Folkstuff

Summerfest 2011

2011-07-02T17:50:00.000-07:00

We went to saturday's program for a while: I'm in my 80's now and Sally in her 70's and we don't have the endurance we used to have back when the Eisteddfod was at SMU. However, we enjoyed the sets by David Jones and Martha Burns. I took some pictures that I'll put on Flickr, and probably put the better ones here as well. But not tonight.

Last Set

2010-09-10T05:38:00.000-07:00

The last performance of the last set of Summerfest 2010

New Bedford Summerfest

2010-07-12T04:04:00.000-07:00

The Summerfest has a facebook page with a good video provided by the Quincy Patriot Ledger. The Karlek page in Flickr (mine) has some Summerfest stills and some stills (by me) of the Whalers. My SVG blog at http://svgblog.blogspot.com has photos (by others) at various venues.

I may well be working on a book about the Whalers when we get back to SVG in the fall.

Barrouallie Whalers in New England

2010-05-30T21:13:00.001-07:00

The Barrouallie Whalers
Authentic Whalers and Shantymen from St. Vincent & the Grenadines June 2010 Appearances in New England

• June 10 Whaling National Historical Park – New Bedford, MA
Visitor Center on Williams St. 7:00 PM www.ahanewbedford.org

• June 11-13 • Mystic Seaport Museum, CT www.mysticseaport.org

• June 15 •Sylvester Manor Farm (unconfirmed) Long Island, NY

• June 16 Schooner Quinnipiack - New Haven, CT 7:00 pm www.schoonerinc.org

• June 17 Hibernian Hall, Roxbury, MA 8:00 pm www.madison-park.org

Dan Lanier The Barrouallie Whalers Project, Inc. dan@barrwhalers.org

Sorry, But I'm Still Alive

2009-12-04T07:20:00.000-08:00

I haven been posting anything here lately, but I have been posting in nthe SVG Blog and doing some non-musical writing. Right now I have a bunch of mp3s in various traditions that are all on HDs that I have here in St Vincent. I'm spending my music time trying to make sense of them. Power Tunes lets one control multiple music libraries and I'm learning how to use that. But I've got so many mp3s, some with the same tune under different titles, that it is taking time.

But I'll get back to this blog eventually. In the meantime there are some things reprinted from Ceildh Columns, the publication of the SMU (U Mass Dartmouth) Eisteddfod that I edited for Howard Glasser. That may still be of some interest.

"Doctors" In Calypso

2009-10-11T12:27:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of event that should be record live and streamed on the Internet!
Wilma

--- On Fri, 10/9/09, Clevil James wrote:

From: Clevil James
Subject: [Limers] TUCO to honour Calypso's Doctors
To: limers@yahoogroups.com
Received: Friday, October 9, 2009, 5:17 PM

http://news. bn.gs/article. php?story= 2009100915584937 0

Friday, October 09 2009 @ 06:00 PM AST Contributed by: LieslThomas More: 52

“Celebrating the Doctors in Calypso” is set to take place at Queen’s Hall, St Ann ’s from 6:30 pm on Monday, October 19, 2009. The event is being produced by TUCO to honour the Doctors of the Calypso fraternity:  - Dr. Slinger Francisco ‘Sparrow’  - Dr. Hollis Liverpool ‘Chalkdust’; and   - Dr. Leroy Calliste ‘Black Stalin.’

  Dr. Slinger Francisco, ‘The Mighty Sparrow’ or ‘Sparrow’ as he is affectionately called, was born in Grenada on July 9, 1935 and moved to Trinidad as a toddler where he launched and sustained a lengthy and successful career as a calypsonian. Sparrow began performing on major competitive circuits from the 1950s and continued into the 1990s. During this time he won several Calypso Monarch and Carnival Road March titles.   Probably his most notable win occurred in 1956 for the song ‘Jean and Dinah’; claiming both the Calypso Monarch and Road March titles that year. Sparrow’s lyrics are known for being witty. His songs have touched on several subject areas to give him the term social commentator, his music has made the masses dance and sing in unison so that he can be called a renowned entertainer, and his contributions to calypso and culture have touched the shores of so many nations, making him an ambassador extraordinaire. Dr. Slinger Francisco is truly a calypso icon.

  Dr. Hollis Liverpool, ‘Chalkdust’ was born in Trinidad in 1941. His music generally addresses the social and political issues of society and the lyrical content of his songs is hailed for having a high quality literary content. He was once a principal at Trinity College and is currently an Assistant Professor of History in the University of the Virgin Islands . He holds a PhD in History and Ethnomusicology from the University of Michigan . Chalkdust regularly conducts lectures and workshops on the history and culture of calypso music. He is even going to be lecturing on “Smut in Calypso” on October 20, 2009 at the Nalis Audiovisual Room from 7:00 pm.   Chalkdust has been singing calypso since 1967 and has captured eight Calypso Monarch Crowns beginning from 1976 with the songs ‘Three Blind Mice’ and ‘Ah Put on Meh Guns Again’ to his most recent win in 2009 with the song ‘Doh Touch My Heart.’ He has won numerous titles in countries outside of Trinidad and Tobago as well. For his exceptional contributions to calypso music on both academic and entertainment levels, Dr. Hollis Liverpool is a calypso icon.  

Dr. Leroy Calliste, the “Black Stalin” was born in San Fernando , Trinidad and Tobago on September 4, 1941. He is the most recent inductee, having received his honorary doctorate on October 31, 2008. He was also awarded the Hummingbird Medal Silver for his outstanding contributions to culture. Black Stalin is a five time Calypso Monarch title holder, wining with notable hits like ‘Caribbean Unity,’ ‘Wait Dorothy,’ 'Look on the Bright Side’ and 'Black man feeling to party.' Black Stalin’s music and entertainment persona generally exudes a feeling of optimism, fun and happiness. Dr. Leroy Calliste will forever be a calypso icon.  

The event “Celebrating the Doctors in Calypso” will feature performances by younger calypsonians, such as Heather Mackintosh, Karen Asche, Jervae Caesar, Erphann Alves and Kizzie Ruiz, who will be singing the songs of these calypso icons. At least three selections from each of the icons will be sung by a younger member of the calypso fraternity in their honour.     ------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- - CREDITS:  - Story by Liesl Thomas  - Photo of TUCO President Eric Taylor by GISL

Pint & Dale Concert at Woods Hole

2009-09-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

Since July, we've been singing and playing our way across the continent, venturing up as far as Canada's Maritime Provinces, traveling down the coast, and exploring the beautiful Chesapeake Bay area. It's been a tremendously fun trip.

Our east coast tour continues with a trip back up to Massachusetts for a concert at one of our favorite places to play. It's hard to imagine a setting more perfect for songs of the sea.

Woods Hole is a beautiful spot steeped in the history of whaling, fishing and shipping -- all stuff we love to sing about!

We'd love to see you at this one. We'd also love for you to pass the word along to any friends or family who might be in the area.

Sunday, October 4th

The Woods Hole Folk Music Society
Concert at the Community Hall

68 Water Street
Woods Hole, MA 02543
508-540-0320
Map

7:30PM
Tickets $15.00

Tucott Website

2009-09-21T04:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.tucott.com/news.html

Is the website of Trinidadian calypsonians and has a lot of interesting information

Howard Glasser Archive

2009-09-15T08:24:00.000-07:00

Howard Glasser

Posted in Howard T. Glasser Archives of Folk Music and Letter Arts by jfarrar1895 on June 18, 2009

On June 17, Howard Glasser toured the new Archives and Special Collections facility and met with archivist Judy Farrar regarding next steps in planning for the future growth of the Howard T. Glasser Archives of Folk Music and Letter Arts. Established in 2003, the mission of the Howard T. Glasser Archives of Folk Music and Letter Arts is to preserve the artistic and musical collecting legacy of retired design professor Howard T. Glasser. The initial donation, digital copies of his Scottish recordings, many original Eisteddfod recordings, and programs and flyers from the Carnegie and URI ceildhs, forms the core of the collection. The Howard T. Glasser Archives Fund was established the following year to help maintain these fragile materials, many of which reside on ageing magnetic reel to reel recording tapes. To date, the fund has enabled staff to pay for digital conversion of a related collection, the recordings of Paul Clayton, and a selection of the Eisteddfod recordings. The fund will also be used to begin conversion of the Tryworks concert recordings.

The archivist welcomes suggestions for donations of potentially important historic material to the collection from folk song groups, coffeehouses and other folk music venues, collectors, artists and musicians to document the folk music “scene” in New England. Contact Judy Farrar via email at jfarrar@umassd.edu.

Tryworks Archive

2009-09-15T08:22:00.000-07:00

Tryworks Coffeehouse Memorabilia Donated to Howard T. Glasser Archives of Folk Music and Letter Arts

Posted in Howard T. Glasser Archives of Folk Music and Letter Arts, Uncategorized by jfarrar1895 on June 12, 2009
On June 5th the Archives and Special Collections received the records of Tryworks Coffeehouse through former managers Maggi Peirce and Jody Heck. Many boxes were neatly packed and ready to go at the First Unitarian Church in New Bedford, the home of Tryworks since it moved from the Pilgrim United Church. Tryworks was in operation from 1967 to 2002 and was a popular venue for young people and budding musicians and poets. Coffeehouses were popular during the 1960s revival of folk music and remained relevant for many years. Tryworks was the second-oldest continuously-running coffeehouse in the country before it closed in 2002. The collection includes recordings, photographs, scrapbooks, programs, and flyers. The Tryworks archives will be part of the Howard T. Glasser Archives of Folk Music and Letter Arts. Read the article in the Standard Times at http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090606/NEWS/906060329

Sandy Paton RIP

2009-08-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

From The Folk-Legacy Site

In memory of Charles Alexander (Sandy) Paton, who passed from this life,
July 26, 2009 at 6:32 pm, at the age of 80

Folk-Legacy Records founder Sandy Paton passed away on Sunday July 26 around 6:30pm. He had been hospitalized the last few days after becoming extremely fatigued. Sandy had been in poor health in recent years, suffering from emphysema which required that he was constantly connected to oxygen. About a month ago, Sandy & Caroline’s grandson died tragically – drowning in a river in Connecticut. Friends have said that Sandy took the loss extremely hard.

Sandy, with his wife Caroline and the late Lee Haggerty, founded Folk-Legacy Records as an independent recording company specializing in traditional and contemporary folk music of the English-speaking world in 1961. Over the 48 years Folk-Legacy has existed, they have produced over 120 recordings with Sandy doing the actual recording and taking cover photographs.

Sandy was a terrific singer in his own right, as well. He and Caroline were designated as the Official Connecticut State Troubadours for 1993-1994.

Sing Out! editor Mark Moss adds: “In a world where meeting your “idols” rarely works out very well, Sandy Paton was an inspiration. His love, dedication and vision for traditional music was unwavering … but he was never strident, pushy or rude about his impressive knowledge. This was a guy who was all about loving the music and wanting to share his love for the songs and singers. And each Folk-Legacy release exuded that passion. Once I “met” my first Folk-Legacy release (the original Golden Ring recording), I was hooked … and am proud to own almost every release from the label. Hardly “hi tech,” but the music Sandy captured, made and shared was the real thing in the truest sense of the words. It was an honor to have known him. My heart was already breaking for the family (after the loss of his grandson Kaelan in June) … I can’t imagine the pain the family is feeling now. A sad, sad day.”

Memorial service Oct 10. Check the Folk-Legacy site for details

Mike Seeger= NYTimes Obit

2009-08-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

Mike Seeger, Singer and Music Historian, Dies at 75
By BEN SISARIO

Mike Seeger, a singer and multi-instrumentalist who played an important role in the folk revival of the 1950s and ’60s, died on Friday at his home in Lexington, Va. He was 75.

The cause was multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, said his wife, Alexia Smith.

Although a quieter voice on the national stage than his politically outspoken, older half-brother, Pete, Mike Seeger was a significant force in spreading the music of preindustrial America during an increasingly consumerist era. In 1958 he helped found the New Lost City Ramblers, whose repertory came from the 1920s and ’30s, and in his career he recorded or produced dozens of albums of what he called the “true vine” of American music, the mix of British and African traditions and topical storytelling that took root in the South.

Mr. Seeger’s dedication had a strong effect on the young Bob Dylan, who wrote fondly of him in his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One.” Although only eight years his junior, Mr. Dylan called Mr. Seeger a father figure — for helping the under-age Mr. Dylan with his paperwork — and rhapsodized about him as the embodiment of a folk-star persona.

“Mike was unprecedented,” Mr. Dylan wrote, adding: “As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart. He was the romantic, egalitarian and revolutionary type all at once.”

But Mr. Seeger made his mark less as a star than as a careful, steady student of his beloved Southern music. He was born in New York to a prominent musical family. His father, Charles Seeger, was a well-known ethnomusicologist, and his mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, a composer and folk-song collector. Besides Pete, Mr. Seeger’s sister Peggy also became a noted singer.

The intellectual pursuit of folk music was part of Mike Seeger’s life from an early age. At 5 he made a recording of the old British folk ballad “Barbara Allen,” his wife said in an interview on Sunday.

Mr. Seeger played banjo, guitar, autoharp and other instruments, which he learned from old records and in some cases from the musicians who played on them. A dogged researcher, he sought out musicians who had been lost for decades and introduced them to an eager (and young) new audience. One was Dock Boggs, a banjo player from western Virginia whose records were prized by folklorists. Mr. Seeger brought him to the American Folk Festival in Asheville, N.C., in 1963.

Mr. Seeger’s most recent album was “Early Southern Guitar Sounds” (Smithsonian Folkways), in 2007, and he played autoharp on Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s Grammy Award-winning album “Raising Sand” (Rounder), also released in 2007. In his career Mr. Seeger was nominated for six Grammys.

In addition to his wife, his half-brother Pete, of Beacon, N.Y., and his sister Peggy, of Boston, Mr. Seeger is survived by three sons, Kim, of Tivoli, N.Y., Chris, of Rockville Centre, N.Y., and Jeremy, of Belmont, Mass.; four stepchildren, Cory Foster of Ithaca, N.Y., Jenny Foster of Rockville, Md., Joel Foster of Silver Spring, Md., and Jesse Foster of Washington; another sister, Barbara Perfect of Henderson, Nev.; another half-brother, John Seeger of Bridgewater, Conn.; and 13 grandchildren and step-grandchildren.

Home

Mike Seeger R.I.P.

2009-08-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

Mike Seeger and Alexia Smith

Folk Musician And Traditional Roots Music Preservationist Mike Seeger Dies
Battle With Cancer Ended Friday Evening, August 7th
By Patte Wood
Staff Reporter

Lexington, VA (August 8, 2009) - Alexia Smith, wife of folklorist and roots music preservationist Mike Seeger, has informed the Rockbridge Community that Mike died peacefully at his home on Enfield Road the evening of August 7th about 9 p.m. Seeger was recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and decided to forego further treatment and entered hospice care. He was surrounded by family and friends during his last days as he wished. Seeger was 75 years old. According to the family, further information about arrangements will be forthcoming on Monday, August 10th.

Seeger contributed his musical talent and knowledge of Southern traditional roots music to the community in Rockbridge since moving here about 20 years ago. Throughout his career and while living in Rockbridge he pursued many projects to preserve traditional southern roots music and dance. Most notable are his recordings of roots music for the Smithsonian with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Locally, he was the main impetus in the creation The Rockbridge Mountain Music and Dance Festival, a music festival by and for musicians in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, in Rockbridge Countyin 1986 and encouraged Bruce Clark to found Clark's Ole Time Music Center, also in Rockbridge County. Seeger also performed locally at festivals and events, sharing his talent and knowledge of Southern roots music with the community.

Word about his death has quickly spread throughout the bluegrass and roots music community and been posted on various roots and bluegrass music websites. A compilation of his recordings and achievements can be found on the NPR website at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111693752.

The following obituary, written by Bob Cherry on August 8, 2009, is from CYBERGRASS The Internet Bluegrass Music News Magazine ww.cybergrass.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=6622:

"Mike Seeger lost his battle with cancer last night, August 7, 2009. Back on Thursday, July 30, Mary Katherine Adlin at Folklore Productions informed us that Mike Seeger, one of the founding members of the New Lost City Ramblers, and the half-brother of folk singer Pete Seeger, had been battling leukemia for several years; just recently he was diagnosed with a new and very aggressive form of cancer, called multiple myeloma. In the same forthright way that he has lived his life, he made the decision to discontinue treatment and enter hospice care. Last night, August 7, his battle ended. Mike died in hospice care at his home in Virginia, surrounded by the loving care of his wife, his sons and his sister. He was at peace and not in pain.

"Just a few days ago, we wrote about The New Lost City Ramblers DVD video. This is sad news to follow that happy release announcement. Mike Seeger and The New Lost City Ramblers captured the essence of old music from early 78 records and spend decades performing the traditional music in the traditional way thus preserving it for many generations.

"During the '60s folk movement, Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers were one of the most influential bands going. Scores of new bands picked up on what they were doing and pushed the music into the public's eye. Seeger was both a musician and a historian devoted to preserving the music he loved.

"Seeger was a folk musician who was also accomplished on multiple instruments. He performed playing the fiddle, banjo, mandolin, dobro, and other instruments. Seeger's love for the old time music resulted in a half dozen Grammy¬Æ nominations, four NEA grants and numerous other awards.

"Just as he set his own path musically, he chose his own path for his final journey as well. May God be with him.

"Mike is survived by his wife Alexia. Condolences may be sent to:

Folklore Productions

1671 Appian Way

Santa Monica, CA 90401

mkaldin@foldoreproductions.com"

A performance by Mike Seeger at The Kennedy Center can be seen at www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/artist_detail.cfm?artist_id=SEEGERMIKE

Further information will be forthcoming in The Rockbridge Weekly as it becomes available.

Rockbridge Weekly & Alleghany Journal Newsline (9 August 2009)
http://www.rockbridgeweekly.com/rw_article.php?ndx=14875
http://snipurl.com/pir6f

Sandy Paton=RIP

2009-07-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

Email from Howard Glasser

HTG Archive -- Judy --

Sandy and Carolyn Paton -- (FOLK Legacy Records)
Were - for many years - invited by me to be advisors as well as performers
to the SMU/UMASS Dartmouth Traditional Arts Festival --
Their contribution to our project was huge --
Our Archive should note this loss -- Sandy was a folklorist --
Collector of the finest of the old traditions --
Producer of commercial recordings of these surviving artists --
As well as, producer of recordings of the new generations of, like thinking, artists --
Sandy and Caroline Paton received the Annual Eisteddfod Award
for their encouragement and support of artists continuing aspects of our heritage --
and for their preservation achievements.
Howard Glasser

Subject: RE: Obit: Sandy Paton
From: bbc - PM
Date: 27 Jul 09 - 09:05 AM

Good morning, folks,

We suspected that the news would filter out from Pinewoods first, since
Sandy's granddaughter, Linnea, is working there this summer. Yesterday
marked 40 days since Sandy & Caroline's grandson, Kaelan, drowned. Sandy had
been deeply grieving, since that time. We had all been concerned about him,
but it was unclear how much of his condition was emotional & how much was
physical. Last week, with Kaelan's memorial & the burial of his remains
past, Caroline felt that Sandy needed to see his doctor. I drove the two of
them to the office on Thursday afternoon, July 23rd. Sandy was unusually
fatigued & was having wide variations in his blood oxygen with any activity.
As soon as he saw him, Sandy's doctor called for an ambulance to take his to
nearby Sharon Hospital (Sharon, CT) for observation. Sandy was checked into
a room, after being observed in Emergency, & Caroline was told they'd like
to keep Sandy for a few days. If I am remembering correctly what Caroline
told me, the hospital called Saturday evening & said that Sandy wasn't doing
well & they didn't know if he'd make it through the night. The family was
able to go to the hospital that evening & spend time with Sandy. During the
night, Saturday, he lost consciousness. During the day, on Sunday, family
was in & out. Duane & I visited for a couple of hours in the early afternoon
& said our goodbyes. When we returned for a second visit at about 7 pm, not
wanting Sandy to be alone, his sister-in-law, Linda, gave us the news that
he had passed from this life about a half hour earlier, at 6:32 pm on
Sunday, July 26, 2009. We waited for Caroline to come & stayed with the
family until they left. Sandy died peacefully, with no heroics, just lightly
breathing until he drew his last breath. The cause will probably be listed
as congestive heart failure. My first thought, when I heard that he was
gone, was happiness for him. In recent times, his life had become more &
more of a burden to him. Because of his emphysema, he had to be connected to
oxygen all the time. His movements & activities were limited. Changes in his
voice meant that he was no longer able to sing &, sometimes, even to make
himself easily heard. He was broken-hearted over Kaelan's death. I feel sure
that Sandy was content to leave.

