Victoria Cafe, Frank Cloutier & Moonshiners Dance

A Guide to My Amnesia Theater

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

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

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

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

The new book and essay: What are they?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where can a person read this essay?

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the deal with the Victoria Theater?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dry Manhattan in Minneapolis

Michael A. Lerner’s 2007 book, “Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City” and thoughts on geographies of memory

My parents were both born in 1925, so their earliest memories formed during Prohibition.

Mom’s father had a moonshine still in a room of their rural Wisconsin farmhouse, behind a door she was not allowed to open. Now 91, she can still smell the still’s awful stench and she associates it with the more traumatizing parts of what was often a very difficult childhood.

When I tell people that anecdote, I find they often have a hard time adjusting to the possibility that moonshine stills also existed outside of North and South Carolina. Yes, in the USA, Prohibition happened everywhere.

And it failed everywhere. I can almost guarantee that if you’re reading this within the United States and your digs were built before 1934, Noble Experiment moonshine was consumed between the walls of the room you’re in right now.

I’ve had Michael A. Lerner’s 2007 book, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, on my shelf for almost a decade during which I’ve been pursuing, often with great intensity, a Prohibition-related research project.

My procrastination in reading it was due to its geographic narrowness. Still, now that I’ve read it, I realize I hadn’t quite anticipated the book’s New York provincialism. It’s not just about NYC — it’s from a strictly NYC POV. Sometimes, it can barely see Hoboken from where it sits.

But point of view is a valuable tool for a writer (and even researcher). Dry Manhattan might be the best book I’ve read about Prohibition (I like it better than Okrent’s excellent Last Call) and I was foolish not to read it immediately in 2007. It’s provided me with a lot of research leads and context for my own findings. It also has me thinking fresh thoughts about my own work, what its own provincialisms are, and what the hidden value of them might be.

Lerner repeatedly argues for NYC’s importance to any understanding of Prohibition — i.e., that the premise of the book is valid. He does it often enough that he seems unsure we’ll buy the premise. (Not a bad instinct, it turns out.)

It’s easy to believe that New York helped set the cultural terms on which the rest of the country experienced Prohibition — at least in large cities. In defying the 18th Amendment, urbanites everywhere felt a specifically newyorkish sophistication. My own research on St. Paul’s “Moonshiner’s Dance” has produced many clear illustrations (a long essay to be published in the next six months or so will touch on this).

Lerner also argues for New York as perhaps the most important political turf for drys and wets alike. Just recall that Al Smith (who changed the national conversation) and FDR (who signed the national legislation) were both New York governors during their presidential bids.

And Lerner shows that the drys saw NYC as a test case. If they could make it there, they could make it anywhere — and inversely, if NYC didn’t sober up, Prohibition would flop nationwide.

His most transformative insight in that vein is that the drys failed to transform the USA because they could only conceive of it as a 19th century fantasy. New York City — with its energy, complexity, diversity, adaptability — was a better model for the real 20th century United States than anything the temperance folks could comprehend.

But there’s the rub. If New York City was too like everywhere else for Prohibition, then so was everywhere else.

Relentlessly, Lerner drops “in the city” or “in New York” into sentences that would’ve been about as true had they been said of any other American city (or, perish the thought, of any corner store at a farmland crossroads anywhere in flyover country). New York City, it often seems, is specified to keep the whole premise of the book from seeming moot.

Sometimes, there’s a blinding New Yorker’s vagueness about that big map “out there” in the middle of the country (where, incidentally, everybody is strangely familiar with New York).

After reading the chapter on Al Smith’s campaign, readers should google-up the 1928 presidential election results map. How that map and that chapter could coexist in the same universe is barely conceivable. What really happened in 1928?

And as a Twin Citian, I would also like to remind New Yorkers that the burning crosses greeting Al Smith were in Oklahoma. Even in Volstead’s rural Minnesota, such is scene is again barely conceivable. But that is a story for another book.

For my purposes, what the book does best also highlights the contradictions and missed opportunities of its premise. (Granted, that’s a universal characteristic of books, which one learns to exploit as a weapon in grad school).

At times, the book turns sharply to what I think of as good cultural history — resuscitating meanings that have long ago stopped breathing, stripping familiar symbols of the inevitability of their symbolism. My own work on “Moonshiner’s Dance” has increasingly poked around at this.

