Farewell, Mike Seeger

I’m sitting on a draft of about 1200 words devoted to my feelings regarding Mike Seeger, scrambled together shortly after his passing, of multiple myeloma, on August 7. But I’ll admit that there’s no way to adequately express his influence on my appreciation of traditional American music, both because the words that I did attempt ultimately left me dissatisfied and because I have no doubt that, as I amble forth with my explorations of the music of the “true vine,” as he called it, I’ll find myself on trails he blazed long before, the influence ever deepening.

So instead I’d like to share a brief, candid moment that Mike captured, perhaps unwittingly, on his tape recorder in 1982. A very rough estimation is that it accounts for less than 1/25,000th of his recorded output – and that’s meant in the capacity of a field recordist only, and not as a solo artist or a New Lost City Rambler – but for me it beautifully encapsulates who Mike was. And by “was,” I suppose I mean in the capacity of a recordist, a listener, a fan, which is how I knew the little of him I did, although, by all accounts of those who knew him thusly, also as a friend. Despite its brevity, it shows Mike Seeger as a man of humor, humility, humanity, and grace.

Last year I had the pleasure of working with Mike on an issue of his 1982 recordings of Nimrod Workman (discussed elsewhere herein). He had never planned to release them – in fact, he wrote that he had gone into the sessions with an album explicitly out of mind, instead with the intention of documenting as much of Workman’s huge repertoire as possible – but as long as the Workman family were into it, he’d be too. All he wanted, he told me, were two copies of the album, with any proceeds he would earn going to the Workmans.

While making selections for the album, I found a couple of nice interview pieces I wanted to include, but made sure to ask Mike first if he’d mind his voice being heard. As I had assumed, he said he’d be all right with that, as long as I submitted the pieces to him for approval first. He, personally, didn’t want to appear “prominent or inappropriate.” He made sure, as he did whenever I saw him make appearances publicly or in print, to deflect attention from himself and onto the principle performer or subject, or, when there wasn’t one, the greater musical, cultural, or historical context, of which he saw himself as just a student. (Why must this quality be so staggeringly rare…?)

So I was a little worried about whether he’d allow me to include this tiny bit of audio that I’m taking so long to introduce. But as he had written about how he treasured his time spent with Nimrod and Molly Workman, I hope that he was ultimately happy to have our record end with the sound of their warm leave-taking of one another, with Nim and Molly’s invitations to “come on back,” and that it recalled that time to him fondly.

That’s all it is – just the sound of farewell – but I imagine he said farewell, equally as fondly, to so many of the singers and musicians he recorded: folks he met as a fellow singer and musician, but from whom he departed as a friend. I didn’t know Mike well enough to call him a friend; instead I knew him primarily through his music – and therein, primarily that which he recorded – so it makes sense to say my own farewell to him through the voices of Nimrod and Molly Workman, who last brought Mike and me together, to whom and for which I’ll always be grateful.

Nimrod and Molly Workman say farewell to Mike Seeger, Mascot, Tennessee, 1982.

Archie Green, 1917-2009.

Published in the April 1 edition of the Louisville Eccentric Weekly (LEO).

In mid-December, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi received a memorandum from a constituent on Caselli Street in San Francisco. President-Elect Obama had been publicly ginning up support for the stimulus package he would submit to Capitol Hill immediately after his inauguration, and the constituent, 91-year-old Archie Green, had a bit of historical perspective to share with Madame Speaker. He reminded Pelosi that during the New Deal there weren’t just roads paved and bridges built; federal agencies stimulated all manner of American ingenuity and creativity, and reflected the best parts of the country back to itself.

“The Federal Writers Project,” Green wrote, “included a folk unit that both preserved and presented workers’ culture” through photography, recordings, film, and journalism, and he advocated the establishment of a similar cultural unit to document the occupational experience of the current stimulus projects.

Archie Green at home, courtesy of Adam Machado.

Green, who died March 22, was a shipwright, union activist, labor historian, folklorist, record collector, professor, author, a wholly unreconstructed progressive, and the progenitor of the theory and expert of the practice of “laborlore.” Defined as the expressive culture – song, story, slang, and technical know-how – of workers, laborlore blew open the hermetically sealed pantheon of generalized American “folk” archetypes -  the Yankee, the Negro, the Indian, the hillbilly, the lumberjack, the cowboy – all of which had long prevailed in both popular and academic consciousnesses. Archie insisted on a deeper, more fluid understanding of American diversity, reflected by the diversity of occupational involvement, and to be seen where any two bodies gather to work a job together, swapping stories, jokes, and expertise. Ingredients of class solidarity and union brotherhood, to be sure, but also, and more essentially, a proud, conscious, and engaged citizenry.

