1. West of the Missouri-1940s and 1950s

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?