Now, we pick up the pieces of life without him. Caroline has her two sons &
her sister, all of whom live locally. She, also, has Duane & me. Together,
we will be giving personal support & helping to get Folk Legacy onto a new
chapter. Your support is needed. Although I have more that I'd like to say,
I'll end this, for now, to give you the basic information. Since phone is
the only way Caroline can conduct business, I might suggest that you send
condolences by mail, for now, to give us time to get up-to-date on the
backlog of orders, due to Kaelan's death & Sandy's health. As is the family
custom, Sandy's passing will be marked by a memorial gathering at some time
in the future. Sing your songs for him, folks! A great man has passed.

http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=122507&messages=44

Launcelot "Da Vincy" Chapman

2008-12-13T13:31:00.000-08:00

I ran across this while surfing.

Lancelot "Da Vincy" Chapman has been making music in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines for quite a while and has to his credit two stints on record at the Mustique Blues Festival.

He has his own recording label and a 45rpm solo effort.

He has never been fortunate in the Island's Calypso Competition, still he has been part of that scene for a number of years and has been the Calypsonians Association Public Relations Officer and also the Associations Sectetary.? He plays Guitar, Mandolin, Piano, and at present he is engaged in pursuit of proficiency with the Saxaphone.

Flying Fish & Coo Coo

Mommie Out The Light

2008-12-12T19:35:00.000-08:00

.
Per a request, listen to Marie Bryant singing "Mommie Out The Light"

Mommie Out The Light

Lord Kitchener [Aldwyn Roberts]

2008-11-16T20:15:00.000-08:00

Born April 18, 1922 in Arima, Trinidad. He was the son of a blacksmith, Stephen, and homemaker, Albertha. He attended the Arima Boys' Government School. Lord Kitchener began singing professionally in 1938 and won the Arima Calypso King contest from 1938 to 1941. His first job as a singer was in 1936, when he was hired to serenade the employees of the Water Works. He got his first break in 1937 while he was performing in an old time bamboo calypso tent in Arima.

He left for Port-of-Spain in 1942 and joined the Roving Brigade which operated from the various cinemas in Trinidad. He moved over to the Victory Tent in 1944. He joined the House of Lords Tent in 1945 but returned to the Victory Tent in 1946. By 1947, he had achieved enough success to open his own calypso tent, The Young Brigade.

He left Trinidad in 1947 and, after short stays in Aruba and Jamaica, moved to England in June 1948. He continued his success as a calypsonian for almost 15 years before he returned to Trinidad for Carnival 1963. After a brief return to England in 1965, he remained in Trinidad for the rest of his years. He won one Calypso Crown in 1975 with "Tribute to Spree Simon" and "Fever."

Kitchener began performing calypsos in the Trinidadian town of Arima in the late 1930s. By the 1940s, he was appearing in Port of Spain. In 1946 he helped to organize the Young Brigade tent, which featured a new generation of calypso singers, and was applauded for his calypso "Tie Tongue Mopsy." After the 1947 Carnival season, Kitchener traveled to Aruba, Curacao and Jamaica. In 1948 he left Jamaica on the Empire Windrush, a ship that marked the beginning of large-scale Caribbean migration to Britain. Kitchener remained in England, where he had an active career that included extensive recording for the Parlophone, Melodisc and Lyragon labels. His records were exported in large quantities to the Caribbean, where he remained popular. Some of his records were also popular in West Africa.

"Kitch" became a very important figure to those first 5000 West Indian migrants to the UK. His music spoke of home and a life that they all longed for but in many cases couldn't or wouldn't return to. On June 29, 1950, he immortalised the defining moment for many of the migrants in writing 'Cricket, Lovely Cricket.' This was one of the first widely-known West Indian songs, and epitomised an event that historian and cricket enthusiast C. L. R. James defined as crucial to West Indian post-colonial societies. The song, later recorded by Lord Beginner, is rarely credited to Lord Kitchener although Tony Cozier and many who attended the Test at The Oval can attest that it was a Kitch composition.

Kitchener, who created highly-popular and sweet melodies, is honoured with a statue in Port of Spain. He is buried in the Santa Rosa Cemetery in Arima. A bust of the beloved entertainer is also on display on Hollis Avenue, Arima, not far from the Arima Stadium.
Kitch has composed calypsoes that cover every imaginable human experience, and social and political events. Kitch is a brilliant expressionist. On stage, his gestures, innuendoes, his control of voice and his capability to paint a picture with his voice clear enough for the very last person in the audience to "see," and understand, what Kitch is talking about, has made him one of the great personalities in the highly competitive business of authentic calypso singing. Dr. Hollis Liverpool, Calypsonian Chalkdust, once observed that "one of Kitchener's many strengths is his ability to present clean smut' in a way that even a priest would want to listen."

The best way, but certainly not the only way, to appreciate Kitchener's talents is to visit the Calypso Revue, also known as Kitchener's Tent and watch Kitch and the other calypsonians perform.The Calypso Revue is no ordinary calypso tent. It was opened in 1964 at the Strand Cinema by Leslie ucky-Samaroo, a movie house proprietor. In its first year, the Calypso Revue had a brilliant cast. It produced four Calypso Monarch finalists - Kitch, Nap Hepburn, Bomber, and Blakie. Kitch won the Road March, and Bomber won the crown. The tent also had a good season in 1965. It produced Sniper, who won the Calypso Monarch title with "Portrait of Trinidad." (The tune earned Sniper the honor of having his photograph on a T&T postage stamp). But following a disagreement with Samaroo, Kitch left the Calypso Revue, and signed on with Sparrow's Original Young Brigade, only to break that contract and return to England.

Over the years, the Calypso Revue has been located in several venues in Port of Spain. In 1966, the cast performed at the Caravan, Brother Superior's tent. In 1967, Calypso Revue was reorganized with Kitch as the lead calypsonian, under Lord Melody's management, and was housed at The Legion Hall, just south of what is now known as Lara Promenade on Independence Square. Melody left the tent after the 1968 season, and the management of the tent was taken over by Jazzy Pantin and his assistant Sonny Woodley. They are still in charge today. Except for a strike by Revue calypsonians in 1970, the year of Black Power revolution in T&T;, the Revue has been described as a tent characterized by a family atmosphere. Other venues used by the Revue over the years are The Princes Building on Upper Frederick Street, the NUGFW building, a union hall on Henry Street located across the street from the Spektakular Forum, another Calypso Tent, and currently at what for many years was the venue for Sparrow's Original Young Brigade, the SWWTU Hall, on Wrightson Road. Kitchener's Tent has to be the longest running Calypso Tent (in the world?).

The tent has been credited with grooming several young calypsonians who have since moved to greater heights, such as Composer, Explainer, Iwer George, Merchant, Organizer, Penguin, Relator, Scrunter, Sniper, Stalin, Valentino. At the Revue, musical tutelage is seen as the duty of Lord Kitchener. He has been known to assist young calypsonians in composing their music, writing their lyrics, giving an opinion here, adding a chorus there, teaching them how to render a song, or, if they couldn't write, compose one for them.

Kitch has many admirers in T&T;. But he also has a few detractors. For example, in 1993, a large number of citizens signed petitions urging the government of T&T; to award Kitch the highest civilian award, The Trinity Cross, in recognition of his accomplishments. For some reason, the Awards Committee denied the petitions for The Trinity Cross, and decided to give Kitch a lesser award. After consultation with his advisors and fans, Kitch decided not to accept the lesser award.

On the other hand, on Saturday September 21, 1996, Trinidad & Tobago took some time out to pay tribute to Kitch. "The Musical Magic of Kitch," was an Honour Performance staged by the Patrons of Queen's Hall, St. Ann's, in recognition of the creativity and excellence of the work of Lord Kitchener, the Grandmaster. The production, directed by Rawle Gibbons and Noble Douglas, was an assembly of orchestras which, through a variety of performing styles, explored the complexities of Kitchener's music.

Gillian Ballantulo and June Nathaniel, the musical directors of the production, used various musical forms of Kitchener's compositions. The programme opened with a young, a-capella trio, Black Mayl, singing "Trouble In Arima" and "Love In The Cemetery." Syl Dopson and his Calypso Band followed with a nostalgic medley of songs which included "Nora, Nora, Nora," "Trinidad Time" and "Miss Tourist."

Calypsonian Relator (Willard Harris), earned the first genuine cheers of the night for his classy interpretations of "Battymamselle," "Mysterious Letter," "Take Your Meat Out Mih Rice" and "My Brother, Your Sister." The Marionettes Chorale, under its musical director, Gretta Taylor, followed with their versions of "Carnival '73," "Pan In Harmony," as well as "Symphony In G," in which Terri Roxborough soloed.
The Samaroo Jets Steel Ensemble, a replacement for Amoco Renegades Steel Orchestra, injected the distinctive style of the musicianship of their leader, Jit Samaroo, concededly the most accomplished interpreter of Kitchener's music on the steeldrum, with scintillating versions of "Mango Tree," "Two To Go" and "Bees Melody."

In the second segment, Arranger-Keyboardist Leston Paul held the audience spellbound with his classical interpretation on the synthesizer of "Pan In A Minor." Mungal Patasar and Pantar, featuring Clive Zanda on piano, added a new dimension to the magic of Kitch with their interpretations of "Old Lady Walk A Mile And A Half," "Margie" and "Iron Man."

Kurt Allen brought back memories of "Bad Impression" and "Mama Have, Papa Have." Juliet Eckel added her particular slant with "The Carnival Is Over," and the Police Band, under the direction of Superintendent Roderick Urquhart, did a Prelude and Fantasia of *A KITCHENER FANTASY IN FOUR MOVEMENTS,* using "Don't Come Back Again," "Sugar Bum Bum," "Best Things In Life Are Free" and "No Wuk For Carnival."

Kitch was unable to satisfy his many fans with a performance that night, because he was not feeling well. Nevertheless, when Lord Relator brought the performance to a rousing climax with his "Tribute To Kitch" and Kitchener's "Drink a Rum," Kitch got on the stage with the other performers. He was accompanied by hundreds of bottles and spoons in the hands of patrons, creating what a T&T Guardian newspaper reporter described as "a cacophony of sound in fitting tribute to a man who has mesmerized the world with an array of beautiful melodies that have left other musicians in awe." As Kitch was presented with a certificate of commendation by T&T President Noor Hassanali and his wife Zalayhar, under whose patronage the Fourth Honour Performance was staged, Kitch received a well deserved lengthy, standing, ovation.

Carnival '97 was another banner season for Kitch. Kitchener's tent was very successful. Several calypsonians from his tent qualified for both the semifinals and the finals of the Calypso Monarch Competition. But the reigning Monarch, Cro Cro from Kitchener's tent, was defeated at the final competition by Gypsy, who was attached to Kitchener's tent several years ago. Kitchener's CD for 1997 contains a couple of tunes which were popular during Carnival '97. "Guitar Pan" was performed by the Amoco Renegades Steel Orchestra, under the leadership of Jit Samaroo, to win the Panorama Championship for 1997. "Ash Wednesday Mas" was the tune of choice at several beach gatherings in T&T on Ash Wednesday, and "They Turn Back The Clock" which deals with Daylight Saving Time in the US, continues the ever present man-woman relationship as seen through the eyes of Kitchener.

One must note that in the year of his death, and for the first time in many years, no steelband group has chosen to play a Kitchener tune during Panorama. The major reason being that Kitchener released his tunes too late to be considered. However, all the Panorama tunes bear shades of Kitchener's fingerprints. In addition the majority of the finalists for the 2000 Calypso Monarch competition are attached to Kitchener Calypso Revue. What a fitting tribute!

Lord Invader [Rupert Westmore Grant]

2008-11-16T14:13:00.000-08:00

Lord Invader (born 1915 as Rupert Westmore Grant in San Fernando, Trinidad; ; † 15. October 1961 in New York) was a prominent calypsonian with a very distinctive, gravelly voice.

Though Lord Invader (1914-1961) is best remembered as the composer of "Rum and Coca Cola," he was a calypsonian with a wide-ranging career. He began singing in the calypso tents of Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1937. That same year the U.S.-based Bluebird Records selected him for a recording session in Trinidad. In 1939 he recorded one of his best-known calypsos, "Don't Stop the Carnival," which was later reinterpreted by Harry Belafonte. Invader was active in the tents in Trinidad through the 1940s and into the 1950s. After the war, however, he spent a substantial amount of time in New York, pursuing a royalties lawsuit as the author of the lyrics of "Rum and Coca Cola," which was a hit record for the Andrews Sisters. He finally received a settlement in 1955.

During the 1940s, Invader sang in nightclubs in New York and, in 1946, appeared in folklorist Alan Lomax's Calypso at Midnight concert at Town Hall. The previous year he sang "Yankee Dollar in Trinidad" in the movie House Rent Party. Meanwhile, he established a relationship with Moe Asch of Disc/Folkways Records and continued to record with him for many years. In 1956 he traveled to England, where he appeared on the BBC and recorded for British labels, before touring Holland, Belgium and Germany. Eventually, he returned to the U.S. and recorded a couple more albums for Folkways. Invader died in New York at age 47.  
Rupert Grant, from San Fernando in Trinidad, was given his nom-de-calypso by his tailor - "I tell you, Rupert, you should call yourself Lord Invader so when you go up to the city you be invadin’ the capital." In February 1937, Invader made his first recordings, having successfully penetrated the highly competitive calypso scene in Port-of-Spain at the age of 22. There was already a lively calypso scene in New York, with musicians like Gerald Clark and Gregory Felix backing the likes of Macbeth the Great and the Duke of Iron Among his other activities during this sojourn in the States, Invader recorded for Moses Asch’s Disc label. Ultimately successful in his lawsuit, although he didn’t see the money for another seven years, Invader returned to Trinidad until 1945, when he went to Britain, in the footsteps of Lord Beginner, Lord Kitchener, and other calypsonians. He made some appearances in Europe (which inspired My Experience on the Reeperbahn and Auf Wiedersehen) before returning to New York late in 1958, and recording again for Asch. He died in Queens in 1961.

Born Rupert Westmore Grant in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, on December 13, 1914, Grant grew up around San Fernando and began improvising calypsos at a young age. Labeled a "country boy" by his fellow Trinidadians, Grant had great aspirations.The many carnivals and parades in Port-of-Spain gave the city its prominent position in the calypso music world. Calypso music was developed in parades as competing bands strived to gain popular acclaim. Bands obtained lead singers, known as chantwells, to invoke call and response songs and increase audience participation.These chantwells eventually broke away from the bands, forming competing groups of calypso singers.

Bands themselves then lost their prominent role in calypso music and only served to accompany the singers. Lyrics in calypso music are often topical in nature, and singers improvise stanzas to denounce their competitors.
It is this calypso scene that Grant encountered when he reached Port-of-Spain. His grating voice, biting lyrics, and carefree melodies helped Grant build his reputation as one of the best calypso artists in Trinidad. He brought his talents to many calypso competitions (including the first Calypso King competition) and recorded for RCA Bluebird. Enticed by Decca Records, Grant traveled to New York City in 1941 with other calypsonians to make records and promote calypso music. This invasion contributed to the growing popularity of calypso in the United States.
Upon returning to Trinidad the next year, Grant was met with a new scene. Several US military bases had been built as part of the Lend-Lease agreement with Britain. The influx of Americans provided calypsonians with a broader market for their music. On October 15, 1961, Grant died at Brooklyn hospital following a short illness and after undergoing two operations. His lifelong devotion to his craft made him one of the greatest calypso artists of all time.

Calypso:From The Internet

2008-11-16T14:12:00.000-08:00

A Brief History of Calypso  Calypso is one of the many musical forms that resulted from the collision of African and European cultures in the New World. It evolved from a concatenation of Kalinda, a Yoruba call-and-response type chant, with French ballad and Spanish string band music. Due to the banning of drums during the era of slavery, Trinidadian music did not maintain the vigorous drumming traditions that survived elsewhere - notably in Brazil and Cuba. Instead, the emphasis was more on the melodic and lyrical side although, needless to say, it still retained a strong rhythmical element.  Calypso grew out of the songs that were sung during carnival. After the abolition of slavery in 1830, Carnival was a boisterous and often violent affair with gangs of stick fighters competing with each other and also with the police. On more than one occasion it degenerated into out-and-out riot and was often banned.  Kalinda was sung as an accompaniment to the stick fighting. Beginning as a jamette, underclass appropriation of the Mardi Gras celebrations of the plantation owners, Carnival gradually became more respectable as more and more middle-class Trinidadians began to take part. By the turn of the century, the original French Creole patois was giving way to English as the language of calypso and the songs were more often in eight line verses rather than the more rudimentary four lines of the so-called road marches. Mastery of English was seen as a sign of sophistication and calypsonians vied with each other to cram as many polysyllabic words into their songs as possible.  The institution of the calypso tent was another factor in the development of calypso as an 'indoor' music to be listened to. The 'Golden Age of Calypso' was undoubtedly in the 1930's and 40's when Lord Executor, Atilla the Hun, The Growling Tiger, Lord Beginner, King Radio and The Roaring Lion, to name only the most prominent, were all in their prime. The subject matter of their songs was usually topical and even when dealing with serious topics such as social injustice they were usually humorous as well. F.D. Roosevelt's state visit to the island, or the particular calypsonian's problems with women might equally well be the subject of a calypso. The bands that accompanied the singers usually consisted of guitar, double bass, violin, trumpet and clarinet and they played in a style somewhat akin to Dixieland jazz - another element to enter the calypso melting pot. Recordings were made and calypso became briefly popular in America, Britain and even West Africa. There was a brief resurgence in the popularity of calypso after the Second World War when the Andrews Sisters had a big hit with Lord Invader's Rum and Coca Cola but this was a safe and sanitised sort of calypso.  The history of calypso does not end here (the entire career of the legendary Mighty Sparrow is still to come for example) but as in just about every other aspect of life the Second World War seems to mark the end of an era. It would be misleading to see this past era as being an age of innocence or even of excellence but the elusive charm of old time calypso, both musically and lyrically, has a distinct character which differentiates it from post-war calypso. Thankfully it has been preserved and remains to delight further generations.-- Peter Ridsdale

The first vocal recording of a calypso was made in 1914 when the Duke of Iron teamed up with Jules Sims. Prior to this, the first recording of calypso music was an instrumental by a band called Lovey's Orchestra in 1912. In the early days of calypso, calypsonians (singers of calypsoes) formed groups and performed at various locations around Trinidad during the months leading up to Carnival. Since these locations were temporary and ceased to exist after Carnival, they were called "tents." Calypsonians took on individual nicknames and the tents were also named. The first calypso tent in Trinidad was the Railway Douglas Tent which opened its doors for business in Port-of-Spain in 1921. Among the other tents that opened in Port-of-Spain during the 1920s was the Redhead Sailor Tent. Some of the popular calypsonians from the 1920s through the 1930s were: Attila the Hun; Lord Beginner; Lord Caresser; Lord Executor; Mighty Growler; Wilmoth Houdini; Lord Invader; Roaring Lion; King Radio; Growling Tiger; Duke of Iron; Macbeth the Great; Mighty Destroyer; Chieftain Douglas; and Gorilla.

In 1935, the first female calypsonian to sing in a tent, Lady Trinidad, made her debut at the Crystal Palace Tent on Nelson Street in Port-of-Spain. Her success paved the way for two more female calypsonians to follow in her footsteps in 1936: Lady Baldwin (Mavis Baldwin); and Lady MacDonald (Doris MacDonald). In 1937, Lady Trinidad made history when she became the first female calypsonian to make a record.

One of the larger and more popular tents in the early 1940s was the Victory Calypso Tent which functioned at 95 Edward Street in Port-of-Spain; however, the most popular tent was The Original Old Brigade which also operated on Edward Street. Another tent in operation was the Maginot Line Calypso Tent which was located at 47 Nelson Street in Port-of-Spain. The name of the World's Fair Calypso Tent was changed in 1943 to the Commando Tent and featured Growling Tiger, Lord Beginner, Lord Caresser, and King Iere. Calypsonians who did not join a tent banded together and performed in cinemas around the country. One such traveling group that functioned in 1942 was the Roving Brigade.

