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.

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.

I received a promotional package a month or so ago from my generous and much appreciated press contact at Smithsonian Folkways. He has long been undaunting in servicing my internet radio requests, never hesitating to gin up their dreamy proprietary CD-burning machine to churn out digital transfers of extremely deep catalog releases. Is there any deep catalog more exciting than the (for-all-intents-and-purposes) endless Folkways trough? It’s not too much to ask of one to shell out $20 for a burned disc in a smart cardboard sleeve, reprinted with the original Ronald Clyne cover art, or $9.99 for a digital album download – even though the digital masters are pulled from clean LPs and not from the original tapes (we can’t expect THAT much, can we?), we’re damn lucky the music is available to us at all. The Smithsonian Global Sound site offers a peerless exploratory experience, and with PDFs available of every album’s notes and cover, SFW’s leap into the digital age sets an example for every archival outlet looking to similarly adapt and disseminate. (That’s not including their downloadable teaching manuals and quixotic – though potentially brilliant – “Synchrotext” process. As a representative of another digitized archive pursuing on-line feasibility, yes, there is plenty jealousy of SFW’s creativity and adventurousness, not to mention funding. Ah… funding.)

I do digress. The package: in addition to the specific requests that it fulfilled, the package also delivered the two CDs that have earned SFW 2008 Grammy nominations – Michael Doucet’s “From Now On…“, in the Best Zydeco or Cajun category, and the Mariachi Los Camperos’ “Amor, Dolor, Y Lagrimas,” for the Best Regional Mexican album.

I listened to, and don’t like, either of these albums. Doucet as a fiddler is above censure – he’s brilliant, and the world requires my saying so not at all – but just as I’d rather have his old-time Cajun sessions with Canray Fontenot any day over Beausoleil, I can do without his interpretations of New Orleans R&B (the unspoken other half of the title is “…Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky,” after Allen Toussaint) and the occasional blues. The arrangements are tasteful – just fiddle, acoustic guitar, accordion, and vocal at most – but they’re harnessed to a less-than-inspired repertoire, just too spit-shined, too World Cafe for my taste.

Doucet is spit-shine; the Mariachi Los Camperos are a damn Zamboni. To these ears, their brand of Mexicano Country-politano música ranchera is the Latin equivalent of those (now utterly dated) collections of folk material sung by George Hamilton IV or Hank Snow, and gussied up by Chet Atkins and Bob Ferguson. It’s slick as can be, with a pro horn section and able harpist. If I were fluent in Spanish, I’d probably find the conceits in the Camperos’ hands nearly as unbelievable as I find those concerning little graves, roving gamblers, and prisoners’ dreams when interpreted by Snow or Hamilton’s.

My complaints with these records, however, are purely aesthetic. To ignore the popularity of slick country music – whether the Nashville Sound (then or now) or música ranchera – or to ask Smithsonian Folkways to do so, would be arrogant and patronizing. I might hate it, but what Los Camperos do is a representation of a thriving vernacular music as it’s enjoyed in Mexico. It’s not exactly “folk music,” but it certainly reflects real folkways, as they continue to be reinterpreted and adapted by their inheritors. I might be giving Grammy nominators too much, or maybe too little, credit, but I have a feeling that this the kind of thing they love nominating.

Maybe the Grammies are due less for the goodness of these records, and more to Folkways, the label, for continually resisting the inclination to become a genre ghetto. This is the label that first brought us Michael Hurley; that enthusiastically pressed up Henry Cowell LPs (and, later, CDs!); Sounds of Frogs and the Human Body; Tony Schwartz’s radio collages; and some of the most poorly recorded, obscurely annotated, and wonderfully interesting ethnographic music albums ever dreamt up. Moe Asch was not a record exec like, let’s say, Alan Lomax was a producer; Lomax who would often turn a tape machine or a video camera off if his informant started playing a pop tune, of any variety, learned off the radio or a record.* Folkways never explicitly dictated the breadth of its big tent. The “folkways” themselves were never explictly defined, and 45 years on, they’re still not.

Meanwhile, “Inefficient supply chains lose $40 billion annually.” That’s what the IBM banner ad chides on National Geographic’s new Nat Geo Music site. Perhaps that’s the problem of getting “world music” to the masses? Well then, perhaps NG can help, by providing an efficient clearing house for and adequate representation of all of those international artists that go criminally overlooked by the MSMM (mainstream music media, anyone?). You know, like Femi and Fela Kuti; Cesaria Evora; Damien Marley; and this scrappy bunch of fellows you’ve probably never heard of, Vampire Weekend! Seriously, though – poking around the site, looking at the genres on offer, I’m at an utter loss. Does National Geographic truly think they’re providing a unique service, or just hoping to cash in on a wholly underwhelming aggregation of economically fail-safe “world music” artists? According to Wired, it’s the former** – a marketing experiment focused on the potentially lucrative fantasy of an international indie youth culture, and not, ultimately, with much interest in fashioning the musicological equivalent of their photo-journalism.

The site’s few artist entries that hint at any greater inspiration than can be hoped for from a Putomayo A&R suit (or, for that matter, Mat Whittington, head of Nat Geo Music and former manager of the Thievery Corporation, an “electronic music duo with international flavor”), have been cut whole cloth from the (former?) Calabash Music site, which is itself a strange and often frustrating grab-bag of mostly contemporary ethno-pop musics. The one potentially exciting program on offer here – of the endangered music and dance traditions of Gabon – is not accessible through the website; no, you must be a subscriber to National Geographic Music Television, currently only available, well, nearly everywhere but North America. In case you were wondering, that station shows no signs of greater adventurousness than that of the website; that is if I understand their stated focus on “top artists” correctly.

