I just finished an excellent book by an excellent writer. I’d like to say this happens more than twice a year but I’m very picky about my writers and more picky about how they can turn a phrase. The book I read was “Devil Sent The Rain” by Tom Piazza, a frequent contributor to the cherished Oxford American magazine. The title is based on the poorly recorded, almost unintelligible, song performed by Charley Patton. The book is a collection of essays, liner notes, and articles that Piazza has assembled to tell stories of American culture that are both personal and powerful. He takes us from Hurricane Katrina to Jimmy Martin, then from Charley Patton to Charlie Chan, then into the worlds of Norman Mailer and Bob Dylan; and oh yes, a little bit of further reflection on the writings of Gustav Flaubert. His excerpt from “True Adventures With the King of Bluegrass” is poignant and worth the price of the book.
One short passage intrigued me because it is extremely relatable in terms of what my own show, Deeper Roots, is all about. Tom Piazza grew up on the East Coast and, for lack of a better term, was an aficionado (if not a connoisseur) of jazz music. His sun rose and set on the be-bop and modern jazz music he was exposed to in the clubs of New York City. While eventually settling in New Orleans (experiencing Hurricane Katrina firsthand), his first real escape into middle America was to settle for a time in Iowa, attending and graduating from the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Before he left, a friend (and clearly a friend to be remembered) put together a collection of vintage recordings on cassette that Tom would listen to on his drive west. The recordings were of Jimmie Rodgers, Charley Patton, Blind Boy Fuller, Clarence Ashley, and countless others, a collection of some of the most important influences and reflections of the many different cultures that are like so many microclimates spread across the American landscape.
It evidently changed his view of culture and music. While attending the Workshop he would go onto describe this music’s importance to him. “I listened to those tapes the whole three years I was in Iowa. It was like having a giant ham in the refrigerator. You’d just go in and cut yourself another slice”. Could not have said it any better.
Some of the most revealing music I listen to hints at what’s in store for humankind by expressing its own historical presence through dialect and direct purpose. It is done in the artistry of music, something that the children’s author Hans Christian Andersen opined that “where words fail, music speaks”. Music is an essential component of our humanity and is an art like no other in that it is the most direct of all art forms. So I find that what’s old to some may be new to me.
Finding music from the early 20th century is an exercise. Sometimes it is found buried in the wells of collector’s catalogs that are priced beyond anyone’s reach or in carefully curated and targeted anthologies. It can also be found on public domain sites curated by educational entities including the Library of Congress. Rest assured, it is no small effort to sit down early on a Sunday morning and browse these sites, including www.archive.org and Juneberry for items that, while sometimes poor in quality, reveal from behind that ‘gauze of static’ as faces long-since passed. But my Sunday mornings are rarely lacking reward whether that be a King Oliver jazz recording, rough blues from Blind Lemon Jefferson, or even an early century pop from an Annette Hanshaw.
When I think that I’ve heard it all, something new grabs my ear and imagination and drives me to later fulfill my curiosity by reading more about the artist, songwriter, or song. And that is what my show is about: sharing what I discover with the listener. My show is Deeper Roots: A Century of America’s Music and airs on KOWS.fm on even Saturday mornings from 9-11 and on even Sunday and Monday nights from 10-midnight. For more information about my shows I’d encourage you to visit my web site at www.deeperrootsradio.com. The site also features links to my Facebook page as well as archives of over a hundred past shows.
Looking ahead, and speaking of musical archives, there are a handful of record labels that are indispensable to those who equally cherish the ephemera, no matter the luster, of American (as well as world) music. Join me on Deeper Roots over the coming months as I highlight these labels, not least of which are Document Records, The Dust-to-Digital label, The Numero Group, Tompkins Square, veterans Arhoolie and Yazoo, Old Hat, and Bear Family.
In my column today, I reflect a bit on how far we’ve come in our ability to communicate the performance of music. It’s what I like to do on my KOWS and KWTF shows, Deeper Roots: A Century of America’s Music.
A continuum is defined by Webster’s as “a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, although the extremes are quite distinct.” Folk and popular music have fed off themselves since the early 19th century, each evolving from ancestral roots, primarily of either European or African descent. Our ability to communicate the song at the time was ‘mouth to ear’ in different ways: minstrelsy, churches, barn dances, front rooms, parlors and front porches. Printed music was also available in either scripted or shape-note form.
We now find ourselves on the other end of that great continuum. It’s a digital world right now; a time when we are exposed to the music as our senses pressed up against a glass of light and sound. This is a relatively new mechanism, this notion of ‘writing a performance to paper’ so that it can be repeated the same time by mechanically etching it onto a disc for a Victrola or arranging, on a high speed sheath of magnetic film in a disc drive, the elements of signals in ways that we might have created a Wooly Willy face in our childhood. In their macro form they are mechanical processes, and there is little difference in their application. While some may perceive some great and technologically profound difference, someday it will be looked upon as pretty much the same because the two technologies can be described in one word: kinetic. One (vinyl) is spinning at 33 RPM and the other (disc), is spinning at upwards of 7200 RPM. Vinyl evangelists are no doubt correct that the feeling and depth of sound found in a record is very different than the CD or other digital form. But that discussion is for another time.
