celestialmonochord

Summer of ’88

Johnkoerner
Spider John Koerner listens to the The Phleshtones
at the Battle of the Jug Bands, Minneapolis, February 11, 2007

As I write, we’re socked in here this morning with the biggest snowstorm in many years. Big drifts, lace in the trees, shovels everywhere, cars rocking back and forth. Whenever I see such scenes, strangely enough, I think of my first summer here in Minneapolis.

I moved here from Tucson in the summer of 1988, a miserably, scorchingly hot summer in the Twin Cities. The drought was so severe that nobody knew if the water level of the Mississippi River would drop below the intakes — if it did, a million people would suddenly have no running water. As if it weren’t miserable enough, it was also an election year.

My move to Minnesota probably magnifies my memory of that summer. But it felt as if the whole state knew the same existential dread, almost as if we could all sense it was the first season of the end of the world (which, in fact, may not turn out to be so far from the truth).

More than a decade later, I first saw Spider John Koerner in concert, and was surprised to find this legendary Minnesota musician had written a great song about the summer of 1988. It sure seemed like he’d seen the same summer I had.

Good profiles have been written about John Koerner and I can’t top them, not today. Even Bob Dylan himself — The Great Written About — wrote about Koerner at some length in his Chronicles autobiography. For one thing, Dylan says Koerner introduced him to the albums of the New Lost City Ramblers.

It’s said that Koerner wrote “Summer of ’88” after many years of not writing anything at all, and it does sound like something you’d say after a long silence. Koerner casts his eye on everything on planet Earth and pulls it all into the song — liberal-conservative left-right wingers, crop prices, fools in the local water hole, money boys, nasty boys, science boys, religion boys, a girl named Lou …

A red-tailed hawk when he’s flying up high
Can see a little bitty snake with his razor-sharp eye
And an eight-hooter owl with her sensitive eye
Can see a hundred-thousand stars more than you or I

Spider John was thinking about the Apocalypse that summer, too — quite a bit, it seems — only what he thought about it was that it didn’t seem to be going on at the moment … at least not around the West Bank of the University of Minnesota, where he’s still playing his gigs, sounding better than he ever has in his life …

Well the moon hangs low and the moon hangs high
And the good old Earth hangs in the sky
Well the sun never rises and the sun never sets
And you know it ain’t over yet

You can get a recording of the song on his Raised By Humans CD. I remember there was footage of Koerner performing the entire song — and nine others, I believe — in the documentary about him, Been Here … Done That, although it’s hard to know how to get a hold of the DVD. I saw it in the theater.

The best thing is to see Koerner in person. I don’t have his complete recordings, but from what I can tell, that’s where the strange beauty of his guitar style strikes home best. He plays in ragged phrases that lurch, like a long deep breath, and then fall silent for a couple beats, and then start again. These wonderful pauses say a lot, and allow him the opportunity to just change tempo or meter, or key or song — whatever it takes — for as long as he pleases. It’s an unmistakeable style. His voice is rough but high and clear, and is perfect for his playing and perfect for singing folk songs for people drinking bourbon. They say there was a time when people used to give him crap for not being “authentic,” although it’s hard to imagine now.

Well, there’s a coda to this story. The first winter I was in Minnesota, I sat in an ice cream shop in Dinkytown, looking down 14th street just after that winter’s first really deep snowfall. It dawned on me that I had seen that exact same street buried in that exact same snowfall before — big drifts, lace in the trees, shovels everywhere, cars rocking back and forth. But this was my first winter in Minnesota, so how could this be? I had not seen it in a dream, and this was not déjà vu.

It took about five minutes of puzzling to realize that, back on the hottest day of the summer of 1988, I had sat in the same ice cream shop and looked down the same street, anticipating what it would be like to experience winter for the first time after spending four years in Tucson. It was on that blisteringly hot day that I had IMAGINED how that snowy Dinkytown scene would look during my first Minnesota winter. I’d seen it before, but only in my mind’s eye. So … there was something about that summer of 1988, the way it played games with my memory and imagination, and maybe Spider John’s too.

Spiderjohnkoerner

Editor’s Note: This is installment 25 of 28 entries in which I seek to post something to The Celestial Monochord every day for the entire month of February. Around here, that’s quite a feat.

Georgia Lee

Madonnachildjpg Pieta

Back in the 1990s, Tom Waits wrote a song called "Georgia Lee." If I remember the story correctly, he wrote it after the body of a 12-year-old girl was found not far from his house.

