Folk Journey

When word leaks out that  you’re  finally putting together a collection of reminiscence and research for serial publication, questions inevitably arise. 

The two most common are, “When can I see some of it?” and “What’s it about?”

The answer to that second one is: it’s a best attempt so far to more fully explore the things talked about with friends around our various kitchen tables over the last 40+ years. Sometimes there’s been a wood stove, and usually a pretty decent music system. For many years, up a short stair, there has been a large library of American music, a lot of it on vinyl. Conversations have often included musical example. Children are welcome most of the time. There’s a lot of coffee involved. The clocks are very small.

The backdrop for all those long talks has been a common and abiding love for this land and its music.

Call this a series of essays, in search of conclusions about the American Nation. Not the country. That’s another thing entirely.

If you’re after the “bottom line,” you will have to share the journey and reach your own conclusions. Lord knows you are welcome to come along. We’re all in this together, folks, and the more stringed instruments we have along, the better. It would be great if everybody knew the lyrics, but not essential.

The answer to the first question is “Pretty soon.” Or, as Bob Segar said, “…turn the page…”

If you live long enough, you come to realize that life is filled with strange blessings and cryptic gifts.

For all the privations of life on the western prairies of America in the 1940s and 50s, there would later come the rewards of having seen technology and social change enter and evolve in digestible bites, discrete additions and subtractions. Media hadn’t become as “mass” as they would. The message wasn’t saturated with images, and the soundtrack was separate. The rest of the country and the rest of the world were still out “there,” to be deciphered from stories on the radio and those of adults, and from newspapers and books and magazines, including the rude pulps that were a bonus for an evening watching the kids down the road, and the occasional much-handled National Geographic.

And with the confusions and collisions of history and culture experienced in later times and urban settings would come the remembered clarity of star-filled nights and deep silence, washed by cool breezes and moonlight. “Perspective,” the space between one and the world, was built-in for those who grew up with a horizon in every direction.

Later would come the realization that the lives and stories seen by the buffalo grass were not necessarily reflected in the history lessons learned in school. That the same was true for other American lives and memories, in towns and cities far from the tumbleweeds. And that winding through those real events and real people was the river of American song, particularly the broadly-defined “folk” music of the country, laid down by working people on the job and at play, and including the songs later written in tribute to those themes and rhythms, the elements of human interaction and love, and a very specific union of music and lyrics that told of accomplishments and challenges in a world become ever-more modern.

“Capital H” history is a small boat floating on a river of unrecorded stories. To chase what really happened you have to dive in. You may have to swim against the current. The waters will get murky. But if you listen for the songs people sing when working and playing you’ll start to find your way.

Work calls music to your head. If you’re drowsy or bored, you can try mental multiplication or reciting “The Song of Hiawatha,” but you’re likely to wind up hearing a common song on your internal radio. It doesn’t matter if you’re hoeing trees or chopping crops, driving a machine, snapping beans or dressing chickens, the rhythm of the work will start to lay down a beat. You’ll start to improvise words around a phrase or tune you’ve heard. If the field you’re plowing is in a cubicle, and you drive a keyboard, that internal radio might get overridden by the telephone, but you could still find yourself keeping the beat with a pencil.

The music on all those internal frequencies is the heartbeat of who we really are as a people—forged from the many, the cast-out and the taken. On any given day it’s the soundtrack for our collective unconscious, and it helps to define us. There are songs and themes that are “Basic” to that soundtrack. It’s not mannered, approved, or sometimes even written down until it’s already a part of us all. A lot of the time it isn’t something you would sing to your average grandmother. Soldiers don’t march 20 miles with full packs humming Beethoven, and hard work has always had a remarkably leveling effect on adjectives. Some things don’t change.

Sometimes we forget. 

Sometimes you have to very nearly lose something to appreciate its worth. And sometimes you can feel it slipping away again, but you don’t know what to do.

Some memories, then. . .

Remembrance is better triggered by smells and sounds than by sights. Looking back at the late 40s and early 50s, when a lot of us were attending those first-through-eighth-grade, one-room schools scattered across the plains, our recall of the words in the textbooks is a little blurry. But the smell of a coal oil-burning stove or the sound of records played at 78 revolutions per minute on a hand-cranked phonograph can call the room back entire.

We certainly didn’t know it at the time, but we were listening to our history’s “official” soundtrack when we opened the door on that five-foot tall cabinet, picked a record, cranked the handle, replaced the needle in the swiveled-up holder and set it carefully down on the spinning shellac. There wasn’t a volume control. There wasn’t any electricity yet out there, so the amplification was megaphonic. And there was a divide between those tall enough to reach the playing arm unassisted and those who needed a stool. “Big” kids could place the needle, but the little brothers and sisters who rode to school behind the saddle were usually limited to turning the crank.

Selection was also limited. The permanent collection would be donated by the community, after careful screening. Then there were the records that came with the “reading books” in the circulating wooden boxes from the County Superintendent of Schools. Memory serves up Sousa marches and Stephen Foster songs and Caruso, and Roamin’ in the Gloamin’, (which took a lot of figuring out) and a constant chorus of crackles and pops. It took nearly 50 years to get a handle on that Gloamin’ thing.

The world was pretty small. Some townships never mustered more than eight students in the entire school.

The “unofficial” accompaniment lived elsewhere. Years later we would learn that, under other names, those were real divisions, laid down by the recording industry as it developed. Thomas Edison didn’t just come up with the phonograph and direct current.

There was no television yet. The newspaper came in the mail—three days after printing. Radios in cars were for “town folks.” Radios in living rooms used batteries, and a few families had 32-volt DC systems, driven by a windcharger and rows of 4-gallon battery jars in the storm cellar. The one radio stayed tuned all day, usually by paternal edict, to stations like WNAX for the market reports and the evening radio dramas, and kids were not to fiddle with it. Things were a little different “in town.” Especially if you had an uncle who loved jazz and blues and swing and gadgets. It was plainly not the same music we had at school. And his electric changer was one of the few around that actually dropped a new record without helping the turntable along with your hand when it cycled. You learned the invisibility trick (if I’m reading a book they can’t see me), because some of the grown-ups pretty clearly did not approve of you hearing “that stuff.” Which guaranteed that you would pay careful attention… while occasionally turning a page… Perhaps “trans-parently” is a better word…

Variations on the invisibility trick also came in handy for community get-togethers. Grown-ups acted differently sometimes, and you finally figured out that there was another world behind the one you saw every day. There were times when the rules changed for a few hours, or even a day. It might be at a barn dance, with the sweet and tantalizing smell of whiskey outside in the shadows. It might be in the triumphant twilight of a blistering summer day spent beating back a prairie fire before it took some family’s cattle and buildings. It might be at a baseball game outside the Grange Hall, or lazing (trans-parently) beside a WPA dam—listening to your Dad and Uncle—fishing for a mess of bullheads with a bamboo pole. It might come with unexpected visitors, when the grown-ups took the evening breeze outside the house and the other kids were racketing through the out-buildings and chasing cottontails into the scrap pile by the shop. A story would be told, perhaps. Or a song would be played or sung… And then one night we found out that there was a whole ‘nother set of rules for something called a shivaree, and some very interesting songs as well…

We didn’t know that John and Ruby and Alan Lomax had been recording the music of regular folks where they lived and worked for over 20 years. We might have heard the name Bessie Smith, but we sure weren’t told about Memphis Minnie. Radio had the occasional musical broadcast, but we were more likely to hear Lawrence Welk than Duke Ellington.

We didn’t know that the steep stairs to the attic of our American musical heritage were seeing fewer and fewer footprints in the dust. We didn’t know about the tunes that were missing from our mental album shelves, or the truths they carried. And we didn’t know that there was a man named Harry Smith who was about to change all that, if he could.

But we knew something was happening. 

1952.

That was the year a lot of us were taken into town to see “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Delight and anticipation at seeing a real movie were dashed after hushed conversations between parents and uncles and aunts. A new epidemic of polio had arrived. The close confines of a theater filled with a crowd of strangers were just too risky. We didn’t understand. 

The 47th (Viking) Division of the National Guard had been called up for the Korean War in 1951, and people started looking more closely at the black-bordered casualty box, centered on the front page of the Argus Leader. Kids started picking up new phrases… Bloody Ridge… Chesty Puller… Heartbreak Ridge. SFC John R. Rice, killed in Korea with the 1st Cav, had been buried with honors at Arlington the previous August, by Harry Truman’s order, after a cemetery in Sioux City had refused him burial because he was a Winnebago Indian. Dorothy Mayner picked up the torch from Marian Anderson (and Anderson’s understudy, a young lady named Elmerlee Thomas) and a black soprano finally sang in Constitution Hall in the nation’s capital. She sang Mozart. Emmett Till was 13 years old, growing up in Chicago.

Elizabeth became queen. Britain got the atomic bomb. Truman signed the treaty ending the war with Japan. Hussein became the king of Jordan. The French opened a huge offensive against General Giap’s Viet Minh. Nixon gave his “Checkers” speech. Eisenhower beat Stevenson. John F. Kennedy won his first election to the Senate from Massachusetts, beating incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge. Republicans took control of the Senate, opening the way for Joseph McCarthy to chair the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate.

And the streamliner The City of San Francisco was trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevadas for 3 days, with 200 passengers aboard.

All those big pieces of big history would change the plain lives that would be later remembered in spoken stories and small newspapers. And somehow—in that same year—Harry Smith cracked open the attic door, cleared a path through the sousaphones and minstrel trunks and gave us back our recorded common heritage, the rest of the soundtrack. It took a few more years before the folk music boom and the blues “revival.” It took a while before the field recordings by the Lomax family and their associates were really appreciated. But the trickle begun in 1952 grew and nourished us, and the river ran full under History’s boat. It’s still important.

So the question arises: “What the heck do folk and blues have to do with the Great Plains and what difference does it make what people out there have to say about it, anyway…what’s the big deal?”

Ok. That’s two questions, but good ones. One answer is the Wisconsin Chair Company. And riverboats. And if you mark the eastern edge of the plains somewhere around Chicago…

The second question? Well, maybe folks in the far lonesome heard it all in a little different context…? And we stand on the shoulders of all who came before, not just the people you can find in books. It’s just possible that our kids and our grandkids can use some of these songs and this history when they’re figuring out who and what they are, and want to become.

Also, we know what a hoolian refers to in Ride an Old Paint, and what Ian Tyson is talking about. Bix Beiderbecke was from Davenport, Iowa . . . And those stairs up to our common, essential musical attic are getting really, really dusty again.

