Harry Smith Anthology – Page 3 – The Celestial Monochord

The Anthology at Tom Waits Concerts

from "KPFK Will Air Folk Fest"
The Pasadena Star Bee, July 3, 1974

Tom Waits is on tour — a rare enough news story in itself.

But note that the music piped into the theater before and after the shows, to date, has been The Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith.

I've often pointed out the folk lineage of various Tom Waits songs, showing connections between:

Cold Cold Ground and Stephen Foster,

Georgia Lee and Blind Willie Johnson,

Swordfishtrombones and Bascom Lamar Lunsford,

Better Off Without A Wife and Chubby Parker, The Carter Family, and John Lomax, and,

Down There By the Train and Uncle Dave Macon and Henry Thomas (although I really "buried the lead" on that one — scoll down).

… I have a lot more of these up my sleeve and I may get some of them written up some day …

Anyway, it's interesting to see Waits tip his porkpie to The Anthology so explicitly.

But it would be absurd to say I've finally been "proven right." Waits has often been pretty generous in acknowledging his debts to other musicians, and folk has always been in the mix.

Thanks to Ray for pointing out the use of The Anthology at the recent concerts, and to TCCBodhi and Dave R. at the Raindogs discussion list for providing independent confirmations.

What’s In A Name?

Moe Thompson founded The Victoria Cafe

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

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 Also, because I’m constantly finding new insights, I’m painfully aware that anything I write will quickly seem outdated to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m a Stern Old Bachelor

Stern Old Bachelor

Over the past few months, I’ve bought nine inexpensive 78 rpm records — the first 78’s in my music collection.

Most of my 78’s relate to my research into Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, although I don’t yet have “Moonshiners Dance” (Gennett 6305) — if you own it, please contact me. One of the “extracurricular” records is by Chubby Parker, which I bought just because he’s a denizen of Harry Smith’s Anthology.

It’s an odd buy, since the label is the same on both sides. It claims to be two helpings of the B-side, “I’m a Stern Old Bachelor,” although playing the record reveals it actually has the correct A-side, “Oh Suzanna.” And in fact, the “Oh Suzanna” side is considerably more worn than the “Bachelor” side, so I guess Gennett chose their A’s and B’s correctly. Presumably, somewhere in the world, there’s a Chubby Parker 78 claiming to have two sides of “Oh Suzanna.”

“I’m a Stern Old Bachelor” is a comic novelty song, which celebrates the delights of being unbound by holy wedlock. (I wish I could make an MP3 for you, but I don’t have the technology.) Parker recorded it for Gennett on February 26, 1927 … in a couple weeks from now, it will be the 80th anniversary of that recording, but I need something to write about TODAY.

It seems to have been one of Chubby’s signatures on the WLS Barn Dance radio show, although “Nickety Nackety Now Now Now” was really his theme. (You may remember “Nickety Nackety” better from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds). Both were later reissued on Slivertone, the record label of Sears Roebuck (the worlds largest store, hence the WLS call letters).

Next, “Bachelor” showed up in John Lomax’s 1934 book, “American Ballads and Folk Songs.” In June 1938, the original Carter Family recorded the song on their last recording session before taking off for Texas and Mexico to be on border radio with XERA. Because the Lomax and Carter texts share a couple extra verses not found on Parker’s recording, I assume the Carters got the song primarily from Lomax. In any case, it’s an uncharacteristically silly performance by Sara and Maybelle.

Here are the lyrics to “Stern Old Bachelor”. The lines in italics are sung by the Carters, but not by Chubby Parker.

I am a stern old bachelor
My age is forty-four
I do declare, I’ll never live
With women anymore

I have a stove that’s worth ten cents
A table worth fifteen
I cook my gruel in oyster cans
And keep my things so clean

[chorus]
Oh little sod shanty
Little sod shanty give to me
For I’m a stern old bachelor
From matrimony free

When I come home at night I have no fear
I smile and walk right in
I never hear a voice yell out
Or say where have you been

On a cold and stormy night
In a cozy little shack
I sing my songs and think my thoughts
With no one to talk back

I go to bed when ever I please
And get up just the same
I change my socks three times a year
With no one to complain

At night when I’m on peaceful sleep
My snores can do no harm
I never have to walk the floor
With an infant [a baby] in my arms

And when I die and go to heaven
As all good bachelors do
I will not have to grieve for fear
My wife will get there too

When I first heard Parker’s recording — despite his high nasal voice and crisp banjo picking — I immediately thought of the Tom Waits song, “Better Off Without a Wife.” You know the one:

I like to sleep until the crack of noon
Midnight howling at the moon
Going out when I want to
Coming home when I please
Don’t have to ask permission
If I want to go out fishing
Never have to ask for the keys

They’re more or less the same song … well, I should say that “Better Off Without a Wife” could easily be a thorough re-imagining of “I’m a Stern Old Bachelor.” I believe Waits used to do this often — take a good old folksong, boil it down to the essence of whatever makes it good, and then build an entirely new song around that same essence. See my post on “Cold Cold Ground.”

Now, you may ask whether, in 1973, Tom Waits was listening to Chubby Parker or Sara and Maybelle Carter, or reading song books by John Lomax. It’s a little-known fact that Waits started out at California folk clubs like the Troubadour and the Heritage. Apparently, Waits and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott would occasionally hang out together in the 1970’s (one suspects a nightcap or two may have been involved).

In any case, although my evidence for a direct link between the two songs is slim — and there must be dozens of other comic bachelor songs for Waits to take some cues from — there’s no reason to doubt that Waits and the music of the Carters or Chubby Parker could easily have crossed paths in the early 1970’s.

Editor’s Note: This is the 8th day of my 28-day experiment. I’m trying to post something every day for the whole month of February. If it’s something worth reading, well … all the better.

Old Dog Blue

I often wonder what I’ll do when my song-by-song series on Diamonds in the Rough comes to an end. I’d love to work on another album, but the only one that seems worthy is Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. But given the pace at which I’ve run through Diamonds, I calculate The Anthology would take me about ten years. Besides, what can I say about something like “Old Dog Blue” that hasn’t been said before (and better)? For example, Robert Cantwell, in his book “When We Were Good,” writes beautifully about it.

But today is the 79th anniversary of the recording of Old Dog Blue on February 2, 1928, in Memphis, Tennessee on the Victor label. To commemorate that great event, here’s a couple notions …

When I first heard Jim Jackson sing Old Dog Blue, my reaction was to regret its sexism. In the first verse, the singer off-handedly mentions the recent death of his wife, and then goes on to mourn the death of his dog, movingly, in verse after verse after verse:

I’m going back where I come
I’m going back where I come
I’m going back to Giles County
My wife died and left me a bounty
Me and them pretty girls ganged around
That’s the reason I’m going to Giles County

Had an old dog whose name was Blue
You know Blue was mighty true
You know Blue was a good old dog
Blue treed a possum in a hollow log
You know from that he’s a good old dog

Do we take this as a joke about the relative importance of wives and dogs?

