The R. Neuwirth Folk Collection Blog: April 2010

Monday, April 19, 2010

Harry Smith and the Anthology of American Folk Music

Arguably the most influential illegal bootleg in music history, the Anthology of American Folk Music is a three volume, six album collection of folk, blues and country music recorded from 1926-1932 and issued by Moses Asch's Folkways record label in 1952. The Anthology was compiled by Harry Smith, an eccentric filmmaker and ethnomusicologist who had been collecting old records in New York City since 1940. Smith divided the songs into three categories: ballads, social music and songs, and wrote elaborate liner notes for each song, strange synopses that read like headlines from the strangest newspaper in the world. For example, Chubby Parker's "King Kong Kitchie Ki-Me-O", about a mouse who marries a frog, has the note, "Zoologic Miscegeny Achieved Mouse Frog Nuptials, Relatives Approve". Because the songs were all commercial recordings (as opposed to field recordings), and neither Smith nor Moses Asch received permission to use the songs, the collection was technically an illegal bootleg.

The influence that this collection had is immense. The Anthology was an enormous part of the folk music revival, and reintroduced the works of many seminal folk musicians, leading folk scholars and enthusiasts to seek out, and in many cases, find the original performers. Key folk performers of the 1960s like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Dave van Ronk studied the Anthology and learned and performed the songs from it. There is little doubt that without the Anthology, our collection might not even exist, and our collection includes copies of many of the original recordings that Smith used in compiling this groundbreaking work.

There was supposed to be a fourth volume of the Anthology, but Smith never finished it before his death in 1991. In 2000, it was released, based on the work that Smith had done. Unlike the rest of the Anthology, this collection includes songs recorded after the Great Depression's effect on the recording industry, and includes songs from as late as the 1940.

Links:

Harry Smith biography from the Harry Smith Archives

Harry Smith on Wikipedia

The Anthology of American Folk Music on Wikipedia

The Anthology of American Folk Music at Smithsonian Folkways

The Folk Revival

Without the Folk Revival of the 1950s and 1960s, there's a decent chance that you would not be reading this blog right now. It's possible that without the increased attention to folk music that came about, starting with the work of archivists and field recorders like Alan Lomax, Harry Smith and Moses Asch of Folkways Records, our collection would not be as special as it is.

The revival began with the popularity of the Weavers, a folk group formed in the late 1940s and featuring the talents of Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, former members of the Almanac Singers, which included Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston. In 1950, The Weavers had a hit with Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene, and before they were dropped by the Decca label for their left leaning politics (this was during the Red Scare and McCarthyism) they had other million-selling singles such as "So Long, It's Been Good To Know You" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine". The folk scene was temporarily driven underground, to college towns and coffee shops in places like Greenwich Village.

In the 1950s, a few folk performers such as Odetta and Harry Belafonte had crossover success, but the flourishing of the revival began with the Kingston Trio, who were directly inspired by the Weavers, and in 1958 had a smash hit with "Tom Dooley", a song that had been performed at Lead Belly's funeral.

Over the next few years, performers such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the trio of Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton all rose to prominence performing folk music. Folk music became associated with the Civil Rights movement, with several folk artists performing at Martin Luther King's famous March on Washington in 1963. Eventually, rock music would consume folk music, an event symbolized by Bob Dylan's playing electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival, and famously being called "Judas" at a 1966 show in Manchester, England.

Still, the folk revival had an enormous effect on the music and culture writ large, and has helped to ensure that folk music has remained prominent ever since.

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is arguably the most famous folk singer of all time, even though his status as a "folk singer" is up for debate. Dylan's first album, Bob Dylan, consisted of Dylan's versions of several folk songs, including "House of the Rising Sun" and "Man of Constant Sorrow", as well as one original composition, his tribute to Woody Guthrie, "Song To Woody", sold poorly when it was released in 1962. His breakthrough came with his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which included his first major hit, "Blowin' In The Wind". While folk music contributed a lot to Dylan's work, it was not until the 1990s when Dylan recorded another album of traditional music, 1992's Good As I Been To You and 1993's World Gone Wrong.

Originally from Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan moved to Greenwich Village, and became part of the folk revival of the early 1960s. He became associated with major folk stars like Joan Baez, who he toured with, and Peter, Paul and Mary, who he shared a manager with, and who first made "Blowin' In The Wind" a hit. In 1965, Dylan stunned the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival (he had been a hit at the 1963 and 1964 festivals) by playing rock music on an electric guitar, a move that was seen as a betrayal of the folk music community and ideals by many in the crowd.

