Victoria Cafe, Frank Cloutier & Moonshiners Dance – Page 2

Music for Moonshiners – Whoopee John

Minnesota’s best-selling pre-WWII band needs a closer look

Older Minnesotans always seem to remember Whoopee John Wilfahrt — so much so that it’s startling how little-known he is to everyone else.

Whoopee John made his first recordings in Minneapolis in September 1927 — just across the river and about a week before Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra recorded “Moonshiners Dance.”

He would later become hugely influential across the Upper Midwest, and because they circulated in a small world, Cloutier and Wilfahrt were probably aware of each other. Still, I don’t see Whoopee John’s influence in “Moonshiners Dance.”

Instead, his early recordings can serve as a good example of the old-time ethnic music being played across the region at the time. “Moonshiners Dance” is also a good example of that music, and is partly a satire of it.

Explanations of Whoopee John’s nickname differ, but it’s pretty clear to my ears — Whoopee John whooped, just like Frank Cloutier’s boys, except at very deliberately chosen moments in the performance.

Neither the whoops nor the nickname appears on Wilfahrt’s 1927 recordings, but they’re both firmly in place by 1933. Perhaps “Moonshiners Dance” inspired Whoopee John to start whooping — but then again, similarly exuberant interjections were common across pre-War genres of vernacular social dance music.

Although Whoopee John’s style doesn’t sound much like “Moonshiners Dance,” it doesn’t sound much different either. To get from Wilfahrt to Cloutier, you mostly need a small shift in meter and tempo, and a huge change in attitude. The Victoria Cafe Orchestra satirizes rural polka music like Whoopee John’s from a cosmopolitan, Jazz-Age perspective.

But keep in mind that old-time ethnic performers themselves relentlessly goofed on their own rustic, old-world personas. “Whoopee John” was, in essence, a satirical character played by John Wilfahrt. There’s an economy of satirical exchange here … with its liquidity provided by good times and bootleg alcohol.

Cloutier and Wilfahrt used similar instruments — after all, this is music from the “Brass Age” to which The Anthology otherwise turns its back. Both bands use instruments you’ll also find in 1920s Chicago jazz bands, and most everywhere else at the time — trumpet, clarinet, bass horn, a little drum set. A signature of Wilfarht’s band was the addition of the German button accordion.

Wilfahrt’s later stuff is much easier to find due to its great popularity. To my ears, it takes on a slightly slick big-band aesthetic that I find a bit bland and cloying. I much prefer Whoopee John’s early stuff from the 1920s and early 1930s — the New-Ulm, Knights-of-Columbus-hall-wedding Whoopee John.

It’s clearly played by a small, spirited combo of townspeople. I like the hint of parlor, or even chamber music formality. I don’t know, maybe it’s a DNA thing, given that this music’s genealogy so closely mirrors my own.

The sound file is an MP3 of about 2.6 MB, and it chains together three abbreviated clips from early Whoopee John 78’s. I chose the cuts because I like them, and because they sound most like “Moonshiners Dance.” Wilfahrt also recorded appealing waltzes, schottishes, marches, etc.

Download WoopeeJohn.mp3

• 0:00 to 1:35 – “Old Time Polka #1” from October 1933.

• 1:35 to 2:42 – “Kinder Polka” from September 1927.

• 2:42 to 3:50 – “Linderman Polka” from October 1933.

The best source for Whoopee John’s music seems to be his grandson, Dennis Brown. His website has an order form you can print out, fill out, and snail-mail with a check or money order.

I’ve done this several times with excellent results. It’s great to have this music available in such a high-tech fashion — usually, I’m crawling around on the floor in the basements of used vinyl stores. I recommend getting either the Whoopee John Historical Music CD #1, or #2, or both.

North Country Blues

A mural in the library of Bob Dylan's high school depicts Hibbing's multi-ethnic iron miners. What did their music sound like?

Around 1965, Bob Dylan turned his back on folk music, confirming the break by "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival.

At once fact and fiction, the story has emerged as one of the more familiar parables from the 20th century.

But lately, I've been thinking about an earlier moment of decision when Dylan walked away from another set of folk music traditions — those of the Upper Midwest. Today, that decision seems more consequential in the long run, all the more so the longer it goes unrecognized.

When Dylan walked away from Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range and the rest of the Upper Midwest, he left behind what was then a dying economy, as portrayed in his song "North Country Blues". It was a dyin' town, it was a dyin' town, he chants in the album's liner notes.

But Dylan was also walking away from dying forms of music as varied and complex as any in the world, including those of the American South.

At the time, old musical ways of life were changing just as fast in the South, of course, but important elements of the Folk Revival were bent on preserving Southern traditional music — and Dylan was about to help out.

Suddenly, the critical difference between the traditional music of the North and the South hasn't turned out to be a matter of quality or inherent interest.

Instead, it's that the music of the South — against all odds, and to our inexpressible benefit — was resuscitated when it needed it most. Up North, in Zimmerman country, a comparable revival just never arrived.

•

I've been working on a study of the only recording on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music clearly representing northern music — "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Minnesota in 1927. It has never been studied before.

Early in my project, I knew I would eventually have to know — and I mean have to, and I mean know — the musical environment in the Upper Midwest before World War Two.

Consider the 1913 mural in the library of Hibbing High School depicting iron miners at work. Each of its 16 human figures represents another ethnic group that mined the Mesabi Iron Range — a deep diversity of cultures that, presumably, intermingled to create distinctive new American sounds.

Those miners were silent as they watched the young Robert Zimmerman browse the library books — but they must've danced to something sometime.

During the early phases of my research into "Moonshiner's Dance," I often thought about them, knowing I would need to hear their music in my head, loud and clear.

