Where Things Are Beautiful: Time Spent with Nimrod Workman

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.

A Man Full Grown

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.

Buell Kazee, reissued

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• •

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

Update, once more: where to in fact buy the Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas box

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.

Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas

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!

 

Historic Kentucky

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.

Anneke’s mule

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.

On the radio

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.