Bob Dylan's version of "Blood in My Eyes", originally performed by the Mississippi Sheiks.

Some Links:

Bob Dylan's Official Site

Bob Dylan at Wikipedia

Expecting Rain - A Bob Dylan Blog and News Site

Bob Dylan as one of the TIME 100

Bob Dylan's 2008 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation

Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter

In 1933, John Lomax and his son Alan, traveling through the South to collect folk songs,met a prisoner in Louisiana's Angola Prison Farm named Huddie Ledbetter. Ledbetter had arrived in prison in 1930 for attempted homicide, and it had not been his first time behind bars. In 1915, Ledbetter had been sentenced to a chain gang. He escaped, but three years later, in January of 1918, he was imprisoned in Texas for killing one of his relatives in a fight over a woman. He was released in 1925, after writing a song for the governor petitioning for his own release. This meeting of the "ballad hunter" and his teenage son would become legendary, as it would introduce the world to the folk icon known as Lead Belly.

Lead Belly was released from prison a year after first recording for Lomax. At the time, Lead Belly and Lomax believed that the release was the result of another song petitioning another governor for leniency, this time as a record with a b-side of Lead Belly's iconic "Goodnight Irene", but it has since been shown that Lead Belly was scheduled for release due to time served and good behavior. Initially unable to find work upon his parole, he became Lomax's driver and assistant as Lomax continued seeking out and recording traditional folk music for the Library of Congress. When he went to New York with Lomax, the press learned of his story, and he became a sensation. Time Magazine even did a newsreel about the "singing convict" for their News On the March series.

Lead Belly would eventually become a fixture of the New York folk scene, appearing on radio shows hosted by Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray (who would gone on to direct Rebel Without A Cause"), recording for Columbia, RCA, the Library of Congress, Capitol Records and Moses Asch, who would go on to found the Folkways label. Famous for his enormous 12-string guitar, Lead Belly either wrote or helped to popularize many of the songs that became folk standards, such as "Midnight Special", "Goodnight Irene", "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", "Black Betty", "Cotton Fields" and "Gallis Pole".

Links:

An Overview about Lead Belly

The Official Site of the Lead Belly Foundation

Lead Belly on Wikipedia

In 1988, Lead Belly was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, better known as Woody, is best known today as the writer of "This Land Is Your Land", but his legacy and importance to the history of American music, and folk music in particular, is much greater than one song. Born in Oklahoma in 1912, Guthrie is forever identified with the Dust Bowl disaster that devastated the Midwest in the 1930s. Like so many other Midwesterners, the disaster led Guthrie to move to California in search of work.

In California, he eventually found success as a radio performer in Los Angeles, signing traditional folk songs as well as his own original compositions, many of which highlighted the plight of the "Okies"and other dispossessed peoples. Songs like "Dust Bowl Blues", "Do Re Mi", "Pretty Boy Floyd" (in which he warned that some people rob with a gun while others rob with a fountain pen captured the sentiments felt by many people who had been evicted from their homes by the banks during the Great Depression) and "Blowin' Down The Road" made up

his first commercial recording, Dust Bowl Ballads, issued in 1940 and consisting largely of songs he debuted on his radio program.

Besides his performances on his radio show, Guthrie, a life-long supporter of left wing causes, began writing a column for the Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker. This column, called "Woody Sez" was not expressly political in nature, but focused on Guthrie's experiences and observations. However, with the outbreak of World War II and the Soviet Union's non-aggression pact with Hitler's Germany, the column led to him losing his radio show and not being able to find work in Los Angeles.

Guthrie moved to New York, where he recorded the Dust Bowl Ballads album, as well as a series of recordings with Alan Lomax, both of songs and oral histories. He got work hosting radio shows in New York, and in 1940 he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land" a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America". Like virtually all of Guthrie's songs, he only composed the words, while taking the music from traditional folk songs. In the case of 'This Land Is Your Land", the melody was taken from The Carter Family's gospel song "Little Darling, Pal of Mine", also known as "Oh My Loving Brother". In 1941, Guthrie grew tired of New York and moved to the Pacific Northwest, although he wound up returning to New York shortly thereafter to join the Almanac Singers folk group founded by Pete Seeger, and based in Greenwich Village. In 1944, Guthrie began recording for Moses Asch's Folkway Records, eventually recording hundreds of songs for the label. He also finished his autobiography, Bound For Glory, which became a very influential book, particularly on a young Bob Dylan.

