More reliable and cheaper than the last link I posted to an outlet for the Discoteca Collection box-set is the Downtown Music Gallery in New York. Here is your direct line:
http://search2.downtownmusicgallery.com/lookup.cgi?item=2007_05_04_04_56_40
Despite any reference to this blog on that site, I received no commission (or a copy of the box-set) from DMG.
The New York Times ran a story today about a recording trip launched by the Brazilian Minister of Culture in 1938. The Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas (or Folklore Research Mission) travelled into rural areas of the Brazilian northeast and its
intention was to record as much music as possible as quickly as possible, before encroaching influences like radio and cinema began transforming the region’s distinctive culture. Traveling by truck, horse and donkey, they recorded whoever and whatever seemed to be interesting: piano carriers, cowboys, beggars, voodoo priests, quarry workers, fishermen, dance troupes, and even children at play.
The minister, Mário de Andrade, had created the Discoteca Pública Municipal (Municipal Public Recordings Collection) de São Paolo in 1935, perhaps modeled after the Archive of Folk Song (now the American Folklife Center) at the Library of Congress, which had been established in 1932.
According to Morton Marks, “this archive of Brazilian musical folklore was meant to be a resource for the nationalist composers of the day, whose goal was to incorporate the folk and popular musics of Brazil into their compositions and to transform these styles into música erudita, or art music.” Sharing the opinion of the radical (though decidedly un-nationalist) Composers Collective of the 1930s – Charles Seeger, Elie Siegmeister, Henry Cowell, Marc Blitzstein – de Andrade considered folk music to be a thickening ingredient that added substance, local identity, and a salt-of-the-earth integrity to contemporary musical works; a prosaic means to sophisticated aesthetic (as well as political) ends.
No surprise, however, that following the mission, according to Larry Rohter in the Times, the discs languished for decades in São Paolo. After all, composers such as Hector Villalobos in Brazil and Charles Ives or Aaron Copland in the USA – composers who are celebrated for creating enduring modern works from the distillation of some essential “folk” quality of their respective homelands’ vernacular music – didn’t need a federal initiative to nudge them along.
Even despite copies being sent to the Library of Congress during the Second World War, none of these recordings was issued until 1997, when Alan Jabbour (former head of the Folklife Center) and Mickey Hart (former Dead drummer and bizarrely public face of the AFC) teamed up with Ryko to release a single disc sampler called The Discoteca Collection. 
The CD is an incredible one, truly, with social and dramatic dances, epic songs, trance rituals, healing rites, originally recorded onto acetate disc. It is unfortunately lacking the beautiful, conversational, minstrel-like tunes played by duos called repentistas, but it bears two recordings of the Pancaru Indians’ praiá ritual, performed during the hog plum harvest, that are shockingly good. In the first, a female soloist repeats several lines of chant as shakers and an occasional exclamation are heard in the background. At one point in her recitation, men – presumably the masked dancers pictured in the album booklet – begin to sporadically grunt and holler, building over the course of several minutes into a steady sheet of moans and cries. Then, cutting through like a jarring overdub, a metallic-sounding flute utters a few soft breaths and the song is over. It’s a incredibly moving recording of, to quote from the notes, an “almost purely Indian music that echoes the earliest encounters between Europeans and Brazilian Indians in the 16th century.”
I go on at such length (kvelling about a CD now ten years available) – and here make my point – because the article tells us that a 6-CD set, “Musica Tradicional do Norte e Nordeste, 1938,” is now available from the Discoteca Collection, presumably produced with the engineering assistance of the pros in the Sound Lab at the Library of Congress. Like so many field-recording expeditions, the Missão was launched in the right place at the right time, and it’s only now, after the wholesale disappearance of the traditions and ways of life it set out to document, that its good work is being given the presentation and notoriety it deserves. I’m thrilled, and think it’s a cause for celebration.
A link to the set with gorgeous photos (a handful of which I’ve lifted here), audio samples, and background info (with an English translation):
http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/hotsites/missao/index.html
If only we had Gilberto Gil as our Minster of Culture… Imagine how many magnificient reissues of regional recording trips we’d have flooding our libraries, schools, and record shops. Up the Republic!
The University of Kentucky Press has recently published a new book of James Archambeault’s photographs, Historic Kentucky, the fifth in his catalog of Kentucky photo volumes. The images therein are among Archambeault’s most evocative and moving, and are, to the credit of all, accompanied by a Wendell Berry forward and an introduction by the artist, both of which place the images in their contemporary context. Namely (and crudely): the places seen in this book are history, in the vernacular sense of the phrase, or are rapidly becoming it.
In his preface, Berry (the greatest living Kentuckian thinker and writer) quotes the late Guy Davenport (one of the greatest, living or dead, Kentuckian thinkers and writers): “every building in the United States is an offense to invested capital. It occupies space which, as greed acknowledges no limits, can be better utilized.” And: “Money has no ears, no eyes, no respect; it’s all gut, mouth, and ass.” Every other page reveals a homestead, a general store, a meeting house that, as the photographer wryly notes in caption after caption, is no more, having either been left to rot into neglected ground or torn down to make way for some whim of invested capital, be it one of agribusiness, energy concern, or pork-barrel politic. A gorgeous view of the Wildnerness Road that brought pioneer families across the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky is included here – hike that trail now and where once our frontiering ancestors saw the ridges, hollers, and creeks of the Kentucke promised land you’ll find mountaintops ripped off for the coal underneath.