Unfortunately, when I finally turned my attention to the problem, I saw there was going be trouble.

I had first committed myself to traditional music 14 years prior, when there were already mountains of products on the market vying to help me navigate pre-War Southern blues and country. But now, up North, even in 2008, I was pretty much on my own.

There is no such thing as, say, The Anthology of Northern American Folk Music (edited by Harry Smithovich). There's no O Brother Where Art Ya Once? There was no "Song to Otto Rindlisbacher" on Bob Dylan's first album.

Alan Lomax made a thousand recordings during fieldwork in the Upper Midwest in 1938, declaring it possibly "the most interesting country I have ever traveled in" with "enough material in the region for years of work". But unlike every other region where Lomax conducted fieldwork, no release in any format has ever been devoted to his Northern journey. The website of Lomax's foundation, its name apparently a bit of self-deprecating humor, makes no mention of it.

There is an amazing record store here in Minneapolis that sells only 78 rpm records, and it has hundreds of pre-War old-time ethnic recordings — cheap, in great condition, with unpronounceable titles. But what do I buy? And what sense do I make of it?

There's simply no … there's no …

There's no Northern canon. Or worse, and more exactly, the canon of "American roots music" has bypassed my part of the country entirely. There are no names from the Upper Midwest like Dock Boggs, or The Carter Family, or Robert Johnson — names of musicians whose work everybody knows is great, even if they haven't actually bothered listening to it.

How do you connect the dots when you have no dots to begin with?

•

I spent much of 2008 trying to crack the case.

I've camped out in university and historical society libraries, scouring the footnotes of academic journal articles. I've literally spent hours clutching photocopies of typewritten discographies while crawling on the floor in used vinyl stores — including one where the owner chain-smokes behind the register. I've found music that's never been issued, is out of print, is on formats I can't play, lacks any intelligible context.

So far, there appear to be no easy solutions. But I have found a few extremely valuable maps of this occult terrain — so valuable, in fact, that I hate to bury reviews of them this deep in an already too-long blog post.

If I could press only three things into your hands today, they would be: (1) a brilliant box set, Down Home Dairyland, containing 40 episodes of a radio show about the traditional music of the Upper Midwest, and (2 and 3) a pair of absolutely essential books with unfortunate titles, Victor Greene's A Passion for Polka and James P. Leary's Polkabilly.

They're hardly the only materials available, but taken together (including their footnotes, discographies, etc.) they allow an incipient canon to emerge — a list of things you probably should recognize if you want to be taken seriously on the subject. They also provide — most pointedly in the first and last chapters of Leary's Polkabilly — clues to explaining why these musicians and their work aren't more widely seen as part of the canon of American roots music.

•

Following various threads into and out of such material, I sometimes return to the mural in the library of Hibbing High School.

Like the rest of present-day Hibbing, the mural was once moved to its current location from the ghost town of North Hibbing, "where even the markin stones were dead, an there was no sound except for the wind blowin thru the high grass," as Dylan described it.

Slowly, as I've started to hear a few strains of music coming from those miners in that mural, what's begun to strike me most about the thing is how deadly silent it first seemed to me, and how silent it must have seemed to Dylan, there in that hushed library.

Why wasn't there a revival of Northern folk music for Dylan to join? And what would one have sounded like? Until 2008, I would have faintly assumed the answer to the first question was the answer to the second. The music down South was just better or more plentiful.

And maybe it was, I haven't quite decided. But the reasons for the historical neglect of the Upper Midwest turn out to be far more complex than that — so much so they deserve their own research institute … or at least their own blog post. I do know it certainly wasn't just about the music.

If we want to keep thinking that Southern music is better, that's ok with me. But shouldn't we be able to say, confidently and in specific detail, "Better than WHAT?"

Chilicothe Schottishe with Intro – Erick Berg

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (part three)

This is the third in a series about the first seven seconds
of "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Saint Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and the
Victoria Cafe Orchestra. It was included in the
Anthology of American Folk Music, sometimes called the Harry Smith Anthology.
See also Part One and Part Two.

Tonight, the Bedlam welcomes the Republicans with a circus (link)

At the start of the Moonshiner's Dance, the leader of The Victoria Café Orchestra grandly calls out to you, the listener, and he renames you "Mister Larson."

I've explained why I think Mister Larson was probably not a specific
person but a cultural caricature — a
generic audience member being welcomed into The Victoria Café.

He's a butter-and-egg man, in other words, getting a Texas Guinan routine in a 1920s speakeasy.

Hey hey, Mister Larson!

Thinking over questions like Mister Larson — trying to reconstruct the meanings the recording would have had in Minnesota in 1927 — has fundamentally rejiggered the Moonshiner's Dance in my imagination.

And those reconstructed meanings, I've come to decide, reverberate across the meaning and argument of the Anthology itself.

Today, as the Republican National Convention slouches toward Saint Paul, I insist that Frank Cloutier and the
Victoria Cafe Orchestra were definitely NOT "from the Minnesota
area," as the 1997 liner notes to the Anthology "assumed."

They were not even from Minneapolis. They were vividly, and
elaborately, and specifically from the city of Saint Paul. Should it surprise us that the Moonshiner's Dance is about its place and time, and that the geographical specifics matter to the music?

As with Dylan and Hibbing, if we want to understand the Moonshiner's Dance, we need to understand a little about the history of Saint Paul.

—

In the early 1900's, the city of Saint Paul operated under a semi-official policy called the O'Connor System. It's goal was to maintain the city as a safe haven for organized crime, with the understanding that major crimes would be committed outside city limits.

I've chosen these words carefully. They sound like they might be some sort of local jack-a-lope folklore of the sort fed to tourists visiting any city. They aren't.