She'd been dumped there in a patch of trees, but her death barely made the newspapers. This was around the time of the Polly Klaas case — or during some other headline-making search for an abducted girl — and Waits was disturbed at the possibility that kids like Georgia Lee don't get as much coverage because they're too poor, or too black, or too troubled, or they're not photogenic enough, or …

While he was giving his album Mule Variations its final edit, Waits deleted "Georgia Lee" from the track list. Tom's daughter — who was near the age Georgia Lee had been when she died — was appalled. Here Georgia Lee was used up, murdered, and thrown away and nobody gave a damn … until, at last, somebody finally bothers to write a song about her … and it GETS CUT FROM THE ALBUM?

So, Waits sighed heavily, restored the song to Mule Variations, wistfully remembering his simple care-free bachelor days when the only people he had meddling around with his creative process were record company executives, producers, accountants, lawyers …

Anyway, with that background, I'll get to the main point, which will take a while to explain. The lyrics begin:

Cold was the night and hard was the ground
They found her in a small grove of trees
And lonesome was the place where Georgia was found
She's too young to be out on the street

[Chorus]
Why wasn't God watching?
Why wasn't God listening?
Why wasn't God there for Georgia Lee?

Probably, the first line pays homage to Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground," a much-admired gospel/blues record from 1927.

Johnson's recording is basically a slide-guitar instrumental — the sparse vocals consist of a little humming, some moans of apparent grief. Occasionally, Johnson says "Ah well." The recording is clearly a profound contemplation, but … of what?

I've known Johnson's recording since I was child, but it was only a few years before the Waits album came out that I learn the full title of the song Willie Johnson was riffing on: "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was the Ground on Which Our Lord Was Laid."

After learning the full title, I wasn't sure whether Johnson had recorded a contemplation of Jesus lying in his tomb or of the humble circumstances of Jesus' birth. After all, the body of Jesus was placed on the cold ground twice — once at when he was born, and once again when he died.

Either story — or both stories, thought of together as bookends — might elicit the overwhelming grief evoked by Johnson's recording: a homeless child born in a stable or a murdered preacher buried in a cave. To Johnson, a blind black gospel artist in 1920s America, either story might sound dreadfully familiar (even if most Americans today tend to miss the intense sense of pity that gives the Christmas story its meaning … bad for sales, presumably).

Eventually, I decided "Dark Was the Night" must be a contemplation of the crucifixion and the burial. After all, that's what Samuel Charters says in his liner notes about Johnson's work.

But I was still aware that I hadn't really thought much about those three days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection until I'd puzzled over "Dark Was the Night," If you try to see them through the eyes of someone experiencing them in real time, those hopeless days give the Resurrection much of its emotional impact.

Soon, I was again reminded of those three days when I heard Bruce Springsteen's version of the old Negro spiritual "Oh Mary Don't You Weep."

Although the song is about the New Testament story of Mary, the mother of Jesus, it makes one reference after another to the Old Testament — to the Hebrew Bible. It's puzzling when you first realize it, but this old African American hymn is written to comfort an old Jewish woman upon the death of her son.

It's a song against despair, to be sung for Mary during those three days, when she knew the Old Testament well and all too much about the Crucifixion, but had no inkling whatsoever about any Resurrection.

Nevertheless, I kept listening to Willy Johnson's "Dark Was the Night" and despite all my thinking about the Crucifixion, the Nativity still lingered in my mind for some reason. And eventually, my confusion of these two bookend images of Jesus lying on the cold, dark ground reminded me of something I'd seen in art history classes back in my college days.

There is a long European artistic tradition of depicting the baby Jesus with the features of an old man, and another of the Pieta, depicting Mary holding the crucified Jesus so as to echo the Madonna-and-Child. The Nativity and Crucifixion have always been mixed up together. So, in the way I'd been hearing "Dark Was The Night," Willie Johnson and Michelangelo shared that ambivalence, that refusal to decide.

So, all this thinking came rushing back to me when Tom Waits' Mule Variations was released. Here was Tom Waits referring to "Dark Was the Night" at the start of a song about a dead African American child. Whether intended or not, "Georgia Lee" revives this long-standing association of the Pieta with the Madonna and Child, and does it by evoking Blind Willie Johnson's 1927 recording.

Tom's song also evokes "Dark Was the Night" in a subtler way.

While Waits writes a lot of wonderfully sad songs, "Georgia Lee" might be the only completely hopeless song he's ever written. Like Johnson's 1927 recording, it's as if Waits' "Georgia Lee" is so hopeless that it feels as if it were recorded during those three days. These are songs about that perfect despair. The chorus more or less says so, outright, in the unanswered question it leaves hanging in the empty air.

Editor's Note: This is installment 24 of 28 entries in which I seek to post something to The Celestial Monochord every day … every stinkin day … for the entire month of February.