In 1952, Guthrie was diagnosed with Huntington's disease, which his mother had died of, and by 1956 his condition had declined to the point where he was committed first to they Greystrone Park Psychiatric Hospital and then the Brooklyn State Hospital, where he remained for the rest of his life. While there, he was visited by the young Dylan, who had traveled to New York from Minnesota with the express intent of meeting his "last hero", Guthrie. As the folk revival that he had helped to foster took shape, he lay slowly dying, finally passing away in 1967.

Links:

The Official Woody Guthrie Web Site

Woody Guthrie on Wikipedia

The Text of Bob Dylan's Poem, "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie"

PBS American Masters Series Page for Woody Guthrie

Acquiring and Cataloging Our Collection

Our collection began with a major and unsolicited (but appreciated!) gift from an anonymous folk music collector of nearly 800 folk music records, the vast majority of which were commercial recordings from before the Great Depression. Taking this as a starting point, we began actively soliciting other folk records with the goal of creating the most comprehensive collection of American Roots music possible. Our focus is on commercial recordings, rather than field recordings. Our collection works with our home library's American Folklore collection to create one of the major destinations for scholars of American folk cultures and traditions.

Given the valuable and rare collection with which we've been entrusted, we understandably funnel most of our budget towards preserving and maintaining our collection, but we do set aside a part of resources towards acquiring new and difficult to find records to continue growing our collection. However, most of our acquisitions come in the form of donations.

Our cataloging follows the Library of Congress' system based on the card catalog system originally created by Works Progress Administration workers in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and fine-tuned by the staff of the Archive of American Song up to the early 1960s. We have modified our catalog to include information about the record labels that originally released the recordings.

Links:

The Max Hunter Collection Folk Song Collection at Missouri State University

The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress

Introducing Alan Lomax

While most of the recordings that make up the R. Neuwrith Collection are commercial records issued before the Great Depression, Alan Lomax's work doing field recordings is far too important to ignore here.

Lomax's father, John Lomax, was a noted collector of folk songs, a self-described "ballad hunter" who helped to create the Library of Congress' Archive of the American Folk Song by going into the field with a recorder in the early 1930s to document folk music, particularly the songs of poor African-Americans in the south. On such a trip, he recorded a Louisiana prisoner named Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly. John Lomax took his son Alan on many of these trips, despite Alan being only 18 years old when John Lomax mounted his first expedition.

In 1934, Alan and John visited Lead Belly in prison again, and when he was released from prison later that year (legend has it that a song that they recorded for Lead Belly and played for the governor secured his release, but in reality he was released for time served and because of the budget crunch brought on by the Great Depression) they hired Lead Belly to serve as their driver and assistant while they were touring the south for songs.

In 1937, Alan became the Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress, and began in earnest his remarkable career of documenting folk songs and, perhaps just as importantly, introducing them to a wider audience. Besides documenting the music, Alan Lomax also collected oral histories, recording interviews with figures such as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Jelly Roll Morton. He hosted a radio show called Your Ballad Man, which played a wide variety of traditional and folk music from 1945-1949. In the 1950s, Alan Lomax edited the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, an 18 volume collection.

In 1959, in the midst the Folk Revival that his pioneering work helped lay the groundwork for, Lomax staged the Folksong '59 concert in Carnegie Hall, featuring gospel, bluegrass, folk, rock and roll and blues music, some of these genres making their first appearances at the famed concert hall.

Links:

Alan Lomax on Wikipedia

Biographical essay on Alan Lomax

The Library of Congress Alan Lomax Collection

Alan Lomax and his "Southern Journey

John Lomax on Wikipedia

A Small Aside About Preserving Our Collection

So far, we’ve been focusing on some background information about the folk music that makes up the R. Neuwirth Special Collection of American Roots Music. While this blog is focused on sharing our love of traditional American music, we thought that our readers might be interested in learning a little more about what goes into preserving and maintaining our collections.

While we have taken some steps towards digitizing our collection of American folk music, this is separate from our role as preservers of the original vinyl artifacts themselves. Digitization has its place, but it is not the same as ensuring that the actual records themselves are cared for so that future generations have access to them. Our collection includes many rare records that we have been entrusted with, and it is up to us to take the best possible care of them, regardless of whether or not the content has been preserved digitally.

Without getting too technical, and keeping in mind that there is still a great deal of work to be done by research libraries and archives in determining what the best ways to take care of collections like ours are, here are some of the things we do with the amazing collection we have been given the opportunity to appreciate, preserve and share with the world. The first thing we do is make sure that we keep our collection in an environment with a controlled temperature and humidity. The temperature is more important than the humidity, and we keep our collection stored at 65-70 degrees Fahrenheit. In order to prevent the discs from warping, the albums are stored vertically, with spacers every four to six inches. We keep our collection on metal shelves, which don't warp the way wood shelves can. Only people who have been properly trained are allowed to handle the records, and then they are required to where white lint-free gloves. Any record which is played is generally cleaned with distilled water and a soft cloth immediately after being played. Some of our rarer and more fragile records are only made available to the public in the form of a copied recording.

