New Lost City Ramblers – Page 2 – The Celestial Monochord

Jolie Holland and Elizabeth Cotton

Jolie Holland’s new album is released May 9

Nearly all Elizabeth Cotton’s work is on Folkways

Guitarist and banjoist Elizabeth Cotton was one of the most beloved figures of the 1960’s folk revival. Like Mississippi John Hurt, she played — and she somehow personally embodied — what Mike Seeger has called “black parlor music.” As a lot of folks know, she was “discovered” by the Seeger family while working in their home, a story which entirely loses the whiff of exploitation the more I learn its facts. I’m now more curious about whether Cotton seemed to take on a little of the role of mother to Penny, Peggy and Mike Seeger after their own mother died at the age of 52.

The best written account I happen to have seen of Cotton’s life is John Ullman’s moving liner notes to Shake Sugaree. Another great account, available as an mp3, is Mike Seeger’s early recollections of Cotton, which ends with one of the very first home recordings ever made of her. (The file is from “The Telling Takes Us Home.”)

Back on February 8th, the New York Guitar Festival held an event in honor of Elizabeth Cotton, featuring Mike Seeger and Taj Mahal — two of the world’s leading exponents of the African American banjo tradition, both of whom worked closely with Cotton. Also performing that night was singer-songwriter Jolie Holland.

It’s not clear what Holland knows about Cotton — no published information exists other than her mere presence on February 9. Holland’s manager informs me that Daniel Lanois introduced Holland’s work to the Festival director, David Spelman, over two years ago and a chance to have her at the festival has been sought ever since.

In any case, whoever decided to associate Jolie Holland with Elizabeth Cotton knew what they were doing. As a devotee of the indispensably obsolete, Holland has the soul of a folk revivalist and is a musical heir of the New Lost City Ramblers and the Seeger family. More directly, Holland and Cotton are both parlor musicians, through and through. Their work is native to the living room — very small, close, antique, and feminine.

It’s common to associate privacy with concealing the truth. But Holland and Cotton remind us that it’s behind closed doors that the real disclosures are made. And when they sit you down in their parlor, we’re reminded that the supposedly traditional domain of women is at least as hard and gritty as the world outside.

That’s particularly surprising and endearing coming from kindly old Elizabeth Cotton. It’s bizarre that her best-known composition, Freight Train, came to be thought of as a “nice” child’s folksong:

Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Please don’t tell what train I’m on
So they won’t know what route I’ve gone

When I’m dead and in my grave
No more good times here I’ll crave
Place a stone at my head and feet
And tell them all that I’ve gone to sleep

In a very similar song, also structured as a Girl Scout Camp sing-along, Holland has similar requests for the listener:

Give me that old fashioned morphine
Give me that old fashioned morphine
Give me that old fashioned morphine
It’s good enough for me

Well, it was good enough for my Grandpa
It was good enough for my Grandpa
It was good enough for my Grandpa
It’s good enough for me

Sister, don’t get worried
Sister, don’t get worried
Sister, don’t get worried
Because the world is almost done

Cotton once oversaw her grandchildren as they composed a song, using the writing of each verse or two as a bedtime activity. The result is certainly a “rounder song,” and I even think of it as being about selling your ass once you’ve got nothing else left:

Pawned my buggy, horse and cap
Pawned everything that was in my lap

     chorus:
     Oh Lordy me, didn’t I shake sugaree
     Everything I got is done in pawn

Pawned my chair, pawned my bed
Don’t have nowhere to lay my head

     chorus

I have a little secret I ain’t gonna tell
I’m goin’ to heaven in a ground pea shell

     chorus

Chew my tobacco, spit my juice
I’d raise Cain but it ain’t no use

     chorus

This strange, hardass domesticity is in everything Jolie Holland does. Here’s another sing-along, sung with one of the softest, sweetest, most intimate arrangements on her album Escondida:

The smell of burnt exhaust drifts into the bar
It’s midnight in California, it’s high noon where you are
Motorcycles and booze and this dirty old perfume
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame
Is what it is
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame

I tried to go to sleep in my haunted little room
The shadows are churning in the passage of the moon
It’d break my heart to tell you I couldn’t come so soon
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame
Is what it is
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame

Holland’s next album, Springtime Can Kill You, is due out on Tuesday. The reviews I’m seeing are positive and seem to promise more of the same, at the very least.