Michael Doucet and the Mariachi Los Camperos are, in their own genre-ific ways, “top artists.” Plenty like them, buy their records, nominate them for Grammies. But those top artists, in the SFW firmament, sit alongside the whole wild ensemble that is the Folkways catalog – not only just the one-offs mentioned above, but also the noble and awe-inspiring Central Asia and Indonesia series, among so many others. Look at their website and the first thing you see is a rotating gallery of Folkways LP covers dug up from the vaults; records that aren’t lost, or dead, but only sleeping, and that can be yours on CD, as we’ve said, for less than $20. The Folkways folks seem – and I bet they are – just as proud of those riches as they are of their Grammy nominations.

But I’m still waiting for proof that the lowest-common-denominating (with its concomitant, hopeful insistence on what was once – is still? – called the “long tail”) that outlets like National Geographic’s music site do to the world’s vernacular music benefits the local musical communities that are obscured the most by the world-beat market’s monoculture. If it did have any benefit at all, it would be because it inspires in listeners more adventurousness than they seem to be comfortable exploiting in themselves; listeners who shouldn’t be so underestimated as to be assumed to appreciate only the most highly processed spoonfuls of that murky pot-au-feu that goes by the name of “world music.” No matter how “top” the artists might be.

*There are some very funny documented examples of Lomax waxing rhapsodic about how old or authentic a song he’s just recorded – with the player agreeing, or just keeping mum – when in fact it’s some cheesy pop-cowboy number of rather recent composition.

**Indeed, Wired says approvingly, National Geographic wants no truck with “the sound of the rain forest, indigenous tribes, or things of that nature. Rather, Nat Geo Music is looking for modern-sounding bands from various countries that have the potential to attract listeners from other regions.” Ouch.

Several months ago Lance Ledbetter of Dust-to-Digital invited me to write the preface to the second volume of their invaluable compilations of Art Rosenbaum’s many decades of field recordings. That volume is now available, and I’m posting its preface here. If you’re unfamiliar, or haven’t gotten around to spending time with the Art of Field Recording sets, I can say unblemished by the promise or hope of any personal gain that they are among the most wonderful and important traditional music collections to emerge in the digital age…!

(I plan on this piece of writing being the last reprise on my complaints with the legacy of Harry Smith’s Anthology for the foreseeable future.)

The release of the first volume of Dust-to-Digital’s Art of Field Recording set last year was a cause for celebration, rivaled only by the ecstatic reception it was given in the press. Don’t misunderstand—there are many (some might say too many) vernacular music reissue projects every year, and many of them are very good, and provide happy coverage of otherwise forgotten or overlooked performers, regions, eras, or genres of American music. And of course those that are very good are very good regardless of how forgotten or overlooked they are by the press. But to see so many outlets positively kvelling (to use a word Art Rosenbaum’s grandmother might have used back in Paterson, New Jersey) over a four-CD set of field recordings made across 50 years by an art professor cum amateur folklorist was remarkable.

Most of the reviews of volume one made nearly requisite mention of Harry Smith’s landmark Anthology of American Folk Music, which for many also elicited a mention of Greil Marcus’ now all-too-familiar chestnut of the “Old, Weird America” that Smith saw his set mystically invoking. Rosenbaum writes below that he is “pleased and honored” to have his set compared to the Anthology. But, for all of its brilliant inclusions, juxtapositions, and revelations, the Anthology is in many ways Smith’s tribute to the tenacity of the record collector and his obsession with obscurity, rarity, and preciousness. It celebrates the highly collectible pre-war 78 and in the process rarifies not only those objects themselves but also their performers, pushing the likes of Charley Patton, Dock Boggs, and Columbus Fruge into some imaginary past of musico-mythological dimensions; a bestial, primitive, inscrutable place, filled with moans, howls, speech-in-tongues, and tribal utterances. We hear them, shiver, laugh, gape, and fall in love, but the Anthology keeps them distant and foggy, behind the cover’s presentation of the hand of God tuning a monochord.

The Art of Field Recording volumes take a different tack. They reveal, not obscure. While the music of both sets speak entirely and effectively for themselves, Art Rosenbaum makes clear his dedication to the undeniable living-ness of the songs, the essential, fundamental quality with which track after track is imbued. It takes fingers and toes to count how many songs end in laughter, a joke, or other gleeful outburst you can’t help but feel lucky to be let in on. And those of the sacred and the melancholy varieties sound so forcefully, throbbingly intimate that to listen can feel almost invasive, requiring the utmost gingerness and respect. These are performances which palpitate with organic presence, enduring with each listen as, in Rosenbaum’s words, “ever-renewing contexts, embodying time past in time present.” Listening to these volumes, it occurs to me how incomplete a portrait the commercial recording of rural American music painted in its pre-war heyday, and that, despite the years since of revivals, re-revivals, and “rediscoveries,” what Alan Lomax called the “deep river of song”—the living stream of musical inheritance, reinterpretation, and reinvigoration—can never be fully sounded. The best known performers included here—Scrapper Blackwell, Buell Kazee, Ola Belle Reed, Dewey Balfa; talents who have been if not exhaustively, at least thoroughly represented on prior releases—flow naturally and happily into voices who have been under-represented, under-appreciated, or often all but unknown. Why weren’t Doodle Thrower and his Golden River Grass regarded as one of America’s most original and thrilling bluegrass bands? Why haven’t there been albums devoted to Laurence Eller, whose voice is as singular and haunting as Roscoe Holcomb’s? Had Cecil Barfield run a juke joint, or perhaps lived in Mississippi instead of his native South Georgia, it’s easy to imagine him being as beloved and as sought after a subject for films and records as was Junior Kimbrough.

