Harry Smith Anthology – Page 4 – The Celestial Monochord

Fifty Miles of Elbow Room

I’m listening again to the original Carter Family’s final, brilliant sessions of 1940 and 1941. It turns out they recorded “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room,” which I mostly know from Harry Smith’s Anthology, performed in 1930 by Rev. Ford Washington McGee and his congregation. It’s currently also available at the great music blog Long Sought Home.

I never understood the song before because of the chaotic revival meeting atmosphere created by McGee and company, which makes the lyrics pretty impossible to decipher. I mean, what ABOUT fifty miles of elbow room?

Well, focusing on the version by Sara and Maybelle Carter — with all the loving orderliness and earnest precision we’ve come to expect from them — the words are easy to figure out.

It turns out the song has pretty much the same theme, or belongs to the same gospel tradition, as the Tom Waits song “Down There by the Train,” which was recorded by Johnny Cash on his first American Recordings album. In this tradition, the purpose and the power of the song are in the limitless, extreme, radical inclusiveness of salvation.

Maybe a kind reader can help out this old Catholic-atheist with the terminology and a Biblical passage … in any case, these songs insist that your station in life doesn’t matter, your race or gender don’t matter, and not even the gravity of your sins matter — NOTHING can keep you from living in paradise, so long as you repent, so long as you meet us “down there by the train.”

The emotional power of these songs is in the radical character of the forgiveness they promise. They are all about the total and extreme nature of the idea that heaven is open to ANYBODY. There’s so much room for absolutely everybody in Heaven that its gates are a hundred miles wide — entering Heaven, you have fifty miles of elbow room.

If you’re in need of a reminder that there’s something good in Christianity, turn off your TV and spin some old 78’s.

FIFTY MILES OF ELBOW ROOM

Twelve hundred miles its length and breadth
The four-square city stands
Its gem-set walls of jasper shine
Not made with human hands
One hundred miles its gates are wide
Abundant entrance there
With fifty miles of elbow room
On either side to spare

Chorus:
When the gates swing wide on the other side
Just beyond the sunset sea
There’ll be room to spare as we enter there
Room for you and room for me
For the gates are wide on the other side
Where the flowers ever bloom
On the right hand on the left hand
Fifty miles of elbow room

Sometimes I’m cramped and crowded here
And long for elbow room
I want to reach for altitude
Where fairer flowers bloom
It won’t be long til I shall pass
Into that city fair
With fifty miles of elbow room
On either side to spare

Chorus

[ Recorded by the Carters, October 14, 1941 in New York, NY ]

I insist that Tom Waits’ song “Down There by the Train” is loosely based on an old negro spiritual, “When The Train Comes Along.” Versions of this earlier song were recorded by Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas and by Uncle Dave Macon. The lyrics below are from Uncle Dave Macon’s recording in Richmond, IN on August 14, 1934. Macon provided the vocals and banjo, with Kirk McGee also on banjo and Sam McGee backing up on guitar.

WHEN THE TRAIN COMES ALONG

Some comes walkin’ and some comes lame
Gonna meet you at the station when the train comes along
Some comes walkin’ in my Jesus’ name
Gonna meet you at the station when the train comes along

Chorus:
Oh, when the train comes along
Oh, when the train comes along
Oh lord, I’ll meet you at the station
When the train comes along

Sins of years are washed away
Gonna meet you at the station when the train comes along
Darkest hour is changed to day
Gonna meet you at the station when the train comes along

Chorus

Doubts and fears are borne along
Gonna meet you at the station when the train comes along
Sorrow changes into song
Gonna meet you at the station when the train comes along

Chorus

Ease and wealth become as dross
Gonna meet you at the station when the train comes along
All my boast is in the cross
Gonna meet you at the station when the train comes along

Chorus

Selfishness is lost in love
Gonna meet you at the station when the train comes along
All my treasures are above
Gonna meet you at the station when the train comes along

Einstein and Folkways Records

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If a movie was ever made about the early years of Folkways Records, someone would have to play Albert Einstein.

It would only be a cameo and its true importance is hard to assess, but nevertheless there is an anecdote that links the father of modern physics with the label that brought us Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the New Lost City Ramblers.

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My research is in its early stages. But it keeps getting clearer and clearer to me that Folkways Records wasn’t just a label that released folk records. It has been a significant force in shaping the way music listeners in the United States and beyond think about their culture and their past.

For example, Woody Guthrie has sometimes seemed to me, and others, as some kind of mythical legendary superfolk. Much of the reason is that Pete Seeger consciously set out to make sure he was remembered this way. But it seems very doubtful that either Pete or Woody would have had the careers they had without Folkways.

