Exploring American Folk Music
Page 40
Not only did they rediscover the first generation of recording artists, but these new collectors also found a thriving group of musicians who had never left the South and who had not been preserved on records. Important “new” traditional singers such as Roscoe Holcomb in eastern Kentucky and ballad singer Dillard Chandler, who lived near Asheville, North Carolina, made field recordings that were eventually released on Folkways. Cohen also introduced a new medium to the folk revival, the ethnographic documentary film, that resulted in short films devoted to Holcomb and Chandler. He has continued to produce films and his most important statement on the subject at hand is Musical Holdouts, a mid-1970s film that addresses regional genres of American music. Once more technology impacts upon folk music in the United States, this time in a conscious effort to visually preserve and interpret.
The renewed interest in American folk music inevitably resulted in a new generation of interpreters, whose backgrounds were usually antithetical to the roots and upbringing of the musicians whom they idolized. Many of the revivalists were younger northern musicians attracted to the wide variety of roots music they heard on Folkways or Vanguard Records or saw at folk festivals from Berkeley to Philadelphia. Unlike groups such as the Limelighters or the Kingston Trio, most of these musicians tended to learn this music directly from the masters and faithfully reproduce it. They viewed themselves as carriers of the torch passed from one generation to the other, often fearing that younger members of the community had passed over this music in favor of more contemporary forms: bluegrass, soul, Nashville country, or R&B.
Mac Benford of the Highwoods String Band recalls his own musical experiences that began in the early 1960s:
The dominant role models for the whole scene were the New Lost City Ramblers, who combined expertise as musicians and folklorists. Their performance style was based on their extensive knowledge for old-time music recorded in the ’20s & ’30s. In addition to their own performances, the concerts, films, and records that they produced of older musicians still stand as shining examples . . . Many amateur folklorists now began enrolling in academic programs to earn credentials for what they had already been doing for love. As the folk boom of the ’60s gathered momentum, the campuses of colleges and universities across the country became meeting grounds for the academic world and old-time musicians. This was the situation when my most notable musical venture . . . first got rolling. The timing couldn’t have been better . . . The support we received was so active that in just three years after Highwoods had teamed up to try our luck at the southern fiddlers’ conventions in the summer of 1972, we had been chosen to become part of the Smithsonian’s Touring Performance Service; we were picked to represent old-time music on a U.S. State Department tour of Latin America; and we had become a favorite group at most of the major folk festivals. (M. Benford, Old Time Herald, 1989, 23)
This trend resulted in new performance venues and avenues for both traditional musicians and those who have revived and interpreted earlier styles. A circuit of festivals, coffeehouses, and small concerts halls catering to folk music devotees developed across the country. This circuit supported musical programs by a wide range of artists, ranging from a semiretired blues performer like Sleepy John Estes to an ensemble that has revived the contra-dance music they heard at a town hall in southern New Hampshire or a string band that learned at the feet of Wade Ward in Galax, Virginia.
In the early 1970s Rounder Records emerged at the vanguard of recording and disseminating American grassroots music. Rounder began as an antiprofit collective but thirty years later it has become a minor conglomerate, having assimilated Flying Fish and several other small labels. The hundreds of issues of old-time, bluegrass, blues, Cajun, and other forms of grassroots and ethnic music are the largest in the United States and appear on such subsidiary labels as Bullseye Blues. They have also led the way in reissuing important material overlooked by major companies, such as releasing the complete (RCA Victor) works of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers on compact discs as well as a six-CD sampler of Huddie Ledbetter’s recordings for the Library of Congress. And, of course, Rounder is carefully revisiting the career of Alan Lomax with the release of approximately 120 compact discs of his material over a ten-year period! Today, however, Rounder Records is owned by the Welk Group, a music conglomerate with roots in Lawrence Welk’s successful empire that began in the 1920s.
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MUSICAL EXAMPLE
One of the most talented and long lasting of these eclectic string bands is the Red Clay Ramblers, who are based in and around Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Founded originally in the early 1970s as an informal group, within a few years the band members had quit their teaching, library, and other day jobs to devote themselves to music. Since then they have toured throughout the United States and parts of Europe, recording numerous times for independent labels and working with several off-Broadway shows. “Tell It to Me” was derived from a 1920s recording by the Tenneva (a diminutive for Tennessee and Virginia) Ramblers. In addition to the old-time tunes, the Ramblers now feature a refreshing mixture of original material, sacred songs, and Irish instrumental tunes.
Title “Tell It to Me”
Performers The Red Clay Ramblers
Instruments Tommy Thompson, banjo and vocals; Bill Hicks, fiddle;
Mike Craver, guitar; Laurel Urton, washtub bass; Al McCandless,
fiddle; Jim Watson, mandolin and vocals
Length 2:26
Musical Characteristics
1. A rich and varied homophonic texture is heard.
2. There is harmony singing in the lead vocals and on the chorus.
3. It is performed in duple (2/4) meter at a rapid tempo.
4. There are several instrumental leads by the fiddle and banjo.
5. The song maintains a steady, high dynamic level.
Going up Cripple Creek, coming down Main
Trying to make a living for to buy cocaine
Cocaine’s gonna kill my honey dear.