Bob Dylan Disappointed Folk Music Purists

Like a lot of bloggers, I’m unnaturally drawn to my site statistics. Of course, I like it when the number of visitors spikes up higher than usual — as it certainly has this month. But the real attraction is seeing where visitors come from, how they got to The Celestial Monochord.

You see when somebody’s linked to you. I get a lot of hits from Boney Earnest’s Suburban Hilltop Tent Revue, Cowtown Pattie, BanjoBanjar, and a lot of other places, especially BoingBoing, who once picked up an entry about my cats. The other day, I noticed somebody from the Weird Al Yankovic discussion list linked to that cat entry. Now and then, something about Dylan is picked up by Expecting Rain, which perks things up considerably.

Mostly, visitors come from Google. There are times when I can tell somebody has seen one of my entries somewhere and they can’t remember where. So, they go to Google and they type in whatever they can remember. Why else would you search for something like “hillbilly fulgurite“?

Sometimes, it seems someone is looking for information and I’m gratified to see that they came to the right place — maybe they’ve searched for “einstein moe asch folkways” or “what causes sundogs“. Other times, it’s clear they’ve come to my site hoping to find a certain kind of information and it seems very likely they were disappointed, as when someone was searching for information on the 2006 winner of the Stanley Cup and got this.

But for nearly a year now, somebody’s been pissing me off. For some reason, about twice a month EVERY month, somebody goes to Google and types in “In July of 1965, Bob Dylan disappointed folk music purists by “going electric” at their annual gathering in what city.

Apparently, the person would REALLY like to know in what city this occurred, and they have a long-standing curiosity about the answer. However, despite never receiving a satisfactory result, it does not dawn on them that maybe they should change their search terms. Or maybe they should go to a damned library. I can’t think of any other reason someone would type the same question into Google over and over and over again, for months. Apparently, this person is waiting for someone to put something on the internet with that exact string of characters, and then answer the question.

Well, that day has arrived, buddy boy. Since I can’t think of anything else to write today, let me put a decisive end to this person’s curiosity. (And — gentle reader of the Monochord — I’m sorry you have to witness this.)

——

Question: In July of 1965, Bob Dylan disappointed folk music purists by “going electric” at their annual gathering in what city?

Answer: NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND! NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND! NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND! NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND!

NEWPORT! NEWPORT! NEWPORT! NEWPORT!

RHODE ISLAND! RHODE ISLAND! RHODE ISLAND! RHODE ISLAND!

Now knock it off, you idiot!

HERE! Now you can find all kinds of interesting links to articles and other resources having to do with this over-blown, irrelevant, piddly little flap that happened FORTY TWO YEARS AGO! Read every single last one of them extremely closely and then drop dead!

——

Thank you for your forbearance, gentle reader.

Editor’s Note: This is installment 23 of a 28-installment marathon. I don’t know … maybe it shows. In any case, I’m trying to post something to The Celestial Monochord every day during the month of February.

Out Squatting in their Domain

Back in August 2005, I registered the domains NewLostCityRamblers dot com and dot net.

Remembering why I did this foolish thing causes me conflicted emotions, to the point that they cancel each other out. Today, I very rarely think of it, except to puzzle over why I did it and what to do next.

That summer, I was kicking around the idea of starting a blog devoted to the members of the New Lost City Ramblers. The band is the best-kept secret in America — their influence is truly incalculable, their musical output seemingly endless and of supreme quality, and almost nobody under the age of 50 seems to know who they are.

When I’ve asked baby-boomer folk and blues enthusiasts how they got into the music (hoping to hear a story about the Harry Smith Anthology), they’ve almost always said they were roped in by the New Lost City Ramblers. After a while, I started to take that message to heart.

The individual members of Ramblers are still out there performing, mostly on their own and often in mind-bogglingly small and informal settings. So starting a blog to trace their comings and goings — and what hot young bands were being compared to them, who was crediting them with starting their careers, and so forth — seemed both a fun project and a useful public service.

But it turned out to be something a good deal more. Once I started the blog, I found my own understanding of the band growing exponentially. I also became much more familiar with a wider community I’d have known nothing about had I not maintained that blog. It was a door to a considerably wider world than I had known.

It is now inactive, though I haven’t given up on it completely. I never received one comment from a reader, and the site statistics remained virtually non-existent — it was as thankless as hell. When I started my full-time pursuit of the Anthology’s Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe, something had to give, and it was the Ramblers blog. Still, I very much miss what I got out of it, and I hope it will somehow live again some day soon.

ANYWAY, point is, I was kicking around ideas for a name, so I went to a domain registration service and started plugging in ideas — BattleshipMaine.gov, BlackBottomStrut.net, LongPlayingShortSelling.com, and so forth. Soon, I thought to try the obvious thing — NewLostCityRamblers dot com and dot net. I was very surprised — startled — that the domains were just sitting there, waiting for anybody at all to just pay a few bucks for them.