The O'Connor System's method was this: protect all criminals from prosecution under the conditions that they (A) announce themselves upon arrival in the city, (B) pay protection money bribes, and (C) limit themselves to vice and conspiracy within city limits.

Violators of this compact were treated harshly, either by the city's legal infrastructure, or by its criminal infrastructure, or both.

And benefit they did, for more than 30 years. In 1932, for example, 21% of all bank robberies in the USA occurred in
Minnesota, but exactly zero occurred within Saint Paul's city limits.

Liquor,
prostitution, and gambling (and so, music) flourished within the city limits, and residents enjoyed them with gusto and relative impunity. So did
visiting tourists. Larry Craig could have tapped his foot all day and all night.

—

Chief O'Connor's system was not a huge break from the past.

Saint Paul began as a little
encampment on the Mississippi around Fort Snelling, providing the fort's soldiers with all the comforts not issued to them by the government.

In 1838, thanks to "beastly scenes of intoxication among the soldiers of this garrison," the fort's administrators had had enough — especially of a moonshiner named Pierre Parrant, known affectionately as Pig's Eye.

The little
village was burned to the ground and its residents were moved eight miles upstream.
The new location was called Pigs Eye for several years, until its first
Catholic priest proposed the name Saint Paul.

As it grew, the city continue to focus on trade and transportation, unlike industry-heavy Minneapolis. Brewing was the main manufacturing activity in Saint Paul, and a vice economy was supported by, and supported, these other sectors.

Prohibition, in particular, did not go well for the Feds in Saint Paul. The city — with its profoundly anti-prohibition population, its proximity to the Canadian border, and its great regional transportation system — was one of the wettest places in America.

Businessmen from all over the US knew Saint Paul was
a good destination for business trips. Truly, what happened in Saint Paul stayed in
Saint Paul.

—

It was Mister Larson, and not the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, who was from "the Minnesota area."

Saint Paul was insular — a cultural island — and thus a peculiar state capital. Most Saint Paulites had ethical qualms about
traveling and spending money beyond city limits, with Minneapolis in
particular being another planet, and a hostile one.

Larger and wealthier Minneapolis was, especially in the popular imagination, a straight-laced,
class-stratified, Republican town of Lutheran factory owners and non-union workers. The workers were
Scandinavian, even more so than the rest of the state, and the owners were old-stock Yankees.

By contrast, especially in the popular imagination, Saint Paul was an island of drunken, unionized, Irish-Catholic Democrats who were not enamored of the law.

And the popular imagination was tolerably close to the truth.

Saint Paul's political machine was overwhelmingly Irish, and the city's many Yankees, Germans, and Scandinavians figured they may as well be Irish
too, given the circumstances. In Saint Paul, ethnic diversity could have
a strange way of drawing the city even closer together, increasing its
insularity.

—

Hey hey, Mister Larson!

So Saint Paul welcomed a generic son of Lars — a pleasure-seeking visitor from the more culturally conservative city of Minneapolis or from the mining and farming communities across "the Minnesota area."

Here we are now — entertain us.

After one strong whiff of cultural history, the Moonshiner's Dance morphs into the shape of countless other recordings, one after another.

Viva Las Vegas, New York New York, I Love LA — the Moonshiner's Dance is an advertising jingle.

In the shadow of its richer and more sober neighbor across the
Mississippi River, Saint Paul knew its place and was not afraid to
advertise. The name of the Victoria Cafe is right there on the record label, as are the cafe's main attractions of moonshine and dancing.

Suddenly, I hear a lot of Rum And Coca-Cola — a lot of working for the Yankee dollar — in the Moonshiners Dance. Whether the Andrew Sisters' version or Lord Invader's, who's to say?

It's a cynical thing — a small, casual violence — to rename your listener with a cultural stereotype. Living and working in a place like Saint Paul, a satirical ear must've come easily to a cafe musician like Frank Cloutier.

So Cloutier makes it seem natural to me, for the first time, that F. Scott Fitzgerald was from Saint Paul — both men must've seen the Jazz Age in something like the way a blackjack dealer sees Las Vegas.

Mister Larson now becomes Mister Jones, the unprepared square of Bob
Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man. In the Moonshiner's Dance, you, Mister Larson, have sneaked into The
Victoria Cafe the same way you, Mister Jones, were about to find yourself
squarely in the middle of Woodstock.

Suddenly, as Larson and Jones stroll into the Victoria Cafe together, Cloutier's Jazz Age
comes into view as Dylan's sixties, with their respective collisions of cultural
whiplash and bootlegged intoxicants.

—

But for now, obviously, much of this oversteps the evidence I've shown you. It's in the actual music later in the recording, for example, that you really get to know Cloutier's satirical cynicism. All in good time. For now, I think I know who Mister Larson is and what he meant in his place and moment.

Now I have to write about the meaning of the other, unintelligible part of the introduction — and about the first seven seconds as a whole. It has to be done before I put this series of entries to rest. In the last installment, I'll try to work out some of what I can say about what I can't understand.

Selected References (more than any other blog!)

Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place by Mary Lethert Wingerd — The best book on the Moonshiner's Dance so far, and she may not even know the recording exists. Hugely important. I've made Saint Paul sound more like a riot, but Wingerd emphasizes the compacts and balances and civic identities that made Saint Paul a great place to live.

John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks' Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936 by Paul Maccabee — The title makes it sound like it could be about any city. Every place thinks it was an Al Capone hangout. But Maccabee has written, in a sense, a chronicle of the consequences of the O'Connor System. Fun read, too.

They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State's Ethnic Groups edited by June Drenning Holmquist — An unbelievable, exhaustive treatment of every damned ethnic group that ever set foot in the state. That it was done at all is dumbfounding.