Although Carnival was suspended from 1942 to 1945 during World War II, the calypso tents were kept open. By 1947, the 24-year old Lord Kitchener had gained enough popularity to open a new tent called The Young Brigade which featured young calypsonians such as: Lord Melody; Lord Ziegfield; Mighty Killer; Mighty Spoiler; and Mighty Viking. Kitchener's tent was later changed to The Original Young Brigade. The Old Brigade and The Original Young Brigade were the two most popular tents throughout the remainder of the 1940s. In addition to the early calypsonians, some of the popular singers of the 1940s were: Lord Pretender; Small Island Pride; Sir Galba; Gibraltar; Lord Viper; Lord Kitchener, Mighty Terror, and Lord Wonder.

Soca

2008-10-21T13:49:00.000-07:00

A nice essay on soca, with more detail than I ever knew:

•What Is Soca Music

 What is soca music?

 This material is geared primarily towards folks who are new to this genre of music called soca...  As an artist who has been recording soca songs for the last eight years, and who has won Caribbean wide soca competitions, I shall humbly attempt to present a comprehensive introduction to soca music.  

Soca music originated in the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago. It is widely accepted to have been created by Lord Shorty (born Garfield Blackman). He noticed that Calypso music was threatened by the more popular reggae music and dying out and attempted to create a new hybrid that was more appealing to the masses. He fused Indian music with calypso music and this resulted in a more energetic hybrid called solka, which later became known as soca. Lord Shorty introduced soca to the world in 1973 with his hit song, Indrani.  

Naturally, soca music of the seventies is very different to what exists today. Today, there are two main types, namely Power Soca and Groovy Soca. What is the major difference between the two?  Power soca music is very fast, with tempos of around 160 beats per minute. The music is largely instructional in nature. Soca artists thrive on motivating audiences to respond to their dancing instructions. Power soca music is largely music to jump, wave and "wine" to. ("Wine" is derived from the word "wind" and is a type of dance that consists of hip movements). Crowd reaction is key.  

Trinidadian soca artist, Superblue has been credited with starting the "jump and wave" craze. His success with this style of soca was so incredible that since then most soca songs are written with crowd response in mind.  Today, the challenge for power soca songwriters is to write songs that can move audiences but not be a regurgitation of the jump and wave theme. This is not the easiest of tasks because of the very nature of the festival that soca music is centered around. Soca music is largely carnival music. Since carnival is all about jumping and waving, the music that drives it must be able to engender such activity.

Increasingly, artists are succeeding at writing songs which are not necessarily based on "jump and wave" or waving rags and flags. In an attempt to stay clear of monotony, themes like love, peace and togetherness have been very common.  Groovy soca music is arguably, a better means of propelling soca music forward internationally. It is much slower, around 115 beats per minute. This newer kind of soca allows for a wider range of topics to be addressed. Unlike the total frenzy that power soca gives rise to, groovy soca is music to sway and dance slowly to. Artists like Kevin Lyttle and Rupee have demonstrated that this type of music is very palatable to mainstream music markets, with international hits like "Turn Me On" and "Tempted To Touch" respectively.

Another artist who has gain international recognition with groovy/crossover soca is Barbadian based artist, Alison Hinds.  I believe that fast and groovy soca music should continue to co-exist. I readily accept all variations of soca and put none against the other. Music is dynamic. Throughout history no genre has ever stayed the same and hybrids are constantly created.  In addition to power and groovy soca, other types of soca music include ragga soca and chutney soca.  Ragga soca is a fusion of dancehall and soca music. Ragga soca performers include Trinidians, Bunji Garlin and Maximus Dan.  Chutney soca is a blend of East Indian chutney music and soca. Chutney Soca is an up-tempo, rhythmic type of song, accompanied by traditional Indian musical instruments such as the dholak, tassa, the harmonium and the dhantal.  

The line between different kinds of soca music is becoming less and less clearly defined. It can sometimes be very difficult and controversial to pin-point what is groovy, power, or ragga soca. There is so much fusion taking place that it is often difficult to tell whether a song is really a soca song. For instance some have argued that Alison Hinds' hit song, "Roll It Gal" is not really a soca song but an R&B song with a West Indian influence. While I do not hold that view, it goes to show that there are no clear distinctions and definitions. Soca music, like other forms of music is an art and cannot be restricted to a specific or exclusive mold.  Soca music is largely competitive.

Every year artists try to outdo each other at carnival competitions such as Soca Monarch and Road March. At a soca monarch competition soca artists perform before large audiences and are ranked by a panel of judges. A road march song is the song which is played the most during a carnival street parade. Each Caribbean island holds its own competitions. Prizes can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for each winner, particlurly in Trinidad and Tobago.  Some of the biggest soca artists in the industry have bowed out of competition. These include big names such as Machel Montano, Bunji Garlin and KMC. The commonly held view is that "music is a mission, not a competition".

Personally, I have found such competitions to be a very negative force, causing undesirable friction between artists. As an artist, I have had my own battles. However, winning is so much fun that it can be hard to quit. The fans can be relentless in urging an artist to compete against their own will. The way these competitions are set up, it is easy to go unnoticed if one is not taking part, except if you are already strongly established in the market.  Popular soca performers include Machel Montano, Destra, Alison Hinds, Atlantik, KMC, Shurwayne Winchester, Denise Belfon, Bomani, Bunji Garlin, Iwer George, Bomani, Kevin Lyttle, Tizzy, Maximus Dan, Mr Killa, Mantius, Fireman Hooper, Jamesy P, Tallpree, Claudette Peters, Burning Flames, Nicole David, Ricky T, Qpid and Krosfyah.  Some of soca's biggest worldwide hits include "Turn Me On" by Kevin Lyttle, "Tempted to Touch" by Rupee, "Who Let the Dogs Out" by Baha Men (originally sang by Anslem Douglas), "Sweet Soca Music" by Sugar Daddy, "Nookie" by Jamesy P, "Hot Hot Hot" by Buster Poindexter (originally sang by Arrow), and "Follow the leader" by Soca Boys (originally sang by Nigel and Marvin Lewis).

  Brass instruments such as trumpets and trombones have been very typical of soca music. Sometimes, the saxophone forms part of brass sections. While these instruments are still used in live performances, synthesizers and samplers are increasingly replacing them, particularly in studio recordings and at smaller concerts. Soca is very percussion and drum driven and these are often very loud in a soca mix. The bass is also very important. Other instruments used include guitars, and keyboards.  Leading soca-producing Caribbean islands include Trinidad and Tobago, St Vincent and the Grenadines, St Lucia, Grenada, Barbados and Antigua and Barbuda.

Posted by All Letters Introduction at 10/21/2008 10:25:00 AM by : Mantius Cazaubon

Covers

2008-10-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

A curious phenomenon is when someone takes the content of a calypso and performs it in another style:

As sung by the Duke of Iron

San Fernando (1)

As sung by Johnny Duncan, a US Country singer

San Fernando (2)

As sung by the Roaring Tiger

Money is King (1)

As sung by Bob Gibson, a folksinger in the '60s

Money is King (2)

Another curious phenomenon is when the same song is performed in different Caribbean styles. I'll give an example of that laterwhen we are back in the caribbean.

Eisteddfod in NY

2008-09-18T19:41:00.000-07:00

Read the flier here.

Zombie Jamboree

2008-08-24T19:33:00.000-07:00

"Zombie Jamboree"

In 1953 Lord Intruder, a little-remembered calypsonian from Tobago, performed his "Jumbie Jamberee" at the Old Brigade Calypso Tent in Port of Spain, Trinidad. The song was about jumbies (spirits) dancing "back to back, belly to belly" in a cemetery. Intruder had the words printed in a calypso lyrics booklet but never recorded it.

The Mighty Charmer and King Flash first recorded the song in the 1950s in the United States, where the reference to a Trinidadian graveyard was changed to one in New York. The song became widely known as the "Zombie Jamboree" during the late 1950s through recordings by the Kingston Trio, a top group in the folk music revival. Meanwhile, Harry Belafonte regularly performed the song and recorded it three times during the 1960s and 1970s. Bob Marley and the Wailers issued a reggae version ("Jumbie Jamboree"), with Peter Tosh on lead vocals.

The Charmer (Louis Farakhan)

Lord Jellicoe

Eloise Trio

Harry Belafonte

The Kingston Trio

Peter Tosh

Note: Some singers, if singing in New York, will mention "Woodlawn Cemetary". This is a large pirvate cemetary in the north Bronx, adjacent to Van Courtland Park. This is a public park that has a few cricket pitches popular with West Indians living in New York because they are at the end of a subway line.

When I was a student I spent a couple of summers workng as an apprentice gardner at Woodlawn Cemetary.

Calypso Mama (Maureen Duvalier)

2008-08-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

http://bahamawavenews.blogspot.com/

Maureen Duvalier - Bahamian Diva at 80
By NORMAN ROLLE, Weekender Editor

norman@nasguard.com

Maureen Duvalier, a multi-talented, multi-faceted entertainer who last month became an octogenarian, is very much in the business and does not plan to retire any time soon. She told The Weekender: "I'm going to perform any time they ask me. I still have my voice, I still can move. I am not thinking about retiring."

She got into entertainment professionally as a vocalist at 17, and like most of her contemporaries who made it in the entertainment business, she started with the world famous Freddie Munnings Orchestra at the Silver Slippers.

Inspired by a Betty Gables musical she saw at the Palace Theatre, later named the Cinema, she and Freeddie introduced 'floor show' to the Silver Slippers.

She recalls: "I sang everything at first but I fell in love with Ella Fitzgerald and her rendition of 'I Put the Peas In The Pot To Cook.' I never really knew who wrote the song but I copied it, we rehearsed it, and I sang it...and Freddie said songs like that were my stuff."

And that's what made Maureen the Bahamian diva, the native, authentic music in her signature screechy delivery. "I worked a stage," she says with a grin. "I danced, I performed. At age 80 I can't do 200 per cent like I used to, but I try very, very hard, because I feel if people come and pay their hard-earned money, they come to feel good, to go away feeling good."

In over 60 years on stage, she has made a lot of people feel good, but in 1992, she thought it was the end for her. "I had a bad cough and I think it was from the cigarettes. I use to smoke two packs a day. The doctor said I had a spot on my lungs. It was the worst thing that could happen to me. But one night while watching Benny Hinn on TV...He said 'God just told me there's someone out there with a spot on her lungs and God is healing it right now.' I said Jesus, it's me...If you heal me I'll serve you for the rest of my life...and I meant that...I went back to the doctor...and no spot could be found. I have never smoked a cigarette from that day."

Maureen is the first cousin of late Haitian president Francoise 'Papa Doc' Duvalier. She was born in Nassau at Burial Ground Corner on East Street. She discloses: "My father's mother was born at Inagua. Two boys and a girl were also born at Inagua...the other four children were born in Haiti. I have an aunt who's 93 and still living in Haiti. I am an only child."

A spinster all her life, Maureen does not have offspring but regards the chidden of her friends the late Rebecca Chipman and John 'Chippy' Chipman as her own.

One of few Bahamians to complete matriculation at Western Senior School at age 11, Maureen attended New York University where she majored in drama from 1952-54. "I did not finish. I had to come home because my mother was ill. I know I would have never lived to see 80 were it not for may mother and grandmother....they formed my life and gave me a beautiful upbringing," she recalls in a subdued voice.

One who loves our culture, Maureen was a pace-setter for women in Juankanoo. "I went on Bay Street as a little girl with my uncle Freddie Bowleg...eveyone thought I was a boy. When I finally unmasked was when women started rushing.
"I went to National Museum in Washington DC. and learned about the origin of Junkanoo...I love my culture and wanted to learn everything about it...to be equipped to explain Junkanoo to the world."

'Ask Me Why I Run' is the hit on the only album she recorded in 1955. And what does she think of today's younger entertainers?

"I think we have the talent. The money is important but you must have pride in whatever you're making your living by...that should be more important because if you're only working for the money, you're only working 25 per cent. If you're working because you love it, that gives you pride, the money comes after."

Good advice from one who's been in the business over three decades.

Don't Touch Me Tomato

Yes, Yes, Yes

Court House Scandal

Gin and Coconut Water

Wilmoth Houdini (Frederick Wilmoth Hendricks)

2008-08-21T20:40:00.000-07:00

Wilmoth Houdini (Frederick Wilmoth Hendricks)

Often called the "Calypso King of New York," Houdini (1895-1973) was the first calypsonian to have a successful career in the United States. As a young man in Trinidad, he sang in calypso tents and served as a "chantwell" (lead singer) for a Carnival masquerade band called the "African Millionaires." During this period, he worked as a seaman and in 1928 settled in New York. There he began an extensive recording career that would continue through the 1940s. Among his many calypsos were songs that proclaimed his artistic rivalry with calypsonians back in Trinidad, such as Lord Executor and the Roaring Lion.

Houdini performed in a variety of venues in New York. He sang at the 1939 World's Fair, frequently appeared in nightclubs and often organized Caribbean parties in Harlem. He composed calypsos on a wide range of topics. In 1939 Houdini recorded a song called "He Had It Coming." In 1946 Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan released a duet version of the song, under the title of "Stone Cold Dead in the Market," which became and R&B hit. The song brought Houdini new-found fame, and he organized his own calypso festival in New York in 1947.

SongNo99

Ol' Lady You Mashin' My Toe

West Indian Sugar Crop

Sly Mongoose

Duke of Iron (Cecil Anderson)

2008-08-21T20:39:00.000-07:00

Appearing on recordings, radio and in nightclubs, the Duke of Iron was one of the best-known calypso singers in the United States from the late 1930s through the 1950s. In addition to singing, he played flute, clarinet, saxophone and quatro. His family moved from Trinidad to New York in 1923. Eventually, he became a regular performer in New York's club scene, including a 10-month stint at the Village Vanguard in the 1940s. During the 1950s and 1960s, he appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Apollo Theater in Harlem and many leading nightclubs, such as the Village Gate, the Jamaican Room and the Calypso Room. He also starred in the film Calypso Joe (Allied Films, 1957) with Angie Dickinson.

The Duke of Iron recorded singles and albums for a variety of labels. Of his own compositions, he is best remembered for suggestive calypsos, like "Convoy" and "I Left Her Behind For You," though he also wrote songs about the radio commentator Walter Winchell and the New York Mets baseball team. In addition, he regularly returned to Trinidad to keep up with current trends in calypso, and performed and recorded many annual Carnival hits. The Duke of Iron died in 1968 at the age of 62.

TheLostWatch.mp3

Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen

Big Bamboo

Convoy

I Left Her Behind For You

Out De Fire

Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts)

2008-08-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts)

Lord Kitchener (1922-2000) was known as the "Grandmaster" of calypso. By the time of his death, only the Mighty Sparrow and the Roaring Lion had reached a similar level of respect. For over a half century, he was widely admired for his musicianship, compositions, performance ability and overall support for the calypso tradition. On 10 occasions, he won the "Road March" title—the award for the calypsonian whose song is most frequently played on the streets during Trinidad's Carnival.

Kitchener began performing calypsos in the Trinidadian town of Arima in the late 1930s. By the 1940s, he was appearing in Port of Spain. In 1946 he helped to organize the Young Brigade tent, which featured a new generation of calypso singers, and was applauded for his calypso "Tie Tongue Mopsy." After the 1947 Carnival season, Kitchener traveled to Aruba, Curacao and Jamaica. In 1948 he left Jamaica on the Empire Windrush, a ship that marked the beginning of large-scale Caribbean migration to Britain. Kitchener remained in England, where he had an active career that included extensive recording for the Parlophone, Melodisc and Lyragon labels. His records were exported in large quantities to the Caribbean, where he remained popular. Some of his records were also popular in West Africa.

Kitchener returned to Trinidad for the 1963 Carnival and formed the Calypso Revue, which continued as a major tent. Through this tent, he helped many young singers develop their calypso skills. For decades, Kitchener remained a favorite calypsonian among steelbands, due to the catchy melodies and harmonic complexity of his compositions. Among his many well-known calypsos are "Trouble in Arima," and "Muriel and the Bug",

Trouble In Arima

Batty Mamzelle

Muriel and the Bug (Muriel's Treasure)

Woman's Figure

Come Back With My Wife's Nighty!

Atilla the Hun (Raymond Quevedo)

2008-08-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest calypsonians of all times, Atilla the Hun (1892-1962) started his musical career as a chantwell (lead singer) for a Carnival masquerade band in Port of Spain, Trinidad. By the 1920s, he was singing in calypso tents and soon became a very popular performer. Along with the Roaring Lion and other calypsonians, he helped to establish the Victory Tent and to introduce such innovations as calypso duets and calypso dramas. (An early drama dealt with the then contentious issue of divorce in Trinidad.) In 1934 Atilla and Lion traveled to New York to record for the American Record Company. While there, they met Rudy Vallee and appeared on his weekly radio broadcast. The historic broadcast reached all the way to Trinidad.

Though Atilla composed calypsos on a wide range of topics, his specialty was politics, particularly the experience of working people in a colonial society. He was admired for both his eloquence and keen observation of detail. Among his many well-known songs are "Graf Zeppelin" (about the German dirigible's visit to Trinidad) and "Treasury Scandal" (on missing funds). While continuing to perform as a calypsonian, Atilla was elected to the Port of Spain City Council in 1946 and later became the Deputy Mayor. In 1950 he was elected to Trinidad's Legislative Council. Atilla also helped to publish booklets of calypso lyrics. After his death, his writings on calypso were compiled in a book titled Atilla's Kaiso: A Short History of Trinidad Calypso (1983).

Together with the Roaring Lion (Rafael de Leon) he was brought calypso to the United States for the first time in 1934.

References

* Quevedo, Raymond (Atilla the Hun). 1983. Atilla's Kaiso: a short history of Trinidad calypso. University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. (Includes the words to many old calypsos as well as musical scores for some of Atilla's calypsos.)
* Hill, Donald R. 1993. Calypso: Early Carnival Music in Trinidad. University of Florida. (includes a CD of early calypso music.)

Graf Zeppelin

Dynamite

Treasury Scandal

Fire Brigade

Mighty Sparrow (Slinger Francisco)

2008-08-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

Known as the "Calypso King of the World," the Mighty Sparrow (1935- ) burst on the scene in the mid-1950s and has been a dominant force in calypso ever since. He has recorded over 70 albums, won Trinidad's Calypso King (Monarch) title 11 times, won the Carnival road march title 8 times and has received many other honors. With his 1956 hit, "Jean and Dinah," Sparrow proclaimed his dominance: "Yankee gone, Sparrow take over now!"—a reference to the declining presence of U.S. servicemen in Trinidad after World War II. From the mid-1950s into the 1970s, he was a headliner at the Young Brigade tent every Carnival season, until the tent was renamed "Sparrow's Young Brigade." He also regularly toured the Caribbean, as well as England and the U.S.

With frequent trips to the U.S., Sparrow eventually bought a second home near New York. Much of his recording has been done there. He continues to tour throughout the world and remains the best-known calypsonian of all times.

Jean and Dinah celebrated the departure of American soldiers from Trinidad after WW2.

Obeah Wedding speaks of the Trini version of Voodoo.

DuDuYemi.mp3 a celebration of African roots.

Congo Man Another african theme.

Good Morning, Mr. Walker
An honest approach to matrimony.

Barack the Magnificent
A demonstration that Sparrow is still in business.

Soca

2008-08-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

Calypso and Chutney merged to form Soca. The name may have come from "Soul" and "Calypso" but the music itself is clearly derivative from Chutney.

There were two Calypso singers who were highly regarded in their own style and were also able to drop into Soca at will.

Lord Kitchener often based his soca pieces around Pan as in Pan In Harmony.

The Mighty Sparrow combined flexible vocal lines with interesting ideas, as in
Life In Hell.

These days both classic Calypso and Soca can be considered Calypso. Other, later stylistic variations like Rocksteady, Ska, and Reggae, were primarily asociated with Jamaica. Songs in a more Calypsonian or rural style from Jamaica are called Mento.

Later blog entries will have more specific topics, as: variations on a song, or various sings by a particular singer.

Chutney

2008-08-21T14:45:00.001-07:00

Along with Calypso there was a musical form that used rhymic patterns from the ethnic Indian population with Caribbean harmonies and, sometimes, english lyrics. This mixture was called Chutney.

One that is purely Indian is Doolha.

As sung by the Calypso singer Lord Beginner the song "Fed-A-Ray" sounds like this.

Calypso.

2008-08-18T06:49:00.000-07:00

I put some examples of Calypso and related genres on my Blog about St. Vincent and the Grenadines [ see here ]. I'll bring those examples here and continue the discussion in this blog. I'll probably also put examples on some of the old entries to this blog, now that I know how to do that.