It’s Barfield that tells Rosenbaum, as you’ll read and hear, that in writing a blues, “What your heart do, your mind be right along with it.” Art reads this as an insistence on emotional primacy in creative expression. That’s a welcome approach to traditional music. It sees a partnership between the collective tradition and the individual artist, and Rosenbaum, an artist himself, explicitly understands his connections with the players of his field recordings as artistic connections. As he writes, these recordings speak, not “as quaint artifacts of the past, but as living art, renewed in performance, continuing to speak to the human spirit and condition.” If that’s not a definition of folk music, it’s indefinable.

A compelling article by Robert Millis, one-half of the Climax Golden Twins, appeared in this month’s Perfect Sound Forever web-zine. You might know the Twins’ work through the “Victrola Favorites” cassette compilations of rare 78s – and, as of 2008, in a lavish CD box-set courtesy of the noble Dust-to-Digital.

I lack a fully gestated version of that gene that imparts the propensity towards obsessive 78 collection; I’d much rather spend $15 on a CD that collects a 78-era-performer’s “complete recorded works in chronological order” (in the vernacular of one reissue label) than on an original disc that I can’t listen to in the car, that requires switching the stylus on my turntable, and that my clumsy ass would probably break anyway. Besides, these days $15 rarely buys the collector something that the collector would consider worthy of collecting.

I also don’t really care about the object; if I can get to the music in the most convenient and edifying way (admittedly the two are usually mutually exclusive), I’m satisfied. I write that, though, recalling a lazy afternoon spent on eBay several years ago, when I found an auction underway of some 50 Turkish classical 78s. The shipping would have been $300 from Ankara, but there was only a day left, with the bidding sitting quietly at $50. I felt, much to my displeasure, that tingly sensation rise in my stomach, and momentarily lost all sense of proportion, fiscal responsibility, etc. The bidding – of course – flew through the scalloped roof over the next day, and I quickly pulled myself back to earth. But I got a fleeting sense of that fearful bug, and enough of it to set me off that kind of vice for good.

The past few years has seen the emergence of a concerted effort to reissue “ethnic” and/or international musics recorded c. 1900-1950 or later on CD. Pat Conte’s Secret Museum of Mankind series on Yazoo set the bar just about of reach. He not only has great records, but has a real gift of sequencing them into an album or, for that matter, a radio show, taking wildly disparate material and making it all play happily together. Dust-to-Digital has done the Victrola Favorites box and the Black Mirror compilations recently – featuring plenty exciting tunes too, though they feel less an attempt to showcase the best possible records of a grab-bag of locales, and moreso a show-and-tell of particular collectors’ collections. (Especially illustrative of the collection ethos is the former – reflective of the preciousness of the 78 object, the set is itself a finely wrought objet d’art.) Though the Climax Golden Twins and Ian Nagoski, Black Mirror’s compiler, are by all evidence discerning listeners, having a good record collection does not necessarily guarantee discernment.* I could have had 50 Turkish classical 78s in my “collection” and still not known the first damn thing about Turkish classical music, or how my records stacked up to the highest stars in the firmament of vintage Turkish classical recordings. Ultimately, I’m much less interested in a particular collector’s collection than the most representative and wonderful records of a particular tradition, genre, artist, or period. Another reason I don’t collect 78s.

But Millis’ interview with Suresh Chandvankar, “honorary secretary” of the Society of Indian Record Collectors, is exciting for both the view of the sheer massiveness of India’s bygone 78 record industry – of the size and scope of the subcontinent itself – and its most dutiful (and obsessive) collectors. Why do I write “dutiful”? I wouldn’t use that word to describe Millis, Nagoski, or even Conte or Bussard. Perhaps I have banging around my skull Alan Lomax’s concept of “cultural feedback” – namely that the job of the folklorist, et al., is not to document traditional modes of expression for export only, but to help reinvigorate local traditions that might be struggling to be heard beneath the roar of the mass-culture media machine. (No small feat in India.) The irony is that these 78 recordings were made by the industry’s foremost corporate firms in the first half of the 20th century, and while “commoditizing” the music of various life-cycle rituals and religious ceremonies, as well as the praise and story-songs of particular musician castes, they also helped document and nurture those traditions. Companies like HMV were unwitting preservers of utterly local and fragile folkways, and collectors like Chandvankar – as an inheritor** of these folkways – are continuing the work of that reinvigorative “feedback.”

Millis writes:

I met Suresh Chandvankar in Mumbai (the current name for the city of Bombay). Suresh is a physicist who is “deep into records” and is the “honorary secretary” of the Society of Indian Record Collectors, an organization devoted to the “documentation and preservation” of Indian music, especially that music released on 78rpm. My mind did boggle when I found out what the SIRC has access to through its various far-flung members: not only the cream of film music and Northern and Southern classical music from the 78 era, but everything else imaginable: jazz played in India, music therapy 78s, Zoroastrian religious discourse, dramas, long forgotten labels, recordings of instruments that are no longer used, puzzle records, radio transcriptions.