I’ve seen (can’t remember where) the explanation that the song is hard to sort out because it’s really two or more songs spliced together. The line mentioning his wife is like a vestigial organ, left over from some previous stage in the song’s evolution. There’s some support for this view. Later, in the middle of everything, we get this strange non-sequitur:

Blue treed a possum out on a limb
Blue looked at me and I looked at him
Grabbed that possum, put him in a sack
Don’t move, Blue, ’til I get back.

It rained, it rained, yeah
It rained, it rained, yeah

Who been here since I been gone?
Little bitty girl with the red dress on
Who been here since I been gone?
Little bitty girl with the red dress on

Is the dog wearing a dress? No, this verse about a girl in a red dress waiting for the singer appears often in old folk and blues songs — so, it’s what’s called a “floating stanza.”

But I think it’s slightly condescending, a little dismissive of Jim Jackson’s artistry, to think as if he’s just a passive antenna through which floating stanzas appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. I trust my own aesthetics here — this performance of this text is heartbreaking, and increasingly so each time I hear it, year after year. Jackson chose his words to move us, and it works.

Once you accept that the text is very deliberate, the song comes into focus as brilliant psychological observation. It’s a study of grief, the way it really works in a real brain. It hits with the force it does because it mirrors sorrow as we actually experience it. Do we really always mourn the most obvious things, or do we sometimes focus on proxies, fetishes, or symbols instead?

Jackson’s character’s wife has just died, so he’s decided to go back to a place of his youth, before he was married, to relive happier days. It seems rather optimistic, even desperate — Jackson’s character doesn’t sound so young now.

Blue, too, seems to have been gone for a long time — so long that you’d expect a grown man to have gotten over it a bit. And I suspect he has. What I hear is a mind returning to everything its ever lost, trying to reconnect with it all both physically and emotionally.

By so vividly recalling this dog, by revisiting that intense ENCOUNTER between species (“Blue looked at me and I looked at him”), the singer is tracing his own edges, the limits and contours of his own identity. He is refamiliarizing himself with his manhood and his humanity, through memory.

In this way, Jackson’s character is like the later folk revivalists of the 1950’s and after, about whom Cantwell writes so beautifully. They renounced their identities, abandoned all hope, denied their inheritances, and then — through song — rebuilt themselves. They invented themselves as a new cast of characters meant to inhabit a new world, which they then also built, on a foundation of reinvented memories.

Editor’s Note: This is the second … jeez, only SECOND? … installment of an experiment — The Celestial Monochord is posting one entry every day during the month of February 2007.

Also, note that the lyrics to this song are notoriously hard to get exactly right.

The Harry Smith Project – Thoughts in Advance

In a lot of ways,The Celestial Monochord is a tribute to Harry Smith and the mesmerizing sampler of old recordings he edited in 1952, The Anthology of American Folk Music.

And so, this Tuesday will be an exciting day at Monochord headquarters. Four disks — two audio CDs and two DVDs — intended to pay tribute to Smith and his Anthology will be released on Tuesday (October 24). I don’t have a reviewer’s copy of the disks (unlike this putz, for example), so I’ll anticipate the release by considering what I can tell about it from the label’s advertising and what others are saying about it.

As the author of the first (and so far only) blog on the entire internet dedicated to the Anthology, my first comment is … people! Treat your bloggers a little better!

——————-

The bulk of the disks offer audio and video from a series of tribute concerts, called The Harry Smith Project, organized in 1999 and 2001 by a guy named Hal Willner. The performers — about half of whom are big stars like Lou Reed, Wilco, Steve Earle, Elvis Costello — do what might be thought of as “covers” of the songs on Smith’s Anthology.

In exactly what sense such performances would constitute a tribute to Harry Smith is unclear to me. I can’t get it sorted out in my head.

Smith’s Anthology and the lessons it taught shaped the revivals that came after, and it defined the careers of some of the best musicians of the late 20th Century. The Anthology also became a milestone in the history of amateur musicianship in America. Those revivals, those careers, and we amateur musicians have paid tribute to Smith far beyond The Harry Smith Project‘s poor power to add or detract — the world will little note nor long remember what Sonic Youth says here …

And there are other problems. Of course, Harry Smith was a mix-master, one of history’s great juxtapositionists, so there’s no such thing as a Harry Smith cover, per se. Thinking of the Anthology‘s songs as if they were Smith’s babies only perpetuates the worship of the collector over the collected, the Lomaxes over the Leadbellies. Harry Smith himself was markedly dismissive of the Anthology and he considered his other projects, now largely forgotten, to be more important. I wonder how Smith would have felt about Tuesday’s release.

In his strange interviews, Smith treats the songs on the Anthology as mere local embodiments of some larger patterns in the human collective unconscious. Although he clearly loved them (no matter what he might have said), he portrays the records in his collection as arbitrary, as if they may as well have been any other records, or even some tangled pieces of string, or some paper airplanes discarded in the gutters of Manhattan.

To me, the most immediately obvious way to pay tribute to Harry Smith is to carry on his work — to go on collecting little bits of culture that embody the most vital meanings animating human life. To work at becoming — ourselves — the embodied examples of such meanings. To investigate and love human culture independently, idiosyncratically.

But then … what do you expect The Celestial Monochord to say?

——————-

I knew about these Harry Smith Project concerts back when they happened, through a Tom Waits discussion list I belonged to. Although none of the list-members who attended the concerts knew or cared much about Harry Smith, their reaction to the concerts was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone seemed to agree something remarkable had happened there. And it’s no wonder. Hal Willner seems to be the right man for the job of organizing these tribute concerts.

First, he’s one of a smallish tribe of people who’ve had their lives overturned by this queer, bent little hypnotist, Harry Smith. At times, it seems there’s about as many of us in the world as there are people who’ve walked on the Moon, or who’ve been struck by lightning more than once.

Willner personally knew Smith well enough to cast him as The King in a production of The Seven Deadly Sins, staged at the Naropa Institute. It was also Hal Willner who put together Allen Ginsberg’s introduction to the catastrophically out-of-print collection of interviews with Smith, Think of the Self Speaking.

And very suggestively, Willner has used his time on Earth to collect amazing things and paste them together — giving him roughly as much insight into Smith’s mind as we can hope for. The list of Willner’s projects is dazzling, but he’s best known for gathering together very dissimilar musicians for improbable tribute albums.

He’s responsible for tributes to Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill, Charles Mingus, pirate ballads and sea chanteys, and music from Walt Disney’s cartoons. Performers he’s rangled together for these projects include Bono, Sting, Loudon Wainwright III, Rufus Wainwright, Dr. John, John Zorn, Sun Ra, Tom Waits, Ringo Starr, Keith Richards, and Elvis Costello. Along the way, he also collaborated with Robert Altman on Short Cuts and Robert Wilson on a show in Copenhagen.