John Cohen and the Voyager Record

The New Lost City Ramblers: John Cohen, Mike Seeger, Tracy Schwarz

Voyager Record
NASA technicians bolting the Voyager LP to the spacecraft

It has finally, really dawned on me.

The Voyager Record is a timecapsule, designed by Carl Sagan and friends, in the form of a long-playing phonograph record. Identical copies were bolted to the side of NASA’s two Voyager Spacecraft, which are now drifting in interstellar space. And this record contains a field recording made in Peru by John Cohen, co-founder of the New Lost City Ramblers.

Here at The Celestial Monochord, that’s one heck of a revelation. Let me think about this.

The Voyager Record (and the soundtrack to the Cosmos TV series, which borrowed heavily from it) was my first exposure to all sorts of music — not just Blind Willie Johnson, but also Stravinsky, Mozart, Beethoven string quartets, and a variety of non-Western musics like the Javanese gamelan and Japanese shakuhachi.

More often than you might think, 25 years later, the thought of the Voyager Record still occasionally overwhelms me with grief and wonder. It must be the strangest episode in the history of the US Government — for one thing, it was partly the result of Sagan’s stunning, awe-inspiring innocence. The record is Carl Sagan’s quixotic love letter to Planet Earth — Earth, which filled him with a grief and wonder of his own. To Sagan, the record expressed Earth’s “cosmic loneliness.”

And somehow, he arranged for this document to roar into interstellar space, riding like a stowaway aboard the federal government’s Cold War nuclear missile technology.

———

When the Voyager Record was launched, Carl Sagan saw it as a fitting tribute to the recently-deceased inventor of the LP, Peter Goldmark.

Sagan had become a young Ph.D. in 1960, about six months before Bob Dylan first arrived in Greenwich Village. His generation passionately loved the long-playing record, and they soon came to define themselves and their worldview through the LP.

They studied LP’s — such as Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music or The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper — with a reverence and creativity that previous generations reserved for The Bible. The social movements that defined the 60’s and 70’s were shaped and held together, to no small degree, by the LP format. It was The People’s Format, an invention that invented a generation.

So, by 1977, it wasn’t a big stretch for Sagan to envision a total summation of Planet Earth encoded into the grooves of an LP. But what should this record say? What would be its argument?

Above all, the Voyager Record is a global anthology. An anthology, because it juxtaposes diverse music, images, voices and sounds. And global, because it sees itself as unconstrained by national boundaries. Its varied elements belong together in a common space simply because they’re all the work of Earthlings.

The argument of the Voyager Record (at least for its human audience) is its humanism, set against the Cold War. It tries to show, by means of an outlandish and beautiful thought-experiment, that the differences separating us are trivial when viewed from a “cosmic perspective,” as Sagan liked to say. In the all-consuming milieu of the Cold War, now difficult to recall, that could be a very forceful vision.

It’s often said that the peace and environmental movements were deeply inspired by NASA’s photos of Earth taken from space. On the other hand, NASA was one of the USA’s primary Cold War weapons. The display of those photos also scored points in the Space Race.

The Voyager Record inherited both poles of this irony. It was Carl Sagan’s ambition to resolve the contradiction in favor of peace.

———

That ambition had roots, of course.

The intensely humanistic Alan Lomax served as an advisor to the Voyager project — it was Lomax who recommended to Sagan’s group the inclusion of John Cohen’s 1964 recording of a young Peruvian woman’s wedding song.

Lomax himself had recorded folk musicians in many countries, partly to get out of the country during McCarthy’s red-baiting and to find a way around the blacklist. This episode, like the Voyager LP, is clear case of the Cold War leading directly to “world music.” Indeed, in a vivid echo of Sagan’s project, Lomax would later dream of a Global Jukebox representing all of human culture through one portal.

And then there was Moe Asch’s Folkways Records, for which The New Lost City Ramblers recorded exclusively. Back in the 1930’s, Asch proposed “a complete acoustic record of the human lifeworld” (as Robert Cantwell put it). He came closer to fulfilling that dream than you might expect, as a little time with the Folkways catalog will show. The Folkways vision first formed in a spirit of resistance to the early stages of WWII and the Holocaust — and, as such, it was endorsed by Albert Einstein (as I’ve described before). Asch’s company certainly became the most critical record label of the Folk Revival, a movement whose reason for being was the disillusionment of America’s children in the post-WWII, Cold War environment (see Cantwell’s brilliant book).