Most Kentuckians have a weakness for waxing rhapsodic about the natural riches of our state and the romantic lives we have lived in, on, and among them – horse farms in the Bluegrass; steamboats down the Ohio into the Mississippi; covered bridges over the countless creeks, streams, and branches; Daniel Boone trekking through the Red River Gorge – but I wonder how many of those with the privilege to wile away their hours in flights of pastoral fancy consider the havoc the market is wreaking on their natural and historical idylls. Kentucky romanticism is a big business; coffee table books, calendars, greeting cards, encyclopedias honoring some stripe of the state’s character or other are legion. Archambeault’s previous books are among the most visible (and beautiful) manifestations of this self-regard, and it’s a vindicating thing that Historic Kentucky has come out, just in time for Christmas, to remind his fellows of the rapacity of gut, mouth, and ass threatening the magnificent sites and sights of the Commonwealth.
This is a letter sent by Anneke, Woody Guthrie’s third and final wife, to Alan Lomax, in June 1953. Folks in Woody’s orbit had a way of adopting his prose style – long, grandiose, playful, freely associative – though never to the same transcendent ends. Lomax was guilty of this in several letters I’ve seen, including one to his young daughter Anna (full disclosure: my boss). But some of Woody’s most beautiful letters were ones that he embellished with his signature cartoons and watercolors. The one that I’m most fond of was typed on the inside of the dust jacket of John Dos Passos’ “U.S.A.,” and then slathered with pink script reading “PEACE.” I’d put that one up, but this is a copyright violation enough as it is, I’m sure. So: Courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archive.
But how about that mule? Regarding its fruit treelet/rose bush? This was one of the first articles I came across when I signed up at the Lomax Archive, and I just couldn’t take my eyes off it. I think it’s utterly charming.
First post goes straight into the self-promotion, though we’ll sprinkle some edifying tidbits throughout.
I do some internet radio shows here in New York City of traditional, folk, local, endangered, and/or extinct music – pithily if not succinctly summed up as old-time, hard time, good time music. Field recordings; country, blues, gospel, old-time, &c from the 78 era; “world” music old and new; 50s and 60s R&B; some bluegrass; some folk revivalists from here and from there; classic and outlaw country from the 50s through the present. Etcetera. One is broadcast every Tuesday morning, 10am-12pm EST, from the East Village Radio studio on 1st St. and 1st Ave., and is podcastable too:
Root Hog Or Die:
http://www.eastvillageradio.com/modules.php?name=evrshow&ordinal=28
The other one, put on by unlikely patrons of the rural arts – the MoMA and the PS1 Contemporary Art Center- is moth-balled in mp3 archives for now (perhaps the patrons became aware of their unlikelitude), but is still retrievable and listenable:
Goodbye Dear Old Stepstone:
http://www.wps1.org/include/shows/stepstone.html
Not entirely happy with the Stepstone program, if only because it was not recorded live but meant to sound like it, leaving my hands to sweat and my mind to race and to occasionally say embarassing and incorrect things. I’m hardly Wolfman Jack or, in a different arena, Bob Fass, but the spontanaeity of live radio – even internet radio – makes missteps managable, expected, and, when they’re not too howling, fun.
The names for the shows are taken from two aged tunes, both dating from the 1800s. “Stepstone” was a sentimental tune written by two fellows, A. J. Crider and George Chase, c. 1880, as “Old Door Step” and recorded on several occasions as hillbilly records in the 1920s. Ernest V. (Pop) Stoneman did a version, as did the Floyd County Ramblers. Woody Guthrie later recorded it for Moe Asch’s Folkways, but my favorite – and I think the most moving – version was recorded by the Minstrel of the Appalachians, folksinger, collector and lawyer, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, of South Turkey Creek, North Carolina, c. 1970. (Lunsford had also recorded it commercially in 1928.)
“Root Hog Or Die” refers to a saying used to describe hard times, such as “Back in root-hog-or-die days.” It was sung in all manner of situations: by black and white cowboys on the range, Ozark and Dust Bowl farmers on their parcels; there’s even a maritime application floating around somewhere. Davy Crockett referred to it as an already “old saying” in 1834. A Union soldier uses it thusly in a letter from 1863: “We hear that the Rebel Gen. Price is in Arkansas. How true this is I do not know. But we will make him root hog or die.” The singer and banjo-picker Neal Morris of Timbo, Arkansas, explained it to Alan Lomax in 1959: “There’s been a saying among the mountain people – that means if you don’t work you don’t get anything to eat. The hog has to root if he gets anything to eat.” The version I play as the show’s theme was sung and played on guitar by Jimmy Denoon, originally of Midco, Missouri. He went on to move to Salinas, Calif., become Big Jim Denoone (“The Giant of Western Swing”) and record for the 4 Star Label in the late ‘40 – his version of “Root Hog Or Die” was one of five songs he recorded for folklorist Vance Randolph in 1941.
Up there on top is Estil C. (E.C.) Ball and his wife Orna, late of Rugby, in southwestern Virginia, as seen on the cover of their third album, “Fathers Have A Home Sweet Home.” It’s an incredible record, just like everything else they recorded, and a crime that one has to scour Ebay looking for a copy of it. More on that, and else besides, later.