Read Millis’ entire article and interview with the good secretary here:

http://www.furious.com/perfect/indiancollectors.html

*Allow me another, mostly useless recollection here: I remember going to a party some years ago in Brooklyn, at the house of a guy that I had been psyched up about – namely about his ridiculously massive record collection. Friends I was with at the time were talking about it excitedly, and I got excited too. It was by all accounts legendary. It filled the entire front room, floor to ceiling, on industrial aluminum shelves of one of those dingy, cheap row-houses of the Williamsburg/Greenpoint variety – it was in fact in Williamsburg – with step-stools for easy access, and party-goers were standing around kind of in awe, quietly, like it was the Sistine Chapel. It was admittedly daunting, but obvious that we were encouraged to interact with the collection (to propitiate our proud host), so I started randomly pulling things off shelves. I swear: Herb Alpert, Kay Kyser, Fogelberg, I mean every absolutely bargain-basement barrel-bottom thing you’ve ever flipped through disappointedly was there, like a whole bunch of little Wizards of Oz behind the curtain of the huge, totally awesome “collection.” I don’t remember seeing anything remotely worth listening to; much less actually owning. This is the end of my recollection, and ill-illustrative example (having confused “good” with “big”).

**It’s certainly arguable that Chandvakar, just because he is Indian – by which I mean the citizen of a nation still in its infancy that is in essence a haphazardly compiled patchwork or palimpsest (after Lomax and Rushdie) of hundreds of ethnic groups, languages, doctrines, and other myriad identifications – is no more entitled to that “inheritance” than any other enthusiastic collector of vintage records, no matter how far flung. Although I’d say that as an Indian, he is in a better position geographically, culturally, and perhaps emotionally to do the work of “cultural preservation,” if that’s what he, we, whomsoever it concerns agrees needs doing.

It’s New Year’s Day 1953, in the Basque city of Tolosa. A bertsolari – composer and singer of extemporized sung verses called bertsos – named Pedro Anaitio is recording some of his lines for Alan Lomax. Actually, maybe his name isn’t Pedro Anaitio, but that’s how Lomax notated it, and none of the experts who have retraced Lomax’s steps through Franco’s Spain in 1952 and 1953 have been able to tell different. Lomax took no photograph of him; one of the only remarks he made concerning him was that he hesitated slightly before singing “not because of shyness, but because he was composing the songs he was going to give us.”

The song, in fact, will probably not thrill you. Anaitio has a “just fine” kinda voice, and the tune is… nice, though not great by any means. But the translation of the lyrics provide – at least to my thusly-inclined sensibility – this fleeting but affecting, sympathetic, and wistful perspective into this fellow’s state of mind, heart, etc., in this moment of improvisation, before a stranger’s microphone, at some hour in the afternoon on New Year’s Day. What is produced, I think, is very beautiful poetry.

(Credit to Aintzane Camara & Juan Mari Beltran for the translation from Basque to Spanish; Judith Cohen for Spanish translation into English. Though too reminiscent of English As She Is Spoke for you, perhaps?)

Here people could live well, getting along well together,
Not because it’s easy, if it doesn’t come naturally.
Offering whatever one can, offering it freely.
It’s not good to get angry, without being able to suffer.
For someone who doesn’t know, I tell you, it’s inevitable.

We’ve really enjoyed the fiesta.
It’s time to start now.
I don’t really like going over the stories again and again.
Let’s make an effort now on one side or the other.
I value good will – thanks, young man!

I was born in Navarre, I grew up in Guipuzcoa.
I’d like to leave something for tomorrow, and not say everything today.
Why should we get tied up in this situation?
I offer you a life of many years, to all those present.

There’s something that must be said – let’s start.
If you’ve said something wrong, don’t leave.
Certainly you’ve seen something similar before.
Here I’ve started to sing now before you.

An unidentified man with cats in the Basque village of Arbizu, in Navarre, shot by Alan Lomax in August of 1953. Sure, a somewhat arbitrary image, but I think somehow a complementary one. Courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archive.

What follows are notes written for “I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful,” an album (CD & LP) devoted to the coal miner, union activist, and singer Nimrod Workman. It’s the first solo CD (however posthumous) of the late Workman, and his first LP in 30 years; it’s also the first release on Twos & Fews, an imprint I’m curating in conjunction with the Drag City label in Chicago.

I’m really excited to be starting with this record of Mike Seeger’s recordings of Workman. I first discovered Nimrod while digging through Lomax’s record collection in 2000, where I found a 45 released on an Appalshop-related imprint called Dillon’s Run, and which featured what have become – if anything can be so-called – Workman’s most famous compositions; namely, “42 Years” and “Coal Black Mining Blues.” The cover portrait of the man, his face stricken with deep rivulets, like a parched and lonesome scrubland, attested to his many years spent underground and along the picket line, and was a visual correlative to his eerie, bristling songs. Those songs floored me. I had never heard anything as starkly intimate and honest, bearing not a trace of romanticism, born as they were of decades of personal experience and hardship. I’m not indulging in hyperbole when I say that they scared me, and made me chilly and uncomfortable. But though they might have slightly repelled me, they were deeply moving, and with each listen they didn’t necessarily soften up, but I began to ken their inherent warmth.