Asch and Lomax (both of whom vigorously pioneered the anthologizing potential of the LP) were the inventors of the Voyager Record’s very spirit. Sagan and NASA — by reframing Asch and Lomax’s vision in the contexts of the Cold War and the Cosmos — each appropriated the vision for their mutually contradictory, competing purposes.

———-

I will close with a few startling anecdotes about John Cohen — not so much to fit his life into the thesis above, but to show you that the guy actually makes sense, standing there on the corner of such mighty intersections.

Besides having co-founded The New Lost City Ramblers in 1958, and having made many recordings and award-winning documentaries about Andean culture, Cohen is also famous as the guy who coined the phrase “high lonesome sound.” In Bluegrass: A History, Neil Rosenberg provides a good summary:

John Cohen … contributed to the interest in bluegrass with his photography and through a short documentary film whose title has become closely associated with the music. In February 1963, when Cohen chose The High Lonesome Sound for his movie about Kentucky mountain music, he was seeking words to describe the high, intense quality of the singing which had impressed him during his research in the region … The film included footage of Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys in a free concert at the 1962 Coal Carnival, on the courthouse steps in Hazard, Kentucky. It was the first documentary film to include bluegrass and marks the beginning of the association of Bill Monroe with the term “high lonesome sound.”

This John Cohen is also the same John Cohen who Bob Dylan addresses in his liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited. In them, Dylan refers to Cohen’s rooftop where Cohen had taken perhaps the first photos of Dylan in New York. I once read that this rooftop was demolished to make room for construction of the World Trade Center. Here’s the passage [punctuation and capitalization are Dylan’s]:

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.

This is also the same John Cohen who provided what was, for many years, the only available interview with Harry Smith, eccentric editor of the influential Anthology of American Folk Music.

And finally, it appears that the Grateful Dead song “Uncle John’s Band” is about John Cohen and The New Lost City Ramblers.

Editor’s Note: One of many reasons it’s been so long since I’ve posted is that I’m working on an experimental news blog on The New Lost City Ramblers — The New Lost Times. Let me know if you think I should keep going or quit.

Little Birdie

If I hadn’t noticed it myself, I’m not sure I would have believed it either.

Mike Seeger recorded a common-enough old banjo turne, Little Birdie, for what might be his masterwork, Southern Banjo Sounds. Various other versions of the song exist and mix together in interesting ways, as these old Appalachian songs tend to do.

But Seeger’s choice of style and lyrics seems to bring out something profound in the old song. His version comes off as a densely woven little contemplation on how art and death, and art and love, and love and death can all seem to circle around each other, amplifying each other’s importance.

I’d heard the song plenty of times before, but this potential had never dawned on me. By comparing this version with an older one, I think I see hints of how he brought out these deep, far-ranging implications in the song, how he got that fledging bird to take flight.

Here’s the lyrics as Mike Seeger sings them, I think:

Little birdie, little birdie,
Come sing to me your song.
Got a short time to stay here
And a long time to be gone.

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes you fly so high?
Dissatisfied, dissatisfied
And a-caring never a bit to die.

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes your wings so blue?
It’s nothing else but grieving,
But grieving over you.

Fly down, fly down, little birdie,
And sing to me your song.
Sing it now, while I’m with you,
Can’t hear you when I’m gone.

Like everything else on Southern Banjo Sounds, it’s a solo performance, played on an old banjo, in an old style — in this case, an 1860’s resonator banjo with a curious hybrid of two-finger picking and clawhammer. The long instrumental passages between verses have the smooth, flowing feel of flying — I guess a little like “Flying” from Magical Mystery Tour or John Hartford’s song “Steam Powered Aereo Plane.”

Thirty-seven years before this recording, when he was only 26 (and maybe less experienced in love, art, and death), he performed the song with the New Lost City Ramblers during a concert in Boston. A recording of it is available on 40 Years of Concert Performances.

To my ears, the earlier version is unusually “folkie” for the Ramblers, with the kind of bright, proud, collegiate sound you find in someone like the Kingston Trio. But being the Ramblers, of course, the musicianship is excellent, with a taste of Mike Seeger’s mandolin skills and Tom Paley’s firm, syncopated, snappy banjo picking.

