Category: Harry Smith Anthology

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.

A Guide to My Amnesia Theater

My new essay on Moonshiner’s Dance, America’s musical geography, and how to revive extinct meanings: What’s the deal?

Monochord headquarters has been celebrating the publication of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: America Changed Through Music, a collection of new essays about the mesmerizing and influential 1952 boxed set of late 1920s and early 1930s recordings.

My contribution to the collection is the product of eleven years of research, thinking, re-thinking, and activism. It’s called “Smith’s Amnesia Theater: ‘Moonshiner’s Dance’ in Minnesota.”

I have oceans of stuff to say about it. For now, I’ll focus on the simple question, “What just happened?”

The new book and essay: What are they?

The book of essays is by a variety of writers, musicians, and scholars, some of whom attended a 2012 conference in London marking the 60th anniversary of Smith’s landmark boxed set.

My presentation at the London conference became the seed of my essay in the book. It focuses on one cut in the Anthology that had been otherwise neglected by historians and other researchers: “Moonshiner’s Dance — Part I,” recorded in 1927 in St. Paul, Minnesota, by the Victoria Cafe Orchestra.

That recording is the Anthology‘s only Northern cut — the only recording unambiguously by musicians from outside the American South. I once made a map of the Anthology — seemingly the only such map anybody’s ever made. It looks a lot like a map of the Confederacy.

For the first time, my essay releases a major chunk of my research into “Moonshiner’s Dance.” To my surprise, I found that answering the simple question “What is this recording?” required a wide-ranging investigation into geography, history, identity, and meaning.

All this new information, the essay argues, matters to how we understand the Anthology, and to how we might encounter any expression left to us by a gone world. The essay is an impassioned plea for open-minded and imaginative curiosity about America’s cultural geography.

“Although ignored, the 1920s recordings of Twin Cities musicians are folk music that, on myriad terms, consciously and sometimes emphatically testifies to the performers’ identities and what they understood to be at stake in their existence.” – Smith’s Amnesia Theater

I meant the essay to feel like a revue, a little like Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The curtain opens on a scene that turns out to be another curtain that opens to reveal a different scene that also becomes a curtain, and so on. If you get bored with my essay, don’t worry — it will take off in another direction soon.

So far, the most consistent comments I’ve received is that the writing is “beautiful” and the scholarship is original. I guess most people try to be kind. If you look for it, you may find humor in there, wisecracks, hidden Easter eggs, and certainly a lot of pictures.

Where can a person read this essay?

This is a scholarly publication, so the authors don’t get paid — I just want my truth out there, and I deeply appreciate your interest.

— Email me. The book’s cost makes this book (and my message) far too rare a commodity. So, if you email me for a copy of my essay, I will very gladly send you a PDF. There are other pieces in the book you’ll definitely also want to read, and holding the book in your hand, you can see a community thinking about the Anthology — it’s a pity it isn’t priced more democratically.

— Please ask your public and university libraries to get the book. Don’t be shy — do it! Providing you with materials that are difficult to get on your own is a big reason librarians exist. Besides, if they get the book for you, it will presumably be there for the rest of your community.

— Please buy the book. For now, Routledge priced the hardback ($152) mainly for university and public libraries, profs in the field, etc. I’m currently seeing buying options on Amazon for around $100. There are Kindle and eBook options for $38-$55.

— At the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, the book is now available for reading and photocopying at the Gale Family Library. That’s where this whole adventure started for me in May 2006, so I find this very satisfying.

What’s the deal with the Victoria Theater?

When I started all this, nobody who’d heard the Anthology could forget the sound of Moonshiner’s Dance. It was, in its own way and degree, infamous around the world, partly for having mysterious origins.

At the same time, nobody in St. Paul understood that the Victoria building (a familiar, vacant, and deteriorating old building down on University Avenue) was responsible for an utterly unique contribution to an influential American masterpiece. Nobody had ever researched the building beyond an architectural study and cursory literature searches.

I set about trying to reconstruct the meanings of the place. I soon believed St. Paul needed to understand what it had. And I wanted Anthology fans to understand that the mystery was solved, and the answers really matter. I wanted to reconnect the lines and let the power flow.

Then, in 2008, the Victoria Theater was threatened with demolition. The neighborhood association asked me to write the nomination to get the building named as an official heritage preservation site.

Having spent two years editing historic and archaeological survey reports as an editor for a Cultural Resource Management company, I jumped at the chance. And I fought to get the city ordinance passed. Then, I got to work on this essay for the Anthology conference and book.

Although I had spent years in academia, it was this experience that taught me what Harry Smith surely knew—that scholarship matters, and that it can matter as much in its absence as in its presence. – Smith’s Amnesia Theater

Now, local neighborhood and global community would both get the chance to think about the kinship Harry Smith’s art had built between them. Despite some exhilarating successes, I still despair that my message will ever quite sink in. At least I’ve sung a little of my song.

Your questions, requests, or suggestions about the Victoria Theater’s future should go to the director of the Frogtown Neighborhood Association, Caty Royce at caty@frogtownmn.org.

What’s next? A book on “Moonshiner’s Dance”?

I wonder. I already look like “that guy” who won’t stop talking about his old polka record, but readers of my essay will hopefully appreciate that there really are worlds to explore here.

Only a tiny fraction of my findings made it into the essay. HAVE I GOT STORIES. If I died tomorrow, I’d be glad I got this essay into the world, but too many big connections and haunting details would die with me. And to my eyes, each aspect of the story magnifies and multiplies the meanings of the others. I’m not sure what to do about that.

For now, I just hope to go back to what I was up to before the Victoria Theater building, the London conference, and the essay took over my life. I hope I’ll try to write and research and get the stories to you, one way or another, before my time’s up.

Rare Medium: The Anthology on Cassette Tape

A cassette-tape reissue of the Anthology of American Folk Music raises curious questions

My last vehicle was a green & tan 1993 Dodge Dakota extended-cab pickup with a cassette player and somewhat blown-out speakers. I used that cassette player every day for years, generally without irony.

But you should’ve heard Tom Waits’ “Jesus Gonna Be Here” — the bassline was just a toneless rumble, and all you could really hear clearly was that monotonous slide guitar. It was beautiful.

That was a long time ago. Today, I’m not sure I still own a working cassette player.

