Folk Revival, Blues Revival – Page 2 – The Celestial Monochord

Math and Memory in New Lost City

Paley Cohen Seeger New Lost City Rambler

I finally bought The New Lost City Rambler’s compilation of their later stuff, 1963-1973, which is titled "Out Standing in their Field." The cover art has a photo of them, you know … out … standing … in their field. This is a very old joke, which is never funny — except in the case of the New Lost City Ramblers, where it really is funny.

One of the members of the band, John Cohen, tells another story that also isn’t funny, but because it’s the New Lost City Ramblers, it’s really hilarious:

A few years ago at a literary gathering in New York City, I was introduced to a music publisher. He remembered the New Lost City Ramblers, he said, and then asked, "What was the band’s big hit?"

When you read about the New Lost City Ramblers, you’re told over and over that their influence has outdistanced their sales. But over the last half-dozen years or so, I’ve come to realize, with deepening amazement, just how true this is. It should always be written with exclamation points.

The band formed in 1958. By 1962, they had already broken up largely due to the fact that there was no money it. With three guys in the band (one of whom had a family to support), the math just didn’t add up. They reconfigured, replacing one member, and proceeded to limp along, although for the vast majority of the last 43 years, they’ve been able to make more money individually being remembered as members of the NLCR than they could together performing as members of the NLCR. Of something like 30 original albums, I count about 5 that are in print as CD’s.

The irony is this:

The Ramblers’ influence on generations of young musicians who have followed in their footsteps is incalculable: it’s difficult to imagine a revival of old-time music of any consequence without them. (MusicHound Folk: The Essential Album Guide)

Jerry Garcia, Ry Cooder, and David Grisman learned to play from their albums. Bob Dylan’s recent autobiography includes a thirteen-page ode dedicated to dramatizing the enormous impact that Rambler Mike Seeger had on the young Dylan:

Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it … But then something immediate happens and you’re in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it — you’re set free … Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door — something jerks it open and you’re shoved in and your head has to go into a different place. Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it. Mike Seeger had that affect on me.

There’s little danger of over-stating the Rambler’s influence — at least until somebody finally gets around to just stating it. Philip Gura, in a hair-raising essay in the journal Southern Culture, is one of the few who’ve tried. The essay leaves you with the impression that he may be over-stating the case. But is he? It’s worth looking into the New Lost City Ramblers and giving it some thought. You may as well — they’re out standing in their field.

On Not Going To Camp

I never went to camp — that is, until my wife sent me to Banjo Camp for my 40th birthday present. My mental images of summer camp come from Alan Sherman’s "Camp Granada" (hello mudduh, hello faddah), from the movies (comedies and horror flicks, mostly), and from the stories friends have told me (typically about their earliest sexual awakenings).

Today, I mostly hear about camp from my wife. Routinely, I turn to her to announce that I’ve made some fantastically paradigm-smashing ethnomusicological discovery — an obscure song long-forgotten in this age of mechanical reproduction, the tune and lyrics of which finally unlock some nagging mystery of the American imagination.

"Oh, sure," she says, "we sang that at camp!" At this point, she shout-sings all of the lyrics to my new discovery, complete with elaborate hand choreography, animal sounds, rhythmic clapping, etc. A field recording of Maybelle and Sara Carter’s rendition of the "The Ship That Never Returned" was such a discovery. The song turned out to have been reworked by the Kingston Trio as "M.T.A.", and was a favorite of the counselors at some Bible camp or other in Minnesota, where my wife heard it a couple decades before I did.

This experience is always a little deflating, needless to say. I begin to wonder what I could possibly have to contribute if all my greatest discoveries turn out to be well-known to every Brownie in the country. But I appreciate being reminded that these old folksongs are still alive, both in my wife’s memory and in my curiosity.

Sometimes I think I really missed something by not having gone to camp. More often, I suspect that, had I learned more of these old songs back then, I would not have the fanatical zeal for them that I do today. And I enjoy my fanatical zeal …

The Meaning of the John Henry Story

Steel Driving Kitten
my kitten Henry (is not a steel-drivin’ man)

I first heard the John Henry story from the public schools, I guess, or maybe from my family, some of whom were involved in the Scouts. And I’d gotten a very specific impression of what the story meant.