I digress…what is important here is that, no matter the media used to transmit the performance, the opportunity we are afforded is the ability to witness the evolution of the uniquely human form of communication: music. As we listen, we can hear the essence of the phrasings and verses, as well as the human factor of what was trying to be communicated at a particular time in human history. Tout simplement magnifique!
Langston Hughes is a favorite writer of mine, right along Lincoln Steffens, Peter Guralnick, Mark Twain, Bill Bryson…but I digress.
In 1942, the Chicago Defender published a review of a Memphis Minnie performance written by Hughes. It’s made its way around the horn many times and is, in my mind, priceless as it gives us the opportunity to witness a performance by Memphis Minnie without every seeing one. It’s a perfectly viable alternative to a YouTube video.
Memphis Minnie sits on top of the icebox at the 230 Club in Chicago and beats out blues on an electric guitar. A little dung-colored drummer who chews gum in tempo accompanies her, as the year’s end — 1942 — flickers to nothing, and goes out like a melted candle.
Midnight. The electric guitar is very loud, science having magnified all its softness away. Memphis Minnie sings through a microphone and her voice — hard and strong anyhow for a little woman’s — is made harder and stronger by scientific sound. The singing, the electric guitar, and the drums are so hard and so loud, amplified as they are by General Electric on top of the icebox, that sometimes the voice, the words, and melody get lost under sheer noise, leaving only the rhythm to come through clear. The rhythm fills the 230 Club with a deep and dusky heartbeat that overides all modern amplification. The rhythm is as old as Minnie’s most remote ancestor.
Memphis Minnie’s feet in her high-heeled shoes keep time to the music of her electric guitar. Her thin legs move like musical pistons. She is a slender, light-brown woman who looks like an old-maid school teacher, with a sly sense of humor. She wears glasses that fail to hide her bright bird-like eyes. She dresses neatly and sits straight in her chair perched on top of the refrigerator where the beer is kept. Before she plays she cocks her head on one side like a bird, glances from her place on the box to the crowded bar below, frowns quizzically, and looks more than ever like a colored lady teacher in a neat Southern school about to say, “Children, the lesson is on page 14 today, paragraph 2.” ….
But Memphis Minnie says nothing of the sort. Instead she grabs the microphone and yells, “Hey, now!” Then she hits a few deep chords at random, leans forward ever so slightly over her guitar, bows her head and begins to beat out a good old steady down-home rhythm on the strings — a rhythm so contagious that often it, makes the crowd holler out loud.
Then Minnie smiles. Her gold teeth flash for a split second. Her ear-rings tremble. Her left hand with dark red nails moves up and down the strings of the guitar’s neck. Her right hand with the dice ring on it picks out the tune, throbs out the rhythm, beats out the blues.
Then, through the smoke and racket of the noisy Chicago bar float Louisiana bayous, muddy old swamps, Mississippi dust and sun, cotton fields, lonesome roads, train whistles in the night, mosquitoes at dawn, and the Rural Free Delivery, that never brings the right letter. All these things cry through the strings on Memphis Minnie’s electric guitar, amplified to machine proportions — a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill.
Big rough old Delta Cities float in the smoke, too. Also border cities, Northern cities, Relief, W.P.A., Muscle Shoals, the jooks, “Has Anybody Seen My Pigmeat On The Line,” “See-See Rider,” St. Louis, Antoine Street, Willow Run, folks on the move who leave and don’t care. The hand with the dice-ring picks out music like this. Music with so much in it folks remember that sometimes it makes them holler out loud….
It was last year, 1941, that the war broke out, wasn’t it? Before that there wasn’t no defense work much. And the President hadn’t told the factory bosses that they had to hire colored. Before that it was W.P.A. and the Relief. It was 1939 and 1935 and 1932 and 1928 and the years that you don’t remember when your clothes got shabby and the insurance relapsed. Now, it’s 1942 — and different. Folks have jobs. Money’s circulating again. Relatives are in the Army with big insurances if they die.
Memphis Minnie, at year’s end, picks up those nuances and tunes them into the strings of her guitar, weaves them into runs and trills and deep steady chords that come through the amplifiers like the Negro heartbeats mixed with iron and steel. The way Memphis Minnie swings it sometimes makes folks snap their fingers, women get up and move their bodies, men holler, “Yes!” When they do, Minnie smiles.
But the men who run the place — they are not Negroes — never smile. They never snap their fingers, clap their hands, or move in time to the music. They just stand at the licker counter and ring up sales on the cash register. At this year’s end the sales are better than they used to be. But Memphis Minnie’s music is harder than the coins that roll across the counter. Does that mean that she understands? Or is it just science that makes the guitar strings so hard and so loud?
