Folk Revival, Blues Revival – 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Outside Llewyn Davis

In anticipation of a Coen Brothers movie, I read the book that inspired it — “The Mayor of MacDougal Street,” by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald

I just read The Mayor of MacDougal Street, a memoir of the Greenwich Village folk scene of 50 years ago, written by the late Dave Van Ronk with engineering by Elijah Wald.

I bought my copy when it was published in 2005, and began the long process of moving it from one stack of books symbolizing my various intellectual ambitions to another. Now that a Coen Brothers movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, has been loosely inspired by the book, it moved to the stack symbolizing “read the damned book already, Einstein.”

To my surprise, I laughed my ass off reading Mayor — my wife was relieved I was finally reading something funny. I want to repeat certain of its stories the rest of my life, but several are chapter-length psychodramas that start funny, and build and build with running gags and all the trimmings.

A story about absinthe smugglers is one of those stories that’s almost too good to be told, never mind whether it’s true. A chapter about Van Ronk’s cross-country trip to California certainly seems smarter and funnier than anything in On the Road … maybe it’s me.

And then there’s that brief anecdote about a Greenwich Village rat. Similar stories helped end my fantasies of having been there for the Golden Age. (I can’t remember how I know a story about Mike Seeger scrawling “roaches roaches roaches” on the wall in John Cohen’s apartment.) But Van Ronk’s vermin story is the best yet, maybe owing to his matter-of-fact delivery.

In essence, Mayor is an oral history of the mid-century Folk Revival.

The book shows just how good oral histories can be as literature, and how important they are to reviving the past as lived reality. Robert Shelton’s role in booking acts at Gerde’s Folk City, and John Mitchell dodging bullets from all directions … those stories reorganized my understanding of that time and place, and they could only have come to me through oral history.

And Van Ronk’s memories constitute arguments about the past that some readers will find challenging.

At some point over the past 20 years, I realized that there wasn’t one Folk Revival, but instead an ongoing, rolling revival impulse running through American culture, changing shape and location and agenda. New revivalists keep being born, always with fantastic notions in their heads about the past:

They all seemed to go to Music and Art High School, and their parents all seemed to be dentists. I remember once coming across a covey of them sitting cross-legged around a bespectacled banjoist who struck a dramatic chord and earnestly explained “This is a song the workers sing when they’re oppressed.”

Van Ronk’s street-level memories, refined over some very eventful decades, would make a great education on what it was really like, what people were really thinking about, and which romantic ideas you should abandon and which you should hold on to.

Not that Van Ronk couldn’t be full of it, or that Elijah Wald’s handiwork doesn’t occasionally shine through. But the quality is such that these function as layers of complexity a wise reader will appreciate.

Here Van Ronk is the stereotypical New Yorker feeling superior to fly-over country, but there he’s marveling at the depth of talent flowing into the Village from Hibbing and Detroit.

Here he insists that song lyrics need to make literal sense on the page (“along” a watchtower?), but there he praises Francois Villon specifically for using slang that no longer means anything.

Here he rolls his eyes at the insipid tourists who associated Greenwich Village with the horror genre (both were weird, he guessed), but there he argues that science fiction was a perfectly natural association (both are weird, I guess).

I know from Lewis Erenberg that theme restaurants like the spooky Cafe Bizarre had been features of Greenwich Village at least as early as 1915. It raises the question of just how important selling “a version of Greenwich Village that never existed” has always been to the existence of Greenwich Village. Much of it was created by landfilling with garbage in the 1700s — its very ground was established by Clydes.

Rigorous peer-review might have cleared and screwed all of this up completely. Visions like Van Ronk’s — both observation and misperception — were driving forces behind the Greenwich Village Folk Revival and, for that matter, all historical events, past, present, and future. The fog of war *is* the real war, not a veil that obscures it.

As for my own fog, Dave Van Ronk had been one of those people I’d had a recurring appointment with, and I never managed to keep it. I knew his face, his voice, and his rap sheet, but he always was mostly the guy Dylan stole the “House of the Rising Sun” arrangement from.