Also, as I understand it, Leadbelly had such a degrading experience under management of the Lomaxes that it’s unclear how much recording he would have done if Folkways founder Moses Asch hadn’t brought him into the studio.

And Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music came out on Folkways and continues to be a major conduit between Americans and their own musical heritage. But when Smith walked into the Folkways offices, all he wanted to do was sell them his old record collection. Having Harry put together an anthology was the idea of Moses Asch.

And remember that the very first LP of bluegrass music ever released was on the Folkways label.

And on page 15 of Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Dylan tells us why he went to New York: “I envisioned myself recording for Folkways Records. That was the label I wanted to be on. That was the label that put out all the great records.”

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Here’s what I know about Einstein’s role — plus a little of what I don’t know.

Moe Asch was the son of Shalom Asch, perhaps the best-known novelist writing in Yiddish and a leading leftist intellectual. He and Albert Einstein were acquaintances. In the late 1930s, both men were actively trying to rescue German and other European Jews endangered by the Third Reich. They encouraged and enabled Jews to leave Europe and tried to get reluctant governments, including the U.S., to accept Jewish refugees.

The young Moe Asch had recently acquired a new “portable” audio recording machine (an enormous, weighty beast in the 1930s). At this point, accounts vary in certain details. Usually, Shalom Asch brings his son and his son’s machine to Princeton, NJ to record a message from Einstein about European Jews for later radio broadcast. In one version, Einstein visits the Asches in their home for the same purpose.

At some point, Einstein apparently asked the young Asch what he wanted to do for a living, and Moe offered that he might like to be a mathematician. (I can imagine a young man answering this way in hopes of pleasing Einstein, then one of the most famous celebrities on Earth.) After the recording was finished, Einstein told Moe Asch that his recording machine was a better path to follow if he wanted a creative and prosperous future.

In some accounts, Einstein speaks expansively about the machine’s potential to record and preserve global civilization. In some accounts, it’s Asch who speaks of starting a company that would “describe the human race, the sound it makes, what it creates,” and Einstein reacts encouragingly. According to Moe Asch himself, Einstein told him:

It’s very important for the 20th Century to have someone like me who understood the intellect and who understood the changes of the 20th Century and who understood folk and dissemination.

Given the very real and immediate threat to Western Civilization that was the very reason for their meeting, it’s not hard to imagine any of these scenarios.

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A little harder to imagine, in detail, is the account Pete Seeger liked to tell his audiences. Seeger was close to Moe Asch and knew him well, but he was also a better entertainer and myth-maker than he was a historian:

… and then over supper, Einstein says, “Well young Mr. Asch, what do you do for a living?” And Mo says, “Well, I make a living installing public address systems into hotels, but I’ve just bought this recording machine, and I’m fascinated with what it can do. And in New York, I’ve met a Negro musician named Leadbelly who’s a fantastic musician but nobody’s recording him. They say he’s not commercial. But I think this is American culture and it should be recorded. Down in the Library of Congress they record things and just put it on the shelf there and only a few people ever hear them.”

Well, Einstein says, “You’re exactly right. Americans don’t appreciate their culture. It’ll be a Polish Jew like you who will do the job.”

I doubt Pete Seeger’s account, but mostly because there’s too much truth packed into it.

The genius of Folkways Records was that it was the fabled “cool corporation.” Asch turned his back on the risky business of making “hits” and instead focused on a sure bet — if you record something great and rare, somebody will want it eventually. So he recorded whatever seemed to be in the spirit of his conversation with Einstein, gave it excellent and exhaustive liner notes, and kept it in print forever. (The “Sounds of North American Frogs” has been available continuously since 1958 — and in 1998 it was even digitally remastered and released on CD.)

I’ve also recently come to really appreciate the vital roles that Europeans played in preserving American folk music, Northerners played in preserving the sounds of the South, whites have played in keeping black musical traditions alive and kicking … and so on, ad infinitum. The Celestial Monochord is lousy with such stories if you know where to look. In researching these curious histories, one finds Folkways Records almost continuously at the center of the action.

Aschsonnybrownie
Moses Asch, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee in 1958 (from a 1-megabyte article from the National Yiddish Book Center, available as a PDF.)

Billy The Bum

Child_with_crutches

About 15 years ago, a friend of mine wanted to cite an example of a bad John Prine song, so he chose Billy The Bum, calling it “a shambles of a song.” At the time, it seemed like a good example to me, mostly because the song’s shameless sentimentality made me cringe. But I’ve gone through a lot since then.