Dry Manhattan, both because of its successes and its not-so-much bits, has me thinking anew that something like an … experiential or signification history of Prohibition still needs to be written. Maybe it’s been done, and I just haven’t found it yet.

Lerner is vivid about how young women in the 1920s got tired of the presumptuousness of older Progressive-era women who had secured their voting rights and took away their drinking rights. The younger generation felt just fine about pursuing other, and even opposing, agendas.

Lerner “brings home” especially well how the dry movement got their Amendment by demonizing immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and city folk. Subsequently, when Prohibition itself instantly flopped, the drys blamed the failure on immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and city folk.

People — my people, really — knew when they were being scapegoated, and violating the Constitution by drinking booze made them feel part of a new, more plausible, more American way of life. And there were, and are, a lot of us around these parts … around-about here, locally … in this area.

My dad was something like an “anchor baby.” His father and mother immigrated separately from Austria and Prussia in 1924, met each other over here (both were German-speaking Catholics, so …), and they had my dad in 1925.

Of the many go-to stories my dad repeated too often, his favorite was about an incident in the early 1950s:

He and Mom and the first of their seven kids were living in Moline, Illinois, in a dense thicket of dry counties. The only way to get a drink was to join some kind of fraternal organization, so Dad joined the Knights of Columbus in Davenport, Iowa, just across the Mississippi River.

One Sunday morning, Dad was drinking in the crowded K of C clubhouse, when the parish priest walked in and told the entire bar that he had a message from the bishop of the Diocese of Davenport himself, the Most Reverend Ralph Hayes.

Henceforth, the K of C clubhouse would be closed on Sunday morning so the men could attend church services instead.

The bar was silent for a moment. Then the bartender shouted, “Alright, everyone in favor of closing the bar on Sunday morning, say ‘Aye’!”

Of course, the priest raised both hands, shouting “Hold on, hold on, wait a minute! This is not a democracy — the bishop says you’re closed on Sunday morning, and by God, you are closed on Sunday morning!”

My own relationship with booze was shaped by my upbringing, a fact that instantly and directly involves the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States in every hangover I’ve ever had. And I was born during the Johnson administration, just outside Chicago.

I’ve been thinking lately that it’s wrong, this belief that we should study history because it has “lessons” for us. No, we should study it because it ain’t over yet and everybody is involved.

Our identities are built in conversation with the built environment — and both persist longer than anyone’s awareness of their having been built at all. We are historic artifacts like those under glass in a history museum, and with memories about as good.

So, especially out here in the historic borderlands of the Upper Midwest, we are vulnerable to, and politely tolerant of, the standard narratives — the regionalist cliches of musical or literary tastes, say, or the full-blast stereo megaphones blaring our culture at us from the east and west coasts.

Good history may do what Dry Manhattan does in defamiliarizing the past, but it should also interrogate the book’s assumption that history starts in the center and radiates outward toward the frontiers over time. Just as often, whether we ourselves know it or not, history starts here.

Notes on Frank Cloutier’s Grave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank Cloutier died on a Friday morning in 1957.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Return of “Temperance & Temptation”

A great ensemble tackles Moonshiners Dance and other music from Minnesota’s Prohibition history

Celestial Monochord readers will be glad to know that the Rose Ensemble’s upcoming season will include Songs of Temperance and Temptation.

The show will be back in November for an eight-city tour of Minnesota and, in abbreviated form, for a Mississippi riverboat cruise on October 23.

This is great news. The three performances of Temperance and Temptation that closed the Ensemble’s previous season included the first known performances in over 83 years of a peculiar, foot-stomping composition known as “Moonshiner’s Dance Part One.” This piece has been the axis around which my research, writing, and preservation efforts have revolved for more than five years.

Hopefully, the Rose’s upcoming November performances will give Minnesota another chance to catch an incredibly rare performance of “Moonshiner’s Dance,” a neglected and nearly forgotten landmark in the state’s musical legacy.

But even for me, the hope of seeing more of “Moonshiner” isn’t the best reason to look forward to this season’s revival of Songs of Temperance and Temptation.