Indeed, because I knew he was a key figure in a key time-and-place (maybe the in the), it meant there was no hurry. His story and music would always be around when I was finally ready for them. That attitude is one reason I’m not good at collecting oral histories.

Now, after Mayor, I have what feels like a relationship with the guy, and I get why people’s feelings about him are often profound in a full sense of the term.

His music seems urgent to me now, and I see the mark of his music and mind on a lot of people who understood him long ago. For example, his friend Dakota Dave Hull is a friend of mine, and I’ve always nodded sagely when he talks Van Ronk, which is often. Probably, I’ll do less nodding and closer listening in the future, when I get the chance.

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

Three Vignettes on Music and Geography

John Cohen signs his book of Dylan photos, Young Bob
Minneapolis, April 15, 2007

#1

I heard John Cohen tell a story. It was at a private party, so I'm not certain it's appropriate to write about here. But … but … it was such a GOOD story.

As I remember it, at least, he was teaching or lecturing a couple years back at a college in North Carolina. There, he discussed his work in the late 1950s, finding old people in the hills of Madison County, North Carolina, who still sang very old ballads without instrumental accompaniment. They just opened their mouths and sang 500-year-old songs, all alone. It had a spooky, lonesome, ancient-sounding effect.

And in those 1950's, that style seemed to be dying right before Cohen's eyes as the old folks themselves died and their grandchildren were passionately seized by jukebox rock 'n roll. Cohen, he felt sure, was capturing this music's death mask at the instant of its extinction.

After the lecture, a young woman in the class came up and told Cohen that her family was from rural North Carolina and was still singing these old ballads in this same way. The tradition had, in fact, survived and was thriving, having been passed down to her through many generations of her family. She even sang a little for Cohen to show him what she meant.

Cohen was puzzled, knowing that he and people who took an interest in this work had scoured every inch of those hills, looking under every rock in all of Appalachia trying to find the last remnants of this folk tradition. Those hills had been picked absolutely clean decades ago.

On a wild hunch, Cohen asked her if anybody in her family had ever gone to the University of California at Berkeley, where Cohen's work on these ballads became very popular. Oh sure, she said. Everybody in her family went to Berkeley — her dad, all her aunts and uncles, her grandparents, her family pets, and so on and so forth, etc. I seem to remember she was about to go there herself.

This young woman and her family were indeed from North Carolina, and this style of singing was indeed a folk tradition from their part of the country. And it was indeed being passed down to her via her family, one generation to the next. Being young, and perhaps not a history major, she neither knew nor much cared that the singing style had gone into exile in Berkeley for a little while before coming back home to the North Carolina hills.

And she was not wrong. The authentic bearers of real folk traditions — if you wanna talk that way — almost never know exactly how the music comes down to them. In her case, this folk music is thriving in her family as a folk tradition, just as sure as it ever did in anybody else's family. She had plenty reason to be proud. She was not wrong. She was right.

In the 1950's and 1960's, Barry Ancelet grew up in Louisiana speaking Cajun French. He studied the French language in Louisiana high schools and colleges, where teachers always insisted that Cajun French wasn't French at all — that it literally had nothing to do with the French language. Ancelet accepted this without too much worry.

And he never paid much attention to Cajun music, even though (or because) it was always around. In many similar stories I've heard, the protagonists often think of the traditional music they grew up with as low — a weakness of ignorant country trash. In his article in the great collection Sounds of the South (which is where I get this information), Ancelet isn't explicit about his own early attitudes toward the music.

In any case, in the early 1970's he spent an academic year in France, where he felt homesick and isolated. One momentous night in Paris, at a concert of Cajun music, he underwent a shattering conversion experience. He realized that he'd been systematically trained to be ignorant of himself and his own surroundings. Everything he thought he knew about his own language and his own culture turned out to be crazy.