The text is a little elusive. Who is the narrator talking to, a bird or a woman? In fact, the identity of the narrator seems to move around from character to character without warning — first a young man speaks (he’s either a married woman’s lover or a bird watcher), and then at the end, the bird (or the woman) talks back.

Despite the marchy, declarative sound and the shifting viewpoint, the lyrics are touching — a snapshot of youthful need and loss.

(Chorus)
Little birdie, little birdie,
Come sing me your song.
Got a short time for to be here
And a long time to be gone.

Married woman, married woman,
Come and see what you done done
You have caused me for you to love you
Now your husband’s done come.

(Chorus, then mandolin solo)

I’m a long ways from old Dixie
And my old Kentucky home,
And my father and mother are both dead,
Got no one to call my own.

(Chorus)

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes you fly so high?
It’s because I have a true little heart
And I do not care to die.

In the later Southern Banjo Sounds recording, Mike has removed the married woman and the husband, the father and mother, and Kentucky — and with them goes any hint of a story line. He leaves us, then, entirely in the realm of abstracted notions, the imagination, and the pure emotional force of the music. The lyrics have been stripped down to nothing but a conversation between singer and bird — between artist (or lover, or mortal) and what matters most to him. What used to be a youthful complaint in the Ramblers version is now an older man’s contemplation.

I guess to take away a lesson from all this, you could do worse than the lesson taught in almost every writing workshop (and which, some day, even The Celestial Monochord might learn) — less is more.

Hollis Brown’s South Dakota

Hollissmall

When Bob Dylan was 13 years old, one of the century’s worst epidemics of black stem rust struck the upper midwest — particularly North and South Dakota and Minnesota. Up to 75% of the wheat harvest was lost to the disease, which blackens the crop with a powdery, sooty fungus. The economic consequences were severe, and the incident became legendary within the science of plant pathology. There’s no way young Bob Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota wouldn’t have heard about it.

But there were plenty of other diseases to blacken your crops, or kill your animals or you. I’m not an expert in any of them. Ergot can blacken wheat, barley, and other cereals and causes “bad blood” in cattle and humans — convulsions, gangrene, derangement. An invisible fungus in a common grass leads to tall fescue toxicosis, with grotesque symptoms like “fescue foot” and nasty birthing problems. Maybe Bob had heard of such diseases as well.

Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown” is an exercise in empathy — its power is in the vividness of its vantage point within the head of a desperately bad-luck South Dakota farmer, and in the way the song dares you to turn away. Having lived in Minnesota for almost 20 years, or about as long as Dylan did before he moved to New York, and I can almost see how the young songwriter might have found the empathy to write such a convincing song.

Even in fairly cosmopolitan Minneapolis and St. Paul, farming is always a presence — to this day, grain mills and breweries (or their ruins) are lined up along the Mississippi River. They’re a constant reminder that the cold climate used to limit the viable crops to stuff you could grind or brew, plus animal feed — wheat, barley, oats, alfalfa, sorghum, various kinds of hay. When you fill your gas tank in Minnesota, you have a good chance of being reminded that farmers have more options today, such as President Bush’s switchgrass. Fully 200 of the nation’s 600 ethanol (“E-85”) gas pumps are in Minnesota.

A few years ago, a friend of mine moved from the University of Minnesota to New York — just like Dylan, you might say, only forty years later. On her first day in Manhattan, a shopkeeper mentioned the lack of rain, and my friend, forgetting herself, asked if the farmers upstate were suffering. The shopkeeper gave her a look as if she’d just evidenced a severe case of Tourette’s Syndrome.

But that awareness and empathy, which so animated Dylan’s “Hollis Brown” in 1964, has its limits. In fact, “Hollis Brown” is primarily about those limits. For that reason, it’s convenient for Minnesotans that the song is set next door, in South Dakota.

South Dakota’s leaders have worked to make the state’s economy, and perhaps its conscience, better insulated from the booms and busts of farm life. In 1980, South Dakota was in desperate financial straits and took action by eliminating all laws against usury. Citibank, among other credit card companies, moved operations to the state almost immediately, leading to an explosion of growth in Sioux Falls and, some say, to a lot of South Dakota farmers declaring bankruptcy.