The Wisconsin Chair Company?? Yep! In Port Washington and Grafton, right north of Milwaukee, in the early 1900s. They made phonograph cabinets for the Edison Company, and one way to sell a fancy item like that was to throw in some records. So, in about 1917 they decided to start a record label—called it Paramount. Only in America… By the 1920s and early 1930s over a quarter of the blues records sold in the United States were on Paramount, cut and pressed in Ozaukee County, right north of Milwaukee. And you are not going to believe who came up on those old roads and railbeds from Texas and Mississippi and the rest of the country. Also, in about 1917, Louis Armstrong was playing summers on the boats running the Mississippi between New Orleans and Saint Paul, before King Oliver called him up to Chicago. And blues and jazz came to “the territories” and to the people who rode the horses and drove the tractors and snapped the beans, and made the history that didn’t much get written down…

So. If history is written by the winners, do the deeds of the losers disappear? If the winners’ history has a soundtrack, do the other songs fade away? If it isn’t in the bookstore at the U, does it really matter, especially in a world moving this fast? Has the music of the people who never owned a bank or a railroad, never made the textbooks, and never made a fuss lost meaning? What of the messages their songs carried?

And how do you really figure out who won. . . and who didn’t?

The folks who have hung around our kitchen table over the years have been pretty much all “neck-down” blues and folk and jazz fans. Most of us wouldn’t know a flatted seventh from a fork lift. We’re not players (although Arlo was known to deliver a bent, screaming guitar lead or two, and Nathan has an historical penchant for showing up in small clubs and playing mouth-harp with bands on open-mike nights—but we’re not players). And we’re sure not musicologists.

On the other hand, we listen pretty good.

And we know enough about how things spread from person to person, in the great American underground, to doubt that you can draw straight lines from the Delta to Memphis to Chicago in a conversation about the music and encapsulate anything as amorphous as folk music or the blues. What about Georgia? What about Texas? What about Indianapolis? What about Ozaukee County?

And what about the women?

We weren’t around, but it seems to make sense that “THE BLUES” (as a form) probably coalesced in the late 1800s. Flat disk records were introduced in 1895. Fast Mail train Number 97 jumped the tracks near Danville, Virginia in 1903.  By 1913, even Tom Edison had moved to disks at about the same time that he was auditioning for vocal talent.

In 1914, a song was published. It would go on to sell millions of copies in various versions. The story we got is that a gentleman named William Christopher Handy had written it in a Memphis bar on Beale Street, called the PWee Saloon (Pee Wee).

For the record, the PWee was owned by an Italian immigrant, according to our sources. Handy had to publish the song himself, in 1914, when nobody else was interested. It was first recorded around 1917. It would eventually be performed in public for the first time by a black woman, after Handy specifically gave permission. The woman was Ethel Waters. The song was St. Louis Blues.

In 1920, Mamie Smith recorded Crazy Blues for Okeh Records, and became the first African-American artist to take a “blues” song over a million copies sold (reportedly over two million eventually). Some say it was the first “race” record. It sure opened things up.

And this was all overlay for the lady who built the form and topics and attitude of the blues, starting well before Handy and any of the Smiths who sang the blues in the next few years. They called her “The Mother of the Blues” and there are strong arguments for the accuracy of the appellation.

Gertrude Malissa Pridgett had been born in Columbus, Georgia in 1886. In about 1904, she married William “Pa” Rainey, a featured dancer, comedian and singer with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, one of the more popular touring shows. “Blues” wasn’t on the menu of the minstrel circuit…it was “folk” music from the rural areas of the country. Supposedly, the young Mrs. Rainey was working a show in a small Missouri town when a girl came into the tent one morning and offered a song about a man who had left her. It had a totally different sound. “Ma” learned it and began to use it as an encore, and got a huge response, but didn’t know what to call the sound. One day, goes the story, she responded to the frequent question, “What is that stuff?” by saying, “It’s the blues.” Who knows…

By 1914-1916, the act was billed as “Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues.” By December of 1923, when she cut her first record, she was on her own, billed as “Madame” Rainey, with a headband, gold and diamonds, feathered boas and a stage band of her very own.

That first record? Well, remember the Wisconsin Chair Company and Ozaukee County? Yup. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey laid down more than 90 “sides” in a five-year recording career and every one of them was for Paramount Records, of Grafton, Wisconsin, employing studios in Chicago and elsewhere. The first one was called Boweavil Blues. She was called “The Paramount Wildcat.”

Her later accompanist and musical director was a young man named Thomas Dorsey, of whom we’re going to see a whole lot more. He was also known, in the years to follow as “Georgia Tom” Dorsey. For now, it need only be said that by the time Ms Rainey quit recording he and Tampa Red were the original “Hokum Boys,” and a whole lot of folks believe that he cut the template for Gospel singing. (And if you don’t think you know what “hokum” is, just stick around.) (The pianist in this version of Ma’s stage band is Georgia Tom Dorsey.)

In about 1933, she retired from the road and returned to Columbus, Georgia, outside Fort Benning. She owned and operated two theatres in Rome, Georgia. She joined the Friendship Baptist Church, where her brother was a Deacon and she died at age 54, on December 22, 1939. She is buried at the Portersdale Cemetery in Columbus.

There are plenty of people who seem willing to call her the “Mother of ‘Classic‘ Blues” as opposed, apparently to “country” and “city” blues. Out here among the neck-down listeners we just call her terrific. And some collection of her work is absolutely essential to any collection of music born in America.

By 1927 or 1928, “Ma” Rainey had purchased her own bus to take her show on tours. Before she was done, Bessie Smith would have her own railroad car.

We’ll get back to that.

“…Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon, all I want is lovin’ you and music! music! music…”(Stephan Weiss, Bernie Baum‚ Theresa Brewer, Dixieland All Stars 1950)

Why do movies have musical sound tracks? Why do television stories about the 1960s, always seem to have the same songs playing behind the same clips of Woodstock, Haight-Ashbury and throngs in protest?

Is it because the producers are looking for a foothold in our memory, and a common emotional response among the audience, to serve as a shortcut and foundation for the messages they are sending?

In a world as saturated by media as ours, it’s easy to lose track of some things. Like the fact that mass media as we know them have only been around for about a third of our national history. And that who we are, what we value and the choices we make as a people are a product of our individual experiences, set against our collective, accumulated memory of more than 500 years in this place and 300 as a country, but only a little over a hundred as a society with recordings of sound, and then pictures.

Print is different. Reading is, of necessity, another kind of interaction between our sensory apparatus and our brain. (Unless, of course, those stupid birds have begun to sing at 4:05 on the morning before a final, or you’re near an open school window in the last week of school. Then you can slide into that hazily conscious place in your head where your own internal movies are written by your hopes and fears.) Written words can certainly trigger memories and emotions, but not as effectively as smells and sounds. And music can amplify its effect by building on our cache of non-musical aural remembrances. If you experienced the sounds of steam locomotives, or train whistles in the night, or the cadence of freight cars hitting the join between rail lengths, there are beats and rhythms and themes that are going to take the fast lane into your cognition. You’re probably even going to hear the yodels of Jimmie Rodgers in a way different from those younger.

There is a huge body of literature out there about classical music, pop and jazz. When the term “American Basics” is used in this discussion, it is meant to draw a twisting line through the listening history of the country. That line follows the contours, the pressure ridges if you will, formed by the cultural fault lines developed over those 120 years or so of recording. On the more populated (and irrigated) side of the pressure ridges you find popular music (to include songs originating in musicals), classical performances, and some jazz. That’s also where the recording companies have historically been found, where the majority of the population was located after about 1917 (along with taller buildings and better footwear), and where the valves that mark the sources and destinations of the flow of American dollars have been most likely to turn up. The wages are a lot better on that side of the ridge, popularity more fleeting, and audiences further from the stage.

On the other side, it’s broken country and dockside bars, overalls and jeans, horse barns and red lights, weekly rents and flat tires, pint bottles and bus stops, work shoes and boots. It’s also blues, some jazz, old-time, country and “folk” music, and the occasional stray songs that got lost and stayed, like They Call the Wind Mariah. In the territory on that side of the ridges, the music can be painfully real, and real has had a tendency to find its way through the filters of the industry onto record. It’s where most of the attention here will be spent.

Sure, these are over-generalizations, but fault lines are, by their nature, buried deep. It can be useful to back off a ways and look for those pressure ridges. Think about it. Visualize a little. If the terms “parlor” music and “back porch” music are offered in the context of 1917 in America, on which side of the ridgelines do you think each was found in the days just before radio? Where did Fiddlin’ John Carson and Eck Robertson go to lay down their first sides? And where did the Lomaxes and Frank Warner and John Jacob Niles and Bascomb Lunsford go to find the source-springs of America’s musical basics?

To some extent it’s urban versus rural, but there have always been places in the cities that really should be mapped on the other side of the music’s ridgeline. People carry their music and memories to new places, and there has been a lot of that going on, for a long time. In 1860, 80 per cent of the 31 million Americans were rural, and there were 392 places with a population over 2,500 souls. In 1890, as the recording industry was being born, 65 percent of the 63 million people living in the U. S. were rural, and there were 1351 places over 2,500.

Gray states were urban in 1900, 40% of total population. Shaded areas were rural.

By 1900 there were still only eight states in which a majority of the residents lived in urban areas: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. Residents in those states, however, made up 40% of the entire population of the country. It’s not that surprising that those same areas of the country would give birth to our mass media and be the heart of the recording industry as it emerged. It’s also easy to see why those concentrations would be the target markets for the record players, initially, and then the recordings to be produced once the industry figured out that it was dealing with an entertainment device, not a dictating machine. The kinds of recordings, and the artists who would be allowed to make them, would be largely based on decisions made in the northeast about what sort of product the people who lived there could be induced to purchase. The rest of the country would be along for the ride for a very long time.

The balance between urban and rural populations would shift in favor of the cities and towns just after World War I. It was just in time for radio to join the ranks of mass media, for the patents which had kept recording in the hands of the few to expire, and for the market for “hillbilly” and “race” records to be identified.

The musical names and legends in America’s attic of memories are the artists who made it through the industry’s screening to record at all, and the further thinning of the herd as recording companies decided what to actually press and release. Many of the fragile cylinders and platters upon which the songs of those survivors could be heard were destroyed by time, repetitive play and political and economic forces. There were millions of singers and musicians in this country before 1877 or 1890, and a lot of songs, both adopted and created. Some of them were preserved as sheet music, or even poetry, and some came down from mouth to ears. But the performances themselves, with all their nuance and setting, were lost to us, save for descriptions.

