Bob Dylan – The Celestial Monochord

Harry Smith, Freeman Tilden, and Revelation

When a Park Ranger gives you their schpiel about a petroglyph or battleground, think Freeman Tilden. He was That Guy — the one who first articulated an expansive vision for what the job of Public Service Interpreter ought to be all about.

Tilden was an outsider — not a professional teacher, park ranger, or naturalist, but a journalist and novelist.

He was born the son of a newspaperman in 1883 (Krakatoa blew when Freeman was four days old). Beginning work as a child under his father’s wing, he learned every gory detail in the production of turn-of-the-20th-century newspapers.

Gradually, his attention shifted to poetry, fiction, travel writing, and economics. He wrote his first best-selling novel at age 46. As a sought-after public speaker, Tilden grew to understand the visiting mind — the psychology of a person seeking an encounter with history and nature.

Freeman Tilden realized that people need a revelator.

—

Since 1987, the Anthology of American Folk Music, originally released by Folkways Records, has belonged to the venerable old Smithsonian Institution. This seems ironic to many who envision the 1952 six-album collection as an uncanny avant-garde semi-sacred text. And the set comes bundled with the soul of its editor, eccentric to the marrow.

You probably know the routine — Harry Smith shredded one of the only big rolls of cash he ever had and threw it down a sewer grate. He maintained vials of his semen, perhaps for their aesthetic value. By contrast, maybe, the Smithsonian used to welcome John Glenn into its Air & Space Museum after business hours so the senator could commune with his old space capsule.

Folkways founder Moe Asch (himself an oddball) understood his strange business and hired exactly the right editor for the Anthology.

Smith was a hypnotist collector and we are walking antiques. His Anthology has a way of snatching people up and hurling their lives into new trajectories. It achieves this partly via a deep and sprawling sense of a great unveiling (an apocalypse, for my Greek readers).

Harry Smith understood that people need a revelator.

—

In 1957, the National Park Service published Freeman Tilden’s landmark Interpreting Our Heritage. Its prose is a bit stiff for my tastes, but Interpreting Our Heritage is written as a handbook of insights to guide you through your long career as, for example, a Park Ranger.

The book’s “Six Principles of Interpretation” defined the modern practice of public service interpretation and its spirit can still be glimpsed today at the heart of the field’s mission.

I’ll leave it to others to check if Harry met Freeman or whether either was aware of each other. I’d bet against it, but it’s hard to imagine a more striking and prominent exemplar of Tilden’s 1957 “Six Principles” than Smith’s 1952 Anthology.

—

Below is the complete, unedited text of Tilden’s “Six Principles of Interpretation” from his book Interpreting Our Heritage. To put my thumb on the scale a bit, I’ve added the headings, written with Smith’s Anthology in mind.

Speak to the Listener’s Inner Reality
1. Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.

Interpretation is Revelation
2. Information, as such, is not interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based upon information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information.

Interpretation is Multimedia Art
3. Interpretation is an art which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.

The Aim is Provocation
4. The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.

The Whole Person Receives the Whole Revelation
5. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase.

We Owe Children Their Own Revelation and Provocation
6. Interpretation addressed to children should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best, it will require a separate program.

It would be a worthy task for someone (me, perhaps, if I ever retire) to chase down, one by one, good examples in the life of the Anthology of these principles in action.

—

The Whitney Museum produced a series of audio guides to accompany its exhibition of Harry Smith’s art early this year. Greil Marcus, who found the boxed set in 1970, spoke for the episode on the Anthology. I hope you listen to it.

I was at a reading in a Minneapolis bookstore early this year where Marcus read from his newest book, Folk Music — the first time I’d seen him in person since the 2007 Dylan Symposium in Minneapolis.

I’ve found that listening to him think in his own voice transforms how I hear his writing. His reading style and, it turns out, his writing style are disarmingly passionate, searching, and unguarded.

From the Whitney podcast, below are three Marcus quotes on the Smith Anthology’s message and effect:

It was a sensibility [the Anthology] passed on to people where it said to them that there’s more in this music — there’s more in this country—than you ever imagined. So seek and ye shall find. Go out looking.

There’s more to America than you ever suspected. There are different kinds of people than those you’ve ever met. There are different kinds of people hiding inside people you have met. You don’t really know this country and [Harry’s mission was] to show it to you.

And that opened the door. And I think that would happen to anybody who comes across this production, this art statement, this remapping of America.

—

If you buy my premise, it’s probably less Harry Smith and more the Anthology that exemplifies Tilden’s “Six Principles of Public Service Interpretation.” Rest a Smokey-the-Bear hat on top of your copy of the boxed set.