The research is amazing: Research as Amazing

The show is very amusing — packed with fresh songs (that is, new-to-you and very alive), sung by skillful, versatile, and charismatic vocalists. The show is also informative, immersing you in a kind of cultural history of alcohol that’s likely to transform your understanding.

But the Ensemble’s marketing materials reprint a blurb from a local paper saying, “No one makes scholarly research more entertaining than The Rose Ensemble.” I think this subtly misses the main point, the best thing about the Rose and this show.

What I like most is the show’s unwavering confidence that its surest bet in amusing the audience is to tell them something they didn’t already know. The Rose just assumes from the start, correctly and to great effect, that surprising information — learning something — is among the wildest experiences the stage has to offer.

To me, this approach felt courageous and just a shade radical in its sheer respect for the audience — a belief in the audience’s intelligence, but even more in its willingness to be game for something new. My frenzied notes taken during the single performance I attended in June have grown cryptic with time, but at one point I simply wrote, “The amazing research.”

I’m fairly well versed in the history of pop music during and just before Prohibition. But the Songs of Temperance and Temptation were almost all completely new to me. And the photographs projected behind the performers were mostly new finds. And the collection of sheet music cover art was fantastic.

The show’s stories of Minnesota’s temperance movement will surprise most Minnesotans — the city of Hutchinson’s founding, for example, by a family of protest singers dedicated to women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and men’s liberation from alcohol.

The Andrew Volstead story may also surprise a lot of people.

The Congressman from Granite Falls was seen across the United States as the primary villain of the Prohibition era — an incompetent, humorless zealot who drove the nation to (furtively) drink. He’s still remembered this way.

But the Rose Ensemble, perhaps following Daniel Okrent’s recent book, invites us to see him in a far more nuanced and sympathetic light.

(My own research has been hinting to me that both Okrent and Rose are going a little far in rehabbing Volstead’s reputation. A proper assessment of Volstead isn’t really available, so I think the guy is ripe material for a thorough biography.)

“I’ve Got the Prohibition Blues”

The members of the Rose Ensemble are trained veterans of choral music, and the Rose’s seasons always lean toward a wide variety of “early music.”

The upcoming season, for example, includes one show on “ancient Mediterranean Jews, Christians, and Muslims” and another on “feasts and saints in early Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Bohemia.”

So, of course, there’s the question of how well they handle Songs of Temperance and Temptation — and the answer is pretty good news.

The show’s first half deals primarily with 19th century conflicts leading up to Prohibition, so a bit of reserve and formal training only improves the verisimilitude. Rest assured, the show cuts loose early on and shows a lot of humor throughout. When they approach something like a barbershop quartet style, they’re clearly well prepared.

The real challenge comes during Prohibition, when American pop music fell in love with Jazz and the blues, and searched for something like an authentic “street” credibility. The Rose does very well with it, but it’s not surprising that swing and growl aren’t its most convincing assets.

But even in the slightly strained way the Rose Ensemble comes to grips with the 1920’s, they remain true to the history. One of the great pleasures of listening to, for example, Archeophone’s Phonographic Yearbook series is hearing the pop stars of the era grapple with those very same changes in public taste.

The blues and jazz revolution ended a lot of careers, just as Rock & Roll did decades later. Those who survived often did so by learning, with widely varying artistic success, the African American-inflected stomp and swerve in the era’s new sounds.

The more you hear what was recorded at the time, the more you appreciate the Rose’s mastery of this material today.

Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One

And finally, I know some folks will want to know how they did “Moonshiner’s Dance.” So here goes.

It came late in a show filled with a lot of unfamiliar music, so to suddenly hear a band, right in front of me, strike up that familiar introductory riff followed by that oompah hopped up on goofballs … it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

The only recording of the piece in existence — the one I’ve heard perhaps a thousand times — is trapped in the antique shellac of scratchy, store-bought 78s. It has no other existence. Hearing the piece played anew by a live band immediately in front of me was mind-bogglingly rare, and I felt it in every note.

Their approach was to hew quite closely to the original recording. The band was a little light on the beat and lacked the dance band insistence I’d expect, but otherwise tried to “play the record” as closely as possible.