I listened to that 45 into the ground, and turned to eBay for more, winning as the only bidder copies of Nimrod’s 1978 Rounder LP “Mother Jones’ Will” and his “Passing Through the Garden,” a record he made with his daughter Phyllis Boyens (now Boyens-Liptak) for Appalshop’s newly launched June Appal label (1974). They lightened my impression of Nimrod a bit, with their inclusions of the tongue-twisters and nonsense songs that Nimrod obviously loved to sing. By that time I had become friends with some of the Appalshop crew, and they passed on a VHS of To Fit My Own Category, which is a beautiful, if spare, portrait of Nimrod as singer, ginsenger, and father. And then I spent time with Lomax’s raw footage of Nimrod, shot in 1982 (just weeks after Mike Seeger made his first recordings) at Nim’s home in Mascot, Tennessee, near Knoxville. Portions of that footage appeared in Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old and Appalachian Journey, two of the six films produced for Lomax’s American Patchwork PBS series, and to watch Workman ease his way one moment through his seven-minute “Lord Bateman” (which he called “Baseman”), accompanied by his elaborate and unique hand gestures, to drop to the floor to show off his spider walk the next, was a happy thrill. The fearfulness with which I heard his most mournful performances and beheld his visage was replaced by intense respect and affection. He had survived brutal social and occupational conditions without sacrificing his pride, his anger, or his allegiance to the good fights for equality and justice. But nor did he surrender his childlike mischievousness and his obvious love of hilarity and the absurd.

Nimrod, c. 1980s. Courtesy Phyllis Boyens-Liptak.

This is all to say that it’s an absolute honor to have worked on this record, in the hope of bringing Nimrod Workman to more willing and sympathetic ears. He’s not an easy listen. My father, for one, tells me Workman’s singing literally inflicts pain to him. But I’ve found him to be one of the most satisfying traditional singers ever recorded, as his performances are near to bursting with humanity and honesty. Several of his granddaughters have written on the Twos & Fews Myspace page short but loving tributes to their Paw-paw, making me all the more sorry that I never knew him while he lived. I would have loved to have sat on the porch “visiting,” as Mike Seeger writes fondly of doing, while Nimrod sang and joked and told his stories. Doing this record is the closest I’ll get to him; and it’s been time well spent. I hope you’ll spend some of your own, and that you’ll come to agree.

* * *

Nimrod Workman was born near Inez in Eastern Kentucky in 1895, into a family that boasted frontiersmen, panther-killers, Civil War veterans both blue and gray, and a great Cherokee warrior as forebears. His family’s subsistence farming in the coves and hollers of Martin County made for no easy way of life, but it soon gave way to one even tougher, as the coal industry moved into the mountains. At the age of 14, like many of his generation, Workman went to work in the mines. He moved to nearby Chattaroy, in Mingo County, West Virginia, where he’d live and work in various mining capacities for, as his composition tells it, “42 Years,” when black lung and a slipped disc forced him into retirement.

Nimrod told Alan Lomax in 1983 that “I been though some great things and some dangerous stuff.” In the wake of the Matewan Massacre of 1921, he marched with hundreds of fellow miners (and, he claimed, Mother Jones too, though this has never been proven*) into neighboring Logan County and what became the Battle of Blair Mountain in an effort to organize the coal fields. Although martial law was declared and the union drive stalled, the experience confirmed his life-long commitment to the UMWA and the Democratic Party. Forty years later, he was part of a contingent of West Virginia miners that visited the nation’s capitol to lobby Senator Robert Byrd for black lung compensation, which they ultimately received.

But, as Mike Seeger wrote in a 1987 report to the NEA, which had given him a Folk Arts grant to make the recordings on this album, singing was “at the center of Nimrod Workman’s life…. When I first visited him in the early ’70s, he sang nearly our entire visit, not necessarily to perform but as an important part of his relating to people.” His upbringing was steeped in lyric songs, comic play-party pieces, dance tunes, hymns and sacred material from the Baptist church, and the mournful Scots-Irish ballads that filled the Southern Appalachian mountains. He learned them from his parents, his grandfather, his neighbors (especially Uncle Peter McNeely, who “came over here from England,” “shantied all the time” and would teach only Nimrod the songs in his bag), and he composed them himself. After leaving home for Mingo’s Howard Collieries, as he recalls to Mike Seeger here, he’d sing to keep himself company. “I’d be in there by myself, couldn’t hear nobody nowhere. Just nothing but me and my light, in that dark place. I’d be a’loading my car, and I’d sing till I get it loaded.” Out of this dark place came Workman’s best known compositions, “42 Years,” “Mother Jones’ Will,” and “Coal Black Mining Blues.”

Later in life, when he began touring the folk and heritage festival circuit extensively, Nimrod would add to these fundamental, formative elements in his repertoire others’ topical material (Hazel Dickens, Si Kahn, Jean Ritchie), popular country compositions (Merle Haggard, Norman Blake), and the songs of his wife Molly’s Pentecostal Holiness Church (tracks 1, 5, 24, 25). He discriminated on his own terms — those songs appealed to him on the basis of his traditional background — if he heard a song that he liked, he learned it, sang it, and often claimed it as his own. Seeger addressed this penchant of Nimrod’s in his NEA report: “Nimrod takes songs and personalizes them, puts them into his own style and changes a few words. He takes great artistic liberties with some songs and possibly with the old ballads. I believe that this might also have something to do with his not being literate, having a strong ego and some measure of rascality. There is no doubt that most of his songs are living things, especially melodically and in mode of presentation.”

Appalshop produced a documentary of Nimrod in 1975 called “To Fit My Own Category,” the title of which was drawn from notes appearing in Nimrod’s first LP (“Passing Through the Garden,” June Appal 001, 1974). Rich Kirby quoted Nimrod as saying in reference to one of his compositions: “I made this song to fit my own category.” Deeply religious, joyfully mischievous, fiercely independent, uncompromising but always adaptable, Nimrod was a tradition-bearer who didn’t let tradition dictate the full contours of his remarkable artistry: an artistry in a category entirely its own.