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (Part Two)

This is the second in a series about the first seven seconds
of "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Saint Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and the
Victoria Cafe Orchestra. It was included in the
Anthology of American Folk Music, sometimes called the Harry Smith Anthology.
See also Part One and Part Three.

Early in my research into "The Moonshiner's Dance," I knew the identity of Mister Larson would be easy to uncover. It's the low-hanging fruit.

After all, Frank Cloutier addresses him the instant the recording begins. Hey hey, Mr. Larson!

I knew Larson would wind up being a musician in Frank's band, or the owner of the Victoria Cafe, and I'd write up a neat biography of this Larson guy and explain why he's so prominently placed at the start of Frank's only recording.

Today, deep into my third year of research, it hasn't turned out that way.

I've seen hundreds of thousands of advertisements, newspaper articles, obituaries, theater programs, union newsletters, graves, birth and death certificates, draft cards, photos, letters, and much else.

I'm a resident of the Twin Cities of 1927. Driving around St. Paul, I once saw a product of the WPA and caught myself thinking, "Hey, THAT'S new."

Living like this — hanging around the dance music scene of Prohibition-era Saint Paul— I keep encountering the same guys over and over. I notice when their wives have kids. I know when they finally get their own bands. I hear about it when a good pitcher joins their kittenball team.

And I'm sorry. I don't know any Larson — at least nobody associated with Frank Cloutier or the local dance scene or the management of the Victoria Cafe.

—

Maybe I'm not hearing the muffled 1927 recording correctly. Maybe it isn't "Mister Larson" at all, but something else. Here's an mp3 of the first few seconds.

I briefly considered whether Frank might instead be saying "Mister Nelson" as in Gordon Nelson, the drummer who seems to have played on "The Moonshiner's Dance." For a bit longer, I considered the Cafe's manager at the time of the recording, Sammy Markus.

But listening again to the recording, I find they just won't do. Hey hey Mr. Markus. Hey hey Mr. Markus. Hey hey Mr. Markus.

No. It's "Hey hey Mr. Larson."

As a last resort, I scoured the entries for "Larson" and "Larsen" in the St. Paul and Minneapolis city directories, which they started to call "phone books" once everybody got phones.

Ordinarily, I adore city directories, intimate and teasing as they are. But searching every Larson in the Twin Cities directories is tedious work — there are roughly 2700 entries in the 1927 editions and they have to be scanned line by line, by hand and eye.

St. Paul is striking for its lack of prospects. I found one music teacher named Bertha Larson who was presumably not a Mister.

There are more prospects in Minneapolis. There was a piano mover named Gustaf Larson and a piano tuner named Martin Larson — unlikely professions for Mister Larson, even though Frank Cloutier was a keyboardist. There was also a movie house manager, a cashier at a dance hall, a radio salesman, and another woman music teacher.

There was a family of musical Larsons, and I've done a longitudinal study of them — followed them around town like a shamus. So far, none of these Larsons seems to have a connection to Frank or to the Victoria Cafe or even to St. Paul. They were not well known, and other than their name, nothing seems relevant about them.

The 1930 census counted about 11,900 individuals named Larsen or Larson
in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, the counties of Minneapolis and St.
Paul. Limiting myself to the right age and gender brings the number down, but I have to face the fact that I may never find the Larson that Frank had in mind.

—

One last prospect has occasionally troubled my mind for about two years. In 1927, the leader of the Minneapolis Police Department's band was a cop called Curly Larson.

I've tried to find out more about him, but so far, he's been a tough nut to crack, probably because of that Curly nickname. We know he was probably bald. I'll keep searching.

But no matter the details, it's a delicious idea.

Smack in the middle of Prohibition, the leader of the Minneapolis policeman's band puts on his uniform every Friday and Saturday night, crosses the river into St. Paul, and plays "The Moonshiner's Dance" at the Victoria Cafe with Frank Cloutier and his boys.

Playing that soused polka in uniform on the bandstand … I desperately want him to have done this. There is exactly zero evidence that he did.

But could he have? Could a Minneapolis cop have played such a drunken, reeling tribute to bootleg liquor without being fired, or even arrested? Especially if he was prominently featured on a 78 rpm record? And might a St. Paul officer have made the same trip to Minneapolis, maybe in a pickled cop exchange program?

During many long days in archives and libraries, I've often bounced these questions about Curly Larson off my findings. Partly thanks to that habit, I've slowly evolved from being the archivist of "Moonshiners Dance" to being its cultural historian.

The shift felt complete the day I finally decided to trust my findings about all these Larsons. There's always so much more work to be done, but so far, nobody has presented himself as the likely Mister Larson.

Therefore, according to my current research results, there probably was no Mister Larson. Or rather, there were many thousands of him. I've come to suspect that Mister Larson is a product of Frank Cloutier's imagination. He's the generic audience member — just your typical Minnesotan off the street.

Hey hey Mister Larson!

If so, this would make him a founding citizen of Lake Wobegon. Like Garrison Keillor's townspeople, he's a caricature invented for the sake of Minnesota humor. To this day, Mister Larson still lives next door to Pastor Inkvist and across the street from Carl Krebsbach.

It would also make Mister Larson an ancestor of Mister Jones, Bob Dylan's main character in "Ballad of a Thin Man."

Just as with Dylan's character, the inclination is to imagine Mister Larson as somebody other than you. But Frank and Bob both address the listener — both are talking to and about you, no matter what name they give you. You are Mister Larson.

Something is happening, therefore, and you don't know what it is. To understand who Mister Larson was, we have to sort out what he might have meant to somebody like Frank Cloutier in a place like Saint Paul at a time like 1927.