To me, the drama of listening to The Harry Smith Project will be in watching Willner do battle with the poppycocky quality of his own project. He’s in the best position anyone can be in to make a “tribute album” to Harry Smith actually pay tribute to Harry Smith. Given who he is, I don’t much doubt Willner will succeed in some sense, and on some terms. But in what sense? On what terms?

—————-

The fourth disk of The Project‘s 4-disk set makes easier sense to me. It’s the hook that will snag me into plopping down my cash on Tuesday, although I suspect the reverse might be true for most buyers.

The fourth disk is a DVD with a documentary about the creation of the Anthology, along with selections from Smith’s abstract films, which were influential in their own right. The documentary is by Rani Singh, the director of the Harry Smith Archives and Smith’s friend and assistant in the last years of his life. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of documentarian she is, but Singh’s previous work perpetuating Smith’s memory has been inspiring and important.

This last disk — the one with the best prospects for bringing us into communion with Harry Smith himself — brings me to something called The Harry Smith Connection …

Willner’s inspiration for the concert portion of this Project was, in part, two previous concerts marking the 1997 reissue of The Anthology on CD. From what I’m able to tell, the CD of those performances, The Harry Smith Connection, was widely disliked by critics. But if you judge solely by the “spin test” — how often it’s in my player, spinning — it’s one of my favorite CD’s.

Perhaps my favorite cut is “His Tapes Roll On,” which another reviewer has called “excruciating” and “unbelievably egregiously stinkerooin’ nonsense.” Unlike most of the other songs on the disk, “His Tapes Roll On” is not from the Anthology, but was written by Peter Stampfel, a Wauwautosa-born sometime member of The Fugs, whose first album was recorded by Smith. Stampfel’s creaky, amateurish, stitched-together song is about Smith’s obsession with recording sound — any, seemingly randomly chosen sound. Stampfel begins:

Harry recorded with a wire recorder
back in World War II
Harry recorded with a reel-to-reel
when the reel-to-reel was new
Harry recorded cassettes by the hundred
as the century rolled on
He even used a telephone answering machine
But Harry Smith is gone

Speed-rapping killers and jump-rope rhymes,
fireworks on the 4th of July
Complete early canon of Gregory Corso,
kittens, snowstorms, airplane trips
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
Where’s tomorrow gone?
Most of his tapes are missing in action
And Harry Smith is gone

It’s true that Stampfel’s voice and guitar-playing will never rocket to the top of the charts, but neither will anything else Harry Smith chose to record — squeaking hinges, squealing brakes, the peyote songs of the Kiowa, or the death-rattles of bowery bums.

It’s here, in Stampfel’s “egregious nonsense,” that we find the gravest contradictions and challenges in the concert recordings of The Harry Smith Project. At least on the face of it — again, sight unseen — the contradiction implied by bringing together popular, professional musicians to work up modernized, financially-viable, critic-pleasing versions of songs that (of all people) Harry Everett Smith collected … well, that contradiction seems to unravel the very goal of paying tribute to him. That’s what I’ll be listening for — the drama, inherent in the very idea of the project, of how to resolve, or respond to, or transcend The Harry Smith Project’s own contractions.

I’ll try to have something written up in the next few months.

KFAI covers Frank Cloutier

Dakota Dave Hull has asked me to talk about Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra on his radio show.

I’m scheduled to appear on August 3rd. The show airs every Thursday from 9:00 – 11:00 a.m. (Central Time) and can be streamed live on the web. Each show is also archived for two weeks.

Or, if you live in the Twin Cities, just turn your radio dial to 90.3 or 106.7 FM. Maybe you can drive by the Victoria Cafe while you listen …

Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra

Newshow

–
Editor’s note: This is the information I had after a couple weeks of research. The research has now gone on for many years! See various updates.
–

In recent weeks, I’ve discovered quite a lot of previously-unknown information about Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra.

Cloutier’s orchestra recorded “Moonshiners Dance, Part 1” in 1927, and Harry Smith included it in his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music (as entry #41). The liner notes to the 1997 reissue state:

The members of the Victoria Cafe Orchestra are unknown. [ The orchestra ] does not appear in any jazz or dance band discography, but is assumed to have been from the Minnesota area.

After many revelations during more than 100 hours of research, the phrase now seems almost comical — “assumed to have been from the Minnesota area.”

When I first heard the Anthology in 1997, Cloutier’s recording caught my attention. For one thing, I thought at the time if you slowed it down and played it in march-time, “Moonshiners Dance” could sound a bit like Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35.” More importantly, I wondered whether I could find out more about its origin, given that so little was known about it and given that it was recorded in St. Paul, Minnesota (I live in Minneapolis).

But then, absolutely everything about the Anthology caught my attention. It took nine years to finally feel as if I’d exhausted the Anthology’s deep well of distractions and drive, one Saturday morning, over to the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. My first step was to look in the 1927 St. Paul city directory — a precursor to the phone book — and there was Frank Cloutier, musician, living two blocks from The Victoria Cafe. I’ve done a fairly thorough literature search of the kind I learned to do in grad school, and it seems as if nobody else knows what I’ve uncovered.

But why? Harry Smith’s Anthology is surely the most influential anthology of sounds in history. It’s widely regarded as the founding document of the 1960’s Folk Revival, which so strongly defined popular music forever after. Many of those on the Anthology were sought out and found in the 1960’s, had a second career, and have been written about seemingly endlessly. Why was NOTHING known about Frank Cloutier and his orchestra until May 13, 2006, when I looked him up in the phone book?

Frank Cloutier presents certain problems specific to him. Despite the heavy influence of jazz on “Moonshiners Dance,” he’s missing from Brian Rust’s authoritative “Jazz Records, 1897 to 1942.” The recording is a mish-mash of French-Canadian, Mexican, and Klezmer dance-band influences, but can’t be found in Dick Spottswood’s “Ethnic Music on Records.” It’s too ethnic and jazzy — perhaps — to have been included in Rust’s “American Dance Band Discography.” I don’t really know why it has been so ignored, but I wonder if “Moonshiners Dance” has fallen through nearly every crack there is because it is both everything and nothing in particular. No wonder it took a character like Harry Smith to rescue it from oblivion.

Another reason the recording seems never to have been researched before, I suspect, is that it’s from Minnesota. As such, it doesn’t fit the story we usually tell ourselves about American “roots music” (if you’ll forgive the term). To an extent, interest in American music has been a subset of interest in the American South. Reasons, when given, usually involve the South’s gumbo of races and ethnicities — a deep mix indeed, which necessitated and enabled profound musical innovations.

As a devotee of Southern music myself, I won’t disagree. But what I hear in “Moonshiners Dance” is the arrival of the Jazz Age in St. Paul, and the adaptation of jazz to that city’s “always-already” multiethnic musical environment. A Klezmerized, French-Canadian, red-hot Scanda-jazzian, beer-garden polka, the recording deserves the prominence given to it by its inclusion in the Harry Smith Anthology — even if Smith was roughly the last person to understand its role in the Anthology’s argument.