Longshoremen, pile-drivers, coal miners, gandy dancers, catskinners, steel workers, millwrights – Archie saw their expressive traditions as aesthetically worthy, intellectually rich, and politically viable. His first book, 1971’s Only A Miner, was a study of recorded coal-mining songs, a number of which were drawn from Eastern Kentucky’s Sarah Ogan Gunning, Aunt Molly Jackson, and George Davis (“The Singing Miner of Hazard”). Songs of and by miners and their wives/sisters/daughters were not mere accessories to the struggles of life in the coalfields but fundamental documents of them; giving them audible space in the public realm through publications, festivals, concerts, and exhibitions – now widely known and practiced as “public folklore” – was not romantic fetish or ideological showboating, but a service to democracy.

(Green didn’t take kindly to the romanticizers, especially as expressed by the likes of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger, whom he described and dismissed as “Stalinism plus pablum.”)

He was no pretender. Weaned on his father’s immigrant Jewish socialism and his after-school engagements with the Workmen’s Circle, Archie joined Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps before paying his first union dues to United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America on the San Francisco waterfront  in 1941. “I know what it’s like to have wanted to be a worker,” he recalled in 2007. “It was a state of exultation.”

In our supposed post-industrial age, such reveries may themselves ring sentimental or romantic. But Green never succumbed to the smug, insulated comfort of the academy, despite his professorships at the Universities of Illinois, Texas, and Louisville (a Bingham Humanities fellowship brought him here in 1977). Foundations and fellowships were only different avenues for his agitation; although he was a self-described left-libertarian and anarcho-syndicalist, he used his affiliations to agitate enthusiastically and effectively. Apart from his union, of which he was a member for sixty-seven years, he was a senior associate at the AFL-CIO Labor Studies Center; a founding member of the Fund for Folk Culture; and he has been credited for nearly single-handedly lobbying Congress for the passage of the American Folklife Preservation Act. Unanimously approved and signed by President Ford in 1976, the bill created the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress; Librarian of Congress James Billington in turn presented Archie with a Living Legend Award in 2007.

“Exulted” is among the last adjectives most Americans would choose to describe their metaphysical state of employment, unless, in the current climate, exultation is the state of being employed at all. Indeed, as America has endeavored to shed its blue collars and clip its dirty fingernails, trading the pension of the skilled journeyman for the retention bonus of the well-connected MBA (and losing both in the process), exultation has become a privilege reserved for those who succeed in avoiding work rather than those who specialize in it. But now that our wide, frantic eyes are beginning to grow accustomed to the tripartite darkness of recession, crumbling infrastructure, and snake-oil finance, perhaps labor might regain some of its attraction. Perhaps we’ll remake the country in the spirit of cooperative toil and communal gain, revealing new dimensions of Americanness. Perhaps a new generation of laborlorists, assisted by the public trust, will take down the songs and stories of new folk heroes – new Casey Joneses, John Henrys, and John L. Lewises – for the ages.

But it will take ingenuity, creativity, and leadership. Archie Green didn’t live to hear how Nancy Pelosi responded. As of press time, she hadn’t.

Buell Kazee, reissued

October 31: I’ve updated this post to jibe (almost) with the version published in this week’s edition of the Louisville Eccentric Observer. If you’d like to see Catherine Irwin’s striking cover art, have a look at http://www.leoweekly.com/.

It’s the first of July 1929, and at Brunswick Records’ studio in Chicago a recording supervisor invites a banjo-pickin’, tabacker-chawin’, moonshine-swiggin’ hillbilly to sit in front of a microphone (“Mike who?” the yokel asks) and make a record. The hillbilly delivers some canned vernacular (“Well dog my cats!”; “Well that’ll make a black snake spit in a bulldog’s eye!”), threatens the engineer, and gets learnt what a cuspidor is. After the supervisor coaxes a few verses and “some of that old-fashioned banjo picking” out of his guest, who has meanwhile gotten himself drunk, both sides of the record are finished, to be released later that year in the Brunswick/Supertone catalog as “A Mountain Boy Makes His First Record.”

That mountain boy was a 28-year-old from Magoffin County, Kentucky, named Buell Kazee, and this recorded skit was of his own devising: two sides of 58 that he made for the Brunswick label between 1927 and 1929, the heyday of the “hillbilly” recording era. Those sides, however, are among the least representative of the mountain boy’s considerable musical abilities (and did not in fact constitute his first record). And, as Loyal Jones, retired director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College, writes in his notes to the June Appal label’s recently released CD of Kazee’s later recordings, “Buell did not look on them as major accomplishments.”

