R.I.P. Phyllis Workman Boyens Liptak

Phyllis Workman Boyens Liptak, daughter of Nimrod and Molly Workman, and a fine singer and composer died Wednesday, December 9, at the age of 62. She appeared with Nimrod on an LP called “Passing Through the Garden,” the first release on the June Appal label, in 1974. I had the great pleasure of working briefly with Ms. Liptak on an album of her father’s songs and stories, and she was very gracious, enthusiastic, and kind. I wish all peace and strength to her family.

Here’s an original composition of Phyllis’s, shot by Alan Lomax in 1983, at her parents’ home in Mascot, Tennessee.

Sid Hemphill and Mr. Carrier’s Line

Sid Hemphill, Senatobia, September 1959.

Sid Hemphill was a multi-instrumentalist, band-leader, and patriarch of a prodigiously musical family in the Mississippi Hill Country. Blind Sid played fiddle, mandolin, guitar, banjo, fife, quills, organ, and every type of drum that the region’s picnics and dances required, and he sang – perhaps shouted is a better word for what he did with his voice – with a ragged, joyful intensity that will shoot the hair on the back of your neck skyward. He was 65 years old when Alan Lomax met him in 1942. Lomax, fifty years later, described Sid thusly:

No one told me that Sid Hemphill was blind, but it was the last thing you’d recall about him. His face blazed with inner light. He ran rather than walked everywhere. He could never wait for his wife to bring something, but always darted up to find it himself. His speech, which could not keep pace with his thoughts and designs, had become telegraphic and brusque.

All of this can be recognized instantly in his music, much of it – at least that which Lomax recorded of him (and only Lomax’s recordings are extant*) – strung up to such a fever pitch, near to bursting with giddiness, passion, and energy. Even when the two met up again in 1959, though Sid was in his early 80s and had mellowed considerably, he retained more than a little of his earlier fury.

Hemphill passed on no small amount of his talent and repertoire to his gifted daughters, Sidney Hemphill Carter and Rosalie (or Rosa Lee) Hill, as well as to his granddaughter, Jessie Mae Hemphill. All of these heirs have now passed on themselves, although they did, to varying degree, make their own representative recordings, Jessie Mae to the widest acclaim.

Rosalie Hill (seated) and Sidney Hemphill Carter at the home of Fred McDowell, Como, Mississippi, September 1959

These Hemphill women, along with their more famous male landsmen – Fred McDowell, Otha Turner, R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough – have rightfully put the music of the Mississippi Hill Country on the map, and it’s now a musical tourist destination for its fife-and-drum picnics and, at least till it burned down, Kimbrough’s juke joint, Junior’s Place. What hasn’t received much recognition is Sid Hemphill’s remarkable ability as a song-writer. His compositions didn’t find a place in the oral tradition of the Hill Country; perhaps the sheer size of his ballads – the longest was 26 stanzas – were too daunting for anyone to attempt to remember. (Other explanations are offered below). The most remarkable of these, to this listener, was a 21-verse ballad called “The Carrier Line,” “The Carrier Railroad,” or just, as Rosalie Hill recalled to George Mitchell in 1967, the “Carrie Song.” It was recorded by Sid and his band – Lucius Smith, Alec Askew, and Will Head – for Alan Lomax in 1942, and that performance is simply one of the most powerful, affecting, and exciting recordings you’re ever likely to hear, from any place, any time, even reaching us, as it does, from an acetate disc made over 65 years ago, and dealing with obscure local events that took place over a hundred years ago.

There are only a couple of places, not counting the Reading Room at the American Folklife Center, where “The Carrier Railroad” (as Lomax notated it in his field log and as it’s filed at the Center) can be heard. One is on Document’s “Field Recordings, Vol. 3: Mississippi” CD, currently available at inflated prices on Amazon, or through Document itself at a more reasonable rate.  This release, to these ears – and if you’re at all familiar with the Document catalog, this will sound counter-intuitive – actually features the available “Carrier Line” of the best fidelity. Another is in “Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi,” a CD released by Rounder in 2000, part of their reissue series of material from the Folklife Center’s archives. Originally released as a Library of Congress Recording Lab LP in 1978, with a highly enlightening and engaging introduction by one of the world’s foremost experts on black vernacular music, Dr. David Evans of the University of Memphis, this album features recordings made by Evans during field-work in the Hill Country from 1969 to 1971, alongside several of Lomax’s acetate sides of Sid Hemphill from ‘42.