He immediately sensed what he should do with the rest of his life — he went back to Louisiana and ultimately became one of the founders of the academic study of Cajun and Acadian culture. Tonight, I see that Wikipedia tells us he's from Louisiana and what he does now, but doesn't mention any conversion experience — least of all in France.

In the past several months of my research into the Moonshiners Dance, the trail has finally led me to the mostly unknown, yet much-maligned traditional music of my various homelands.

In the past few weeks, for example, I've been listening with mounting enthusiasm to Down Home Dairyland. Originally a radio show, I know it as 40 episodes released on CD, with an accompanying listener's guide.

The hosts are Jim Leary and Rick March — the Gilbert and Gubar of polka music — two folklorists who've been exploring the traditional and ethnic music of the Upper Midwest since the late 1970s.

Their work, and that of other musicians and scholars in their field, is rapidly being hauled aboard here at the Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues.

For now, I draw your attention to program #21 of Down Home Dairyland, which deals with the ethnic music of Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Apparently, if you walked into a hall in Stevens Point today, you'd have a good chance of hearing polka that's audibly and vividly Polish, feeling a little like the crooked-metered concertina recordings made by Polish immigrants in the 1920's.

And why not? The area was heavily settled by Poles in the mid-1800's and again in the early 1900's. Wouldn't the ethnic music of Stevens Point sound pretty damned Polish?

Not necessarily, it turns out. In the mid-20th century, the sound that dominated among Stevens Point polka bands was the German-sounding oompah style popularized by Minnesota bandleaders Whoopee John Wilfahrt and Harold Loeffelmacher. Their styles influenced bands far and wide as Whoopee John, especially, became a kind of regional hero like Charlie Poole did in the southeast.

By the late 1950's, though, some younger Stevens Pointers grew weary of the "arranged and mannered" German sound and the sedentary stage presence of the bands. The more authentically European Polish styles they found among bandleaders from Chicago and Milwaukee were aggressive, improvised, visceral — they felt more like rock 'n roll, and more authentic at the same time.

So, there was a Revival — Leary and March call it a "resurgence" and a "revitalization" — of explicitly Polish music among Polish bands around Stevens Point. I imagine that, today, those mid-century revialists are easily old enough to have great grandchildren who might know only that their family came from Poland in the 1850's, and that they're learning to play Polish styles from great grandpa.

I won't try to squeeze my own sudden attentiveness to the ethnic-American styles of the Upper Midwest into a little vignette. Maybe that's for you to do. But I've been brought back north precisely because I wanted to contribute to the understanding of Harry Smith's influential collection of southern music.

I've seen that pattern over and over again in other people, and one of the things that surprises me most is my own surprise that it's happening to me.

As Real As It Gets

The book reviews in next Sunday’s New York Times (March 4) will include a review of Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor. The reviewer, Ben Yagoda, is disappointed in the book’s prose — his own latest book is When You Catch An Adjective, Kill It — but he likes the book’s ideas tolerably well. Certainly, the review is worth reading.

The book is about the ways American musicians have tried to convey their authenticity, often pushing back against powerful cultural currents challenging them on the point.

Especially interesting is Yagoda’s discussion of the book’s chapter on Mississippi John Hurt. His music was not black enough for Okeh’s race records in 1928, even if his skin was too dark for their hillbilly line. Ironically, he was rediscovered in 1963 by white record collectors and introduced to contemporary audiences as a blues revivalist, although he didn’t play blues. Or anyway, this is how I read Yagoda’s reading of Barker and Taylor’s reading of history.

As often as I wish I’d been there for that 1960’s Revival of myth and legend, I’m just as often reminded that today’s revivalism has great advantages over that gone paradise. I get the impression folk and blues people used to harbor fierce, malignant, withering resentments about the tuning of hammer dulcimers, whether you may use a plastic thumb pick, and whatnot. They sometimes positively hated each other over such things. Or anyway, if so, it’s pretty much a thing of the past.