So I puzzled over that. I had long been a fan of Tom Waits, so I knew TomWaits.com had been held for years by a cyber squatter. Going to the domain yielded a come-on for a flat-out porn site, plus a lot of pop-up windows. I hear Waits had to pay a lot of lawyers to finally get his name back. Although I’m not absolutely sure, it appears Mike Seeger’s name is already being squatted on in an analogous, if slightly more clever way — perhaps the reason for the real Mikes’s odd URL.

For several days in a row, I returned to the registration site. I thought about alerting the Ramblers that the domains were available, but figured they must already know. I wondered if there might be such acrimony among the members that none wanted to be seen as grabbing the band’s name. Mostly, I foresaw the day that a cyber squatter grabbed the domains and set up his scam, at which point they would become much more expensive property.

After several days of watching and thinking, a normal person would have concluded that the domains were worthless, that nobody wanted them, and they would remain available forever. But not me! I started wringing my hands a bit over the issue, especially since knowing they were available made me feel partly responsible for any bad outcomes. I thought about seeking advice at certain discussion lists I follow, but going public might have resulted in a self-fulfilling prophesy.

So … one day, without really having thought it out very deeply — on a whim — I whipped out a credit card and nabbed them. (It’s ssssooo easy to do, almost like “one-click” buying at Amazon.) Of course, this multiplied my involvement exponentially. Instead of resolving a puzzle, it turned the puzzle into a problem, and one that was decisively MINE. Maybe that’s what I wanted — I’m not sure.

And so there it is. It’s embarrassing, because it’s ethically ambiguous and something only an obsessive “fan” would get himself into. It’s a bit like Iraq — too costly to hold onto, especially since it was none of my business in the first place, but it’s uncomfortable imagining what might happen if I walked away.

I’m pretty sure — assuming no other intervention — I’ll hang onto the domains for a time and keep wondering about them. If the Ramblers want them, they can sure as hell have them for nothing. When I do let them go, I’ll try to give their management plenty of advance warning.

In the meantime, the domains sit there as something for me to think about, a touch stone. The very situation itself is an episode in the screwy history of the band’s under-appreciation … and in the strange career this kind of music is enjoying in cyberspace … and in my own obsessive, expensive relationship with both.

Editor’s Note: This is installment 22 in my 28-part attempt to post one entry of The Celestial Monochord every day during the month of February 2007. And boy howdy, am I running out of ideas … but I’m still standing! I’m gunna make it!

Oysters Monochord

Consider_the_oyster

It’s a measure of my laser-like focus on Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe that The Celestial Monochord has gone without any mention of oysters until this month. For you see, not only do I love raw oysters, I’ve also read two — count ’em, TWO — books about oysters since last spring.

The first was M. F. K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster. Fisher seems to have been almost a food-focused Dorothy Parker or Edna St. Vincent Millay — you know, a brilliant writer, and an independent, bohemian, bisexual, martini-swilling raconteur. More or less.

Her Consider the Oyster is a beautifully-written, tiny little book — elegant and kind and wickedly funny, if sometimes a bit too silly. Open the book to any paragraph and you’ll see. Here she is early in the first chapter, discussing the early life of an oyster:

He is small, but he is free-swimming … and he swims thus freely for about two weeks, wherever the tides and his peculiar whims may lead him. He is called a spat.
It is to be hoped, sentimentally, at least, that the spat — our spat — enjoys himself. Those two weeks are his one taste of vagabondage, of devil-may-care free roaming. And even they are not quite free, for during all his youth he is busy growing a strong foot and a large supply of sticky cementlike stuff. If he thought, he might wonder why. [all original punctuation, etc.]

She gives many oyster recipes, and her ability to splice them seamlessly into a great story is dazzling. Writing before 1941 with an intimate eye for detail, her stories are vivid views of all sorts of gone worlds — fancy restaurants in France, roadside shacks in Maine, a girl’s school in Michigan, if I remember correctly. It’s only 76 pages long, and even I — slowest reader on Earth — finished it in a weekend. I’m even tempted to re-read it before the months without R’s begin.

By the way, Fisher says refrigeration had already rendered oysters safe to eat even in Oskaloosa, Iowa in any month of the year. Avoiding the R-less months might help the oyster farmer, since oysters lay their eggs during the warm months, but no season renders them dangerous to eat. Besides, some say summer oysters taste better.

I do recommend the other oyster book I read last year … it’s not Mark Kurlansky’s fault that a world-class stylist got to the subject first, and it’s even less his fault that I read Fisher’s book immediately before The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.