Around 1999, after I’d pretty much memorized the Anthology of American Folk Music, I was starving for more blues and hillbilly recordings from the 1920’s. So I sought out recordings by many of the same performers Harry Smith had put in his collection. And there, beyond the Anthology, were many astonishing surprises for which the Anthology had not really prepared me.

Chief among them, initially, was how often these performers had recorded extremely sentimental 19th century “parlor songs,” as I call them. These earnest, stiff numbers told tales full of pathos about drowning sailors, dying orphans, childhood cottages never seen again. Maybe Harry Smith had mostly ignored them because they weren’t “folk songs” in a certain sense — most were relatively new compositions from the late 1800’s, widely sold as sheet music for middle-class homes. In the late 1920’s, white folk musicians made sound recordings of them for the first time, their original copyright status long forgotten.

Initially, I was a little impatient with them — a bit embarrassed, disappointed, and amused by their commercialism and their hokiness. But after listening closely to dozens of them, researching the origins of several of them, and having a few conversion experiences with them (I guess you’d say), I’ve come to love them. There’s Charlie Poole’s “Baltimore Fire”:

It was on a silver falls by a narrow
That I heard a cry I ever will remember
The fire sent and cast its burning embers
On another faded city of our land

Fire! Fire! I heard the cry
On every breeze that passes by
All the world was one sad cry of pity
Strong men in anguish prayed
Calling loud to Heaven for aid
While the fire in ruin was laying
Fair Baltimore, our beautiful city

There’s Buell Kazee’s “If You Love Your Mother”:

In a lonely graveyard many miles away
Lies your own dear mother slumbering ‘neath the clay
Or have you forgotten all her tears and sighs
If you love your mother, meet her in the skies

She is waiting for you in that happy home
Turn from sin’s dark pathway to no longer roam
Give your heart to Jesus, upward lift your eyes
If you love your mother, meet her in the skies

And then there’s the Carter Family, whose influence now seems to me ubiquitous in John Prine’s music (and who provided the title song for Diamonds in the Rough). The Carters recorded these sentimental parlor songs more often and more movingly than anybody ever has. Their “Engine 143” did make it onto The Anthology:

Georgie’s mother came to him with a bucket on her arm
Saying my darling son be careful how you run
For many a man has lost his life in trying to make lost time
And if you run your engine right you’ll get there just on time

Up the road he darted, against the rocks he crushed
Upside down the engine turned and Georgie’s breast did smash
His head was against the firebox door the flames are rolling high
I’m glad I was born for an engineer to die on the C&O road

I’ve come to appreciate these songs as beautifully written and recorded, often, but also as an important part of the roots of American music. In no small part through the influence of the Carter Family, country music is heavily based on them (what do you get when you play a country record backwards?).

Billy The Bum, which I’ve known for over 30 years, is today a completely new song to me. I hear it within a tradition that’s well over a hundred years old and that I’ve taken deeply, if cautiously, into my emotional, intellectual, and maybe spiritual life.

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Billy The Bum is another of Diamonds In The Rough’s country waltzes. The first verse again establishes John Prine’s firm flat-picking, accompanied by David Bromberg on a second acoustic guitar. Bromberg plays mostly bass runs, but strums often to help keep the beat. I’d say he plays “oldtime guitar” — an art that’s been essentially lost to the upright bass, on the one hand, and bluegrass guitar on the other.

With the first statement of the chorus, Bromberg begins dubbing over (I assume, unless he’s playing with his toes) the sliding dobro that gives the song much of its countrified twang. Also on each chorus Dave Prine enters, turned down very low in the mix, singing back-up vocals in a strained, high-lonesome wail, like a far-off cry in the wilderness.

As I understand the lyrics, Billy always fantasized about riding the rails as a hobo, but because his legs had been twisted by polio, he could only hop a train in his imagination:

Billy the Bum lived by the thumb
Sang of the hobo’s delight
He’d prove he could run twice as fast as the sun
By losing his shadow with night

He loved every girl in this curly-headed world
But no one will know, it seems
For two twisted legs and a childhood disease
Left Billy just a bum in his dreams

It’s interesting that even in the 20’s and 30’s — presumably the heyday of hobo culture — films and songs romanticized the lifestyle, seducing many young people into riding the rails. In other words, hobos were already a dream even back when they were still a reality. Billy was only one of millions who dreamed of riding the blinds. There’s a sad irony and richness here — his polio made him a bum in his own eyes, unable to attain his dreams, which included being a real bum on the open road:

He lived all alone in a run-down home
Near the side of the old railroad track
Where the trains used to run carrying freight by the ton
And blow the whistle as Billy waved back

It seems fairly clear to me that John Prine has always believed in Jesus Christ, that he’s a christian. But if this is right, his work presents us with a rare and fearsome portrait of a blazingly angry and disappointed, public-spirited, and wildly playful faith. Prine’s first album is all about spirituality, if you look at it just so, and is big enough to contain everything from “Eat a lotta peaches, try to find Jesus” to “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes — Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.”

If Prine were an atheist like myself, it would be a different matter. But given Prine’s long and powerful history of working out his thoughts about faith in song, I don’t take lightly his portrait of the song’s townspeople, whose children “seemed to have nothing better to do than to run around his house with their tongues from their mouths.”

Now some folks’ll wait and some folks’ll pray
For Jesus to rise up again
But none of these folks in their holy cloaks
Ever took Billy on as a friend

For pity’s a crime and ain’t worth a dime
To a person who’s really in need
Just treat ’em the same as you would your own name
Next time that your heart starts to bleed

It’s easy enough, if you prefer, to hear easy platitudes and a certain self-righteousness in this indictment. But given Prine’s body of work and the religious themes he’s explored so frankly, I think we’re bound to take this portrait seriously. Trapped among such people by his physical disabilities and his shame, Billy, a real fluorescent light, cried pennies on Sunday morning.

By this point, I’ve come to decide that it’s a defense mechanism, this tendency not to really hear the lyrics of these old-style sentimental songs. If we took them literally, pictured them, read them over, took them at their word, they’d cut too close to the bone. They’d go places we’ve decided, as a culture, we don’t want to go.

It’s no wonder that generation after generation of Americans experience a recurring “Folk Revival” in which young people rediscover acts like the Carter Family. And, regardless of what else might be said about them, it’s no wonder that these Revivals are continually experienced by their participants as a burning away of some vast, heavy haze of sanitized corporate nonsense to reveal something that finally, at long last, matters.

(This is part of my song-by-song series on John Prine’s second album, Diamonds in the Rough: Everybody * The Torch Singer * Souvenirs * The Late John Garfield Blues * Sour Grapes * Billy The Bum * The Frying Pan * Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You * Take the Star Out of the Window * The Great Compromise * Clocks and Spoons * Rocky Mountain Time * Diamonds in the Rough)

Harry Smith, Bob Dylan, and
“The Ramblers Step” (Part 2)

(See also Part 1)

The New Lost City Ramblers and Harry Smith

Reading a song as sheet music is like looking at a roadmap of a place. Hearing an actual recorded performance of a song is like is going to the place and eating its gumbo. Both the Ramblers and the Anthology grew out of this critical historical shift:

The locus of collecting, preserving, and disseminating folklore changed from the printed page to the electronic media. In the first half of the twentieth century, folklorists began to use disc, tape, wire, and film rather than writing to collect and preserve sung and played folk music, and a parallel documentation was carried out by the fledgling entertainment industry which inadvertently preserved some dying folkways among its … phonograph records. [John Pankake, liner notes to NLCR: The Early Years, 1958-1962]

The Ramblers and the Anthology made this transformation matter desparately after WWII, when the LP brought the actual sound of America’s folk musicians into the ears of young urban musicians.

Mike Seeger’s ears were full of these sounds long before the Anthology. His parents had been turned on to Dock Boggs, for example, by Thomas Hart Benton in the early 1930’s. They turned away from the European museum pieces that meant "folk musc" to American intellectual leftists and musicologists. Instead, Mike grew up in a house with fresh field recordings by the likes of the Lomaxes, and with lively commercial recordings. Mike’s dad even played for a time in Benton’s hillbilly-style stringband (see Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music). But it is important to remember that this was not the mainstream American view of folk music until well after Moe Asch asked Harry Smith to compile his Anthology (with the intent of changing that mainstream view, I imagine). This explains the odd fact that when the Ramblers first appeared, a great many folk purists considered them "inauthentic."

Tom Paley, too, had anticipated the Anthology’s message. In the late 1940’s, he’d already been "an admired virtuoso on guitar and banjo," according to Philip Gura:

By the early 1950s, Paley and a few others began to steer an important segment of [East coast] urban musicians away from the then popular English ballads and political songs toward country music. The shift was crucial, for it distinguished Paley and Cohen from such proponents of the "art" folksong as Richard Dryer-Bennet and John Jacob Niles, on the one hand, and politically motivated artists like Pete Seeger and the Weavers, on the other.