Just to illustrate some concepts in Caribbean music, here are three examples of pre-WW2 Trinidadian calypsos:

Lord Invader sings about Matilda.

King Tiger (also known as The Growling Tiger) sings about money.

Atilla the Hun sings about a politician in Nankivell

Amazing Grace

2008-06-22T05:33:00.000-07:00

Amazing Grace, How sweet the sound.
That saved a wretch like me,
I once was lost, but now am found,
was blind but now I see.

Wikipedia says: "John Newton, the author of the lyrics to Amazing Grace, was born in 1725 in Wapping, England. ...After a brief time in the Royal Navy, Newton began his career in slave trading. The turning point in Newton's spiritual life was a violent storm that occurred one night while at sea. Moments after he left the deck, the crewman who had taken his place was swept overboard."

This was brought to mind because of the funeral of Tim Russert: they used a single bagpiper playing the Appalachian version of Amazing Grace over the picture of the rainbow that appeared at the conclusion of the memorial service. That brought a number of things to mind.

Back in the late '50s, when I was a graduate student at Columbia, their adult education department invited Pete Seeger to give a series of illustrated lectures on American Folk Music. This was a way of giving a series of informal concerts in a format that allowed the audience to feel they were improving themselves, but Pete took it seriously. Most of the audience were my age or older, and were used to the style of Burl Ives and his generation: who used "parlor versions"--singing the lyrics clearly to simplified versions of the folk tunes.

For these lectures Pete took the point of view of his step-brother Mike, and tried to get us to understand how the songs were really performed and why. He brought in a log and an axe and chopped it in two while singing a work song. And he sang Amazing Grace in a slow, unaccompanied version with all the ruffles and flourishes that was characteristic of the Appalachian mountains where the traditional styles of performance still existed. A-a-maz-i-i-ng Grace ... I can still remember how that sounded 50 years later.

A few years later, when I was working at Yale and had my first real vacation, I went to London. There I met Louis Killen, who introduced me to a number of other english singers, and I started to understand how the vocal flourishes that I had heard Pete sing fit into a vital tradition. When I came back I started the New Haven Folk Music Society, and we started holding sessions similar to the British Folk Clubs. We didn't have any money to hire professional performers, so we had to depend on volunteers. Since I was always there I often had to start things going until some more talented performer arrived, which had the benefit that I became inured to performing without the assurance that I would be admired. But I did learn some of the decorations that Lou Killen used in his performances.

When I went back to London in 1965 Lou was somewhere else, so I went around to the folk clubs by myself. In one I was introduced to Bob Dylan, since our hosts were surprised that, as American Folk Singers, we didn't already know one another. In England al the folk singers knew one another. In another club I was asked to sing in what would be an "open mike" session if they had had microphones. I sang Amazing Grace with all the flourishes that I had learned from Pete Seeger and some from Lou Killen. They were amazed. because in England Amazing Grace was just a hymn-book staple that nobody listened to any more.

Later that evening I was approached by a young American couple who were touring Britain earning their upkeep by singing at the clubs. They asked if I minded if they added Amazing Grace to their repertoire, since they had forgotten how it sounded with the Appalachian decorations. I told them to feel free: I was going back after a short stay and was unlikely to do any more performances in England.

I met them again at a Newport Folk Festival a couple of years later. They told me that they had performed that decorated version of Amazing Grace all over England and Scotland and that audiences loved it. A year or so after that, Amazing Grace was played by an Edinburg Pipe Band on a record released in the US, in just the way I had learned it from Pete Seeger.

And it still is a staple of the bagpipe repertoire.

And I suppose it's my fault.

Note: The version that you hear when you click on "Amazing Grace" in the first line is sung by Doc Watson and Jean Ritchie at Gerde's Folk City in the early 1960s. If I listen carefully I can hear someone singing a high harmony out back, and I think it is me. I was certainly there singing that on that night.

Back Again

2008-01-15T07:28:00.000-08:00

For the last couple of years I have been occasionally picking calypso and country music from the internet, and ripping gospel music from old LPs and the few CDs I've been able to afford. Just the other day I discovered the blog at [http://time-has-told-me.blogspot.com/] and I've been downloading rips from the English records that I couldn't get during the 70s and 80s. Wonderful.

Maybe I'll start writing about music again, in between adding to my general blogs:[http://index.karleklund.net]

New Bedford Pictures

2007-11-13T09:22:00.000-08:00

I forgot all about posting pictures from New Bedford on this blog: I'm sorry. Go to
http://pix.karleklund.net and look up "summerfest". I'll have to post some more on flickr, maybe some from past years.

Sugar In The Gourd ...

2007-11-13T09:17:00.000-08:00

is the name of an internet broadcast that plays "all old-timey, all the time". It is narrower in scope than Sandy Sheehan's Traditional Folk stream on WUMB, but of as good quality. I have been filling up iTunes for the last couple of weeks from both sources. I recommend them.

New Bedford

2007-06-27T20:23:00.000-07:00

The folk festival at the New Bedford Summerfest is coming up soon. I'll try to add some images to this blog.

Joshua Gone Barbados.

2007-02-27T05:50:00.000-08:00

Eric Von Schmidt's "Joshua Gone Barbados" is one of the few well-known songs that refers to St. Vincent. Some background (part of which only appeared after Eric's death) can be found on http://svgblog.blogspot.com

Me & Folkmusic, Part Eight

2007-02-27T05:26:00.000-08:00

Back in the 1990s I figured, as I said in the last part, that I had written my last word on folk music. I wrote that on a Macintosh computer and stuck it up on the internet in a primitive way. I had no idea that Steve Jobs was going to change the face of music.
It took me a while to catch up, but as a retired old codger with more time than money, iTunes and the iPod was a perfect way to get reinvolved with folk music.

The first thing was calypso. Calypso still exists, more or less, but it had a Golden Age after World War 2. American soldiers who had been stationed in the Caribbean guarding the Panama Canal brought it back to the mainland and the Andrews Sisters diluted it enough for American tastes. But it remained what it had been in the Caribbean and particularly in Trinidad, for another generation. I had enjoyed Calypso in the late '40s, what little I could find, so when we started comind down in the winters I looked for CDs. Eventually, in the airport in Antigua, I found a record of The Mighty Sparrow. Then a couple more, here and there, on Rounder Records or the Smithsonian. But Calypso was old fashioned. Finally I ran across Irwin Chusid on WFMU. He plays an hour a week of Calypso and Soca and I have downloaded three thousand or so Calypso tunes since I started listening. He plays some soca and pan (steel drum) but no ska, dub and reggae. There's plenty of that elsewhere.

I have also been downloading, and sometimes purchasing, old Timey and Gospel music.

Later I'll add to this a list of links. I intend to go back and add links to these essays, too.

Me & Folkmusic, Part Seven

2007-02-27T05:23:00.001-08:00

By 1966 I had accomplished what Yale wanted me for, so I allowed myself to be recruited by SUNY Stony Brook, who wanted to create a similar laboratory. I went on the grounds that I wanted to influence the Physics Department to develop in a more humane direction.

What I did was to run into the student protests of the late '60s: drugs, antiracism, antiwar, hippiedom and their reflections in the middle-class student body at Stony Brook.

It did give me the opportunity to go to the Newport festival, where I met the lady who would be my first wife. In the 1966 Newport Bob Dylan used an electric band for the first time, sending "folk" careening toward "Folkrock".

I had met Dylan, briefly, in a folk club in London the summer before, where he and I were both "visiting American folksingers". When he did the concert in Festival Hall later that week it was no question who the "star" was. The had oversold my, ticket so I ended up sitting in one of the best seats in the house (Dylan's guest seats) with the young lady who was our mutual acquaintance.

Stony Brook was desperately trying to go from an obscure teachers college to a major player, and we were able to use some of the funds this effort made available to promote some small concerts of folk music. We were, for instance, able to give John Roberts and Tony Barrand one of their first concerts in this country.

About that time there suddenly appeared on the scene a group called the Young Tradition: Peter Bellamy, Heather Wood and Royston Wood. They sang intense arrangements of traditional english songs and ballads with harmonies based on those of the Copper family and medieval church music.
I had just met a young tenor, Bob Stuart, through a Linda Hughes who had a folk music program at C. W. Post college. Linda, Bob and I performed such of the Young Tradition repertoire as we could manage, some from a tape she had of the Watersons, and some of our own arrangements. We sang at a few festivals and, when Linda graduated, she was replaced by my then wife. The group did not last long after that: Bob wanted to do his own songs and I was finding that you can't lead a group from the bass part.

Among the people I met during this period on Long Island were Frank and Anne Warner, their sons Jeff and Gareth, and Jeff's friend Jeff Davis. One of my memorable experiences was being able to sing "The Texas Ranger" while Jeff Davis played the Grayson accompaniment on fiddle.

We managed to have one gathering at Stony Brook that included 85 folksingers and relatives, but relations with my job and my wife soon soured.

Lou Killen had come over to the states in '67 and when he gave a concert at Yale we went over to hear him and meet other friends. They introduced me to Howard Glasser, who had also been introduced to folkmusic in the 40s in New York, gotten fascinated with scottish singing, and was trying to do in Southeastern Massachusetts University what I had been trying to do in Stony Brook.

I went up to the first Eisteddfod in 1971, and attended every one after that until it stopped in 1996. I met my present wife, Sally, there in 1974, moved to her goat farm in Myricks in 1976, and have been here ever since.
From 1978 to 1983 I edited the official publication of the Eisteddfod, Ceilidh Columns, including:

Yankee Ingenuity,
Sage and Hero,
Columns and Fragments, and
Modes and Scales

After 1983 the support for the Eisteddfod had diminished beyond the point where it would support a publication.
Not long after that Sally and I were relegated to a passive part in the organization of the Eisteddfod.

In the mid-80s a young man came to be a pastor at the Methodist Church down the street (which had had no pastor for a while) and he boarded with the lady next door. He came over to visit, (curious about the hippies who had been living in the old Baldwin place for the last ten years) and it turned out that he played banjo and guitar and had been in a folk-rock-gospel band in the 60s.
We introduced him to the style of old-timey gospel and formed, with a couple of the members of the choir, a band that did concerts for church-related affairs. We also did a gospel tune as part of the regular morning service at the Methodist church.
After he left (leaving some uncomfortable feelings and taking a new wife) Sally & I continued doing the gospel song at sunday services, trying for something new every sunday. (That stretches one's repertoire.)
We also put groups together that sang at village christmas programs, but the enthusiasm was waning. When the Methodists reflected the growing conservatism of the time by inveighing against gays we dropped out of the Methodists.

Since the late 80s we have not performed and have followed developments in the folk music scene at some distance. In the mid-90s Sally had serious skull surgery that made it difficult to sing. We had also bought a house on St. Vincent towinter in. This web site and this memoir probably marks my final effort toward promoting traditional folkmusic.
It has, however, been an interesting time.

Me & Folkmusic, Part Six

2007-02-27T05:21:00.001-08:00

To have a term for what "folk" meant in the 1940s, a new term had to be adopted. When I use "traditional" I mean music that is:

a survival from or a copy of music of a rural community in the pre-recorded period or

music that is an attempt at reconstructing what pre-recorded folk music may have sounded like, done with a sensitive interpretation of the style of such music as is available through scholarly sources.

Louis Killen was my introduction to the latter sense of "traditional". At his best Louis is a better singer than any of the elderly gentlemen from whom he learned some of his songs: I have heard field recordings of Sam Larner and his contemporaries. I suspect that Louis is a better singer than any of them ever were in their prime. Louis can take a ballad with an excessively plain tune and overipe lyrics and, by a subtle use of pacing and decoration, give the words passion and make no two verses of the tune identical. Louis was not brought up in an isolated rural community so that the traditional aesthetic was the only one he knew; but he was brought up in a family that sang harmony, so he has an intuitive sense of how much a tune can be varied and still be "the same", and he has an ear for what can be done to a tune and still leave it within the bounds of a musical aesthetic and how that variation can be used in another tune.
And he has the intelligence to do the scholarly homework that allows him to place that tune in a geographical, temporal, social and occupational context.

Over the thirty-odd years that I have been listening to Louis I get a greater appreciation for his art. At times it was only when I tried to duplicate one of Louis' performances and fell short that I was able to hear what it was he was doing. Louis can be an education in the traditional aesthetic by himself.

But the notion of traditional style was not restricted to Great Britain. The vanguard of the american traditional folkmusic revival was Mike Seeger, Pete's half-brother, who, with John Cohen and Tom Paley formed The New Lost City Ramblers. Mike Seeger's home page says "Mike learned the old ballad Barbara Allen at age five from the singing of his parents. Soon he graduated to their collection of early documentary recordings. He began playing in his late teens, learning from Elizabeth Cotten, and later seeking out guitarist Maybelle Carter, banjoists Dock Boggs and Cousin Emmy, and autoharpist Kilby Snow. Mike's love for traditional music led him to produce documentaries and to organize countless tours and concerts featuring traditional musicians".

He says elsewhere "Old-time music was the old-time name for real mountain- type folk music. It is the kind of music that Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers and in fact most rural people prior to the mid nineteen twenties, were raised with. It is the old unaccompanied English ballads like Barbara Allen, new American songs like Wild Bill Jones, old fiddle tunes like Devil's Dream, and newer banjo tunes like Cumberland Gap. It's a rich and varied heritage of music - as rich as the roots music of any country. "

Even in New Haven we could feel the beginnings of a new phase of the folk music revival. When the interest in folkmusic and the number of excellent performers outgrew the back room of a bookstore a Folk Coffee house was started. This gave our group of enthusiasts a degree of coherence.
When the City of New Haven suggested that it might be good to put on some programs during the summer in school auditoria we formed the New Haven Folk Music Society so that there would be an organization that the city could deal with. That summer program was a disaster (neither local kids nor Yale undergraduates ever showed much interest) but there was a steady group of faculty, grad students and townspeople.

One of the members ran a restaurant, so The Society then had the opportunity to do singing gatherings during their slow time on Sunday afternoons. I was the first President of the Society (probably because I was older, and therefore more respectable than the rest of the folkies) and I began to do some performing, at least partly so that somebody (me) would be doing something on the stage when all the other performers were late.
My repertoire consisted of songs cribbed from Ewan McColl's records, from my hearing of Lou Killen and Sydney Carter, and various other bits and pieces that I remembered from years of listening. I occasionally played the autoharp and the harmonica.

By leaning heavily on the songs learned from Lou Killen and Sydney Carter, which were entirely unfamiliar to even a sophisticated American audience, I managed to disguise my lack of skill as a performer. Eventually enough practice made me more at ease on a stage.

About this same time the Indian Neck Folk Festival expanded from a weekend house party for Yalies and the Folkie friends of their girlfriends to an invitation-only festival for performers. The only "event" at Indian Neck was a Saturday Night concert for all comers. I never got comfortable with an audience of seasoned performers, but there were some memorable moments. The rest of the weekend was spent in sharing ad hoc music with whoever was around.

I'm an early riser, so one of my favorite memories of Indian Neck was hearing Alan Block playing softly to himself in the soft dawn light.
Indian Neck provided another venue and an opportunity to hear performers doing a variety of different styles. What continued to interest me were those people who were trying to capture the essence of traditional music without merely being biological tape recorders.

Me & Folkmusic, Part Five

2007-02-27T05:16:00.001-08:00

As I was saying, when I came back from my tour around Europe I went to work for Yale. Not on the faculty, at least not to teach.

I was going to work for Al Bromley, who was later to be [the elder] Pres. Bush's Science Advisor, to make his new laboratory work. I could talk to the engineers in the lab because they were the kinds of people I had been working with outside of school, I had a Ph.D., so I could talk to the scientists, I had been working for a supplier of scientific equipment (and occasionally selling it), so the vendors couldn't snow me, and my father was a tool&diemaker, so I could talk to the machinists in their own language. The lab went together better than anybody had any right to expect: not because the construction went without mistakes but because we could figure out ways to correct the mistakes.

After the initial round of crises I had time to look around, and I found that there was a bookstore in New Haven that had informal folkmusic gatherings. Later I found out that that was formerly a hangout for John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Ramblers may have gelled there. I started hanging out with a group of people, townies and graduate students, who were interested in "traditional" folk music.

I better say a few words about "traditional" "folkmusic" in the way I use those terms.

When Cecil Sharp took his flivver-&-muleback tour of Appalachia in 1913 through 1916 the people he heard singing and playing were "traditional" "folk" "musicians".

They were musicians because they made music.
 They were "folk" because the music they made had not been influenced by official "classical" or "popular" music for some time, possibly generations.

"Classical" music is academic, and "popular" music is middle-or- low-brow entertainment; but both are created by professionals and performed by professionals. "Folk" musicians may be entertaining themselves or others, but the odds are that the entertainment doesn't stray much from their farm or neighborhood.

Classical music is based on aesthetic principles that are codified in universities, popular music is derived from watered-down classical arrangements of variations on traditional tunes, but the kind of folkmusic that Sharp collected was built on aestrhetic principles that had been traditional in the isolated backwoods settlements for generations. Some of the songs were recognizably in "modes", the medieval mustical structures that had been completely replaced by the notion of "keys" in classical and popular music. The important thing was that to the musicians that Sharp collected this wasn't "a kind of music" to be distinguished from other kinds of music, this was the way music was.

In the late 1920s, in order to market the new phonographs, recordings were made of rural musicians like the Carter Family and Jimmy Rodgers, who would sound familiar to the rural communities. It became possible for people like them to travel around and earn a living by performing their music in meeting-halls. Making these traditional folk performers into professionals blurred the lines between "folk" and "rural-style popular" music. This rural popular music broadened its listener base in World War II and became "County Music". That has spawned enough "crossover" singers with lush arrangement that furthur blurred the lines between country and popular; and that, in turn, stimulated a revival of the earlier rural styles as "roots" music.

The "folk revival" of the 1940s had been stimulated by singers like Burl Ives and political singers like Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie, who were interested in presenting a simple tune and clear words. Any folksong, from any source, American, Irish, Scottish, Jewish, even African, was ground down to a simple tune and clear english words. There was no sense that there was any aesthetic associated with a particular folksong other than American poular or parlor songs of the late 19th century.

Of course 20th century popular music has been powerfully influenced by the traditional music of african americans. From the synchopation of the Ragtime of the late 1800s to the harmonies of the blues, American popular music from the Civil War to Rock and Roll has tried to absorb every variation of African American music and make it acceptable to white audiences.

Folkmusicians of the 1960s revival were no different: to be popular they adapted the instrumentation of a Jazz band and the aesthetic of African-influenced popular music. They were so successful that in the music business "folk" now means music that is in the style of folk-influenced popular musicians of the revival of the late-60s-early-70s period or music that is a little more like country than "soft rock".

Me & Folkmusic, Part Four

2007-02-27T05:09:00.000-08:00

By 1961 I had finished my Ph.D. and was working at an industrial salary for a company on Long Island making research equipment. I was still living at home on the scale of a graduate student so when I read a review in the New York Times of a british folksinger at Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Village I could afford to drive into the city, have dinner at a Levantine Restaurant where George Mgrdichian was playing Oud, and go to Gerde's to be astounded.

There was this young scottish girl who sang the big ballads unaccompanied, with such a crystal clarity that an accompaniment would have been disturbing. She also did comic songs, ceilidh standbys, mouth-music and a hauntingly magical seal song. Nothing before or after has had the effect of my first hearing of Jean Redpath.

It opened up a whole new aesthetic world to me.

My experience of english folksong had been Percy Grainger art-song arrangements, field recordings and Ewan McColl. Jean made me understand that scottish songs, at any rate, could be sung with such artistry that they made lieder take a back seat and yet be consistent with the tradition. Jean is still singing around the circuit and, while neither of us is as young as we were in 1961, hearing her is still an experience that shouldn't be missed.

I haunted Gerde's for a while, and was there when Jean Ritchie made her first appearance in a "bar", along with Doc Watson and Roger Sprung. The repertoires of Doc and Jean overlapped mostly in Carter family stuff which helped me understand American traditional music better.

Roger Sprung also helped me understand that one could be a marvelous instrumentalist and still "not get it".

I kept an eye out for records of british traditional singers (which was mostly Ewan McColl). McColl was born in Scotland in 1915 as "Jimmy Miller". Ewan was a playwright during the 40s, but turned to promoting British traditional music during the 50s folk revival in the UK. With his wife, Peggy Seeger, he produced a series of radio-ballads for the BBC, from which we get "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", "Shoals of Herring", "Sweet Thames Flow Softly", "Dirty Old Town", and "Ballad of Springhill" among others.