Kurlansky writes those pop history books where some very improbable thing changed the world forever — 1968, cod, salt. Stylistically, he’s as workmanlike and kitchen-sinky as you might expect. But his oyster book did transform my view of both New York and oysters, and made me enjoy the education.

The Big Oyster begins with Europeans sailing into New York Harbor for the first time, which allows Kurlansky to show how beautiful, bountiful and sweet-smelling its waters used to be — how much New York’s very existence was ABOUT those qualities. For me, it was an opportunity to finally wrap my mind around the confounding geography of New York City, and beginning with the estuary in its natural state turned out to be key.

But The Big Oyster has organizational issues, and can feel frustratingly directionless. I frequently thought of the fish in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life — the ones who complain there isn’t much in the movie about the meaning of life. Still, there are moments when your mind spins. Do you know why Manhattan city fathers laid out two hundred streets going from side to side (the short way) but only about twelve the long way (Bronx to Battery)? Because they thought the main flow of traffic would be between the two riverfronts. New York used to know where it was situated.

Kurlansky does leave us much more savvy about oysters than Fisher does. You can read Fisher closely without really realizing that all oysters you’re ever likely to eat have been seeded, grown, and harvested by farmers — and it’s been like this for at least 150 years. There hasn’t been a natural, unmolested oyster bed essentially anywhere for more than a century. If there were, you wouldn’t want to eat oysters from it. Natural oysters tend to get huge, and eating them is like “eating a baby.”

Editor’s Note: Well, here I am! The Celestial Monochord is trying to post an entry every day during the month of February. This here is installment 21 of 28. Whoo-hoo!

yeeee – HA!

Ralph
Ralph

I started learning to play clawhammer banjo almost five years ago. I caught on to the basic stroke almost the instant it was shown to me, which was exciting since I’d never shown much musical aptitude before.

Soon after, I sat down at the dining room table and really played in the apartment for the first time. Immediately, our cat Ralph got up off the couch, walked directly over to me in a purposeful gait, and puked right in front of me. My first heckler.

I should note that Ralph always left the room as soon as he heard the voice of Johnny Cash. He was a very supreme cat and we miss him terribly … but I’m sorry to say, his musical tastes WERE suspect.

Later, when I’d learned a few tunes well enough, I started frailing a little at family gatherings to entertain the troops. The instant I opened up my banjo case for the very first such concert, a boyfriend of a relative said, “yeeee-HA!” It was a sort of “stage” yeeee-HA! — at the volume of ordinary speech, but said in such a way as to suggest hollering very loudly. I just continued with what I was doing without acknowledging it.

But ever since, I’ve puzzled over why a person would say this, especially in this way. As when scientists say “So”, I’ve wondered what it could possibly mean. I don’t have an answer, but at least I can speak freely on the matter, now that the boyfriend has long ago been dumped.

First, it was not a sincere expression of joy, despite what’s been suggested to me. I’ve expressed real joy with something like a yeeee-HA (a Shane MacGowen concert a few years back comes to mind), and my yeeee-HA’s are entirely incomparable to his. Besides, would anyone issue such a yeeee-HA at the very sight of a piano or a trumpet?

No, this particular heeee-HA was not from anticipatory musical ecstasy — it was supposed to be joke. The best explanation I’ve heard for the origins of laughter is that it’s a signal to a primate group that the sudden, unexpected, startling thing that just happened is OK — there’s no danger, regardless of appearances to the contrary.

I think this heeee-HA was a joke intended to defuse a banjo-induced anxiety. It constituted a claim that, as an audience member presented with a banjo, he was not going to respond in the way the banjo supposedly demands. A possible way of responding — with a sincere yeeee-HA — needed to be invoked as a thing already refused.

The yeeee-HA sought to establish this fellow as a master of his own relationship with this banjo, but instead exposed the opposite. Karen Linn in That Half Barbaric Twang (which I haven’t read yet), and Robert Cantwell in his chapter on Pete Seeger in When We Were Good, describe the banjo as persistently haunting and troubling the boundaries of social life:

The social connections of the banjo had been obscured by its repeated disappearances from popular music; it’s marginality, its obdurate indissolubility in social meaning, gave it an eerily unlocatable quatity, a “signifier in isolation” … As banjo music loiters on the edges of western musical categories, so it has tended to linger where sexual, social, and political boundaries are most ambiguous. [Cantwell, chapter 7]

Cantwell almost makes me feel sorry for the guy. Meeting our family for the first time, as a suitor of one of “our women,” he would have wanted to be perceived as being well within a set of recognizably “safe” racial, economic, and sexual categories. And here he’s presented with a friggin’ BANJO, of all things. A banjo of black-faced minstrelsy, of folksinging HUAC-interrogated commies, of Deliverance.