There were no recordings. After 1887, there were still very few artists recorded. We’ll simply never know what Buddy Bolden actually sounded like, for instance, even though many hold him to be the key figure in the origin of New Orleans jazz. If there were recordings they did not survive, although the melody of his (and Willie Cornish’s) “Funky Butt” was part of the published ragtime number “Saint Louis Tickle,” and was recorded by Jelly Roll Morton as “Buddy Bolden’s Blues.” Winton Marsalis was an Executive Producer for the movie “Bolden” based on his story, but the music of the man and his band is gone with the memories of those who heard and are themselves gone.

And the music is important, perhaps even vital, to us if we are to learn from the history of those in our American family who didn’t make it into any indexes, and a few who did. However, mediated by the recording industry that emerged, the recordings at the dawn of the “American Century” and since have both affected and reflected their times. And that means some of them are basic to us, if we are to have a realistic appreciation of our culture as it has emerged in the last 120 years, and to try to better understand the history that swirled around our ancestors and was made by them. The interplay of music, culture and history has been there for a terribly long while.

The music of a people has been a critical component of culture and preservation of their history for as long as there have been folks who had figured out the concepts of past, present and future. It was part of the conduit of remembrance for oral cultures. It lingered in that role after the birth of the written word. And that gizmo at the head of this chapter that looks like a cross between a nose hair trimmer and a tiny howitzer didn’t change that.

At some point, way back there at the start of the road, someone put percussion under the beat and rhythm of chant, and it became music. Whether you are striking a log, a drum, a string under tension or a set of those strings, you have begun to expand the reach of the mood accompanying the words. There are a lot of us who will never hear a slow, measured, muffled drumbeat again without returning to November of 1963 in our minds and memories, and we will not be light-hearted.

A few years ago, some of us were in Scottsdale, Arizona attending a celebration of the Kingston Trio and their songs. There were more guitars and banjoes there at once than most of us had ever seen outside a music store, and more players using them at the same time than the finale of a PBS fund raiser.

Down toward the end of it, Travis Edmonson borrowed a guitar and both participants and audience went quiet. Those days, this incredibly talented guitarist and gifted singer had only small use of his left hand. No one knew what was about to happen. He turned the guitar over, onto his lap, and used his right hand to set a beat, employing the guitar as a purely percussive instrument. He sang a song in the Yaqui language, as an elder of the small “tribe” assembled in that small auditorium. No one else in the venue could speak or understand a word of the song. It didn’t matter. Not only did the percussion accompany and expand the words, it allowed him to introduce tension into the performance by playing the rhythm of the song against the beat. And he set a mood of loss, of sadness and bittersweet memory, that several hundred people silently absorbed and radiated to each other and back to the stage. All without understanding a word.

Would his song have been as powerful if delivered a cappella? No. The accompanying music he made became part of the message, the mood and the memories. But there’s another very important thing to consider.

It wasn’t recorded, screened/”mediated”/influenced by interveners who could accept or reject it, pushed through patented recording technology, copyrighted, commodified, merchandised, marketed, purchased or reproduced in a home, car or set of earbuds.

It became, instead, a collective and composite memory for those who were there, to be filtered and played back against future learnings, subject to the emotional changes that recollection inevitably brings to human beings. His performance was stored and integrated in as many ways as there were people present. Their pieces of that larger memory included the heat outside in the night, the smell of the crowd, the sounds and hush, and whom they were with—what it felt like to be there—as well as the sound. It was all pretty much as if the year had been 1875 or earlier, if you add in electric lights, better shoes and air conditioning. And a whole bunch of Martin guitars and Vega banjoes. . .

When the last of us who were there that night have gone on, nothing will remain of his performance, save perhaps for these few words and the second-hand emotional memories passed on to our descendants by those of us able to tell the story in a way vivid enough for it to become part of that amorphous, individuated but cumulative thing we sometimes call the collective unconscious of the American People.

Now, if it had been performed to a specification and a prescribed set of emotions to be triggered, timed to limits, pattern-cut to the commercial desires of people who weren’t there, recorded and packaged in a manner meant to appeal to the largest audience, it could still become part of our collective emotional memory. But that’s a lot of filters. The prospects are better if the performer somehow made it to the recording booth through the side door of the studio, slipping through some of the holes in the screen.

And that all goes back to a nursery rhyme, in 1877, probably between December 4th and 6th, but possibly in November. Thomas Edison produced a device called the “phonograph” and there was a patent issued on February 19, 1878 to prove it. There’s a lot of discussion to be had about whether Edison was the first to build such a recording machine, and the difference between a patent and a true working model, along with some names you may not have heard.

Before Edison, there were mechanical devices like water-powered organs, programmable automatic flute players, barrel organs, and music boxes.  Player pianos, those wonderful machines for capturing and reproducing the individual finger strokes of geniuses like Scott Joplin and George Gershwin, would find a place American parlors. None of these devices captured “free range” sound out of the air.

It might be sufficient to note that the telegraph seems to have given birth to the telephone, and those two devices were parents to the phonograph.

But, in the background, there had been a fascinating thread of thought and invention that saw devices much akin to the phonograph posited and documented since the beginning of the 19^th century, at least 70 years before Edison’s phonograph and 30 years prior to Morse’s first working model of the telegraph.

And there were “recordings” made 20 years before Edison’s patent, that would not be played back until over 130 years after they were created, finely nuanced tracings of a “ghost in the machine” and a musical treasure hunt worthy of a Nicholas Cage movie. Without the explosions.

Let’s start in 1807, in Europe. Thomas Young was a startlingly intelligent Englishman, born in 1773. By his fourteenth birthday he had learned Greek and Latin and was acquainted with 11 more languages, in addition to his native tongue. By the time he was 23, he had earned a medical degree and by the age of 28 he was appointed a professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution. In the next two years he delivered 91 lectures covering a range of scientific disciplines that fully justified his appellation as a “polymath” and one of the most brilliant people of his time.

Those lectures were published 1n 1807 and included the description of a device called the “Vibrograph.” It was designed to measure the frequency of a tuning fork by attaching a stylus to the fork and using it to etch the vibrations from striking it onto a vertically mounted soot-covered cylinder. Speeds were regulated and the cylinder moved down against the stylus.

This thing begins to look like a recording apparatus from our viewpoint, without the ability to capture sound out of the air. With the keen acuity of hindsight, we could see this as the beginning of the base of knowledge that would lead to the phonograph (and eventually to the trunk of Ike Turner’s car). (We’ll get back to that one).

Across the English Channel and a little over 35 years later, in 1843, a French physicist and mathematician named Jean-Marie Duhamel took another step down this path and came up with a strikingly similar device, which he called a “Vibroscope.” Once again, the source of the sound waves to be recorded was a tuning fork. Once again, a stylus etched the wave form on a coated cylinder.

Interestingly, the cylinder was now in a horizontal position, as would be the case with Edison’s phonograph. Also interesting is the fact that that you can still purchase any number of modern “vibroscopes” today, designed to do pretty much the same thing—capture and document vibrations in critical environments like aircraft.

Nearly 150 years went by. And a series of discoveries would lead back to the 1850s and to sound recordings captured from thin air, 20 years before Edison’s phonograph. That story had somehow lain buried until 2008, when First Sounds, a collaborative of scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, figured out how to scan a paper “picture” of sound waves from April of 1860 and extract the audio represented. By 2014, one member, Patrick Feaster, went after the American history of the machine that “recorded” those sounds. He published his findings in 2016. Here’s the tale as we understand it.

There were 20 years and 70 miles between the Charles Banker collection of optical and auditory devices in Philadelphia in 1856, and the site in Menlo Park, New Jersey where Edison would found his research laboratory in 1876.

Charles Nicoll Banker was the president of the Franklin Insurance Company in Philadelphia and a very wealthy man. He had been born in 1777, well before the other players in this drama.

By the 1850’s Banker was accumulating a remarkable collection of optical and auditory devices, and was evidently reading Cosmos, a scientific journal founded in France in 1852 by Abbé Francois-Napoléon-Marie Moigno.

Also in France, Leon Scott (Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville) had been pursuing a means of recording sounds. A French printer, bookseller and inventor, born in 1817, he played a role in the development of stenography and wrote a history of the subject 1n 1849. While proofreading a textbook, he came across drawings of the ear and set out to render the functions in a mechanical device. He succeeded and patented the Phonautograph in France in 1857. He then came in contact with Moigno and his journal, resulting in exposure of his invention in both Europe and America

By 1858, The Journal of the Franklin Institute back in Philadelphia recounted an 1857 Cosmos article. Cosmos had described Scott’s device as consisting of a “tube” spreading out like a trumpet, with a membrane at the other end and a very light pencil attached in the middle of the membrane.

  The “trumpet” concentrated sounds which entered it and the vibrations of the membrane were scribed on a paper coated with lamp-black that was passed under the pencil by clock-work. It was noted that the “traces thus produced may be copied and preserved (magnified if necessary) by photography.” The plaster of paris “trumpet” was soon replaced with one of zinc, in the actual trumpet shape we are more accustomed to seeing.

By 1859, Moigno would introduce Scott to a man named Rudolph Koenig, and those two would work together to bring the phonautograph to market. Koenig would launch a career as an independent manufacturer of scientific precision instruments, with his first catalogue, in that same year, containing two models of the phonautograph, for sale for 400 and 500 francs ($74 to $93 US).

Also in 1859, Moigno wrote in Cosmos, “The scientific passion that suddenly seizes wealthy American merchants presents a truly wonderful side. We are in frequent contact with Mr. Banker of Philadelphia, who has been taken by such a great love for optics that he would not forgive himself for letting a new device go by without immediately acquiring it.” (Banker was described as “an avid reader of Cosmos.”) Banker would also, apparently, show a keen interest in at least one acoustical device.

Whether Mr. Banker arranged a private purchase or ordered a phonautograph from Koenig’s catalogue is not known. It is pretty clear, however, that he had one of these devices no later than 1859, based on Scott’s own words written in 1878 that his device “has been in Philadelphia since 1859,” and the vanishingly small chance that it was anywhere but in Banker’s collection. There is substantial evidence that Banker’s phonautograph may have actually been the first manufactured by Koenig, since it had a “trumpet” formed from plaster of paris.

Charles Nicoll Banker died in 1869 and his collection was prepared for auction two years later. And that’s where that Nicholas Cage thing comes in, with Patrick Feaster in the role of the intrepid explorer.

Feaster tracked the disposition of the Banker collection, and the whereabouts of the phonautograph that had been included in that collection in Philadelphia in 1859, with persistence and attention to detail that are simply remarkable. We may come back to that story in greater detail later in these pages, but for now we’re unable to resist referencing in a couple of documents he discovered, and which clearly indicate that the preceding saga is not just an audiophile’s fever dream.

Call it the department of “Ok, I can accept that this thing was in Europe, and that’s pretty cool, but show me the proof it was being used here in America way before Edison’s phonograph. Hmmm. . .?”