While not folksongs in the purest sense, the McColl-Seeger songs could be very catchy. I was driving in Nova Scotia on one rainy night in the area of the Sprinhill mine, and the windshield wiper beat out the Ballad of Springhill for hours.

At the end of 1962 I had a fight with the president of the company I was working for so I arranged to rent a car in Paris in the summer, did a couple of consulting jobs in the spring, and took off.

In London I ran across Colletts record store on Oxford street: a whole store dedicated to nothing but folk and jazz. After arranging to get a king's ransom of records shipped home, I asked the clerk what was happening in folkmusic around town. "This fellow can tell you better than I", she said, and introduced me to Louis Killen.

Louis Killen was born in Durham, outside Newcastle, in 1934. He opened the Folk Song and Ballad club in Newcastle in 1958. He performed on the folk circuit and was living in London in 1963.

For the next couple of weeks I pretty much went to whatever folk club Louis was going and listened rapturously to everything. One evening when Louis was otherwise busy I went to a pub out in nowhere to hear a young man named Martin Carthy, and on another occasion I heard Cyril Tawney. I think I heard four distinct versions of the long ballad "Bonny Bunch of Roses", which is similar to "A Grand Conversation on Napoleon".

Eventually I left for Paris to pick up the rental car, but by then I had learned the tunes of some of Louis' repertoire and scribbled a version of the words, and a smattering of what else was going around. There was no chance that I could sing the grand ballads with Louis' skill because I could barely hear the subtleties of his performance, but Bob Davenport was singing them with vigor rather than decoration and I could always fall back on Sydney Carter's comic songs like "Down Below", the sewer ballad.

I spent the next four months driving around Europe, from Paris to the Norwegian Arctic, to Greece, to Lisbon and back to Paris again. I stayed for a while with relatives in Finland and a couple of weeks with a fellow physicist in Rome, but I only heard a "folk" singing a "folksong" once: in the Tower of Belem a maid was singing "Meninas vamos o vira" while dusting the inside of a massive fireplace.She stopped, embarrassed, when she realized a tourist was in the room. I was charmed, because it was one of the few Portugese folksongs I knew myself.

I had planned another few weeks in Paris and in London, but I had a message waiting that my father had had a heart attack, so I flew back. He survived for a few more years.

Not long after I got a job as Assistant Director of the Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale.

Me & Folkmusic, Part Three

2007-02-27T05:07:00.000-08:00

Pete Seeger was born in New York City in 1919, the son of the eminent musicologist Charles Seeger (1886- 1979), the stepson of composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-53), the nephew of the poet Alan Seeger (1888-1916), and the half brother of Peggy and Mike Seeger. In 1938 Seeger dropped out of Harvard University and traveled through the U.S., singing and collecting songs. He later worked with Alan Lomax on the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song.

Seeger formed the Almanac Singers in 1940 with Woody Guthrie, and the Weavers in 1948. In 1955 he was investigated by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and in 1962 charges against him were dismissed. He later became active in environmental preservation.

Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1912. He traveled throughout the U.S. during the Great Depression, doing odd jobs and singing for a living. Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory was published in 1943. He died in New York City of Huntington's chorea.

I met a fellow in New Haven who claimed to have been in the same Communist Party Cell in Chicago with Pete Seeger and Studs Turkle, but that was unlikely. In any case it was not so much their left-leaning politics as their personal characteristics that made them beloved.

Pete Seeger had a charisma that had to be experienced: he could get any group singing, from upper-middles in a theater to grubbies at a festival.
Woodie's "protest" songs had a human dimension that made them universal, in contrast to the easily-forgotten "See how oppressed I am" imitations. If anything their politics hurt folkmusic more than it helped the left wing.
It is, however, fascinating to see even Republicans singing "This Land is Your Land", which has more to do with agrarian reform than jingoism.
At the same time the scholarly approach was represented by John Lomax, his son Alan, and the people they collected and discovered, like Leadbelly (Hudie Ledbetter).

By the time I graduated from MIT in 1950 McCarthyism had put its dampening hand even on Pete and Woody. In the beginning of 1951 I got drafted for the Korean War and ended up as an enlisted man in a laboratory in Maryland doing classified research on defenses against radiological warfare.

I was in an atmosphere where drawing attention to connections with left wing politics, no matter that the basis of the connection was aesthetic rather than ideological, would have been not only "bad taste" but potentially dangerous. One chemistry Ph.D., a Canadian who let himself get drafted because he wanted US Citizenship, was relegated to Dugway proving ground watching over nerve gas munitions simply because, being Canadian, he couldn't get a clearance.

I was not about to encourage the FBI to pore over my connection with The People's Bookstore in Boston or People Songs.

By 1953 I had done my service but, being broke, agreed to work for the Army for a year to put some money in my pocket. In 1954 I entered graduate school at Columbia. Living with my parents on Long Island and studying nuclear physics in the late '50s under the Korean War GI Bill was difficult because the GI Bill didn't even fully pay the tuition. I spent most of my spare time working as a consultant in the aerospace industry on Long Island.

I did manage to attend some "lecture- demonstrations" done for Columbia's adult education program: six were by Pete Seeger and another six by Joseph Marais and his wife, Miranda. Before the war Marais had been doing a radio program that featured South African (Boer) folkmusic. Marais and Miranda had met while doing propaganda broadcasts during the War, and their repertoire as a couple was more European than African. This enabled them to avoid the question of apartheid, which would have made their liberal audiences uncomfortable.

Folkmusic recordings were not to be found in the ordinary record store, but I was living with my parents in Hempstead, L. I.., where a record store was started by a fellow known as "Swede" Olsen. He had some scandinavian dance music records and, as we got more friendly, he would point out "world music" records he thought I would be interested in.

I did buy one Folkways record during this period: an exchange student singing swedish folksongs. I learned one and sang it to my mother who said "Where did you learn your grandfather's favorite song?" But not many american folksingers knew swedish, and fewer audiences understood it.
At that time (say 1957-60) Vanguard issued a couple of collections of field recordings made in england and scotland (edited by Ken Goldstein), and also a collection of songs from the 1959 Newport Festival. That had one cut of a gospel song done by a moderately well-known singer named Bob Gibson, together with an unknown young woman with a remarkable voice: Joan Baez.

Me & Folkmusic, Part Two

2007-02-25T07:55:00.000-08:00

Why the music was available through a communist front bookstore and not through the usual channels is an interesting story.

During the thirties and forties nobody in particular was interested in folk music except scholars and communists.

There were a few scholars following in the tradition of Francis James Child [1825-1896]. He was a philologist, born in Boston. a professor at Harvard from 1851 to 1896 and an authority on the ballad. His best known books are:

English and Scottish Ballads (1857-58) and
English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1883-98).

His canon of (indexed) groups of related ballads ["The Child Ballads"] were regarded as the be-all-and-end-all of British Folk Art for many years.

Cecil James Sharp [1859-1924] is the other big name in British folksong scholarship. Born in London, he practiced law in Australia but returned to England in 1892 as a music teacher. He was music master at Ludgrove School and principal of Hampstead Conservatory . From 1903 he collected and published many native English folk songs and dances in:

Folk Songs from Somerset (1904-09),
The Morris Book (1907-13),
The Country Dance Book (1909-22), and
English Folk Songs (1932).

He founded the English Folk Dance Society (1911) and initiated the teaching of folk song and dance in English schools. He is particularly important in American folk music scholarship because during 1916-18 he collected folk songs and dances of English origin in the Appalachian Mountains; thus proving that british folk culture survived in the American backwoods.

Child saw the ballads as "literature" and was so disinterested in the tunes that his massive compilation has very few hints that the ballads were actually sung. Sharp was mainly interested in "preserving" the bare bones of the tunes so that they could be incorporated in schoolbooks and preserved by being sung in school classrooms with cleaned-up words. The bare tunes and the words, if they were clean enough, were enough for Sharp.

The communists felt much the same way. They had decided that the way to get to "the people" was to use "the people's art" as a vehicle for propaganda. In the Soviet Union the party encouraged the performance of folk music and dance by organizing large professional companies of dancers and singers to perform it in theaters. The Red Army Chorus made international tours when other functionaries were forbidden a sight of the outside world.

The American Communist Party felt that they should encourage the tradition made famous by "Joe Hill" of the Wobblies.

"Joe Hill" was a labor agitator and songwriter born Joel Hoegglund in Sweden in 1879. He was also known as "Joseph Hillstrom" and "Joe Hill". He came to the US around 1901 and became active in the Industrial Workers of the World (The IWW or Wobblies) around 1910. He worked in strike organization and contributed to the IWW journals "Industrial Worker" and "Solidarity". Some of his songs such as "The Preacher and the Slave", "There is Power in a Union", and "The Rebel Girl" became widely popular. In 1914 he was arrested, convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence, and after numerous appeals, was executed for murder. This made him a hero (and saint) of the radical labor movement.

The Industrial Workers of the World advocated the Marxist theory of class struggle between workers and capitalists. Its early policy was one of direct action [propaganda, strikes, boycotts, and sabotage] rather than more indirect political means such as arbitration and collective bargaining. The aim of the IWW was to include in its membership the entire industrial population of the U.S. The IWW was at the peak of its strength in 1912, with a membership of about 10,000. [See Jack London's The Iron Heel for attitudes of the time.]

Between 1906 and 1917 the IWW carried out a number of strikes that were violent on both sides. Among these strikes were the miners' strike at Goldfield, Nev. (1906-07), TRIG the textile workers' strike at Lawrence, Mass. (1912), and the silk workers' strike at Paterson, N.J. (1913).

The union opposed the entrance of the U.S. into World War I. The losses sustained by wartime prosecution, by the subsequent action of several states in prohibiting "criminal syndicalism," and by the action of many IWW members in joining the American Communist party after its formation (1919-21), caused a decline in union membership. Thereafter, the IWW ceased to play a prominent part in the labor movement, and was dispersed. In recent years it existed as an office in Chicago where one could order copies of its "Little Red Songbook" containing the Joe Hill "Top Hits".

The political aspect of the post-World-War-II left-radical support of folkmusic peaked with the campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948. Wallace represented the far left wing of the Democratic Party, opposed to Harry Truman's centrist position. Strom Thurmond represented the far right (southern) wing and, with the Democratic Party split three ways, the Republican Thomas Dewey (a former DA and Governor of New York) figured on a shoo-in; leading to the famous picture of a victorious Truman holding a Chicago Tribune with the headline "Dewey Wins".

I had been sympathetic with the Wallace campaign because of its use of folksingers and folkmusic in the campaign, but Wallace was unrealistically far left for an american politician and lost. It made for a fascinatingly close election, which obscured the complete rout of the left wing.

The loss caused Wallace's party to break up into a far left wing that took over an older party called the American Labor Party (with no strength except in New York) which subsequently followed the Soviet line a bit too obviously, and a moderate left-wing group that kept the Progressive Party name for a while and formed the far left wing of the Democratic Party.

After McCarthy's Unamerican Activities Committee began making leftist connections uncomfortable even a stalwart publication like "People's Songs" faded into a folkie fan magazine called "Sing Out"; and folkmusic dropped out of mainstream american politics in my lifetime.

In the early fourties, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, Burl Ives, John Hammond, Lee Hays, Alan Lomax, Irwin Silber and others had been looking for a new way to carry on the folk tradition. According to Joe Klein, Seeger suggested a loose-knit union of songwriters who would stage occasional performances and provide songs for unions and other progressive groups. It would be ecumenical enough to include some less radical sorts like Oscar Brand, Tom Glazer, and Josh White. In 1946, they began to publish "The People's Songs Bulletin". People's Songs was forced to close in 1949 by the prevailing uncomfortable atmosphere.

It was revived in 1950, as Sing Out! with a not so obvious left radical orientation. It remains as a folkmusic journal but it never had any political significance.

Curiously, the influence of the radical left on American Folkmusic was quite strong but, in a characteristically American way, it was through the actions of individuals rather than organizations. Two people, the charismatic Pete Seeger and the poet Woody Guthrie, came out of this "progressive" movement to make themselves saints and heros of the American Folkmusic revival.

However, like the earlier scholars and educators, Seeger and Guthrie were less interested in the tunes and musical styles than the literary content. Guthrie would use any handy folk or country tune that fit the poetic thought; and Seeger molded all the music to fit his banjo technique and his ability to get people singing. It was Seeger's younger half-brother who was to set the folkmusic revival moving in a different direction.

Me & Folkmusic, Part One

2007-02-25T07:46:00.000-08:00

In a sense I learned my first folksongs very early, but they were in swedish and I didn't relearn them until many years later.

"I" am Karl Eklund, the guy described in the sidebar, and a memoir of my life is not terribly interesting, except that I got involved in "American Folk Music" during the revivals of the 1940s andthe 1960s, when "folk music" was regarded as something primitive rather than being a type of popular music characterized by having the performer claim tohave composed the music and written the lyrics. The transition from objects of scholarship to popular music is somewhat interesting, and not many people remember it any more.

As I said, I learned some swedish folksongs early. I was born to an immigrant couple who had come from Finland and were living in The Bronx. So I usually date my discovery of "folk music' [as a thing separate from all the other harmonious noises] as being in Evander Childs High School, in the Bronx, in 1945-6.

There were actually two strains of folk music but I didn't connect them up till much later. One strain was the songs we learned to sing in assembly. They included things like "La Paloma", from the Argentine, and "Chee Lai", the Maoist anthem from the Chinese partisans. You can hear Paul Robeson singing "Chee Lai" in concert style.

It was toward the end of World War Two, the notion of the United Nations was in the air and we were all very much into international cooperation. We learned songs from other countries on "our side", i.e., russian and chinese rather than german and japanese. In only a couple of years Nixon and McCarthy would learn that it was politically profitable to be anti- communist and songs like Chee Lai and other anti-fascist partisan songs would be banned from the curriculum.

The other strain of folkmusic was unofficial. In our High School we had a traditional "Senior Day" when seniors wore silly costumes featuring the school colors (orange and black) and wise teachers figured out something that would keep us from being disruptive. Our economics teacher brought in some records from his private collection: Josh White, Burl Ives and a group called "The Almanac Singers" who had an album (78s came in real albums) called "Talking Union". He played the title talking blues from that album and grabbed the pickup just before the singer said, about the boss, "He's a ......".

I naturally had to get a copy (from Macy's as I remember) and find out that the next word was "bastard". Later, I would find out that the Almanacs were the singers later known as "The Weavers" plus Woody Guthrie and others not identified.

There wasn't much of this folkmusic to be had in normal channels in the mid-fourties, but Moe Asch (who later produced "Folkways" records) was putting some things out on the Stinson and Asch labels in 78rpm, there were a couple of albums by Josh White, Richard Dyre-Bennett had recorded some delicate english songs and ballads that sounded more like leider, Joseph Marais had a radio program singing South African (Boer) folk songs, and there was always Burl Ives.

By the time I went away to MIT I had a fair collection of 78rpm albums. I also had some odd singles that I had picked up used on The Avenue of the Americas [which we still thought of as Sixth Avenue]; russian army songs, arabic solos, a version of "Romania, Romania" in theatrical yiddish by Aaron Lebedov that I can still hear in my minds ear. I had learned about these records, and where to get them, from an early evening radio program by Henry Morgan, a very funny fellow who played even funnier records. He didn't call them folk music, though. It is what is now called "World Music" anything that is traditionally styled pop from another country.

When I was at MIT I was involved in the campus radio station and, one year, had two folk music programs per week: one using records and one live show. Dick and Beth Best (whose book of song words and chords satisfied the need for group singing in the '50s) ran the Outing Club and had occasional singing gatherings that let me recruit performers.

Folkmusic records could still be found at reasonable prices at "The People's Book Store" near Boston's chinatown. Like the dozen or so firms called "People's This" and "People's That" with offices in the Little Building on the same corridor as the Communist Party, USA, it was undoubtedly what was then called a "front" organization. Harvard students used to go there for cheap copies of Das Capital and the Manifesto.

I was generally broke and record albums weren't cheap at best, so I was always peeved at Moe Asch because when vinyl lps came in he priced his Folkways records at $1 more than the usual records and never discounted. Since I was a student and broke I never got many. I got a chance to bitch at his son years later, when we met in London, but I'm sure he had no idea what I was talking about.

There were interesting records in the MIT and Harvard libraries (Harvard had the Library of Congress 78s) but they were reference and couldn't be borrowed.

Hero & Sage: Folksong as Pastoral

2007-02-24T06:54:00.000-08:00

THE HERO AND THE SAGE: The Folk Music Revival As Pastoral

Contemporary popular art certainly isn't "folk art" by any definition; nor does it have the pretentions of being fine art. But that doesn't mean we can't learn anything from it, because sometimes it says something that resonates with our basic feelings. The kind of thing that Jung would have said hit on an archetype that was lodged in our collective unconscious.

This summer, amidst the myriad bombs at the movie box office was one real financial success that made a new superstar: the movie was The Empire Strikes Back and the superstar was Yoda, the Jedi master.

That the second Star Wars movie was box office was perhaps to be expected--but Yoda? Admittedly he has a lot of personal charm, perhaps best described by thinking of him as a cross between Kermit the Frog and Mr. Spock. With improvements: he still lives in the swamp that Kermit gave up for his trenchcoat and microphone, and his ears have a vitality and expressiveness that Spock's never aspired to. He is an absolute technical triumph of muppetry and Frank Oz deserves an oscar by acclamation.

But there is also something more, something that draws us to this confrontation between Yoda and Luke Skywalker. Luke has come to the swamp to learn to use the Force, and to do that he has to seek Yoda in his dismal hole. But if Yoda lives bodily in muck his mind travels the universe freely--while Luke, normally at home amidst the full plethora of super modern technology and the blessings of interplanetary civilization, is so mired in behavioral patterning that he drops his training at the first opportunity for meaningless heroics.

It is an ancient theme, this interaction of hero and sage: the Zen annals resound with deaf samurai asking Roshis questions they don't really want answered, western fairy tales tell again and again of heros who won't listen because they have to learn the hard way.

But what has this to do with the folk music revival? Consider, if you will, a similar contrast: the folk-rock "star" always on the move with their complement of groupies burdened with the latest monstrous bit of electronic technology, needing the artificial excitement of uppers when not being adored on stage and of the chemical surcease of downers when they can't stand being up; and the archetypical revivalist. playing at the local ceilidh or backyard festival, welcomed and admired for their understanding of the nuances of the music wherever the "pros" gather but content to stay home and cultivate their garden most of the time.

The Beach Boys, say, or the Kingston Trio contrasted with....well, 1 won't mention his [her] name but you know who I mean. They are here at the Eisteddfod.

The question is: Why do so many of the "stars" burn out, while the laidback, low key traditional revivalists seem to go on forever? Is there something of the sage that they have captured that gives them a long. full life compared to the short blaze and cold ashes of the hero? If there is we ought to at least know what is going on so we can make the choice consciously.

The key can be found, oddly enough, in a book of literary criticism: in Some Versions Of Pastoral[New York: New Directions, 1950] by William Empson. Empson, of course, never talks about the folk-revival...the closest he comes is in talking about the proletarian novels of the twenties. But he does talk about the hero and the sage; and particularly of the pastoral swain as sage and savior. He said "the essential trick of the old pastoral...was to make simple people express...something fundamentally true...in learned and fashionable language [so that you wrote about the best subject in the best way.]"..."the simple man becomes a clumsy fool who yet has better "sense" than his betters and can say things more fundamentally true; he is 'in contact with nature', which the complex man needs to be...; he is in contact with the mysterious forces of our own nature, so that the clown has the wit of the unconscious; he can speak the truth because he has nothing to lose". "The usual process for putting further meanings into the pastoral situation was to insist that the shepherds were rulers of sheep...; this piled the heroic convention onto the pastoral one, since the hero was another symbol of his whole society. "

On that basis it is certainly true that the style of the folk-revival is pastoral. Our preferred art-forms are those of isolated rural communities hidden away from contemporary civilization. Our uniform is, more often than not, the farmer's blue jeans and work shirt or bib overall, the more worn and faded [impoverished] the better. Some of us [I indude myself] have gone so far as to actually farm the land; often with no more modern techniques and implements than our grandfathers might have known. Others have revived the handwork of previous generations and bring our products to festivals like the Eisteddfod to hawk them personally to those who must get their homespun and homemade at second hand.

And still, many of us can, and will, discourse on these arts and crafts in the language of the university: the middle-class mark of Cain bequeathed us by our middle class parents. What is this if not pastoral in Empson's sense? Pastoral lived rather than the basis for literary construction, but pastoral none the less. Is this anything more than the pastoral of the french court before the revolution, when the Louis' and their Marie Antoinettes dressed as Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses? Is there some kind of method to our....well, not "madness" perhaps, but eccentricity at the very least? What significance does a real- life pastoral have?