… but in fact, it was just a banjo of MINE. Perhaps I’m too unforgiving and I have too long memory … on the other hand, perhaps this incident foreshadowed reasons that he would some day be dumped. I don’t know.

Editor’s Note: This is day 20 of my 28-day marathon. I’m trying to post an entry of The Celestial Monochord every day in February 2007.

Bob Dylan’s American Journey

Lord_growing
Lord Growing

Last night (as I write this), my wife and I had dinner at one of our regular spots, the Loring Pasta Bar in Dinkytown. During my first 13 years in Minneapolis, it was a drug store. And Bob Dylan lived above that drug store 30 years before that.

Today, I went to the Bob Dylan exhibit a few blocks from there at the Weisman Art Museum. To my eyes, it has two sections. The first puts Dylan into the social context of Hibbing, Minnesota and the Dinkytown neighborhood where he nominally went to college. The second part displays cool and undoubtedly expensive collectibles from Dylan’s later career.

When I visited Washington DC a year ago, I promised myself I would really try to learn something by studying the “social context” type exhibits. But after a lot of traveling and schlepping bags around and figuring out the Metro system, I was more than happy to just gawk at the actual gun that killed Lincoln, Archie Bunker’s actual chair, Wilbur Wright’s actual mandolin.

The Weisman exhibit’s Minnesota section will not be traveling with the exhibit to other parts of the country (if I understand correctly), but it gives us the best of both types of museum experiences — insight into the Iron Range world Dylan was born into and what kind of environment he walked into in Dinkytown, as well as piles of “actual” stuff.

We get a couple actual pages of a high school term paper Bob Zimmerman wrote on the Grapes of Wrath (the paper is entitled “Does Steinbeck Sympathize With His Characters?” and we can see that the teacher felt Bob had over-used the phrase “You can’t help but like …”).

We get a couple actual copies of Little Sandy Review, the folk music magazine founded by Paul Nelson and Jon Pankake. It turns out the magazine was actually LITTLE — about 4 x 7 inches. I imagine it was sandy, too. I should have named this blog The Big Tidy Review.

There’s a copy of the real Anthology of American Folk Music — the analog thing you dropped a needle on. I’ve never seen it before.

And movingly, there’s a little white t-shirt with “Greystone Park Hospital” stenciled on it. The card next to it reads “Woody Guthrie wore this t-shirt during the five-year period from 1956 to 1961 that he was confined to Greystone State Hospital — he called it ‘Gravestone’ …” But it’s roughly at this time that the revealing historical context starts to slip away and we’re left with little else but these kinds of neat artifacts … not that there’s anything wrong with that. I like actual stuff, too.

We see the familiar “Mickey Mouse ears” camera with which Pennebaker filmed Don’t Look Back, uncorrected galley proofs of Tarantula, Bruce Langhorne’s actual tambourine (i.e., THE tambourine). There’s a genuine Lovin Spoonful souvenir spoon (which looks like a mighty small spoonful, in my experience). I half expected to see Lord Growing stuffed and mounted.

I spent two hours on it and needed another, especially if I was going to listen to the audio clips and watch the videos, at least some of which came from Scorsese’s recent documentary.

It’s an excellent exhibit, really. If you’re in — or can get to — Minneapolis before April 29, definitely do it and give it three hours. Then go have pasta at the Loring in Dinkytown. Most important, see some live music — check my Monochord Minnesota links, for example. There’s also a decent chance the brilliant Spider John Koerner is in town, and he is very much worth the trip from wherever you happen to be.

Editor’s Note: This is installment 19 of this thing where I’m trying to post something every day, all month long. Or was it all day, every month long?

Hearts in Dixie

Hearts_in_dixie

Lately, I spend a lot of my time in university libraries, city and county libraries, and state historical societies, often looking through old newspapers from around 1925 to 1959. I now have no patience for anybody who ever feels “bored” — just pick up a newspaper from the 1920’s and go nuts.

I recently ran across the headline above in a July 1929 newspaper from St. Paul, Minnesota. “Hearts in Dixie” has been written about often by scholars working on media images of African Americans, and I can’t add much to that work. The main subject of interest, of course, is the racist nostalgia for the antebellum South to which the movie appealed and which it reinforced.

But for me, finding the particular article above drove home a few things. It appeared in a newspaper from one of the highest latitudes in America — Minnesota’s state motto is “The Star of the North.” The article reminds me again that these fantasies of blacks yearning for the happy days of slavery were not solely — in fact, not primarily — southern fantasies. A lot of northerners liked images of African Americans who wanted to go back where they came from.

Roughly the same preference gave rise, a hundred years before, to black-face minstrelsy, which was invented in northern cities like New York and Boston and remained more wildly popular there than in the South. I often think of the American vision of Ireland as a place where people are always covered with shamrocks and drink green beer — a total lack of familiarity is ideal for growing fantasies.