A profile of Spider John Koerner makes it sound as if Koerner was hounded into giving up music and leaving the country because he wasn’t deemed authentic enough (I think my reading of the article is a bit overly dramatic, actually). If this is at all close to correct, he really DID teach Bob Dylan a lot — as we all know, in July of 1965, Bob Dylan disappointed folk music purists by “going electric” at their annual gathering in … somewhere. Can’t remember.

But it seems everybody went through their own version of it — if Barker and Taylor are to be believed, even John Hurt got pushed out of, and stuffed into, various authentic closets. I know a guy who bought his first New Lost City Ramblers album in the mid-sixties, and he felt he had to hide it on the subway ride home — the Ramblers, apparently, weren’t considered authentic enough in his neighborhood.

Back in 2004, between banjo seminars, I saw the subject of authenticity brought up in Mike Seeger’s presence. He said various sensible things about it, including something like “You always have to wonder, an authentic WHAT? ” I don’t remember what he said exactly … maybe it was “Everybody’s an authentic SOMETHING.”

My understanding is that the Carter Family, between around WWII and the mid 1960’s, were considered by many folk music enthusiasts to be grossly inauthentic pop country recording stars — sort of the mid-century equivalent of … well, I don’t know who … Faith Hill?

In any case, people like Ed Kahn and Mike Seeger (not to mention Harry Smith) helped articulate a “reading” of the Carters that brought them to their current reputation as more real than reality itself. Mike Seeger, and especially Ralph Rinzler, did the same thing for Bill Monroe. Of course, Maybelle Carter and Bill Monroe may have helped out a bit too.

The more I see and read, the less I worry about authenticity. There was never a time in some real down-home past when it was anything other than a pain in the ass. Elijah Wald’s Escaping The Delta and and Benjamin Filene’s Romancing The Folk are better educations in the matter than you’ll receive here at The Celestial Monochord.

But you know … we have it good, we who became interested in this music at the turn of this century, around the time of the complete Robert Johnson and the Harry Smith Anthology in CD box sets, of O Brother Where Art Thou, of The Old Crow Medicine Show, and so on. It literally took decades of fighting and arguing, going hungry and losing friends, writing and researching — not to mention playing and hearing and collecting a lot of great music — to bring me this long perspective I now (believe myself to) enjoy. In 1960, a lot of people would have sacrificed anything to read Wald, Filene, Cantwell, Marcus, Charters, and … well, I don’t know, maybe Barker and Taylor.

Editor’s Note: Hey! Here I am! This is entry number 26 — count ’em, twenty six — in my 28-part mission to post something every day this month to The Celestial Monochord. And I mean, something Monochordum Mundi, not just any old thing. I mean, not my laundry list or something. Whatever a laundry list is …

Crumb

Back in March, a magazine called Exclaim! (which I take to be sort of a Canadian Mojo) published an article about the rising popularity among young folks of collecting 78 rpm records.

It was written by Jason Schneider, who seems to be a little like me — a turn-of-the-century convert to early 20th Century blues and country. Schneider’s article is well worth the read, so I forwarded it to a Monochord reader who’s a very experienced 78 collector.

He and I enjoyed picking at the article, finding various things to admire and attack in it. In particular, my correspondent would like to urgently warn new 78 collectors NOT to play their records on old “gramophones.” You can, and should, buy a modern record player with a 78 rpm setting, instead of ruining your 78’s with 100-year-old technology. These are not floppy disks — you don’t need an out-dated playback device for this out-dated medium.

Another interesting passage in Schneider’s article is this:

Robert Crumb especially has had a profound influence since the acclaimed 1994 documentary about his life fully illuminated his obsession with 78 collecting and old time music’s ongoing hold on his psyche. In fact, the best introduction to the music is still Crumb’s series of blues and country “trading cards” that provide bios of his favourite artists. [link added]

I wouldn’t know where to start in confirming whether or not Crumb really has had any such profound influence … and I wonder whether Schneider can confirm it, and how. The main difficulty of Schneider’s article is his “authoritative” point of view. Instead of staying close to his experience, he wants to use an omniscient voice — and ironically, this can actually strip your writing of its most useful information.