We get a hint about this in Alfred Toynbee's monumental Study Of History[London:Oxford, 1939-1956]. Toynbee compared the American colonies--in particular, comparing Massachusetts with the Carolinas. The Carolinas had the obvious advantages, better land, better weather, better financed colonization: they had everything going for them and yet they became a cultural and economic backwater until the last couple of decades. Massachusetts had nothing going for it: rocky soil, bitter winters, colonization by impoverished religious refugees; and yet it became the cradle of the American political and industrial revolutions. From this, and other examples, he enunciated a "Principle of Compensation" that said the more challenges you had to face [assuming that they weren't so bad as to completely exhaust you-- his example of that was Maine] the more you had the less you did with what you had.

Toynbee didn't take this principle into our individual private lives, but it makes sense. One of the persistent items of American folklore is the notion of the "poor little rich kid"--the spoiled brat who has everything on a silver platter and all it does is to make him a rich, obnoxious nebbish at best; a complete failure at being human. Whether this happens all the time isn't the point: we do believe it happens, and it is one of those myths that reenact the way we think about ourselves. It is the opposite side of the coin from the Abraham Lincoln myth: the kid who goes from the log cabin to the White House. That doesn't happen every time, either; but it forms part of the myth. "Them as has" make little of it: "Them as don't" make the most of themselves. Is this realistic? Or is it just a holdover from Victorian propaganda meant to glorify the entrepreneur and keep the proletariat from unionizing? We are beginning to see, from anthropological research, that there is more to it than a capitalist's Horatio Alger con-game.

The primitive hunter-gatherer tribe works on a basis of strong conformity, and that makes a lot of sense. Those with more give their surplus to those without in a kind of primitive communism. It makes for survival, because that kind of tribe doesn't have a surplus on the average; so if everything isn't shared out many of the tribe might starve and then nobody'd survive. Besides, our evolutionary edge over the other primates is vocal language: we can talk and throw a rock at the same time while they have to use body language. Even educated apes like Washoe have to use sign language to talk.

Speech gives us the advantage of culture: we can learn from others and don't have to invent being human from scratch. But to do that requires a degree of conformity that the other animals wouldn't dream of: as the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel points out, we can only be human if we all speak the same language. So even if we aren't in a primitive tribe where we will get teased back to normality when we get uppity we get a feeling of anxiety when we get above ourselves. We can make up rationalizations or fantasies that we deserve to be better, or some such nonsense, like thinking that people of one skin color are better than another, but that's just a way of compensating by screwing up our heads. We have an unconscious need to be "equal on the average".

There were two people in the primitive tribe who weren't equal: the shaman and the warchief. Or, to give them the titles they got in later mythology, the. Sage and the Hero. The Shaman had to know more and have more power over disease. and weather, and the scarcity of game, and what have you. The War chief had to be able to boss the war-party around under conditions where there wasn't enough time to talk about things and reach a consensus by discussion. But the principle of compensation wasn't repealed for them: they just paid for their powers in different ways.

The Hero paid by being in the forefront of the battle--he was the first one in the fight, not like the present behind-the-lines generals. He took the most risks and counted the most coup. If he got the most glory out of it he did so at the price of dying young. He was "one-up" on the warband in that he had the power to boss them around; but he was certainly "one-down" if you value coming back alive. He was"equal on the average".

The Shaman paid a different price. Often a Tungut shaman didn't get the "call" to become a shaman until he had survived a case of smallpox, or a siege of epilepsy. Even after that, like the Eskimo shaman, he might go out and fast alone in the Arctic midnight. Even when a shaman candidate was recognized young he had a long and demanding training and [as Carlos Castaneda tells us] an initiation carrying the risks of madness or death. If the Hero paid for being "one-up" on demand; the Shaman paid in advance. And it is the shaman's technique that provides the sense behind pastoral.

The pastoral swain, the wise fool, the Shakespearian clown, gain their powers from being socially "one-down" from the level of ordinary people; just as the Hero must be "one-up" to exert his leadership. If the Hero's uniform is golden armor [or a white lincoln convertible] the Sage's uniform is a tattered robe and a shepherd's crook. By being one down the pastoral swain is allowed to be more in tune with nature, and his own nature, wiser in the human values if poorer in the status symbols of the "normal" culture of his place and time.

And this is precisely the kind of symbolism that the folk-revival flaunts'. We do not listen to politicians or kings; but to the ordinary members of peasantry and proletariat. We do not learn from begowned literati and eminent divines; we sit at the feet of farmers and housewives and backwoods preachers. We do not listen to opera and symphony but to the music coming out of rural kitchen windows and the open doors of backstreet fancy-houses. We admire, and emulate, the culture that in the "normal" values of our time an;l place is nothing if not "one-down".

But what do we get from it? Well, some of us may use the pastoral role to become more in tune with nature; others to be more in tune with their own nature, freeing them from the"normal" anxiety over status and success. Some may choose the role to allow them to criticize the normal culture: Woody Guthrie and his emulators are certainly being what Empson would recognize as "pastoral swain as savior".

Most of us are not even aware that our involvement in the folk-revival is a "role" in any sense: we just know that we have been drawn to it because it satisfies some need. We don't need to know how it works so long as it saves our minds from the corrosion of middle-class values and enables us to tolerate our lives. And some of us use it as a vehicle to cruse the Hero route: but most of us aren't attracted to the kind of hero's payment that was collected from Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix and Richard Farina and legions who paid less noticeably. We prefer the shaman's technique: we stay quietly in our swamps.

This is certainly not to say that everybody who is involved with the folk-revival is a sage: we can look around and test that one ourselves. But we can also look around and compare the folkies we know, particularly those who live the pastoral role most completely, and compare them to the straight, success and status oriented, anxiety-ridden middle-class people we also have to deal with: bureaucrats and businessmen, professors and policemen and politicians. We can then decide who we prefer to be with: the pastoral swain or the striver after middle-class heroism.

PS: I'm still alive and writing after having had my 79th birthday, possibly because I've never had any public recogniion. We don't farm any more, though.

Yankee Ingenuity

2007-02-24T06:53:00.001-08:00

For the last couple of years one of the features of the Eisteddfod has been a ''craft fair", which provides an opportunity for craftsmen to exhibit, and sell, their wares. This has proved to be popular with the people who come to the Eisteddfod and also with the craftsmen; so we expect that it will be a permanent part of the festivities. The only trouble with a ''fair'' of this kind is that it has a necessarily commercial aspect.
This is no objection, because craftsmen have to sell their wares; either to support themselves or at least to have their craft pay for itself so it isn't just an expensive hobby. But it does tend to take the focus away from the prime purpose of the Eisteddfod, which is the passing on of traditional arts and crafts from person to person. As we say elsewhere, without the learning it might be fun but it wouldn't be the Eisteddfod.

This year, to supplement the fair, we are going to have workshops in which the crafts can be demonstrated; and also a gallery exhibit of both contemporary and antique examples of craftsmanship. But this raised an interesting question. The craft fair is not a judged show: we try to encourage craftsmen whose products fit the traditional theme of the Eisteddfod, but we have not yet actually rejected a craftsman's application on the grounds that what he wanted to show wasn't good enough or wasn't the right thing. We have been lucky, because that allowed us to avoid the question of just what ''craftsmanship'' consists of.

But an exhibit is a whole other thing: the essence of an exhibit is that some things are shown and others aren't. So we had to ask ourselves "What is American Craftsmanship anyway?".

The word itself is not unambiguous; the word "crafty" has a decidedly sneaky connotation. In fact the word is common in the teutonic languages and means ''strength'' or ''force''---it is only in English that is got the meaning of a skill or art. Even then the word seems to have had an occult sense earlier than a practical one; even now the skill of a craftsman seems half magical to those who don't have it.

In more modern usage the use of the word to refer to activities needing little skill has made it derogatory: "artsy-craftsy" is a real put-down. But ''craftsmanship'' still has enough positive meaning that it can be used (with more or less honesty) in commercial advertisements.

There tends to be a bit of snobbery in the way we use the word, the feeling that what We are doing is more significant, more seriously aesthetic, than making little animals by gluing glass marbles together. Still---I'd prefer to think that it isn't all snobbery; that a work of craftsmanship is something more than just something made "by hand". Maybe even more than something that is very well made by hand. If so, What is it?

Let's go to the exhibit and look at two banjos hanging side by side. Both are "collector's items", maybe even rare ones, by the accident of time; but they are quite different. One is made by Vega and labeled ''Regent'', evidently made to sell in Wurlitzer's Boston music store as a house brand, probably in the teens and twenties. The other is merely labeled "The New Yorker" and looks to be a copy of a turn-of-the-century Stewart.
They are made quite differently. The Regent is a student grade banjo---sturdy neck, solid, durable wooden rim with a metal tone ring, and with a minimum of decoration. The New Yorker is much more lightly constructed: its head is stretched over nickeled sheet metal spun onto a thin wooden rim; but the light, gracefully formed neck is decoratively laminated, has inlays on the tuner and carving on the stock.

Obviously the effort on the Regent has gone into making a sturdy instrument with reliable good tone; whereas The New Yorker has sacrificed durability (its neck and rim are both a bit warped because of their light construction) for visual aesthetics. Neither the inlay nor the sculptured neck add anything to the sound of the instrument; but its maker obviously felt that the effort was worth it in that it would find a buyer who valued visual over musical aesthetics.

Richard Dyer-Bennet once told me about a guitar-maker who I'll call ''Trabajo''. The patriarch of the clan made some fine guitars (while his sons and nephews concentrated on producing a student guitar made of plywood that was practically indestructible) but he did not himself play the guitar past a few arpeggios necessary for demonstration. As a result, the only way he had of putting a price on a guitar was by considering the amount of work he put into it.

Dick said that if you dug around in the Trabajo workshop showroom and played all the guitars you could usually find a good guitar that cost less and sounded better than the ''top of the line."

This illustrates two different styles of craftsmanship that, for want of better terms, I am going to call "European" and "American." European craftsmanship ship values ''workmanship'', which is to say the amount of effort put into the product, even if that effort is put into rococo decoration. American craftsmanship values function over decoration. The Trabajo family can illustrate both styles because we children of immigrants will often be aggressively American in ways the Yankee takes for granted.
In a sense these labels are prejudiced. The American urban upper-middle class have always been "European" in this way---sometimes excessively so. After all, the European aristocracy merely needed to remind everyone that they could command the kind of labor that workmanship entails; in America upward-mobility created the need to display one's status conspicuously. We still show our devotion to this European tradition in the way we value decor over function in such status symbols as automobiles.

Conversely. the style I call American has always been present in rural crafts in Europe. Only in America, however, did the combined factors of a seemingly limitless territorial expansion and the explosive development of the industrial revolution make a rural style into a national one.
''Rural'' does not mean ''badly done''. 1 live in a rural house, framed in local oak, morticed and trunneled, and now in its third century. [ photo]If anything about the house doesn't survive into the fourth century it is likely to be the parts added in this century out of milled lumber fastened with nails. The balloon-framed house superseded the post-and-beam house not because it was better but because there was a shortage of house carpenters in the new western territories The farmer who had never made a mortised joint could order a set of precut lumber from a city mill and have it shipped by rail to the nearest whistlestop; then put it up himself.
Now that the traditional revival includes craftsmanship we are seeing a revival of I the post-and-beam house; as witness the ads in Mother Earth News and Yankee Magazine.

But if it is sturdy there is little fancy-work in our house---even the parlor paneling is a kind of shiplap and the cupboard inserted above the fireplace is severely functional. It represents a kind of craftsmanship that had to be reintroduced to us from Europe---Mies van der Rohe's Bauhaus dicta of "Form follows function" and "Less is more." The difference is that in modern European tradition these had to be introduced as theoretical aesthetic principles; in early America they were not set by theory but by the situation. There was simply not enough time and effort available for frippery. . Things had to work, and you made them work the best and simplest way you knew how.

But this didn't mean that you made things that were bad to look at. Among the exhibits are some forged ironware for the kitchen: a spoon and some tongs for breaking loaf sugar. Isolated from their uses they are like small items of statuary; but they worked, and still work. The carpenter's scale, square and miter gauge have their fastenings and points of wear reinforced with brass; and the contrast between the brass and the walnut of the handles and the gray steel blades is particularly satisfactory.
With all that, nothing on these pieces is of the nature of superfluous decoration. The epitome of this kind of American craftsmanship is that associated with the Shakers.

Every item of Shaker manufacture, from cheese boxes to clothes presses, shares this economy of design; but the Shaker chair is perhaps the most characteristic. The Shakers sat to eat, during worship (and not always then, because they believed in dancing before the Lord) and at such work as absolutely required sitting. Between times the chairs were hung from pegs on the wall to eliminate the temptation to indolence. A Shaker chair thus had to be strong, because it was expected to last under use, but it had to be light, so that it could be easily lifted and hung. The design6n solution that satisfies these criteria and is still relatively simple to make has of itself a timeless beauty.

It did not, unfortunately, have to be comfortable to sit in: because sitting as a recreation was not part of the Shaker lifestyle. That, incidentally, tells us something very important: that the function that the form should follow is dependent on the social environment in which it is used, and that may not be the way we would expect to use it. One does not watch television or read novels in a Shaker chair. But that doesn't affect our viewpoint on the style of the craftsmanship.

The chairs in the cottages of the Gilded Age, like The Breakers in Newport, were meant to be looked at and admired for what they cost. They are not comfortable to sit in either. The Shakers and The Breakers provide another interesting comparison: in order to produce the costly decoration of the gilded cottages various craftsmen had to be imported from Europe; while the invention of the circular saw is attributed to a Shaker, and a female Shaker at that. (Considering that many of us still begrudge women mechanical ability, this is a particularly striking example even if it was a reinvention.)

What it indicates is that while European crafts remained handcrafts, the essence of American craftsmanship was not isolated from the industrial revolution. It was, in fact, industrial development that absorbed much of the creative energy of American craftsmen. One can see this in the early textile machinery preserved for us by such institutions as the Slater Mill Museum in nearby Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The wooden frames, reinforced by metal inserts, are of the same family as the carpenter's square mentioned earlier. Divorced from their function they too can be seen as statuary---mobiles, in fact.

But they should not be divorced from their function, which was to supply a rapidly increasingly American population with textiles at a price and volume that could never have been supplied by a cottage industry of hand looms. This mechanical evolution transferred the need for craftsmanship from the finished product to the machine that made that product; and the need for the finest craftsmanship to the machine that made that machine- the lathes and millers, drill presses and shapers we call machine tools.
The historic importance of the Slater Mill is not only that it was an early textile factory, but that it developed in conjunction with the shop of David Wilkinson, who developed the screw cutting lathe and is called 'the father of the machine tool industry".

But if the factory produced the necessities for American expansion, the factory system had, and has, severe drawbacks. There must have been considerable satisfaction for the Wilkinsons and Slaters when they finally got their balky machines to work; but there wasn't much for the mill-hands who kept them running. It is a yet unappreciated result of modern technology that the mill-hand is obsolete. (Organized labor and corporate management are slow to see this because when the mill-hand finally goes they will, too. Like the Luddites they seek to spit against the wind.)
In many areas of production the processes are so standardized that even toolmaking goes by the book: creative satisfaction is limited to those who write the computer programs. Between the automatic machinery that takes the joy out of making things and the bureaucracy that takes the joy out of doing business most of us get little satisfaction out of earning a living. A situation which has had some effect on the revival of the handcrafts.
But that is a recent development. While it was certainly true that America had no monopoly on the industrial revolution (the screw-cutting lathe, for instance, was independently and almost simultaneously invented in England and France) we certainly acted as if we did. Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee bringing inventions to the benighted English may have been pure jingoist propoganda, but it suited our image of ourself, (and, incidentally, Europe's image of us), as a classless innocent bumpkin riding a machine.

If it was a myth that each of Napoleon's troopers had a Field Marshall's baton in his knapsack, it was equally a myth that every American mechanic had a world-shaking invention up his sleeve. But some of them did.
The turning point came with Eli Whitney, not merely because his cotton gin made cheap textiles possible (and slavery economic) but because he developed the mass-production of small-arms at the Springfield Armory. Till then the factory had been a building housing a convenient collection of machines. The final product was generally built by one man laboriously cutting and filing pieces to fit till he could assemble it as a whole. In the assembly line each worker makes just one part, and makes it precisely to predetermined standards, so that the whole can be assembled from parts selected at random; parts which need no final fitting or adjustment. This is a process that is obviously unsuited for making one of anything; it is only efficient if you have to make a lot of whatever it is. This means big sales, big marketing, big capital investment in plant and equipment---in a word, big business.

This, in turn, means that one particular consumer doesn't matter too much---it is the "market' that counts, and the market, which is the least common denominator of many consumers, is interested in cheapness. This created a new twist on Mies' principle of "form following function" - - the function that form followed was not that of the final use, but of ease of manufacture. Make it cheaply enough, they figured, and it doesn't matter if it doesn't last very long. It doesn't even matter if some of them don't work when they come right off the production line. They can always throw it away and get another one.

Curiously, this also brought on a revival of rococo decoration. When you build something of cast iron the molds, usually of sand, have rough surfaces and there are inevitable voids or bubbles in the surface of the casting. If you cover the surface with decoration this is a lot less obvious. It took considerable sophistication in the rolling and forming of sheet metal before manufacturers could afford to display large areas of smooth surface on their products: to get a subtly curved roof on an automobile requires a press the size of a building.

It was late in the industrial revolution before Mies' other proverb, "less is more', could practically be rediscovered and applied as theoretical aesthetics rather than the result of necessity.

This has led directly to the revival of craftsmanship. When the design of a consumer product is determined by the convenience of the manufacturer rather than the use by the consumer it doesn't work well and it doesn't last long. This is acceptable as long as it is a cheap throwaway. But cheapness is relative: you can reduce the cost of labor by mechanization, but in an economy where the cost of energy and raw materials rises faster than labor mass production doesn't save very much. You end up with expensive shoddy goods rather than cheap shoddy goods. It then makes sense to go back to labor-intensive rather than energy intensive processes because expensive high-quality goods have an obvious advantage over expensive shoddy goods.

The small craftsman, operating by hand or with a few machines that are merely updated versions of the ones in Wilkinson's shop, and selling to a local market that doesn't require too much promotion, can easily compete with the topheavy multinational corporation in selected areas.

Sometimes, however, the vagaries of an industrial economy can lead to a satisfactory solution: an item of manufacture that is both cheap and useful. A case in point is Zimmerman's Autoharp.

The Autoharp began with a fight for principle. Zimmerman was convinced that the only thing standing in the way of our becoming musical virtuosos was an archaic system of notation. He invented his own system, and was discouraged that no one paid the slightest attention. He had a precedent, after all, since shape-notes were just the same kind of inventive musical notation and they are still being used to print books of gospel songs.

But Zimmerman lacked the backing of a religious revival and went in another direction: he invented a kind of semiautomatic zither that would play according to his notation. He made and sold them in Philadelphia from the early 1880's to 1895. (Incidentally, nobody paid any attention to Zimmerman's notation then, either, nor have they since.)

In that year free trade nearly ruined Arthur Dolge. He was a manufacturer of piano parts. He made almost everything but the cast iron frames and outer cases: he sold wire, felt, ivory keys and the internal mechanisms to American piano manufacturers. In 1895 the tariff was removed from cheap imported pianos (like Steinway) and they flooded the market.

Dolge saw Zimmerman's autoharp as a small piano without a cast iron frame, bought the rights, and within a few weeks was making 2000 a week. From that point till the introduction of the phonograph in the 1920s the autoharp and its equally ingenious competitors provided cheap and satisfactory musical instruments to sunday schools and backwoods cabins. He enabled the Carters and the Stonemans and the Snows to develop distinctive regional and individual styles of playing an indigenous American musical instrument; which would not have been possible without the expression of American craftsmanship through industrial production .

As Dolge's factory was dependent on volume sales it failed with the introduction of the phonograph, which provided music in the home with even less effort than the autoharp. But by making possible permanent records of the Carters and Stonemans the phonograph preserved a homemade musical tradition by freezing it; and it never quite killed the autoharp. The patents passed to other hands who could survive with lower production quotas; and it was produced in much the same form from the twenties to the folk revival of the sixties.

Then the increase in demand enabled the manufacturer to redesign them to take advantage of modern technology (aluminum and plastic) in a style reminiscent of the molded plywood furniture of the early forties and a price 50 to 100 times that asked by Arthur Dolge.