In the recording, the third segment of the medley consists of a harmonica vamping some chords, possibly noodling a bit with an indecipherable tune. The blog Old Weird America claims the tune is “Turkey in the Straw,” but this is almost certainly wrong. The Rose Ensemble went with this suggestion, enunciating the tune very clearly.

I think it was the right decision. “Turkey in the Straw” is familiar and rousing (as the whole medley would have been to its original audience), and fits the piece nicely. It also dovetails (turkeytails?) with my thesis about the recording being something like a big-city parody of rural culture.

During the “At The Cross” segment of the medley, the fiddler took up a small American flag and waved it haughtily, which I loved. For one thing, it provided a light suggestion of the satirical stagecraft that I think was the real point of the “Moonshiner’s Dance” recording.

What we’re hearing in the recording was the soundtrack to something we’re not seeing. The Rose’s performance, then, also necessarily missed the chaos of the recording’s laughing, indecipherable voices, and generally … thick atmosphere that gives the recording its particular and mysterious register.

Certainly, I think the Rose’s performance worked wonderfully on its own terms, and the piece is plenty sturdy to have a performance life of its own.

But the challenges of performing it anew also highlight what I’ve come to focus on in my years of research — that the original “Moonshiner” recording has the power it has because it is so bursting with its very narrowly specific moment and place. To understand what this peculiar thing really is, then, we need to reconstruct the time and community from which it arose.

The Rose Ensemble has gleefully run directly into the path of that time and place, seeking a new way to make a new kind of performance sense for this piece that so often seems bent on denying the very possibility of sense itself.

In a way, that reinvention of new senses from old contexts is what The Rose Ensemble does for a living. These are brave people, and I want to see more of them.

[See also my thoughts in advance of the show.]

Featured image: Hutchinson Family Singers, 1845, www.metmuseum.org (founders of Hutchinson, MN, and abolitionist and temperance folksingers)

Rose Ensemble to Perform Moonshiner’s Dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthology’s Victoria Cafe Honored by Saint Paul

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

Well … now, things have changed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a little further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harry Smith Anthology Site Before Saint Paul Council

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And please, spread the word!

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saint Paul City Council — please contact them!

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

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

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

Kevin Moist and the Anthology as Collage

Revealing the divine in everything through sight and sound collage

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Dylan was one of those fresh new kids.

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gennett Gets Remembered in Indiana

I recently made a one-day pilgrimage to a place called Richmond, a small Indiana town (pop. 39,000) on the Ohio border.

My reasons to do it were complex, but above all else, I wanted to understand why the town hadn’t preserved the Gennett Record Company’s recording studio when it had the chance.

Richmond, after all, was the home of the legendary Gennett Records, which released the first real masterpieces of recorded jazz – the influential early records of King Oliver with Louis Armstrong, the game-changing piano solos of Jelly Roll Morton, the first recordings of Bix Beiderbecke and of Hoagy Carmichael.

In essence, it was Gennett that captured early jazz in exile in the Midwest. Without knowing it then, Gennett preserved many of the critical coming-of-age moments that jazz experienced as it found its voice in the wide world outside of New Orleans.

And jazz isn’t even my main interest. Gennett also recorded scads of other artists at the core of my sense of what the 1920s were musically all about – Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charlie Patton, Ernest Stoneman, Fiddlin’ Doc Roberts, Uncle Dave Macon.

The company also made a few experimental mobile recording trips. Their 1927 sessions in St. Paul, Minnesota, resulted in “Moonshiner’s Dance” by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra.

Visit Richmond if you can find the chance, and prepare by reading the work of Rick Kennedy, the guy who’s done much of the heavy lifting on the history of Gennett and jazz in Indiana.

In Richmond, I really saw how Gennett was a little side project of a major piano company in town.

In the office of the Starr-Gennett Foundation, they have a mind-boggling old photo showing the Gennett recording studio looking like a little rickety wooden shack tacked onto the ass end of the sprawling, brick factory complex of the Starr Piano Company.

At the site of the actual studio, you appreciate how inadequate the structure really was, especially for its intended purpose.

Simply too much imagination would’ve been needed, at the right moment, to envision the site as a global tourist destination, or to anticipate the strong sense of sacredness that many visitors experience as they approach the site of the studio.

This should be a challenge to our own imaginations as we contemplate the demolition of St. Paul’s comparatively palatial Victoria Theater.