They are also a completely misleading portrait of the man himself (not that many fell for it; the record hardly sold and has never been reissued), as the June Appal album, Buell Kazee, released in June, makes clear. Kazee was well-educated, deeply religious (he heard the call to preach at 17), and without a doubt one of the most remarkable talents in American folk music. His extensive repertoire of ballads, lyric songs, and occupational pieces reflected an upbringing in a mountain community steeped in the “old songs” and entertained by square dances and bean stringings, where he picked up the banjo at the age of five and where his love of music was nurtured by his parents, both of whom were talented singers.

Kazee’s vocal delivery, however, belied the influence of a sophisticated musical education, and, while for some listeners it placed him in an uncertain territory between authenticity and affectation, it was wholly his own. He had studied voice — in high school; at Georgetown College, where he majored in English, Greek, and Latin; and after graduation in Ashland, Kentucky, with a visiting tenor from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York — and he brought to his material a vocal sensitivity seldom heard applied to old-time music. For many, his “good voice,” as he called it, was at best an occasional distraction and at worst a liability. A Brunswick engineer remarked of it, “That’s fine, but it won’t ring on the cash register.” One of America’s foremost scholars of country music, the late Charles K. Wolfe, wrote in 2003 that “fortunately, only a few of [Kazee’s] recorded selections were seriously marred by his inclination to employ artistic vocal technique.” Indeed, most of Kazee’s recorded output is marked by a subtle synthesis of that technique with the “light throat” he explained was characteristic of mountain singing, and though it might not have been the most “authentic” article, it marked Kazee as an artist of depth, grace, and individuality.

Authentic or not, Buell Kazee’s career as a professional musician came to end in 1929, despite offers of tour support for county fairs across the country and membership in the radio cast of WLS’s National Barn Dance in Chicago. His priorities were spiritual, not musical. As he is quoted in the June Appal CD: “I couldn’t go that way. My life was cast in a different direction and there wasn’t any reason to consider it…. I was going to preach all my life.”

He got out just in time. The stock market crash of 1929 sent the Brunswick label into bankruptcy, and by 1933 countless banjo pickers, blues singers, jug bands, and old-time combos would be driven back into obscurity by the Depression. Considering the grandiose and metaphor-prone enthusiams of many fans of this era of American music, one might forgive its end being likened to the natural calamity that finished off the dinosaurs. The outcome of the labels’ collapse was that many performers with gigantic repertoires and talents disappeared back into the folds of the fields, hollers, bottomlands, and assorted Southern locales from whence they came and where they returned to jobs more typical of those environments. Many old-time players like Clarence Ashley and Dock Boggs went into the mines. Bluesman Mississippi John Hurt farmed as a sharecropper. Others, such as Son House and Blind Willie McTell, like Buell Kazee, entered the ministry (with varying degress of success, professional or spiritual). Still others moved north seeking work, which some found, in industry. Many vanished without a trace.

Over the next forty years, Kazee led congregations in Morehead and Lexington, wrote two books on Christian theology, and taught at Lexington Baptist Bible College. Despite a struggle with depression and an agonizing period of uncertainty about his faith after his wife left him in 1940, he surely would have been content with his religious vocation and to keep any singing of the “old songs” a purely private affair.

But in 1952 the Folkways record company released Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-LP set reissuing old-time, blues, gospel, and Cajun music from the pre-Depression 78 era. Up to this point most urban listeners had gotten their folk songs secondhand, from songbooks, summer camps, and spit-shined renditions perfomed by the tuxedoed likes of the Weavers. The Anthology was remarkable because it transmitted American folk material democratically, from primary (if commercial) sources, without mediation. It also helped precipitate the period now known as the Folk Revival.

Smith — eccentric, occultist, avant-garde filmmaker, collector of Ukranian Easter eggs, Seminole quilts, and 78 rpm records — compiled his Anthology as a glorification of the “exotic” in American music: an exploration of the metaphysical space writer Greil Marcus termed “The Old Weird America,” an era not even 30 years gone but separated from the early 1950s by a massive gulf of political, cultural, and technological developments. Smith saw the album as a catalyst for social change that, according to Marcus, was to “distinguish those who responded from those who didn’t.” You either got it or you didn’t, and a handful of dissatisfied young people coming of age in Eisenhower’s America really got it. They responded to Smith’s mytho-anthology by identifying with the gamblers, hobos, and murderers inhabiting the songs therein; recreating those songs to the best of their urban teenage abilities; and fantasizing about the vague deities who howled, moaned, and keened them out.