Although Paley and Seeger knew some of the terrain covered by the Anthology, they very much welcomed it as a guide for themselves and their audience. Tom Paley:

When Folkways issued Harry Smith’s Anthology, those three albums (six 12" LPs) hit us like thunderbolts … The impact on those of us already interested in the music was terrific. [Harry Smith Tribute]

Interestingly, Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler (a protege of Mike Seeger’s, I think it’s fair to say) found much of the Rambler’s material in Harry Smith’s record collection, which Smith had sold to the New York Public Library (see Cantwell’s book, When We Were Good).

The influence of the Anthology on John Cohen is even more clear-cut:

Raised in the suburbs where the Hit Parade (the top forty) dominated musical taste, I first became aware of a world outside my musical milieu when I heard the old commercial records on Harry Smith’s Anthology, issued by Folkways in 1953. The Anthology, along with Alan Lomax’s "Listen Tour Our Story, Mountain Frolic & Smoky Mountain Ballads," made me more receptive to the sounds that spawned bluegrass, Cajun, and rhythm & blues. It was very different from what filled the folk song marketplace of the 60s.

Over the years, Cohen has been a significant force in keeping the Anthology in the public imagination. For three decades, Cohen’s 1969 interview with Harry Smith was just about the sole source of information about Smith that folk enthusiasts had available to them. Moe Asch reports that Cohen had been among those who had tried and failed to get the final "missing" volume of the Anthology released (see the 1997 notes to the Anthology).

In a certain sense, the Ramblers influenced the Anthology as much as the other way around by embodying its spirit, asserting its definitions of folk music, and putting it "in currency" among folk music enthusiasts. The Ramblers and the Anthology shared the same project of not only exhuming the old recordings, but resurrecting them — giving them new life in new contexts with new meanings and functions.

"Anthologizing" Dylan: The Ramblers Step

Bob Dylan didn’t need the Anthology — he had the Ramblers. More importantly, before Dylan even showed up, the Folk Revival itself had already been crafted by the Anthology and the powerfully reenforcing efforts of the Ramblers. Let’s go back to a quote from Dylan we saw earlier, in which he denies being strongly influenced by the Anthology:

… those recordings were around — that Harry Smith anthology — but that’s not what everybody was listening to … mostly you heard other performers. All those people [Griel Marcus is] talking about, you could hear the actual people singing those ballads. You could hear Clarence Ashley, Doc Watson, Dock Boggs, the Memphis Jug Band, Furry Lewis. You could see those people live and in person. They were around.

But Dylan could sit at the feet of these musicians only because, in the years immediately before Dylan showed up in New York, devotees of the Anthology had gone south in search of the musicians it featured. At Mike Seeger’s strong urging, Ralph Rinzler traveled in 1960 to the Union Grove, NC Fiddler’s Convention where Rinzler’s research into the Anthology enabled him to recognize a musician prominently featured on the Anthology, Clarence Ashley. Rinzler soon returned to record Ashley, at which point Ashley introduced Rinzler to a young, blind guitarist named Arthel Watson, who everyone called "Doc":

I had brought the six-record collection [the Anthology] with me to give to Ashley as a way of making clear to him why I understood his importance. Doc Watson and I reviewed the list of performers and songs on the album covers. To my astonisment, he was familiar with many of them, having heard the recordings and some of the performers themselves in his childhood and having known others as neighbors. [from Rinzler’s liner notes to "Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley: The Original Folkways Recordings, 1960-1962"]

Thanks to Rinzler’s apprenticeship to the necessary combination of Mike Seeger and the Anthology, Clarence Ashley and Dock Watson made their first appearance in Greenwich Village only a couple of months before Dylan arrived from Minneapolis.

The Ramblers were, according to Philip Gura, "among the first to bring on stage with them living exemplars of the southern folk tradition, a very significant innovation." It was Seeger, for example, who "rediscovered" Dock Boggs and brought him to New York in 1964. If I understand Gura correctly, the Ramblers spearheaded the founding of the New York Friends of Old Time Music, a major force in bringing Southern musicians to urban audiences. Gura’s essay — particularly its last section — provides a stirring summary of the enormous impact the Ramblers had on generations of traditional musicians in the United States, and Dylan was simply part of the first such generation. The streets of Dylan’s Greenwich Village were simply paved with what Greil Marcus calls "The Old Weird America."