You can also hear “The Carrier Line” below. I treasure this recording more deeply than just about any Lomax ever made. I also wanted to share it, its fascinating subjects (John Carrier and his wily engineer, Dave Cowart), and Sid Hemphill’s extraordinary compositional ability with whoever might care to enjoy them, so I asked Dr. Evans for his permission to reprint a portion of his notes regarding the song and its story, as well as his transcription of Sid’s lyrics. This transfer of the tune comes to me from a source separate from the Document and Rounder releases, duly noted so as not to run afoul with any master-use clauses or what-have-you that might apply, even though the only real rights herein belong to the Hemphill family.

I hope you’ll enjoy it, and please do note that the Rounder release that includes Dr. Evans’ notes is luckily still in print – unlike many other essential albums of vernacular music recordings that once made Rounder a label worthy of great acclaim and appreciation (before “Tangle-Eye” and Plant & Krauss, et al., remade their business model) – so consider yourself strongly urged to pick it up before it too is put out to pasture. Act fast – Amazon thinks it already has been.

*                    *                    *

The Carrier Line (click to download)
Performed by Sid Hemphill, vocal and fiddle; Lucius Smith, banjo; Alec Askew, guitar; and Will Head, bass drum.
Recorded by Alan Lomax in Dundee, Mississippi, August 15, 1942.

Notes by David Evans, 1978:

This song is an example of a “blues ballad,” combining the narrative quality of balladry with the loose, shifting, and subjective approach of blues singing. A blues ballad often assumes a prior knowledge of the underlying events of the story on the part of the audience. Most ballads in black folk song are blues ballads, as are quite a few in southern white folk song. Often the same piece is known in both black and white traditions (e.g., “John Henry,” “Frankie and Albert”), so that it may be difficult to determine its origin. This particular blues ballad was composed by Sid Hemphill, a black man, but all the main characters in the story were white.

Robert Carrier owned a logging company and in 1901 built the Sardis and Delta Railroad, called simply Mr. Carrier’s line in the song, to haul logs to Sardis in Panola County from Bobo Lake (later renamed Lake Carrier), twenty-two miles to the west in the Delta. Hemphill told Alan Lomax that he composed the song in 1903, but he may have been a few years off. Lucius Smith, Hemphill’s banjo player, said that the wreck occurred in 1905 or 1906, but possibly it occurred at the same time as the other event referred to in the song – the financial panic of 1907. Local newspapers for this period are unenlightening about these events.

View Larger Map

“Now you can get the map out and trace his whole damn route,” said Hamper McBee about “Billy Richardson’s Last Ride” in West Virginia. Same for Dave Cowart’s in Mississippi. The “A” marks Lake Carrier, according to Google maps, although that doesn’t look like much of a lake to me. That spot does rest on Bobo Road, however. Sardis is to the northeast, and about a dozen miles north of it along Highway 51 (and now Interstate 55) is Senatobia. Eighteen miles west of Sledge is Dundee, where Lomax made his recordings of Hemphill’s band.

In any case, the song has two themes, which are not clearly connected to each other in the text. Stanzas 1, 14 though 17, and 23 refer to the panic. Carrier paid his workers with brass scrip while the banks were closed [see comments below for a differing opinion on this], but many of them became discouraged and took up farming near Malone’s Trestle, where the wreck was to occur. The remaining stanzas refer to the wreck. Carrier had two engineers, “Pop” Bailey and Dave Cowart. Hemphill described Cowart to Lomax as a “rough engineer.” Carrier had warned Cowart on several occasions not to run his train so fast. He transferred Cowart to another engine and threatened to fire him. Stanza 13 indicates that he actually did fire Cowart, but in stanza 18 he is back his running his original engine, the “Seven Spot.” Cowart wrecked the train at Malone’s Trestle. Nobody was killed, but several were scalded badly by the steam, including a preacher named Lovey Lemons who worked on the railroad.