But just last week, a label in the UK calling themselves Death Is Not The End (hereafter, DINTE) reissued the Anthology of American Folk Music on cassette tape. Of course, I’m tempted to pony up. It’s pretty affordable — £21 for the 3-volume set before transatlantic shipping.

But then, I don’t have anything appropriate to play them on. And if I had the equipment, I’d probably only use it to dub over to ones & zeros my tapes of some clawhammer banjo lessons from a decade ago.

Besides, I own two copies of Smithsonian-Folkways’ 1997 reissue of the Anthology on CD (since one set of CDs is apparently one too few). Plus, I’ve already bought more than a few other copies of that 1997 CD set as gifts for friends and for people who’ve been helpful in my research on “Moonshiner’s Dance.”

The 1997 CD set was the format in which I first met the Anthology.

I had stumbled across Greil Marcus’s book Invisible Republic at the Har Mar Barnes & Noble in late 1997. I read it voraciously, not quite realizing that the book was only a few weeks old. It convinced me to go buy the Anthology, so I hurried over to the Electric Fetus in south Minneapolis. There, I held the boxed set in my hands for the first time, again not fully appreciating that this had only been possible for a few weeks.

Because it was new, the Electric Fetus had it on sale. And I had an Electric Fetus coupon. And everything at the Fetus was 10% off that day. I remember asking a dude behind the desk which of these discounts would be applied. To my great surprise, they would all be applied. Still, it would be over $50, so I walked around the Fetus for an hour with the boxed set tucked under my arm before I screwed up my courage to pull out my wallet.

Looking back, I see they should’ve given me that first set *and* electrified my fetus for free. Folkways should’ve sprung my lizard for nothing. When I think of those fifty bucks now, after the countless tens of thousands in opportunity costs and hard currency I’ve blown thanks to buying that very first copy … damn! Still, of course, I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

I didn’t bother getting the LP reissue Mississippi Records put out a couple years ago. I didn’t want to discourage Smithsonian-Folkways itself from doing a proper job of it instead. Besides, from what I can assume judging mostly from the total silence on the subject from Mississippi Records, their LPs were just burned off the Smithsonian CDs that I already own.

Some vinyl partisans claim that old LPs sound better than typical CDs because down-sampling the music for CD deletes information contained in the original analog recording. Could be — but you sure as hell don’t get that information back by burning a CD back onto vinyl. I have no problem with the Mississippi Records release, but buyer beware if you think you’re buying vinyl sound integrity and not just an accessory for your handlebar mustache … not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The Mississippi Records LP release also would have been a different matter had they, for example, started with another batch of source 78s and reassembled the Anthology from scratch. What if Mississippi Records had been introducing us to dubs from completely different copies of the 78 RPM records that comprise the Anthology?

Now *that* would be something. Not only have various technologies been advancing since the mid 1990s, every 78 RPM disc — not every title, every physical disc — is a unique object. You know this if you’ve ever played the same recording from two ostensibly identical copies of a 78, one after the other. You don’t just hear more or less, you hear different things in the two copies. They have lived alternate lives between 1920-something and the day they arrive together again on your turntable. Quality is qualitative, not quantitative (that’s quantity).

More recently, I ponied up a Clydesdale for a pristine, very early copy of the Folkways LP boxed set. I don’t know but I’ve been told it’s from 1952, the very year Folkways first released the Anthology. That original release was practically made by the hands of Harry Smith, Moe Asch, and Peter Bartok by spinning on the turntable 78s in Harry’s personal collection and dubbing them onto the master.

Then, 45 years later, Smithsonian-Folkways used a lot of that 1952 master to make the 1997 CD reissue. But for some cuts, they swapped in cleaner, newly-located 78s. They also did some noise reduction and fussed with speed/pitch.

That’s why having a copy of the 1952 LP opens up the possibility of observing the handiwork of the 1997 reissue team. What exactly did they do to 1952 to get the 1997 results? I’ll write about that here when I think I’ve got something to say. For now, DINTE’s cassette reissue seems likely to have been recorded off the 1997 CDs and seems unlikely to provide that sort of new insight.

What really interests me about DINTE’s cassette reissue is that it nearly unbreaks the circle of the Anthology’s historic formats. With a cassette tape being made available, the job of format revival is almost done.

The Anthology first appeared as a collection of LPs. Those eventually went out of print, but the Anthology never did. No Folkways recordings have ever been out of print — even when the company couldn’t afford to press new vinyl of a title, Moe Asch kept it in print by any means necessary. The Smithsonian agreed to the same policy as a condition of acquiring Folkways.

For many years, the only way Folkways could sell the Anthology was as cassette tapes made on demand. I wish I’d known enough to order it during that period — I’d like to see what those tapes looked like. Did they have cover art? Were they typed? Mimeographed? Handwritten? Did you get Smith’s booklet?

Already in the early 1960’s, Smith’s original cover art (featuring the celestial monochord) had been replaced with Ben Shahn’s Farm Security Administration photograph of a farmer — it took the 1997 CD set to restore the long-abandoned celestial monochord cover art. So, given the specific cover art that was current at the time Folkways started fulfilling orders with on-demand cassette tapes, DINTE’s choice of Ben Shahn’s photo makes serious sense. That level of thinking stuff through is a good sign.

In any case, those days of on-demand cassette tapes were the dark ages that the 1997 CD reissue was designed to end.

If you want new LPs of the Anthology, I think you can still find the Mississippi Records reissue. And of course, the CD boxed set is still available from the Smithsonian-Folkways website. And suddenly, that in-between era of on-demand tape is now also covered, thanks to DINTE’s cassette reissue.

The only period in the Anthology’s history not currently available as a reissue is its prehistory.

There was a time before Smith and Asch had even dreamed of creating such a collection. In that pre-Anthology period, all those 78s were just unrelated, scattered old records, even if today they look like scripture lost among dusty discs of apocrypha.

I’ve got to assume somebody is out there working to reissue the collection of 78 RPM records that Smith assembled to make the Anthology. I imagine each reissued disc would have to include its original B side, a subject often discussed by Anthology devotees.

I’d hope anyone considering such project would do it up right by starting from scratch and not simply burning to vinyl 20-year-old CDs from Document or the Smithsonian. And they could also consider comping some bloggers, or at least answering their questions.