Nimrod Workman died in 1994 at the age of 99. It’s an honor to make these recordings available.

It’s amazing that Nimrod learned and retained these songs, that he can compose on the spot, that he survived 40 years of mining life and many more years than that of tobacco and alcohol use, and that he remains at the age of 92 vital and able to talk and sing with strong conviction. He is a treasure.
—Mike Seeger, 1987.

*This caveat did not appear in my notes to the album. Jack Wright, producer of the Music of Coal box-set and of Nimrod’s first recordings, has looked into this and can’t substantiate Nimrod’s claims. I took Nimrod’s telling of the tale at face value – something I should have known better than to do – and for that I’m regretful. What a thrilling image it musters.

This is a slightly edited version of what appears at the newly minted Smoke Music Archive, accompanied by two videos of a conversation I had with Charlie Louvin at the Louvin Brothers Museum in Nashville, in December 2007. Check the Smoke site for the videos at full-quality, as well as a playlist of murder ballads worth your ears’ time. (Thanks to Aron Conaway and Hallie Jones for the camera work; to editor Leslie McCleave; and to Smoke director Bob Moses for funding the shoot endeavor.)

Long before cable news, supermarket tabloids, and O.J. Simpson’s imaginary memoir stepped forward to sate our voracious and voyeuristic appetite for stories of jilted lovers and bloody retribution, Renaissance England teemed with broadsheet hawkers selling sex, death, and damnation for a shilling a page. Following a rarely deviating story line — from rendezvous to murder to cover-up to punishment (corporeal and/or divine) — many of these ballads were born of real events and were hurriedly composed (by hacks), printed (by third-rate printers), and rushed out into the cobble-stoned streets (by “patterers”) for rapid consumption by the citizenry. And that citizenry could sing them on the spot, provided it was familiar with the popular tune the ballad’s composer assigned it, or was able to pick it up from the singing of the patterer. Stabbings, bludgeonings, stranglings, drownings, victims stuffed with stones and pieces of iron — the ingenuity of the murderers put many of their contemporary counterparts to shame, and the high melodramatic syrup dripping from the broadsheets remains untouchable even by the most craven tabloid journalism.

But no matter how shocking the crime and its accompanying blood and gore, the ballads (written primarily in the first person — that is, from the perspective of the perp) never forsook the opportunity to conclude the story with an adult-sized cocktail of pious regret, gallows moralizing, and an entreaty to get right with God: “people take warning, not to do as I have done.” The Renaissance murder ballad gave the people the lowbrow sensationalism they craved — as we crave — with one God-fearing eye fixed on Hellfire. They were temporal and timeless, and they remain timeless today.

Charlie Louvin, in our video interview, gives the birth-date of “The Knoxville Girl” as 1723. There is some dispute as to when it first appeared in broadside form, which it did as, alternately, “The Bloody Miller” or “The Berkshire Tragedy; Or, The Wittam Miller. With an Account of his Murdering his Sweetheart,” although evidence suggests that the murder did in fact take place in 1683 or 1684. But it hardly matters much when, these 400 years later, the story’s core elements have been disseminated through dozens of sung descendants of varying degrees of textual, musical, and geographic distance. The lyrics of Charlie’s “The Knoxville Girl” would have been recognized by Irish, English, Maritime, Appalachian, Texan, and Midwestern singers over the past 250 years as cousin to “The Wexford Girl,” “The Oxford Girl,” “The Lexington Girl,” or “The Cruel Miller,” among a number of other variants.  And, as Charlie makes plain, some small difference a handful of years makes when the ballad’s themes of jealousy, revenge, and punishment are nearly carbon-datable, and will certainly endure in perpetuity.

No listener of American folk music, no matter how amateur, will have missed the profusion of murder ballads in the tradition. Francis James Child’s landmark study of British vernacular song in the Southern mountains (1876-1882) shows that the murder ballads comprised a considerable portion of the enduring old country repertoire. Cecil Sharp visited in 1916 and documented, despite his primary interest in British origins, an increasingly American approach to the songs, such as, in one instance, the transformation of portions of “Pretty Polly” into “The Virginian Lover.” And come the heydey of the “hillbilly” recording era of the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, nearly every other artist was cutting a ballad learned from a parent, a grandparent, or a neighbor to shellac, picking up where the late Renaissance left off and providing the ballads with a new method of commercial distribution.

Charlie Louvin recalls his mother’s singing of “The Knoxville Girl,” and credits her for teaching it to him when he was young Charlie Loudermilk in Henegar, Alabama. Judging by extant recordings of other musicians from that part of the country, Mrs. Loudermilk’s version seems to have been the favorite of northern Georgia and Alabama, as well as of southwestern Tennessee. In fact, in 1925, two years before Louvin was born, a guitarist and singer from North Georgia named Arthur Tanner would record what would be the first commercially released “Knoxville Girl,” and one that is nearly identical to that which the Louvin Brothers cut at their first session in 1957, and that Charlie Louvin sings today. And five more “Knoxville Girl” sides would follow in the next ten years, as well as several other manifestations of the story from Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas.