One last thing is critical to understand about why this work seems to have waited until now. The US Census keeps personally-identifying data confidential for 72 years, so the full details of the 1920 census were released in 1992. The details that were collected in 1930, you might say, “swept through” the events of the 1920’s — probably the critical decade in the history of American “roots music.” And on the release side, the decade from 1992 to 2002 swept through the years of the information revolution. In other words, in 1992 all we had was 1920 and no computers, whereas in 2006 we have 1930 searchable on our desktops.

For those interested in the Anthology — or for any devotee of American music of the 1920’s and 1930’s — the information landscape has very recently been significantly improved. Those of us relying on discographies and other conscientious research from the 1940’s through the 1990’s should consider getting back to work all over again.

To be merciful, I’ve left an awful lot out. But below, I summarize the highpoints of what I’ve discovered about Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe, thus far. Much of it may seem mundane, but I keep remembering that six weeks ago, the best of our knowledge was a single, modest question mark in the Anthology’s 1997 liner notes.

——————————-

Prior to 1926, hard facts about Cloutier are still few.

According to the 1930 United States Census, Frank E. Cloutier, the St. Paul orchestra musician, was born in Massachusetts to a French-Canadian mother. His father was born in New York and, considering his surname, I imagine he had a French-Canadian background too (although many Cloutier’s immigrated from Ireland). Frank E. served in the military during World War I, and the census gives his age, in 1930, as 32. I haven’t been able to find Frank E. in any previous census — at least not with confidence.

1930census
(Frank E. Cloutier and his family, from the 1930 Census)

Occupationindustry
(Frank E. Cloutier’s “occupation” and “industry”, respectively)

There is a 1917 WW I draft card signed in Manitowac, Wisconsin for a Massachusetts-born musician named Frank E. Cloutier, but he’s four years too old to be the Frank E. of the 1930 census. Maybe the 1930 census taker underestimated our Frank’s age (the census records contain a lot of errors and guesses). Maybe Frank E. was anxious to defend France and lied to the military about his age. Maybe they’re just not the same guy, however unlikely that may seem.

In any case, in 1930, Frank E. has a wife, Olive (sometimes “Oline,” maiden name probably Olson), and two young children — Alene (b. 1923) and Alden (b. 1926). Frank’s wife and son were both born in Minnesota, but his daughter and mother-in-law were born in North Dakota. Maybe Olive and Frank E. met in Minnesota after the Great War, and then went in 1923 to stay with her family in North Dakota to have their first child.

From 1926 to 1933, the information is more easily available. Frank E. Cloutier first appears in the St. Paul city directory in early 1926, listed as a musician living in what’s called the “West Side“. In June, his son Alden is born.

From at least August to October 1926, Frank E. and musician Thomas M. Gates are the co-leaders of The Gates-Cloutier Metropolitans, the house orchestra for the Metropolitan Ballroom, an apparently short-lived, downtown dance hall. The Metropolitan, together with The Coliseum and the Oxford Ballroom, seems to be one of a few venues owned by one John J. Lane.

Gatescloutier
(From the September 1, 1926 St. Paul Daily News)

Lane would play an important role in Cloutier’s life — and a lot of other people’s lives — for the next several years. An Irish immigrant and former dance instructor, by 1926 Lane was a beefy, 46-year-old businessman who, on November 2, was elected to the Ramsey County Board of Commissioners. One wonders, among other things, whether having a dance hall owner as a county commissioner helped to maintain “high spirits” in St. Paul during Prohibition.

Johnlane
(John J. Lane, from a
November 3, 1926 article
reporting his election
as County Commisioner)

Of course, the year 1927 is the critical one for us, because of “Moonshiners Dance.” By May 1927, Tom Gates is leading orchestras at John Lane’s Coliseum and Oxford Ballrooms, and Frank E. Cloutier has moved to St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood (which got its name, in my opinion, from its history of French settlement).

Frogtown

Frank’s new home is near two of Lane’s dance halls, and is just two blocks from another venue, The Victoria Cafe at 825 University Avenue, near the corner of University and Victoria. Unlike all the other venues mentioned here, the building that housed The Victoria Cafe is definitely still standing today.

(the former Victoria Cafe, near the corner of University and Victoria)

(the former Victoria Cafe, 825 University Avenue, St. Paul —
click for larger view)

It was built in 1915 as The Victoria Theater, one of St. Paul’s early movie houses. It operated as a theater only until around 1921, and then stood vacant for several years. In 1925, a building permit was issued for the property, probably to convert it to The Victoria Cafe. The Cafe appears in the city directory the same year. Moe Thompson is listed as proprietor — so it was probably Thompson who dreamed up The Victoria Cafe.

Vic1926
(from the 1926 St. Paul city directory …
telephone number Dale 4664)

About 37 years old in 1925, Moe Thompson was born in New York to Jewish parents. He was already in Minnesota by World War I, and married a Swedish girl from Iowa sometime before 1920. From 1917 through 1930, he lists his calling alternately as music and the theater.

In late 1926 or early 1927, Thompson moved to New York City. It’s unclear if he remained the owner of The Vic or sold it to Lane, but the city directory gives the venue’s manager as one Samuel E. Markowitz. Everybody associated with The Vic in 1927 is listed as his employee. Markowitz — who went by the last names Markus and Markhus during this period — was an auto mechanic, driver, and car salesman before and after his association with The Vic.

Victoria1928
(from the 1928 St. Paul city directory)

Cloutier1927
(from the 1927 St. Paul city directory …
r = renter, h = homeowner)

The first newspaper ad I’ve found, so far, for The Victoria Cafe is from Saturday, April 23, 1927 (see the top of this entry). It announces the premier of a new revue starring “Cloutier’s Victorians” and 10 pretty dancing girls. In all the ads for the venue, its dancers, bright lights, Chinese food, and affordability all seem more prominently highlighted than Frank E.’s band.

Tengirlrevue
(ad from May 21, 1927)

Chinesefood
(ad from May 14, 1927)

Dancers
(ad from June 19, 1927 — everyone named
is a dancer except, presumably, Cloutier)

Frequently, other dance bands appear with Cloutier’s Victorians, such as Wally Erickson’s and Tom Gates’ Orchestras. These bands were from John Lane’s venues just a few blocks away, perhaps signaling some financial involvement by Lane in the cafe — but I haven’t confirmed this. Certainly, it hints at a closely-knit community among the neighborhood dance bands.

In May 1927, the label that recorded Moonshiners Dance, the Gennett record company, comes to town and begins recording local acts, including Erickson, Gates, and Cloutier. On May 29, the St. Paul Daily News carries a front page article announcing that recording sessions had begun at the Lowry Hotel the day before.