But once I grew up and started listening to the music of the 1920’s, I found very little support there for the interpretation I’d grown up with. I had always thought it was a story of Man against Machine, where human virtues like bravery, nobility, vulnerability, and the work ethic did battle against technology and heartless Progress.

But that’s not quite what I hear on the old records. Take the version Mississippi John Hurt recorded on December 28, 1928, on that same Christmas trip to New York when he recorded “Avalon Blues.” It’s called “Spike Driver Blues”:

Take this hammer and carry it to my captain
Tell him I’m gone
Just tell him I’m gone
“I’m sure he’s gone”

This is the hammer that killed John Henry
But it won’t kill me
But it won’t kill me
Ain’t gunna kill me

John Henry was a steal driving boy
But he went down
But he went down
That’s why I’m gone

Hurt’s delivery isn’t comic, it seems to me, but sweet, sincere, and thoughtful. There’s no mention of any steam drill at all, just a killer hammer which the singer renounces.

J. E. Mainer and his Mountaineers did a version on June 15, 1936 in which the young John Henry issues a prophesy:

John Henry was a little boy
Lord, he sat on his pappa’s knee
He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel
Said this hammer’ll be the death of me
This hammer be the death of me

This version does mention the contest with the steam drill, but as always, it’s the hammer that’s the cause of John Henry’s death.

When I first started listening to the old recordings, the biggest surprise about the message of John Henry was that there didn’t seem to be much of a message at all — folk music, it turned out, isn’t nearly as preachy as Folk Music. Stranger still was that insofar as there was a message, it seemed to be that hard manual labor just plain sucks and should be avoided.

The story of John Henry seems to have taken hold around, maybe, 1910 or so, and everybody seems to agree that Henry was a black man. So originally the story was, partly, a complaint against working conditions for African Americans during Reconstruction.

But when I encountered it in the post-WWII suburbs, the story was being made to reflect the conflicts and concerns of that time and place. It seemed to assure us of the dignity of hard work. At the same time, it seemed to reflect our middle-class anxieties over the idea of technology rendering our jobs obsolete. Maybe today John Henry would be in a steel-driving race with 30 tech workers from Bangladesh.

There’s a lot of good information on the John Henry story. Check out Norm Cohen’s Long Steel Rail for more on John Henry (I keep intending to do so myself). I recently discovered Brett Williams’ interesting John Henry: A Bio-Bibliography at a used bookstore. And Harry Smith’s anthologies of folk music (the original Volumes 1 though 3 from Folkways and now Volume 4 from Revenant) are crammed to the gills with songs about hammers.

Pop, Skip, Hiss and Forget the Lyrics

I’ve been wondering (here and there) why the records of the 1920’s have been returned to generation after generation, seeming to never quit revolutionizing the way their listeners see (and hear) the world. I may never fully figure it out, but a few of the reasons are surprisingly simple.

My favorite of the old recordings might still be Charlie Poole’s “White House Blues.” Its effect on me is always overwhelming, but uncanny, mysterious. Let’s just say it’s a stunning record.

More strange still is that Charlie Poole screws up the lyrics on a dozen occasions in the short span of the record’s 3 minutes. I’m even not sure what a lot of the lyrics are, they’re such a mess. But this is the cut that I’d pick as The Best Song Ever.

There’s a live recording of the New Lost City Ramblers from 1978, I guess, where Tracy Schwarz introduces the next song saying,

Here’s a song that Henry Whitter and G. B. Grayson gave to the world, like delivering a million, million, million dollars worth of GOLD all on one side of a 78 rpm record. “I’ve Always Been a Rambler.” As far as I’m concerned, that’s about the best song they ever put out. When I first heard that, I think I’d of DIED if I couldn’t have gotten at it. And here it is, “I’ve Always Been a Rambler.”

And with that, they strike up their obsessively precise imitation of the cut on the 78. What’s most surprising is that Schwarz intentionally slurs the lyrics, making them hard to understand — sometimes I wonder if even he knows what the lyrics are supposed to be. Mind you, this is the song Schwarz feels is the greatest artifact in the history of mankind.

It’s clear to me that those gaps are a big part of why Schwarz and I listen to these old scratched records, which were almost always cut in one single take and then released “warts and all.” Maybelle Carter used to insist on doing multiple takes until she got it perfect, and then was usually frustrated to find that record executive Ralph Peer had chosen one of the takes with a mistake on it. Peer felt that mistakes caused the listeners to lean in closer and concentrate on the record. He was right.