— “Music at Year’s End”
Langston Hughes
From The Chicago Defender
January 9, 1943
Reprinted in
“Oxford American Magazine”
Spring, 2003
I love that term. There are so many connotations that come to mind for me. Of course, it perfectly describes the ethereal cloud of sound that comes from many years of wear (and poorly honed steel needles) that spun themselves to powder on one or more Victrolas before being captured by a collector or curator who had the sense to make sure it was preserved through either analog or digital means. It also describes what one might imagine an ancestral glue to be that binds the music passed from one generation to the next.
What it also describes is what I heard as a pre-teen in the sixties as I turned the small, serrated thumb-dial atop my transistor radio to one of the tiny ticks between the station numbers. Behind its aluminum or plastic faceplate was a speaker not much larger than a silver dollar. The sound it produced might have been paper thin, but the music and voices came to me as if they were in the next room. It was, after all, more often than not what was known as ‘border radio’, XRB blasting their way from south of the border and into my earpiece in the middle of the night in the Valley of the Moon. Wolfman Jack or some other mysterioso. And it all came through a gauze of static.
That is why I enjoy what I do around the curation of the music that I know and love. It is because of that common, milky bond of gauze they share. I did, at one time, try to avoid listening to the hiss and crackle of a poorly preserved recording, choosing to find a remake or remastered substitute. But not so anymore. That sound has taken on a personality of its own, a kind of texture that brushes against the performance, validating the certainty of time. When I hear the voice of Blind Willie Johnson, the steel guitar work of Sol Hoopii, or the ghostly voices of the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet, I’m comforted in the knowledge that they were recording on (usually) the best technology of the day. I feel somewhat blessed that I’m able to hear them this very moment through that gauze of time either on MP3, vinyl, radio, or tape, feeling blessed myself with the technologies of the current day.
Frank Zappa once said that “Without music to decorate it, time is just (you fill in the blanks here)”. What is it you remember about the first time you heard a song? Was it where you were, or maybe who you were with? Maybe it was about where you were going or even how you got there. If you’re like me, it is likely that it struck you like a drop of condensation from on high, fluttering down from some compartment of sound and emotion, cheating time by way of the radio airwaves or the streaming ether.
Whether you’re a fan of world, classical, eastern, or modern Americana music, it is no doubt that your mood might sometimes dictate a shift outside your comfort zone to find a break from the repetition. Sometimes our moods demand that we listen to music in a free form manner, allowing us to revel in the many contrasting sounds that may push our boundaries of musical discretion. It’s good to stretch a bit, don’t you think?
When I find myself stretching, I get curious. I might want to know more about the lineage of a given piece, its fundamentals, its story, its performer and so I find myself following a thread. Rarely is it a story that starts with a beginning and concludes with “The End”. More often than not, it involves finding something new in the middle. Once I’ve found some common pattern that connects one musical piece to another, I often discover something that leads me to a current release. There are also those pieces that can be become something to sit and revel with like a passage in a book that you might return to someday for solace. Simple nostalgia sometimes drives the curiosity, but not always.
When assembling playlists for a Deeper Roots’ show, I’m always struck by how a 1932 Lonnie Johnson can be so easily bookended by pieces from a different time, say from The Band or even The Staple Singers. These threads of sound, these flotsam and jetsam on the waters of time, are often easily woven together even though the stories they tell may be so different. They are declared linear only by the blinking of the cursor, the hands of the clock, and the rotation of the Earth.
Some time ago, I was reading a couple of album reviews on Amazon. The first, by Buddy Miller was titled “Universal United House of Prayer” and is a musical exploration of gospel roots. The review, by a listener from Alabama, consisted of three sentences, the last two summed things up with “The first song on the CD is good and not gospel. The rest of the CD is gospel which I dont(sic) enjoy “. The other review took on Jorma Kaukonen’s “Stars In My Crown” and its reviewer hailed from somewhere out in the Alaskan wilderness. The album is also a study of early century gospel roots music. The reviewer titles his missive “If You’re Not a Christian, It’s Not For You” and sums up his feelings thusly: “it was disheartening to hear messages of exclusion and righteousness–great gospel music brings all people in as it embraces the human condition and our yearning to become better people. In this CD unfortunately one must believe that Jesus is the only way to have a spiritual life.” Well, I’m no Christian, but that album’s a fine piece of work. I guess when it comes to religious discussions around the dinner table, even if that table is set on the internet, it still draws passion.
My show, Deeper Roots, occasionally digs into gospel music not because of its ‘message’ but because its litany of Christian sanctification goes back to an almost prehistoric time where, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the only ‘folk’ music that was allowed was that of the church. Rhythm, righteousness, and holiness created a pattern and ways to extol Christian virtue because it gave folks structure in their lives. No more. No less. Contemporary music that interprets this music often does so as a means of reverence for its contributions as I’m sure Messrs. Miller and Kaukonen would agree with.
The show explores the works of numerous artists who come from the Deep South and were exposed to the sacred sounds of the Baptist and Pentacostal churches; in fact, much of the blues and country artists that broke through in the 20th century owe a great debt to the music they either performed in church or learned in church. Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Thomas (Georgia Tom) Dorsey, Nappy Brown, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke…well, you get the idea.