Souleslovetsky
(front page story, May 29, 1927, St. Paul Daily News —
the Minnesota historical society has a hard-copy original print
of the photo on file, and a good scan online)

Although the article doesn’t mention Gennett, it does specify that the accompanying photograph shows Harold Soule at the controls of “the recording device.” We know from archives housed today at the Indiana Historical Society that Soule was a Gennett employee.

I’m now working with the Indiana HS to get photocopies of the original company ledgers from the St. Paul sessions by Gennett. In the meantime, I must rely on redhotjazz.com for most of my information about those sessions — but I can’t determine precisely where they get any given piece of information.

Redhotjazz.com does not mention “Moonshiners Dance.” However, it lists the personnel from a session by the Tom Gates Orchestra held on either May 28 or July 25 — maybe the line-up was the same for both dates.

Lee N. Blevins (trombone)
Earl Clark (banjo)
Frank Cloustier (piano, director)
Bob Gates (bass brass)
Tom Gates (tenor saxophone)
Tracy “Pug” Mama (clarinet, alto saxophone)
Victor Sells (trumpet)
Nevin Simmons (alto Saxophone, vocals)
Harold Stoddard (drums)

Note the mysterious “Frank Cloustier” who is listed, strangely, as the director of the Tom Gates Orchestra — wouldn’t Tom Gates be its director?

We already know that Gates and Frank E. Cloutier were billed a few months before as the joint leaders of a single band, and that Gates and Cloutier continued to work together in the same venues on the same nights — indeed, they did precisely that at The Victoria Cafe six days before the May session. This should be proof enough that it was actually Frank E. Cloutier, not “Frank Cloustier” who played piano on at least one of the Gates Orchestra recordings.

But there is additional proof in the St. Paul and Minneapolis city directories. Nobody with the surname “Cloustier” appears in any directory of either of the Twin Cities from 1920 to 1936, nor any other year I’ve checked. Frank E. Cloutier, however, regularly presents himself.

Furthermore, searching the US Census from 1790 to 1930 — that is, in 15 consecutive decades of US history — nobody with the surname Cloustier was ever encountered by any census taker, anywhere. One family pops up in searches for the surname — a Rhode Island family in 1910 — but previous and subsequent census records list the same family as Cloutier. “Cloustier” is a spelling error.

The alternative possibility — that the only Cloustier in the history of the American Republic happened to be named Frank and happened to show up in St. Paul in 1927 to record with Frank E. Cloutier’s partner, taking a one-day turn as the director of the band — is absurd.

This discovery of at least one “lost recording” by Frank E. Cloutier raises an issue that might be resolved in the next few weeks, when I get my hands on copies of the company ledger. I don’t know the date of Moonshiners Dance recording (I’ve seen September 29, but there’s contradicting evidence). If the recording was made on the same date the members of the Gates Orchestra were documented, there’s a chance that Frank E. was not the only musician shared by the two outfits. There’s some small hope that the recording members of The Victoria Cafe Orchestra could be — or now have been — discovered.

Frank E. seems to have been involved with The Victoria Cafe for a very short time. Although there’s more research left to do, I’ve so far found strong evidence for an association only in April, May, and June of 1927. He’s missing from a September 22 ad for The Vic, where the featured attraction that night was the broadcast of the Tunney-Dempsey boxing match. Mostly, The Vic itself is missing from the ad sections of the local newspapers.

Tunneydempsey
(ad from September 22, 1927)

The Victoria Cafe appears again in the 1928 city directory, but disappears in 1929. The property at 825 University Avenue is listed as vacant for the next five years.

By 1928, Frank E. is listed in the directory as a musician at the Coliseum Ballroom — he’s again clearly working for John J. Lane. In 1929, he’s now a manager at Lane’s Coliseum Amusement Company and he’s moved west about six blocks to a home only a stone’s throw from the Coliseum. In September 1929 (at least), Frank Cloutier’s Orchestra is appearing on WCCO radio every Wednesday night at 10:30. Wading through newspaper listings could reveal when this radio gig began and ended.

Radio
(radio listings for Wednesday, September 11, 1929)

The 1930 census (discussed above) now finds Frank E. and his family right there, living next to the Coliseum. Frank E. remains in the same neighborhood for several more years, usually listed in the directories simply as “musician,” but in 1933 as “musical dir.” at the Coliseum Ballroom.

The 1933 directory contains Frank E. Cloutier’s last known address, and I don’t yet know what happened to him thereafter. (“Improvise, Frank E.!”) There is pretty good evidence that the family moved to North Dakota, where his wife’s mother was born.

A 1939 high school yearbook from Minot, North Dakota contains an entry for an Alene Cloutier. The name is the same as Frank E.’s 7-year-old daughter from the 1930 census, who would have been 16 in 1939. The entry is hard to interpret, but it appears the student has a connection with St. Paul’s Central High School.

It’s certain that Alene’s younger brother, Alden M. Cloutier, was assigned a Social Security Number in the state of North Dakota, a strong confirmation that the family moved to that state. Alden went on to serve as an Army sergeant in the final year of World War II. He died in 1981, barely 55 years old, and is buried at Wood National Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In 1934 — the year after the Cloutier family disappears from St. Paul — activity resumes at the former site of The Victoria Cafe. The unfortunately-named La Casa Grande Cafe opens at the address, under the management of John McNulty, who was previously a chauffeur, cab driver, and then cab company owner.

In 1935, McNulty wisely changes the establishment’s name back to The Victoria Cafe. Nevertheless, the property is vacant again in 1936, and McNulty goes back to driving a cab. He then works as a solicitor for a small local newspaper and soon moves in with several McNulty women — his widowed mother, apparently, and several of his sisters or possibly aunts. His wife and profession disappear from the listings.

It seems the property at 825 University has been associated with the Muska lighting company for most of the past 70 years and was, for a long time, a lighting fixture showroom. The “bright lights” of The Victoria Cafe shined on for a long time, one way or another.

The property is vacant today. In 2004, it was evaluated for possible eligibility for the National Registry (see the 4.6-MB PDF, pages 211-213). The evaluation was part of a survey conducted by The 106 Group Ltd. to evaluate the historical impact of a proposed light rail line running along University Avenue (see the 1.5-MB PDF). The report is very interesting and useful. However, the evaluation of 825 University Avenue completely misses the entire second half of the 1920’s, as well as the building’s close (but never studied) association with one of the most influential documents in the history of American music.

Although I was a copy editor and report production manager for a cultural resource management company for two years, I’m not qualified to say the report’s recommendation of “not eligible” for the National Registry was appropriate or inappropriate. It’s very clear, though, that the most historically and culturally important events and people associated with the property were entirely missed during the evaluation. I think the recommendation needs to be revisited by professionals — especially if the former site of the Victoria Cafe is to be negitively impacted by the project.