The effort invested by the listener counts for something toward the listener’s enjoyment, and the “gaps” in the records are spaces through which the listener’s imagination can insinuate itself into the aesthetic experience. In this sense, the old records act the way modern poetry, painting, dance, and other arts do — they seek to force collaboration between artist and audience by leaving open evocative gaps in their meaning. A lot of people these days think that Bob Dylan figured out a way to turn pop music into modern art after spending years straining to understand the old 78 rpm records from the 1920’s.

Why the 1920’s?

from “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” UNC-Chapel Hill

I’m always writing here about records from the 1920’s — so much so, that it might sound like I have “a thing” for them, that I’m just obsessed with that decade for peculiar personal reasons. Maybe. But the main reason the 1920’s records keep appearing at The Celestial Monochord is that they are really and objectively special. Something happened in the 1920’s that had never happened before, can never happen again, and changed forever a lot more than just music in America.

— — —

The commercial record business started just before 1890 with wax cylinders, and evolved from there. The customers were well-off white city folk — the sort of people who could afford the high-tech gizmo that sound recording was then. For the next 30+ years, this audience bought (and was sold) the sort of music it liked — opera singers, European classical, military bands, Tin Pan Alley pop tunes, etc. Mostly, the recordings only supplemented sheet music, which had long been the primary way people bought music for the home.

Then came the 1920’s. Better recording and player technology had been developed and was now inexpensive, making records appealing to a wider audience. Perhaps more important, the record companies were nervous about radio. They imagined their traditional white, well-off customers investing in this new-fangled technology, and then just enjoying its limitless, streaming, high-fidelity music — for free. Why ever buy another record? (Record companies are fretting over the same question today.)

The record industry realized that a vast market was untapped — new immigrants, poor urban and rural whites, and urban and rural blacks. Essentially, anyone who couldn’t yet affort a radio.

So, early in the decade, the industry started seeking out musicians who could play what these audiences liked. Such musicians had never been recorded before in human history and their music had been badly under-represented in sheet music. Companies like Vocalion, Paramount, Okeh, and Columbia took mobile recording units into cities throughout the South, or brought the musicians to New York and Chicago.

Today, what we think of today as the earliest days of jazz, the blues, country, folk, bluegrass, and gospel can be vividly heard in the recordings of the 1920’s: Dixieland, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Charlie Patton, the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Uncle Dave Macon, Mississippi John Hurt, Clarence Ashley, the Skillet Lickers, Blind Willie Johnson, Rev. J. M. Gates, the Sacred Harp. What came before is generally known only in the most shadowy terms.

The economic bubble of the 1920’s burst dramatically with the onset of the Depression. Many record companies went out of business, and the rest slashed their recording schedules. The next time the record business picked up, the U.S. had experienced not only the vastly disruptive Great Depression but the even more vastly disruptive Second World War as well. By then, everything had changed.

In decade after decade since the 1920’s, virtually everyone who has mattered to most American music listeners has made these recordings the cornerstone of their work — from Aaron Copeland and George Gershwin to Elvis Presely, from Earl Scruggs to Jimi Hendrix, from Miles Davis and Charlie Parker to Johnny Cash and Gillian Welch … Perhaps mysteriously, these records have remained an inexhaustibly generous wellspring of inspiration.

Perhaps mysteriously. For me, trying to explain just why this is true — why these records are inexhaustible wellsprings of inspiration — has seemed like the intellectual and spiritual adventure of a lifetime. Why the 1920’s? At least a few answers are already clear and are surprisingly concrete. I’ll try to mention some in the coming days.

Blind Willie Johnson: Revival

The first musician of the 1920’s I ever took an interest in was Blind Willie Johnson, and my interest grew directly from my interest in astronomy.

When I had just turned 16, PBS first aired Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series. Music was central to the show’s mission, so I bought its soundtrack album and listened to it constantly. It included an excerpt of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (On Which Our Lord Was Laid).” Sagan had earlier edited an LP that was bolted to the side of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft. The LP was a kind of timecapsule, designed to introduce the species that built the spacecraft to any civilization that might find it millions of years from now. It was Earth’s greatest hits, and it included the full version of Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night.”