The refrain after every stanza is unrelated to the text of the song. In its full form it should be “Oh, my honey babe, why don’t you come home?” Hemphill, however, plays the last half of the line on his fiddle. The first half actually sounds like “Oh, my heart beat,” but Hemphill insisted to Alan Lomax, who heard it similarly, that he had sung “Oh, my honey babe.” A similar refrain has been reported elsewhere in black folk music for blues ballads and blues. Howard Odum noted it in adjacent Lafayette County, Mississippi, and Dorothy Scarborough in Texas.

Hemphill was fond of singing blues ballads and, in addition to this piece, he also composed ballads about a local bad man [Jack Castle, "The Roguish Man"], a mob at the Senatobia jail ["The Strayhorn Mob"], and one of the world wars ["So Soon I'll Be At Home"]. Among traditional ballads he sang versions of “Joe Turner,” “The Boll Weevil,” “John Henry,” “Old Blue,” and “Casey Jones.” Except for a nine-stanza version of “The Carrier Line” collected by George Mitchell from Hemphill’s daughter [Rosalie], none of Hemphill’s composed ballads has survived in the folk tradition of the area. Lucius Smith can only remember the banjo parts to a few ballads and one stanza of “The Carrier Line.” He says that he never paid much attention to the words.

There seem to be several reasons why these ballads are not well known in the area despite the fact that Hemphill was generally acknowledged as one of the best local musicians and has been dead for only about 15 years. [Hemphill died in 1963.] Blues ballad singing has declined in general among blacks in recent years. New ones are not being composed, and only a few old ones are kept alive in tradition, mainly through the influence of such records as Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” and Buster Brown’s “John Henry.”

Hemphill’s own ballads were performed with a string band. This type of ensemble no longer exists in the area, a fact that has undoubtedly conctributed to the disappearance of the repertoire of songs associated with such bands. Furthermore, there exists a strong feeling in this area that songs like “The Carrier Line” belonged to Hemphill only. Several people have said that Hemphill performed mostly “his own” songs, so that other performers avoided them. Hemphill himself made it well known that he had composed “The Carrier Line” and some other songs. Although the tune, stanza structure, and refrain are traditional, most of the words of “The Carrier Line” are very much Hemphill’s own creation; it contains very few of the lyric phrases that seem to “float” freely from one blues ballad to another.

Sid Hemphill and Lucius Smith, Senatobia, September 1959

A final reason may be that Hemphill performed some of his songs mainly for white people. He was asked to write “The Carrier Line” by a Mr. Willard, a white section foreman on the line. Hemphill said he sang it for all the participants in the events except Mr. Carrier himself, although Lucius Smith said that the band often performed at Mr. Carrier’s house in the country as well as for picnics held by “all them big rich folks in Senatobia.” Another musician has stated that Hemphill would sing this song for Mr. Carrier every Saturday morning and collect ten dollars for his efforts. No doubt this is an exaggeration, although Hemphill may have done this once or twice and bragged about it to others, so that a legend arose locally.

[Evans continues, describing the structural influence blues ballads like "The Carrier Line" had on the  development of the blues, and briefly discusses the transition away from the black country string band, and those bands' instrumentation.]

Enjoy.

*                    *                    *

Nobody had a nickle, you couldn’t get a dime.
If you want to make your money, boys, work on Mr. Carrier’s time.
Oh, my honey babe… (Refrain repeated after each stanza.)

Mr. Dave Cowart went on Mr. Carrier’s engine; Mr. Carrier he looked and laughed.
“Tell you, Dave Cowart, don’t run my train too fast.”

Mr. Dave told Mr. Carrier, “Man, don’t you know I know your rule.
Tell you, Mr. Carrier, a train ain’t no mule.”