——————————-

Future Research
I didn’t publish this now because I’ve squeezed out all the information that can be gotten. I had other reasons, including a degree of fatigue. Much more can be uncovered (or has been uncovered, but not discussed here) and I hope to continue my research, but perhaps at a more leisurely pace.

For example, my research on Frank’s activities in St. Paul after the Gennett recordings is spotty, and light can be shed on his years from 1928 to 1933. It’s possible some clues as to why he left Minnesota could be found. I also think I can discover more about Olive Cloutier’s early life in Minnesota (and thus, when and where she met Frank E.).

Certainly, much more can be discovered about all of the characters recorded during Gennett’s 1927 sessions in Minnesota (not to mention Vocalion’s in 1929, etc.) and all of the venues in which they played. (I have seen, for example, the WWI draft card of the brother of Grace Slovetsky, the stenographer standing next to Harold Soule in the newspaper photo.) This is one reason for my choice to fixate exclusively on the obscure “Moonshiner’s Dance” — the vast quantity (if not necessarily quality) of information available on other people and venues is staggering.

Again, I’m working with the Indiana Historical Society to get copies of some of their extensive archive on the Gennett record company.

It would be easy enough to trace more of the career of John J. Lane, including his term as a Ramsey County Commissioner — and were I to write a book (or long article, Master’s thesis, etc.) about the Twin Cities music scene in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Lane would figure prominently. I don’t know how likely such a book (etc.) is without additional funds or other enabling conditions.

Many resources located in North Dakota and Wisconsin would be of great interest and value in finding out about the Cloutier family before and after St. Paul. But without being both unemployed and divorced, it’s hard to see how I’ll be able to access them in person any time soon. I’m exploring various possibilities. Certainly, I would love to hear from music fans in these states who have the deep enthusiasm and skepticism needed to do this work well. Ditto if you live in Minnesota, by the way — there is a lot of work to do, and I’d love to have partners in getting it done.

I’ll update The Celestial Monochord in the event any interesting discoveries are made.

——————————-

Acknowledgments
The resources at the library at the Minnesota History Center, especially city directories and newspapers on microfilm, have been extremely useful. So have the History Center’s patient staff members, even when I’ve been a pain in the ass.

The census information, military records, veterans’ cemetery information, and yearbook entry were all accessed through Ancestry.com. The site is available at many libraries that have institutional subscriptions, such as the MnHS. Individual home subscriptions can also be purchased at monthly or yearly rates. They’re not cheap, but they’re really useful.

Many sincere thanks to my wife, Jenny, for sharing her husband with various dead hillbillies — morning, noon, and night — for about a decade now. Thanks, especially, for listening … and listening … and listening.

“Old is the New New” is Old

While looking through a local Minnesota newspaper from 1927, I happened to notice the two-sentence “filler” article above, buried on page 9.

Sure enough, listening to reissues of the old “hillbilly” 78’s from the late 1920’s, you can hear the performers trying to appeal to this trend. They often seem to be trying hard — occasionally to point of absurdity — to sound antique and to project a feeling of old-timey nostalgia.

You sit down to listen to an obscure old recording from the 1920’s thinking you’re going to hear some of that real, authentic, genuine, old-time music just like the miners and moonshiners used to play way up in the hills when things were real … and at the start of the recording the leader of the string band introduces the song with something like “Yessir, we’re gunna play some of that real, authentic, genuine, old-time music just like the miners and moonshiners used to play way up in the hills when things were real!”

And you think … wwwwwait a minute …

Clearly, the companies who recorded southern hillbilly music in the 1920’s wanted to meet a demand for music that felt old-fashioned. Luckily, in doing so, they went out and unwittingly preserved a lot of American musical traditions that would’ve been otherwise lost.

Although I was aware of such an “old-time revival” of the 1920’s, it still surprised me to read about it in real newspapers alongside articles on the floods in Mississippi and Louisiana, and Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. Another 1927 article profiles a local record store owner who even uses the word “revival” to describe the situation of his day:

To me, it seems Bernstein might be describing songs from Tin Pan Alley — commercial music written by professionals — more than the kind of ancient, anonymously-composed songs we associate with old folk and blues music. But remember that performers we today consider “authentic” folk or blues musicians recorded such songs all the time. Bernstein could easily be thinking of recordings by The Skillet Lickers, Buell Kazee, and the Carter Family.

Reading all this, I was reminded of Robert Cantwell’s remark about Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music,” which collects commercial recordings mostly made in the late 1920’s:

The music reissued on the Anthology was already selectively, conscientiously, and conspicuously revivalist when it was originally recorded. This quality had recommended it, at the height of the Jazz Age, to its various parochial and provincial listeners. The Anthology recovered that music … converting a commercial music fashioned in the twenties into the “folk” music of the [1950’s] revival. [p. 190, When We Were Good]

Among other interesting things about this passage, Cantwell hints that the 1920’s revival was a reactionary response against the popularity of jazz. Could he be right? It’s an uncomfortable suggestion in our ecumenical age, but it’s hard to deny there’s some truth to it.

The most explicit proof I know of is that Henry Ford sponsored old-time fiddle contests with huge prizes to encourage the wholesome, clean-living values associated with old-time music. Such values made for good workers and customers, but I think Ford may also have wanted to disassociate — at least in the eyes of rural Southern folks — the Ford brand from the disruptive effects of the Ford product. To many, the auto stank of jazz, sex, alcohol, and economic turmoil, and Ford’s support of an old-time revival helped to sanitize the auto’s jazzy image.

Still, it’s always easy to over-simplify history, and I distrust Cantwell’s off-handed remark about the antagonism between these two musical trends of the 1920’s. If Bernstein’s customers listened to all the latest new musical fads, they’d be listening to BOTH jazz and old-time music, and I think there’s some evidence that this is exactly what happened.

Dock Boggs, for example, drew heavily from female blues singers who would have been considered, at the time, intensely new, racy, glitzy, and commercial — and indeed, he built a brand-new style around them. The Harry Smith Anthology’s “Moonshiner’s Dance” by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra is a promiscuous mash-up of red-hot American jazz and Scandinavian, French Canadian, and Mexican dance music. Neither Dock Boggs nor Frank Cloutier were parochial and provincial, and I wouldn’t be too quick to assume their listeners were either.

In another wrinkle, the old-time recordings made during the 1920’s weren’t exactly academic preservation efforts, although we often listen to the Harry Smith anthology (etc.) as if it were a direct pipeline to the distant past. To sell music that your average 1920’s (or 2006) record buyer would hear as old-timey and traditional, you can’t just offer traditional music. It’s often too unexpected, too weird, too racy, too contemporary. What you need is new music that sounds like an immediately recognizable sign that MEANS “traditional.”