We have to reconstruct a meaning that no longer exists. We have to do cultural history.

I'll present some initial findings in Part Three.

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (part one)

This is the first in a series about the first seven seconds
of "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Saint Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and the
Victoria Cafe Orchestra. It was included in the
Anthology of American Folk Music, sometimes called the Harry Smith Anthology.
See also Part Two and Part Three.

Alessandro Carrera, Minneapolis Dylan Symposium
Alessandro Carrera
Bob Dylan Symposium in Minneapolis
March 27, 2007

At the 2007 Bob Dylan symposium in Minneapolis, Alessandro Carrera, the leading Italian translator of Bob Dylan's lyrics and prose, told a story about his first awareness of Dylan. I keep remembering it as I think about Mister Larson.

The gist of the story was this:

When Carrera was a teenager in Italy in the late 1960's, he was obsessed with American music — even though it was very difficult to get a hold of, and he could count all the words in his English vocabulary on one hand.

Listening to albums by Joan Baez, and by the Byrds, and by Peter Paul and Mary, what excited him most on each album was always the one or two songs that had been written by this guy — one "Bobe Dee-lahn", as Carrera pronounced it.

Of course, he couldn't understand the lyrics at all — it was Bob Dylan's melodies that attracted him.

It took some doing, but Carrera finally got a hold of a recording by Bob Dylan himself — a 45 rpm single, one side of which was "Mister Tambourine Man." He put it on the turntable, and was elated to hear that the first word out of Dylan's mouth was one of the few English words that the teenage Carrera knew.

"Hey!"

Carrera didn't just know what the word meant — that is, he didn't just know its Italian translation — he also deeply recognized the word. He appreciated it. It spoke to him.

"Hey!"

It meant, "You! LISTEN TO ME." And that was cool.

—

"The Moonshiner's Dance" begins with a 7-second spoken introduction. A prologue.

Here's an mp3:

Download MoonshinerIntro.mp3

In its first two seconds, someone — almost certainly the leader of the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, Frank E. Cloutier — practically shouts "Hey hey, Mister Larson!"

In the next five seconds, in the same declarative voice, he rattles off about 20 more syllables. But because of some rasping and, maybe, needle-bouncing at start of the recording, all but a few of these syllables are completely indecipherable.

To just count the syllables in the introduction, I had to transcribe it phonetically, without worrying about its meaning. The words sound something like this:

Hey hey, Mister Larson! These boys geeky entwine anonymous spectacle play pen! That's it, go boys!

We may never know what Frank E. really said (and I doubt I've made a lucky guess). Maybe the Gennett recording engineer in 1927 used a blank wax disc that was rough or soft near the outer edge. Preparing the wax was skilled labor and results could be slightly uneven. If that's the source of the noise, every released copy of the 78 is similarly indecipherable.

On the other hand, the Smithsonian-Folkways' reissue on CD is the only version I've heard. It may be that their "source copy" of the 78 rpm record was damaged just there. Perhaps another copy of the 78 has a prologue that can be understood.

In any case, after this spoken introduction someone whoops "WAH hee!", and the band strikes up its reeling, careening medley of tunes played as one-steps.

—

I, and possibly you, listen to these old recordings to put our minds through an intense exercise. It's, like, mind-expanding.

We lean into the noise and try to tease out the delicate signal as it leaks across a divide as impenetrable as a world war, a depression, and a cold war. The Mason-Dixon line. The color line. Class and gender and religious and educational and technological divides. And, for us, those divides are not so much obstacles to our listening pleasure as they are at the root of the pleasure.

Among the recordings on the Harry Smith Anthology, Moonshiners Dance comes to me across the shortest distances.

The first seven seconds are in English, it seems. Frank E. would have had a Rhode Island accent, but his audience at the Victoria Cafe was an Upper Midwestern one — it still is, given that nobody is listening but me. In fact, the Victoria Cafe is still standing, just a couple minutes' drive from my house. Frank E. was even raised Catholic, like me — and unlike almost everyone else on the Anthology (except the Cajuns, who do not speak my language).

You'd think I'd have a shot at understanding Frank E.

Instead, I'm like Alessandro Carrera. There's a world between me and the speaker, and I can only pick out a few translatable syllables.

But I recognize something in the gesture. Hey hey, Mister Larson!

Frank could hardly have imagined our existence. We're eavesdropping on his message to Mr. Larson, but somehow the message seems intended for us. But what does it mean?

Louis Armstrong in Minnesota, 1939

(used by permission of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
and the Minnesota Historical Society)

As a side trip from my regular research, I’ve spent a week or so of evenings and weekends looking into the facts surrounding Louis Armstrong’s appearance at the Coliseum Ballroom in St. Paul on Friday night, July 28, 1939. Please forgive any errors, and let me know what you think.

The 1939 show was advertised as Armstrong’s first appearance in the Twin Cities — a point repeatedly stressed in the twin African American newspapers, the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder.

But he might also have appeared in Minneapolis in the spring of 1931. That earlier show is mentioned in Jones and Chilton’s Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story but I haven’t been able to confirm it despite a grueling newspaper search.

Regardless, today we know Armstrong had visited the Twin Cities about 20 years earlier. From 1918 to 1921, he’d played for the Streckfus line of riverboats — paddle-wheelers that were still (or already) trading on nostalgia for the Mississippi’s 19th-century heyday with picturesque excursions up and down the river. That is the gig that first brought Armstrong to St. Paul-Minneapolis.

For Armstrong, then, his 1939 appearance in Minnesota might have been a kind of nostalgic excursion of his own.

The Coliseum

One of the only facts you might still hear about the Coliseum Ballroom is that a lot of famous acts played there — Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Jack Teagarden, Ben Pollack, Lawrence Welk, the Andrews Sisters.