Well, Feaster found that the auction item listing of the Banker collection still existed in two places, in part by searching WorldCat, a catalogue that itemizes the collections of 15,600 libraries in 107 countries, whose roots go back to 1967. You can find those two references HERE.

He followed the trail of the catalogues and hit paydirt in Canada. He located the single available copy of the auction listing of Banker’s collection. It is simply incredible, comprising some 42 pages of dense item lists. You can lose a couple of days just scrolling around in it. Or you could look HERE and use the page finder to look up the items listed under lot number 630, on page 38 of the .pdf file.

Feaster would pursue the phonautograph and paper “recordings” made on it to the Stevens Institute (of Technology) in Hoboken, New Jersey. Time will tell if the device itself will ever be found in the numerous locations of the huge collection there. We’re pretty sure that if it appears it will be reported by First Sounds and Patrick Feaster.

In the meantime, as noted earlier, these folks found a way to translate the undulating analog waveforms inscribed in those phonautograms into digital signals, not unlike the WAVE files familiar to those of us who have captured recorded music to computer files. This is an image of a phonautogram from 1859.

And THIS (at :47 –  wait for it ((and don’t mind the material at the end)) is the sound of what is generally held to be the first known voice recording, captured from a paper phonautogram waveform by the folks at First Sounds. The mathematics behind that spectral voice would later be recalculated and more accurately reproduced. It’s the baritone voice of Scott himself, according to those knowing much more than us. But this is the sound we originally encountered, before the recalculation. And this is the one that has stuck in our mind’s ear, like the plaintive call of history’s ghosts.

One could get lost in further details of discovery and process, but it’s time to zoom our attention back out nearly 20 years, to the wider view in 1877, and ask a couple of important questions about Edison’s phonograph. Not what we mean by the word, but what did he mean by “phonograph?” And what did a nursery rhyme have to do with anything? For answers we return to Menlo Park.

Edison had been working on improvements to the telegraph as well as to the telephone Bell had patented the year before, in 1876. In 1877, he was working on a machine to bring greater efficiency to the dissemination of telegraphic messages, by recording the message on indentations in a paper tape, so it could then be retransmitted repeatedly. Being who he was, it’s hardly surprising that he would come up with the notion that perhaps the same thing could be done with telephone messages.

One thing led to another, paper became a cylinder of tin foil and a guy named John Kreusi invested his mechanical skills, Edison’s sketches and (supposedly) 30 hours of hard work. He came up with a gizmo that put grooves in the tinfoil with one diaphragm-driven stylus and played them back with another. The styluses moved up and down in relation to the surface of the cylinder, which would prove to be very important, later.

Edison was also a practical man.  If you have a device that can capture a spoken voice and then play it back somewhere else, you need a market for people who want such a thing, and have the money to buy one. So, while the patent was pending, he demonstrated it in the offices of Scientific American, formed a company, and came up with a list of uses for the thing. The primary use he envisioned, and number one on his list, was “Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.” This intended use for the machine was also included in the name of the company.

If we go back to the Greek roots of the words for “writing sound” we get phono and graph (and gramo and phone and grapho and phone). The name of the company was the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. The device was a hit. Demonstrations were given, and publicity was generated, but it was hard to operate, and the tinfoil gave out quickly, which meant, of course, just as you were dictating something like “My Dear Mr. Westinghouse, I find your offer regarding electricity SKRCH…”

Once the novelty appeal had worn off, interest waned, and Edison got caught up in the development of the incandescent light bulb. Speaking of electricity, by 1882, Edison was using direct current to light up Pearl Street in Manhattan and by 1887, there were 121 Edison power stations generating DC for customers. 1887 was also the year that a young chap named Nicola Tesla filed for seven U.S. patents that comprised a complete electrical generation and transmission system, as well as motors and lighting to use it, employing alternating current. We’ll be coming back to 1887.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Leave Edison’s little machine gathering dust for 10 years on a figurative back shelf in his lab. Twenty years and 28 miles away, at the Stevens Institute in Hoboken, the first instrument designed to record sounds out of the air was in all probability also gathering dust.

And the rhyme was “Mary had a little lamb,” the first words to go into and be reproduced from Edison’s first speaking phonograph. . . in 1877.

We have a great friend named Tom Barrett who has been a part of these discussions for any number of years now. He maintains that if we’re talking about folk, blues, jazz and country music and musicians, everybody and everything is connected to everything else, given some discrete number of iterations. The whole thing is like a pile of wire coat hangers.

But if you can’t identify the beginning that doesn’t preclude talking about some beginnings. One candidate for earliest American folk song, for instance, is On Springfield Mountain, a ballad recounting events in August, 1761 in the vicinity of Hampden, Massachusetts. A young man (22 years old) named Timothy Merrick set out to fill some of the long hours before his wedding by putting up some hay on his father’s place. Although snakes of the poisonous persuasion were, then and now, seldom seen in those parts, young Merrick entered a place in our history and song by succumbing to the strike of the rattlesnake in question. There were some possible embellishments to the story involving the possibility that Timothy’s intended, Sarah, was present, attempted to suck the poison out of her fiancé, and succumbed to a cavity in one of her teeth.

And a folk song occurred. By the 1940s there were at least two recognizable versions of it.

In keeping with the “pile of hangers” approach to tracking American popular music, sometime around 2008 we went out to breakfast with Billy Faier and the subject of On Springfield Mountain joined the discussion over eggs and sausage. Billy used to drive up from Texas once or twice a year to jam on the deck with the local Bloodliner faction (See John Stewart). 

 

Billy Faier on the deck in 2007. The Great Assembly was recorded at a house concert later that evening.

— Click top arrow below to play introduction and history of the song.

— Bottom arrow for song.

— Back button to return.

Billy was a banjo maven who was once introduced to a large crowd along the Hudson River by Pete Seeger as “the best banjo player I’ve ever heard.” We’ll return to Billy, but for now need only state that he was an integral part of the New York City folk scene in the early 1950s and hence, as performer, journalist, raconteur, sometime traveling companion of Woody Guthrie (“. . . just the one coast to coast trip, Gene . . .”) and hugely neglected folkmaster.

He talked about a third version of Springfield Mountain with reference made to Woody Guthrie and, we subsequently found it, recorded in the 1940s, re-released in 1989. He performed it right there while waiting for coffee refills. For a taste of the other versions of the song, we  can turn to Burl Ives.

Sixty or seventy years after the unfortunate events in the hay meadow, there coalesced a peculiarly American form of entertainment called minstrelsy, or the minstrel show. It consisted of white people in blackface playing the roles of black people, so as to make them look ridiculous, through repartee, song and dance. Contrary to the easy assumption, minstrel shows originated in the Northeastern states, and by mid-century had been termed the “national art form.”

Over time, these blackface shows would be joined by African-American troupes, paving the way to the Blues.

Another of the “beginnings” for the tangle of aesthetics and mechanics that lies under the phenomena of American recording is the “father of American music,” Stephen Foster.

Born in 1826, 65 years after the death of Timothy Merrick, Foster was only 37 when he fell in his hotel room in New York City, possibly as a result of a fever, cutting his neck and succumbing to the effects three days later at Bellevue Hospital.

He had, by then, authored a fistful of songs like Camptown Races, Old Folks at Home (Swanee River), My Old Kentucky Home, Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair, and many more. Contrary to another of those easy assumptions, Foster never lived in the South, visiting the region only once, on his honeymoon in 1852. In about 1850, he had signed a contract to provide music to the Christy Minstrels, the most popular of the minstrel shows, marking a pathway to modern folk music emphasized when  Randy Sparks formed the New Christy Minstrels in 1961.

Those one and two-room schools sitting isolate on the reaches of the Northern Plains in the 1950s would coalesce into a county’s worth of kids two or three times a year. One was called “rally day,” an aggregate of individual competitions in track and field-like events. Another was “county chorus,” at which as many as a couple of hundred students from the tiny schools scattered over the county would convene to rehearse all day for a concert of American standards that night. That one-hour-or-so performance would inevitably feature several songs by Stephen Foster.

Off the plains, Foster would also prove to have more durability than the minstrelsy to which he contributed. By about 1920, there were a mere handful of troupes, as vaudeville, variety shows and musical comedies came to dominate the scene. Foster’s songs were anthologized by Nelson Eddy in 1947, and were recorded by Ray Charles, Jennifer Warnes, the Byrds and James Taylor, among others.

The “mechanical” side of American music and recording also had its roots in the 1700s. Samuel Finley Breese Morse did not invent the telegraph. He also didn’t invent Morse code. Born in 1791, he was an artist, a pretty well-known portrait painter, who also had interests in electricity, invention and politics. In 1817, he and his brother took out three patents relating to pumps. He founded the National Academy of Design in about 1825. In that same year he received a commission from New York City, to paint a portrait of Lafayette and, while working on it, a horse messenger brought a message  from his father that his wife was “convalescent.” The following day he received another posting from his father that she had died. Although he left immediately for his home in New Haven, Connecticut she had already been buried by the time he could get there.  It’s 81 miles from New York to New Haven. After this bitter experience, Morse set out to learn a whole lot more about communication over distances.

The telegraph had actually been invented 1n 1774 but wasn’t practical. It required that each receiver/transmitter be hooked together by 26 separate wires, one for each alphabet letter. By about 1832, two inventors in Germany had gotten it down to five wires.

In that same year, the story goes, Morse was on a ship back to the United States when he overheard a conversation about electromagnetism. It occurred to him that pulses of electricity could be sent over a single wire and used to send messages. Over the next five years, Morse built a working model. He employed home-made batteries, old clockwork gears and a couple of partners.

One was an academic named Leonard Gale.

 

The other brought skills at mechanics and his family’s iron works to the mix. His name was Alfred Vail.

By 1837, the first working model was demonstrated. It was still trying to send letters of the alphabet by tracing curves on a paper tape. It worked by employing a common dictionary at each end to encode and decode the curves back into letters. Within a year someone on Morse’s team had apparently decided to put meat back in the loop by substituting human fingers and ears for the tracing system, and let the machinery take care of the transmission of signals which made the code audible. Vail invented a code using dots and dashes for letters and numerals. Morse transmitted ten words per minute in New York in 1838. He was 47.

The foundation had been laid for the telephone and the speaking phonograph. And by the time those inventions were entering the market fifty years later, they would spin out the father of the vacuum tube, the grandfather of the transistor and the great-grandfather of both the home computer and the plug-in cartridge mayhem-generator.

Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone. He was an immigrant from Scotland, via Canada, arriving here in 1871 at the age of 24. While Morse had come at the problems of telegraphy from the direction of technology, specifically electricity, Bell came at them from the completely opposite direction. In many ways these two men show the present division between digital and analog approaches to problem-solving.

