Exploring American Folk Music

by Kip Lornell

  Nordiff calls me up and books me to play a record . . . four sides, two recordings. He says, “Mr. Tarras, I’m giving you forty dollars to make a session. And then, if it’s all right I’ll give you more.”

  Forty dollars? I would have done it for nothing. I was making a record!

  “Can you play a Russian session?”

  Yeah.

  “Good, so you’ll come down next week and make a Russian session.”

  So I went; I make. Two weeks later I make another Jewish session with [not Jewish band leader, Abe] Schwartz; whatever Nodiff give me: Russian, Polish, Greek. (Lornell and Rasmussen, eds., 1997, 59).

  Born in the Ukraine in 1897, Tarras brought this music with him when he immigrated to the United States. It wasn’t until the 1920s that musicians born in the United States began performing klezmer, and among most of these musicians Tarras was their idol. These musicians included Sam Musiker, Tarras’s son-in-law and a featured soloist between 1938 and 1942 with Gene Krupa’s very popular swing band, and Howie Leess. Along with American-born musicians, by the 1930s klezmer bands began incorporating pianists into their ensembles. Many of these musicians felt quite at home with jazz and their bands featured improvised solos. Like the swing-influenced jazz, klezmer was also used to accompany dancing.

  The music thrived not only in big cities like New York and Chicago but also in the summer Catskill resorts from the teens through the 1950s. Commercial recordings of klezmer bands led by Dave Tarras, Abe Schwartz, and others were popular until its appeal to a younger audience diminished. Klezmer’s nadir came during the 1960s and 1970s when the aging of the first and even the second generation of musicians left a void. By the 1980s, however, klezmer was revitalized by younger musicians like Hank Netsky, Henry Sapoznik, and Andy Statman, who also sparked a renewed interest in this unique aspect of Jewish expressive culture. Sapoznik also helped found Klez-kamp, a midwinter gathering that celebrates the expressive arts in Jewish culture, which recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary.

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  MUSICAL EXAMPLE

  “Ot azoy” (“That’s the Way”) is a highly expressive klezmer performance. Clarinet player Sid Beckerman’s father, Shloymke, first recorded the piece for Columbia Records in 1923. The brief vocal refrain (roughly translated “That’s just the way it goes”) implies a world-weariness that must have been felt by many newly arrived immigrants. Klezmer Plus blends older, veteran players like Beckerman and Howie Less with Sapoznik, Sokolow, and Spielzinger, who became involved with klezmer in the late 1970s. This piece was recorded in front of a live audience as part of the “Folk Masters” series.

  Title “Ot azoy”

  Performers Klezmer Plus

  Instruments Sid Beckerman, clarinet; Howie Less, tenor saxophone; Henry Sapoznik, tenor banjo; Peter Sokolow, keyboard; Michael Spielzinger, drums

  Length 3:58

  Musical Characteristics

  1. The clarinet takes the initial lead and is featured throughout.

  2. The simple duple meter is established by Sokolow’s accordion and then accented by Spielzinger’s cymbal.

  3. The piece is taken at a moderate, easy-paced tempo that increases slightly over the course of the performance.

  4. The form is ab with the group joining in the brief vocal refrain.

  5. It is performed in a minor key, which underscores its eastern European roots.

  The source for this recording is Smithsonian Folkways 40047.

  * * *

  In the early 1980s there were a handful of bands playing; twenty years later klezmer bands can be found countrywide, their numbers are in the hundreds. Many (but not all) of the musicians who have performed in bands such as the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble, Kapelye, Klezmer Plus, the Klezmatics, and the New Orleans Klezmer All Stars are Jewish.

  Scholarly and popular interest in klezmer has also recently coalesced. Not only has Henry Sapoznik produced many widely respected new and reissued recordings of klezmer, but his 1999 book Klezmer! also became the first in-depth study of the genre. Mark Slobin, a highly regarded academic ethnomusicologist, followed a year later with Fiddler on the Move and in 2001 with an edited volume, Klezmer: The Evolution of an American Micromusic. The popular interest in klezmer is underscored by the publication in 2000 of Seth Rogovoy’s The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music, from the Old World, to the Jazz Age to the Downtown Avante-Garde.

  NATIVE AMERICAN

  Long before Europeans and Africans reached our shores, the United States was populated by a wide assortment of distinctive tribes that we now call Native Americans or American Indians. They actually migrated here from Asia by way of Alaska, eventually settling in the United States thousands of years before Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World. Because of their disparate geographical patterns, among other factors, these groups developed at least seven major distinctive cultural areas: Northwest Coast, Southwest, Great Basin, Plateau, Plains, Northeast, and Southeast. Indians within these cultural areas were further divided into about 1,000 smaller units called tribes. Names of some of these tribes are permanently etched into the American past, especially during the European and Anglo-American conquests of the western United States: Sioux, Cheyenne, Cherokee, and Blackfoot. Since the middle of the nineteenth century most have been culturally decimated, greatly reduced in number, and resettled onto reservations.