During its 38 years, the Coliseum was a quirky, unavoidable, irreplaceable center of St. Paul’s nightlife, love life, and imagination. It’s rarely remembered today, but Garrison Keillor did provide a gratifying exception a few months ago 22 minutes into a speech for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

I started thinking about the Coliseum two years ago on my first day researching the Victoria Cafe, the orchestra of which recorded the strange “Moonshiner’s Dance” that eventually found its way onto Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.

It turned out that the Victoria Cafe Orchestra leader, Frank Cloutier, later acted as the leader of the house orchestra of the Coliseum, four blocks to the Cafe’s west. He worked at the Coliseum for thirteen years.

It must have been a good gig. The Coliseum boasted the world’s largest dance floor and offered $100 to anyone who could prove otherwise. Its floor was a rebuilt hockey rink with a 250 x 90-foot playing surface, so a packed house at the Coliseum Ballroom could mean more than 3000 dancers at one time. Leading the Coliseum Orchestra regularly put Frank Cloutier’s band on the radio across the Midwest.

The Coliseum’s owner — the husky, gregarious, and scrappy John J. Lane — often billed himself as “The Musician’s Friend.” He was also a Ramsey County commissioner at the time Frank Cloutier took the job.

Satch Returns Triumphant

In the late 1930s, major national stardom had just come to Louis Armstrong.

A front-page article in the African-American weekly Spokesman-Recorder credited Armstrong’s sudden popularity to his work in Hollywood films. An ad in the paper featured a photo of Armstrong goofing around with Bing Crosby.

Armstrong had indeed played a fairly substantial role in Crosby’s 1936 Pennies From Heaven. The next year, he was in both Jack Benny’s musical comedy Artists and Models and Mae West’s Every Day’s A Holiday. In 1938, Armstrong sang “Jeepers Creepers” to a horse in Going Places starring Dick Powell, Anita Louise, and Ronald Reagan. A New York Times film critic didn’t think much of Going Places but he was left wanting more of Armstrong.

On the day of the Twin Cities show, a wry editorial in the Spokesman-Recorder described Winchell himself, “the ‘Patron Saint’ of many an American column reader,” declaring Louis Armstrong the King of Swing. The paper seemed to almost grudgingly agree that Armstrong “has brought something to modern music that defies definition, and reams of paper and tons of ink have been used trying to describe it.”

Jazz was now being taken very seriously as an art form and scholarly work had begun to appear about it. Scarcely three months after his show in St. Paul, Armstrong appeared at Manhattan’s enormous Center Theater portraying Bottom in Swingin’ The Dream, a jazz adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Benny Goodman co-starred and Walt Disney designed the sets.

Things To Do Around The Twin Cities

Capitol

There were plenty of other things to do around town without paying 80 cents to see Louis Armstrong on that clear, mild summer night.

Several area theaters were showing Dark Victory with Bette Davis for 25 cents. Or you could see Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, and Ann Sheridan in Dodge City or the W. C. Fields comedy You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man with Edgar Bergen and the somewhat wooden Charlie McCarthy.

Alternately, there was the “Melodies Around The World” ice show at the St. Paul Auditorium — 25 cents in the bleachers, 50 cents to sit at a table. The Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus wasn’t scheduled to arrive for another week.

And the Streckfus line ran the paddle-wheel steamer Capitol out of the dock at the foot of Jackson Street. You could take day trips down to the lock and dam at Hastings or one of the “moonlight dance trips” leaving every night at 9:00 pm. Armstrong had worked on the Capitol in his youth — there’s even a 1919 photo of him aboard that boat.

So far, I don’t see that the Streckfus excursions were racially segregated in Minnesota in 1939 as they were elsewhere, long before and long after. While he was in town for the Coliseum show, maybe Armstrong could have taken a ride on the Capitol, this time as a passenger. I wonder if the idea would have appealed to him.

These other temptations aside, the 1939 appearance was a rare opportunity for Twin Cities jazz fans. It was their chance to see Louis Armstrong while also voting with their dollars. On the day of the show, an editorial in the Spokesman-Recorder stated:

Somewhat off the beat theatrically, the Twin Cities seldom have an opportunity to see and hear internationally known Negro artists. When they do come along, we think we should support them.

The week after the show, the Spokesman-Recorder reminded its readers how lucky they were to have Armstrong play here.

In St. Louis, where there are 100,000 Negroes to draw a crowd from, the Missourians pay $1.10 to hear the same band Twin Citians heard for 80 cents.

It must have helped that jazz, and Armstrong in particular, had a fast-growing White audience nationwide — the 1940 census found fewer than 9000 African Americans in Minneapolis and St. Paul combined.

The Trio Club

The 1939 concert was sponsored by either the Trio Club or the Tri Club, depending on whether you believe a news article in the Spokesman-Recorder or ads appearing on the day of the show in St. Paul’s mainstream papers. A Spokesman-Recorder columnist describes the club as “three St. Paul men who invested several hundred dollars.”

Beyond that, I don’t know much about the Tri or Trio Club. There’s no entry for them in the 1939 St. Paul city directory — either in the yellow or the white pages, as we would say today — and my search of the records of Minnesota’s Secretary of State showed no clear sign it ever incorporated.

The Spokesman-Recorder did report that the three investors barely made a profit from Armstrong’s appearance, thanks to a rumor circulating prior to the show.

Rumor Cuts Attendance

A thousand people saw Armstrong at the Coliseum that night, according to a follow-up article in the August 4 Spokesman-Recorder. Hundreds more would have attended had it not been for an apparent act of sabotage:

Some irresponsible individual several days before the date of the dance spread the rumor that the Armstrong band would not appear. Attempts are being made to ascertain the guilty party.