Smith himself wouldn’t have lasted long working at the Grand Canyon or, god forbid, the Statue of Liberty. For the best-documented part of his life, it was hard to predict how tolerant or tolerable Smith might be toward company. He was an artist, ethnographer, alchemist, and much else — a satirist, say — but not a docent.

So, who would be our exemplar of a Tilden-style American Folk Music Public Service Interpreter? Very likely, bloggers need not speculate, as surely the Federal Government already employs some excellent, under-recognized examples. I’d love to hear your suggestions.

To count as an AFM-PSI, I think you should actively decide to conduct yourself as something like an interpreter in public service focusing on the folk genre.

Greil Marcus seems an excellent candidate, but is he a folk guy or a rock guy? As a writer, is he an educator or an artist? Are these distinctions even close to meaningful? He absolutely would look great in the hat. Mike Seeger, of course, was born wearing that mountie hat and is almost surely who I’d pick. I miss that guy every day of my life.

More than anyone I’m aware of, Dom Flemons has been taking up Mike’s mission of educating, entertaining, and maybe most of all, converting audiences to the cause. I’ve had a post about him in the back of my mind for nearly 20 years. Maybe, ironically, old Freeman Tilden will shake it loose.

Otherwise, I’d consider Robert Cantwell — an American-folk-music-focussed public-sector teacher and professional mind-blower. Strangely enough, and for whatever it’s worth, it was Cantwell’s book Ethnomimesis that I had on me as I watched the towers fall on 9/11.

—

Pivoting around the annual Festival of American Folk Life held on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Ethnomimesis offers still more candidates for Tilden-style interpreters of folk music.

Most prominent is Ralph Rinzler, the “founder and for many years presiding genius of the Festival of American Folklife.” Rinzler distributed the work of revelation throughout the multi-medium folk artists and festival goers themselves. Stimulating the imaginations and bodies of everyone present made for whole-person revelatory provocations.

Interestingly, a passage in Ethnomimesis seems to suggest that Rinzler kind of … fired … the young Cantwell from his book contract. Maybe all this polymorphous stimulation didn’t sit well with Cantwell’s boss or his boss’s bosses. Perhaps someone saw Cantwell’s styles of writing and thinking as not quite public enough for Public Service.

Regardless, Cantwell’s contract, like Harry Smith’s life, remind me that there must surely be daily tensions between Tilden’s apocalyptic goals and the institutional agendas that public service interpreters must satisfy throughout their careers, day after tightly contained day.

Let the Duquesne Whistle Blow

A song title in an upcoming Dylan album reminds me of my father’s birthplace

The tracklist for Tempest, Bob Dylan’s upcoming album, was released on Tuesday:

1. Duquesne Whistle
2. Soon After Midnight
3. Narrow Way
4. Long and Wasted Years
5. Pay in Blood
6. Scarlet Town
7. Early Roman Kings
8. Tin Angel
9. Tempest
10. Roll on John

In response, the armies of Dylan analysts went on red alert. The Expecting Rain discussion about the (as-yet-unheard) album suffered 500-posts in the first day. With little to go on but song titles, I’ll mostly keep my powder dry for now.

Still … I have to note the first track, “Duquesne Whistle,” because my father was born in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, in 1925, according to his birth certificate. My next earliest addresses for him are a couple miles up the Monongahela, in Clairton (where The Deer Hunter was set).

For me, the title of the song is great news. For one thing, it confirms that Bob Dylan is indeed sending me — and not you — subliminal messages through his song lyrics. What a relief! I was beginning to think I was just imagining things.

More importantly, Bob has thrown Duquesne to the Dylanologists like meat to ravening wolves. Over the years, the song will provide an ongoing opportunity to know more about my dad’s native town and the history of this particular corner of America.

Picture on a blog of a picture on a shelf.
My dad’s on the right.

My father was the first child of immigrant workers, starting a family in a steel mill town full of other immigrant workers. His own father had just arrived two years before from Austria — aboard the SS President Fillmore, believe it or not.

The other families on my dad’s particular street had just arrived from Mexico, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Hungary, and Lithuania, according to the 1930 census. Dad was an anchor baby, if you prefer.

Some time in the late 1930’s — that is, in the depths of the Depression — the family moved to Milwaukee, where dad met mom at a bowling alley. She was a farm girl from just outside Port Washington, where Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded for Paramount.