This is what Bill Monroe developed as he created the bluegrass sound in the mid-1940’s. According to Cantwell’s book “Bluegrass Breakdown,” Monroe learned the trick of inventing a traditional music for a contemporary audience from one of the most popular old-time bands of the 1920’s revival, The Skillet Lickers:

In the Skillet Lickers … we hear the raucous, brilliant, and spontaneous sound of southern mountain dance music played by men who understood that in the recording studio they were at liberty to play as they might after the dancers had gone home — that is, with heightened vitality and energy [for] an audience who could attend more closely to the music than actual dancers and who could imagine a dance more gay and wonderful than is usually possible for ordinary self-conscious mortals. [p. 52, emphasis is Cantwell’s]

It’s clear that the old-time revival of the 1920’s preserved older traditions, even as it reworked those traditions and created new ones. Although we should keep this in mind as we listen to old records from the 1920’s, it’s not so strange. We know that folk revivals always curate and create at the same time — this is what happened in the 1950’s and early 1960’s in Greenwich Village, and in Chapel Hill around 1970, and it’s clearly happening again in the full-on folk revival we’re witnessing today.

Sometimes it seems the revivals come around so often they blend into one another, to the point where I begin to doubt the very idea of a distinct revival. There is near-constant churning and re-invention of America’s musical traditions, blending the mass-produced and the home-made, the new and the old, to the point where the distinctions between them become as imaginary as they are potent.

Beyond The Anthology

Banjo_camp_rancher

A reader has asked:

I only recently discovered the Harry Smith Anthology but I’m already obsessed. Any further recomendations?

What a question! For the past eight years or so, my musical and intellectual life has revolved around my own discovery of the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music compiled and designed by Harry Smith. You could say The Celestial Monochord’s own reason for being is to provide such “further recommendations.”

But I also hesitate to answer. Much of the energy and diversity in a Folk Revival (which is what’s happening today) seems to come from everybody struggling to find their own way. When I ask like-minded people how they found the old folk and blues music — and where they went from there — the answers almost always surprise me.

At the 2004 American Banjo Camp in Washington State, I met the guy pictured above (I can’t recall his name). He was a rancher from arid eastern Washington near the Idaho pan handle. Several campers listened as he told about the time he traded his much sought-after banjo — an old Gibson Mastertone — for seventeen tons of hay. We all laughed and told him he’d been bamboozled. When the laughing died down, he said, “Do you know what seventeen tons of hay cost?” We all conceded that indeed we did not.

Anyway, point is, this guy seemed like a truly authentic folk character — The Genuine Article. So I asked him how he got into playing the banjo, hoping he’d say it was a family tradition going back centuries. Instead, he said “Well, when I was a kid, I was very heavily into the Rolling Stones. And their liner notes said they owed it all to Muddy Waters. So I got some Muddy Waters albums, and that got me into Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton records, and that got me to Harry Smith and Dock Boggs, which got me into bluegrass and … well, twenty years later, here I am at Banjo Camp.”

You just never know.

I’m happy to list some of the places I’ve been, but I wouldn’t think of it as a road map. It’s mind-boggling how much stuff is out there today, and how many paths there are into and out of The Anthology.

THE ANTHOLOGY

Harry_smith

Once you’ve memorized The Anthology and scoured its liner notes, you may want even more supporting material.

Anthology of American Folk Music is an invaluable but out-of-print book from Oak Publications. I found a hard copy from an online bookseller, but this electronic version at Tower of Babel will also do nicely.

Volume 4 was released in 2000 by Revenant, where it promptly went out of print (which is why I wish Folkways had done this, as nothing goes out of print there). Smith had long planned this fourth volume, but his attention span expired. It’s wonderful — maybe you can find it used somewhere.

Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus. In a way, it’s a book-length argument that the spirit of The Anthology deeply animates Dylan’s vision — even more so AFTER he “went electric.” I think you need to know this book to go any further. It’s been renamed and revised, but I only know this first version.

When We Were Good: The Folk Revival by Robert Cantwell — especially Chapter Six, “Smith’s Memory Theater.” Cantwell’s writing is often dense and difficult (in a postmodern cultural studies kind of way) but if you can figure out what he’s saying, he’ll change your life. I’ve returned to this beautiful chapter again and again over the years.

Think of the Self Speaking: Harry Smith — Selected Interviews is for the serious Smith-head. It’s easy to forget that the highly honored and influential Anthology was put together by a border-line homeless weirdo whose main source of income was often small-time dope peddling. This collection of interviews is frustrating, hilarious, tedious, inspiring, illuminating. Mostly, it’s a sad reminder that Allen Ginsberg was right about what becomes of the best minds of his (and your) generation.

THOSE ANTHOLOGIZED

Henry_thomas

Find out what ELSE the people on The Anthology recorded — that is, find out what Smith chose from to arrive at The Anthology. Here are my favorites so far.

The Carter Family: In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain. The fact that I laid out the cash for this Bear Family box set suggests how important I think the Carter Family is (it sure as hell doesn’t mean I’ve got the money to spend — you might want to go for some of the box sets put out by JSP instead). You know … sometimes I walk down a crowded street and am suddenly saddened, thinking “Most of these people don’t know about the Carter Family.”

The Complete Blind Willie Johnson and its liner notes. Johnson is a gospel musician, so the central themes of his work go back to African American slavery, and back through all of Western literature, and ultimately to Jewish slavery and the Torah. This may be why his artistry can seem to take on layer upon layer upon layer. It’s DEEP. Don’t screw around with any “selected” collection — go for the Complete.

The Complete Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas. Despite their wild differences, Thomas is like Willie Johnson in that a Great Theme gives his art a depth that opens up beneath you and swallows you up. Born less than a decade after the abolition of slavery, his theme is travel — the road’s promises of freedom and its ever-present threats of sudden terror.

Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years, 1963-1968. Boggs is like the greatest old Irish storyteller you’ll ever meet — you never know whether to laugh or cry. These years that Dock Boggs and Mike Seeger spent together have a mythic status in my mind — like Dylan and Guthrie at Greystone Hospital, or like Johannes Kepler at Tycho Brahe’s bedside. The difference is that Seeger made recordings.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford: Ballads, Banjo Tunes and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina. After many weeks of listening exclusively to this, I stood on the shore of Lake Superior and tried an impersonation of Bascom Lamar Lunsford. To my surprise, what came out was a terrible Lunsford, but a great Bob Dylan. I think not only Dylan’s voice, but his approach to imagery and meaning owes a large, mostly unrecognized debt to Lunsford.

Original Folkways Recordings of Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley, 1960-1962 documents one of the great moments of American music — Ralph Rinzler’s simultaneous rediscovery of The Anthology’s Clarence (Tom) Ashley, and his discovery of the young Doc Watson. The collection has the sound of music being reborn.

THE NEW LOST CITY RAMBLERS + ALAN LOMAX

Black_texicans

Reading a song as sheet music is like looking at a roadmap of a city, while hearing an actual recorded performance of a song is like visiting that city and eating its gumbo. That’s the big shift in which Harry Smith’s Anthology participated. Technology and imagination allowed The Anthology, The New Lost City Ramblers, and Alan Lomax to put the true sound of real folk music right into people’s ears — and it literally remade the world.