But if a spelunking Kentuckian named Floyd Collins didn’t get trapped in a cave in 1925, the story of the Knoxville Girl might not have reached us at all. The entrapment, rescue effort, and ultimate death of Collins in Sand Cave are well known, precisely because they gave rise to one of the most hysterical media events America has ever experienced. Just as the country was held captive by the disappearances of Laci Peterson or Natalee Holloway, millions waited anxiously for a week in February of ’25 as riveting updates from the Barren County cave were delivered by nearly every American newspaper and radio broadcast. When the accidental celebrity finally expired of starvation and exposure, the nation mourned. And three months later, when a Columbia record of “The Death of Floyd Collins” hit stores, with opera singer cum country star Vernon Dalhart’s delivery positively dripping with melodrama, the nation devoured it. As Chris King writes in his notes to the Tompkins Square label’s boxed-set, “People Take Warning,” Dalhart “set in motion a rage for country-tinged exploitation event songs which made 78s and sheet music the broadside ballads of the post-Industrial Age.”

“The Death of Floyd Collins,” penned by the Reverend Andrew Jenkins, sent A&R executives of the major American recording companies into a frenzy trying to cash in on the success of Dalhart’s record. Although, to again quote King, songs like it were “old and familiar, yet fresh as the morning headlines,” it seems that management was also willing to gamble on older news. Not more than a month after “Floyd Collins” was released, Columbia brought Arthur Tanner into their New York studio to re-cut his “Knoxville Girl.” Yes, re-cut. He had recorded a version just shy of three weeks before the death of Collins, but evidently someone at Columbia was unimpressed and the master was lost or destroyed. Its commercial viability had yet to be revealed. In fact, Tanner wasn’t the only one who had submitted a version of “Knoxville Girl,” only to have the Columbia brass find it uninteresting or unusable. In fact, the blind singer and guitarist Riley Puckett — who would go on to become one of the most popular and prolific old-time performers, both solo and with the super-group the Skillet Lickers (led by Arthur’s brother, Gid Tanner) — had visited New York nearly a year earlier, in March of 1924, where, of his five sides, the only one rejected was “The Knoxville Girl.” (Puckett, however, never re-recorded it.)

Thus the Renaissance murder ballads met their 20th-century descendants in the catalogs of the American record companies and on the Victrolas of American homes. Though dance tunes (“Turkey In the Straw”) and sentimental numbers (“Little Old Log Cabin In the Lane”) were the old-time era’s morning-line favorites, the event ballad — whether pulled from memory or newly composed — quickly became an indispensable element of the early country-music repertoire. Local murder ballads became an especially popular item, fusing some of the language of the British varieties with the people and places of current headlines. (See our playlist for examples: Nana Wray’s “Ballad of Charlie Lawson” and the Floyd County Ramblers’ “Story of Frieda [or Freda] Bolt.”

The 1930s brought with them many changes for hillbilly music, not the least of which was the Great Depression’s effect on the previously high-flying record companies’ bottom lines. Many performers found their contracts expiring and not renewed, and the satellite recording operations that captured the local music of so many Southern backwaters were no longer profitable to maintain. Top artists in the late 1920s, song-crafters like Rev. Jenkins and Fiddlin’ John Carson, were among the casualties of the Depression years, as their big-selling ballads of the 1920s had literally become old news. Motion pictures were giving rise to a Western craze, and the record companies, as Bill Malone points out in his Country Music U.S.A., were refocusing their attention from the Southeast to the Southwest. And hugely popular programs like the National Barn Dance out of Chicago and Nashville’s Grand Ol’ Opry were shifting the very medium of country music from the phonograph to radio receiver.

Despite these modernizations, however, the traditional aspects of many popular artists’ repertoires held firm, as did many listeners’ preference for them. The “old-time songs” provided succor for millions of Southerners scratching out livings on rented parcels in Georgia, slaving in the cotton mills in North Carolina or the coal mines of Kentucky. Those who migrated north to Midwestern factories or followed the Joads west to the migrant labor camps in California tuned into the radio barn dances or the continent-sweeping programs broadcast by the powerful “X” stations across the border in Mexico. As Mark Zwonitzer writes in his biography of the Carter Family, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?, “radio could cut against the loneliness of the country’s age of dislocation, could find the homeless wanderers who had escaped the rural South for dreams of better lives, and then lost their own sense of where they belonged.”

Between advertisements, rural listeners strewn across the country could hear the Carter Family, who spent the late ‘30s in Del Rio, Texas, playing border radio shows like XERA’s “Good Neighbor Get-Together,” pick out murder ballads such as “Young Freda Bolt,” “The Fate of Dewey Lee” (a ballad based on a 1935 murder in Wise County, Virginia, and written by A.P. Carter), or “Never Let the Devil Get the Upper Hand Of You,” a Southwestern Virginia variant of “The Knoxville Girl.”

Bill Malone has written that hard-scrabble existences combined with a rigorous Calvinist faith naturally disposed Southerners towards ballads of a mournful variety. And hearing those ballads sung by parents, grandparents, and neighbors no doubt instills a keen sense of the tragic in a child. Perhaps that’s why so many family bands, especially the brother duos — the Monroes, the Stanleys, the Delmores, the Blue Sky Boys (whose “Story of the Knoxville Girl” from 1937 is virtually identical to that of the Louvins) — trafficked in such material. It’s no surprise that when the Louvin Brothers began their radio career in the 1940s, as Charlie remembers, the most requested song was “The Knoxville Girl.”