It was a good move, I think, since the shock of the Depression seems to have been less sharp in Wisconsin. Mom reports being largely unaware of it on the farm — they weren’t rich, but then, they never had been. Prohibition made a much bigger impact on her because it brought a still into the house.

Dylan’s “Duquesne Whistle” will help illuminate my dad’s side of the story. That seems natural since music was the main reason I got into family history at all.

I had focused obsessively on “Americana” or “roots music” for 15 years before I tried to do any original research on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Its “Moonshiner’s Dance” entry was the obvious place to start, as it was recorded right here in Minnesota.

But I soon understood it as the exception that proves the Anthology‘s rules — the only really Northern recording on the Anthology, for example, and the only cut making the sounds of recent immigration.

We are so satisfied by our dreams of a musical South that Duquesne and St. Paul (and even Hibbing) are a kind of terra incognita in America’s musical imagination — so much so that my own genealogy has emerged as a critical source of information. Let the Duquesne whistle blow.

I’ve long postponed my Duquesne research for when I can visit it and Clairton myself — maybe when I finally attend the Harry Smith Festival in Millheim, PA. But now, I might not have to see the place at all — Bob Dylan and the internet may have just rendered my personal voyage of self discover entirely pointless! Hallelujah!

Of course, the song may not even turn out to be about Duquesne, PA. It may refer, for example, to the Pennsylvania Railroad train route the Duquesne that used to run from Manhattan’s Penn Station to Harrisburg. Or maybe it refers to the CSI Miami character, Calleigh Duquesne. Bob likes the ladies, I think.

But I’m not concerned. A Dylan song not being about something doesn’t mean that this something won’t provide plenty of fodder for research and analysis.

PS: Note that Earl Hines was also from Duquesne, PA. There’s a great chapter in William Howland Kenney’s book, Jazz on the River, that deals with the musical environment/cultural history of Pittsburgh and its environs.

Talkin’ Michael Gray

The Monochord rides a tour bus to Hibbing with one of the world’s top Dylan scholars

Gray contemplates Hibbing’s open-pit iron-ore mine

A noted Dylan expert and critic offers his home in France (and himself) for conversation.

Early one morning in March 2007, I was riding in one of those tourist buses that deliver senior citizens to casinos — tinted windows, plush seats, TV screens in the ceiling. That foggy Minnestoa morning, this bus was filled to capacity with about sixty Bob Dylan scholars.

The trip, from Minneapolis to Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, was the opening event of the largest scholarly Dylan conference ever held.

In my aisle seat, I talked to the stranger in the window seat next to me. He turned out to be an evangelical Christian Tennessean researching Dylan’s spirituality. A smart guy — curious, thoughtful, and original.

Still, it was hard to concentrate on the conversation. If the first guy I met was THIS guy, who else might be slouching toward Hibbing on this infernal bus?

Immediately across the aisle, an Englishman and an American were engaged in a lively discussion (about Bob you-know-who). Eavesdropping, I gathered that the Englishman — proper accent, eccentric dress, soul patch — was Michael Gray himself.

In 1972, Michael Gray authored the world’s first critical study of Dylan’s work and, in 2007, had recently completed The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, offering as much obsessive Dylan knowledge as any book ever published. A kind of paper cinder block, The BD Encyclopedia comes at you like an authoritative reference but winds up snaring you in an idiosyncratic maze — the strategy reminds me of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

Recognizing a once-in-lifetime opportunity, I turned to Michael Gray and asked the obvious question: Who threw the glass in the street?

It was a rhetorical question and a bit of a joke — after all, the answer represents the quintessentially unknowable cipher that is the object of all Dylanology — so I was gobsmacked when Gray actually knew the answer, and offered a couple minutes of historiography contextualizing both the answer and the question itself.

We talked, excitedly and with a lot of laughter, most of the way to Hibbing. During the long days of the Dylan conference, I’m not sure what I would’ve done without Michael Gray — I kept seeking him out whenever I felt like a wallflower and needed a friendly conversation.

Not the kind of Dylan author who doesn’t suffer fools (I should know), he was generous with his time and knowledge, listened closely, laughed easily, gave useful advice when I asked for it, remembered my name. I find myself repeating his anecdotes in my own conversations even today.

Days later, at the end of the conference, Gray gave the closing keynote address.

Built around a series of film clips of Dylan throughout his career, Gray described the “moment” that surrounded them — the atmosphere, the shocks and conflicts, the relationships and revelations going on in Dylan’s life and work, and in the life of the United States and the globe. He was contextualizing the clips, breathing new life into them, and the effect was moving and revealing.