On the day of the show, the offices of the Spokesman in Minneapolis and the Recorder in St. Paul got more than 100 calls from people trying to find out if the show was really canceled.

We’ll never know the motives behind the cancellation rumor. For me, the natural hunch would be racism and an accompanying hatred of jazz, although whatever I know about that isn’t very specific to late 1930s Minnesota. Certainly, Armstrong’s sudden fame must have made his shows an obvious target for reactionaries along the tour’s route.

Two years earlier, a scene in Artists and Models with Martha Raye had drawn controversy for its hints that Armstrong’s trumpet made the white actress horny.

Closer to home, I’ve found the St. Paul musicians union experiencing friction 16 years earlier over the popularity of jazz. I also stumbled upon a series of 1927 news articles detailing Klu Klux Klan meetings about a mile east of the Coliseum. These sightings are underscored — literally — by a note immediately below the Spokesman‘s article about the cancellation rumor. It reports that the front page of the major local paper The Minneapolis Star had used the word “pickaninny” a few days before.

Given all this, it’s interesting that the Coliseum’s owner, John J. Lane, had a strong ethic of inclusivity. According to his daughter, “there was no color line in our house, we had Fats [Waller] over for dinner.” Lane often loaned the Coliseum free of charge to organizations needing a place to hold fundraisers — the musicians union, the Knights of Columbus, the B’nai B’rith, the Urban League. Probably, he called in such favors during his successful bid for County Commissioner in 1926 and his abandoned campaign in 1938.

All this being said, in my experience, a reasonable hunch about history is usually wrong. I simply don’t know why the rumor started. Maybe the Tri or Trio Club had enemies we don’t know about. Certainly, John J. Lane had both friends and enemies in many walks of life, accumulated during his decades-long, high-profile life in the politics and economics of the Twin Cities. Indeed, one of Lane’s other nightclubs was bombed by mobsters a decade earlier.

Armstrong on the Coliseum Stage

There are no detailed accounts of Armstrong’s show that night, so far as I know, but I’ve pieced together a few clues.

Identical ads in two of St. Paul’s mainstream papers on July 28 claimed that the “Trumpet King of Swing” would be backed by “17 Swing Artists.”

The Spokesman-Recorder repeatedly reported that the band would be led by Luis Russell — an arranger, pianist, and pioneer of Swing who was indeed leading Armstrong’s outfit at the time. Also mentioned is the innovative trumpet player Henry “Red” Allen. This squares with the personnel for Armstrong’s 1939 recording sessions for Decca, including those in New York on June 15 and December 18:

piano and arrangements: Luis Russell
trumpet: Shelton Hemphill, Otis Johnson, Henry Allen
trombone: Wilbur de Paris, Geo. Washington, J.C. Higginbotham
clarinet and alto sax: Rupert Cole, Charlie Holmes
tenor sax: Joe Garland, Bingie Madison
guitar: Lee Blair
string bass: Pops Foster
drums: Sidney Catlett

But the Spokesman-Recorder also names three other veterans of Luis Russell’s band. One of the great jazz drummers, Paul Barbarin, was presumably touring in place of Sidney Catlett. There was also the “romantic tenor” vocalist Sonny Woods and two articles mention the “petite song stylist” and “torch singer” Midge Williams — little remembered today, but a much-admired rising radio star at the time.

The number of backing musicians listed for the Decca recordings + Woods + Williams + Armstrong himself = 17, the number of swing artists given in the July 28 ad in the major Twin Cities newspapers.

The following week, a columnist for the Spokesman-Recorder wished “a million scallions” to the rumor monger who cut attendance but wished “orchids” for the audience that did attend, which he found refreshingly peaceable. “Maybe the presence of one of Chief Hackert’s skull-busters had something to do with it, but we think not.” Brawls and other unseemly behavior appeared to be going out of style, the columnist said. Another follow-up article in the Spokesman-Recorder comes to a trustworthy conclusion:

Armstrong Great Showman

Armstrong gave the crowd its money’s worth and the people left the Lexington Avenue dance palace in good humor feeling that they had enjoyed a treat.

— — —

Thanks

Thanks to the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder — this year celebrating its 75th anniversary — for kind permission to reprint the article up top.

The excellent staff of the library at the Minnesota History Center is forever essential to my work. Thanks also to the Minneapolis Public Library, and the University of Minnesota’s Wilson and Music Libraries.

My wife Jenny is unbelievably kind and patient, as you might imagine.

Selected References — More Than Any Other Blog!

St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 28, 1939 ad “Tri Club Presents Louis Armstrong” and “Moonlight Dance Trips” p. 9

St. Paul Dispatch, July 28, 1939 ad “Tri Club Presents Louis Armstrong” p. 8

“Moonlight Dance Trips” and other ads for rides on the Capitol were ubiquitous in the warm seasons of 1939 in the Twin Cities. The one above happens to be from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 28, 1939, from the University of Minnesota newspaper collections.

Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, 1939:

— July 21 “Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong Coming to Coliseum Ballroom, Friday, July 28” p 1
— July 21 ad with Crosby/Armstrong photo, p 3
— July 28 “Louis Armstrong and Band Play at the Coliseum Ballroom Tonight for Swing Fans” p 1
— July 28 “Hear a Noted Artist Tonight” p 2
— Aug 4 “Crowd Applauds Louis Armstrong Band; Rumor Cuts Attendance” p 1
— Aug 4 “Twin Town Talk” p 4

Bergreen, Laurence. 1997. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life. Broadway Books.

Jones, Max, and Chilton, John. 1988. Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, 1900-1971. Da Capo.