I believe the lesson Dylan learned best of all in those early years was the startling modernism of the Anthology’s form and (most surprisingly) its contents, which were reinforced, I think, by the particular styles and personalities of the Ramblers. Cohen’s experience with the avant-garde clicked with the Anthology. The Ramblers, like Dylan, had a mischievous attitude toward their own identity, sometimes telling audiences that their music originated in a place called New Lost City and impishly calling one album "Tom Paley, John Cohen, and Mike Seeger Sing Songs of the New Lost City Ramblers." I especially recognize Dylan in John Pankake’s description of John Cohen:

John Cohen was the groups’s William Blake, a visionary role befitting his artist’s traning and talents. In retrospect, he seemed … most aware that the group was about something more than entertaining, was carving out some yet unknown place in history and inspiring many of its audience to become a new kind of musical community, and he often struggled to articulate this evovling vision both onstage and in the poetic essays he wrote for the Rambler’s albums.

The Beat movement and the Folk Revival grew up together in Greenwich Village, and developed a kind of shared culture (see Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good). Dylan, of course, explored this intersection more brilliantly than anyone. His stage was certainly set by the Anthology, with its improvisational plan, its prescient racial integration, and its flat-out weirdness. But Dylan was not alone. According to Gura, Cohen "had financed his first field trip to Kentucky in 1959 by selling Life magazine his photographs of Beat writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others whom he had known in Greenwich Village." Somewhere, I recall a story in which the Ramblers ran across the street to a notorious Beat hangout to drag Ginsberg and others to see a concert by a Southern musician they’d brought to the city.

Finally, I simply hear the Ramblers in Dylan, most clearly in his first album, which I think remains shamefully underrated and too rarely heard. Although the Ramblers are often mistaken for simply imitating the old records, they instead deeply absorbed their spirit and idiom and then fearlessly created a new, vibrant art in response. Dylan’s first album does nothing less. It comes off as pure Dylan in both its profound respect for tradition and (already) its almost reckless thrusting beyond tradition. It brings vividly to mind something John Cohen wrote in Sing Out! a full year before the album’s release:

There are certain qualities we demand from the music. A sense of immediacy, of personal involvement, a sense of tradition as well as appreciation for that which carries things to a point where they can go no further … a rejection of compromise … an obsession … with the song material and a sense of an event with every performance.

Harry Smith, Bob Dylan, and
“The Ramblers Step” (Part 1)

(See also Part 2)

Greil Marcus did a fine and important thing with "Invisible Republic," a book which has overturned the way a lot of Bob Dylan’s fans think of Dylan’s career and music.

Rarely do Dylan fans still think of him as starting out as a folkie and then "going electric," leaving folk music behind in the transition. Marcus showed (very convincingly and much to our surprise) that the true influence of folk music on Dylan’s imagination deepened, intensified, and reached a kind of maturity during and after Dylan’s turn to rock and roll — instead of before.

However, at the center of his argument, Marcus places the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music edited by Harry Smith.

After about seven years trying to retrace and "fill in" this picture, I’ve decide that Marcus is right about folk music and Dylan’s imagination, but he’s only half right about Harry Smith and Dylan. Dylan did not learn Harry Smith’s lessons directly from the Smith Anthology. He got them mostly second-hand — that is, he learned them, but mostly in translation. I’m now convinced that the single most important vehicle delivering Harry Smith’s peculiar message to Dylan in those early days — the widest pipeline between Harry and Bob — was The New Lost City Ramblers. I’m also convinced that it matters, this missing what I think of as "The Ramblers Step."

Bob Dylan and Harry Smith

Like Harry Smith himself, the Anthology of American Folk Music was peculiar — perhaps even a bit insane. It was not a neutral, representative overview of folk music in America, but rather an idiosyncratic work of kaleidoscopic art that had little to do with folk music as it had previously been understood. Released in 1952, the Anthology was a collection of scarcely 20-year-old commercial recordings that few folklorists saw as folk music at all — one cut is even from a Hollywood singing-cowboy movie. But the music sounded (and still sounds) strange, wild and wooly, intensely immediate, and was presented with a modernist, mystic sense of collage that, today, is hard not to see as "Dylanesque."

Marcus’ Invisible Republic established the Smith-Dylan connection, and the consequences are vast —but the details are fuzzy and shifting. Momentous but uncertain … you can understand what made me want to confirm and describe the connection, sort of as a historian might. After years of trying, I’m come to feel that Marcus seems more persuasive the "bigger" he thinks — that is, he is a master of teasing out what matters, what has significance, what is at stake. Writing in this mode, he still has me entirely conviced of why the Anthology matters to Dylan, and why both should matter to you. But like a painting by Georges Seurat, the closer you get to the details, the more the picture breaks apart.