That reconstruction of gone significance is at the heart of my own efforts at cultural history. The question for me is no longer “what does it mean?” but rather “what DID it mean?” The change in tense seems to transform the entire landscape of possibility and impossibility.

I haven’t had the opportunity to see him speak since, but Gray does speaking engagements — it would be interesting to see what he’s doing now.

Given all of this, I’ve been very amused to see that Gray has been offering himself up as a conversationalist to paying Dylan fans. You get to talk (and talk) about Bob Dylan with one of the world’s leading Dylanologists, and enjoy his wife’s gourmet cooking, in his lovely home in southwest France.

It’s one of those vacation ideas you read about occasionally in the “news of the weird” — it’s utterly cracked, but you would surely do it if you had the chance.

Mostly, I keep chuckling about the mindset that makes it possible. Are authors who aren’t assholes so rare that you can charge admission to talk to them?

During the conference, I sought out Michael Gray because his very presence relaxed me, amused me, made me feel smart and attractive, and — most of all — because he had very interesting things to say. Who recognizes having this effect on people and thinks, “Hey, I can charge for this”?

I mean, I’ve been thinking about charging people to NOT talk to me!

For more information:

bobdylanwinterlude.blogspot.com

North Country Blues

A mural in the library of Bob Dylan's high school depicts Hibbing's multi-ethnic iron miners. What did their music sound like?

Around 1965, Bob Dylan turned his back on folk music, confirming the break by "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival.

At once fact and fiction, the story has emerged as one of the more familiar parables from the 20th century.

But lately, I've been thinking about an earlier moment of decision when Dylan walked away from another set of folk music traditions — those of the Upper Midwest. Today, that decision seems more consequential in the long run, all the more so the longer it goes unrecognized.

When Dylan walked away from Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range and the rest of the Upper Midwest, he left behind what was then a dying economy, as portrayed in his song "North Country Blues". It was a dyin' town, it was a dyin' town, he chants in the album's liner notes.

But Dylan was also walking away from dying forms of music as varied and complex as any in the world, including those of the American South.

At the time, old musical ways of life were changing just as fast in the South, of course, but important elements of the Folk Revival were bent on preserving Southern traditional music — and Dylan was about to help out.

Suddenly, the critical difference between the traditional music of the North and the South hasn't turned out to be a matter of quality or inherent interest.

Instead, it's that the music of the South — against all odds, and to our inexpressible benefit — was resuscitated when it needed it most. Up North, in Zimmerman country, a comparable revival just never arrived.

•

I've been working on a study of the only recording on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music clearly representing northern music — "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Minnesota in 1927. It has never been studied before.

Early in my project, I knew I would eventually have to know — and I mean have to, and I mean know — the musical environment in the Upper Midwest before World War Two.

Consider the 1913 mural in the library of Hibbing High School depicting iron miners at work. Each of its 16 human figures represents another ethnic group that mined the Mesabi Iron Range — a deep diversity of cultures that, presumably, intermingled to create distinctive new American sounds.

Those miners were silent as they watched the young Robert Zimmerman browse the library books — but they must've danced to something sometime.

During the early phases of my research into "Moonshiner's Dance," I often thought about them, knowing I would need to hear their music in my head, loud and clear.

Unfortunately, when I finally turned my attention to the problem, I saw there was going be trouble.

I had first committed myself to traditional music 14 years prior, when there were already mountains of products on the market vying to help me navigate pre-War Southern blues and country. But now, up North, even in 2008, I was pretty much on my own.

There is no such thing as, say, The Anthology of Northern American Folk Music (edited by Harry Smithovich). There's no O Brother Where Art Ya Once? There was no "Song to Otto Rindlisbacher" on Bob Dylan's first album.

Alan Lomax made a thousand recordings during fieldwork in the Upper Midwest in 1938, declaring it possibly "the most interesting country I have ever traveled in" with "enough material in the region for years of work". But unlike every other region where Lomax conducted fieldwork, no release in any format has ever been devoted to his Northern journey. The website of Lomax's foundation, its name apparently a bit of self-deprecating humor, makes no mention of it.

There is an amazing record store here in Minneapolis that sells only 78 rpm records, and it has hundreds of pre-War old-time ethnic recordings — cheap, in great condition, with unpronounceable titles. But what do I buy? And what sense do I make of it?

There's simply no … there's no …

There's no Northern canon. Or worse, and more exactly, the canon of "American roots music" has bypassed my part of the country entirely. There are no names from the Upper Midwest like Dock Boggs, or The Carter Family, or Robert Johnson — names of musicians whose work everybody knows is great, even if they haven't actually bothered listening to it.