Chorus
Tell it to me, tell it to me
Drink corn liquor, let the cocaine be
Cocaine gonna kill my honey dear
Sniff cocaine, blow it at night
Sniff cocaine if it takes my life
Cocaine’s gonna kill my honey dear.
Chorus
Sniff cocaine, sniff it in the wind
Doctor said it’ll kill but wouldn’t say when
Cocaine gonna kill my honey dear.
Chorus
All you rounders think you’re tough
Feed your women on brandy and snuff
Cocaine gonna kill my honey dear.
Chorus (repeat)
This selection is from Smithsonian Folkways 31039.
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Hundreds of thousands of music fans have been exposed to a wide range of music by these means and to performers with increasingly eclectic repertoires. They hear groups with tongue-in-cheek names such as “The Mighty Possums,” “Mice in the Attic,” and “Moose Chowder.” Many of these bands unblinkingly mix Irish tunes, western swing, British ballads, rockabilly, and southern fiddle tunes. Revival bands of all descriptions became the staple ensemble for many young white instrumentalists interested in alternatives to popular music groups.
As the years go by, this diversity becomes more pronounced and institutionalized. For example, at the 1991 “Dance Augusta” workshops in the hills of West Virginia, the first session was “Cajun week.” This workshop attracted enthusiastic dancers primarily from the Middle Atlantic States who came for instruction in “couples dance styles of southwest Louisiana . . . in the two-step, jitterbug, waltz, Cajun blues dancing and zydeco.” The flyer also advertized that attendees would experience “Cajun culture, dance parties, snacks, and more.” The musicians included not only southwest Louisiana natives Dewey Balfa, Bois Sec Ardoin, and Canray Fontenot, but also Tracy Schwarz (one of the New Lost City Rambler’s founders), Matt Honey, and Bob Smakula.
The
Highwoods String Band at the Festival of American Folklife in the middle 1970s. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
NEW ENTREPRENEURS AND FRONTIERS
A new breed of entrepreneurs also entered the record business. Moe Asch started Folkways back in the 1940s, but virtually no one else came into the business during the 1950s because of a perceived audience shortage. This changed, of course, beginning with the folk song revival, and any number of small record companies moved in to fill the void. Chris Strachwitz, for example, founded Arhoolie Records in 1960 and continues to operate this label today. The label celebrated its fortieth birthday in 2000 with a deluxe box set, The Journey of Chris Strachwitz, that takes a chronological look at Arhoolie’s development. Strachwitz had taught school in northern California but was deeply interested in records and regional folk music, and the first Arhoolie issue was by the Texas songster, Mance Lipscomb. His shoestring operation has followed its founder’s muse and good taste. Arhoolie continues to be Strachwitz’s window to the world, and his catalogue of over 200 releases includes some of the best recordings by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Lydia Mendoza, Clifton Chenier, and a host of other artists whose work is discussed in this book. Most other companies—Red House, Folk Legacy, Shanachie—have sprung forth from similar roots and have issued a similarly eclectic mixture of regional, revivalists, folk-based, and older traditional music.
Another aspect of the folk music revival is a renewed interest in ethnic traditions. Earlier in this book I briefly discussed the interaction between commercial record companies and ethnic musicians during the teens and 1920s. Ethnic traditions always existed in their communities; like blues and hillbilly music, they never “died.” Unlike the other two genres, ethnic traditions never really moved beyond their grassroots audiences to become part of popular culture. This is partly the result of language differences, making the words sung in Yiddish, Swedish, Ukrainian, or Spanish unintelligible to those whose native tongue is English.
The ghettoization of ethnic music is also related to the relative inaccessibility of the mass media, particularly radio and record companies. Except for those serving a major urban center or smaller community dominated by a members of a certain cultural/language group, most radio stations do not serve the musical needs of ethnic groups. Similarly, record companies generally do not sell enough disks to warrant paying much attention to foreign language records. In this case there simply is not the demand to make such ventures profitable enough to make them attractive. Moreover, the longer the period of time that ethnic groups reside in this country, the more acculturated they generally become. This also creates a weaker demand for the tangible products of their musical culture.
The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the beginning of a strong movement toward multicultural perspectives in the arts, education, and the humanities; there is a reawakened awareness that the United States is not a monolithic society. One minor result of this new assessment is the understanding that ethnic music plays some part in our cultural fabric. Since 1970 we have witnessed revitalization movements in klezmer, native American, Hawaiian, and Norwegian American music among others. This music was merely submerged by the commercial forces that shape our daily consciousness, bubbling along within the confines of its community.
The Folklife Center of the Library of Congress sponsored a conference and a book about ethnic traditional music in the United States. Both Pekka Gronaw and Richard K. Spottswood have undertaken the most basic and extensive related discographical work. Spottswood’s seven-volume discography, Ethnic Music on Records, is the standard reference on ethnic recordings up to 1943. Despite the increased emphasis on ethnicity, the focus of the most recent folk revival has been upon American folk music as opposed to traditions imported to this country.