When I went off to college, I visited the University music library and listened to The Complete Blind Willie Johnson closely and repeatedly, and I was very moved by it. Johnson’s voice was shreaded and harsh, sort of like Tom Waits or Louis Armstrong, but was capable of a huge range of tone and emotion. His guitar-playing — typically slide guitar — was extraordinarily expressive and could act as a rhythm section at the same time it played melody.

I read then, in college, that Willie Johnson was blind because his stepmother (his mother had died when he was very young) blinded him with a pan of lye. She did it to punish Willie’s father for having beaten her, which he did after finding her in bed with another man. Like many blind black men then, Willie learned to play guitar on streetcorners to sustain himself. His father had always wanted his son to be a preacher, and Willie played religious songs exclusively. He was not a bluesman, but a gospel guitarist and singer — indeed, he’s often thought of as the greatest ever recorded. Probably his best-known song is “Motherless Children Have a Hard Time.”

For reasons I don’t understand, this was the last collection of 78’s I would hear for another 12 years. When I finally started buying such CD’s in early 1996, The Complete Blind Willie Johnson was the first one I got.

The liner notes to that collection are written by the well-known jazz and blues historian Samuel Charters, who had owned a copy of “Dark Was the Night” as a teenager in the late 1940’s. They are a riveting read:

For anyone who has grown up after the ’60s, already knowing about singers like Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt … Memphis Minnie, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, there’s no way to understand what so much of the American musical heritage meant to us when it was almost completely a mystery. The few records we knew about, the handful of names that we knew, were like a faint, distant light through a mist, and we had no idea what the light meant.

In 1953, Charters set off for Texas to try and find out about Blind Willie Johnson (this was very early in the history of such expeditions). When he finally found Johnson’s home, Charters was informed that he had died only a few years before. Charters writes, “If I had known the way to the run-down house in Beaumont when I first heard Dark Was the Night, I could have asked him to play it for me.”

I usually think of Willie Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt at the same time, precisely because their biographies are so profoundly different from one another — especially the end of their biographies. For Johnson, there was no Folk Revival. Its absence in Willie’s life vividly shows us what the Folk Revival really accomplished when it rediscovered 1920’s musicians like Dock Boggs and John Hurt. Willie Johnson’s widow Angeline describes the death of her husband in Beaumont, TX so soon before the young Samuel Charters knocked on her door, looking for his hero:

He died from pneumonia … We burnt out there in the north end, 1440 Forrest, and when we burnt out we didn’t know many people, and so I just, you know, drug him back in there and we laid on them wet bed clothes with a lot of newspaper. It didn’t bother me, but it bothered him. See, he’d turn over and I’d just lay up on the paper, and I thought if you put a lot of paper on, you know, it would keep us from getting sick. We didn’t get wet, but just the dampness, you know and then he’s singing and his veins open and everything, and it just made him sick. [The hospital] wouldn’t accept him. He’d have been living today if they’d accepted him. ‘Cause he’s blind. Blind folks has a hard time.

Mississippi John Hurt: Revival

drawing of Mississippi John Hurt by Robert Crumb

In the mid-1960’s, Dock Boggs told Mike Seeger that if he had his life to do over again, he’d learn to play guitar like Mississippi John Hurt. Around the same time, Dave Prine’s little brother asked him for guitar lessons, so he gave John Prine a Carter Family record (so he’d know what good songwriting was), and a John Hurt album (so he’d know what good guitar playing sounded like). A college student at the time reports that he’d go to John Hurt concerts because all the best looking girls flocked to them, but he soon found that their eyes and attentions were focused exclusively on this 71 year old black man.

It’s hard to grasp how profoundly unlikely all of this would have been only a few years before. John Hurt was a tenant farmer in Mississippi and considered himself an amateur musician. He’d recorded just 13 songs in 1928 and they didn’t sell particularly well. The record industry shrank as the Depression set in and Hurt continued farming, apparently thinking little of his brief recording gig.

After WWII, the old records cut by southern musicians in the 1920’s were not commercially available. They made the rounds mostly as bootleg tapes among a tiny subculture of obsessive, cranky collectors and a few college kids who took an interest in very obscure music. Hurt’s records were particularly rare, since few had been manufactured in the first place. But Harry Smith put two John Hurt cuts on his influential 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, causing some of these hobbyists to go looking for him. They always failed.

