Tag: Minnesota

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.

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Talkin’ Michael Gray

The Monochord rides a tour bus to Hibbing with one of the world’s top Dylan scholars


Gray contemplates Hibbing’s open-pit iron-ore mine

A noted Dylan expert and critic offers his home in France (and himself) for conversation.

Early one morning in March 2007, I was riding in one of those tourist buses that deliver senior citizens to casinos — tinted windows, plush seats, TV screens in the ceiling.  That foggy Minnestoa morning, this bus was filled to capacity with about sixty Bob Dylan scholars.

The trip, from Minneapolis to Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, was the opening event of the largest scholarly Dylan conference ever held.

In my aisle seat, I talked to the stranger in the window seat next to me.  He turned out to be an evangelical Christian Tennessean researching Dylan’s spirituality.  A smart guy — curious, thoughtful, and original.

Still, it was hard to concentrate on the conversation.  If the first guy I met was THIS guy, who else might be slouching toward Hibbing on this infernal bus?

Immediately across the aisle, an Englishman and an American were engaged in a lively discussion (about Bob you-know-who).  Eavesdropping, I gathered that the Englishman — proper accent, eccentric dress, soul patch — was Michael Gray himself.

In 1972, Michael Gray authored the world’s first critical study of Dylan’s work and, in 2007, had recently completed The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, offering as much obsessive Dylan knowledge as any book ever published.  A kind of paper cinder block, The BD Encyclopedia comes at you like an authoritative reference but winds up snaring you in an idiosyncratic maze — the strategy reminds me of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

Recognizing a once-in-lifetime opportunity, I turned to Michael Gray and asked the obvious question:  Who threw the glass in the street?

It was a rhetorical question and a bit of a joke — after all, the answer represents the quintessentially unknowable cipher that is the object of all Dylanology — so I was gobsmacked when Gray actually knew the answer, and offered a couple minutes of historiography contextualizing both the answer and the question itself.

We talked, excitedly and with a lot of laughter, most of the way to Hibbing. During the long days of the Dylan conference, I’m not sure what I would’ve done without Michael Gray — I kept seeking him out whenever I felt like a wallflower and needed a friendly conversation.

Not the kind of Dylan author who doesn’t suffer fools (I should know), he was generous with his time and knowledge, listened closely, laughed easily, gave useful advice when I asked for it, remembered my name.  I find myself repeating his anecdotes in my own conversations even today.

Days later, at the end of the conference, Gray gave the closing keynote address.

Built around a series of film clips of Dylan throughout his career, Gray described the “moment” that surrounded them — the atmosphere, the shocks and conflicts, the relationships and revelations going on in Dylan’s life and work, and in the life of the United States and the globe.  He was contextualizing the clips, breathing new life into them, and the effect was moving and revealing.

That reconstruction of gone significance is at the heart of my own efforts at cultural history. The question for me is no longer “what does it mean?” but rather “what DID it mean?”  The change in tense seems to transform the entire landscape of possibility and impossibility.

I haven’t had the opportunity to see him speak since, but Gray does speaking engagements — it would be interesting to see what he’s doing now.

Given all of this, I’ve been very amused to see that Gray has been offering himself up as a conversationalist to paying Dylan fans. You get to talk (and talk) about Bob Dylan with one of the world’s leading Dylanologists, and enjoy his wife’s gourmet cooking, in his lovely home in southwest France.

It’s one of those vacation ideas you read about occasionally in the “news of the weird” — it’s utterly cracked, but you would surely do it if you had the chance.

Mostly, I keep chuckling about the mindset that makes it possible. Are authors who aren’t assholes so rare that you can charge admission to talk to them?

During the conference, I sought out Michael Gray because his very presence relaxed me, amused me, made me feel smart and attractive, and — most of all — because he had very interesting things to say. Who recognizes having this effect on people and thinks, “Hey, I can charge for this”?

I mean, I’ve been thinking about charging people to NOT talk to me!

For more information:

bobdylanwinterlude.blogspot.com