Notes on Frank Cloutier’s Grave

Finding the grave of a long-lost musician shakes my grasp of time and space

This past Thursday was the 55th anniversary of Frank E. Cloutier’s death.  He died just over 5 years after the release of the Anthology of American Folk Music, for which he’s marginally remembered.

Here’s what his headstone looked like on my first visit, the first Saturday after Thanksgiving, 2006:

It’s in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which is a beautiful drive from the Twin Cities, especially if you take Highway 61 through the Mississippi River valley.

You pass through, or near, Red Wing and Rollingstone, Wabasha and Zumbro Bottoms, Frontenac and Trempealau.  There are often bald eagles, red-tailed hawks.

Frank Cloutier is buried “on a local heroes hill,” to borrow John Prine’s phrase, in La Crosse’s Oak Grove Cemetery.  Frank’s is one of about 200 headstones of veterans of each American war from the Spanish American through the Korean.

Though basically from Rhode Island, Frank happened to be working as a piano player in Manitowoc when the US entered World War One — hence the “Wisconsin” on his Army-issued headstone.

He arrived in France with the 311 supply train company in 1918, not long before the Armistice and too late to see fighting.

But France was pretty out-of-sorts and needed supply trains, so Frank’s company stayed on after the war for about 9 months in wine country.  Less than six months after Frank returned to the states, Prohibition took effect.

Knowing he was both Catholic and a Freemason, I was curious to see whether his headstone would have a cross or a masonic square-and-compass.

Frank Cloutier contributed the Anthology‘s only Upper Midwestern music. Here’s his headstone on March 1, 2009:

As the musical director of St. Paul’s Victoria Cafe, Frank and his band made a 78 RPM record in September 1927 — “Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One”.

It was released that January, but by then the Victoria Cafe itself was already in Federal court, fighting for its life.  From the start, the record always represented a gone world.

“Moonshiner’s Dance” seems to have utterly vanished from history almost as soon as it was released.  When Frank died in 1957, he apparently didn’t know the recording had been reissued 5 years earlier in New York as part of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

But even then, nobody would’ve been able to predict the Anthology would become as important to America’s self-image as it’s become.

Frank Cloutier couldn’t have foreseen that “Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One” would one day become the best known recording made in Minnesota during his lifetime.

Its hard to appreciate how deeply the country had changed between 1927 and 1957.  Indeed, much of the Anthology’s power derived from the way the alien sounds of Prohibition-era, pre-Depression, pre-WW2 America mystified young Cold War listeners.

Frank Cloutier died on a Friday morning in 1957.

That very same morning, the Vanguard TV3 exploded on its launch pad in Florida.  Meant to meet the challenge of Sputnik with America’s own first satellite, the Vanguard TV3 was an embarrassing, televised explosion.  Headline writers dubbed it Flopnik, Oopsnik, and Stayputnik.

The satellite itself was recovered from the wreckage and put on display at the National Air and Space Museum, where I took a picture of it in January 2005, not yet knowing the object was somehow about the Anthology.

(I was in Washington for Mike Seeger’s concert marking the “Picturing the Banjo” exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery).

Note the light trespass fogging the film in my old battered 1970’s camera.  More than any other single photo, this one finally convinced me to get a digital SLR camera. (In retrospect, I should have just replaced the light seals.)

In any case, that Friday morning in 1957 not many Americans were focused on the death of Frank Cloutier.

Even by the time the Smithsonian reissued the Anthology on CD in 1997, there was exactly zero research on Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe to draw from while writing the liner notes.

It wasn’t until Thanksgiving weekend 2006 that an Anthology listener finally showed up at Cloutier’s grave, wearing earbuds to listen to his record graveside.

In 2007, on the 50th anniversary of Cloutier’s death, I had planned to be in La Crosse, but an opportunity suddenly arose to go to Chicago instead.  It took me a while to choose Chicago, but I made the right decision … although I still do think about that now and then.

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.

Rose Ensemble to Perform Moonshiner’s Dance

Perhaps for the first time in over 83 years, a piece of music that consumes my life is finally performed

The Rose Ensemble will perform “Moonshiner’s Dance” — for the first time, as far as I know, in 83 years

Thursday, June 16, 8 pm — Duluth, Weber Music Hall
Friday, June 17, 8 pm — Saint Paul, Fitzgerald Theater
Saturday, June 18, 8 pm — Saint Paul, Fitzgerald Theater

Minnesota’s own Rose Ensemble, an internationally acclaimed music group, has notified me that they will perform “Moonshiner’s Dance” at upcoming concerts called Songs of Temperance and Temptation: 100 Years of Restraint and Revelry in Minnesota.

This is stunning, partly because these just might be the first performances of Moonshiner’s Dance in more than 83 years.

After five years of work on the piece’s origins and reception, I’ve never heard so much as a rumor of any other performance since the original — the September 1927 performance by the house band of Frogtown’s Victoria Cafe, recorded by the Gennett Record Company and later reissued on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.

What the Rose Ensemble is about to do is rarer than any routine solar eclipse, black swan, or blooming corpse flower.

Moonshiner’s Dance is actually a medley of even older tunes, mind you, and those have been performed and recorded countless times. But right now, I have no evidence that anybody has ever put them back together through that peculiar alchemy that makes them “Moonshiner’s Dance.” (Please write me if you have info.)

Naturally, there must have been other performances over the years. After all, learning and playing the songs and sounds of Harry Smith’s Anthology has been a signature rite of passage for folk revivalists for half a century.

During the 1950s/60s Folk Revival, even those musicians who’d never heard, or heard of, the Anthology learned its songs and musical figures. That is, the Anthology supplied the Folk Revival with a canon — a repertoire of texts that everybody knew, even if they didn’t know why. In turn, the Anthology contributed heavily to the Revival’s influential ideas about America, memory, and meaning.

But Moonshiner’s Dance wasn’t performed.  It never made it from the Anthology into the collective performance repertoire. What could this performance history of Moonshiner’s Dance — the Upper Midwest’s sole contribution to the 84 recordings of the Anthology — tell us about how we choose to embrace or ignore our own cultural inheritance?

There’s a hell of a lot to say about that, and I hope to publish a book about it one day. These are questions just too big to blog.  They’re so profound, they’re almost … untweetable.