Then in 1963, Tom Hoskins and Mike Stewart, two young white folkies, got a tape of Hurt’s Avalon Blues through their informal network of tape traders. Hurt had recorded Avalon Blues at the end of a week-long stay in New York that spanned Christmas 1928. Homesick in the big city, Hurt slipped in a line about his home in Avalon being always on his mind.

Hoskins and Stewart figured Mississippi John Hurt might have meant an Avalon, Mississippi. So, they grabbed a current atlas and studied the state. There was no Avalon on the map. So they found an 1878 atlas and there, between Greenwood and Grenada, was Avalon. They packed some clothes, guitars, and a tape recorder and drove south to look for Hurt, though they figured he was probably dead.

When they arrived in Avalon, they found it was basically just a tiny general store. They approached the men sitting on its porch and asked if anyone knew a guitarist named John Hurt. One man lifted an arm, pointed a finger, and said, “Down that road, third mailbox up the hill.” Hoskins and Stewart drove, and found a little black man around 70 years old driving a tractor, looking startled by the sudden appearence of two white men who looked like they meant business. When they insisted he follow them back to Washington DC, Hurt decided he’d better go “voluntarily,” suspecting they were the “police or the FBI or something like that.”

Folk festival gigs back east were easily arranged for Hurt, and he was an enormous hit. Hurt played in a technically dazzling but graceful and gentle ragtime style, his thumb playing bass lines to take the place of a piano player’s left hand, and two fingers picking out melodies like a pianist’s right hand. Hurt’s voice and demeanor were witty and heartbreakingly sweet. The crowds literally lurched forward to be close to him. When Hurt played the Johnny Carson show, he had never owned a television himself.

He died in his sleep at home in Mississippi, only three years after being rediscovered.

“The Folk Revival” of the 1950’s and 1960’s was a revival of interest in certain songs or styles, but it was also a revival of many talented artist’s lives — or at any rate, of their music careers. Nobody is more closely associated with that aspect of the Revival than John Hurt. When I hear his recordings and wonder at the all-consuming benevolence of their sound, the generosity of Hurt’s presence, and his virtuoso guitar picking, I’m swept up in gratitude for the Folk Revival. It went out and found John Hurt, made him one of the most deeply (if not widely) loved Americans of his day, and was able to tell him so in the last months of his life.

Dock Boggs: Revival

Dock Boggs, age 9

Ever since banjoist Dock Boggs made his first recordings, people’s interest in him has often taken on a rare intensity, part revelation, part morbid compulsion.

In 2005, Rennie Sparks described his 1927 recording of Pretty Polly as “compassionless, cold as a cockroach.” Greil Marcus devoted a whole chapter to Boggs in his book about Bob Dylan’s Basesment Tapes — Boggs, he wrote, sang Oh Death with “the words jerking in his throat like a marionette.” The night in 1932 that Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger first heard Boggs’ recording of Pretty Polly, they realized that an American folk music was still alive and they dedicated the rest of their lives to it.

In 1963, Mike Seeger, Charles and Ruth’s son, sought out the long-lost Boggs while traveling with his wife and three pre-school children in a Studebaker Lark station wagon. When they finally realized they were really getting close to finding Boggs, it was getting dark and they needed to find lodging. Mike’s wife finally suggested they look in a phone book under “Boggs.” Seeger was amazed — “Look in the phone book for Dock Boggs?” Boggs was listed, they called, and Dock was in.

In the last eight years of Boggs’ life, Seeger became Boggs’ recordist, booking agent, best friend, confessor, and maybe in a certain unforeseeable way, demon. Seeger writes: “I’ve often wondered if his second — his 1960’s — music career was good for him.”

In 1910, Boggs had gone to work under the surface of the Earth, in the coal mines, at the age of 12. He spent 44 years digging coal in eastern Kentucky and western Virginia. In his youth, he supplemented a coal miner’s starvation wages the same way many others did — bootlegging whiskey. It was a violent existence, reflecting a disregard for people’s lives shared by the coal companies that dominated the region’s economy. Boggs was often arrested, carried a gun and used it, beat a brother-in-law almost to death, and at one point plotted in detail the murder of his wife’s entire family. “I’m talking about being set on it. I was set on it,” he told Mike Seeger’s tape recorder.