For our purposes, gentle Celestial Monochord reader, it’s the article’s musical content that’s most interesting. The short article consists almost exclusively of a list of 25 songs that appear in the movie. Presumably, the writer believed the Minnesota audience would recognize these songs and have an opinion about them. I have a relatively shaky grasp of the history of where that belief came from.

A few of the songs are familiar to me from simply being an American. I don’t know, I guess I heard them in grade school — “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen”, “Old Folks at Home”, and “Swanee River”.

But a surprising number of the listed songs were completely unknown to me until I started listening intensively to what’s known today as “Old Time” music — The New Lost City Ramblers, Tom Brad and Alice, and so on. Others may have been familiar before, but I now closely associate them with old time, bluegrass, or the Harry Smith Anthology. The article lists “Lonesome Road”, “I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray”, “Li’l Liza Jane”, “Shine On”, “Turkey in the Straw”, “Old Hen Cackle”, and “Oh Dem Golden Slippers”.

As a consumer of so-called roots music, one line of the article is all too familiar:

Some of the other numbers are noteworthy in that they are foundation stones, so to speak, in the structure of jazz music.

Of course, jazz, particularly if loosely defined, was the most popular new music of the day, and it’s funny to see that even back then, companies were using dubious claims of historical significance to move product.

I’ve written before, though, about newspaper stories that cited a kind of old time revival underway in the late 1920’s, and this article is further support. One of those articles featured record store owner Harry Bernstein, who discussed the revival entirely in terms of repertoire, as opposed to performance style — it was old songs that were popular, not necessarily old styles of playing. THAT revival had to wait for Harry Smith and the New Lost City Ramblers. I haven’t seen “Hearts of Dixie,” although I’m sure I’d find the performances rather disappointing, stylistically … at the very least.

I know vastly more about the history of performance styles and instrumentation than I do about repertoire (Benjamin Filene‘s chapter on it has helped a lot). This blind spot probably results from my being more directly a product of the revival of the 1950’s and 1960’s — which was so much about the rebirth of sounds — than a product of the various late-19th and early-20th century revivals, focused as they were on texts. If there had been an article about banjos in Minnesota, I would have had some good contexts in which to understand it, but this list of old songs is a little more mysterious to me.

Editor’s Note: This is installment 18 of The Celestial Monochord’s great February 2007 adventure — we are posting an entry a day all month long! JUST IMAGINE … magine … magine … THAT … at … at … at …

Observation — IRAS-Araki-Alcock

In May of 1983, IRAS-Araki-Alcock came closer to Earth than any comet since 1770 — about 12 times the distance to the Moon.

It was my first comet, and I saw it from the back yard of my family’s house in Palatine, Illinois. Although Palatine was small then, it was already a Chicago suburb on O’Hare’s flight path. I did a lot of complaining about the light pollution, but those turned out to be the darkest skies I’ve ever lived under.

IRAS-Araki-Alcock was a ghostly thing. It looked roughly the size of the moon, and spherical — it had no visible tail. You could see its nucleus, though … overall, the comet was like a round patch of smoke with a star caught inside. Aside from its pale blue-green color, it looked like one of the little fairy sprites that followed the UFOs around in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Because it was so close, you could almost see it move against the background stars, like the minute hand of a clock (and believe me, I know how the minute hands of clocks move). I would try to get a fix on where it was in relation to the stars, but what my eyes were seeing would never match the image in my mind, which was always already obsolete.

Having spent so much of my youth with my developing brain focused on the sky, it felt a little perverse to have something new up there, especially something that moved so fast. I could feel in my bones why comets were regarded as disturbing omens of bad things to come.

Mostly, what it looked like was … and this was the most remarkable thing … it looked like an evaporating bit of ice about 12 times as far as the moon. Although I knew more than enough about astronomy to know why it had to be silent, I remember being amazed at its silence. It just slipped on by.

Editor’s Note: This morning, my wife got her copy of her latest publication, a poem entitled “We Seek a Shepard or a Sign” in Court Green #4, a literary journal from Chicago’s Columbia College. Check it out.

This is installment 17 of a 28-day experiment. The Celestial Monochord is trying to post once a day, sort of like a blog is supposed to do.