Really specific historical evidence that Dylan knew the Anthology well in the 1960’s — that is, that it "was Bob Dylan’s first true map" — is measly. Dylan did rewrite "Down on Penny’s Farm" twice, and he recycled a line from "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" for "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again." But both these Anthology songs were "covered" often by Greenwich Village street and coffeehouse singers. Admittedly, "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" does sound suspiciously like "Moonshiner’s Dance" (except played as a march), but this would never stand up in court.

I’m sincerely sorry to admit it, but I think we have an intellectual obligation to take Dylan seriously when he told Rolling Stone (November 22, 2001):

[Marcus] makes way too much of that … those recordings were around — that Harry Smith anthology — but that’s not what everybody was listening to. Sure, there were all those songs. You could hear them at people’s houses. In know in my case, I think Dave Van Ronk had that record … but mostly you heard other performers. All those people he’s talking about, you could hear the actual people singing those ballads. You could hear Clarence Ashley, Doc Watson, Dock Boggs, the Memphis Jug Band, Furry Lewis. You could see those people live and in person. They were around.

But Dylan was deeply and directly affected by the New Lost City Ramblers, and the NLCR, in turn, were powerfully infuenced by Harry Smith’s Anthology. Just as importantly, in the years between the release of the Anthology and Dylan’s arrival in Greenwich Village, the Ramblers were a major force in spreading, far and wide, the same kind of lessons taught by the Anthology, so that by the time Dylan showed up on the scene, the Folk Revival that shaped Dylan had itself been thoroughly "Anthologized." Happily, the historical evidence for these claims is hard, over-lapping, deep, and dense.

Bob Dylan and the New Lost City Ramblers

Clearly, the New Lost City Ramblers were crucial to the early development of Dylan’s self-image as a performer. Among the earliest photos ever taken of Dylan as a young musician is a fine photo set by a member of the NLCR, John Cohen. In them, you see the young Dylan adopting various poses and personas, experimenting with his image, trying to please the eye of the Rambler’s camera. Cohen was a student of the fine arts and a sophisticated image-maker — it had been John Cohen who had come up with the name "New Lost City Ramblers," and he was thus the first person among many to admire the ambiguous, ambivalent, self-referential irony in the band’s name. A few years later, Dylan addressed Cohen directly in the liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited (referring to, among other things, Cohen’s apartment which had just been demolished to make room for the World Trade Center):

you are right john cohen — quazimodo was right — mozart was right … I cannot say the word eye any more … when I speak this word eye, it is as if I am speaking of somebody’s eye that I faintly remember … there is no eye — there is only a series of mouths — long live the mouths — your rooftop — if you don’t already know — has been demolished … eye is plasma & you are right about that too — you are lucky — you don’t have to think about such things as eye & rooftops & quazimodo. [punctuation and capitalization are Dylan’s]

As I mentioned in a previous post, Dylan dedicates a lenghty passage of his recent autobiography to the importance of Rambler Mike Seeger to Dylan’s sense of himself as an artist:

He was extraordinary, gave me an eerie feeling. Mike was unprecedented. He was like a duke, the knight errant. As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart … It’s not as if he just played everyting well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them … it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns … the thought occurred to me that maybe I’d have to write my own songs, ones that Mike didn’t know. That was a startling thought.

Perhaps to partly repay this debt, Dylan later recorded a banjo-guitar duet with Seeger for one of Seeger’s albums.

Invisible Republic points to "Henry Lee" as opening both the Anthology and World Gone Wrong, one of two great albums of old folksongs Dylan recorded in the early 1990’s. But in the liner notes to World Gone Wrong, Dylan again points to a Rambler, Tom Paley, as the song’s source instead of the Anthology. Indeed, World Gone Wrong’s version bares very little resemblance to that on the Anthology, either lyrically, melodically, or emotionally. The two songs share the same subject matter, but they are different songs entirely — Dylan’s version is Paley’s. (Actually, the song appeared on a 1965 album by Tom Paley and Peggy Seeger, Mike’s sister.) In confusing the Anthology’s version with Paley’s, Marcus has erased the Ramblers from the trail of evidence. Nevertheless, it’s clear to me that Dylan, at least based on his word, wants to be associated with the Ramblers and is at best indifferent to his association with the Anthology.

See also Part 2

The Meaning of the John Henry Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orphan Songs, Part 8:
Motherless Children Have a Hard Time

Blind_willie_johnson

Much as in yesterday’s story of misheard lyrics, Columbia recording engineers misunderstood the title of Blind Willie Johnson’s 1927 recording “Motherless Children Have a Hard Time” to be, instead, “Mother’s Children Have a Hard Time,” which is how it appeared in their notes and on the label of the publicly-released record.