During the boom of the late 1920’s, Boggs made several recordings and vividly glimpsed a chance to escape the mines through music. But the boom soon busted, and Boggs missed a last recording session because he was unable to scrape up any cash for a train ticket. He continued to play his banjo for a few years, but eventually had to pawn it during a run on the banks. Decades later, he would talk to Mike Seeger about these losses with acute pain.

When Mike and his family showed up in their station wagon, Boggs had just retrieved his pawned banjo no more than six months before. Members of his wife’s holiness church considered the playing of music to be a sin, and to both Dock and his wife Sara, the instrument was an ominous reminder of their darker days.

He travelled and recorded extensively with Seeger. Boggs deeply enjoyed his second music career, there’s no question about it. There’s also no question that it was emotionally challenging for him as well. He started to drink heavily, at least occasionally. On one such occasion, with Mike Seeger’s tape recorder rolling, Boggs threatened to buy a .38 Special and murder someone over legal issues regarding a cesspool, as well as the entire staff of an insurance office. One night, during a concert tour, Seeger and Boggs shared a sleeping room and at one point, Seeger awoke to find that Boggs had had a “rough wakening.” Dock said he’d dreamt of “burning hell.”

Boggs was a complex, intelligent, and sensitive person, so we’ll never fully understand the conflicts that troubled him in those final years. Surely, his 44 years in the mines had a lot to do with it. Boggs was a staunch advocate of the United Mine Workers union, and understood the brutality of an extractive economy. Boggs’ father had started life with 350 acres of land, but sold one farm after another to the coal companies until, “When he died, he never owned enough land to bury him on.” The chance to make money and fans through music must’ve produced regrets over the time Boggs had lost, as well as something like survivor’s guilt.

My copy of the double CD of Boggs’ music from the 1960’s is one of my most cherished possessions. Certainly, it’s one chapter in the life of Mike Seeger, which has taken on mythic proportions for me and, I’ve noticed, a lot of other fans of oldtime music. But the facts of what Boggs’ music meant to Boggs himself — how it framed, troubled, and gave meaning to his life — make his 1960’s work some of the deepest art I’ve ever known. In the end, what really make these recordings so valuable is something I’ve barely mentioned here — Boggs’ startling, touching voice and his exquisitely original and skillful banjo playing.

1969 and the Moon Landing Part 2: Alice’s Restaurant

Alice’s Restaurant is a long, rambling, very funny song about a lot of things — particularly the absurd way that its author, Arlo Guthrie, got out of the draft.

A film version of the song was rushed to the theaters soon after the song became a hit. In Arlo Guthrie’s fascinating audio commentary for the “special features” of the film’s DVD, Arlo describes the writing of the song, and then its first public performance:

I went to the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, and they said, “Oh, Arlo Guthrie, you know, aren’t you Woody’s kid?” And they put me out in this field — you know, I was just 18 or 19 years old, I was a real young guy — and I remember playing Alice’s Restaurant standing on a box in a field with about 300 people.

They got such a response that they put me on some other program later on that afternoon with, you know, about a thousand people and that got such a respsonse that they put me on at the very end of the festival, and that evening there were probably about twenty, thirty thousand people in the audience.

They were afraid to put an unknown person like me at the end of a big festival. It’d be really chancy, I mean, what if I was terrible? What if it was horrible? …

And so Judy Collins came out, Joan Baez came out and then other people came out, and Pete Seeger came out. And by the end of the evening, all the performers were onstage singing Alice’s Restaurant.

And that was the day that Man first walked on the Moon. I remember being onstage and telling everybody, you know, “There’s people walking around up there.” And looking at the moon. And it was a big day. Big day for me, big day for everybody. The next day, I started getting the phone calls from all the record companies and the execs and stuff.

It’s true that the song made its public premier at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1967. But “Man first walked on the Moon” two years later, in July 1969. There were no astronauts in space during the 1967 festival.

Part of what fascinates me about the film, and Arlo’s commentary, is that they are both constantly haunted by endless coincidences, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and mysteries — some of which Arlo points out, and some of which he seems to miss. The moon landing the night of his great triumph at Newport, for example, happened only in Arlo’s memory.

The timing of the song and the film interests me. Hollywood in the mid-60s was in pretty bad shape and the studios were desperate to get people into theaters. Bonnie and Clyde (produced by 28-year-old Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn) was a surprise success and helped encourage bolder movies by sometimes by younger artists, oriented toward younger audiences.

