Uncategorized – The Celestial Monochord

Harry Smith, Freeman Tilden, and Revelation

When a Park Ranger gives you their schpiel about a petroglyph or battleground, think Freeman Tilden. He was That Guy — the one who first articulated an expansive vision for what the job of Public Service Interpreter ought to be all about.

Tilden was an outsider — not a professional teacher, park ranger, or naturalist, but a journalist and novelist.

He was born the son of a newspaperman in 1883 (Krakatoa blew when Freeman was four days old). Beginning work as a child under his father’s wing, he learned every gory detail in the production of turn-of-the-20th-century newspapers.

Gradually, his attention shifted to poetry, fiction, travel writing, and economics. He wrote his first best-selling novel at age 46. As a sought-after public speaker, Tilden grew to understand the visiting mind — the psychology of a person seeking an encounter with history and nature.

Freeman Tilden realized that people need a revelator.

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Since 1987, the Anthology of American Folk Music, originally released by Folkways Records, has belonged to the venerable old Smithsonian Institution. This seems ironic to many who envision the 1952 six-album collection as an uncanny avant-garde semi-sacred text. And the set comes bundled with the soul of its editor, eccentric to the marrow.

You probably know the routine — Harry Smith shredded one of the only big rolls of cash he ever had and threw it down a sewer grate. He maintained vials of his semen, perhaps for their aesthetic value. By contrast, maybe, the Smithsonian used to welcome John Glenn into its Air & Space Museum after business hours so the senator could commune with his old space capsule.

Folkways founder Moe Asch (himself an oddball) understood his strange business and hired exactly the right editor for the Anthology.

Smith was a hypnotist collector and we are walking antiques. His Anthology has a way of snatching people up and hurling their lives into new trajectories. It achieves this partly via a deep and sprawling sense of a great unveiling (an apocalypse, for my Greek readers).

Harry Smith understood that people need a revelator.

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In 1957, the National Park Service published Freeman Tilden’s landmark Interpreting Our Heritage. Its prose is a bit stiff for my tastes, but Interpreting Our Heritage is written as a handbook of insights to guide you through your long career as, for example, a Park Ranger.

The book’s “Six Principles of Interpretation” defined the modern practice of public service interpretation and its spirit can still be glimpsed today at the heart of the field’s mission.

I’ll leave it to others to check if Harry met Freeman or whether either was aware of each other. I’d bet against it, but it’s hard to imagine a more striking and prominent exemplar of Tilden’s 1957 “Six Principles” than Smith’s 1952 Anthology.

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Below is the complete, unedited text of Tilden’s “Six Principles of Interpretation” from his book Interpreting Our Heritage. To put my thumb on the scale a bit, I’ve added the headings, written with Smith’s Anthology in mind.

Speak to the Listener’s Inner Reality
1. Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.

Interpretation is Revelation
2. Information, as such, is not interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based upon information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information.

Interpretation is Multimedia Art
3. Interpretation is an art which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.

The Aim is Provocation
4. The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.

The Whole Person Receives the Whole Revelation
5. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase.

We Owe Children Their Own Revelation and Provocation
6. Interpretation addressed to children should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best, it will require a separate program.

It would be a worthy task for someone (me, perhaps, if I ever retire) to chase down, one by one, good examples in the life of the Anthology of these principles in action.

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The Whitney Museum produced a series of audio guides to accompany its exhibition of Harry Smith’s art early this year. Greil Marcus, who found the boxed set in 1970, spoke for the episode on the Anthology. I hope you listen to it.

I was at a reading in a Minneapolis bookstore early this year where Marcus read from his newest book, Folk Music — the first time I’d seen him in person since the 2007 Dylan Symposium in Minneapolis.

I’ve found that listening to him think in his own voice transforms how I hear his writing. His reading style and, it turns out, his writing style are disarmingly passionate, searching, and unguarded.

From the Whitney podcast, below are three Marcus quotes on the Smith Anthology’s message and effect:

It was a sensibility [the Anthology] passed on to people where it said to them that there’s more in this music — there’s more in this country—than you ever imagined. So seek and ye shall find. Go out looking.

There’s more to America than you ever suspected. There are different kinds of people than those you’ve ever met. There are different kinds of people hiding inside people you have met. You don’t really know this country and [Harry’s mission was] to show it to you.

And that opened the door. And I think that would happen to anybody who comes across this production, this art statement, this remapping of America.