So let me do what Schneider should have done, possibly, and ponder Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb — which I saw early in my interest in the old music — as I, personally, actually experienced it.

A girlfriend suggested I see Crumb because R. Crumb and his family were so much like me and mine. Someone else suggested this was a stupid and cruel thing to say. So, I saw Crumb in a questioning frame of mind — How is this like looking into a mirror? Does it represent me? Misrepresent me? What here should I embrace? But, to an extent, maybe that’s how we always go to the movies.

Over the previous year or two, I had bought a lot of CD reissues of old blues, but R. Crumb was the first 78 record collector I ever “met.” There isn’t much music heard in the film, the main exception being a moment with R. Crumb sitting on the floor listening to an old Geechie Wiley 78. But for me, that scene is the film’s most persistent memory. When I think of Crumb, that’s what I see.

Much more important, though, were his drawings of street lamps. At some point, R. Crumb says he and a photographer friend drove around taking photos of ordinary lamp posts and other municipal and commercial fixtures and structures — the only way he could later manage to draw them into his cartoons. We live in a civilization so soulless and ugly and forgettable that we can’t even remember what it looks like.

And that was like looking into a mirror, so much so that I could almost feel my mind reorganizing itself to accommodate the experience of having these private thoughts so vividly projected onto the big screen. My previous experience with the old music had carried some of that sense — of these old musicians being forgotten by an ugly culture, of all the real greatness in the world collecting dust somewhere, of the lives of people like Harry Smith and the Crumb family being examples of what happens to the best minds of my generation and yours.

So it would be false, outright, to say Crumb introduced me to the old music. You might possibly say that the film made it “cool” to be into the music. It would be best to say that the film was one of several things that modeled for me a possible relationship with the music, a way of fitting the music into a worldview that mattered, a way the music could be employed in the job of making sense of things.

To make the strongest possible claim for it, maybe Crumb was the last straw — it aided and abetted, giving me permission to just go ahead and finally become that dusty old crank obsessed with old music who I’d begun to glimpse in the mirror.

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of my attempt to post something every damned day for a whole month … it is not a coincidence that I chose the shortest month of the year. But is it short enough to preserve my sanity? Stay tuned!

Also, anybody know where the photo from this post is from?

Dixieland Jazz at Dupont Circle

Editor’s Note (August 30, 2006): A lot of light has since been shed on the Dupont Circle musicians by readers submitting comments on this entry. I have now closed the comments seciton for this entry, but I invite you to write me at celestialmonochord@gmail.com. I will be posting a “New Updated Revised Edition” of this entry in the coming months.

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I saw a Dixieland jazz band busking on the street in Washington, DC this early June. It was made up of about ten African American kids — all boys between 13 and 17 years, my friend thought. They played a kind of Dixieland I’d never heard before. It was apparently a sound all their own.

I wish I’d had a recorder, since all I can do now is describe the sound. In the center — physically and musically — there were a couple of drummers with a bass drum and snare, I think. They were beating out fairly complex polyrhythms, usually with a core tempo of a fast walk.

Next to the drummers was a tuba and a … euphonium, maybe … providing a pulsing bass foundation. Around them crowded about six trombone players. No sax, no clarinet, no trumpet or cornet, and certainly no banjo.

The trombones generally played slides and very short runs, often repeating brief phrases, intertwining with each other in keys and with a spirit that made the music Dixieland, without any doubt. But mostly, the trombones too were their own rhythm section. They pretty much stuck within the beat, and syncopated a lot more than they swung. It was Dixieland rendered from the perspective of James Brown.

The effect was sort of a long, uniform, jam-band stream of music. Often a given trombonist would stop, walk around a little, wipe the sweat off his face, and then raise his trombone again for a couple well-placed squawks — and then repeat the procedure. The music was built so that you could freely drop in and out without interrupting the flow.