I happened to hear “Hollis Brown” on the same day the South Dakota governor (born the very year of the black stem rust epidemic) signed the bill designed to ban almost all abortions in the state, and ultimately, to overturn Roe v. Wade nationwide. That’s what got me thinking about the song again. It seemed like yet another example of Dylan’s uncanny foresight that he set the song in South Dakota even though, in 1964, Mississippi played the role in folksong that South Dakota now seems eager to play.

Dylan got the melody of Hollis Brown from “Pretty Polly,” as Greil Marcus has pointed out. “Pretty Polly” is about a young man named Willie who murders his girlfriend for reasons which the song leaves completely unaddressed and which therefore seem to take on a menacing profundity. But as Rennie Sparks points out, at least one of Pretty Polly’s 16th-century sources explains the motive simply and without ambiguity: She was pregnant and Willie doesn’t want the birth to take place. At least partly, this is the origin of “Hollis Brown” — a story about the murder of a woman as a de facto abortion.

The best-known version of “Pretty Polly” (the version Rennie Sparks calls “cold as a cockroach”) was recorded by Dock Boggs in 1927. In 1963, Boggs was rediscovered by Mike Seeger who then recorded and traveled extensively with him. In 1993, Bob Dylan made a studio recording of “Hollis Brown” accompanied by Mike Seeger playing banjo in Dock Boggs’ very singular style. Really, the banjo part on the recording is basically just a sped-up version of Boggs’ “Pretty Polly.” The effect of the recording is to return “Hollis Brown” to its family tree, to explicitly situate it within its lineage.

In writing “Hollis Brown,” then, Dylan surely wasn’t looking ahead to 2006. He was looking back to the old Appalachian murder ballads, which the song so convincingly resembles. Marcus seems to claim the song was also inspired by a newspaper report of a mass murder in South Dakota, but I haven’t been able to track that down (Charles Starkweather?). Perhaps the more inspiring history took place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota’s most notorious mass murder and part of the Indian Wars in which Minnesota also played an unfortunate role. Given the history of this South Dakota farm — where the buffalo no longer roam — I wonder if Hollis Brown and his family aren’t merely the most recent seven people to have died there.

It makes little sense to try to enlist “Hollis Brown” in a contemporary political fight. Or anyway, that’s simply not The Celestial Monochord’s schtick. Besides, the song is striking as an early hint of the full-blown poetic strategies Dylan was about to unleash — strategies that revolve around undecided meaning, meaning as an unfinished art for the listener to complete, meaning not as autocratic rule but as democratic process. To claim that “Hollis Brown” is somehow against South Dakota’s new abortion law is to pretty much miss the song entirely.

Still, it’s in the character of Dylan’s art to keep coming around, over and over, asserting itself in new contexts. I think this uncanny relevence comes from reaching as deep into empathy as he can, and from his willingness to share with us the work of meaning. Or, maybe the more you’re able to encounter the world with the past very much alive in you, the more you’re able to anticipate the future. Maybe this is why Dylan continues to mystify, particularly in America where memory is notoriously short and empathy often runs thin.

Editor’s Notes: The following is transcribed from the 1993 recording with Mike Seeger. Also, the coyote is the official state animal of South Dakota.

THE BALLAD OF HOLLIS BROWN

Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children and his cabin breaking down

You looked for work and money and you walked a ragged mile
You looked for work and money and you walked a ragged mile
Your children are so hungry, man, that they don’t know how to smile

Your babies’ eyes look crazy there, a-tuggin’ at your sleeve
Your babies’ eyes look crazy there, a-tuggin’ at your sleeve
You walk the floor and wonder why with every breath you breathe

The rats have got your flour, bad blood it got your mare
The rats have got your flour, bad blood it got your mare
Is there anyone that knows, is there anyone that cares?

You prayed to the Lord above, “Oh please send you a friend”
You prayed to the Lord above, “Oh please send you a friend”
Your empty pockets tell you that you ain’t a-got no friend

Your babies are crying louder, it’s pounding on your brain
Your babies are crying louder, it’s pounding on your brain
Your wife’s screams are stabbin’ you like the dirty drivin’ rain

Your grass is turning black, there’s no water in your well
Your grass is turning black, there’s no water in your well
You spent your last lone dollar on seven shotgun shells

Way out in the wilderness a cold coyote calls
Way out in the wilderness a cold coyote calls
Your eyes fix on the shotgun that’s hangin’ on the wall

Your brain is a-bleedin’ and your legs can’t seem to stand
Your brain is a-bleedin’ and your legs can’t seem to stand
Your eyes fix on the shotgun that you’re holdin’ in your hand

There’s seven breezes blowin’ all around your cabin door
Seven breezes blowin’ all around your cabin door
Seven shots ring out like the ocean’s pounding roar

There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm
Seven people dead on a South Dakota farm
Somewheres in the distance there’s seven new people born

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.