Mr. Dave Cowart went down to Baptist; Mr. Carrier stood on the railroad track.
“Send back Dave Cowart, get Mr. Bailey back.”

Mr. Dave told Mr. Carrier, “Man, fire me if you will.
Every time it come a shower of rain, he can’t run it up Johnson Hill.”

Mr. Carrier said, “Dave Cowart, see what you have done.
You left Sardis at twelve o’clock, done made it back at one.”

Mr. Dave said, “Well, Mr. Carrier, let me have my way.
Let me run this Seven Spot, I’ll make three trips today.”

Mr. Carrier said, “No, Dave Cowart, tell you in time.
Can’t let you run the Seven no more.” “Well, I’ll have to run the Nine.”

Everybody around Sardis said “Mr. Carrier, I know you got your way.
Mr. Bailey’s much too old a man to run your train like Dave.”

Last one Monday morning, it come a shower of rain.
Nine come to Ballentine blowing like a fast train.

When the Nine got over to Sardis with a large load of logs,
Mr. Carrier told the people at the plant, “Yonder train off the Yellow Dog.”

They said to Mr. Carrier, “Man, ain’t you ’shamed?
Looking out the window, don’t know your own train?”

Mr. Carrier went to Dave Cowart, “Dave, I done told you so.
Train costs too much, you can’t run my train no more.”

Mr. Carrier’s timbermens quit too. Thought they all was mad.
They didn’t like his paydays cuz he’s paying ‘em off in brass.

Mr. Carrier’s timbermen left, thought they was going home.
Stopped down the railroad, farming at Malone’s.

Mr. Carrier went down to Malone’s, he didn’t mean no harm.
He didn’t know his timbermen knowed how to farm.

Oh he couldn’t pay ‘em no greenbacks, couldn’t pay ‘em no gold,
Couldn’t pay ‘em no silver. All his banks done closed.

Mr. Carrier’s engine left Sardis then; she left there mighty hot.
Got down to Malone’s Trestle where he could wreck that Seven Spot.

Well, they telephoned to Mr. Carrier. Don’t you think it’d be nice?
“Telephone to Sardis and get Dr. Rice.”

Mr. Carrier said to Dave Cowart, “Man, ain’t you ’shamed?
You done wrecked my Seven Spot, done scald the preacher’s hand.”

Mr. Carrier said to the conductor, ‘ductor / doctor [?], thank you for saving his life.
Conductor says he’s a lazy man, he won’t hardly die.

He wore a mighty fine coat, boys. Mighty fine shirt.
Rid that train every day. He didn’t never work.

I played on Mr. Carrier’s railroad, Sardis on Main and Beale.
I made dollars down there without working in the field.

Well they carried him down to Emma’s. Aunt Emma hollered and screamed.
“Needn’t cry, Miss Emma, but he got scalded by the steam.”

*                    *                    *

*Dr. Evans has corrected my earlier assertion that Lomax was the only one to make recordings of Sid Hemphill, noting that James W. Silver – Ole Miss history professor, friend of Faulkner, and outspoken civil rights advocate – also recorded Sid, but the tape has not survived. For more on Sid Hemphill and his “Carrier Line,” see James W. Silver, “Paul Bunyan Comes to Mississippi,” Journal of Mississippi History 19 (1957): 96-101.

“Face A Frowning World: An E.C. Ball Memorial Album”

The stoic couple that grace the masthead of this blog are E.C. and Orna Ball, a pair of singers and musicians who are responsible, to these ears, for some of the most affecting music ever to come out of the Southern Appalachian mountains — or anywhere else, for that matter. On December 8th, the Tompkins Square label in New York City will release an album that I put together to pay tribute to the Balls and to commemorate the anniversary of E.C.’s death in July of 1978. (Which happens to be the month of my birth — suffice it to say that I’ve already indulged in all manner of that shade of sentimentality.)

The album gathers a large number of singers and musicians for whom I have great affection, appreciation, and respect, and who provide fairly non-standard interpretations of songs from the Balls’ repertoire — mostly traditional (or nearly-so) country gospel and folk songs, but a few of E.C.’s originals too. It was played in large measure by a Louisville group of much-earned local renown called the Health & Happiness Family Gospel Band, and an additional grip of good friends and talented musicians.