So the music was “scalable” — that is, it could be played by a smaller or larger band without much harm to the overall feel. In that sense, they had rediscovered a trick at the core of the “Old Time” stringband sound usually heard today at Old Time jams.

In the late 1960’s around Chapel Hill, Alan Jabbour and his Hollow Rock String Band had every instrument play in unison (except the guitar), so they could add a second or third banjo or a fifth fiddle — and the main effect was that the jam just got louder. In this way, you could have a single jam that was large enough for a whole “scene” or community to participate, something not possible with other stringband styles. This Dupont Circle jazz was a little like that — scalable, participatory, community-building, revivalist, and new.

But of course they weren’t playing in unison — each was improvising. They were playing jazz. Around the 1950’s, many amateur white Dixieland enthusiasts memorized the parts in old jazz recordings so they could reproduce them in their own band, sort of as a classical orchestra does. I don’t know if they didn’t understand, or if they just ignored, that the original recordings had been improvised. But what these white bands played wasn’t jazz — it was an impersonation of jazz.

Improvisation, of course, is key. In several of the earliest articles written about bluegrass, the writers tried to explain the music in terms of Dixieland. Both forms involve an ensemble collectively, spontaneously composing a unique performance that “fills up” each measure with polyphony. Bluegrass, they said, is like Dixieland played on southern stringband instruments.

It was clear to me that the kids in Dupont Circle had been listening to Dixieland recordings and had vividly understood — and had been deeply impressed with — their essence, which is collective simultaneous improvisation.

Traditionalists who fixate on certain narrow views of authenticity would probably be disappointed in the music — particularly in the brief and simple lines they used and the featureless “architecture” of the numbers those lines added up to.

I was not disappointed. I was so happy and amazed that I couldn’t believe my ears and eyes. First, these were children, damned near — born in the early 1990’s around the time “Friends” debuted on TV — and they were intensely and joyously REVIVALIST in their approach. It was hardly something I anticipated seeing that night, coming from people so young of any race, any class, or any gender. Certainly, I’d seen little in Minneapolis to quite prepare me for it.

Lately, I’ve been studying the lives of several brass dance-band musicians of the 1920’s. Most were World War One veterans, and found discipline and musical experience in the US military. Of course, these Dupont Circle kids haven’t played for their countrymen during a World War (at least not yet). Nor can I imagine they were raised in a community that strongly and consistently nurtures the development of obsolete tromboning — I know I wasn’t.

But they understood Dixieland jazz well enough to try it out and fashion from the results of their experiment a new thing, suited to their skills, their aesthetics, and their time and place. I walked away without really understanding who I’d seen — I still don’t quite get who they were or how they got there. But they were clear proof that we are still deeply in the midst of a full-on, all-out Revival.

Look Away From The Cross

Sara Carter (photo by David Gahr, from Dunson and Raim)

In early March 2004, I first heard the original Carter Family’s 1940 and 1941 recording sessions — their final sessions together as a trio. By coincidence, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” happened to be Number One at the box office that week. So, the Carter Family’s “Look Away From The Cross” sounded to me like a sharp crack of thunder.

I can always count on the original Carter Family to send my mind reeling. They always seem to dissipate some thick fog of nonsense the world has become so accustomed to that we’ve forgotten it even existed. They seem to get directly into the core of something, though I’m never able to predict just what that something’s going to be.

Of course, whether they’re “really” getting to the heart of something is separate question, but regardless, their music powerfully projects that effect. No wonder the folk revival of the 1950’s and 1960’s — always seeking antidotes to American Cold War culture — so lovingly embraced the original Carter Family.

Anyway, I won’t rehash the media noise generated by “The Passion of the Christ.” I’ll only mention that the Gospels themselves spill very little ink on the suffering of Jesus — they even emphasize that he suffered less that most people executed by crucifixion. What really interests the Gospels is the resurrection. As I understand it, the fetish for fluids, whips, and naked men is primarily Medieval.