Careless Love

The first version of Careless Love I knew was the one Dock Boggs did, recorded by Mike Seeger thirty-eight years ago today, just in time for Valentine’s Day 1968.

This was near the end of Dock’s life, and so near the end of his second music career — his “Revival” career. As I’ve discussed at length before, Mike Seeger writes that Dock loved this second career but also found it unsettling in some ways. It apparently brought back memories of his misspent youth and its moonshine-fueled violence. Everything Boggs played in this second career could be heard as confronting this past, and as exorcising his decades working the infernal coal mines.

Careless Love is a fine example. To match Dock’s high, raspy, pinched voice, you’d have to sing and sob at the same time. Though the tempo is so fast — and accelerating — that Dock can barely get some of the lines sung clearly, he delivers every word as if speaking spontaneously. Like all great singers, his song feels immediate and new:

Oh when my money you could blow
Oh when my money you could blow, Lord Lord
When my money you could blow
You was always hanging around my door

I wish to the Lord this train would run
I wish to the Lord this train would run, Lord Lord
I wish to the Lord this train would run
To carry me back where I come from

Oh now my money’s all spent and gone
Oh now my money’s all spent and gone, Lord Lord
Oh now my money’s all spent and gone
You pass my door and sing a song

But it’s not one of Dock’s graveyard songs — it’s a party blues tune in good old open-G banjo tuning. In Boggs, I see the cliche of the theater’s masks of tragedy and comedy taking on a new life — his music projects so many intense facial expressions.

Into this mix, add the fact that Dock apparently learned this song — and many others — from recordings of female blues singers of the 1920’s. Oddly and movingly, Dock retains the original gender of the narrator:

Oh momma, oh momma, yonder he goes
Oh momma, oh momma, yonder he goes, Lord Lord
Oh momma, oh momma, yonder he goes
With a banded hat and a suit of clothes

Oh place this ring upon his hand
Oh place this ring upon his hand, Lord Lord
Oh place this ring upon his hand
To show the world he’s a married man

Oh take this ring and put it on
Oh take this ring and put it on, Lord Lord
Oh take this ring and put it on
And think of me when I’m gone

If I had listened to what momma said
If I had listened to what momma said, Lord Lord
If I had listened to what momma said
I’d been at home in momma’s bed

Given Careless Love’s subject — people gathering around when you’re doing well, dumping you when you’re down — there’s no wonder the song has drawn the attention of a lot of professional musicians, from Elvis and Janis Joplin to Pete Seeger and Dave Van Ronk. Since discovering the song through Boggs in 1999, at least two other versions have crept into my CD collection. Both are unbelievable in entirely separate ways — like Boggs’ version, they make me want to sit you down and say “Listen to THIS!”

One is on the first bluegrass LP every released, also recorded by Mike Seeger. It’s by Snuffy Jenkins, who inspired several generations of three-finger banjo players, including Earl Scruggs. His version is outlandishly cheerful and skilled, a virtuoso piece that Seeger describes as “much influenced by jazz, as if he were playing a trumpet or jazz guitar.” Follow the links above to get the Smithsonian CDs that the Jenkins and Boggs versions come from (I highly recommend them) or get the individual tracks from Smithsonian Global Sound.

The other version in my CD collection is a duet between Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, who probably know a thing or two about careless love. The track is available only as a bootleg. In this version, Cash and Dylan are mostly screwing around. Dylan seems initially lost until Cash comes to the rescue by feeding Dylan a verse he can sink his teeth into as a tool for improvisation — a reason for the recording to exist:

Cash: Love, oh love, oh careless love
Gimme some love, oh love, oh careless love
Love, oh love, oh careless love
Won’t you see what your love has done to me

Cash: Sing one now, Bob.

Dylan: Hmmm. Give me a verse.

Cash: I pass my window. [pause] Pass your window. [pause] Pass your window.

Dylan: Pass your window by.
I pass your door and your window too.
I pass your door and your window too.
Yes, I’m still very much in love with you.

