inaccuracy is authentic.

Many years ago along the Illinois-Wisconsin Border
There was this Indian tribe
They found two babies in the woods
— white babies
One of them was named Elizabeth
She was the fairer of the two
While the smaller and more fragile one was named Marie
Having never seen white girls before
— and living on the two lakes known as the Twin Lakes —
They named the larger and more beautiful lake Lake Elizabeth
And thus the smaller lake that was hidden from the highway
Became known forever as Lake Marie

I see now that the song is apparently about Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, which was founded by a family that did indeed have twins — Elizabeth and Mary. But the twins were never abandoned to the Indians.

But two white sisters were held by a group of Potawatomi Indians in 1832 — one of the most famous and influential incidents in the nasty, confused series of massacres and skirmishes known today as the Black Hawk War. Both pairs of sisters lived within about a 10-mile radius of Johnsburg, Illinois.

It's troubling how little the schools I attended taught me about the pre-European history of this place so full of Native-American-derived place names, as well as cigar-store-Indian kitsch. But those place names and that kitsch and the beauty of the Wisconsin landscape swam around in my head my entire life.

John Prine's "this Indian tribe," who named lakes according to how well they could be seen from the highway, gets it exactly right. There was no telling how long ago any of this history happened, or whether it really happened at all, or whether it ever even stopped happening.

Later in the song, the Black Hawk War is somehow seen, if not quite recognized, on the evening news in the work of European settlers like Illinoisan John Wayne Gacy and Wisconsinite Jeffry Dahmer.

The dogs were barking as the cars were parking
The loan sharks were sharking, the narcs were narcing
Practically everyone was there
In the parking lot by the forest preserve
The police had found two bodies
Nay! Naked bodies!
Their faces had been horribly disfigured by some sssssharp object
Saw it on the news
In the TV news
In a black and white video —
You know what blood looks like in a black and white video?
Shadows. SHADOWS!
That's what it looks like

It's already been a quarter century since Tom Waits wrote the song "Johnsburg, Illinois". Back then, Brennan and Johnsburg were new to Waits, comparatively, and Brennan didn't yet have the kind of intimate involvement in the writing that she does today. Well, that's what I gather anyway.

Waits seems to have deliberately painted Johnsburg as a place that exists mostly in his imagination — the kind of Midwestern farming community any Californian might imagine. He plays a character who can't tell the woman from the photo, the community from the Rockwell painting.

She's my only true love
She's all that I think of
Look here, in my wallet — that's her

She grew up on a farm there
There's a place on my arm where
I've written her name next to mine

It's almost a joke, inviting us to say "No, that's not her — that's a PICTURE of her." The song, just like the photo in his wallet, is how he shows us the image of her that he carries around with him.

Of course, it could very well be that this confusion between the person, or town, and their image is what romance is all about. Who the hell wouldn't want such a song written for them? And what chamber of commerce wouldn't thank a writer for naming such a song after its town?

At that stage in Tom Waits' career, Johnsburg is not yet really recognizable. It's not Brennan's Johnsburg — the sleepy little grid of streets, the town here on this commonplace side of the border. After all, she didn't write the song. For that matter, she hasn't tattooed HER OWN name into his body. He has marked himself with his own understanding of her.

In a sense, the soldier in that oversees war in Day After Tomorrow has gone from thinking of his hometown as a resident would to thinking of it as an outsider might. The war experience has transformed him from a resident of the border town, like Brennan, to a dreamer of a mythical place, like the Waits of 25 years ago.

Look for the Silver Lining

I’ve been working long hours on a ridiculously long entry, but I can’t quite get it “out there” just yet.

But aren’t blogs about “what I happen to be thinking tonight” anyway? Aren’t they? So while we’re waiting for that ridiculous masterpiece, here’s what I’m thinking tonight.

I’ve been listening to CDs from Archeophone lately.

Going into the Moonshiner’s Dance project, I knew more about southern Appalachian tunes for banjo and fiddle than anything else. Now, as I do my research on that Minnesota oompah record, I’ve often suffered from a lack of context.