I guess “Look Away From The Cross” is probably a Negro spiritual of the Holiness Church variety — it ain’t German Catholic, I can tell you that from personal experience. Below, I’ve repeatedly written out the chorus instead of just writing “Chorus” in order to give you a feel for how insistently Sara Carter cries out “look away.” In customary Carter Family fashion, Sara sings lead and plays autoharp, Maybelle plays guitar and “seconds” the lyrics with rejoinders (shown in parentheses), and A.P. Carter just kinda sings when he’s good and ready. The overall effect is as bright and catchy as any advertising jingle.

LOOK AWAY FROM THE CROSS

Look away from the cross to that glittering crown
From your cares, weary ones, look away
There’s a home for the soul where no sorrows can come
And where pleasure will never decay

LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(weary ones, look away from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown (glittering crown)
LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(look away, weary ones, from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown

Though the burdens of life may be heavy to bear
And your crosses and trials severe
There’s a beautiful hand that is beckoning “Come”
And no heartache and sighings are there

LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(weary ones, look away from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown (glittering crown)
LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(look away, weary ones, from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown

Mid the conflicts of battles, of struggles and strife
Bravely onward your journey pursue
Look away from the cross to that glittering crown
That’s a waiting in heaven for you

LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(weary ones, look away from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown (glittering crown)
LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!
(look away, weary ones, from the cross to the crown)
From the cross to that glittering crown

Recorded October 4, 1941, New York City

Don’t Plug In — Bluegrass and the Folk Revival

(Gibson ETB-150 Model Electric Tenor Banjo, 1940)

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1970’s and 80’s, I knew some lovers and practitioners of bluegrass music. They all loved rock n’ roll too, and seemed a lot more worried about electricity running microwave ovens than musical instruments. I remember laughter at the thought that folkies had turned on Bob Dylan for “going electric.”

Still, I also remember sharing with bluegrassers a special affection, even reverence, for the acoustic quality of bluegrass instruments. I’m reminded of John Hartford’s drawn-out, playfully grandiose introduction to his tongue-twister “Tater Tate and Allen Mundy”:

Bluegrass music a-playin’ in the park
Bluegrass music picking way past dark
Bluegrass music, it don’t butt in
Don’t need an amp and don’t plug in

I thought of all this last night while reading the introduction to Neil Rosenberg’s “Bluegrass: A History.” In a section entitled “Bluegrass — What Is It?”, Rosenberg insists on a paradox. Bluegrass has always been a commercial and professional form designed for radio and records, and its sound was shaped by a 20th-century electric invention: the microphone. Nevertheless, the non-electric stringed instruments of bluegrass are usually the first thing mentioned by its followers when trying to describe the genre:

… [as] can be seen from a joke told by Ricky Skaggs … “How many bluegrass musicians does it take to change a light bulb? One, and three to complain because it’s electric!” [taken from Rosenberg’s book]

I’ve finally begun reading Rosenberg’s history of bluegrass because, over the past year or so, I’ve become aware of a lot of such paradoxes and surprises. That’s what good histories are always for — “the past” always turns out to be nothing like the way our presumptions lead us to believe.

For example, I’ve recently realized how important the Folk Revival of the 1950’s and 60’s was to the survival of bluegrass. The first-ever bluegrass LP was released in 1957 by Folkways Records. It was recorded and compiled by Folk Revival future-heavyweight Mike Seeger, and its liner notes mark the first use in print of the word “bluegrass” to refer to a genre of music.

The author of these liner notes, Ralph Rinzler, would eventually found the Smithsonian’s annual Festival of American Folklife in Washington D.C. — but first, he helped revive Bill Monroe’s stalled career by becoming his manager. Some of Monroe’s new band members were soon to be Northern “citybillies” who first encountered bluegrass in Greenwich Village coffee shops or at folk music concerts on college campuses.