Achilles Is In Your Alleyway

When I first started hitting the old stuff hard, I mostly listened to blues from the 1930’s through the 1950’s. And some of my favorite recordings were things like Memphis Minnie’s “Keep On Eating”:

Every time I cook, looks like you can’t get enough
Fix you a pot of soup and make you drink it up

[chorus]
So keep on a-eating
Oh, keep on a-eating
Keep on eating
Baby till you get enough

I know you’re crazy about your oysters and your shrimps and crabs
Take you round the corner and give you a chance to grab

I’ve cooked and cooked till I done got tired
Can’t fill you up of my fried apple pie

I know you got a bad cold and you can’t smell
I ain’t gonna give you something that I can’t sell

And then there was another favorite, Sonny Terry’s spirited rendition of “Custard Pie”:

I’m gunna tell you something, baby, ain’t gunna to tell no lie
I want some of your custard pie.

[chorus]
Well, I want some of it
Yes, I want some of it
You gotta give me some of it
Before you give it all away.

Well, I don’t care if you live across the street
When you cut your pie please save me a piece

Now, when you listen to such songs metaphorically and creatively, if you read between the lines and against the grain, as it were, if you try to catch their double meaning … it’s almost as if these songs could also be about FOOD! And actually, they’re kind of sweet as food songs. Maybe it’s me.

Of course, my joke here is how these raunchy blues tunes supposedly fooled somebody at some point (who or when, I don’t know) into thinking they were only about food (or deep sea divers, or horse jockeys), when in fact they were also “secretly” about sex. Today, anyway, most of us have to use our imagination and concentrate to hear them literally. The literal and figurative meanings have switched places — the “vehicle” has become the “tenor,” as I’m supposed to say, sitting here with my masters degree staring down at me.

There’s some old songs about sex that are on the other extreme. They do such a good job of hiding their meanings that the metaphors barely take place at all. The literal (non-sexual, tenor) images and the figurative (sexual, vehicle) meanings are connected by gossamer threads so tenuous, thin, and indirect that they almost snap. You’re left with a set of nearly free-floating, abstracted images with little particular connection to anything — you’re left with something like modern poetry:

The Old Man At The Mill

Down set an owl with his head so white
Lonesome day and a lonesome night
Thought I heard some pretty girls say
Court all night and sleep next day

[chorus]
Well, the same old man sittin’ at the mill
Mill turns around of its own free will
One hand in the hopper and the other in the sack
Ladies step forward and the gents fall back

I spied a woodpecker sittin on a fence
Once I courted a handsome wench
She got saucy and she from me fled
Ever since then, well, my head’s been red

“Well,” said the raven as he flew,
“If I was a young man I’d have two.
One for to get and the other for to sew
I’d get another string for my bow, bow, bow.”

Well, my old man’s from Kalamazoo
He don’t wear no yes-I-do
First to the left and then to the right
This old mill grinds day and night

Like a lot of other 20th Century modern art, Bob Dylan’s poetics were inspired by “primitive” folk sources. Just as Picasso and T. S. Elliot and Brancusi and Stravinsky were inspired by folk art around the world (African masks, etc.), Dylan figured out the trick of modernism from folk music. He cracked the case of how to make a popular music (I mean music very large numbers of people wanted to hear) that was also modernist art — abstract, with unstable and open-ended, shared meanings. Set the raunchy “Old Man At The Mill” beside Dylan’s raunchy “Temporarily Like Achilles,” for example:

Well, I rush into your hallway
And lean against your velvet door
I watch upon your scorpion
Who crawls across your circus floor
Just what do you think you have to guard?
You know I want your lovin’
Honey, but you’re so hard.

But to give credit where credit is due, the idea really settled itself into my head while I was thinking about John Prine’s “Forbidden Jimmy.” It’s a bawdy song in which the sexual symbols are so unattached to their literal meanings that they’re free-floating, they operate as modern poetry:

Forbidden Jimmy, he’s got a mighty sore tooth
From biting too many dimes in a telephone booth
He’s got half of his bootlace tied to the dial
Thank you, operator, for getting Jimmy to smile
…
“Call out the Coast Guard,” screamed the police
Forbidden Jimmy, he’s got three water-skis
He put two on his wavelength and gave one to his girl
She’s a mighty fine person, it’s a mighty fine world
…
I got caught cooking popcorn and calling it hail
They wanna stick my head inside a watering pail
Ya know, they’re gonna be sorry, they’re gonna pay for it too
Forbidden Jimmy, he’s coming straight at you

John Prine and Tom Waits were from that first generation of songwriters to learn the trick of modernism from Dylan. Of course, both have also reached around Dylan … let me rephrase that … both have gone directly to the same source Dylan did, by listening to and responding to the old American blues and country.

Editor’s Note: This is the sixteenth installment of my frenzied attempt to post something or other to The Celestial Monochord every day for the entire month of February without winding up like Katerina Ivanovna. This thing is more than half done! It’s supposed to get up above 10°F in Minneapolis this weekend! There is light at the end of the tunnel! Go towards the light, Celestial Monochord!