That’s why, over the past two years, I’ve looked for ways to boost my familiarity with popular music that’s both pre-Moonshiner’s Dance and not necessarily from the South.

For one thing, my CD collection has taken on things like Jewface, and Avenue A to the Great White Way, and Archeophone, Archeophone, Archeophone.

The 1921 edition of Archeophone’s yearbook series includes Marion Harris singing “Look for the Silver Lining.” It turns out to be a bone-crushingly sad song, despite the encouragement it supposedly provides. It pretends to offer advice on how to keep the spirits up, but leaves you a sniveling heap instead.

Of course, I was reminded of the original Carter Family’s signature song, “Keep on the Sunny Side.” Its modus operandi is identical — while encouraging you, listener, to turn away from your troubles, it only emphasizes them and the pathos of your trying to soldier through them.

Archeophone’s 1922 yearbook includes Al Jolson singing “April Flowers.”

(Someday, I may write a post that asks the sticky question, “Al Jolson: Crap?” Anybody want to be a guest blogger on that?)

In any case, “April Flowers” proceeds in very much the same way, and was an attempt to duplicate the smash success of “Look for the Silver Lining.”

Archeophone’s inclusion of a rewriting of “Silver Lining” leaves me with the impression that “Keep on the Sunny Side” too was probably an attempt to score a hit by following a previous hit’s blueprint. If that’s the case, it was a hugely successful attempt, both commercially and artistically.

The book Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone portrays AP Carter as struggling, struggling, always struggling to come up with new material for Sara and Maybelle to perform — he was like a Brill Building songwriter without the benefit of a building full of brilliant creative people from whom to draw ideas and inspiration and a spirit of competition.

The Carter Family was as much a commercial act as it was a folk act — or better, they expose how wrong-headed the distinction can often be.

Another thing I hear in “Look for the Silver Lining” — in fact, for the first few listenings, it’s the only thing I can hear — is “Look for the Union Label,” the stirring theme song in 1970’s commercials sponsored by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

Marion Harris gave the melodic lines of “Silver Lining” lovely little paisley swirls and seagull dips befitting a great 1921 pop song. It seems “Union Label” took the tune and straightened it out and squared it off to serve as a rousing union sing-along.

As I say, “Silver Lining” outwardly keeps a stiff upper lip, but inside, it’s a song almost entirely lacking in hope for the future. So I don’t know if this was the right tune to borrow — union membership has crashed through the floor and Americans now buy foreign goods with such fervor that you’d think it was the American-made toys that were dripping with lead. Look for the lead lining?

It’s doubtful that I’m the first to consider most of this. That ridiculously long post? Now THAT nobody’s ever thought of before. But this is here, and that isn’t. No wonder blogs are always about what you happen to be thinking tonight.

Louis Armstrong in Minnesota, 1939

(used by permission of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
and the Minnesota Historical Society)

As a side trip from my regular research, I’ve spent a week or so of evenings and weekends looking into the facts surrounding Louis Armstrong’s appearance at the Coliseum Ballroom in St. Paul on Friday night, July 28, 1939. Please forgive any errors, and let me know what you think.

The 1939 show was advertised as Armstrong’s first appearance in the Twin Cities — a point repeatedly stressed in the twin African American newspapers, the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder.

But he might also have appeared in Minneapolis in the spring of 1931. That earlier show is mentioned in Jones and Chilton’s Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story but I haven’t been able to confirm it despite a grueling newspaper search.

Regardless, today we know Armstrong had visited the Twin Cities about 20 years earlier. From 1918 to 1921, he’d played for the Streckfus line of riverboats — paddle-wheelers that were still (or already) trading on nostalgia for the Mississippi’s 19th-century heyday with picturesque excursions up and down the river. That is the gig that first brought Armstrong to St. Paul-Minneapolis.

For Armstrong, then, his 1939 appearance in Minnesota might have been a kind of nostalgic excursion of his own.