New Lost City Ramblers, 40 Years of Concert Performances. A great introduction to the Ramblers, with many stories told between songs, plenty of laughs, and brilliant musicianship. You can hear the guys grow to a venerable age right before your ears. Tracy Schwarz’s introductory comments about “I’ve Always Been a Rambler” are alone worth the price.

New Lost City Ramblers: The Early Years, 1958-1962. Selections from the Folkways albums before Tom Paley left the group. Particularly surprising for these Patron Saints of Oldtime is all the bluegrass they played so capably. Particularly amusing are all the bawdy and politically questionable songs such as “Sales Tax on the Women” and “Sal’s Got a Meatskin.”

Out Standing in Their Field: The New Lost City Ramblers Volume II, 1963-1973. Selections from the albums recorded with Tracy Schartz in the line-up. I love the ever-timely Roger Miller song “Private John Q,” the hilariously bad-news “Dear Okie,” John Cohen’s insanely shaggy shaggy-dog story “Automobile Trip Through Alabama,” and the worryingly moving Freudian parable “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake.” For more on the Ramblers see The New Lost Times.

Southern Banjo Sounds
Solo Oldtime Country Music
Third Annual Fairwell Reunion. I carry around these CDs by founding Rambler Mike Seeger like the American President’s nuclear football — they’re never far from my side. Mike has done more than any other living person to make the music of The Anthology a living reality in the hearts and hands of people like us. Like the Ramblers themselves, Mike is not a nostalgic impersonator of old records — he’s very much a new thing, a creature of today and tomorrow.

The Alan Lomax Collection Sampler. A brilliant way to get a sense of what Alan Lomax preserved in his journeys through America, and during his McCarthy-era exile in Europe. A good third of these performances by longshoremen, patrons of taverns, and prisoners in work crews just don’t seem possible — they’re too beautiful and strange.

Deep River of Song: Black Texicans. The reason I choose these recordings of black Texans over all the other Lomax recordings I own is that they just happen to blow my mind so consistently. Lomax recordings have a startling immediacy — you feel like you’re there watching the thing get recorded, every time you hear it. If I could sit down with you and spin some disks, I might just start you off with Butter Boy’s freaky “Old Aunt Dinah.”

INHERITORS OF THE ANTHOLOGY

Aereoplain

It’s silly to list performers influenced by The Anthology, since just about everybody’s world has been transformed by it, whether they know it or not. But here’s a few people I happen to like, and who just seem to smell like Harry Smith — they have The Anthology and/or Lomax and/or the Ramblers written all over them.

There’s a vast universe of incredible musicians who perform in old folk styles. They are world-class masters of their instruments, but when you see them in concert, you might be one of only a dozen people in the audience. It’s insane, but … hey, at least they do requests. I once told Ken Perlman that I’ve given his brilliant “Northern Banjo” CD to friends as gifts a few times. He gave me a puzzled look and said, “Where do you get them?” Lord help us all. I’m also crazy about Tom, Brad, and Alice, Mac Benford, and local boys Spider John Koerner, Charlie Parr, and Lonesome Dan Kase. (These last three are all fine songwriters, but I think of them as oldtime bluesmen.)

Then there’s all the more popular (for better or worse) singer-songwriter acts who Smith-ites might like. Recordings I really like and tend to associate with the Anthology are Jolie Holland’s Escondida, Gillian Welch’s Time the Revelator and Revival, John Prine’s John Prine and Diamonds in the Rough, John Hartford’s albums, the great and unavailable Aereo-Plain and the very strange Mark Twang, Tom Waits’ Mule Variations, and The Handsome Family’s Through the Trees.

Also, for all that can be said about Bob Dylan’s debt to The Anthology, Alan Lomax, and The New Lost City Ramblers, I think Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong are the Dylan albums that make the point most clearly. They’re also among Dylan’s best, it seems to me, and like his first album, they’re heard far too rarely.

Adieu False Heart

Fiddling Arthur Smith

Today is the sixty-eighth anniversary of the recording of Adieu False Heart, by Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith and the Delmore Brothers on January 26, 1938 in Charleston. Readers of The Celestial Monochord will recognize Adieu False Heart, of course, as one of the few pre-War hillbilly recordings about astronomy and cosmology.

It’s a “heart song” — a very sentimental parlor song. You might dismiss it entirely, until you actually bid adieu to an actual false-hearted lover, at which point you think, “Now, how did that old song go again?”

Here are the lyrics, near as I can tell:

ADIEU FALSE HEART

Adieu false heart, since we must part
May the joys of the world go with you
I’ve loved you long with a faithful heart
but I never anymore can a-b’lieve you

I’ve seen the time I’d-a married you
And been your constant lover
But now I gladly give you up
For one whose heart’s more truer.

My mind is like the constant sun
From the east to the west it ranges
Yours is like unto the moon
It’s every month it changes

When I lay down to take my rest
No scornful one to wake me
I’ll go straight ways unto my grave
Just as fast as time can take me

I’ve always thought the last line of the third verse should be “It’s every night it changes.” After all, the moon’s phases change from night to night — from month to month, they’re pretty much the same.

But that third verse is great. For one thing, its astronomical imagery sets up the final verse’s mention of a fairly technical idea in cosmology — the speed of time. Coming after the previous verse, it gives a touching sense of the singer caught up in nature’s relentless, remorseless clockwork — he’s as much a victim of Isaac Newton’s conception of time as of a lousy girlfriend.

That theme is emphasized by the recording’s pace, which is set by a firm, metronome-like guitar. As Arthur Smith sings the very last line (“Just as fast as time can take me”), the clockwork rhythm … gradually … slows … to a … halt.

I’ve mentioned before, in the context of Tom Waits and Stephen Foster, that people who are grieving often become morbidly fixated on nature’s small details. Think also of Walt Whitman’s When Lilacs Last In the Dooryard Bloom’d. In a sense, Adieu False Heart gives us yet another person in deep emotional pain who becomes acutely aware of the natural world — and in this case, the “nature” that the mourner struggles to come to grips with is the very character of space-time itself.

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By the way, both Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith and the Delmore Brothers were members of the Grand Ol’ Opry around the time of this recording. Smith’s fiddling (along with that of Clayton McMichen and Curly Fox) was hugely influential to Bill Monroe as he was inventing bluegrass. You can maybe hear a hint of this in the solid, driving 4/4 time of the Delmore Brother’s guitars and in the novel, extended use of the “five chord.” About Adieu False Heart, John Fahey writes:

Most songs go to the four chord and then the five chord and quickly back to home base. This construction is quite rare and makes for an unusually beautiful ballad.

You can find the song on the “lost” fourth volume of Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music,” released on Revenant in 2000 for the first time. Chords and sheet music are available from Dylan Chords.