Musical instruments make interesting examples, not only because they are a bridge between the craft and musical aspects of the Eisteddfod but because they lie on the borderline between the craftsman and the factory. The exhibits include two casket-shaped guitars made by Nick Appolonio in the sixties, when he was starting as a lutanist. He soon found, however, that after he was able to build up an investment in jigs and fixtures it was no harder to make guitars in the more usual shape, and they had better acceptance. Guitar building, it would seem, is inherently a 'factory' operation; even if the factory has only one employee and the capital investment in plant is fairly elementary.

Banjos are still made at home by individual craftsmen, but they are now made for a market of fanciers of the antique: either for the decorative shape or the antique sound. The basic requirement for a banjo is a membrane that stays in position relative to the neck. In the homemade banjo that is generally accomplished by putting a small membrane in a disc-shaped wooden frame (several varieties of which have been described in the Foxfire books).

This is a limitation on the amount and quality of the sound produced, so the factory banjo has its membrane stretched over a hoop like a drumhead. Two of the exhibits show this technique in an interesting comparison--one is obviously handmade and is similar in construction to banjos shown in paintings of the 1850s, the other is equally obviously factory-made, but has the same details, from the shield shaped brackets to the red paint inside the hoop. It seems likely that one was made as a copy of the other, but which came first?

As the banjo evolved as a band instrument improvements were directed toward more volume of sound: steel instead of gut strings, tighter head membranes (which required sturdier construction) and the addition of sound reflectors (called resonators). This led to the use of laminated wooden hoops and, more recently, cast metal finely machined; techniques which are obviously more suited to factory than home workshop production.

Inventiveness was then pointed toward more minor improvements: numbers of variations on the edge-mounting of the membrane, or the adjustable brace on the Waymann 'Keystone State' that assured precise positioning of the neck relative to the head membrane. Whether or not proprietory or even patented, these improvements were not basic and their effects were more or less duplicated by all the major manufacturers; so that aside from a tone coloration characteristic of each manufacturer and evident only to fairly advanced banjo players all the major lines of good banjos are pretty much alike.

This, in turn, meant that the 'top of the line" had to revert to the European style---an expensive banjo was expensive not because it sounded that much better but because it had decorative touches, primarily extensive inlay on the neck, that showed considerable hand labor. the factory, in other words, having reached the limits of inventiveness in the American style of craftsmanship turned to the employment of craftsmen of the European style in order to provide luxury goods to an urban market.

The fact that an item of manufacture absorbs a considerable amount of handwork does not automatically put it in the European style unless that handwork is essentially irrelevant to the function of the finished product. In the case of quilts, for instance, the function of the piecing is to allow the use of small scraps of material; and the function of the quilting stitch is to retain the insulating layer.

The "Peach Tree' quilt made by Sally Snow, which required some 1500 hours of handwork, is the result of an aesthetic evolution that has its basis in functionalism. [quilt photos]The earliest American quilts were undoubtedly merely multiple layers of patches, but that made a bedcover that was not only indifferently attractive but stiff and unwieldy, particularly considering the material was homespun. As soon as factory made cotton fabrics were available it became possible to put a!layer of cotton batting between two layers of thin fabric and still get the warmth of a thick wool blanket.

But the fabric would first be used to make clothing. so that the quilt had to be pieced out of the irregular scraps that were left when the clothing pattern was cut out. One might make one's first quilt out of pieces patched any which way (a style which was revived with a difference in the Victorian Crazy Quilt) but after immediate necessity is met the need for aesthetic satisfaction becomes important.

One might want to set light and dark colored scraps in a pattern, and the Log Cabin quilt exhibited is just such a pattern made of small scrap pieces. When this is done an interesting thing happens: the gestalt of the overall pattern tends to override the variation in fabrics, so that several kinds of reddish fabric will just read as red in the context of the pattern. The tendency, then, is to go to bold patterns that will catch the eye and suppress the fact that it is composed of scraps: a perfect example of a labor-intensive process that recycles used things into "new" ones.
The quilting stitching, starting from the necessity of holding the layers of the quilt together, also developed into a subtle aesthetic expression. In simple quilts the stitching will merely outline the pieced or appliqued pattern; but it can also provide a patterning of its own that creates a counterpoint to the main pattern. The Peach Tree quilt is used as a teaching aid because it uses several traditional quilting patterns from different regions. The combination is possible because the main pattern is a strong bordered medallion which gives the quilting patterns independent fields to operate in.

Like other labor-intensive rural processes, such as harvesting or barnraising, quilting sometimes was done cooperatively. The quilting bee then provided an occasion for socializing that did not conflict with the protestant work-ethic. It can still be used as a way of keeping the hands busy, and the protestant conscience still, while watching television. In general, those rural crafts that applied considerable labor to an aesthetic end used the time, say between supper and bed, that could not effectively be applied to more immediate needs.

Interestingly, the modern quilt is particularly a product of sophisticated industrial development, because the polyester fiber used for the batting, being lighter and warmer than cotton or wool, is a product of synthetic organic chemistry. One can raise a sheep, or grow cotton, and process a usable fiber by hand; but you need an immense capital investment to produce polyester. Recently DuPont has introduced a new hollow synthetic fiber with insulating properties approaching goose down. When available to quilters it will make possible quilts that are substantially more functional than the traditional ones, but which retain ail the possibility for expressing individual creativity within a traditional aesthetic.

We can, thus, come to the conclusion that there is no necessary conflict between craftsmanship, at least in the American style, and industrial technology. There may well be a conflict with the European style insofar as that represents the conspicuous consumption of hand labor for its own sake; but there is no inherent reason why industrial products cannot be made to satisfy a user's needs and still be aesthetically satisfying on the terms of "form follows function' and 'less is more".

But the design tradition of American industry is an ill-considered mixture--centered primarily on the convenience of the producer rather than the user, and following the notion that superfluous and superficial decoration will take our minds off inadequacies of function; steady in the belief that the design principles that characterized rural America in its first century are too sophisticated for the people to appreciate. And there seems to be too much inertia in "the system" to expect that to change: even if the economics of energy-intensive production is undergoing a revolution.
What we can do as individuals is simple: take what we need on our terms. If you want something that serves a mass need, and the drawbacks of producer-centered manufacture do not affect the function too badly, you use the product of industrial technology. You would not, for instance, get your canning jars hand-blown to order; though you might get a few storage canisters done that way.

If you want something that meets a particular need, in quality of function, or life-expectancy, or aesthetics, you go to an individual craftsman.
Or, if you believe in serendipity, you wait till you run across an "antique": a product of the past in which the American style of craftsmanship was reflected even in the products of our factories.

Modes & Scales

2007-02-24T06:41:00.001-08:00

Modes, Scales and Temperments

Hopefully, not more than you wanted to know.

To the novice there are few things about traditional folk music more confusing than the "modes". Of course to a lot of us the whole idea of formal, written music is a bit forbidding; but one system, with its keys and tonics and dominants and things like that, is bad enough without having two, or maybe more, systems. Even to people who know enough about the theory of music to read scores the modes are soinewhat mysterious.
They do, however, make a kind of sense, and I am going to try to articulate that sense in this little essay. I don't guarantee that it will tell you all there is to know, or even feel entirely comfortable with them; but I hope it will leave you able to face the words like "mixolydian" without flinching.

There is a deceptively easy way to explain the modes by reference to a piano keyboard. First of all you ignore all the black keys---the sharps and flats. We'll get back to them, but for now we don't need them. Now sound a scale by starting at "C" and going up the keyboard hitting every key till you reach the "C" an octave above.

In ordinary notation that is called the "major" scale. In modal notation it is called the "ionian" mode. Now do the same thing, except start on the "A". That scale is called the "minor" scale, and it is also called the "aeolian" mode.

In ordinary notation those are the only scales that are given specific names, while in modal notation there are several other scales, each with its own name. Thus we can say that ordinary musical notation has developed by taking only two of the modes and building on those.

This would indicate that ordinary notation is less flexible than modal notation, except that we have been ignoring the black keys. Ordinary notation has the possibility of using the sharps and flats that are entirely outside the major and minor scales, and that gives it a tremendous flexibility.

But folkmusic generally doesn't need that kind of flexibility. Most folksongs don't use more notes than are in the wholenote scales (those that can be played on the white keys). Instead they get their flexibility by using different wholenote scales.

For instance, if you sounded a scale like we did before, but started on "G" instead of "C" or "A", you would get the scale of the ''mixolydian'' mode. If you started with "D" you would get the "dorian" mode. The effect of choosing these different scales is like that of going from major to minor; in fact the tuning of the banjo that is convenient for playing in the dorian mode is often called the "mountain minor."

The mixolydian mode feels a little more minor than the major scale (or ionian mode); and the dorian mode is still more minor in feeling, but not as minor as the aeolian, which is the minor scale. Choosing between these different scales one can find tunes that are appropriate for different modes. That gives a reason why the modes should exist, but it doesn't explain why they have those weird names.

As it happens, that is something of a mistake. The creator of a folksong doesn't say "I think I'll write this one in the dorian mode"; he just remembers (or creatively misremembers) a tune that sounds right for the thing he wants to say. Tunes and scales are given names by music theorists; and the modes were named in the middle ages.

The medieval theorists invented modes as such, but in those days it was important to refer everything to ancient authorities. Theg thus said, and maybe even thought, they were rediscovering the musical system of the ancient greeks; so they gave the modes ancient greek names. There are lots more, because you can get a different mode every time you sound a scale starting on a different key; but most folksongs ae in the four modes mentioned, ionian, mixolydian, dorian and aeolian, so we'll ignore the rest.

That is a simple explanation but, as I said, deceptively simple. It ignores the question of why a wholenote scale starting on "C" should sound different than one starting on "G". Or, conversely, What do you do if you want to play a mixolydian tune in the key of "C"?

That there is any difficulty here comes about because some wholenotes are stparated by two semitones and some only by one. if we look at the piano keyboard again, but this time look at both the white and black keys, we see that some white keys are separated by a black key and others aren't. There isn't any key between "E" and "F" that would sound E-sharp, or F-flat, anid there isn't any key between "B" and "C" either. These short intervals are called "gaps" and the modes can also be characterized by where in the scale the gaps fall.

In the ionian mode the gaps fall between the third and fourth notes and the seventh and eighth notes; while in the dorian mode they fall between the second and third notes and the sixth and seventh notes. (Why this should make one tune sound "sadder' than the other I simply do not know. It may be that we just expect it to.)

If, therefore, you want to play a Dorian tune in key of C you substitute an E-flat for an E and a B-flat for a B and you have a dorian scale.

One of the things that makes the appalachian dulcimer an interesting instrument is that it automatically plays in modes. It is [traditionally] fretted in wholetones and the positions of the short intervals or gaps is such that you get a mixolydian scale when you start with the open string. But the dulcimer is not restricted to the mixolydian mode, because any fret can be chosen as the basic, or tonic, note of the tune; and the drone strings can be tuned to the same note (or an octave lower) and an appropriate harmonic interval such as a fourth or fifth.

If, for instance, you want to play an aeolian tune in the key of "C" you retune the melody string to sound a "C" when the dulcimer is fretted on the first fret after the nut and tune the drones harmoniously. For a guitar player this sounds inconvenient, but obviously when the frets have some large spacing and some short, making a gapped scale, you can't use afiything like a capo.

But that raises the question of why you can use a capo on a guitar?
This brings in the question of the temperament of a scale and that is quite interesting. It is also a bit difficult, so bear with me.

Let's think about a very simple instrument, the monochord, which has just one string. The basic note that it makes is that produced when the open string is plucked. If the string is fretted or stopped at other lengths it will produce other notes, and some of these have a definite harmonic relation to the basic open notes.

If the string is stopped at its midpoint, the note sounded will be an octave higher than the open note. This is because the pitch (or frequency of vibration) of a plucked string is inversely proportional to its length (all else equal) and the octave is a note that is in a 2:1 ration of pitch to the basic note. Similar things happen when the string is stopped at three-quarters and four-fifths of its length. The next simplest ration to the octave, that with a 3:2 ratio of pitch, is identified with the fifth step of the scale on which the octave is the eighth step.

The musical scale can be built out of this 3:2 ratio alone. If, for instance, one starts with C, the note a fifth higher is G, a fifth higher than that is D, and continuing in like manner gets A, E, B, F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp, D-sharp, A-sharp, E-sharp, B-sharp, F-doublesharp, C-doublesharp, etc.

Going down from C in fifths one gets F, B-flat, E-flat, A-flat, D-flat, G-flat, C-flat, F-flat, B-doubleflat, E-doubleflat, etc. The octaves are considered to be musically identical, so we can consider all these notes to be within the same octave. Then we have a problem.

If we look at the vicinity of the interval between B and C, which we know is a short interval of one semitone, corresponding to one fret-spacing on a guitar, we see that we have seven different notes: A-doublesharp, B, C-flat, B-sharp, C and D-doubleflat. In this system they are all distinct notes. Obviously a guitar with seven times the number of frets, or a piano or organ with seven times the number of keys, isn't really very practical. What we do is to compromise, and the way we compromise is called the "temperament" of the scale. The first compromise is to cut down the number of frets on the guitar or keys on the piano by lumping the notes that are close enough into one note. We say, for instance, that A-doublesharp, B and C-flat are all the same note. That gives us twelve semitone intervals in each octave; but we still have the freedom to make any of these semitones a little bigger or smaller than the rest. This would make it inconvenient for the makers of fretted instruments, and it would prevent us from using the capo, so guitarmakers prefer to make all the semitone intervals the same.
In other words each fret-spacing decreases the string length in the same proportion. This is the ''even'' or "equaltone" temperament. In the piano, or harp, or organ, where each note is tuned separately, all lemperaments are equally convenient. and there are some others that can be used.

In what we can call the ''Pythagorean'' temperment we preserve the intervals of octave and fifth in perfect harmony; but this makes the interval of a third, which is important to modern harmony, sound a bit discordant. In "meantone" temperament we preserve the perfect harmony of octave, fifth and third in the key of C; but keys with sharps and flats in them sound more and more discordant as they go farther from C.

In general all modern instruments are tuned to the guitarmakers' compromise, the equaltone temperament. In this temperament neither the fifth nor the third is in perfect harmony in any key, but the degree of discordance differs in each key. This difference is what makes classically trained musicians say that the same series of intervals has a different "feeling" when played in C or, say, in E-flat; so that the key in which music is composed has signifIcance.

This variation, together with the freedom to use all twelve intervals in composition, made the modes superfluous in classical music and they disappeared from the music textbooks.

The voice, however, is a more flexible instrument than one that is keyed, or fretted, or stopped like a flute. This makes it possible for an unaccompanied singer (or the player of a fiddle tune) to shade notes up or down within the tune if that ''feels right". This amounts to a change in the temperament of the scale he is using, so that the key he is singing or fiddling in is less important than something which indicates the general mood of the piece. This, in turn, means that the modes, which represent intervals of gradation of mood, make a very sensible way to characterize a folktune.

The demonstration of this is Bertrand Bronson's massive compilation of The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959- ) which uses the modes as the basis of a system of classification. The discussion of modes in the introduction of Volume II of the series is recommended to anyone interested in pursuing this subject any farther than this elementary discussion.

Jottings: Part 2

2007-02-24T06:30:00.000-08:00

Here we are again!

We nearly, lost it, but somehow the Eisteddfod did survive. A little white-faced and shaky, perhaps, from the close brush with extinction; but it made it through one more year. It is very gratifying to all of us who have worked diligently on the Eisteddfod Committee, and particularly Howard Glasser, who have been pumping life into the Eisteddfod this last decade, that it is taking on a life of its own.

Let us look again at what we are doing here. Under the trappings of an ordinary "folk-festival" is a hidden agenda. We take the art created by European peasants, hardscrabble swamp yankees, delta sorghum cutters, and Hamtramc mill-hands and, using its intuitively-created aesthetic principles, try to create a new art that is valid for our present condition.
Does that sound ominous and pretentious? It is and it isn't.

We all know, deep in our hearts, that we exist in a time in history that corresponds to the fall of a civilization. We have been teaching the world for several generations that the be-all-and-end-all is to catch up to the Joneses (we are the Joneses), and we suddenly come to the realization that there isn't enough to go around and that they've got some of the most important stuff: A depression close to the Great Depression had to be generated just to get OPEC off our backs for a little while, and they are only waiting for us to get tired of cutting off our noses to spite our faces before they pull in the reins again.
Things are going to get worse before they get better. Things are certainly ominous enough to satisfy anyone, and all the establishment knows to do about it is to try to recreate a fantasy world of 1890's economics.

So what has that got to do with the Eisteddfod? In order to create a new art on traditional aesthetic principles it isn't enough just to follow book rules or phonographically copy what a Collector collected. In order to create you have to let the traditional art soak into your soul (or intuition, if you prefer that term) and sit there long enough to become comfortable. When you do that, some of the traditional attitudes toward life seep in along with the art.

And those traditional attitudes evolved in the direction of survival. Neither the European peasant nor the swamp yankee nor the cane-cutter nor mill-hand was ever far from disaster. A bad winter or summer, an economic downturn, and a lifetime's hard labor could go down the drain.

There was no point in being sorry for yourself (or at least only a point when "false true-loves" were con concerned), because that didn't help you to survive. Better to maintain an attitude of gallows-humor and shrug and hunker down till the disaster passed. You can work more effectively and think more clearly when you are chuckling (even if bitterly) than when you are whining. The traditional aesthetic, like the traditional ethic, is pointed toward survival in the real world.

We members of the corporate-governmental bureaucracy are insulated from the real world. Even our disasters are bureaucratic: a merger or a congressional budget-cut and we get riffed out of our positions. We don't even have the dignity of Setting fired: we just get shifted to the unemployment lines where we are still part of the bureaucracy, only shifted to the bureaucracy's nether end where the product comes out. If we tried to create an aesthetic out of the values inherent in our jobs and lives it would come out in precisely the kind of whine that the traditional aesthetic avoids.
When the final collapse comes in, probably drifting in like a ground fog, but with the nasty yellow-green of smog, those people who have, however indirectly, absorbed some of the traditional aesthetic will have a marginally better chance to survive. And when they do hunker down they will feel a lot better with their ironic joking than those who know only the electronic whine of establishment art. It may be a small margin, but in desperate straits even a small margin is better than none.

So the Eisteddfod is necessary. It is also fun. And, after all, civilization may last a few more weeks. Enjoy it while it is here; and if the sense that it is contributing to your survival releases the puritanical inhibitions against simple enjoyment, maybe even this editorial will have served a useful purpose. Maybe there will be enough enjoyment, along with the recognition of value, to let the Eisteddfod survive even next year!

.....

The Eisteddfod is an entertainment, it is an educational experience, it is a reunion of friends, it is a time to enjoy. In addition to all that, it has a point to make.

All of us who participate, by making or listening to music; by doing or admiring craftsmanship, value something we call "traditional". The arts and crafts that were common in small, isolated rural villages were carried through the generations "by ear"... people heard or saw what they liked about the way other people did things and did the same, more or less. They emphasized the things they especially liked and forgot the things that didn't interest them. Many years of this process gave the traditional arts and crafts a special kind of beauty, expressed through a local style.

We no longer live in isolated rural villages---we are connected to ''official'' culture by television, by radio and records, by the plastic implements bought in supermarkets and discount stores. And some of this has its own kind of beauty or function---but it is not the kind of beauty of the old, traditional arts and crafts.

Some of us who especially value the beauty of tradition have tried to capture it ourselves---and this has been called the "Folk Revival." Some of us try to be living archives; attempting to reproduce folk art as we perceive it. Some of us try to find the essence of some particular tradition and create new things in that traditional style. Some of us apply the style of one tradition to a fragment of another---creating an original in spite of ourselves.

All of this, and more, is part of this ''revival1" that does a lot more than ''revive". As we do this we need contact with the preserved fragments of tradition---the field recordings of collectors, their books and raw notes , and the artifacts dusty in museums or shiny in antique shops. But more important than this is contact with a live person who creates traditional art. A recording can tell you one way it was done, but not the hundred ways it might have been done. It can't distinguish between accidental variation and personal intent. It can't pass on the essence--the subtleties that make one artist differ from another and yet belong to the same tradition. This can only be learned in the traditional way---from one person to another. This, then, is the point of the Eisteddfod---that it is a time and a place where the performers and craftsmen of the folk revival can meet and learn from one another.