The Coliseum

One of the only facts you might still hear about the Coliseum Ballroom is that a lot of famous acts played there — Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Jack Teagarden, Ben Pollack, Lawrence Welk, the Andrews Sisters.

During its 38 years, the Coliseum was a quirky, unavoidable, irreplaceable center of St. Paul’s nightlife, love life, and imagination. It’s rarely remembered today, but Garrison Keillor did provide a gratifying exception a few months ago 22 minutes into a speech for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

I started thinking about the Coliseum two years ago on my first day researching the Victoria Cafe, the orchestra of which recorded the strange “Moonshiner’s Dance” that eventually found its way onto Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.

It turned out that the Victoria Cafe Orchestra leader, Frank Cloutier, later acted as the leader of the house orchestra of the Coliseum, four blocks to the Cafe’s west. He worked at the Coliseum for thirteen years.

It must have been a good gig. The Coliseum boasted the world’s largest dance floor and offered $100 to anyone who could prove otherwise. Its floor was a rebuilt hockey rink with a 250 x 90-foot playing surface, so a packed house at the Coliseum Ballroom could mean more than 3000 dancers at one time. Leading the Coliseum Orchestra regularly put Frank Cloutier’s band on the radio across the Midwest.

The Coliseum’s owner — the husky, gregarious, and scrappy John J. Lane — often billed himself as “The Musician’s Friend.” He was also a Ramsey County commissioner at the time Frank Cloutier took the job.

Satch Returns Triumphant

In the late 1930s, major national stardom had just come to Louis Armstrong.

A front-page article in the African-American weekly Spokesman-Recorder credited Armstrong’s sudden popularity to his work in Hollywood films. An ad in the paper featured a photo of Armstrong goofing around with Bing Crosby.

Armstrong had indeed played a fairly substantial role in Crosby’s 1936 Pennies From Heaven. The next year, he was in both Jack Benny’s musical comedy Artists and Models and Mae West’s Every Day’s A Holiday. In 1938, Armstrong sang “Jeepers Creepers” to a horse in Going Places starring Dick Powell, Anita Louise, and Ronald Reagan. A New York Times film critic didn’t think much of Going Places but he was left wanting more of Armstrong.

On the day of the Twin Cities show, a wry editorial in the Spokesman-Recorder described Winchell himself, “the ‘Patron Saint’ of many an American column reader,” declaring Louis Armstrong the King of Swing. The paper seemed to almost grudgingly agree that Armstrong “has brought something to modern music that defies definition, and reams of paper and tons of ink have been used trying to describe it.”

Jazz was now being taken very seriously as an art form and scholarly work had begun to appear about it. Scarcely three months after his show in St. Paul, Armstrong appeared at Manhattan’s enormous Center Theater portraying Bottom in Swingin’ The Dream, a jazz adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Benny Goodman co-starred and Walt Disney designed the sets.

Things To Do Around The Twin Cities

Capitol

There were plenty of other things to do around town without paying 80 cents to see Louis Armstrong on that clear, mild summer night.

Several area theaters were showing Dark Victory with Bette Davis for 25 cents. Or you could see Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, and Ann Sheridan in Dodge City or the W. C. Fields comedy You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man with Edgar Bergen and the somewhat wooden Charlie McCarthy.

Alternately, there was the “Melodies Around The World” ice show at the St. Paul Auditorium — 25 cents in the bleachers, 50 cents to sit at a table. The Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus wasn’t scheduled to arrive for another week.

And the Streckfus line ran the paddle-wheel steamer Capitol out of the dock at the foot of Jackson Street. You could take day trips down to the lock and dam at Hastings or one of the “moonlight dance trips” leaving every night at 9:00 pm. Armstrong had worked on the Capitol in his youth — there’s even a 1919 photo of him aboard that boat.

So far, I don’t see that the Streckfus excursions were racially segregated in Minnesota in 1939 as they were elsewhere, long before and long after. While he was in town for the Coliseum show, maybe Armstrong could have taken a ride on the Capitol, this time as a passenger. I wonder if the idea would have appealed to him.