How do you connect the dots when you have no dots to begin with?

•

I spent much of 2008 trying to crack the case.

I've camped out in university and historical society libraries, scouring the footnotes of academic journal articles. I've literally spent hours clutching photocopies of typewritten discographies while crawling on the floor in used vinyl stores — including one where the owner chain-smokes behind the register. I've found music that's never been issued, is out of print, is on formats I can't play, lacks any intelligible context.

So far, there appear to be no easy solutions. But I have found a few extremely valuable maps of this occult terrain — so valuable, in fact, that I hate to bury reviews of them this deep in an already too-long blog post.

If I could press only three things into your hands today, they would be: (1) a brilliant box set, Down Home Dairyland, containing 40 episodes of a radio show about the traditional music of the Upper Midwest, and (2 and 3) a pair of absolutely essential books with unfortunate titles, Victor Greene's A Passion for Polka and James P. Leary's Polkabilly.

They're hardly the only materials available, but taken together (including their footnotes, discographies, etc.) they allow an incipient canon to emerge — a list of things you probably should recognize if you want to be taken seriously on the subject. They also provide — most pointedly in the first and last chapters of Leary's Polkabilly — clues to explaining why these musicians and their work aren't more widely seen as part of the canon of American roots music.

•

Following various threads into and out of such material, I sometimes return to the mural in the library of Hibbing High School.

Like the rest of present-day Hibbing, the mural was once moved to its current location from the ghost town of North Hibbing, "where even the markin stones were dead, an there was no sound except for the wind blowin thru the high grass," as Dylan described it.

Slowly, as I've started to hear a few strains of music coming from those miners in that mural, what's begun to strike me most about the thing is how deadly silent it first seemed to me, and how silent it must have seemed to Dylan, there in that hushed library.

Why wasn't there a revival of Northern folk music for Dylan to join? And what would one have sounded like? Until 2008, I would have faintly assumed the answer to the first question was the answer to the second. The music down South was just better or more plentiful.

And maybe it was, I haven't quite decided. But the reasons for the historical neglect of the Upper Midwest turn out to be far more complex than that — so much so they deserve their own research institute … or at least their own blog post. I do know it certainly wasn't just about the music.

If we want to keep thinking that Southern music is better, that's ok with me. But shouldn't we be able to say, confidently and in specific detail, "Better than WHAT?"

Chilicothe Schottishe with Intro – Erick Berg

Rollingstone out on Highway 61

Along Highway 61 on your way out of Minnesota, you pass two towns called Minnesota City and Rollingstone. Their histories began with a Utopian crackpot and his followers, who soon became his victims in one of the more ghastly episodes in the state's history.

The Rollingstone Colony was a little like the Donner Party, if a lot less famous. It also reminds me a bit of the Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre, and certainly adds a new dimension to the song "Like a Rolling Stone."

In 1851, a New York printer persuaded a group of New York professionals to join a Utopian community. They would start fresh in a well-planned city out west in the health-promoting climate of the new Minnesota Territory. The town was to be called Rollingstone.

The leader went west first to found the beautiful city, and when 400 people followed him, they were surprised to find him stuck in a swamp. The women and children slept in a large tent, the men in gopher pits. About three quarters of them soon died in the epidemics that swept the settlement.

Wait. Come to think of it, that's more or less how I came to live here too …

Anyway, the survivors founded Minnesota City. A small village two miles away is today called Rollingstone. Pinning down which of the two towns was the location of the Rollingstone Colony and how exactly they relate to each other historically would take more digging than I've done.

In any case, I'm thinking more about Bob Dylan and the mid-1960's.

It seems hard to believe that a Minnesotan would write a song called "Like A Rolling Stone" — a song about what it's like to find yourself all alone and boondoggled out on the new frontier — and that he'd put it on an album called Highway 61 Revisited without knowing anything whatsoever about the story of the Rollingstone Colony.

But then, a lot of true things are also hard to believe. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that Dylan seemed preternaturally relevant — that his empathetic imagination would insinuate itself convincingly beyond what seems possible. I've written about that before.

Maybe it's all a coincidence, but it's worth doing the legwork to understand how well-known this incident could've been to Dylan in the early 1960's. My research time is booked at the moment.

I also don't know if anybody has ever asked Bob when, if ever, he first heard about the Rollingstone Colony down on Highway 61.

Sources:

Cathy Wurzer's just-published book, Tales of the Road: Highway 61, provides an efficient telling in two pages. She also talked about it today on Minnesota Public Radio.