But the search for a device to transmit sounds leads back in time to Europe and one Jacob Reis. Reis took an approach similar to Bell’s, seeking a way to replicate the functioning of human anatomy. He began around 1850, when he was a teenager. One early experiment used a guitar case as a resonator, with a beer can as a mouthpiece and a sausage casing stretched across it as a diaphragm. The juxtaposition of beer, sausage and guitars is amusing, but Reis continued his quest for what he early called an “electrical eardrum.” Before he was done, he had begun calling it the “telephon,” and in October of 1861 he demonstrated the device before the Physical Society of Frankfurt, Germany by transmitting the verses of a song over a three-hundred-foot line. Demonstrations of improved technology continued until Reis died, broke, in 1874.

At about the same time as Reis was experimenting with guitar cases and beer cans in Germany, Antonio Meucci produced sound electrically in Italy. It was 1849. Bell was two years old, born in 1847. Meucci emigrated from Italy to Cuba, and then to Staten Island. In 1871, he filed a “caveat” or intention to file a patent for a device he called the “electrofono.” He apparently had three years to file the patent application for the device. During that time, he was caught in a steamboat explosion and spent a great deal of time near death. He never fully recovered, and the caveat expired two years before Bell filed his second patent application for the telephone. The time between filing of a caveat and a patent application would be 90 days by 1876.

Bell’s background was speech, hearing, sound and music. His mother was nearly deaf. His father had invented the first international phonetic alphabet. Bell was a gifted pianist, with a precise sense of pitch. He noted, while still at home in Scotland, that a note played loudly enough on one piano would sound the same string on another, that sound carried through the air could set up a precise sympathetic vibration on another instrument.

By 1871, back on telegraph track, the search was on for a way to carry multiple telegraphic messages down the same wire, to increase the size of the “pipe” down which messages were carried. It was a problem not dissimilar from modern bandwidth demands. Bell decided that the answer lay in varying the pitch of each message channel and set out to find ways to send signals down the wire at different pitches (or frequencies). In this search to improve the telegraph, Bell determined that a continuous, undulating current was the medium for the answer, rather than the interruptions of electrical current which drove the telegraph key. He would eventually figure out that the intervening steps and equipment could be eliminated, and the current could carry an analogue of speech itself, composed of varying pitches and complex waves.

Bell applied for his first patent (there were two involved) for the device which would become the telephone on March 6, 1875 and received it on April 6, 1975. It was for an “Improvement in Transmitters and Receivers for Electric Telegraphs.” It was assigned to Bell, Thomas Sanders and Gardiner Hubbard. The application called for use of a “vibratory circuit breaker,” and noted that while Bell preferred a “light lever of the first order,” other forms could be used including “membranes, etc.” The patent application doesn’t speak directly of speech transmission. Instead, it seems to propose a device we would call a facsimile transmitter and receiver, duplicating writing input at the originating point by a form of scanning device and using a stylus system at the receiving end.

There was still another player. On February 14, 1876, Elisha Gray filed a caveat to patent a device called an apparatus “For Transmitting Vocal Sounds Telegraphically.” Two hours earlier, Bell had filed the second application—for patent of an “Improvement in Telegraphy.” This time, his was the only name on the application. Bell’s signature is dated as January 20, 1876. There were some lawyers about to get rich.

Elisha Gray was a farm boy from Ohio, who dropped out of school when his father died. He became a carpenter to support himself while completing preparatory school and two years of Oberlin College. He became fascinated with electricity and received a patent in 1867 for an improved telegraphic relay. He would eventually be granted some 70 patents. His 1876 patent caveat envisioned speaking and listening devices featuring a stretched diaphragm of a thin substance, and mechanisms for converting the vibrations of the diaphragm to electrical current and back, connected by a telegraph wire carrying a constantly varying resistance, in both frequency and amplitude.

The date of the first transmitted telephone message, “Watson come here, I want to see you,” would be March 10, 1876. It would later be found that Gray’s device, as described in the caveat, did in fact transmit voices and Bell’s device, as described, did not. It wouldn’t matter. Bell won the lawsuit. A lot of people over the years have read the opinion and come to the conclusion that the judge had given some pretty extraordinary consideration to Bell.

But Bell’s invention was really a “telephone” in name only. The wires swallowed the signal over any real length of line, and the diaphragm wasn’t producing a signal that made plain speech clear enough for the device to be really marketable..

Enter a true lost hero of American communication. A young immigrant named Emil Berliner invented a transformer capable of overcoming the voltage loss between telephone sets, and a carbon microphone transmitter for use in Bell’s device. Without them, mass marketing of the telephone would not have occurred at that time. He gave access to the rights to Mr. Bell. We’ll be getting back to Mr. Berliner.

He’s also the one who invented the phonograph as we know it.

1876 was the year of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and Bell demonstrated his invention there. By the following year, Bell had founded the Bell Telephone Company, and the first local exchange had been established in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1882, he took a controlling interest in a company called Western Electric, and in 1885 he founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, to deliver long-distance service. The Western Electric Company, by the way, had been started by one Elisha Gray.

When Bell’s patents came down in early March of 1876, he had just turned 29 years old.

And Edison turned 30 in 1877, when he was granted  the patent that would, pretty much inexorably, lead us to Ike Turner and the Rocket 88. That’s another story, and we’ll tell as much as we know a little further down the line.

“…When I die Lord bury me deep, way down on old Chestnut Street.
Please don’t tell what train I’m on, so they won’t know what route I’m going…”
(Elizabeth Cotten, written approx. 1910 at age 13)

As the 1940s rolled over into the 1950s, the reaches of the country west of the Missouri began to slowly sense big changes coming. Out there in the big empty, between Canada and Mexico, you learned to figure such things out for yourself. News conferences and press releases got pretty diluted by the time the bigger patterns they represented filtered into places with more rabbits than people. But you could feel something in the words and sounds carried on the winds, even if you were six or eight years old. So you kept your eyes and ears open and looked for patterns, like coyote pups in early summer, storing up subtle shifts, poised between play and survival. Like the noises on the radio, and those that marked the passage of the long trains on the paired rails heading west.

There was a lovely affinity between those open spaces and railroad trains. And kids, of course. In the towns and the tangles of the isolated switching yards, the railbeds smelled of creosote and coal, grease and hot oil. But out where the big engines broke into the open, saw the far horizon through the single eye of a headlamp and hunkered a little like quarter horses, the sun gradually took such odors away. The heat of summer days built up in the shine at the top of the rails, waiting for the approach of incautious hands holding doomed pennies.

Automobiles were ok, whether the new models rolling out of Detroit, or those with running boards from before the war. The ones we saw weren’t very sexy yet, and it would be a few years before some of us would begin making them our own, with frenched body joins and Lakes pipes and floor shifts cut into the hump.

It would be three more years until the first Corvette, in 1953, and four until the first T-Bird two-door roadster the year after.

But if you wanted to feel your insides shake and your ears go on overload and your face go numb from too many sensations to screen, there were the big steam locomotives, hauling the long trains, cars in numbers bigger than you could count, from places and railroads far away. Steam was dying, but we didn’t know it.

Oh, those first diesel locomotives, back in the 30s and ’40s had caused a stir, all right. “That’s the future,” people had said, and by the 50s the passenger trains had one or two at the head of a string of sleek cars, sliding streamlined through the nights. That’s when most of the passenger runs came through the far lonesome, and folks from the East or West slumbered past the places that had been defined as having “nothing to see” by those who cast the schedules.

In the light of a 1950 day, those trains seemed somehow far away from our experience, and some of us just couldn’t hook into all that smoothness and shine. But the freights were another matter. Our small world was four o’clock mornings in old Ford pickups with trembling rear fenders, running dirt roads to the two-lane to beat the Chicago & Northwestern 513 freight to the depot with our load of 5 and 10-gallon cream cans. Steam still ruled on those runs in 1950. 

It wasn’t all diesel on the passenger trains, either. The “400” was still blazing down the rails between Saint Paul and Chicago at 80 to 110 miles an hour, with right-of-way priority over all other trains.

In our smaller world, the freights had the right-of-way at crossings, and we waited for many an hour as they rumbled by, in those old Fords and Chevies, as the metal dashboards became so hot from the sun’s energy that they could not be touched, riveted by the hiss and thunder of the big engines and then tormented by younger brothers determined to ruin our count of the cars. Here was wonder, even if we didn’t know it by name.

Here was the magic of far and gone.

And at the end of a long and weary time would come a reward, a truth some of us took right down into our quick. Even mothers groaned if the end of the train didn’t have a caboose, tagged onto the big-shouldered parade like a clown with sad eyes.

 

As the forties faded on the Northern Plains, the engines carried the ram on a rock of the Great Northern Line, the yin and yang of the NP or the bar and ball of the C&NW. The kids in the middle of the west knew the Union Pacific. In the open spaces of the southwest, the steam freights rolled behind mammoth engines carrying the SP logo. And from north to south, there were the whispers of stories overheard, about uncles and others who had ridden the steam freights in the decades of depression and war, what had been seen, what had been done.

In 1950, the Southern Pacific still ran west out of New Orleans, through Dallas and into the lonesome west to El Paso and on to Tucson, just as it had in the 1800s. From Tucson, the rails dodged the border across burning miles of Nevada and into southern California, before wheeling northward to Los Angeles and Oakland and San Francisco, to the original mile one of the line.

On a summer’s night in 1950, an 18-year-old man walked the sleepers out of the yards in Oakland, with an ear on the hum of the rails and the bang of the cars, and an eye out for the railroad bulls. Over one shoulder, he carried a bindle made from a khaki-colored Army blanket. In the opposite hand was a dusty case holding a Martin six-string acoustic guitar. He had played that Martin to pass the miles and entertain his fellow itinerants down the long miles that ran back to the switching yards in Tucson. Five days before he had climbed up into a dimly-sensed gateway to the mysteries of the future, a head full of 78 rpm folk songs and the scent of fortune’s favor blowing faint in the shifting breezes.

His name was Travis Edmonson. Over a half-century later, he would share his memories with us in an extensive series of long, Thursday night phone conversations, recorded and transcribed and then reviewed by him for accuracy and completeness.

He couldn’t know then that chance and the instincts of the artist had brought him to a marking place, a tightrope between old and new in history, politics, art and music, shifts as pronounced as the difference between the steam locomotive that had cast a long line of smoke back down the rails from Tucson, and the sleek diesel passenger trains that had stormed past the westbound sidings, heading east.

The 33 rpm long-playing record was two years old and ten inches across. The 45 rpm was coming up on its first birthday. REA electrical power was still finding its way into areas west of the 100th meridian, and many a western barn was still lit by the noisy, scalding hiss of a coal oil lantern.

“Folk” music meant different things on the east and west coasts of the country. “The East” was pretty much New York City and Moses Asch, but there were live performances in Greenwich Village and Harlem. People like Frank Warner and others were ranging the seacoasts and mountains, capturing and preserving the songs people carried in their memories. In the West, the sources were radio and the recordings that found their way to the small towns. There was some live music along the border, and Travis would help it find its way into the idiom in just a few years.

Travis Edmonson had gone on the trail of the music itself:

“I hopped a freight to San Francisco late in June or early July, the summer after I got out of High School. It wasn’t quite a spur of the minute thing, but there wasn’t a whole lot of preparation, either. I pulled together some clothes and food, mostly sandwiches, and made a bindle out of an old army blanket, made sure I had enough water for four days and that was about it. It was partly just to kick my heels up a little after High School, and partly to see what it was all about there, and partly, maybe, a little dream that I might be able to be a performer–a singer.

“I walked down to the Southern Pacific freight yards in Tucson with that bindle and my guitar case really early one morning and nosed around until I figured out a string of cars that were going west and climbed up into one. I probably could have picked better. It started to roll right about dawn and I remember it was a clear sky without a trace of a cloud. I knew it was going to be hot, but I grew up with hot there in Arizona, and I figured there would be a breeze from the speed of the train.

“I must have picked a slow one, devastatingly slow. It was hotter than the hinges of Hell. We pulled up at every whistle stop along the way and there were times a slow dog could have passed us. There were about a dozen other guys riding the train. Most of them were coming from the fields in Texas and further east, and didn’t have the money to get back and see their families in California, so they did what they had to.

“We were spread out along the train, but I wound up meeting all the guys riding before too much time went along. In the evening we would all get together in one car and they would talk about some of the places to avoid along the way west, where bad things had happened or there were yard bulls you had to avoid. There was a lot of other talk of course, and some would tell stories about things they had seen and things that had happened. Some of those stories were really sad, and some of them were undoubtedly true. Some had made up songs, and they sang about the kind of things that go through your head when it’s midnight and you’re just laying your head down a long way from your home.

“Some nights I’d take my guitar out and sing the songs I knew–some in English and some in Spanish that I’d learned from the mariachis, growing up on the border.

“I grew up in a little town 65 miles south of Tucson named Nogales, right along the Mexican border. I’d been born in Long Beach, California while my folks were on a trip in 1932. Our house was bilingual and sometimes more. My father had been born in Aguas Calientes in Mexico, but his parents were American, down there working for a mining company, and they didn’t move back to the States until he was a teenager. His name was Everett Sterling Edmonson. My mother was Lillian Evelyn Monroe and she was a teacher for a number of years in small schools in southern Arizona.

“They met in Jerome, Arizona, where she was teaching, and they were drawn to each other partly by the fact that they were about the only English speakers in town. They moved to Nogales because of people they had met there and because my father wanted to open up his own pharmacy. He built it as an absolute replica of the Tumacacori Mission about 20 miles from town and it was called the Mission Drug Store. People really liked it and he became the apothecary for that whole area. Later on, and for many years, he was the Welfare Secretary there in Nogales. Growing up bilingual stood him in good stead.

“Mother gave up teaching after a while because she had a barnfull of boys to raise. My eldest brother was Munro, then Earloyde, then Colin and then me. There were four years between each of us. Monroe and Colin wound up getting degrees from Harvard, and Earloyde and I got ours from the University of Arizona in Tucson.

“My parents were both avid readers. We had a big table in the dining room, about as long as the average room, where we ate every night. After the dishes had been put away, we would sit around that table and have a “conversational” time in the evening. I have to say I learned more from those evenings than I ever did in school. They took great care with how all of their boys grew up. My mother also got us to speaking some French.

“We were really lucky to be on the border where there were two cultures, and in an area where there wasn’t enough attention to what we did to bother anybody. We could camp all we wanted, hike all we wanted, see all we wanted of the countryside. It was great. The only thing that slowed me down in my childhood was that I got stung by a scorpion when I was five or six. It stung me several times on the leg and I was at death’s door for a while. The doctor we had was from the Phillipines, Dr. Gonzalez, and he knew exactly what to do and what medicine to give me, but I still remember that pain.

“As I was growing up, there was a lot of music in the house and they took me on in the choir at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church, because they needed voices. I very quickly became an acolyte and was an acolyte all my years there. The church was a big part of my life and it got me started in music. I was also lucky to have as friends of the family and members of my family, some really good musicians who listened to music all the time and played a lot of it. It was a kind of combination of what we’ve come to think of as folk music, and pop and jazz and songs from movie musicals and the heyday of Broadway.

“Radio was a huge influence. We had a radio shaped like the door of a church that sat right in the living room and we listened to Churchill and the news and music. We also had a record player and quite a collection of records–78s. We played those all the time unless we ran out of steel needles, and then we used cactus needles. They worked just fine. We listened to classical music, jazz, blues, pop, everything. We picked up records by various Black groups and artists and we really liked those, too. In about 1948, we replaced that record player with a new one for the 33s, but we continued to listen to the 78s. A lot of people down there thought the new LPs were ridiculous and would never catch on.

“We knew about network radio back then, but it must not have reached that far. Mostly what we listened to were local stations in both Spanish and English, and that radio was just part of our lives. There was a lot of music on in the 1940s, and then for a while there were a lot of serials and dramas and things with music sort of squeezed in. Down there around Nogales, even the roads were few and far between and there wasn’t any live music, so that radio filled the gap, but in another way, I was lucky.

“Starting when I was a kid I used to sneak through the border fence at Nogales, into Mexico. There was a place there called the Cavern Cafe, where the mariachis played. That was the only live music there was in our part of the world. No cowboys sitting out there on the rocks singing, no Gene Autry, no matter what some folks elsewhere seemed to think. The mariachis were happy to teach me songs and I wound up spending years and years listening to their songs and learning them. When I started performing them there was never a shortage. I always tried to give credit and bring some of those musicians into the shows from time to time.

“When I was in my teens, my brother Colin took up the guitar and I started learning at the same time. I think the first song I ever learned to play was “The Golden Vanity.” Naturally, I wanted to sound like the mariachis, and about that same time Colin got an album by Josh White and I fell in love with it. I set out to learn that whole album note for note. A number of the songs that Josh White performed were credited to Huddie Ledbetter and I set out to find his recordings, too. They were hard to get hold of, but I found them. Those were some of the songs I sang on the train on the way to San Francisco, along with some from Burl Ives, like “Foggy Dew.” Singing and playing that old Martin was my ticket to ride, so to speak, and nobody bothered me.

“When we got to southern California, we had to change cars in the switching yards south of Los Angeles and I grabbed a car that was all metal, in the train they made up to go north. Then it was really hot. We were rolling along and there was no breeze coming through and I finally got up on top of the train and started running from one end to the other, jumping between the cars, just to try and cool off.

“There was an older guy who poked himself up at the end of a car and stopped me. He told me to come down into the car he was riding and that’s when I really learned something about bumming. I don’t know if he was just trying to keep me from hurting myself or what, but I spent the rest of that trip being schooled by him about the rules of the road.

“I learned that there was a whole world, a culture if you will, spread all over the country and some stayed on the road and some had their places in the towns and cities along the way. He taught me about hobo signs and the codes and markings on the sides of the cars and along the way. Before we got to San Francisco, the guys on the train started talking about something called a “Sally Rally” that was coming up. “Sally” was short for Salvation Army, and we left the train with our things to go to this gathering. There was free food and drinks and people connected back up with friends they hadn’t seen for quite a while. You had to take something to donate to a pile of things to be given away, and, since a lot of the fellows didn’t have any money their contributions came from the local stores, courtesy of Mr. Woolworth. By that time I fit in pretty well. I was about five days out of Tucson without a real bath and my clothes looked like it. I also had a big old straw sombrero like we wore back then to keep the sun off.

“This man who had been teaching me on the train told me his name was Jeff Davis. I knew my history and I thought he was probably making that up, but I wasn’t going to ask him about it. Later on, I found out that it really was his name–Jefferson Davis–and he had been King of the Hoboes all the way back to the depression. Later on, I wrote a song to try and capture the feeling I caught from him.

“That train finally rolled into Oakland, through the town and into the switching yards north of town. It was about 10 at night and I hitchhiked into San Francisco. I finally found a little park up the hill from Chinatown and after all those days in that rolling oven, I was really glad to have that blanket to roll up in and catch some sleep. It was cold.

“For the next 10 days I looked around to see if there were any clubs or places I might make some money singing, but they were all booked for months, and they weren’t looking for the kind of music I did. There were people like Rusty Draper and the Ink Spots and Nat King Cole appearing that summer. By the time I got home, the Weavers record of Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene” was being played everywhere, but it didn’t make any difference that summer in San Francisco.

“That straw sombrero came in awfully handy though. During the day it kept the sun out of my eyes. And at night I put it on the sidewalk and sang behind it with my guitar, after salting it a little out of my pocket money. I played sidewalks all over town, over in Sausalito, North Beach, Fillmore District, you name it. Did all right, too. People were very nice and they seemed to like what I was doing.

“I got some really interesting offers from some of the passersby, but after about a week and a half I caught another train back to Tucson and got ready for college. The Korean War had started and things were really heating up over there, and it just seemed like a good time to be back on home ground. When I came back to San Francisco to try it again about five years later, I hitchhiked and caught buses–no freight trains…”

On July 7, 1950, Mona Lisa by Nat “King” Cole hit number one on the charts and stayed there for several weeks. It displaced The Third Man Theme by Anton Karas. Other number one singles that year included Rag Mop by the Ames Brothers, Music, Music, Music by Theresa Brewer, songs by Sammy Kaye, the Andrews Sisters and Eileen Barton (If I knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake). On August 11th, Goodnight Irene by Gordon Jenkins and the Weavers hit number one and it was on the charts for 13 weeks. On January 3, 1950, a disk jockey and broadcast engineer named Samuel Cornelius Phillips had opened the Memphis Recording Service, at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis.

Huddie Ledbetter had passed away on December 6, 1949.

The Korean War started when North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel on June 25th, 1950, and lasted until the armistice of July 27, 1953. The fact that it has never really ended has something to say about the time since.

On February 9, 1950, Joseph McCarthy, elected in 1946 as US Senator from Wisconsin opened his campaign on the issue of Communism at a women’s group in Wheeling, West Virginia with a claimed list of 205 Communists in the State Department, and controversies begun there would swirl through the world of entertainment and music until at least the end of 1954.