These other temptations aside, the 1939 appearance was a rare opportunity for Twin Cities jazz fans. It was their chance to see Louis Armstrong while also voting with their dollars. On the day of the show, an editorial in the Spokesman-Recorder stated:

Somewhat off the beat theatrically, the Twin Cities seldom have an opportunity to see and hear internationally known Negro artists. When they do come along, we think we should support them.

The week after the show, the Spokesman-Recorder reminded its readers how lucky they were to have Armstrong play here.

In St. Louis, where there are 100,000 Negroes to draw a crowd from, the Missourians pay $1.10 to hear the same band Twin Citians heard for 80 cents.

It must have helped that jazz, and Armstrong in particular, had a fast-growing White audience nationwide — the 1940 census found fewer than 9000 African Americans in Minneapolis and St. Paul combined.

The Trio Club

The 1939 concert was sponsored by either the Trio Club or the Tri Club, depending on whether you believe a news article in the Spokesman-Recorder or ads appearing on the day of the show in St. Paul’s mainstream papers. A Spokesman-Recorder columnist describes the club as “three St. Paul men who invested several hundred dollars.”

Beyond that, I don’t know much about the Tri or Trio Club. There’s no entry for them in the 1939 St. Paul city directory — either in the yellow or the white pages, as we would say today — and my search of the records of Minnesota’s Secretary of State showed no clear sign it ever incorporated.

The Spokesman-Recorder did report that the three investors barely made a profit from Armstrong’s appearance, thanks to a rumor circulating prior to the show.

Rumor Cuts Attendance

A thousand people saw Armstrong at the Coliseum that night, according to a follow-up article in the August 4 Spokesman-Recorder. Hundreds more would have attended had it not been for an apparent act of sabotage:

Some irresponsible individual several days before the date of the dance spread the rumor that the Armstrong band would not appear. Attempts are being made to ascertain the guilty party.

On the day of the show, the offices of the Spokesman in Minneapolis and the Recorder in St. Paul got more than 100 calls from people trying to find out if the show was really canceled.

We’ll never know the motives behind the cancellation rumor. For me, the natural hunch would be racism and an accompanying hatred of jazz, although whatever I know about that isn’t very specific to late 1930s Minnesota. Certainly, Armstrong’s sudden fame must have made his shows an obvious target for reactionaries along the tour’s route.

Two years earlier, a scene in Artists and Models with Martha Raye had drawn controversy for its hints that Armstrong’s trumpet made the white actress horny.

Closer to home, I’ve found the St. Paul musicians union experiencing friction 16 years earlier over the popularity of jazz. I also stumbled upon a series of 1927 news articles detailing Klu Klux Klan meetings about a mile east of the Coliseum. These sightings are underscored — literally — by a note immediately below the Spokesman‘s article about the cancellation rumor. It reports that the front page of the major local paper The Minneapolis Star had used the word “pickaninny” a few days before.

Given all this, it’s interesting that the Coliseum’s owner, John J. Lane, had a strong ethic of inclusivity. According to his daughter, “there was no color line in our house, we had Fats [Waller] over for dinner.” Lane often loaned the Coliseum free of charge to organizations needing a place to hold fundraisers — the musicians union, the Knights of Columbus, the B’nai B’rith, the Urban League. Probably, he called in such favors during his successful bid for County Commissioner in 1926 and his abandoned campaign in 1938.

All this being said, in my experience, a reasonable hunch about history is usually wrong. I simply don’t know why the rumor started. Maybe the Tri or Trio Club had enemies we don’t know about. Certainly, John J. Lane had both friends and enemies in many walks of life, accumulated during his decades-long, high-profile life in the politics and economics of the Twin Cities. Indeed, one of Lane’s other nightclubs was bombed by mobsters a decade earlier.