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If you buy my premise, it’s probably less Harry Smith and more the Anthology that exemplifies Tilden’s “Six Principles of Public Service Interpretation.” Rest a Smokey-the-Bear hat on top of your copy of the boxed set.

Smith himself wouldn’t have lasted long working at the Grand Canyon or, god forbid, the Statue of Liberty. For the best-documented part of his life, it was hard to predict how tolerant or tolerable Smith might be toward company. He was an artist, ethnographer, alchemist, and much else — a satirist, say — but not a docent.

So, who would be our exemplar of a Tilden-style American Folk Music Public Service Interpreter? Very likely, bloggers need not speculate, as surely the Federal Government already employs some excellent, under-recognized examples. I’d love to hear your suggestions.

To count as an AFM-PSI, I think you should actively decide to conduct yourself as something like an interpreter in public service focusing on the folk genre.

Greil Marcus seems an excellent candidate, but is he a folk guy or a rock guy? As a writer, is he an educator or an artist? Are these distinctions even close to meaningful? He absolutely would look great in the hat. Mike Seeger, of course, was born wearing that mountie hat and is almost surely who I’d pick. I miss that guy every day of my life.

More than anyone I’m aware of, Dom Flemons has been taking up Mike’s mission of educating, entertaining, and maybe most of all, converting audiences to the cause. I’ve had a post about him in the back of my mind for nearly 20 years. Maybe, ironically, old Freeman Tilden will shake it loose.

Otherwise, I’d consider Robert Cantwell — an American-folk-music-focussed public-sector teacher and professional mind-blower. Strangely enough, and for whatever it’s worth, it was Cantwell’s book Ethnomimesis that I had on me as I watched the towers fall on 9/11.

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Pivoting around the annual Festival of American Folk Life held on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Ethnomimesis offers still more candidates for Tilden-style interpreters of folk music.

Most prominent is Ralph Rinzler, the “founder and for many years presiding genius of the Festival of American Folklife.” Rinzler distributed the work of revelation throughout the multi-medium folk artists and festival goers themselves. Stimulating the imaginations and bodies of everyone present made for whole-person revelatory provocations.

Interestingly, a passage in Ethnomimesis seems to suggest that Rinzler kind of … fired … the young Cantwell from his book contract. Maybe all this polymorphous stimulation didn’t sit well with Cantwell’s boss or his boss’s bosses. Perhaps someone saw Cantwell’s styles of writing and thinking as not quite public enough for Public Service.

Regardless, Cantwell’s contract, like Harry Smith’s life, remind me that there must surely be daily tensions between Tilden’s apocalyptic goals and the institutional agendas that public service interpreters must satisfy throughout their careers, day after tightly contained day.

Go Johnny Go

Information lost and found, and connections between the Voyager record and Harry Smith’s Anthology

feature photo courtesy J. R. Rost

Until he died a week ago Saturday, the last time I’d thought about Chuck Berry had been a few weeks earlier. I’d thought about his lyrics, as usual, as my emblem for information efficiency — for conveying a lot with very little.

I was re-watching an episode of Carl Sagan’s 1980 show, Cosmos — specifically episode XII, “The Persistence of Memory.” In it, Carl has a dandelion hidden in his hand and plays a game of 20 Questions:

With 20 skillfully chosen questions we could easily whittle all the cosmos down to a dandelion. In our explorations of the cosmos the first step is to ask the right questions. Then, not with 20 questions, but with billions, we slowly distill from the complexity of the universe its underlying order. This game has a serious purpose. Its name is science.

And I remembered what Chuck Berry wrote:

Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans, way back up in the woods among the evergreens, there stood a log cabin made of earth and wood where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode, who never ever learned to read or write so well, but he could play the guitar just he’s like a ringing a bell.

In the first few lines of “Johnny B. Goode,” mostly without realizing it, we learn that Louisiana even has a Piney Woods at all, a bit about log cabin construction, the main character’s name and aspirations and his degree of literacy, and we’re told how to hear his guitar style in our imaginations (to prime us for hearing it in our ears immediately after).

While he’s at it, Berry situates you, the listener, on the song’s fictional map. Whether you’re actually listening to the song in Calabria or Tasmania, at McMurdo Station, or in the French Quarter, you are now somewhere from which Louisiana is “way down.”

Sagan’s “Persistence of Memory” episode ends with “Johnny B. Goode” becoming part of the music anthology on the 1977 Voyager Record, which so transfixed me as a kid. At some point during a more recent fixation, I realized Harry Smith’s earlier 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music had come to me later, out of sequence, like a prequel.

Reviewing the evidence — especially Sagan’s astonishing book, Murmurs of Earth — I see no reason to think the Voyager Record’s design team was familiar with Smith’s Anthology. (Otherwise, they surely would’ve included “Moonshiner’s Dance.” I mean, it would’ve taught the aliens to count to four in English, right?). They consulted Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress, but seemingly not Moe Asch of Folkways.

Blind Willie Johnson — I first heard his collected works as an astronomy student in Tucson in 1984 — appears on both the Smith Anthology and the Voyager Record, but there’s an even more surprising connection between the two anthologies. Appearing on the Voyager Record is a field recording made in Peru by John Cohen.

Cohen’s band, the New Lost City Ramblers, had Harry Smith’s sensibilities all over it — Smith’s twisted humor, his expressionist evocations, his taste for anything soulful but arcane, his ambivalent self-image as something that could be called a new, lost, city rambler.

If you found your first banjo or autoharp in the back of your parents’ or grandparents’ closet, they might never have heard Smith’s Anthology, but they almost definitely knew about The Ramblers. The band disseminated Smith’s attitudes about America’s musical identity more broadly than Smith himself did, by orders of magnitude.

After Smith’s vast personal collection of 78’s was acquired by the NYC Public Library, Cohen’s bandmate Mike Seeger and the Anthology’s key booster, Ralph Rinzler, spirited out the non-circulating disks, taped them, and then secretly returned them to the library. This cache became a key source for The Ramblers’ repertoire — their mother lode, as Rinzler called it.

Later, in 1969, Cohen interviewed Smith for Sing Out!, and the interview seems to have been the folk revivalist community’s first widespread introduction to the kind of mind they had followed over the cliff.

So, along with Willie Johnson’s, Cohen’s cut on the Voyager Record smuggled a bit of Smith’s spirit aboard that NASA rocket in 1977.

If an extraterrestrial civilization ever retrieves the Voyager spacecraft, the artifact of the vehicle itself would yield beautiful information about planet Earth and about the state of human technology as of the 1970s. To that civilization, the Voyager Record — with its technical textbook, ambient sound essay, spoken greetings, photos, and music anthology — would be a bonus, like the prize that used to come in a Cracker Jack box.

For them, the music portion would be easy to play back but challenging to comprehend and likely to initiate deep debates across hundreds of generations.

In that music, I’m sure they’d recognize strings being stretched and vibrated, and gas being made to resonate in tubes. They’d know it was some kind of communication, possibly more for us than for them, maybe communication we valued and thought was somehow good for us, maybe something we were proud of.

But I can’t see that they could ever grasp any those details in “Johnny B. Goode” — the fledgeling string-vibrator vying for wide-spread awareness within in his civilization. No matter how advanced the ET’s technology or philosophy, the contexts and meanings of the recording would be unrecoverable.

I argued in my recent “Amnesia Theater” essay that meaning without context and content takes on a special intensity. Maybe the lostness of 20th century Earth would lend a powerful aura to the recordings — music from outer space, music from a gone world, music from entirely other spheres of creation heard resonating in the celestial monochord. I bet they’d think those sounds were some of the best music in the entire universe.

Look for the Silver Lining

I’ve been working long hours on a ridiculously long entry, but I can’t quite get it “out there” just yet.

But aren’t blogs about “what I happen to be thinking tonight” anyway? Aren’t they? So while we’re waiting for that ridiculous masterpiece, here’s what I’m thinking tonight.

I’ve been listening to CDs from Archeophone lately.

Going into the Moonshiner’s Dance project, I knew more about southern Appalachian tunes for banjo and fiddle than anything else. Now, as I do my research on that Minnesota oompah record, I’ve often suffered from a lack of context.

That’s why, over the past two years, I’ve looked for ways to boost my familiarity with popular music that’s both pre-Moonshiner’s Dance and not necessarily from the South.

For one thing, my CD collection has taken on things like Jewface, and Avenue A to the Great White Way, and Archeophone, Archeophone, Archeophone.

The 1921 edition of Archeophone’s yearbook series includes Marion Harris singing “Look for the Silver Lining.” It turns out to be a bone-crushingly sad song, despite the encouragement it supposedly provides. It pretends to offer advice on how to keep the spirits up, but leaves you a sniveling heap instead.

Of course, I was reminded of the original Carter Family’s signature song, “Keep on the Sunny Side.” Its modus operandi is identical — while encouraging you, listener, to turn away from your troubles, it only emphasizes them and the pathos of your trying to soldier through them.

Archeophone’s 1922 yearbook includes Al Jolson singing “April Flowers.”

(Someday, I may write a post that asks the sticky question, “Al Jolson: Crap?” Anybody want to be a guest blogger on that?)

In any case, “April Flowers” proceeds in very much the same way, and was an attempt to duplicate the smash success of “Look for the Silver Lining.”

Archeophone’s inclusion of a rewriting of “Silver Lining” leaves me with the impression that “Keep on the Sunny Side” too was probably an attempt to score a hit by following a previous hit’s blueprint. If that’s the case, it was a hugely successful attempt, both commercially and artistically.

The book Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone portrays AP Carter as struggling, struggling, always struggling to come up with new material for Sara and Maybelle to perform — he was like a Brill Building songwriter without the benefit of a building full of brilliant creative people from whom to draw ideas and inspiration and a spirit of competition.

The Carter Family was as much a commercial act as it was a folk act — or better, they expose how wrong-headed the distinction can often be.

Another thing I hear in “Look for the Silver Lining” — in fact, for the first few listenings, it’s the only thing I can hear — is “Look for the Union Label,” the stirring theme song in 1970’s commercials sponsored by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

Marion Harris gave the melodic lines of “Silver Lining” lovely little paisley swirls and seagull dips befitting a great 1921 pop song. It seems “Union Label” took the tune and straightened it out and squared it off to serve as a rousing union sing-along.

As I say, “Silver Lining” outwardly keeps a stiff upper lip, but inside, it’s a song almost entirely lacking in hope for the future. So I don’t know if this was the right tune to borrow — union membership has crashed through the floor and Americans now buy foreign goods with such fervor that you’d think it was the American-made toys that were dripping with lead. Look for the lead lining?

It’s doubtful that I’m the first to consider most of this. That ridiculously long post? Now THAT nobody’s ever thought of before. But this is here, and that isn’t. No wonder blogs are always about what you happen to be thinking tonight.

New Monochord World Headquarters

The Celestial Monochord world headquarters have moved.

The photo at left shows my view from the apartment we’ve occupied for the past six years (you can click on it for a larger image). I stared at this wall as I founded and developed The Celestial Monochord, as I learned to play clawhammer banjo, and as I became interested in the Minnesota music scene of the 1920’s. I quit drinking looking at this wall. I lost a cat and gained two. I got married. When I came home from my first Battle of the Jug Bands, I came home to this view. It all happened looking at this wall.

Now my tribe and I have moved into a real house, with great views to the east, south, and west. It has a yard in which to set up my telescopes (there’s a bright erupting comet in Perseus, by the way, which you should check out). It has a porch on which to play my banjo. And a dedicated office where I can write about fulgurite for you, and from which I can revive the memories of dance bands long dead. The sun and moon rise at the foot of my bed (see photo on the right).

Buying a house was very exciting — especially if you consider debilitating stress to be a form of “excitement.” Consider the mortgage crisis, just for starters. And the old apartment had beautiful woodwork and the best caretakers/friends you could hope for. But the new digs are a great leap forward, and The Monochord should be extremely well served by them.

Thanks for your patience and check back soon and often.

We’ve Moved

The Celestial Monochord now has its own domain and a better technology to work with.

However, its design is still up in the air (The Institute’s Advisory Council for Electronic Publications has degenerated into open warfare over the color scheme … you know how these things can get political). Anyway, let me know if you have any suggestions or requests about the new features or design.

I hope to see a new life for the Monochord, of some sort. Although I try not to blog about blogging, the changes here seem like a good time to take stock. Start over and concentrate, as Gertrude Stein told Ernest Hemingway.

Years ago, I began reading Robert Cantwell, Greil Marcus, and a few others who’ve written about “roots music,” whatever that is. After quite a few unhappy years in an English graduate program, I found it intensely refreshing to read good writing and valuable insights from people who were writing about what they love, as opposed to writing about what they hate.

There’s a place for everything, of course, and I certainly have my own list of things I detest, but I think if I am capable of making a lasting contribution — or even a lasting impression — it is through The Way of the Monochord. There is no shame in loving things, even if they are just banjos and telescopes …

We’re Moving

After another frustrating battle with [Blogger’s] service, The Celestial Monochord is moving. The new arrangement will, I hope, be more reliable and will offer better tech support for yours truly. I hope to have my own domain, even!

Check back here soon. I predict the transition will take “noticeably less than a month.”

Many thanks for your patience.