The Roosevelt Democratic hold on national politics that carried over to Harry Truman would end with the election of Eisenhower in 1952. Richard Nixon would become Vice President after riding allegations of Communist ties against Jerry Voorhis in 1946, his seat on the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948, and the 1950 “Pink Lady” campaign against Helen Gehagan Douglas, from Whittier to a heart-beat away.

Out in the big empty, folks kept on watching the sky, riding the buffalo grass, turning the soil and hammering out their own answers to circumstance and broken machinery on family anvils, with homemade forging tools.

The prairie moonlight might hear the strains of a tune on the radio, from dwellings opened up to the air, but there were also love songs, story songs and lullabies in English, Gaelic and Norwegian… passing between generations, mouth to ear. And sometimes those old nights heard the songs and stories of the first peoples, as elders and healers and historians passed down a heritage founded in the truths of experience, beyond the reach of writing.

“Days of 1881” parade in Pierre, South Dakota, circa 1940
“…What ever happened to those faces in the old photographs…?”
(John Stewart, Mother Country, 1969)

Hindsight, whether individual or collective, is not 20-20. It’s more like the flickering, fragmented images thrown on a screen by a racketing old 16-millimeter projector with the drive belt stuck on the high-speed spindle. And, since so very few of us were around in the years before 1940, quite often that screen is the one in our minds—and the images have been chosen by others.

It can be all too easy to use that as an excuse to leave out the parts we don’t like, the things that happened but make our skin feel about a size too small. But this is a really good time to know who we are, and what we were, and how we got here. There are some people who have made us a cartoon of ourselves and rallied myth and superstition against us. How can we become better than we are if we don’t know what we were?

There might just be a case to be made that it is our core of pure cussedness and stiff-legged refusal to be herded, (after you peel away some of the truly awful things we have done and put up with), that has been our greatest strength. It might also be one of our weaknesses, but figuring such things out for ourselves is another of our long suits. That gets harder all the time, though. We’re swamped now, up to our brains in the offspring of the massing of media that began in the late 1800s. Have you ever heard yourself say something like, “I don’t have time to cross-check right now, I just have to get it done…”?

Finding our divisions, over time, is easy. There are books full of them. Finding the smaller compassions and crimes, sharings and shelterings, joy and grief and triumph and native invention requires that we zoom in a whole lot from those big, flickering pictures of the past.

The music of the American nation is one way to dive down through that big-screen, badly-focused history to the parts of the story you might have missed. Down at those levels you’ll find the people who drove the horses, fixed the cars, raised the kids, put up the crops, mined the coal, drove the spikes and made the mistakes that whiskey, temper, hunger and human failings can lead to. Truth has a way of hitch-hiking on the blues and the songs of cowboys and farmers, miners and steel workers, edge-dwellers and drifters. Message words can hide in code known only to the audience back then but preserved for later generations to find. Sometimes the real song, under the song, hides in the delivery and sometimes it’s in the accompaniment. And, sometimes, you need to take a look at why something made it into song–at the story, the setting and the time. You may just find some of those things that weren’t in your history texts. For instance:

“Stagolee” was a real man named “Stag” Lee Sheldon. He shot Billy Lyons in Bill Curtis’s saloon over a Stetson hat, a political disagreement and perceived disrespect. Lyons was a levee hand and Sheldon a carriage driver. Liquor was involved. While Lyons was bleeding out on the floor, Stag Lee Sheldon retrieved his hat and strolled out the door.

The Saint Louis Globe Democrat reported the incident on December 28, 1895, and the whole transaction was likely destined to be lost to history. The collective conscience (and consciousness) of America, as represented along the river, however, determined that this was an example of conduct so in violation of the proper rules of deportment that it should be given into verse as a lesson to all.

The story finally made it to record, then to Harry Smith’s Anthology in 1952, and it not only sold some records for Lloyd Price and a whole lot of other people (including Tommy Roe, for Pete’s sake, whose version rewrote the story, but had an interesting lyric about the bullet going all the way through Billy and hitting something). It may just have had something to do with the rediscovery of both Frank Hutchison and John Hurt.

There really was a time and place where “the Southern crossed the Dog.” “The Southern” is easy, but the “Dog” was the “Yellow Dog Line” more formally known as the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad (or Yazoo Delta RR). The place was near Moorhead, Mississippi. And the time was after the 1883 building of the line, and before W. C. Handy wrote it down in the middle of a night in Tutwiler in a railroad station in that same state, in 1903.

It’s not likely we’ll ever know the name of the slide player who sang it to Handy, but his song got written down by W. C. in 1914 as Yellow Dog Rag, as an answer song to the 1913 composition I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone. Some people say that one’s really hokum, and we may have to come back to it, if only to get May West in here somewhere.

Back to Handy and the Yellow Dog Rag, it’s likely that the first vocal rendition was recorded as Yellow Dog Blues by Lizzie Miles in February of 1923, in the time just before electric recording (which explains a lot about the sound heard by modern ears. You want some serious blues? Tune the lady in on YouTube or elsewhere). The song pair became part of a line that runs from Handy, Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong to Janis Joplin and Cass Elliott and a ton of others. Maybe Yellow Dog Blues is about that railroad, maybe it’s really about yellow dog contracts being imposed as northern money impacted the south. And maybe it’s just about things that go bump in the night.

Listen to Josh White do Saint James Infirmary. Figure out what you think it means and then use the song as another elevator to the past. You’ll find that it links to Hally Wood, a cowboy in Laredo, a hospital in Liverpool, sailing ships, the history of both leprosy and syphilis and an Irish song recorded by John McCormack (a prominent figure in the early history of “folk” recording), along with Galveston, Louis Armstrong and Tommy Makem.

And that’s just the beginning.

We can’t hear Josh White around here without recalling Travis’s stories about touring the reaches of the Pacific with Josh and learning blues guitar licks from him so he could play the instrumental parts for Josh’s performances. White had chronic problems with his finger tips and “he played so hard that after a while he couldn’t push the little wires down.” He could still sing like crazy though. And then, fifty years later there we were, sitting with Travis and Rose Marie in a jammed hotel suite in Scottsdale and requesting Josh Junior to sing it. He killed it, just him and that old guitar, and history looped all the way back to the 1920s and beyond.

Have you ever noticed how textbook History tends to commodify working people when it covers every depression except the one that occurred at the same time as a drought and some really stupid farming theory in the 1930s? How about the one (which we’ll be getting back to) in 1893, in the years just after Edison dusted off his phonograph patents and the American recording phenomenon exploded? The stock market crashed on June 27th, 600 banks closed, 74 railroads went into receivership, and the depression lasted four years, accompanied by “layoffs and widespread unemployment.” And some lessons that were apparently totally unlearned. Or learned too well, maybe.

Or the Panic of 1857-58, 20 years before Edison’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in 1877 and just before Éduard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s recording of “Au Claire de Lune” in 1860. Massive embezzlement brought down the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, accompanied by the pullout of European investments from the U.S., plummeting grain prices and “hard times” in agriculture, huge “layoffs” when goods went unsold, and multiple railroad failures which brought down leveraged land speculation deals and… still more layoffs. That one included the sinking of the good ship Central America in a hurricane off South America, with the loss of 30,000 pounds of gold being shipped from the San Francisco mint to the east coast to prop up the economy, together with 400 passengers and crew (and it’s always reported in that order).

Compare all that to another Josh White song–One Meat Ball. Because of the timing of its recording and release, a lot of us have probably assumed it was created during, and referred to, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it speaks poignantly, in its gentle way, about the plight of the “laid off” and the humiliations of sudden poverty. Drill down, however, and you’ll find that it has been speaking about these things for a couple of hundred years, and the trail will take you back through Harvard University, Germany, France and England, and to its origins as One Fish Ball.

Sometimes the music reflects events like the real struggles from our history, that might otherwise fade away. When Pete Seeger sang Florence Reese’s lyrics, “…They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there. You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair…” with the Almanac Singers in 1941, it made record of battles whose details have gotten left out of a lot of histories. Mrs. Reese knew exactly what she wrote about.

Dig down in that field and you’ll find a lady named Aunt Molly Jackson, who used to visit Huddie Ledbetter’s house and sang a song or two of her own. Then cue up Dark as a Dungeon and Coal Tattoo on your mental radio station. And remember that Blair wasn’t the mining company. He was the sheriff of Harlan County in 1931, in Kentucky.

Ten years earlier in Logan County, West Virginia, the sheriff’s name was Don Chapin, and that story reaches back to 1890. Before it came to a head in the fall of 1921 it would involve the death of the mayor of Matewan, the assassination of the town’s pro-union police chief a year later, Mother Jones, a near-full-scale war on Blair Mountain between ten to fifteen thousand miners and an unknown number of forces under Chapin that lasted a week, prepared defenses, a stolen train, oversize homemade pipe bombs dropped on the miners from private airplanes, intervention by President Harding using federal troops, General Billy Mitchell, and the introduction of the term “red neck” into our vocabulary.

You can look it up. Actually you’ll probably have to look it up, since it doesn’t take up a lot of shelves in our collective memory. And don’t believe everything you find on the internet. There were apparently machine guns and primitive land mines involved. No record was found that the Army Air Corps dropped bombs on US citizens. The aircraft were armed with gas bombs and other ordinance, but were not used.

The Logan-Mingo County “War” wound up with a movie–about the early events in Matewan. The Harlan County “War” in 1931 had Florence Reese’s lyrics. The Logan County movie (Matewan) has pretty much faded from recall, but you don’t have to look very hard to find someone who’s heard of the song from ten years later. Perhaps if the West Virginians in 1921 had included a poet… ? And perhaps you can find aftershocks, just across the border into Virginia and six years later, when an ex-miner named Dock Boggs recorded a song that captured the strange dance of dread with humor that resides down in coal mines, out on battlefields, and in far too many other times and places then, and now. It included the lyrics, “They shot right through me, killed my brother Bill.” (Hard Luck Blues)

No discussion of things reflected in our music would be anywhere near complete without a trip back to the Wisconsin Chair Company and Grafton’s Paramount Records. In 1931, Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James traveled those old roads up from the Bentonia area in Mississippi and put a life-time’s worth of music down in just two days. To say that he’s a favorite in these parts is understate things to a dizzying extent.

Sometimes the music affects events as well. Between 1882 and 1968, over 4,700 people were lynched in this country. Seventy percent were black, and the total number included a fair number of women, who seem to have slipped from memory, as well. In the late 1930s, a song was written by one Lewis Allen that decried this. “Lewis Allen” was really Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher and union activist who would eventually adopt the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, after the execution of their parents.

Meeropol was introduced to Billie Holiday, she finally found a label that would record the song, and in 1939 and 1940 Strange Fruit became a part of the American lexicon and dialogue. A few years later it would be the title of that Josh White album that a young Travis Edmonson memorized in Arizona.