Christopher M. Johnson's article in Minnesota History (49:140-148) provides much detail on how the community got to Minnesota.

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (Part Two)

This is the second 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 One and Part Three.

Early in my research into "The Moonshiner's Dance," I knew the identity of Mister Larson would be easy to uncover. It's the low-hanging fruit.

After all, Frank Cloutier addresses him the instant the recording begins. Hey hey, Mr. Larson!

I knew Larson would wind up being a musician in Frank's band, or the owner of the Victoria Cafe, and I'd write up a neat biography of this Larson guy and explain why he's so prominently placed at the start of Frank's only recording.

Today, deep into my third year of research, it hasn't turned out that way.

I've seen hundreds of thousands of advertisements, newspaper articles, obituaries, theater programs, union newsletters, graves, birth and death certificates, draft cards, photos, letters, and much else.

I'm a resident of the Twin Cities of 1927. Driving around St. Paul, I once saw a product of the WPA and caught myself thinking, "Hey, THAT'S new."

Living like this — hanging around the dance music scene of Prohibition-era Saint Paul— I keep encountering the same guys over and over. I notice when their wives have kids. I know when they finally get their own bands. I hear about it when a good pitcher joins their kittenball team.

And I'm sorry. I don't know any Larson — at least nobody associated with Frank Cloutier or the local dance scene or the management of the Victoria Cafe.

—

Maybe I'm not hearing the muffled 1927 recording correctly. Maybe it isn't "Mister Larson" at all, but something else. Here's an mp3 of the first few seconds.

I briefly considered whether Frank might instead be saying "Mister Nelson" as in Gordon Nelson, the drummer who seems to have played on "The Moonshiner's Dance." For a bit longer, I considered the Cafe's manager at the time of the recording, Sammy Markus.

But listening again to the recording, I find they just won't do. Hey hey Mr. Markus. Hey hey Mr. Markus. Hey hey Mr. Markus.

No. It's "Hey hey Mr. Larson."

As a last resort, I scoured the entries for "Larson" and "Larsen" in the St. Paul and Minneapolis city directories, which they started to call "phone books" once everybody got phones.

Ordinarily, I adore city directories, intimate and teasing as they are. But searching every Larson in the Twin Cities directories is tedious work — there are roughly 2700 entries in the 1927 editions and they have to be scanned line by line, by hand and eye.

St. Paul is striking for its lack of prospects. I found one music teacher named Bertha Larson who was presumably not a Mister.

There are more prospects in Minneapolis. There was a piano mover named Gustaf Larson and a piano tuner named Martin Larson — unlikely professions for Mister Larson, even though Frank Cloutier was a keyboardist. There was also a movie house manager, a cashier at a dance hall, a radio salesman, and another woman music teacher.

There was a family of musical Larsons, and I've done a longitudinal study of them — followed them around town like a shamus. So far, none of these Larsons seems to have a connection to Frank or to the Victoria Cafe or even to St. Paul. They were not well known, and other than their name, nothing seems relevant about them.

The 1930 census counted about 11,900 individuals named Larsen or Larson
in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, the counties of Minneapolis and St.
Paul. Limiting myself to the right age and gender brings the number down, but I have to face the fact that I may never find the Larson that Frank had in mind.

—

One last prospect has occasionally troubled my mind for about two years. In 1927, the leader of the Minneapolis Police Department's band was a cop called Curly Larson.

I've tried to find out more about him, but so far, he's been a tough nut to crack, probably because of that Curly nickname. We know he was probably bald. I'll keep searching.

But no matter the details, it's a delicious idea.

Smack in the middle of Prohibition, the leader of the Minneapolis policeman's band puts on his uniform every Friday and Saturday night, crosses the river into St. Paul, and plays "The Moonshiner's Dance" at the Victoria Cafe with Frank Cloutier and his boys.

Playing that soused polka in uniform on the bandstand … I desperately want him to have done this. There is exactly zero evidence that he did.

But could he have? Could a Minneapolis cop have played such a drunken, reeling tribute to bootleg liquor without being fired, or even arrested? Especially if he was prominently featured on a 78 rpm record? And might a St. Paul officer have made the same trip to Minneapolis, maybe in a pickled cop exchange program?

During many long days in archives and libraries, I've often bounced these questions about Curly Larson off my findings. Partly thanks to that habit, I've slowly evolved from being the archivist of "Moonshiners Dance" to being its cultural historian.