Alice’s Restaurant was Arthur Penn’s next directing job after Bonnie and Clyde, and has a disorienting strangeness that seems to come from being a weird hybrid of countercultural documentary and studio pandering. So, Alice’s Restaurant feels like it catches Hollywood in mid-morph, trying to figure out how to do a new thing. The movie is one key to understanding Hollywood at that moment.

But I want to understand the year 1969 and how the The Moon Landing fit into it. One lesson of Arlo’s mistaken timeline is that the recollections of the major players — whether astronauts or folksingers — are 36 year old, and are bound to be cloudy.

Certainly, any drugs used at the time are unlikely to help, but they’re not the only thing that can make things “run together” — young people in 1969 had a lot on their minds, what with a draft, a war, assassinations, Nixon, and such. I often remind myself that between 1965 and 1970, there were … well, just five years.

But the main lesson of Arlo’s mistake is that it wasn’t some other mistake — it was about the Moon Landing. It is testimony to the importance of the landing not just as a technological feat, but as a reflection and contributor to the headiness of the times.

The 1967 Newport Folk Festival was certainly one of the most important events in Arlo Guthrie’s life. It changed everything for him, and it was inextricably wrapped up in momentous national events (just listen to the song). It really was a big day for everybody — every day seemed to be.

So, it makes sense that memories would get pegged to Apollo 11 as a way of expressing their own intensity and, especially, to express the way those memories were shaped by various dramatic displays of American power.

Part 1

The Crush Collision Trio

Crush Collision Trio

Recently, the Mullet River Boys, a trio of oldtime vaudevillean minstrels, saved what was, for me, an otherwise iffy show, The Ukulele Gala. I was surprised to find that they’re a local group I’d never heard of. In terms of the kind of music I love, I’m more familiar with Memphis 80 years ago than with my own town today. I need to do something about that.

I first realized this a few years ago when I stumbled across another Twin Cities group, The Crush Collision Trio fronted by Lonesome Dan Kase. Lonesome Dan (LORD, what makes that Dan so LONESOME?) is an oldstyle accoustic bluesman — I mean an even older style than you’re probably picturing.

The usual image people have of the accoustic “country” blues tends to come, I think, from people like Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, and Skip James as an old man. But when these guys learned to play the blues, they were kids in at least the late 1920’s or later, and they were playing what was, at the time, a new approach. It was slower, sadder, with sometimes irregular rhythms not meant for dancing. Their lyrics were often pretty grim.

But among the first round of solo bluesmen recorded in the 20’s were older men who played an older style that grew up in house parties, dance joints, and medicine shows. Their rhythms were more often steady and lively, their lyrics were geared toward crowds of mixed gender, age, and race, and they tended to play in a range of different styles, including religious tunes. I’m thinking of Charlie Patton, Mississippi John Hurt, Henry Thomas, and Jim Jackson. Many of their songs, verses, subjects and styles were shared by older white songsters recorded at the same time, such as Uncle Dave Macon. A few of these older black songsters were recorded playing banjos.

This is the terrain that Dan Kase has claimed for himself. His band includes a mandolin (by Matt Yetter) and a washboard (Mikkel Beckman), and when I corner these guys in bars, they each seem to confirm my admittedly shaky grasp of this storyline. (Still, I can’t speak for them, of course.) A high-ranking, unnamed source assures me that if I like the Crush Collision Trio, I’d love a guy who lives in Duluth named Charlie Parr. We’ll see — Dan’s music, with or without his Trio, always makes me feel pretty damned right with the world.

All these Minnesotans seem to be in their twenties or thirties. Clearly, this evidence from Minnesota — together with more familiar national acts like the Old Crow Medicine Show, Jolie Holland, Gillian Welch (etc., etc., etc.) — suggests that the “Folk Revival” that started in the 1990’s is bearing fruit. Suddenly, there’s a reason to see live music.

As an aside, The Crush Collision Trio named themselves after a publicity stunt. In 1896, William George Crush staged a head-on collision of two locomotives on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas train line (“The Katy”). Forty-thousand spectators watched the smash-up somewhere between Waco and Hillsboro, Texas. Unexpectedly, both trains’ boilers exploded shortly after impact, killing two spectators and mutilating several others. (Crush Collision Trio shows tend to work out a little better.)