Kenney, William Howland. 2005. Jazz on the River. U of Chicago.

Maccabee, Paul. 1981-1995. Research collection for John Dillinger Slept Here. MN Historical Soc. library.

Rust, Brian A. L. 1978. Jazz Records, 1897-1942. Arlington House Publishers.

What’s In A Name?

Moe Thompson founded The Victoria Cafe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Celestial Monochord now an “author blog”

Pidgeon
A pidgeon contemplates St. Paul history atop the Victoria Cafe

I’ve always puzzled over how — and whether — to present my research into Frank Cloutier and Victoria Cafe here at the The Celestial Monochord.

My goal has always been to understand “the complete circumstances” surrounding the recording of the “Moonshiner’s Dance” in 1927, knowing that “the complete circumstances” surrounding anything are ultimately unknowable. They’re sure-as-hell too complicated to fit within the here’s-what-I’m-thinking-today format of the blogosphere.

Well, after thousands of long hours of research, the picture I’ve uncovered is so sprawling, complex, and transformative that it’s outgrown my ability to post it sensibly at The Monochord.

So here’s my plan: I’m working toward a book to be published by somebody like the Minnesota Historical Society, Indiana University, or even myself. There may also have to be an article, or series of articles, for Minnesota History, or Minnesota Monthly, or Ramsey County History, or The Old Time Herald, or Sing Out, or your publication (contact me!).

I understand, by the way, that there is probably zero money to be made as the author of a book about an 80-year-old polka record.

Nonetheless, The Celestial Monochord is now officially an “author blog” — at least with respect to my history research. This might resolve some of my uncertainty about what to post here, what not to, and how often. And it gives me a genre of bloggery to work in, providing some models for how to proceed.

This could result in MORE of my research being posted, not less. I’ll feel less of a need to be “complete” and “authoritative” when, in fact, that is a long quest I’m working on elsewhere.

And needless to say, I’ll also continue posting other stuff too, about Dylan, Waits, Prine, banjos, symposiums, fulgurite, kittens, nickles, etc., etc., etc.

My Dodo

Dodo
(photo from Wikipedia)

The January 22 issue of The New Yorker featured an article on the dodo, the large bird that became extinct around 1690. Its only habitat was the island of Mauritius, on which no human beings ever lived until the Dutch landed in 1590. It therefore took just one century of carelessness, and wee bit of malice, to wipe the species out. “Nor were they afraid of us,” a contemporary wrote, “but just remained sitting, allowing us to beat them to death.”

The New Yorker article mostly concerns the history of dodo skeletons and the men who love them. But just as with most pieces in that magazine, other stories come rushing in once the door is left open. Well-meaning scientists are caught up in post-colonial cultural politics. Local politicians argue that the dodo’s extinction was the best thing to ever happen to the Mauritius tourist trade. A lone, obsessive amateur tries to redirect the wide world’s attention toward his curious little plot of ground.

Naturally, it was this last story with which I identified most:

Alan Grihault, a retired teacher … was surprised to learn that there was no standard glossy dodo book … He began to gather material for one. He, too, found his way to the Mare aux Songes [a site with many underground dodo skeletons] and, in his mind, became the site’s unofficial caretaker. “It was my place, a tranquil place,” Grihault said … [His wife] told me that her husband’s dodo interest “sometimes gets to be a bit too much. Only two of us at home, so I hear everything, and sometimes twice, when he explains it to friends. Luckily I have the ability to switch off.”

And believe me, my wife identifies with this story, too. She and I both immediately recognized that Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra are like this for me — they are my dodo.

After my hundreds of research hours and all the conclusions I’ve drawn, my most pressing conclusion that almost nothing is known about virtually everything — certainly these old musicians remain almost wholly ignored. I would have guessed, for example, that there would be several people in the United States working on each and every performer on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. There isn’t.

When I bought the Anthology in 1997, the authoritative heft of the thing left me with the sense that there was little more to say. Surely, the Smithsonian must be delivering to us the limits of what is knowable, particularly given all those citations to scholarly journals. That’s really why it took me nine years to finally try a little research on my own. But when I did, I was stunned to realize that nobody had bothered to do even the laziest, most casual investigation. Even after discovering a second researcher interested in Cloutier and the Victoria, I still find that … well, I’m it. I’m the world’s leading expert.

Mountains of undiscovered material are waiting to be unearthed about an infinite variety of the past’s important people and events. One reason for all this ignorance may be we’ve been tricked into thinking it’s been researched. We picture Sherlock Holmes, with the hat and the pipe, or we Google up all sorts of interesing sites, and we think everything’s been sorted out already. Well, it hasn’t.

Maybe this sad, universal forgetfulness is due to everybody trying to make a living and reproduce themselves. Who’s got the time? More likely, I think it’s just a rare personality trait, to want to know everything that is knowable about one thing.

Minnesota Public Radio recently broadcast an interview with the author of an illustrated biography of Django Reinhardt. You can almost hear MPR reporter Tom Crann struggling to understand how someone can focus on one idea — one story — for most of his life. He seems to ask Michael Dregni the same sort of question, over and over, again and again, finding new ways to ask it until he finally blurts out, “Why do you care about him so much?”

It could easily be my imagination, but what I hear is a reporter — someone who tells at least one new story every day — struggling to come to terms with why someone would choose to know everything about one subject. Dregni is very gracious in his response, but I want him to just say, “Look, Crann. Django’s my dodo, OK?”

Editor’s Note: Today was the coldest day in three years here in Minnesota. And you wonder why I chose February to sit behind my computer and try to write one post every stinking day all month long. This is the sixth installment. Do you hear those helicopters?

KFAI covers Frank Cloutier

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

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

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