Surely it’s more than voyeurism that keeps us returning to murder ballads. We have more than enough contemporary violence in sound and image to hold our attention. Their enduring relevance might have something more to do with humanity’s perpetual, ineluctable high-wire walk between the worst of our bestial natures and the best of our aesthetic capacities. These songs, full of beauty and bathos (they couldn’t have lasted so long without them), are stories of animal responses to human emotions; they’re frank portraits of our species, and unsettling in their familiarity. Charlie Louvin scoffs at those who wonder at how the murderer of the Knoxville girl could commit such a crime. “Why would this dirty guy do this?” they ask. “Unattended love,” obviously, replies Charlie. “You didn’t listen to the song good: ‘Go down, go down, you Knoxville girl, with a dark and roving eye.’ There are still those idiots out there who will say ‘if I can’t have you nobody can.’ “ The crime itself is all that separates us from those idiots. Who among us hasn’t felt such a pang? Thus, as for the murder ballads: “I think they’ll always be here.”

Been returning recently to one of the more intense and affecting albums I’ve experienced in my short life of trouble: recordings made by Bruce Jackson in 1965 at Texas’s Ramsey Prison Farm (now the Ramsey Unit) of a fellow named Johnnie B., or J. B., Smith. The record was released in 1966 on John Fahey’s Takoma label, and is as far as I can tell the only LP devoted to a single unaccompanied singer of prison work-song (or field hollers, if you prefer). Not only that: the LP, “Ever Since I Have Been A Man Full Grown,” devotes nearly all of its second side to a composition of Smith’s of that same name, a 24-minute opus drawing on imagery and lyrics most fans of African American work songs, hollers, and blues will find familiar, but strung together and performed with an artistry and delivery both unsettling and incredibly moving.

J. B. Smith, originally from Hearne, Texas, about 75 miles northeast of Austin, was in Ramsey on and off for years. Jackson wrote in his Wake Up Dead Man (Harvard, 1972) that, when he met him, Smith had already been in prison three times on burglary and robbery by assault charges. At the time of the recording, he was back in for the murder of his girlfriend, an act Smith recalled being born of “insane jealousy mixed up with love.” If ever ballads like “Knoxville Girl” or “The Banks of the Ohio” seem outlandish in their narrators’ impulsive acts, J. B. Smith brings their conceits down to earth: “So many of us do that,” he told Jackson, referring to his crime. “Lot of fellas in here today on those same terms.” The murder, according to Jackson, brought Smith back to Ramsey with “a forty-five-year sentence, which, because of his age, looked pretty much like life.”

[Jackson did continue, parenthetically: “He was paroled in 1967, lived in Amarillo for a while and did some preaching. I heard recently (1972) that he’d returned to prison for a parole violation.”]

If the nature of his crime was not uncommon, Smith’s musical response to his resulting situation certainly was, even if he didn’t seem to think so. He told Jackson:

Now these songs, we can, you know, you stay here so long, a man can compose them if he want to. They just come to you. Your surroundings, your place, you’re so familiar with them, you can always make a song out of your surroundings. I read about some great poetry, like King David in the Bible, he used to make his psalms from the stars and he wrote so many psalms. A little talent and surroundings and I think it’s kind of easy to do it.

Jackson seems to have recorded seven songs of Smith’s, judging by the texts included in Wake Up Dead Man, but only three could fit onto the Takoma LP, with the addition of a minute-long commentary on the notorious Texas prison transfer agent (or “long-chain man”) Bud Russell. The A-side songs, “I Got Too Much Time for the Crime I Done” and “No More Good Time In the World for Me,” are very evocative and effective, but perhaps it’s the prodigiousness of “Ever Since…” that makes listening to it such an intense experience. And as these recordings weren’t made while working, Smith takes his time with his delivery, relaxing the phrases and stretching them out, free as they are of axe or hoe accompaniment. Immediate and private, it’s as though we’re listening in on J. B. in the bunkhouse, having found 20 minutes alone to sing out his lamentations unto the Lord.

The tragedy of Smith’s songs is that they’ve never been reissued in any form, and as the Fantasy corporation bought up the Takoma catalog several years ago, it’s doubtful they will be without some very energetic agitation by some well-heeled concern. And the tragedy of Smith — at least one of them — is that he has slipped back into obscurity. I wrote Bruce Jackson several years ago asking if he knew what became of Smith after the update he had been given before the publication of Wake Up Dead Man. He didn’t.

• •

I was returned to this record of Smith’s by way of the release of a seemingly dissimilar album. The Yaala Yaala label out of Baltimore, run by Jack Carneal, who had spent several years in Mali with his family, has recently released two CDs of local musicians originally “issued” on cassette in Bougouni and Bamako (and another CD of field recordings made in those locales). The second of these CDs — Yaala Yaala oo3 — is of a griot named Daouda Dembele, a resident of the outskirts of Segou, who plays the West African lute called the ngoni (or kontingo or akonting or xalam, and considered by many to be the Ur-banjo).

There are plenty of griot (or jali) stars in the world music firmament at this point — kora players Toumani Diabate, Bai Konte, and Foday Musa Suso; the electric updates of Djelimady Tounkara’s Super Rail Band — but Yaala Yaala offers us the chance to hear a griot performance as might have been heard before the spatial limitations and market considerations of commercial recordings forced them to abbreviate. The CD contains a single performance, and I felt, listening to it once, then again, and then again, that the jali, so much like Smith, was performing privately on his terms, and I was being blessed by the opportunity to listen in. Of course, griots by function don’t sing for themselves; they sing for the edification and entertainment of others (and for their own livelihoods). But to spend such intimate time with recordings of folks like J. B. Smith and Daouda Dembele, in this age of mp3 clips and stuttering 16k audio streams (“buffering… buffering”), not to mention our own perpetual impatience, is a very moving and increasingly rare experience, and one to be treasured.

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.

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