If you get on that elevator down into the real events, you’ll find a whole lot of history that couldn’t be swept under any more rugs after she sang it, including people like Ida B. Wells-Barnett (who refused to give up her seat to a white man in 1884 and was ejected from a Chesapeake and Ohio train, and who was a founder of the NAACP), Mary Talbert and the Anti-Lynching Crusaders in the 1920s, and the death of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill by filibuster in the U. S. Senate after it passed the House of Representatives 230-119 on January 26, 1922.

Some might be tempted to sweep things back under the rug by trying to exclude One Meat Ball, Which Side Are You On, or Strange Fruit from the definition of folk music. That’s ok. There’s no expiration date on truth. Every one of them spoke to the folk of America, were internalized and ran through heads whose hands were working, although they may not have been sung aloud. There are a lot of us still dealing with discomfort with our past, whose instincts and reactions run occasionally to the broom and carpet school of revisionism–it’s a natural enough thing. But what a terrible price to pay! What an awful denial of our collective self.

And that’s another way our music comes into play. It can not only preserve history, in the cracks between the textbooks, it can help us sing things down to a size that may break our heart, but won’t break our minds. Lord knows we need it sometimes. We are a people steeped in tragedy. In so very many ways our story as a nation is one of struggle between the two sides of our collective soul, and its reflections in each of us. But how can we draw strength and nurture from the diffuse compassions acted out by millions of ordinary folks, over centuries of lives, unless we also recognize the winds that buffeted them? The very measure of those gales, howling through the canyons between people–gouged out by venality, fear and hatred fostered upon us, theft on a mind-boggling scale, and the quenching of generations of brilliance–is the meter and coin of the gifts sent down to us on the rivers of time and music.

But Bix found a way to jam with Pops, and Louie remembered him to us at a moment near death.

People sheltered each other on both sides in Minnesota in 1862.

Benny Goodman hired Charlie Christian.

The Fool Soldiers rode the Dakota prairie to give away everything they owned except their moccasins in trade for the lives of people they had never met, and then gave their footwear to those white women and children, for the long walk home across the buffalo grass.

The Tarriers and the Gateway Singers toured mixed folk groups in a time when they could not necessarily lodge together.

And a slave whose name is lost created an American instrument uniquely suited to challenge the winds of division. His banjo would give us the signature sound for Americans of every hue and geographic persuasion to deliver everything from Child ballads to jug band stomps and bluegrass breakdowns. And it would fuel the engine of our folk music as it shifted gears and then surged across those pressure ridges and deep into the consciousness of the nation. We’ll return to some of the issues that were stacked back in the freight cars.

It might be the universality of home-made music, its willingness to absorb new ways to play a note or new instruments to shade its meaning, but it is surely true that it brings our hard-earned heritage of healing and humor right along with history. It also opens our eyes to other ways of perceiving, other tools for understanding.

Every wrenching of the tectonic plates of our culture and history includes and abuts the smaller tragedies, the more immediate and personal. We also use our songs to memorialize these, to sort out our grieving and our fears, to sing those down to size over time, too. Sometimes we make them a home in our music to be sure we don’t forget. Examples abound.

Listen to Blind Blake or Odetta or the Gateway Singers or the Weavers deliver Run Come See Jerusalem.

Listen to Stan Wilson or Billy Faier or Bob Gibson or the Chad Mitchell Trio or Tom Rush deliver Galveston Flood (A Mighty Day).

Listen to John Stewart bring the Johnstown Flood forward into perspective on Mother Country.

Listen to Woody Guthrie or Cisco Houston or Pete Seeger or the Gateway Singers or the Kingston Trio sing The Sinking of the Reuben James. Find Frank Proffitt, and Bascomb Lunsford and Frank Warner and the field recordings of the Lomaxes.

Listen to all of them, and you’ll begin to notice that something changed in the definition and delivery of “folk” music in the 1930s and ’40s, and again in the mid-1950s. Listen through them, to the context of the time of recording, and you’ll find yourself coming back around to American song as the carrier of messages that might not just be in the words.

And think a little about whether you are building your loop too small. If all these things discussed are gifts of the music, you might not want to exclude something because it was written too recently, or because there are no lyrics, for instance.

Consider Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, or Bruce Cockburn’s When It’s Gone, It’s Gone,

or Duke Ellington’s East Saint Louis Toodle-oo or The Mooch, or, most especially,

consider Louis Armstrong’s 1928 rendition of King Oliver’s West End Blues. Pops and the Five (Earl Hines, Jimmy Strong, Fred Robinson, Mancy Carr and Zutty Singleton) put 49 pounds of freight in a three minute package, lifetimes of history and current events, and a little bit of prophecy wrapped around a horn so good that there didn’t need to be any words.

In each entry on that too-short list of examples, you have to bring something to take something away, but you’re welcome to more than you carried in. Sounds a little like “folk” music…

And, yes, it’s that Earl Hines.

Also remember that sometimes the music has to be a little silly to be serious. There’s hokum, and the story of Thomas Dorsey, Booger Rooger Blues by Lemon Jefferson, Lizzie Douglas and her National steel, and the wonderful tale of Gus Cannon’s jug, Erik Darling’s long wait for a couple of 12-strings to be built by Gibson and a song from 1929 that was a hit in 1963 but is still known by most people in their 20s…

And the answer to the question posed by the title of this piece, (for those who weren’t in attendance yet in the ’40s and 50s)?  Tommy Dorsey, 1936, with vocals by the remarkable Edythe Wright. Apropos of things that the buffalo grass heard and saw, Dorsey had a huge fan out in Rowe Township, South Dakota. And we mean huge. …and the music comes out here.

It’s the music of the American people, folks. And after about 1887, some of it started being recorded, or preserved in form by those very people.

John Stewart also wrote, “…we’ll sing it long and proud, so everyone will know, that the road to freedom is a long, long, way to go…”

Images–Wikipedia, Northern Plains Archive Project, Library of Congress, Edison National Historic Site, Travisedmonson.com, Locomotive Wiki, Howard Braunsteiner (California Roadman), YouTube, Brittanica.com

Video–Youtube

Sound Files–Northern Plains Archive Project, MGH

1
Harry Lauder image–Cooper NY/Public Domain)
Harry Lauder– Roamin’ in the Gloamin’–You Tube
2
W. C. Handy image–Wikipedia/Library of Congress
W. C. Handy–St. Louis Blues–You Tube
Pwee Saloon image–Historic Memphis
Mamie Smith image–Wikipedia/Library of Congress
Mamie Smith–Crazy Blues–You Tube
Ma Rainey image–Wikipedia/Library of Congress 
Ma Rainey– Bo Weavil Blues—You Tube
Ma Rainey and band image–Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
Ma Rainey and band–Moonshine Blues–You Tube
3
Tinfoil machine image–Courtesy of U. S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site
Buddy Bolden–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
Travis Edmonson and Rose Marie Heidrich image–travisedmonson.com
Thomas Edison image–Wikipedia/Library of Congress/Public Domain   
Thomas Young–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
Vibrograph–soundbeat.org
Jean-Marie Duhamel–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
Vibroscope–sounbeat.org
Abbé François-Napoléan-Marie Moigno–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
Leon Scott (Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville)–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
Phonautograph (original)–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
Later Phonautograph with zinc trumpet–Commons.Wikimedia.org/Public Domain    
Phonautogram–Commons.Wikimedia.org/Public Domain    
John Kruesi image–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
4
Billy Faier image– © Angela Henriksen/Northern Plains Archive Project
Billy Faier sound files (2)–© Gene Henriksen/Northern Plains Archive Project
Woody Guthrie image–Wikipedia/Library of Congress
Woody Guthrie–On Springfield Mountain–You Tube
Burl Ives image–Wikipedia/Library of Congress
Stephen Foster image–Wikipedia/Public Domain  
5
Samuel Morse image–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
Leonard Gale image–Wikipedia/Public Domain  
Alfred Vail image–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
Alexander Graham Bell image–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
Jacob Reis image–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
Antonio Meucci image–Wikipedia/Public Domain  
Elisha Gray image–Wikipedia/Public Domain   
Emile Berliner  image–Wikipedia/Public Domain
6
Chicago and Northwestern Number 1385 freight–Locomotive Wiki
Blue ’54 Corvette–Wikipedia/Creative Commons     1.2+
Black ’55 Thunderbird–Wikipedia/Creative Commons     1.2+
Soo Line caboose–© Angela Henriksen, NPAP
C&NW System logo–© Northern Pacific RR   (fair use)
Great Northern Railway Logo–Great Northern Railway Historical Society
Northern Pacific Railroad–Wikipedia/ Northern Pacific RR   ( (fair use)
Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific RR (Milwaukee Road)–de.wikipedia.org/wiki
Soo Line logo–Wikipedia/Creative Commons-2 –
Travis Edmonson (1948?)–Travis Edmonson.com
7
Days of ’81 Parade image–Northern Plains Archive
Mississippi John Hurt Image–YouTube
John Hurt–Stagolee–YouTube
Globe Democrat Image–Staggerlee.com/Wikipedia
Frank Hutchison Image–Wikipedia
Southern crossing the “Dog” Image–YouTube
W. C. Handy (hat) Image–YouTube
W. C. Handy–“Yellow Dog Rag”–YouTube
Lizzie Miles Image–YouTube
Lizzie Miles–“Yellow Dog Blues”–YouTube
Josh White Image (1)–Wikipedia
Josh White–“Saint James Infirmary”–YouTube
Josh White Image (2)–YouTube
Josh White–“One Meat Ball”–YouTube
Almanac Singer Image–YouTube
Aunt Molly Jackson Image–YouTube
Miner’s Machine-Gun Nest Image–Wikipedia
Dock Boggs Image–YouTube
Dock Boggs–Hard Luck Blues–YouTube
John Hurt and Skip James Image–YouTube
Skip James–“Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues–YouTube
Abel Meeropol Image–YouTube
Billy Holiday Image–Library of Congress Music Division
Billy Holiday–“Strange Fruit”–YouTube
Odetta Holmes Image–YouTube
Odetta–“Run Come See Jerusalem”–YouTube
Chad Mitchell Trio Image–Wikipedia
Chad Mitchell Trio–“A Mighty Day (Galveston Flood)”–YouTube
John Stewart Image–Howard Brauensteiner (California Roadman)
John Stewart–“Mother Country”–YouTube
Gateway Singers Image–YouTube
“Blind Willie” Johnson Image–Wikipedia (Fair Use)
“Blind Willie” Johnson–“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”–YouTube
Duke Ellington Image–Brittanica.com
Duke Ellington–“East Saint Louis Toodle-oo”–YouTube
Louis Armstrong Image–Wikipedia
Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five–“West End Blues”–YouTube