Smithsonian Folkways has always included ethnic-American releases in its catalogue, while Arhoolie’s Chris Strachwitz’s fondness for Spanish American and the creolized forms from Louisiana and east Texas assured their places in his company. The bulk of the recording of ethnic music, however, was undertaken by small companies dedicated to meeting the needs of their narrow-targeted audiences. As they usually do in our capitalist society, commercial companies sprang up to fill the void left by major companies. In New York City, for example, the influx of Caribbean immigrants has created a thriving business for entrepreneurs hustling concerts and dances in addition to records and tapes. Canyon Records in New Mexico has been serving the native American communities, albeit mostly Southwestern tribes, since the early 1960s. The documentation and marketing of popular and folk music of ethnic enclaves remains, even today, largely unknown outside of the communities themselves.
Calypso, reggae, and styles from Haiti, Cuba, and other countries along the Caribbean Rim have influenced music in the United States for many years. This occurred several times during the twentieth century alone, especially with jazz. From its roots in the Deep South, and New Orleans in particular, Cuban poly-rhythms affected jazz. Jelly Roll Morton noted the “Spanish tinge” in his own music, perhaps as the result of his own partially Hispanic background. In the late 1940s the craze for instruments such as bongos and conga drums swept through jazz, resulting in tunes such as “Cubana-Be-Cubana-Bop” and “Manteca.” (These genres were touched upon in chapters 8 and 9.)
Yet the folk revival has left permanent marks upon our musical awareness. During the 1990s some very popular singers/songwriters, most notably Suzanne Vega, Ani De Franco, Michelle Shocked, Tracy Chapman, Indigo Girls, and R.E.M., all clearly bear the heritage of American folk music in their own work. The popular press continues to trace and help create new musical trends: the 1970s and 1980s brought alternative journals and magazines devoted to American vernacular music. Folk music publications such as Living Blues, The Old Time Herald, and other more ephemeral magazines have chronicled the history and development of vernacular music. Today, much information about these musics can be found on the thousands of Web sites (not all of them based in the United States) devoted to American vernacular music from Cajun to surf to Tejano. Most of the noncommercial college and national public radio stations devote some of their weekly programming to folk music, and the attention paid to the revised Anthology of American Folk Music underscores the vitality of this music. These examples illustrate that a small, persistent, and formidable network of resources devoted to the preservation and dissemination of folk music exists, much of it now available on-line.
Fiddler Dewey Balfa (center) and his friends conduct a workshop and performance at Louisiana State University at Lafayette. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
Europeans also retain a strong hand in documenting our musical heritage. All of the major discographies of blues, gospel, and early country music have been compiled by Englishmen and were first published overseas. This ironic situation remains as true today as it did in the late 1930s when Hughes Panaisse wrote a pioneering scholarly book on jazz and assembled its first discography. If only American scholarly interest had been so strong fifty years ago! Several of the major collections of race and hillbilly records are in the hands of European collectors, while record companies such as Interstate (England) and Document (Scotland) issue more records of black blues than any American company. The European-based Old-Time Music, Blues & Rhythm, and Soul Bag, among others, have printed hundreds of issues devoted to American folk music.
Early in 2001 the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? sparked the latest revival of interest in folk and folk-based film. A critical success, the movie’s soundtrack has received almost as much attention as the film. Most of the songs on O Brother are quiet, acoustic performances that draw upon American folk music: “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” (based on the 1931 performance by Skip James) and “O Death” are among its musical highlights. Although the songs were mostly rotated into the mix on noncommerc
ial “public” radio stations, there is at least one potential radio hit on the album: “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.” This traditional song has been recorded by singers as diverse as bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley, English rock singer Rod Stewart, and (Blind Faith and Cream) drummer Ginger Baker. In O Brother the song is played (in bluegrass style) by the Soggy Bottom Boys and its video received good play on Country Music Television, the commercial country music industry’s equivalent of MTV. Will the circle (once again) be unbroken?
FINAL THOUGHTS
All of this attention, American or otherwise, simply highlights the fact that our grassroots culture continues to fascinate and reinvigorate our music. Even after more than seventy years of intervention, technology remains a strong force in shaping folk music. The most remote sections of America are dotted with satellite dishes, just as the same houses contained primitive radios in the late 1920s.
Despite all of these advances, the VFW in Fairview, Virginia, still holds its bimonthly square dances with old-time string band music mixed with bluegrass. KPLK in New Ulm, Minnesota, is no longer the “Polka Station of the Nation,” but they continue to play an hour’s worth each day at noon. Just because Bob Wills is dead, western swing and two-step dancing has not disappeared from Texas dance halls—they were alive and well during George W. Bush’s White House years. In southwestern Louisiana dance halls Buckwheat Zydeco and Queen Ida continue to meet the zydeco and creolized Cajun music demand. Regional folk music in the United States is not dead, it remains lurking just below the consciousness of popular culture always at the ready to be discovered and revived yet again.