The Starr-Gennett Foundation, along with various boards and booster types, have spent a lot of funds commissioning a series of mosaic emblems for a “Walk of Fame” at the former site of its famous studio.

And their Walk is a pretty effective example of public commemoration. It serves to take visitors the hundred yards or so from the remains of a factory building (stabilized and converted into a performance space) to the remains of the studio’s foundation.

A number of these emblems stand out as especially successful visually, and the Walk invites contemplation and discussion – even on the cold February day when I saw it.

Enlightened individuals will of course want to see the marker honoring Moonshiner’s Dance – so far, that noble effort is unrecognized. While the recorded output of Frank and his band totaled just two sides, one of those sides is the only Gennett-label recording on the Anthology of American Folk Music.

The Starr-Gennett Foundation estimates the still-expanding Walk could ultimately feature 80 artists, so we’ll see what happens. I imagine a scene in which the Walk features increasingly obscure artists – maybe a cow that once mooed on a Gennett sound effects record, say. Around that time, we would have to start a letter-writing campaign for Frank and his boys (although a check-writing campaign just might make a more lasting impression).

A member of the Starr-Gennett Foundation (you can join too) volunteered to take me on a whirlwind tour of Richmond, which was considerably more action-packed than you might imagine. In fact, one day was clearly not enough time.

I was often reminded of my reaction to first seeing Hibbing, Minnesota. Although Hibbing is considerably more disorienting, both places left me a little ashamed that I had expected so much less of them than I actually found.

Does the “anonymous little nowhere” in my imagination exist at all? The suburb I knew in my childhood certainly seemed like nowhere at the time, which might be my problem.

Anyway, I wish I had the time and stamina to write up the things I did have time to see in Richmond:

the Murray Theater, where this community has supported live performance continuously for more than a century;
the 1902 train station designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham;
the Gennett family mansion, which has recently seen a miraculous resurrection thanks to inspired restoration efforts;
the Starr-Gennett Gallery, a gift shop occupying donated space in a corner of a huge furniture store;
Little Sheba’s restaurant, which has a good Rueben sandwich – and where I lobbied for the addition of a “Carmichael Hoagy” sprinkled with some sort of stardust;
and the Wayne County Historical Museum is brilliant … I’ve seen my share of county historical societies, and none had a museum as impressive as Wayne’s.

My mind keeps returning to the Historical Museum’s beautifully preserved Conestoga wagon, emblematic of the period when Richmond was at the western frontier of American expansion.

I used to associate Indiana’s identity as the “crossroads of America” with the Indianapolis 500, but today I’m more likely to think of that Conestoga wagon in Richmond. I wonder if the Rollingstone Colony passed through there on the way to Minnesota.

Certainly, Gennett employees undertook a trip from Richmond to Minnesota in 1927. In the coming weeks, I’ll report a little of what else I learned about Gennett’s activities in St. Paul during the rest of my week-long stay in Indiana.

Featured image: The New Orleans Rhythm Kings on the Walk of Fame

Moonshiner’s Parking Lot?

A piece of St. Paul's cultural history may be torn down for a parking lot.

The Victoria Cafe produced a recording of absolutely unique importance

—

In May 2006, I realized that an internationally notorious recording from 1927 — "Moonshiner's Dance, Part One" — was the work of the house band of a nightclub at 825 University Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Nobody had understood this before, so I was astonished and overjoyed to find the building still standing 79 years later. Since then — since early 2006 — I drive by it often, and each time my heart skips a beat until I see that the Victoria Theater is still there.

But now, not even 4 years into my research for a book on "Moonshiner's Dance," the Victoria building is being eyed for demolition to make way for a parking lot.

What disturbs me most is that, while my findings are enormously suggestive, the building's historical importance is not yet well understood. Like a species allowed to go extinct before biologists are even able to describe it, the Victoria Theater may be destroyed in the near-total absence of knowledge.

Other community members have great reasons to want the building saved.

I have my own reasons.

[ NOTE: Most of the information previously presented in this space has been superseded by my subsequent writing and research efforts. For this reason, I've deleted the text. Please visit this more recent post for better information on my mission to express the many stories I've encountered while trying to understand the meanings of this place. ]