What follows is the introduction I wrote for the album, as well as the album’s track list and a note about the provenance of the songs in E.C. and Orna’s recorded output, should you be interested in hearing the originals on which we drew — and I do urge you to so be. Downloads of some available below. And should you pick up “Face A Frowning World,” I hope you’ll enjoy it, and find that we’ve given E.C. and Orna a portion of the tribute they so greatly deserve.

(All photos courtesy of the Blue Ridge Institute. See below for their involvement.)

To ears used to the high lonesome sound of the Southern Appalachian mountains, the music made by Estil Cortez Ball of Rugby, Virginia, can seem out of place. His rich, relaxed baritone seems a world away from the plaintive keen of a Roscoe Holcomb, a Clarence Ashley, or a Nimrod Workman, and his guitar playing, gifted with genius and grace, always takes its time, while so many of the region’s instruments flail and frail as fast as they can.

Perhaps it was E.C. Ball’s day jobs that made his music sound that way – he ran a service station and drove a school bus: two occupations requiring patience and a gentle touch. No doubt his deep religiosity and commitment to sharing the gospel of Christianity inspired a certain forbearance in him. But most likely, like the best of artists, the music he made was just a reflection of who he was — in his case, thoughtful, diligent, and honest, with severity, gentleness, and humor in equal measure.

One thing certain is that he, with his wife, Orna, made music prolifically. The Balls’ repertoire was legions deep, and was open to all manner
of material: not just hymns or country gospel — traditional, borrowed, or of their own devising – but play-party songs, blues, ballads, self-composed comic numbers and E.C.’s sui generis guitar instrumentals. They performed on two Sunday morning gospel radio programs and in churches of every denomination throughout the Blue Ridge. They were the subjects of frequent recording sessions — at the hands of John A. Lomax (the first to record E.C., in 1937) and Alan Lomax (first in 1941 and again in 1959), then John Cohen, Mike Seeger, Mark Wilson, Kip Lornell — and were featured on a number of LPs, both with their Friendly Gospel Singers and on their own. But this recorded output represents just a fraction of their repertoire. Indeed, as more archival collections of Blue Ridge mountain music are cracked open, inventoried, and presented to the public, more insight into E.C. and Orna’s prodigious songbook becomes available. They rarely recorded more than a handful of the same songs twice, and their recorded legacy extends into the hundreds of songs.

So it wasn’t easy to make selections for this tribute album, and some aspects of the Balls’ repertoire have been under- or un-represented: there are none of the mountain ballads — “Pretty Polly” or “Poor Ellen Smith,” most famously — and no attempts (and they’d only be attempts) to recreate any of E.C.’s sublime guitar pieces. Two of his most endearing comic numbers are tackled here — “The Early Bird Always Gets the Worm” and “Plain Old Country Lad” — as well as the Balls’ immensely winning “Jenny Jenkins,” but it’s the religious material that predominates. It’s this material that always struck me the hardest and deepest. It’s no wonder that E.C.’s composition “Tribulations” has spread far and wide, often being declared “public domain” or “traditional” when appearing in someone else’s hands. It’s hard to imagine one man writing such a thing; a terrifying meditation on the end of days as envisioned by the Book of Revelation and a celebration of a hard-won faith in redemption. But E.C. and Orna Ball, as writers, arrangers, performers, were most often most effective with the songs they felt the strongest, and so in the hopes of adequately and respectfully representing them, it’s primarily their sacred material we’re presenting.

I feel compelled to mention that of the 30-odd contributors to this record, not all are believers a la the Balls; in fact, few are. I’m not. I do hope, however, that our interpretations of these songs — sacred or secular — will serve the ultimate goal of honoring the talents of E.C. and Orna, informed and inspired as they were by the traditions of their region and of their faith.

While this album is a tribute to both E.C. and Orna Ball, it was conceived, in the winter of 2007, as a memorial to E.C., who died July 14, 1978, at the age of 64. The plan was for its release to mark the 30th anniversary of his death, but although, like all such plans, it’s a bit late in finding fulfillment, I’m overjoyed that it finally has. A thousand most sincere thanks to the Health & Happiness Family Gospel Band and all the contributors for their interest, generosity, talent, and patience.

As E.C. and Orna Ball left no heirs, royalties from the sale of this album will be donated to the Blue Ridge Institute, which documents, preserves, and promotes the folkways of the people living in and around the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Thank you, too, for your interest in E.C. and Orna Ball.

“Face A Frowning World: An E.C. Ball Memorial Album.”

01. INTRODUCTION by E.C. Ball.
Recorded by Alan Lomax at E.C. and Orna’s home in Rugby, Virginia, August 1959. Previously unreleased. Used courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archive.

02. HE’S MY GOD. Sung by Dave Bird
Original on “E.C. Ball and the Friendly Gospel Singers,” 1967 (County Records). Out of print.

03. JOHN THE BAPTIST. Sung by Bonnie “Prince” Billy
Original on “E.C. Ball,” 1972. Reissued on CD in 1996 as “E.C. Ball with Orna Ball.” (Rounder).

04. JENNY JENKINS. Sung by the Handsome Family
Several original versions recorded by John A. Lomax (1937), Alan Lomax (1941 and 1959), and John Cohen (1965). Those of Lomax the elder and Cohen are currently in print on, respectively, “E.C. Ball and Orna: Through the Years, 1937-1975,” 1999 (Copper Creek) and the CD reissue/expansion of Cohen’s “High Atmosphere” compilation, 1974 / 1995 (Rounder).

05. WARFARE. Sung by Joe Manning
Original on “High Atmosphere” and “E.C. Ball and Orna: Through the Years.”

06. PLAIN OLD COUNTRY LAD. Sung by Pokey LaFarge
Original on E.C. and Orna’s “Fathers Have A Home Sweet Home,” 1976 (Rounder). Out of print.

07. LORD I WANT MORE RELIGION. Sung by Rayna Gellert
Original unreleased. Home recording made by E.C. in 1970.

08. THE EARLY BIRD ALWAYS GETS THE WORM. Sung by Michael Hurley
Original on “E.C. Ball with Orna Ball.”

09. WHEN I GET HOME I’M GONNA BE SATISFIED. Sung by Jon Langford
Original on “White Spirituals” LP in the Southern Folk Heritage Series, 1959 (Atlantic); reissued in “Sounds of the South” box-set, 1993. Both out of print.

10. TRIBULATIONS. Sung by Joe Manning and Glen Dentinger
Original versions on “White Spirituals”; “Sounds of the South”; and volume five in the Southern Journey series, “Deep South… Sacred and Sinful,” 1960 (Prestige). Reissued on “Southern Journey #6: Sheep, Sheep, Don’cha Know the Road” in the Alan Lomax Collection CD series, 1997 (Rounder). Only version currently in print is on “E.C. Ball and Orna: Through the Years.”

11. ONE DAY I WILL. Sung by Nathan Salsburg
Original on “Fathers Have A Home Sweet Home.”

12. CABIN ON THE HILL. Sung by Catherine Irwin
Original on “White Spirituals” and in “Sounds of the South.”

13. WHEN I CAN READ MY TITLES CLEAR. Sung by Glen Dentinger
Original on “E.C. Ball with Orna Ball.”

14. BEAUTIFUL STAR OF BETHLEHEM. Sung by Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Dave Bird, and Catherine Irwin
Original on “E.C. Ball and the Friendly Gospel Singers.”

15. FATHERS HAVE A HOME SWEET HOME. Sung by Jan Bell, Jolie Holland, and Samantha Parton
Original on “Fathers Have A Home Sweet Home.”

16. JUBILEE. Sung by the Sandpaper Dolls
Original on “Fathers Have A Home Sweet Home.”

The world’s music 2.0: Smithsonian Folkways vs. National Geographic

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.

On the Art of Field Recording, Vol. 2

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.

Briefly off-message: from Leonard Cohen’s Book of Mercy.

As an American Jew watching with horror what is being done in Gaza in the name of “defending Western values” and the “war on terror,” not to mention the “defense” of the Jewish people, I feel compelled to share this piece of Leonard Cohen’s, from his 1984 “Book of Mercy.” It should be nailed on every telephone pole between here and Ashdod – and Khan Yunis and Gaza City, too – a la Martin Luther.

Shalom rav, al adamah am’cha. (Adonai,) grant peace to all mankind, your people.

*   *   *

Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself
Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to
be a nation – none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of
holiness, all of you are at war with Mercy. Who will say it? Will America
say, We have stolen it, or France step down? Will Russia confess, or Poland
say; we have sinned? All bloated on their scraps of destiny, all swaggering
in the immunity of superstition. Ishmael, who was saved in the wilderness,
and given shade in the desert, and a deadly treasure under you: has Mercy
made you wise? Therefore the lands belong to none of you, the borders do not
hold, the Law will never serve the lawless. To every people the land is given
on condition, Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the
constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation’s sweetest
dreams of itself. The Covenant is broken, the condition is dishonoured,
have you not noticed that the world has been taken away? You have no place,
you will wander through yourselves from generation to generation without a
thread. Therefore you rule over chaos, you hoist your flags with no
authority, and the heart that is still alive hates you, and the remnant of
Mercy is ashamed to look at you. You decompose behind your flimsy armour,
your stench alarms you, your panic strikes at love. The land is not yours,
the land has been taken back, your shrines fall through empty air, your
tablets are quickly revised, and you bow down in hell beside your hired
torturers, and still you count your battalions and crank out your marching
songs. Your righteous enemy is listening. He hears your anthems full of
blood and vanity, and your children singing to themselves. He has
overturned the vehicle of nationhood, he has spilled the precious cargo, and
every nation he has taken back. Because you are swollen with your little
time. Because you do not wrestle with your angel. Because you dare to live
without God. Because your cowardice has led you to believe that the victor
does not limp.

Collecting India

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.

Here People Could Live Well

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.

The Best Record of the Year is 100 Years Old: Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette

“I not only commend him to your intelligent notice but personally endorse him.” -Mark Twain.

At the risk of seeming aggressively anachronistic, or perhaps atavistic, I’d like to suggest that you call off your slobbering dogs of insatiable aesthetic appetite and spend the rest of the year relishing an album by Polk Miller and his Old South Quartette. Recently released on the Tompkins Square label, the CD is the complete recordings made by Miller and his group, comprising their 1909 Edison cylinders and the Quartette’s reappearance on 78 in 1928, fifteen years after Miller’s death.

An introduction: Polk Miller was decidedly both anachronistic and atavistic. He was the son of a Virginia plantation owner who grew up serenaded by the music of his family’s slaves – spirituals, work songs, dance tunes – and who, later as a pharmacist and a veteran soldier of the Confederacy, made his name as the impresario behind “Old Times in the South.” This traveling show (though Miller hated the term “show”) consisted of a lecture, recitations in Southern black dialect, and a performance by Miller (vocal and banjo) with a rotating cast of black male singers of religious material, sentimental Dixie chestnuts, and a serving of minstrel songs. The anachronism is that Miller never trafficked in blackface, he dressed “his men” in suits, and as the show increased in popularity, touring elite clubs in New York, Boston, and Cleveland, it earned derision and threats of violence due to the semblance of “brotherhood” that it presented on stage. While the contemporary music publishers were pumping out such popular white-composed “coon songs” as “If the Man in the Moon Were a Coon” and “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” “Old Times in the South” was presenting “authentic” Southern black song performed by a racially mixed ensemble.

Granted, this ensemble – of course barring Miller and his friend Colonel Tom Booker, who occasionally joined the troupe on banjo – was often billed as a representation of, as one program had it, “the real Southern Darkey.” And there’s the issue of Miller’s discomfiting, atavistic motive behind the show: “I do try to give the older people something that would take them back to their childhood, and to give to the younger generation an insight to the happy past under the old regime in Dixie.” Miller made it clear to reporters that the members of the Quartette were not his collaborative equals but, like the “men who are in my employ at my home,” his “servants.” “Old Times in the South” was a romantic trip down Miller’s memory lane, when slaves loved their masters, the South was unspoiled by Yankee imposition, and the weeping willow was in bloom.

But it’s also an example – are there many others? – of a willful nostalgia for a dark and evil chapter of history expressing itself artistically in a fashion too progressive for its times. Setting aside the Quartette’s sociological dimensions, their music is thrilling; admittedly enriched by its historical peculiarity, but not solely because of it. It’s awfully jarring to hear the anthem of the CSA, “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” sung by African American voices (especially since Miller’s voice is the lead, engendering an uncomfortable if not accurate feeling that “his men” have been compelled under no uncertain terms to sing lustily along), but if you allow yourself to ignore your vantage point atop this side of history and just listen, it’s gorgeous and stirring. The sacred songs are a fascinating reminder of how firm a foundation underlies black religious music in America. Already decades old when they were recorded in 1909, songs like “What A Time” and “That Old-Time Religion,” recorded hundreds of times since, display their timelessness in the Quartette’s able  renditions. The same goes for the more egregious of the minstrel material. Sure, the “Watermelon Party” immediately conjures up all manner of awfulness, but it’s also impossibly catchy. Mark Twain certainly thought so, declaring that “perhaps [America] can furnish something more enjoyable, but I must doubt it until I forget that musical earthquake, ‘The Watermelon Party.’ “

Twain gets cover billing on the Tompkins Square release: “I think that Polk Miller, and his wonderful four, is about the only thing the country can furnish that is originally and utterly American.” Apart from the hilarity and wonderfulness of a CD bearing a Mark Twain “endorsement,” he, as he was in so many arenas, was right. No matter how backwards-looking Miller might have been, he made forward-thinking music with his Quartette. Like other enormously influential American music that followed it – jazz, rhythm & blues, hip hop – theirs is a synthesis of disparate styles, locales, and identifications; the very sound of, if not true “brotherhood,” then at least a nascent spirit of tolerance, collaboration, and mutual respect. After all, despite all his puerile longings and chauvinist business dealings, Miller undeniably loved black music, and he arguably made a significant contribution to its dissemination and appreciation. Ignore his goof-ball lead vocal on that august spiritual number, “Rise and Shine.” Which song is instantly recognizable to 21st century American schoolchildren? It, or “All Coons Look Alike to Me”?

In 1928, when the Quartette mysteriously reunited in New York City – or reformed; no one knows for sure, as no information regarding the ‘28 session’s personnel has survived – their seven new sides slipped into a massive stream of black music being commercially produced and sold in department stores and catalogs across the country. Enough whites in positions of corporate influence saw a value (and of course in America economic value is always the penultimate value) in African American gospel, blues, jazz, and other dance music to invest in it; and enough Americans, both black and white, considered it worthy of consuming. While Polk Miller and his Old South Quartette might jar our ears today – lyrically, sociologically, sonically (although laurels for everyone aurally involved in this reissue for succeeding in reducing the disc and cylinder noise to listenable, maybe even enjoyable, levels) – they deserve to be recognized as seminal figures in the history of American music. They also deserve to be listened to, not just for their historical value, but, as Twain had it, for being an utterly wonderful band.

Laissez les Obama temps roulet!

It’s impossible to choose a favorite among the myriad vernacular musical tributes to President-Elect Obama which streamed in from so many corners of the globe way back when he was Candidate-Senator Obama, so here are the best stateside contributions (not counting Young Jeezy’s “My President Is Black” – though we’ll argue mightily for its vernacularism, despite the ridiculous “Lambo” bits); not to mention the best red states (Louisiana and Texas) had to offer…

Y viva Obama y sus Obamaleros!

For more, see the Smoke Music Archive and the “Obama Is Beautiful World!” episode of WFMU’s Transpacific Sound Paradise.