It might happen in a concert, or an exhibit, or a workshop. But it might also happen between two people talking quietly in a corner. Without this we would enjoy the concerts and exhibits, enjoy meeting old friends and making new ones, or just enjoy a friendly ambiance. But without the learning it wouldn't be the Eisteddfod. We hope you enjoy yourself---and learn something that you will value.

.....

With amazement, and some pleasure, we recognize that it is fall again. The air is brisk and clear (barring hurricanes), the kids are back in school, and the frost is on the pumpkin (or almost). It is time again for the Eisteddfod, time to greet old friends, time to anticipate new musical surprises Howard has garnered for us, time to show off new things we have learned and to be prepared to learn new things from the old and new friends we will hear.

Time again to celebrate our new tradition, which is to annually celebrate the old traditions: folk art and culture.
Folk art? There is a sense in which it doesn't matter if what we are doing is art--it is enough that we enjoy what we are doing, and that we do it well in our own eyes. And we certainly do that. No one who comes to the Eisteddfod to perform is coerced by fees they could not afford to refuse--most of our performers are lucky if they break even. Even with that, there are always many more who want to come than could possibly be invited. They must enjoy something about the Eisteddfod or they wouldn't work so hard to get invited.

Still--folk art! In a historical period when our consciousnesses have been raised to be aware of the political implications of being female, or-'ethnic', can we afford to be unaware of the social slur implicit in our celebration of folk art and culture!
"Good enough for folk music" is a performers' joke to cover the recalcitrance of a new string or an old guitar--but isn't it a self-denigrating joke like the minstrel's shuffle! Or, if you think of it as applying to the other people on the stage, isn't it as chauvinist a joke as Dr. Johnson's joke about women preachers!

If our art is a minor art, a second-class citizen of the artistic world, why are we busting our chops looking for excellence? If the best we can do is inherently inferior to lieder or opera, to consider only the product of the human voice, why don't we stop kidding ourselves and relax!

But we don't really believe that--at least none of us do who are part of the Eisteddfod-and maybe it is time for us to raise our consciousnesses in that direction. Maybe it is time for us to be a little more militant--even if only for the benefit of our own heads. Artists arise! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Make art not.......whatever.

There are people in the world, some of them pivotal people in our part of the artistic world, who believe that you can't be a 'traditional' 'folk' artist if you have been born in or near a city or since 1900. To them folk culture means an absence of "real" culture, a homemade substitute good enough to fill the vacuum left by the absence of civilization. Obviously such a weak culture would be immediately driven out by any contact with real culture, vital culture, official city culture. Thus if you have not been brought up in a poor rural village or farm, if you have attended a school or even listened to a radio or television set you are contaminated. You aren't inferior enough to be considered genuine folk. You aren't a curious anachronism fit only for a museum (or folk festival), you are just an ordinary person; and if you prefer the aesthetic values inherent in folk culture it must be because there is something inferior about you. After all, if you thought you were a good musician, why didn't you go to Juliard?

We are beginning to see that official city culture is a dead end. Personally, I find lieder and opera, particularly those produced in recent years, sterile and mechanical--but interesting, in their own way, as anachronisms. They are as out of date as the Cadillac. the downtown office building, the superhighway and the other physical manifestations of city culture. The raucous hysteria of popular music is paralleled by the quiet desperation of economists and politicians trying to find ways of revitalizing the dying dinosaur--even if only to ride it one more term. If we define city culture as 'real', is it a wonder that we are inevitably drawn to fantasy and nostalgia for a Golden Age that never was!

When you!look at it th?t way, the 'Folk Revival' makes a lot of sense. Sure, part of it is the same hokey nostalgia as the '50s craze [and ask Pete Seeger if he is nostalgic for joe McCarthy!]. But there is a part of it that is a searching for a set of aesthetic values that are consistent with things that made sense in an agricultural economy: respect for the land, and each other; the kind of egalitarianism that produces mutual sharing and help with problems; the things we now might label sane ecological values.

City art is the anachronism: traditional folk art can be the aesthetic basis on which we can build the an that will help us to survive tomorrow. So...no more self-denigrating jokes, please. When you put folk art down you aren't just putting yourself down, and the rest of us, you are siding with the dying dinosaur and against our children's hope.

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Before that becomes more real than metaphor.

.....

As we began to put together this issue of Ceilidh Columns, we discovered that there was something of a theme developing. The theme was the answer to a question we hadn't fully realized needed to be asked: "What is this thing we call a 'folk music revival' anyway?" The sticking point, the thing that immediately removes it from the category of "obvious" and "common sense" and "take it for granted" is the gallery exhibition of pieces from the collection of Russell Daly. We call that exhibit "Eccentric Folk Art"; and while that label seems to fit, it also slaps it down hard on the horns of the dilemma.

Folk art is, if it is anything at all, the art of a community: an art that had connections with city art at one time or another [so that, for instance, Appalachian ballads use medieval church modes as their harmonic basis]; but an art that was propagated within a relatively isolated community [of Ozark hill-farmers, say, or rural English villagers alienated by social stratification] by the pre-literate technique of oral transmission.

The style of that folk art is characteristic of the community, not of the individual artist. It is a product of tradition, not innovation.

In contrast, the notion of originality, of stylistic individualism, is an invention of post-Renaissance European city art, of academic fine art. The folk artist knows what the aesthetic rules of his art must be because they are the only rules in his community. Those rules are art: the only art he knows.

The contemporary city artist must thread a path of his own through the myriad influences of a world culture till he comes to an individual, original statement--not only in content, but style.Woe be to him if the critic finds too strong evidences of his major influences.

The artists exhibited in the gallery share one powerful difference from folk artists: they stand out from. and apart from, their community.Their work is reminiscent of folk art, but their position in the community is reminiscent of the cliche fine artist: neglected, ignored, perhaps persecuted or left to starve in a garret. This is emphasized by the peculiar occupation of one of the artists, Gerry Kamrowski.... He is a 'fine artist' by trade who chooses to work in this style to satisfy himself; just as Jesse Howard is a farmer who chooses to work in his style to say what he wants to say. Their work has the same flavor as folk art; it is as primitive and naive as folk art is; it shares enough characteristics with folk art to cry out to our intuitions for that label: yet it is also individualistic, original, intellectual and strongly creative in the most powerful sense of that most abused word.
And if for Jesse Howard and Romano Gabriel and Manuel Bizarre it is the only style they know how to use: for Gerry Kamrowski it is a matter of deliberate choice among the many styles that are available to him. What we can say, therefore, is that this exhibit is of a kind of art that, like folk art, is constrained by a set of implicit aesthetic conventions, that derives from folk art and shares much of its flavor, but which has enough scope and power to permit a range of people from 'ordinary folk' to 'professional artists' to use it to make individual statements.

If it is to be more than an antiquarian hobby aping the dreary pedantries of museum curators and university professors, the 'folk music revival' must be that same kind of art. This says nothing new to those who have read these pages in earlier years, or who have truly listened to what the Eisteddfod has to offer. But it may be worth beating a dead horse one more time.
It is not enough to take a traditional text and marry it to whatever tune happens to fit the meter. It is not enough to sing an English ballad in the style of a forties' crooner or a seventies' country-pop star. It is not enough to be cute, or hokey, or to justify a slipshod performance by patronizing the material.

There is nothing less than the best you have to give that is "good enough for folk music"!

This is not to say that the folk music revival won't survive the slipshod, the cutesy, the academic patronizing and the contemptuous exploitation of the quick-buck artist. It has, and it will continue to survive that, and worse. It has the power of any valid art form: the power to inspire and awaken and the power to corrupt and degrade.
It is we who won't survive if we don't understand the rules of the game we are playing!

.....

For some of us the slight nip in the air is as reviving to our spirits as the first warm breeze of spring--it is time again for the Eisteddfod and the faint strains of music rouse us from the doldrums of August.
It is certainly time for a rebirth: the political "swing to the right" has made for a bleak year for the holders of liberal values, and they probably constitute the majority of the folk music community. When military bands receive a larger share of the federal budget than the National Endowment for the Arts it sends chills down the backs of even those who were not in the anti-war movement.

But, when you think about it, does it really matter? Labels are deceptive--sometimes deliberately. One would think that "conservatives" would admire traditional values, and thus be supportive of the arts and crafts that embody the traditional values -of America and its various immigrant ethnic communities; but the label is deceptive.

What they wish to conserve are the traditional values of one small segment of American culture, the entrepreneurial traditions of the business community. If it can't be marketed on a large scale they aren't really interested.
Besides, folk music has been a vehicle for protest and satirical commentary and, worst of all, it has been associated!ed with the political left. It is not one of the things conservatives want to conserve.

On the other hand, for all their concern for the poor, for labor and for the disadvantaged of various kinds, "liberals" are not often very liberal. They tend to see people as statistics; and statistics only respond to massive solutions operated by vast bureaucratic institutions. They are full of definitions and categories: "this" is folk music and deserving of a federal grant, "that" is not and deserves only rejection to a chorus of academic scorn. Those who can adapt themselves to institutional needs, who can learn to smell like bureaucrats, prosper; the unwashed masses don't.

In the process of adaptation some of the folkmuaic community have lost their roots in the true folk culture and values. For most of us, those who are involved with folk culture more for the sake of our spirits than our pocketbooks, who are more interested in saving our souls than our performing gigs or our academic tenure, the accident of who won the last election is totally irrelevant.

If it is harder for us to. experience the performances of our idols, we will spend more time practicing our own craft; if there are fewer festivals there will be more parlor ceilidhs. Folk culture may be transmuted by circumstance, but it doesn't die.
Folk music has seen its highs and lows just in my lifetime. It had a mild high in the late forties only to go underground in the fifties. It had a new high in the sixties only to turn into folk-rock and folk-pop in order to follow the market. We have seen respect for traditional folk music develop steadily in the seventies, stimulating parallel revivals in the ethnic communities.
If the institutional forms that have grown up around traditional folk culture suffer from inflation and conservative economics it need not affect the cultural values that the institutions were created to serve. Aesthetic appreciation and the satisfactions of craftsmanship are not transient fads, they are inherent in the nature of the human species. The Eisteddfod resonates with the same needs that produced the cave paintings in Altamira and the shaman's song of the arctic tundra.

The forms change, the particular embodiments come and go, particular kinds of expression become easier or harder, but the human values that are expressed most directly in what we call "folk music" for want of a better name are universal.
Enjoy your reaffirmation of the fact on this Eisteddfod weekend.

Jottings: Part 1

2007-02-24T06:29:00.001-08:00

[Editorials written for Ceilidh Columns, the official Publication of the Eisteddfod, an annual folk festival held at what is now called U. Mass., Dartmouth. All text not otherwise credited was written by Karl Eklund.]

Now that it is almost 2000, if we live through the millennial Computer Glitch we are probably due for another "folk-revival". I got hooked in the last stages of the folk-revival of the 1940s, when one of the few places you could buy records of people like the Almanac Singers was the local left-radical bookstore. That revival died when Henry Wallace lost to Harry Truman in 1948. Everybody knows about the revival of the 1960s. That turned into "folk-pop" and "folk-rock".

It wasn't so obvious to those of us who were in it, but there was another revival in the late 70s and early 80s; and for a lot of us it centered on a small annual festival with a funny name, "Eisteddfod", in a funny place, a college campus in southeastern Massachusetts. During the height of that revival, from 1978 to 1982, there was a publication, Ceilidh Columns. Howard Glasser used that name for occasional publications he had published, but he asked me to edit Ceilidh Columns when it was the official publication of the Eisteddfod.

My reimbursement for this job, and for running the flats to the printer at 6AM the day after the deadline after working all night pasting up, was that I could write the editorials. You who are used to the Internet will never have the thrill of knowing that more than one person at a time will read your thoughts.

When the Eisteddfod faded to the point that it couldn't support Ceilidh Columns I thought I'd put together some of the things I had written in a little booklet. I made a few copies and gave them to friends. For that booklet I wrote the following:

Introduction

The SMU [Southeastern Massachusetts University, now called U. Mass., Dartmouth] Eisteddfod in its lifetime, 1971-1996, has had a major influence on my life.

I met my wife there from trying to teach a group how to 'doublethumb' an autoharp. Because of that I moved to the region to live on a dairy goat farm in the hamlet of Myricks. From that I learned the significance of practicing the palpable crafts, rather than just appreciating them. By the time the Eisteddfod was ready to spawn a publication I was more than ready to articulate my opinions of the folk-revival.

The Eisteddfod was a very suitable occasion. It was itself the product of the opinions of one man, Howard Glasser. Glasser is a professor in the art department at SMU, a calligrapher of the first rank, who had been exposed to 'folk music' in the same mileau that I had--New York City in the 1940s. Finding himself teaching in Pittsburgh he provided an opportunity for like-minded people to make music, calling his gatherings Ceilidhs from the gaelic word for an evening of music.

Later, teaching at Southeastern Massachusetts University, he was asked to organize a grander enterprise, a weekend of folk-music, and chose for it the name Eisteddfod, the welsh.word for an annual gathering of bards and scholars.

He had used the title Ceilidh Columns for an occasional newsletter, and it seemed appropriate to use the title for a publication that would be program and commentary. The essays and revues collected here are from the issues of Ceilidh Columns that appeared between 1978 and 1981.

The folk revival was, and is, a polymorphous beast. Howard, in fact all of us on the 'committee', knew what we wanted to have at the Eisteddfod but aside from saying 'yes' or 'no' to a particular audition tape none of us could tell you exactly why it was 'yes' or 'no'. It was, and remains, an intuitive judgement.

There were some distinctions that could be made on the basis of established labels. What we were looking for was not 'folk-rock' or 'folk-pop' or even contemporary 'country'. There was a style of presentation that was distinct from the tune or the lyrics, and while the styles of two ethnic backgrounds could differ radically from each other, it was generally possible to distinguish between "folk' and 'pop' from a given culture.

It was too easy to slip into pejorative labels--like saying that the music we wanted was 'honest', implying that the other was 'dishonest'. But that helped very little. 'Pop' culture has its own kind of validity--it just wasn't the kind of validity that we were looking for.

It was also too easy to slip into the scholar's prejudice--that 'folk' is something produced by someone who is rural, uneducated, poor enough not to be strongly influenced by radio or television--in other words 'uncivilized'. By this definition "folk art' is no longer produced--all the folk are dead except for a few certified specimens of great antiquity who are carefully carted around to prestigious festivals by academic caretakers. This is convenient for the scholar because it gives him a closed field to operate in--only that material that has already been collected has to be looked at and listened to.

It makes it hard on the collector--but there is always the hope of finding a shangri-la in the Ozarks with a geriatric source that hasn't been tapped. If that was what we were looking for we weren't going to find it by listening to our contemporaries, much less the vigorous young people working so hard to be part of the revival.

There is a kind of scholarly revival, exemplified at its best by the outdoor museums like Sturbridge Village and Plimoth Plantation, in which the scholar-curator takes on the robes of the teacher-entertainer. Here, on the basis of the best possible information, an attempt is made to create a fully accurate reproduction of the certified genuine antique folk culture. In the folk-music revival this takes the form of the living tape recorder; the performer who precisely (and often tediously) recreates a recorded performance of a genuine certified folk-musician. This is not without value, because the living tape recorder is peripatetic and self-starting, and thus more of an evangelist than a vinyl disc; but it still wasn't what we were looking for.

Out of these negatives, and out of commentary on the best (and sometimes not the best) of the exemplars available to us, we have come to a conclusion: the folk-revival is an art-form with consistent (if implicit) aesthetic principles.

It is based on 'genuine' folk-art the way the 'back-to-the-land' movement is based on pre-industrial agricultural practices; but it is no more 'folk' in the scholar's sense than a rototiller is an ox-drawn plow. It has its own validity independent on its source--it contains its own examples of good art and bad art. It is an aesthetic universe in which worlds can be created.

These essays record that awakening realization and try to articulate some of the implicit aesthetics.

These essays would not have been written without the encouragement of Howard Glasser, although he would certainly not agree with every word. But equally they would not have been written without the support of my wife, Sally Snow Eklund, who read every word in manuscript and gently kept me from the grosser excesses of rhetoric. Sally has been the coordinator of the manual crafts at the Eisteddfod and has contributed to and organized some of the gallery exhibits which accompany the festival (see the essay "Yankee Ingenuity" in particular). Without the example of her superb craftsmanship as a quilter I would have understood much less; and without her tolerance of the ritual of pasting up Ceilidh Columns many fewer of these essays would have been seen in print.

These essays are only a small part of the contents of the four issues of Ceilidh Columns that were produced, and, in particular, this format cannot reproduce the splendid graphics that adorned its pages. Those interested in the graphic arts should try to get copies while they still exist.

Howard hated to see any brags on himself in Ceilidh Columns but, sensing that we weren't going to have more chances, we put this in the last issue.

Howard's Work of Art

In the late 1940's a young artist bought a record album; an obscure and unrecorded event that has affected our lives. He was struck originally by the cover, but the music caught him despite himself.
That was the way Howard Glasser was brought into the Folk Revival of the 1940's. As he developed as a calligrapher and designer he also continued his interest in folk music, something that wasn't hard in New York even in the Fifties. Then he accepted a call to teach in the boondocks- in Pittsburgh, of all places !

Pittsburgh was a long distance from Greenwich Village. But as any artist can tell you, what does not exist must be created. Howard proceeded to establish an opportunity for others who were interested in folk music to get together. They were called Ceilidhs, after the singing gatherings of the Scots, whose music Howard had come to hold in special affection.
The Ceilidhs grew and Pittsburgh was a place of special vitality during the folk revival of the Sixties. Howard brought the Ceilidhs with him when he moved to Rhode Island, and later SMU. Here he sensed a need for a somewhat grander event- a weekend gathering that would bring together musicians from distances too great to travel for a few hours singing. Singers would come from all over the United States, from Great Britain and Europe.
This more formal and grander event needed a grander name, so one was borrowed from Welsh gaelic. Eisteddfod was, in the old tradition of Wales, a national gathering of bards and poets.

The Eisteddfod grew over the. decade of the seventies into a loved and respected tradition. It was a 'Folk Festival' to be sure, but one without mob scenes or media celebrities. A unique festival, one stamped with the taste and personality of Howard Glasser.

But though many have judged from Howard's taste and erudition that he is an academic folklorist, he is instead a graphic artist of wide reputation. The years devoted to the Eisteddfod and the folk revival community were years taken away from his art; that could not be endured forever. Howard has had to step back from the Eisteddfod and let it continue in the hands of his friends and apprentices.

So much is simple history. But it is not too soon to assess a deeper significance. "Folk Music" is the art of a community that is isolated from formal culture by geography or social stratification. The "Folk Revival' is a revitalization of that music by people aware of formal, classical and commercial popular music. Folk themes and styles reach something in these revivalists that city music doesn't; and they imbue their recreations with their own aesthetic and personality.

The best products of the folk revival stand comparison with the best of any artistic medium. It was Howard's unique contribution that he recognized that, and created in the Eisteddfod a way of fostering and expressing that art. Under Howard's direction the Eisteddfod was a Work of Art itself!
Though collectively (and sometimes casually) produced, it was a coherent expression of his vision of the folk revival as an artistic medium; and the recordings he made are a priceless history of its development.
Like any work of art this did not come easily. There were times that the Eisteddfod was as much incubus as beloved. It was not just an annual event; it meant a continual effort, fostering and nurturing the folk revival community. How many of us took Howard's hospitality for granted? For how many was he a volunteer agent and promoter? How many repertoires were built from his unparalleled collections? the folk revival community owes a great deal of its vitality to Howard's unstinting efforts.

We owe Howard more than thanks (although we have not shown simple appreciation as much as much as we could have!). We owe him the tribute of passing on our own contributions to the folk community and to the Eisteddfod. It is not easy to maintain an artistic vision in the confusion of committees and the drudgery of administration; it is not easy to express our sense of the occasion during the too brief events of the annual reunion.

So we make this call to the folk community to thank Howard by making the Eisteddfod a continuing occasion for the best that the folk revival can create. Share with us your ideas and feelings about your work, articulate for us what the revival means to you as an artistic medium, contribute your visions to the collective effort. Let us continue to make the Eisteddfod an expression of the artistic vitality of the folk revival.

Karl & Sally Eklund

This will be continued.

Folksongstuff - a new beginning

2007-02-24T06:17:00.000-08:00

About five years ago I thought that I had lost interest in folksongs and would stop listening to them. I had no choice about not performing--my voice was rusty and my fingers arthritic. But I didn't count on the iPod. So I'm going to dig out stuff I've written in the past and post it here where there is easy access.

If anything stimulates you to write to me, use the email address Karl@karleklund.net

2/24/07