Armstrong on the Coliseum Stage

There are no detailed accounts of Armstrong’s show that night, so far as I know, but I’ve pieced together a few clues.

Identical ads in two of St. Paul’s mainstream papers on July 28 claimed that the “Trumpet King of Swing” would be backed by “17 Swing Artists.”

The Spokesman-Recorder repeatedly reported that the band would be led by Luis Russell — an arranger, pianist, and pioneer of Swing who was indeed leading Armstrong’s outfit at the time. Also mentioned is the innovative trumpet player Henry “Red” Allen. This squares with the personnel for Armstrong’s 1939 recording sessions for Decca, including those in New York on June 15 and December 18:

piano and arrangements: Luis Russell
trumpet: Shelton Hemphill, Otis Johnson, Henry Allen
trombone: Wilbur de Paris, Geo. Washington, J.C. Higginbotham
clarinet and alto sax: Rupert Cole, Charlie Holmes
tenor sax: Joe Garland, Bingie Madison
guitar: Lee Blair
string bass: Pops Foster
drums: Sidney Catlett

But the Spokesman-Recorder also names three other veterans of Luis Russell’s band. One of the great jazz drummers, Paul Barbarin, was presumably touring in place of Sidney Catlett. There was also the “romantic tenor” vocalist Sonny Woods and two articles mention the “petite song stylist” and “torch singer” Midge Williams — little remembered today, but a much-admired rising radio star at the time.

The number of backing musicians listed for the Decca recordings + Woods + Williams + Armstrong himself = 17, the number of swing artists given in the July 28 ad in the major Twin Cities newspapers.

The following week, a columnist for the Spokesman-Recorder wished “a million scallions” to the rumor monger who cut attendance but wished “orchids” for the audience that did attend, which he found refreshingly peaceable. “Maybe the presence of one of Chief Hackert’s skull-busters had something to do with it, but we think not.” Brawls and other unseemly behavior appeared to be going out of style, the columnist said. Another follow-up article in the Spokesman-Recorder comes to a trustworthy conclusion:

Armstrong Great Showman

Armstrong gave the crowd its money’s worth and the people left the Lexington Avenue dance palace in good humor feeling that they had enjoyed a treat.

— — —

Thanks

Thanks to the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder — this year celebrating its 75th anniversary — for kind permission to reprint the article up top.

The excellent staff of the library at the Minnesota History Center is forever essential to my work. Thanks also to the Minneapolis Public Library, and the University of Minnesota’s Wilson and Music Libraries.

My wife Jenny is unbelievably kind and patient, as you might imagine.

Selected References — More Than Any Other Blog!

St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 28, 1939 ad “Tri Club Presents Louis Armstrong” and “Moonlight Dance Trips” p. 9

St. Paul Dispatch, July 28, 1939 ad “Tri Club Presents Louis Armstrong” p. 8

“Moonlight Dance Trips” and other ads for rides on the Capitol were ubiquitous in the warm seasons of 1939 in the Twin Cities. The one above happens to be from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 28, 1939, from the University of Minnesota newspaper collections.

Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, 1939:

— July 21 “Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong Coming to Coliseum Ballroom, Friday, July 28” p 1
— July 21 ad with Crosby/Armstrong photo, p 3
— July 28 “Louis Armstrong and Band Play at the Coliseum Ballroom Tonight for Swing Fans” p 1
— July 28 “Hear a Noted Artist Tonight” p 2
— Aug 4 “Crowd Applauds Louis Armstrong Band; Rumor Cuts Attendance” p 1
— Aug 4 “Twin Town Talk” p 4

Bergreen, Laurence. 1997. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life. Broadway Books.

Jones, Max, and Chilton, John. 1988. Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, 1900-1971. Da Capo.

Kenney, William Howland. 2005. Jazz on the River. U of Chicago.

Maccabee, Paul. 1981-1995. Research collection for John Dillinger Slept Here. MN Historical Soc. library.

Rust, Brian A. L. 1978. Jazz Records, 1897-1942. Arlington House Publishers.