One of those keening voices was Buell Kazee’s. Harry Smith had included three of his sides — “The Butcher Boy,” “East Virginia,” and “The Wagoner’s Lad — and soon Revival performers like the New Lost City Ramblers were trying their hands at them in Washington Square Park, admirably approximating Kazee’s banjo frailings and tunings. But as the Anthology offered only aural hints as to such specifics of the original performances – Smith was more inclined to elevate them to the realm of musical mysticism (the set’s cover bears the hand of God tuning a monochord) — it occurred to some of the young revivalists that perhaps the best way to learn the Anthology’s songs was to seek out their original singers and players and study at the source; some might still be alive!

Thus, in 1957, Gene Bluestein, a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota, tracked Kazee down in Lexington and recorded a session that Folkways soon released on LP as Buell Kazee Sings and Plays. It was a process that would be repeated many times over the next decade: young folk music enthusiasts “rediscovering” pre-war recording artists — elderly musicians with predominantly rural backgrounds and perspectives – making albums of them, and introducing them to predominantly young, urban, and middle-class audiences at innumerable folk festivals. While those artists were pleased by the interest their music engendered, and often enjoyed the notoriety they received, such arrangements were not always happy ones.

Buell Kazee, for example, was disappointed with his Folkways album, feeling it had been recorded in too-casual circumstances and did not offer an adequate portrait of his abilities and repertoire. Later, in the Vietnam years, when Kazee shared festival stages with the likes of Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, his conservative sensibility was scandalized by the radical social notions that were the calling-cards of the Folk Revival. After all, however much the revivalists honored the Rediscovered as elder statesmen, the latter had reëmerged into the cultural universe of the former, who called the tunes and determined (however inadvertently) how their “contemporary ancestors,” saved from obscurity, were presented.

Buell Kazee died in 1976 and Buell Kazee, conceived as a memorial album for the man, was released on LP that year by June Appal, the imprint of the Appalshop media center in Whitesburg, Kentucky. It was the first attempt — and a successful one, both in its release and now in its reissue — to showcase the broad and nuanced context of Kazee’s music and biography, drawing on recordings made in the 1960s by ex-New Lost City Rambler John Cohen, folk documentarian Mark Wilson (responsible for many other fine recordings of old-time musicians), Kentucky Educational Television, and Buell himself. Here are Child ballads; songs of teamsters and a railroad track-lining gang (the latter composed by Kazee); popular country tunes; a blues interpretation; and two very beautiful hymns, sung accompanied. There are no hillbilly skits included.

That this subtle vindication of Buell Kazee should be provided by Appalshop is fitting, though to be fair, he is not in desperate need of it. The power and beauty of his 1920s recordings are not remotely in dispute. But a legacy of Harry Smith’s “exotic” Anthology, for all its inclusive brilliance, is a fetish of pre-war folk musicians as foggy denizens of a mystical, bestial, primitive place, their ballads and banjo tunes emanating from the crackly surface of an old 78 like some kind of speech-in-tongues or tribal utterance. Appalachia, of course, is used to this sort of exoticism, from (but certainly not beginning with) D.W. Griffith’s 1909 film “The Mountaineer’s Honor,” through “The Beverly Hillbillies,” to the current voyeuristic fascination exerted upon it by the likes of New York City’s Vice magazine.

Appalshop, however, has been working hard in the face of this trend. The media cooperative, founded in 1969, assists Appalachian filmmakers in the telling of their own stories and those of their region, and it has become one of the most visible and highly regarded advocates of rural issues, be they cultural, political, environmental, or aesthetic. Through its films, theater productions, radio broadcasts, and symposiums, Appalshop has proven that the reality of life in Appalachia resists pat generalizations and has gone far in asserting the complexities of the experiences, perspectives, and personalities of Appalachians.

For Buell Kazee was nothing if not complex. Despite the fervor of his calling, nearly his entire life was marked by the struggle to reconcile his love and talent for music with his faith and devotion to his ministry. He disagreed with the assertion that the old mountain ballads should be exempt from sophisticated musical interpretation, as he considered them among the world’s great poetry. And though, as Loyal Jones remarks, rediscovery “was not a totally happy experience for Buell,” it gave him the opportunity to “tell the story of his music, to create a spell,” and to enjoy the ovations of audiences edified and entertained by his performances. These complexities, illustrative of a thoughtful and sensitive man, helped to make Buell Kazee the profound musician he was. Appalshop deserves thanks for giving us the chance to consider him anew.

• •

Buell Kazee, the CD reissue on June Appal, is now available from, among other outlets, http://www.appalshop.org/store/.