This surprises me, both comin’ and goin’. On the one hand, today’s officianados of “Old Time” music think of Mike Seeger and his New Lost City Ramblers as champions of authentic folk alternatives to post-WWII commercial inventions like rock n’ roll and bluegrass. It is definitely not widely known in the Old Time community that Seeger, Rinzler, and Alan Lomax helped rescue bluegrass from obscurity (if not oblivion) by forcefully asserting its legitimacy as an authentic American folk genre.

On the other hand, it’s surprising coming from the other direction, too. An acquaintance from West Virginia once expressed suspicion about the fact that I, a Chicago native, have an intense interest in “her” music. From what I gathered, she might have been surprised to learn that Monroe’s invention only dates from the mid-1940’s, and that its commercial prospects nearly died a decade after they were born. Not only the finances, but the very values and identity of bluegrass were shaped by us Northern revivalists. Rosenberg writes:

Until the mid-fifties the acoustic aspect of bluegrass was not unique within country music, and in that sense the use of acoustic instruments in bluegrass is a historical accident. But because it was performed on such instruments, particularly the antique five-string banjo, it was virtually the only form of contemporary country music acceptable to the folk boom of the late fifties and early sixties, where electric instruments were considered inauthentic and symbols of the alienation of mass culture. Through the folk boom bluegrass gained new audiences and recognition as a distinct musical form [that is, became thought of as “bluegrass”]. Today the insistence upon acoustic instruments has become a philosophical position.

By the way; thinking about bluegrass and the folk revival, it’s interesting that other branches of country music in the post-War years dealt directly with social problems facing southern expatriate “urban hillbillies,” such as adultery, divorce, depression, and alcoholism. But bluegrass chose to deal with these same pressures by evoking feelings of an alternative — and idealized — place and time. Rosenberg:

Because the content of the bluegrass repertoire is so often clearly symbolic (rather than directly oriented toward current concerns), it is more accessible to people from very different cultural milieux who relate to the music as an art form, enjoying it as many enjoy opera sung in languages they do not comprehend.

I may report more about these and other matters as I get further into “Bluegrass: A History”.

Those U.S. State Department Blues

I just read an essay by Paul Oliver, one of the best-known historians of the blues, about why it is that much of the best and earliest work on the blues had long been done by Europeans.

Swedes, Belgians, Germans, French, Englishmen and others wrote exhaustive studies of the meanings of blues songs, compiled 2000-page catalogs of blues 78s, founded some of the first magazines anywhere devoted to blues — all of this long before America had a "blues revival."

Charles Delaunay had to write "Hot Discography" secretly, on onion skin, because he was in the middle of the Nazi occupation of France. When Paul Oliver (a Brit) wrote "The Blues Fell This Morning," Martin Luther King wrote the introduction.

In 1960 — the year "The Blues Fell This Morning" was published — Paul Oliver finally scraped up enough money to actually visit the United States, the birthplaces of the blues he loved so much. He traveled to Washington, New York, Detroit, Memphis, New Orleans, Shreveport, Dallas and various parts of Mississippi and Arkansas. He stayed with Muddy Waters in Chicago and traveled with Chris Strachwitz, who founded Arhoolie records using some of the recordings they made. The impact of the trip on Oliver’s life and scholarship was incalculable.

The trip was made possible by a very small grant from the U.S. Department of State — a grant "for leaders and specialists."

I don’t know whether such grants still come out of the State Department or from anywhere else in the U.S. government anymore. I do hear frequent stories of scholars having to give presentations to conferences in the U.S. via telephone or satellite hook-up due to difficulties getting temporary visas to travel here — and I mean British astronomers and Swedish music historians and the like. I often read about such incidents in left-wing rags like … Sky and Telescope, for example. Bad times, bad times.

Editor’s Note: Paul Oliver’s essay is in "Sounds of the South," a collection of papers from a conference celebrating the 1989 opening of the Southern Folklife Collection at Chapel Hill. It was edited by Daniel W. Patterson … and I’m finding it really interesing. Also, thanks to reader Bill B. for, among other things, correcting my spelling of Chris Strachwitz’s name.