Still, here are a couple things I’ll be thinking about as I look forward to the Rose Ensemble’s performances:

The original Victoria Cafe Orchestra was not as different from the Rose Ensemble as you might think. My evidence indicates they were musically literate, sight-reading professionals, members of the Saint Paul Musician’s Union, and primarily big-city jazz musicians. So why, on Moonshiner’s Dance, were they playing the oldtime ethnic dance music — proto-polka — more associated with rural, outstate Minnesota?

The 1927 Minnesota State Fair had just ended a few days before the recording, and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra must have been playing for a lot of out-of-towners — or for city folk who had themselves been rubbing elbows with those out-of-towners. The band appears to be riffing on that. In Saint Paul, good-natured joshing about Lake Wobegon has deep roots.

If this is right, Moonshiner’s Dance is a product of Prohibition-era Saint Paul in its regional context — but it’s also self-consciously about Prohibition-era Saint Paul in its regional context.  Like the newspaper, it was truly a first draft of history.

It’s also clear from my research that the Victoria Cafe was a cabaret-style night club. And it was perfectly commonplace for performers on a cabaret stage to develop simple themes or stories, such as the intermingling of rubes and slickers.  That is, we should have expected, all along, that Moonshiner’s Dance might be programmatic.

Thus, we’re hearing only the audible portion of an experience for all five senses. It’s the soundtrack of a full American cabaret environment and, according to my findings, one very narrowly tailored to Saint Paul’s University Avenue circa mid-September 1927.

I can’t wait to see what the Rose Ensemble does with it. In a way, the ensemble’s mission is to provide vivid translations, restating music that was meaningful in a very different time and place and giving it new significance in our time and our place.

I don’t know how rarely they translate across such a long span of time but such a short spatial distance. While Moonshiner’s Dance is certainly a creature of a very different era, it represents a place less than two miles up the road from the Fitzgerald Theater.

If we could tell the Victoria Cafe Orchestra that we’d be watching their tomfoolery recreated by the Rose Ensemble in the 21st century, I imagine they might ask us … “What the heck do you see in it?”

[UPDATE: I’ve also posted a review of the show.]

Anthology’s Victoria Cafe Honored by Saint Paul

For the first time ever, a site gets official historic status due to a connection to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music


The Victoria Theater in winter.  Its 1927 house band recorded the only unambiguously Northern recording of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

 —

It’s official.  The Victoria Theater is now a Heritage Preservation Site of the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota.

As a primary cause, the city’s preservation commission cites the building’s role in Harry Smith’s influential Anthology of American Folk Music. The Victoria’s 1927 house band recorded “Moonshiner’s Dance Part One,” now familiar from the 1952 Anthology.

The Victoria appears to be the first historic site— anywhere, at any level of government —protected by means of an Anthology connection.

Five years ago, I faced a different and rather depressing situation, being the only person alive who’d connected the dots between this building, “Moonshiner’s Dance,” and Harry Smith’s Anthology.

Nobody interested in the Anthology knew where the Victoria Cafe had been.  And Saint Paulites didn’t know about the recording — including the historians who’d been commissioned over the years to survey the Victoria building.  Worst of all, the very day I understood this, the building seemed to be under imminent threat from multiple directions.

Well … now, things have changed.

The point of my work has never been to save any old buildings.  My project has always been to deeply understand the cultural context of “Moonshiner’s Dance,” and to develop ideas about what this fresh history really means to us, now.

And yet, when the Victoria Cafe itself — the recording’s immediate context — was about to become a pile of bricks, I knew I had to set aside the microfilm and speak up.  I figured I could sleep at night if Saint Paul let the building be torn down — but only if I could have my say first.

In the past 18 months, I’ve attended dozens of hearings, written a slew of nominations and articles, been interviewed by journalists dozens of times, networked feverishly.  I’ve also thought a hell of a lot about Wordsworth’s “Happy Warrior,” and decided I am not he.

Now, after a unanimous city council vote and the mayor’s signature, I feel I’ve come out of a dark tunnel, blinking at the sunlight.  I intend to re-focus on my history research and writing, and on blogging.

Still, there’s more work to do on the Victoria’s future.  It’s a vacant building with an owner who doesn’t respect its history — a point he’s emphasized many times.  Until the building finds a respectful use, it will remain threatened.

I also can’t help wondering … would the Victoria’s working-class neighborhood still have this cultural resource if I hadn’t begun poking around at the Historical Society five years ago?

What other buildings, maybe in comparable neighborhoods down South, would benefit from somebody — particularly a fan of the Anthology — just showing up, doing some research, and doing a little writing?

It’s odd to consider how important, as tangible assets, “Moonshiner’s Dance” and the work of Harry Smith have become to a hard-working neighborhood in the capital city of Minnesota.

Here’s a little further reading:

History of the Victoria Theater — a short sketch at the Frogtown Neighborhood Association website.

Save the Victoria Theater — the Facebook group with nearly 700 members.

A Geography of the Anthology — a map of the influential Anthology, a reminder of the geographic element in the idea of American “roots music”.

North Country Blues — thinking about the American musical canon, and what it means that the Upper Midwest is too often neglected.

Moonshiner’s Parking Lot? — when the wrecking ball was coming for the Victoria, I shared a little of my thinking, at the time, on why I thought the building mattered.

Louis Armstrong at the Coliseum, 1939 — Frank Cloutier, the Victoria’s bandleader, moved to the Coliseum at Lexington & University, where he became Musical Director.

Harry Smith Archives — the Victoria’s preservation is announced at the Archives.

Email Me — if you have questions, or answers, about the Victoria or Moonshiner’s Dance, or anything else.

See also “Anthology of American Folk Music” links at the upper left of this blog.

_

Harry Smith Anthology Site Before Saint Paul Council

The city of Saint Paul officially takes up the question of its Folkways Anthology landmark

In May 2006, I was astonished to find the Victoria Cafe, still standing, right there in the Frogtown neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Apparently, nobody had figured this out before.

Although music fans around the world knew the 1927 recording made by the Victoria Cafe’s orchestra, the Cafe’s location was unknown. Meanwhile, the old building was familiar around the neighborhood, which seemed completely unaware of any recording associated with it  — much less what that recording represented, what place it held in American culture.