The shift felt complete the day I finally decided to trust my findings about all these Larsons. There's always so much more work to be done, but so far, nobody has presented himself as the likely Mister Larson.

Therefore, according to my current research results, there probably was no Mister Larson. Or rather, there were many thousands of him. I've come to suspect that Mister Larson is a product of Frank Cloutier's imagination. He's the generic audience member — just your typical Minnesotan off the street.

Hey hey Mister Larson!

If so, this would make him a founding citizen of Lake Wobegon. Like Garrison Keillor's townspeople, he's a caricature invented for the sake of Minnesota humor. To this day, Mister Larson still lives next door to Pastor Inkvist and across the street from Carl Krebsbach.

It would also make Mister Larson an ancestor of Mister Jones, Bob Dylan's main character in "Ballad of a Thin Man."

Just as with Dylan's character, the inclination is to imagine Mister Larson as somebody other than you. But Frank and Bob both address the listener — both are talking to and about you, no matter what name they give you. You are Mister Larson.

Something is happening, therefore, and you don't know what it is. To understand who Mister Larson was, we have to sort out what he might have meant to somebody like Frank Cloutier in a place like Saint Paul at a time like 1927.

We have to reconstruct a meaning that no longer exists. We have to do cultural history.

I'll present some initial findings in Part Three.

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?

What’s In A Name?

Moe Thompson founded The Victoria Cafe

My article on the links between “Moonshiners Dance” — one of the selections on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music — and Minnesota’s Jewish communities has just been published at Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. None of that article’s information has appeared here at The Celestial Monochord, or anywhere else, so Monochord readers and enthusiasts of “Anthology-type music” may want to check it out.

It’s a little anxiety-producing to publish on a subject in which I am so inexpert — the history of Minnesota’s Jews — especially for what must be Zeek‘s fairly erudite audience. Also, because I’m constantly finding new insights, I’m painfully aware that anything I write will quickly seem outdated to me.

But as soon as I began researching The Anthology‘s “Moonshiners Dance” in early 2006, I saw that the Jewish aspects of the story I was uncovering would need to be told somewhere, by somebody. The Jewish connections to the recording made me sit up straight and listen, because of a certain hazy constellation of issues I’d already been toying with for some time …

In November 1963, Newsweek ran an infamous article “exposing” Bob Dylan as the middle-class son of a Midwestern appliance dealer. It included a photograph of Dylan with the caption “What’s in a name?” — a sardonic reference to the revelation that Bob Dylan started life as Robert Zimmerman.

Exactly why this was presented as scandalous is open to interpretation. The article attacks Dylan for portraying himself as real and authentic while simultaneously hiding and misrepresenting his past. But as I read it, the article treats the specifics of Dylan’s past as the real scandal, as what really undermined Dylan’s authenticity. The implication was that Dylan turned out to be the least authentic things you can be — Midwestern, middle class, and Jewish. If a folksinger is supposed to be one of “The People,” surely he can’t be THAT.

And it wasn’t just Newsweek. The post-War folk and blues revivals often seem to me pathologically obsessed with authenticity and commercialism, as abstractions, and the idea of Jewishness seems to have gotten drawn occasionally into those neuroses (in part, by conflating Jewishness and commerce — a conflation my own arguments have a habit of reproducing).

Those revered pre-WWII Southern musicians on The Anthology and so many other reissues actually played and loved quite a lot of Tin Pan Alley popular songs and tunes from the New York stage. Dock Boggs himself based much of his repertoire on “blues queens” who gave stridently commercial, nontraditional, and “inauthentic” performances.

Today, younger revivalists like myself have benefited from writers like Elijah Wald (Escaping the Delta) and Norm Cohen (Long Steel Rail) for whom boundaries between authenticity and artifice, between commerce and tradition, are pretty much gone from their world views. You might say it’s the new orthodoxy among today’s authorities. I think Bob Zimmerman and Elliott Adnopoz could have kept their birth names today.

I often think of Jon Pankake, who Dylan remembers unkindly in Chronicles Volume One (“a folk music purist … breathed fire through his nose”). But you should read Pankake’s liner notes to New Lost City Ramblers: Out Standing in their Field, dedicated as they are to showing a constant sloshing back and forth between professional popular music and supposedly pure amateur folk music — the permeability of those boundaries.

In a 2006 article in the New York Times, Jody Rosen wrote about his work to reassert the important influence that the professional and commonly Jewish music-makers of Tin Pan Alley have had on Rock n’ Roll. The “roots” of Rock, he argues, run through the Brill Building as much as through Robert Johnson and his supposed crossroads.