  This tragic cultural transformation has greatly affected the music of Native Americans. We know a great deal about twentieth-century Indian music, but relatively little about earlier periods. Unfortunately, our knowledge of twentieth-century Native American music often does not truly reflect the past. This is due to several critical facts. First, Native Americans did not notate their music. Second, the forced migration of tribes permanently altered their musical traditions. Third, American Indians had very few musical instruments, leaving little for archeologists to discover and reconstruct. Fourth, most ethnomusicologists specializing in this music have concentrated on the period after 1890 when sound recordings provided them with aural documentation. Finally, the impact of European and African American music greatly affected Indian music, most especially in the Northeast and Southwest.

  It is safe to say that music has been a very important, perhaps even vital, component of Native American culture so we can make this sweeping observation: their music is closely tied to myth and religion, is fundamentally similar across the United States, and in some cases even bears similarities to that found in Central America. For most tribes music was thoroughly integrated with religion as an essential ingredient in worship, rites of passage, and other related ceremonies. Supernatural powers, usually known as spirits, transferred power and specialized knowledge to humans by teaching them songs. These songs cannot be isolated from worship and religious experiences, and the “success” of a song is judged by how well it fulfilled a spiritual need or helped to provide needed food or water.

  Seminole women cooking, taken during the research conducted by Francis Densmore (circa 1915). Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.

  These observations about the social and spiritual context for music remain largely true, even in the early twenty-first century, despite the inherent regional and tribal differences that inevitably occur as well as the extended interaction with Anglo and African American culture. For example, the influence of Mexican music upon southwestern tribes has permanently altered the nature of Apache music; their contemporary music is now liberally infused with elements, such as the use of violins, that would not have existed until several hundred years ago. Despite these variations contemporary Indian music continues to play a unique role in helping to define Native American identity.

  Our understanding of Indian music from the late nineteenth century is traceable to two female researchers who began their work then. Alice Fletcher researched Native American music from the 1880s until her death in 19
23. During that time she published many monographs and books, the most notable of which are A Study of Omaha Indian Music (1893) and Indian Story and Song From North America (1900). Trained as an anthropologist, Fletcher wrote extensively about the relationship between music and religious ceremonies. Many of these ceremonies had truly cosmic significance; others were designed to heal or assign powers of the occult. Fletcher’s pioneering work holds important observations that pertain to contemporary Native American music.

  Frances Densmore, born some thirty years after Fletcher, came from a varied academic background and was trained to perform and compose music. She became interested in Indian music after hearing live performances at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, though she did not actually begin her own fieldwork with the Chippewa until 1905. Densmore initially recorded Chippewa songs in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin for about five years before turning her attention to tribes in the Plains/Pueblo area. All told she gathered healing songs, songs taken from dreams, ceremonial songs, and others for nearly fifty years. Her most comprehensive collection, Chippewa Music, was published between 1910 and 1913, and much of her work was undertaken on behalf of the long-defunct Bureau of American Ethnology.

  The modern era of our knowledge of Native American music begins about the same time as Fletcher and Densmore were working. This era of research is also linked with Jesse Walter Fewkes’s sound recording in March 1890 of the Pasamaquoddy Indians of Maine. These earliest field recordings inspired Willard Rhodes, George Herzog, and others to include sound recordings as part of their research. Sound recordings preserved Native American music in such a way that it could be disseminated and dissected. Tragically, by the 1930s when sound technology had advanced to the point where the equipment was more portable and the results were more palatable, much of Native American music had been radically transformed. Over the past fifty years the music studied by Alan Merriam, Bruno Nettl, David McAllester, and the other significant scholars of middle-to-late twentieth-century Indian music is significantly different from that first heard by Densmore in 1893.

  Although such sweeping generalizations are dangerous, much of contemporary Native American music results from the Pan-Indian movement that first developed in the 1920s. This movement has tended to greatly homogenize Indian music because of the propensity to gather in large powwows that encompass many tribes, sometimes from different parts of the United States, in search of one true identity for all Native Americans, irrespective of tribal or regional affiliations.

  Music and Ceremony Today

  David McAllester has written most extensively about the ghost dance and peyote cult that spread from Mexico to southwestern tribes in the 1940s. Based upon Indian religious practices, the ghost dance also touches upon Native American modes about the power and significance of dreams and their relationship to healing. The interaction between song and ceremony, which occurs after the ingestion of the peyote, is described by McAllester:

  During the ceremony a drum and rattle, both of special design, are passed, with other paraphernalia, clockwise among the circle of participants. When a member receives the rattle he is expected to sing a number of songs, usually four, after which he passes the rattle on to the next man. The rattle goes ahead of the drum so that, immediately after his turn to sing, each man is the drummer for the man on his left. Four times during the course of the ceremony the leader interrupts the procession to sing special songs which are always used at these times. At other times a participant sings whatever songs he chooses from the repertory at his command, or even extemporizes on the spur of the moment. (McAllester, Peyote Music, 1949, 89)

  For nearly sixty years peyote use remained strongest among Southwestern Indians. Through much of the twentieth century, however, the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) People of Wisconsin also gained peyote users as its evangelical adherents spread the word to the north and the east. But in the late 1950s its general popularity increased throughout the United States due to greater Pan-Indian activity. Even non–Native Americans began using peyote during the psychedelic days. Nonetheless, the ghost dance and peyote practices remain central to Navajo culture. In 1989 the United States Supreme Court heard a case in which the lawyers for the Native Americans argued for the legalization of small amounts of peyote for use in Navaho religious ceremonies. The Native Americans lost the case.