The Victoria — in which I see unparalleled significance for American music, and especially for the cultural history of the Upper Midwest — was just sitting there unnoticed, uncelebrated, and vacant, watching the traffic pass back and forth on University Avenue.

Now, about 5 years later, the City Council of Saint Paul will decide whether to finally recognize this building as an official Heritage Preservation Site. The city has an opportunity to protect this cultural resource and keep the demolition crews away from this landmark.

To my eyes, passing up this opportunity would reaffirm the Victoria’s decades of anonymity and neglect, instead of finally acknowledging an important cultural contribution made by Minnesota, Saint Paul, and Frogtown.

RESIDENTS of Saint Paul, please contact your City Council member and urge them to strongly support the Victoria Theater’s bid to become a Heritage Preservation Site.

NON-RESIDENTS of Saint Paul, please contact them anyway!  You should email the entire council, or just the Victoria’s councilmember, Melvin Carter III.

And please, spread the word!

Links:

Now that the Victoria has reached the City Council, I’m tempted to tell the whole story all over again — explain it all, get it right, pin it down.  But, well … the heart of the matter is out there in one form or another.  Here’s a sampling.

History of the Victoria Theater — a short sketch at the Frogtown Neighborhood Association website.

Moonshiner’s Parking Lot? — when the wrecking ball was coming for the Victoria, I spilled (some of) my guts about why I think the building matters.

A Geography of the Anthology — a map of the influential Anthology, and a reminder of the default Southern emphasis of the idea of American “roots music”.

North Country Blues — thinking about the American musical canon, and what it means that the Upper Midwest has been neglected too often.

Louis Armstrong at the Coliseum, 1939 — Frank Cloutier, the Victoria’s bandleader, moved to the Coliseum at Lexington & University, where he was Musical Director for 13 years.

Email Me — if you have questions, or answers, about the Victoria or Moonshiner’s Dance, or anything else.

Saint Paul City Council — please contact them!

Save the Victoria Theater — the Facebook group with over 600 members.

See also “Anthology of American Folk Music” links at the upper left of this blog.

   
an original copy of the 78 rpm record of the 1927 “Moonshiner’s Dance,”
which Harry Smith included on the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music

_

Kevin Moist and the Anthology as Collage

Revealing the divine in everything through sight and sound collage


The fetishized harmonica rack from the 1952 liner notes (detail)

Harry Smith approached his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music as a self-consciously avant-garde art project.  Knowing that the Anthology was going to be commercially released as a set of LPs, he nonetheless compiled a proto-post-modern collage.

And this turned out to be a source of its power — a catalytic feature.  The Anthology seduces you into hearing old-sounding, authentic-sounding poor-people’s music as tomorrow’s high art.

In the decade after its release, the early adopters and taste-makers in the small Greenwich Village folk music scene were staring deeply into this Anthology.

And they got to work building a small world that had learned from the Anthology, where the next waves of young folkies could, for example, sit at the feet of Roscoe Holcomb and Skip James — very old, weird southern musicians indeed.

Bob Dylan was one of those fresh new kids.

Of course, a wide variety of brilliant people in different fields were already chipping away at the separation between high art and low culture.  But the most devastating blow to that barrier ultimately came from a veteran of this Greenwich Village folk scene, a fact that surprises us still.

Allen Ginsberg said it about his friend Bob Dylan, but he could have easily said it about his friend Harry Smith. “It was an artistic challenge to see if great art can be done on a jukebox. He proved it can.”

—

Kevin Moist’s article (“Collecting, Collage, and Alchemy: The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music as Art and Cultural Intervention”) starts from essentially the same premise — that the Anthology derives its power to influence from high art sensibilities, which it helped to democratize.

But Moist takes the next step.  He opens up those sensibilities to see what they’re made of, at least as Smith used them in the Anthology.

Moist focuses on collecting, collage, and alchemy — not as “themes” or “conceits” in a work of art, or as Smith’s personal quirks, but as practical concerns that shaped Smith’s understanding of his task, as Smith would probably have wanted us to do.

Moist’s findings reveal that Smith’s interests in collecting, collage, and alchemy were actually part of his coherent focus on cultural transformation — on the problem of how to rework the world through the meanings we ascribe to it.

As a result, Moist’s article reads like an anatomy of the Anthology’s ability to change the perceptions of its listeners.  Accepting his 1991 Grammy Award, Smith said “I saw America changed through music,” and Moist’s article is a natural history of that power to affect change.

An associate professor of communications at Penn State Altoona, Moist seems to have a long-standing interest in the religious ideas of the 1960’s counter-culture, and their role in the art and music of the era.  It makes sense, then, that Moist would think this carefully about Smith’s very earnest interest in alchemical theory.

About the Anthology, two alchemical principles seem important, and Moist argues that the application of these two principles to culture, high and low, was a key element in Smith’s thinking.

First, alchemy holds that “as above, so below” — the patterns and structures in the highest spiritual spheres are reflected in the lowest material orders.  If you want to know the mind of God, start with whatever common “stuff” happens to be at hand.

(Look at the image of the celestial monochord on the Anthology‘s cover, with its hand of God tuning a string extending down through the nested spheres of creation.  It’s an emblem of this harmony across the high and low orders.)

Second, alchemists believe that by stripping stuff of its original context — purifying or distilling it — and rearranging it, nature’s true divinity can be exposed.  The alchemist doesn’t turn lead into gold, but instead serves as “midwife” to an ever-present potential inherent in all of nature.

Smith’s interest in alchemy, it turns out, matters when we try to understand Smith as a collector — as we should, if only because every anthology starts with collecting.

Collecting, Moist explains, is a fairly recent phenomenon in which the consumer acts as curator.  As such, the collector sees a larger cultural significance in his collection, and wants to intervene in the usual meanings that the broader culture ascribes to the objects he collects.

In this sense, Smith was a kind of super-collector.  In multiple interviews, Smith describes his accumulation of objects as merely the first step in a larger reconsideration of culture as a whole.

So, as a collector and student of alchemy, Harry Smith sat down to edit his Anthology — although Moist finally convinced me to take literally Smith’s insistence that his Anthology was a collage.  The “anthology” is really a metaphorical conceit of this collage artwork.

Moist points out that collage — another type of collection — works by isolating pieces of the world and rearranging them, thus reshaping the meanings they bring with them into the new collage. Collage is “a process of reconstructing reality by reassembling pieces of it.”

This vision of Smith’s cultural transformation through collage, collecting, and alchemy is convincing and useful and full of exciting possibilities.  But the essay attempts a new reading of the Anthology that proves disappointing, maybe because a journal article just isn’t long enough to do the job.

In a few paragraphs, Moist takes on the entire “lost” Volume 4 (first issued in 2000) without unearthing any surprises about the music or the Anthology.  The reader could conclude, I think incorrectly, that the exhilarating insights in the rest of Moist’s essay aren’t so useful after all.

The reading might have revealed much more with a much narrower focus, by dedicating those paragraphs to only one piece of Smith’s collage, or to one transition between pieces.

Let’s see, I don’t know which recording to suggest … I guess I’ll have to pick one completely at random here …

—

“Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One” is one of only two medlies on the Anthology.

Not a tune but a collection of tunes, it is an anthology in the Anthology, a collage incorporated into a larger collage.

Our understanding of “Moonshiner’s Dance” therefore benefits from some of the same thinking we apply to the Anthology itself — if, possibly, on a different scale.  It’s, like, totally fractal, bro.

In the 4 years I’ve been investigating Moonshiner, I’ve come to understand it as a promiscuous set of juxtapositions, a collection of popular tunes that were mostly already old fashioned in 1927.

Clearly, some of the meaning Moonshiner held for its 1927 audience would have derived from its aggressive and multi-leveled recontextualization of these earlier tunes.

Like the Anthology itself, the pieces that make up Moonshiner trailed some of their meanings with them into their new assemblage, where these meanings served a new agenda in a new context — in this case, that of the Victoria Cafe, a cabaret-style nightclub and speakeasy in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul, MN.

Part of what maintains my interest over the long haul is tracing the way Moonshiner (and, subsequently, the Anthology) transformed meaning into meaning, agenda into agenda, context into context.

For example, of the 112 selections in the four-volume version of the Anthology, Moonshiner is the only one that’s unambiguously from outside the American South. Basically, you get 111 southern recordings, and one from the capitol of Minnesota.

Of course, the recording process always isolates (distills) music from its historical contexts.  And Smith’s collage style maximizes this effect, which actually contributes to the Anthology‘s power and appeal.

Even so, the regional geography of the Anthology uniquely decontextualizes Moonshiner even from the context-free space Smith created for it.

Much of the pleasure of my project is in placing “Moonshiner’s Dance Part One” back into context, often shedding light on the sources of Moonshiner’s own power and appeal.

The work is slow going, in part because related scholarship, reissues, revival activity, etc., has been sparse. Indeed, I’ve found no evidence that anybody had even bothered to look up “Frank Cloutier” in the St. Paul phone book.

Thus, my interest in the Anthology‘s jazz-inflected Northern polka has me pondering the Anthology‘s contribution to the various chauvinisms of “roots music” and “Americana” — ironic, given Smith’s radical eclecticism.

The failure to follow up on this recording makes it seem prescient, to me, that the center of Smith’s Anthology is the silence that follows Moonshiner.  I mean that mostly literally.

The mid-point of the original 3-volume Anthology falls between Moonshiner and the next cut, “Must Be Born Again,” the first cut of Volume 2’s second half.  Frank Cloutier’s command to “Be seated!” introduces the silence at the center of the 1952 Anthology.

This placement also puts Moonshiner at the pivot-point between the secular and the sacred — by far, the most jarring transition in a collection of jarring transitions.

Moonshiner was clearly chosen to end the secular half of Volume 2 with a bang — to achieve a kind of final paroxysm for the sequence.  Listen to it.  With Moonshiner, the secular body of Volume 2 finally exhausts itself, and the spirit rises.

Hearing it this way, it’s not so surprising that Smith would find this break “elsewhere” — by reaching outside of the context the Anthology had established for itself, outside its system.

Given the Anthology‘s eclecticism, finding its “outside” isn’t so easy.  So Smith reached out for Moonshiner, the exception that proves the Anthology‘s various rules.  It’s intriguing that the piece chosen to play this role would itself be an anthology.

“Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One” is thus an excellent probe of the Anthology‘s meaning system, of Smith’s method, and of their sources and consequences and limitations.  Then again … maybe the same might be said of each of the other 111 entries of the Anthology, each its own universe in a grain of sand.

I’
;m not sure, and given the time-consuming nature of the work involved, somebody else will have to confirm that hunch.

_

Kai Schafft: The Monochord Interview

A small-town Pennsylvania brewpub hosts an annual big-name festival dedicated to Harry Smith’s Anthology

The second annual Harry Smith Festival is this Sunday, November 15.  Eight bands from Ithaca, NY, and central Pennsylvania will perform songs from The Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by the late avant-garde filmmaker and record collector Harry Smith.

The Festival is held in a town with less than 800 people — and one inspired brew pub.  It’s organized by Kai Schafft of the band Chicken Tractor DeLuxe.

Kai is also an assistant professor at Penn State, and directs Penn State’s Center on Rural Education and Communities.  He’s got a Ph.D. from Cornell.

I emailed him questions, and he emailed me answers. Many sincere thanks to him!

The Celestial Monochord (CM): What happens at a festival about an anthology?  Please say there’ll be PowerPoint slides — I love lectures by experts!

Kai Schafft (KS): No powerpoints, sadly. Last year we did show an experimental film inspired by Harry Smith. I had found an old 20 minute 16 mm Maryland Game Commission film in a junk shop and rigged up a contraption that would allow me to mount the film reels and create some under-lighting. I re-animated the whole thing with Sharpies, frame by frame, turning it into a kind of psychedelic game commission film. Then I recorded a soundtrack – an audio montage of found sound, bird noise, gospel music recorded on old 78 records (naturally), Baba Ram Das giving spiritual advice by telephone, sex noise off a weird slab of vinyl, echoey ambient noise from the lobby of an interstate rest area in Maine, and so forth. We set up a screen and projector halfway through and showed the film. I was a little worried that it might seem too esoteric, but people loved it – another successful social experiment! Our friend Elody Gyekis (who is returning this year) completed a pair of oil paintings as the bands played. The place filled up, lots of people ate food and drank beer. They seemed to feel that something special was happening.

CM: What kind of audience showed up for this on the first year?  What’s the venue like?

KS: We didn’t know who would show up. The Elk Creek Café + Aleworks (www.elkcreekcafe.net) is located in Millheim, a small rural town located practically in the geographic center of Pennsylvania. It’s Amish country, with ridgelines and long flat farmed valleys. The venue is right in the center of town at the one stoplight in either direction for miles and miles. Amish buggies roll by. It’s an unlikely place for a craft brewpub and music venue, but the proprietor, Tim Bowser, is a pretty visionary guy and not afraid to take risks. He’s also a huge music lover and early on set his sights on establishing Millheim and the valley we occupy, Penns Valley, as a center of great (local) food, excellent craft beer, eclectic music and local culture. So he immediately took to the idea of the Festival. He didn’t need any convincing, and I knew he wouldn’t. And we ended up packing the place and not just with hipsters and folkies from State College (about 25 miles away), but all sorts of people from near and far. Tim books music at least 2 or 3 nights a week, so, especially now the place has quite a good reputation. But last year, it hadn’t even been opened for a year. So it was a bit of an experiment. But, like the film, it worked!

CM: The musical line-up sounds fantastic.  How do you rope all of these people into playing?  Are they all Anthology fans, or do they owe you money?

KS: They are all people that I know – or at least know of. Early on I thought about how great it would be to hand pick my favorite local-ish bands and musicians to play songs off the Anthology – turn it into a big benefit, have a happening, create a shared situation where really talented people are challenged to dig into the Anthology and reinterpret and re-encounter these chunks of American Collective Unconscious. Practically speaking, the only way to really do this was to turn it into a benefit. And really, this kind of thing should be done for love anyway. Everyone who I’ve asked, both years, has seemed genuinely honored to be asked and genuinely excited to participate. And, as a musician (albeit as one that doesn’t do it for a living) I know that some of the most boring, worthless and fucked up gigs have been the highest paying, while some of the craziest, most inspired and transcendent gigs have been those done for little or no dough. But maybe others have had different experiences. I don’t know. We do offer gas money for bands coming in from away. That was mostly or entirely turned down last year. I expect a similar thing will happen this year. The performers get free food and beer though and they can sell merchandise. The beer is great, so that’s a strong incentive. Plus the Elk Creek is a flat out special place to play. The vibe and the audiences are always tops. And, unless I am very much mistaken, Elk Creek will be packed this Sunday too.

CM: Every February, there’s a battle of the jug bands in Minneapolis.  There are 20 bands, and it lasts over 8 hours … by the end of the night, you can see into other dimensions.  Is the Harry Smith Festival like that?

KS: Yes. Or at least it was last year. The songs on the Anthology have some pretty heavy spiritual, emotional and aesthetic content. Eight bands playing this stuff for 6 hours can be a surprisingly affecting experience. I think a lot of people felt this way. It caught them off guard. It definitely was a case of the whole being way larger and more expansive than the sum of the parts. It’s a social, aesthetic and cultural experiment that makes all sorts of crazy stuff bubble up.

CM: The Anthology covers a huge range of southern music — blues, cajun, cowboy songs, sacred harp, square dance fiddling, etc.  It must be hard to match that kind of scope in the festival.

KS: Well, it’s always interesting to see what people pick. There are some obvious ones I think. And then there are some that I wish someone would step up to the plate and try to do. Like “Saut Crapaud” which almost seems to anticipate The Shaggs, albeit transported back 40 years and 40 time-space continua. Or, one of your favorites,”The Moonshiner’s Dance Part One.” Nobody’s picked those yet. We have some great bands this year, though. The Evil City String Band is doing “Indian War Whoop” which I’m very excited to hear.

CM: How did you discover the old American music?  Was it part of your upbringing?

KS: I grew up in Washington DC near the Walter Reed Hospital. When I wasn’t listening to the “album oriented rock” stations, I listened to bluegrass music on WAMU, and the blues shows on WPFW where I was introduced to artists like Tampa Red and Leroy Carr (and also tripped out on Louis Farrakhan sermons and other non-mainstream stuff). And my parents used to take me to the Folklife Festivals down at the Mall in Washington near the Smithsonian. So, you might say I always had “predilections.” But sometime in the early 1990s I came across the collection of field recordings John Cohen did in the mid-1960s that had been released on Rounder, “High Atmosphere.” That was really my gateway drug. I heard for the first time people like George Landers, Wade Ward, Gaither Carlton, and Estil Ball and I felt like my neural structure had somehow been re-arranged. Literally. Then I lived in Ithaca for a long while and got steeped in that music scene. Lots of old-time and roots music, and interestingly an actual local music culture where people share certain kinds of understandings and sounds and aesthetics – not as an orthodoxy, but as a shared framework, a culture. And that’s what Harry Smith was interested in too, those regional cultural expressions. When I was up there I DJ’d a Sunday morning radio show for a number of years, along with some compatriots, the Salt Creek Show, which is devoted entirely to American roots music of varying levels of obscurity. I still listen to it online. (wvbr.com/saltcreek). So that also was a huge influence and really introduced me not only to rural music of the 1920s and 30s but also straight up classic country and honky tonk which I also love.

CM: When did you find the Anthology?  How did it change things for you?

KS: Well, I was certainly familiar with the Anthology, but I didn’t actually break down and buy it until I started thinking about doing this festival. It’s a bit of an investment! And of course you can probably figure out ways of accessing the anthology, but ultimately, the print catalog Harry Smith pulled together is indispensable. It really does establish the fundamental point that the Anthology – or rather this collection of music – has cosmological, mystical qualities. If anyone doubts that, listen to Bascomb Lamar Lunsford’s “Dry Bones.” Or any number of other selections. Or the whole thing. Or whatever. You come away and you conclude, “This is not nothing. This is Something.”

CM: Fans of the Anthology seem to struggle to react to it.  They launch a thousand ships, go on fantastic voyages, build impossible contraptions.  You and I certainly have.  Why?

KS: Well, with the festival, really because I could, because I thought it would be fun. Because I thought it would help build community in a variety of ways. Because I thought it would help bring this great and largely forgotten music and expression back to the light of day. But mainly, to be honest, I just thought it would be a kick. As it happens though, the Anthology has some real juju. So it turned out to be a lot more than just a kick. But it’s that too.

CM: How does your work in rural education connect to your Anthology interest?  I think of Bill C. Malone, who writes a lot about country music and southern working-class culture.

KS: I work in a university. A good friend of mine described universities as “temples of rationality.” I’ve never heard a more apt description, with all the positive and negative that that implies. The Anthology is in some senses a temple (or altar?) of irrationality. So, it’s a balance thing really, balancing a life of rationality with a world – or many, many inner worlds – of IRrationality. Actually although a lot of my colleagues and some of my students know about this other part of who I am, for whatever reason I generally don’t broadcast it. As for Bill Malone’s stuff, yeah I’ve read it and I like it, a lot actually. But as for my own practice, I’ll keep my irrationality irrational!

CM: How did you get interested in Gypsy, or Roma communities in Hungary?  And, of course, have you followed the resurgence of gypsy music?

KS: I lived and worked in Budapest in the early 1990s and then went back to work with rural Gypsy communities. I was interested in Hungary’s system of local minority self governments and what that meant for marginalized Gypsy communities. How they could use it as a leverage point for political and economic power and cultural autonomy. I spent a lot of time out in some pretty rural villages, living and working. But there wasn’t much music happening that I saw, at least where I was. A lot of the Roma music is associated with particular groups of Roma, especially in urban areas, wealthier, higher status groups. I was pretty far from that. But I imagine there are some analogies to be drawn, like Hungary’s Kali Jag is to the Carolina Tar Heels, as The Gypsy Kings are to Garth Brooks, as Muzsikas is to New Lost City Ramblers … ? But I don’t know. I haven’t followed Gypsy music that much.

CM: You live up there at the top end of the Appalachian range.  Do you think there’s a kinship with people living further down on the same range?  Have you explored music closer to Pennsylvania and New York cultural history?

KS: Well, I don’t know. Except in pockets, regionally-specific musical expression seems largely non-existent. But there are certainly pockets, and even very strong pockets of people tapping into local/regional musical expression, rural music and so forth, old time, and what have you. Ithaca has been a real hot bed. There’s good stuff around Morgantown and further south into West Virginia, North Carolina. I would like to be one of those people who goes to Clifftop and Mt Airy, but I don’t. And maybe I’m not looking in the right places, turning over the right rocks. Sifting through piles of 78s around here you find a lot of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. He used to have a banjo orchestra and was pretty popular for a while. He actually died at a show when he was in his 80s – a friend of mine was actually at that show! But he was more of a jazz guy I think. Much of my efforts these days seem to be more with creating, or reinvigorating, or strengthening a local musical-cultural presence than digging into what came before. But, then again, there’s not much evidence of what came before, at least as far as I can tell. It’s like a cultural amnesia, the Clear Channelization of popular consciousness. To that extent the Harry Smith Festival is a subversive act – and it’s meant to be.

CM: Did you attend any of the Harry Smith Project concerts — the concerts by Philip Glass, Wilco, Beck, Elvis Costello, etc?

KS: No, and in fact, I didn’t even know about these till we started planning the first one here in Millheim. I have the Harry Smith Project DVD. There’s some great stuff on that, although it’s a little hit or miss too.

CM: There’s something called the “Harry Smith Frolic” held annually in Greenfield, MA.  It seems to be a weekend of oldtime stringband jam sessions.  Have you been in touch with them?

KS: I didn’t know about this either. I’ll have to check it out.

CM: What’s your favorite ancillary Anthology-related stuff?  What book, CD, DVD, and/or movie?

KS: Well, the Celestial Monochord is actually a big favorite of mine, and the website run by that French guy is absolutely amazing! I also love the site you have linked with the visual art of the different anthology songs. Perhaps farther afield there’s a great Motorhead documentary, “Ace of Spades,” that I really enjoyed. I like Harry Smith’s catalog. One of these days I’ll get around to reading some of John Fahey’s stuff. I have read and re-read the booklet that comes with the High Atmosphere disc. I recently read a book called Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia. There’s an excellent CD that goes with it. I really enjoyed that. And most recently I’ve been really freaking out about Michael Hurley. Really, really freaking out. The next “fest” might have to be Michael Hurley themed, I don’t know. I’m still figuring that one out. And Karen Dalton has also recently left a pretty strong impression – “Green Rocky Road” (her robotic voice intro to Green Rocky Roads: “This * song * recorded * in * two * tracks”). So these are all ancillary to the Anthology in my mind.

CM: It’s a painful fact that a man is rarely asked to talk about his banjo.  Please, Kai, tell me about your banjo.

KS: I used to live in an old farm house in Upstate New York. One day by happenstance I found an old gun in the wall of the house. It was a WWII German Mauser. We had it around the house for a while, and a friend borrowed it, cleaned it and got bullets for it. I went over to his house and we shot it a bunch and blew apart some old clay flowerpots. He got really excited about it and really wanted it for his own. He said, “I have an old banjo – I’ll trade you the gun for the banjo.” So we struck a deal and I took the banjo home. Some months later, with prodding from my wife, I screwed up my courage and took some lessons from Richie Stearns, a phenomenal musician and clawhammer banjo player from the Ithaca area who plays with The Horseflies, plus a ton of other projects, plus has played with a crazy list of musical luminaries from Mike Seeger and Tony Trischka to Natalie Merchant and Jim Lauderdale. But he’s also just a really nice and humble guy. A mutual friend said, “Oh Richie, he’s common as dirt!” So, I learned some stuff off him and started playing in a zydeco-electric old time band called The MacGilllicuddies, who I still play with a bunch of times a year, but these days I mainly play with my local band Chicken Tractor Deluxe, the band that’s hosting the festival. Last year we were preparing to record our CD, Tin Can Holler, and the Austin band The Gourds came through and played at Elk Creek. Kev Russell did an a capela version of Butcher’s Boy, which slayed everyone in the house. I talked to him about it afterwards and we geeked out about the Anthology. He told me that he played a gig in Arkansas where the audience pissed him off, and when they clamored for an encore he played them My Name is John Johanna! So we ended up playing Butcher’s Boy and John Johanna in last year’s Festival and they ended up on our CD, Tin Can Holler, along with I’m On the Battlefield for My Lord, and Country Blues. But I’m getting off track. About the banjo and all, Richie plays with Evil City Stringband, so I’m hoping that we can get him to sit in with us when we do the Coo Coo Bird. It all comes around in the end!

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