He even takes a jab at the “rock snobs” who would not be caught “without Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and an Alan Lomax field recording or two” in their record collection.

At least in the text of that particular article, Rosen takes the wrong approach. He’s absolutely right to assert the importance of Tin Pan Alley to today’s popular forms, but in doing so, he lets The Anthology keep its “authenticity,” the myth that it’s the pure product of amateur, oral transmissions stretching back to antiquity.

Instead of trying to sweep The Anthology (etc.) off the table and replace it with Tin Pan Alley as the proper source of Rock, why not keep The Anthology on the table, and show that it’s a much more commercial, worldly document than we’ve been told? To me, that’s the more deeply transformative insight.

And so … all of this, rightly or wrongly, was one of the threads running through my thinking on the day I first discovered that Moe Thompson, the Tin Pan Alley-style songwriter and vaudevillian, was behind the founding of The Victoria Cafe.

Oink Joint Road

In central Minnesota, on US 10 between Verndale and Wadena, you’ll see a sign for Oink Joint Road.

There must be a story there … but I don’t know what it is. Probably, a hog farm is up that road, and when the owner had a chance to name it, he experienced a flash of inspiration.

In any case, when I see the sign — and I pass it about twice a year on the way to a friend’s cabin — I usually picture Tom Waits whipping out his note pad and jotting down … Oink … Joint … Road.

Tom Waits has made a living by collecting colorful things people say and squeezing them into songs — he has said he’s “in the salvage business”:

Coulda been on Easy Street, coulda been a wheel
With irons in the fire and all them business deals
But the last of the big time losers shouted before he drove away
“I’ll be right back, as soon as I crack the one that got away”

A lot of songwriters do that, of course — write lyrics by collage, basically. I happen to think of Waits because he’s kind of obvious about it, and it usually works beautifully.

By contrast, Bob Dylan sometimes seems to collect phrases from the ordinary speech of ordinary people. Not the striking phrases that Waits might gather — Oink Joint Road, Little Red’s Recovery Room, Beulah Land — but dull, dead things that come alive in Dylan’s voice:

Someone’s got it in for me
They’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is, I wish they’d cut it out quick
When they will, I can only guess

I’ll always insist that Dylan learned his collage method from folk songs and the blues (and, in turn, everyone else mostly learned it from him). The “floating stanzas” that he found in those old songs act a lot like the cliches of everyday speech, in that they just hang in the air waiting to be snapped into place by a singer.

Who’s a-gunna walk you side-by-side
And tell you everything’s alright?
Who’s a-gunna sing to you all day long
And not just in the night?

The result of stitching together a lot of floating stanzas can be, over the course of the song, a strange, nonlinear train of thought that begins to make a kind of sense only slowly, in the gradually accumulating mood of the song.

And, as it turns out, that’s exactly the key to how Dylan modernized vernacular song, making it work as both pop culture and impressionist verse at the same time.

And … well, anyway. It takes about four and half hours to get from Minneapolis to our friend’s cabin, so you have plenty of time to over-think things … and Oink Joint Road does present itself …

Hollis Brown and The Monochord on the Radio

You may have seen the essays and comments about Bob Dylan’s “Hollis Brown” here and here. Well today, Jerry Clark played three records on KFAI to illustrate some of those ideas — and gave The Celestial Monochord a big juicy plug, too.

You’ll be able to hear the June 21 show online (for the next two weeks only) by streaming it from here. I think the Celestial Monochord section starts somewhere after 1:16 and ends around 1:38.

Jerry begins with “Pretty Polly” (which Greil Marcus says inspired “Hollis Brown”), playing a version by Ralph Stanley.

He then plays “Poor Man” by the Louisiana Honeydrippers. Jerry contends it was certainly a more direct inspiration for Bob Dylan’s song — I’ll be damned if he doesn’t turn out to be right about that.

He then plays an unfamiliar recording of Dylan doing “Hollis Brown.” At the end, Jerry and host Dakota Dave Hull ruin my reputation with very kind words and high praise for me and The Celestial Monochord. (When you stream the audio, you can skip right to that part if you want.) Thanks, Jerry and Dave!

Listen to this episode and, come to think of it, every episode you can of Dave Hull’s radio show, where Jerry is a frequent guest. I always learn enormously from it and I enjoy it mightily. I’ve heard rumors that radio used to be good — that it used to be kinda like this. Nah, couldn’t be!

Picture on a blog of a picture on a shelf. My dad’s on the right.

Picture on a blog of a picture on a shelf.
My dad’s on the right.