Cash: Well, I pass your window, pass your door
You pass my window, pass my door
Woman, man, you pass by my window and you pass my door
But you’ll never get by my forty-four

Cash: Sing one now, Bob.

Dylan: Well, I pass your door, I pass your gate.
Well, you pass my door and you pass my gate
Yes, you pass my door and you pass my gate
But you won’t pass by my thirty-eight.

And so on. Louis Black describes the recording fairly well:

They do an overly long version of “Careless Love” … One of the lines refers to a gun that Cash identifies first as a .44 caliber, then Dylan labels it a .38, and then a .45. By the end of the song, Cash has identified it as a .30-ought-6 (a rifle rather than a pistol). At one point, however, in order to hit a rhyme, Cash calls it a .41 (which doesn’t exist). He’s so pleased with this that, just a bit later, he again refers to a .41, and you can hear the absolute delight at this silliness in his voice. Especially noticeable throughout the recordings is just how sweet and lovely Dylan’s singing and harmonies with Cash are.

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

Math and Memory in New Lost City

Paley Cohen Seeger New Lost City Rambler

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

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

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

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

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

The irony is this:

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

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

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

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

“A Talk on the World” by Clyde Lewis

In April 1967, Clyde Lewis delivered a 3-minute history of the world to a group of maybe one or two dozen spectators gathered in the parking lot of the Union Grove Fiddler’s Convention at Union Grove, North Carolina. Mike Seeger was there with his Nagra portable tape recorder to capture the talk, which is now available on Close To Home, an invaluable selection of Seeger’s field recordings.

The atmosphere of the parking lot is intense in the 38-year-old recording. Seeger writes that the Fiddler’s Convention,

was getting huge and more than a little wild in the late 1960s. It was quite a scene. As I recall, Bessie Jones stayed in the car, probably a wise decision for an elderly Black woman … People were playing fiddles, banjos, and guitars all over the place, some drinking, others undoubtedly taking other substances … somebody came and got me, saying “There’s somebody over here you need to hear.”

Lewis’ Talk on the World needs no commentary, but after several years of frequent listening, some exorcism would do me good. It’s mesmerizing, in part because my father would have loved this recording more than any other I own. In the late sixties, he was delivering very similar speaches to Knights of Columbus audiences across Illinois.

Lewis begins (I should add that there are no typos in what follows):

My subject for this evening am entitled, “Whyfore, Wherefore, and How Come.” But before I starts to commence to begin, there am some mighty important trifles that must be took into sideration before the main subject of the discourse am discoursed on this here elevated platform.

The character Lewis is playing stepped right out of a medicine show, like an overstuffed small-town mayor, a holiness preacher, a snake-oil salesman, or Shakespeare’s Polonius. Lewis mainly lampoons the high-falutin’ ways of the excessively educated and their obsession, especially at the time, with the idea of progress.

The main target for the Talk on the World is celestial navigation, long the branch of astronomy most useful to navies and corporations. Europe’s global empires were built on it.

The world were always round like an apple. This epileptyc shape on account on of the axil what done perperates through the middle of the center in congestion with the latitude of the horizontal. Now then, when the solar plexus of the sun’s violet rays congregate on the middle of the bisection, there am set in motion the magnetic conundrum …

I can’t help but be reminded that Lewis and his Appalachian audience — their world so deeply and brutally defined by the mining industry — know very well that the benefits of science and technology are not always evenly shared:

And in the year fourteen and ninety-two AD (AD, understand, mean After Dark), they discovered Columbus, Ohio. That’s where the dark ages of history done stopped. Christmas [Columbus] done leave all his men in Ohio, he scoots back to the Queen of Spain, she done tapped him on the head with a sword and made him a knight. The men what stayed in Ohio got tapped on the head with swords and was made angels.

Lewis even reminds the attendees of this Fiddler’s Convention of the dubious benefits of modern media technology:

And did you ever stop to think what a great invention the raido am to the chromonology and the welfare of the universe? Sure am a coppious invention. All you got to did am sit right at home and revolvitate the dials and the music am preambilated through the atmosphere and comes right down the chimbley onto your Aunt Emma.

It’s clear from the editing of the piece that Seeger has more of Lewis and that day in Union Grove than he’s provided on Close To Home, and I rack my brains trying to think of a way to get at those tapes.