The background to this story is perhaps less amusing than yesterday’s. Willie Johnson’s mother died when he was only a baby, probably just before 1905. His father’s second marriage didn’t go well — to punish Willie’s father, his stepmother dashed a pan of lye into 7-year-old Willie’s face, blinding him permanently. Willie soon dedicated his life to singing spirituals, and is today often considered one of the best ever recorded.

“Motherless Children Have a Hard Time” is arguably his most widely-known recording. Just on the face of it, the performance is great — its vocals are intense, and its slide “blues” guitar is dazzling. But in light of Johnson’s biography, it’s one of the most amazing 3 minutes in all of audio recording history. I actually find it a little shocking, as if it’s perhaps too intimate a glimpse into Johnson’s life. Here are the lyrics, as best as I can tell:

Well, well, well …
Motherless children have a hard time
Motherless children have a hard time,
When Mother’s dead
They’ll not have anywhere to go,
Wanderin’ around from door to door
Have a hard time

Nobody on earth can take your mother’s place
When Mother is dead, Lord
Nobody on earth takes Mother’s place
When Mother’s dead
Nobody on earth takes Mother’s place,
When you were starting, she paved the way
Nobody treats you like Mother will

Your wife, your husband may be good to you
When Mother is dead, Lord
Be good to you, when Mother’s dead
Your wife, your husband may be good to you,
But they’ll find another and prove untrue
Nobody treats you like Mother will when,
When Mother is dead, Lord

Well some people say that sister will do
When Mother is dead, Lord
Sister will do when Mother’s dead
Some people say that sister will do,
Soon as she’s married, she’ll turn her back on you
Nobody treats you like Mother will

Father will do the best he can
When Mother is dead, Lord
Well, the best he can, when Mother’s dead
Father will do the best he can,
But so many things a father can’t understand
Nobody treats you like Mother will

Motherless children have a hard time
When Mother is dead, Lord
Motherless children have a hard time, Mother’s dead
They’ll not have anywhere to go,
Wanderin’ around from door to door
Have a hard time

The misreading of “motherless children” as “mother’s children” is no great sin. Johnson is admittedly hard to understand — I challenge you to confirm my transcription of the lyrics. It ain’t easy.

But the well-heeled, white male recordists from up North apparently heard the song as mourning the fact that children have a hard time because they are “Mother’s.” Their misunderstanding, however unintentional, was neither random nor neutral. It replaced the story that already existed in the song with one that already existed elsewhere — in the ideas of race and gender that they took with them into the recording session. In doing so, they took the high regard for motherhood actually expressed in the song and turned it almost exactly up-side down.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Misheard Lyrics:
Cave Love Has Gained the Day

Kelly Harrell

Many massive volumes could be written about the musician-recordist relationship, but my favorite stories about these worlds colliding in the 1920’s are about the engineers misunderstanding the song titles.

In the 1920’s, record companies took a keen interest in southern “folk” musicians — by that, I mean generally amateur musicians who couldn’t read music and who learned mostly traditional songs from family members or neighbors. These musicians were typically poor, rural people.

Now, the guys who showed up to record them came from a very different set of worlds — urban, middle- or upper-class, well-educated, and often with rather high-brow musical tastes. Legend has it that they were sometimes appalled at the music they were recording, and mystified that these records often sold extremely well.

At a February 1929 recording session for Victor records, Kelly Harrell sang a song entitled ‘Cuz Love Has Gained the Day, but his pronunciation sounds more like ‘Caze Love Has Gained the Day.

The engineers recording him that day apparently misunderstood and rather underestimated Harrell, possibly reflecting their attitude toward this Virginia textile factory worker. Their paper work (as well as the label of the record that was actually released to the public) identifies the song as “Cave Love Has Gained the Day.” Despite what Harrell actually sang, here are the lyrics that the Victor representatives thought they heard:

Go find your lover like I did
Go find your lover like I did
Go find your lover like I did
Cave love has gained the day

I’d give ten cents to kiss her
I’d give ten cents to kiss her
I’d give ten cents to kiss her
Cave love has gained the day

I’d walk fifty miles to see her (3x)
Cave love has gained the day

I’ve got some candy to give her (3x)
Cave love has gained the day

I’ll try to take it over Saturday (3x)
Cave love has gained the day

I got her a whole dime’s worth (3x)
Cave love has gained the day

That’s the way I beat the other fellow (3x)
Cave love has gained the day

We’ll fly to get married at Christmas (3x)
Cave love has gained the day

Blind Willie Johnson: Revival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mississippi John Hurt: Revival

drawing of Mississippi John Hurt by Robert Crumb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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