These are not all of the steps that we take, and we are constantly learning new things about how to best take care of these cultural treasures, but they hopefully have given you an idea about what goes into maintaining our collection.

Links:

Audio Preservation: A great collection of links about preserving audio materials

Association of Research Libraries Guide to Sound Recording Media

Wikipedia on Preserving Vinyl Records

Some of the Types of American Folk Music

Last time, we spoke a little about all of the different kinds of music that falls under the umbrella term “folk music”. Now, let’s take a closer look at some of the different styles and traditions that make up American folk, or Roots, music.

Appalachian folk music traces its roots to English and Scottish immigrants who settled in and around the Appalachian mountain range in the 18^th century. The style combines English and Scottish ballads, dance music such as Irish reels and the “new world” ballad tradition, which were songs that often functioned as ways to pass along news and current events. The music is generally played on banjos (originally brought to the region by African-American slaves), guitar, autoharp, dulcimer, mandolin and fiddle. Appalachian music was a big part of the folk music revival in the 1960s.

Bluegrass Music: Like Appalachian folk music, Bluegrass has its roots in the music of immigrants from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The genre takes its name from Bill Monroe’s band, the Blue Grass boys. The traditional instruments in bluegrass include the fiddle, the banjo, guitar, upright bass, mandolin and resonator guitar. In Bluegrass, each instrument often takes its own turn playing by itself, as opposed to Appalachian folk where the instruments all play at once.

Country Blues: There is actually a lot of debate about whether this counts as “Folk” music or not, but our collection includes a number of important songs from this tradition, and the tradition fits most of the traditional criteria of “folk music”, so we choose to include it here. While Appalachian folk and bluegrass often refers to songs performed by groups of people (but not always- remember, that when you are talking about folk music, it almost by definition doesn’t have hard and fast rules)

Cajun music traces its origins to the French speaking Acadian immigrants from Canada to Louisiana. The music is known for accordion and fiddle sound, with lyrics often centering on themes of death and star-crossed romance, reflecting the Cajun people’s exile from Canada. The lyrics are traditionally in French, but now are often sung in English.

Jug Band music is notable for its use of non-traditional, homemade instruments. Besides the jug, which is played by buzzing one’s lips about an inch away form the mouth of the jug, jug bands often include spoons, the washboard, washtub bass, kazoo, even guitars made from the necks of discarded guitars attached to bodies made from gourds. The first jug bands came form Louisville and Birmingham, and the Memphis style of jug band became famous, especially before the Great Depression and the near-collapse of the record industry.

Introducing Folk Music

“Folk music is where it all starts and in many ways ends. If you don’t have that foundation, or if you’re not knowledgeable about it and you don’t know how to control that, and you don’t feel historically tied to it, then what you’re doing is not going to be as strong as it could be. … What I was most interested in twenty-four hours a day was the rural music. The idea was to be able to master those songs. It wasn’t about writing your own songs. That didn’t even enter anybody’s mind.”

-Bob Dylan, 11/22/2001 issue of Rolling Stone

What do you think about when you hear the term “folk music”? The “old timey” Appalachian music from O Brother Where Art Thou? The coffee shop folk revival songs popularized by Peter, Paul & Mary and Joan Baez in the early 1960s? The Dust Bowl ballads of the dispossessed that Woody Guthrie became famous for? All of these are valid responses, but folk music means so much more. Here at the R. Neuwirth Special Collection of American Roots Music, we love folk music, and this blog is our way of sharing the passion with the world.

The term “folk music”, which originated in the mid 19^th century, is almost impossible to define precisely. Generally, it means music that has been passed down through generations, often without a known writer or composer. It is often looked at in opposition to more formal or classical musical traditions.

Our collection is concerned with the American folk music tradition, which is often called “roots music”. Besides the various ethnic folk traditions that immigrants brought to America, music critic Michael Gray identifies four main strains of American folk music: the African-American tradition of folk music, Cowboy folk music, Southern poor white folk music and Yankee folk music. Music traditions such as Bluegrass, Country, the Blues and Gospel might all be considered forms of folk or roots music, and Rock and Roll, Rhythm and Blues and Jazz all developed from Roots Music.