  Nonetheless, the ghost dance and peyote cult underscore that some regional/tribal ties remain in Native American music and link music and ceremony. The relationship between music and all types of social, religious, and even quasireligious events remains critical. Even in the current Pan-Indian movement, nearly all musical events remain partly dancing, partly religious ceremonies.

  Significantly, strong connections remain between the spiritual world and music. People who sing and dance receive this music from the supernatural, as opposed to creating it themselves. These impulses come from dreams or some other induced state that permits the singers to touch either their distant past or ancestors. In the far Southwest Pia Indians believe that songs preexist and that they are “untangled” in dreams. During World War II some American Indians, most notably Navajo males who served as “dream walkers” for their tribe, were unique in their success at decoding encrypted messages sent by the Nazis. They attributed this special ability to crack codes as part of their inherent spiritual realm. Thus, some Native American performers are viewed not as creative artists but as special vessels who are closely in touch with the past and the spirit world. Because of this unique relationship, the ability to recreate a performance is critical, though the need to recreate these songs precisely varies from tribe to tribe.

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  MUSICAL EXAMPLE

  This brief performance is of the initial song heard in the First Song Cycle of the Washo Indians, which occurs during the night-long meeting of the peyote cult. It was recorded by the noted ethnomusicologist Willard Rhodes in the late 1940s as part of a larger project documenting the varieties of Native American music of the Southwest. Rhodes captured the beginning of the ecstatic trance, just as the peyote was being ingested.

  Title “Peyote Song”

  Performers Washo Indians

  Instruments drum, rattle, voice

  Length 1:14

  Musical Characteristics

  1. This performance has a steady rhythm and is taken at a rapid tempo.

  2. The vocals are moderately ornamented.

  3. Slight syncopation supplied by the rattle can be heard.

  4. The somewhat tense voice is in the middle range.

  This performance is taken from Smithsonian Folkways 4401.

  * * *

  A minority of tribes, however, do not make these direct connections between spirit and song. They believe that they can compose new songs based on traditional themes and musical motifs. Plains tribes such as Cheyennes routinely borrow songs from other tribes with whom they have contact. Pueblo Indians, in an attempt to keep their culture “pure,” zealously guard their music from outside sources, both Native American and Western.

  Nor does Native American music adhere to Western thoughts related to notation and theory, which is anathema to its generally ethereal premise. Indians may not refer to scales, but they are able to distinguish among hundreds of songs that sound similar to untrained ears. Most Native American music is performed by nonprofessionals, who tend to learn through traditional means. The majority of these performers are males who also have some connection with religious practices. Though we are slowly learning that women sometimes take leadership positions in Native American musical activity, male domination reflects the larger world in which men generally take a leadership position in religious ceremonies. Younger musicians, and would-be musicians, take part in these ceremonies and generally learn by rote and through their active participation.

  Musical Characteristics

  It would be fair to observe that Indian music uses less complex harmony than most other forms of American folk music. In fact, the texture of most Nativ
e American music is monophonic; if more than one vocalist is present, then they join together in unison or (occasionally) sing in octaves. Vocables constitute an unusual aspect of Native American singing that is widespread across the entire United States. These sound like mere nonsense syllables, but actually refer to nonlexical syllables, which serve to fill in or properly space out the lines in a song. They consist of short syllables like “he,” “wi,” or “yo”—low-sounding vowels that are usually sung in a nasal voice with glides. While these might sound like gibberish to outsiders, vocables serve also as aesthetic communication that not only helps to solidify their sense of social unity but sometimes also communicates the sound of natural phenomena. Vocables impart a special meaning to the singers (some of whom might be in a highly emotional or ecstatic state) that transcends the function they serve. Since vocables are most often heard as a chorus, all of the participants know when these syllables will occur.

  Of course Native American music is not monolithic, and regional variations remain important. Among Native Americans, tribal differences are also quite important. Our knowledge about the different styles of Indian music is limited by the research conducted over the past one hundred years—the music of only about 10 percent of the 1,000 Native American tribes has been studied. Furthermore, research undertaken during the 1940s is difficult to compare with research from the turn of the century because of the major cultural changes that have taken place over the intervening time. As a general rule, the musical styles reflect cultural boundaries and the western tribes display greater variations than their eastern counterparts.

  Bruno Nettl suggests that the music of Native Americans can be grouped in six broad regional groups, each of which uses some kind of drum and rattle accompaniment: