Anthology Of American Folk Music Research Articles

Historical Records: Reissuing as Curatorial Practice in Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music

AbstractReissues of recordings are commonplace, yet rarely examined by scholars. This article considers how reissuing is a creative act akin to museum curation. Through this lens, reissuers emerge as crucial interpretive figures, making decisions that affect how music and music history are understood by listeners. I take as a case study the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), one of the most canonic and widely praised reissues. Created by record collector and avant-garde artist Harry Smith and distributed by Folkways, the Anthology comprises eighty-four commercially released recordings made between 1926 and 1932, accompanied by an idiosyncratic set of liner notes. At the time, folk music was beset by various mythologies, notably an idealization of racial purity and an antithetical stance toward commercialism and modernity. When reissuing the material, Smith carefully selected, sequenced, and annotated the recordings in ways that unsettled these mythologies. In 1994, the Smithsonian reissued the Anthology on compact disc. Drawing on archival documents from the Smithsonian, I demonstrate how their decisions reframed the Anthology in various ways to fit their goals and concerns. Through marketing, reproduction, cover design, and the soliciting and editing of additional notes, the Smithsonian elevated Smith as a racially progressive auteur while navigating commercial concerns and historical preservation. In particular, the editing of notes avoided controversial statements during an era of politically contentious museum exhibitions. Nevertheless in doing so, the very myths that Smith unsettled in his reissuing were replaced by an idealized race-blindness, anti-commercialism, and historicism.

Party Politics: Ideology and Musical Performance at Donald Trump’s Inaugural Celebration

Research Article| December 01 2017 Party Politics: Ideology and Musical Performance at Donald Trump’s Inaugural Celebration Dan Blim Dan Blim Dan Blim is assistant professor of music at Denison University. During 2017–18 he is a fellow at the University of Rochester Humanities Center, where he is developing a book project on music and memorialization. He has also published research on stage and screen adaptations in musical theater, political narratives in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, and Bernard Herrmann’s score to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2017) 35 (4): 478–489. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.35.4.0478 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Dan Blim; Party Politics: Ideology and Musical Performance at Donald Trump’s Inaugural Celebration. American Music 1 January 2017; 35 (4): 478–489. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.35.4.0478 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: COLLOQUY You do not currently have access to this content.

Review of "Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music" by David Janssen and Edward Whitelock

David Janssen and Edward Whitelock. 2009. Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint LLC. While any attempt to characterize a nation and "a people" is bound to expire in dubious generalization, claims about the essence of the United States and constitution of the "American character" have often been marked by especially outlandish and totalizing rhetoric--by American and non-American writers alike, both affirmatively and critically. (1) One example is Jean Baudrillard's 1986 book America. Poised as the postmodern successor to Alexis de Tocqueville, Baudrillard, perceiving American culture simultaneously as pre-civilized (an old trope) and as the paradigm of hypermodern simulacral "spectrality," characterizes the nation as both "the only remaining primitive society" and as "a giant hologram." (2) If representations of the United States from the last half-century are inflected by the post-World War II phase of American exceptionalism, this has affected not only imperial apologists and vulgar nationalists but even, residually, writers on the left, like Baudrillard. More generally, the United States has always been a strongly symbolic nation, whether imagined as the singular beacon of democracy or as the paradoxical no-place/no-face of late capitalism. For this reason, critical studies of the American mythos are important, and, as Greil Marcus realized some decades ago, popular music serves as a good lens through which to view the agglomerated fragments of "America." (3) Clearly indebted to Marcus, David Janssen and Edward Whitelock, professors of English at Gordon College and authors of Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music, take as their entry point into the American imagination a perceived deep relationship between rock and apocalyptic thought. Although forsaking Baudrillard's shimmering, overtly hyperbolic style, Jannsen and Whitelock nevertheless exhibit a more muted version of his tendency to paint American culture in overly broad brush-strokes. This is seen in the book's thesis of sorts, found in the authors' introduction. Quoting Frank Kermode, the authors observe that in examining the history of apocalyptic thought "the end is immanent rather than imminent," and go on to explain: The difference between an imminent and an immanent apocalypse is the difference between "The end is near" and "the end is here." We will show that apocalypse is a permanent and central part of the American character. As rock and roll is a reflection of that character, apocalypse remains one of the most consistent and evocative threads in the development of the musical form itself. (3, italics mine) But what does it mean to speak of a "permanent" part of an "American character"? From the outset it is unclear whether Janssen and Whitelock are attempting to complicate and deconstruct the idea of the "American character" or simply reify it. If this thesis raises eyebrows, it does, at least, gesture toward answering a primary question about the book: Why apocalypse ... now? By positing the "permanence" of apocalyptic thought in American culture, the authors would seem to foreclose the question of relevance. I will return to questions of the book's historiographic specificity in my conclusion. Throughout the volume, Jannsen and Whitelock attend mostly to rock-from Elvis to Sleater-Kinney-but also to other genres, energetically tracing the theme of apocalypse through American musics and musicians as diverse as gospel, country, and John Coltrane. Proceeding roughly chronologically, the book is organized in four parts (with two to four chapters apiece, most of which concern a single band or album): Part 1--"Apocalypse USA" sets the stage; Part 2--"Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" discusses Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and the music of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen; Part 3--"Artifacts From the Blast Zone" covers Love's Forever Changes, Devo, and R. …

Michael Seeger (1933-2009)

Michael Seeger (1933-2009) Neil V. Rosenberg Mike Seeger was born in 1933, the first of Ruth Crawford and Charles Seeger's four children. The Seegers, who were prominent avant-garde composers, had recently discovered folk music, and when Seeger was young, Saturday night folk singing had become a regular activity in their family. Raised in Maryland, near Washington, D.C., Seeger later spoke of learning "Barbara Allen" at the age of five. When his parents began transcribing music for John and Alan Lomax's Our Singing Country (1941), his home was filled with the sound of Library of Congress field recordings. Musical siblings Pete and Peggy shared in this journey. The Seeger housekeeper, Elizabeth "Libba" Cotton, gave him firsthand experience with what he would later call "Music from True Vine—the home music made by American southerners before the media age" (Seeger n.d.). In his late teens, Seeger taught himself to play string instruments and began meeting other young people who shared his musical interests. Some, like Hazel Dickens, came from families that had migrated from Appalachia to work in the capital region. Seeger and Dickens, who is now best known as a songwriter, were drawn to bluegrass, part of a group of young people who frequented country music parks, like New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland, to hear shows by Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. Seeger began taping these performances with a portable recorder, and he brought new friends like Ralph Rinzler, whom he met at the Swarthmore Folk Festival, to hear them. In 1956, Folkways Records' Moe Asch encouraged Seeger to record this music. The result, American Banjo Scruggs Style (1956), was the first of over twenty documentary albums, mainly field recordings, that Seeger produced for Asch in the next fifteen years. Many of these have been reissued by Smithsonian Folkways. In 1958, Seeger and a group of like-minded musicians founded The New Lost City Ramblers. Inspired by Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, this group re-created music recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. They performed widely in the 1960s, making over twenty albums. As Seeger located and began playing with master musicians like Doc Boggs, who had made those old recordings, the focus of the The New Lost City Ramblers opened to embrace a broad spectrum of southern rural musics. They became leading advocates for the American old-time music movement. The New Lost City Ramblers continued to perform, albeit less frequently, until 2009. In later years, Seeger usually recorded and performed on his own or with musician friends, including Elizabeth Cotton, Doc Boggs, and the many others whose work he documented. He was a three-time Grammy nominee. From the 1970s on, awards and grants from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Guggenheim Foundation supported Seeger's research, and he worked as a consultant and board member for a variety of cultural organizations, particularly festivals. Recognition for his work came from the Society for American Music, the Rex Foundation, and others. He was a visiting scholar at California State University (Fresno) and the Smithsonian. Shortly after his death, the NEA gave Seeger the 2009 Bess Lomax Hawes Award, a prize that "recognize[s] an individual who has made a significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of cultural heritage" (National Endowment for the Arts n.d.). Mike Seeger's metaphor of True Vine aptly describes his own Barbara Allen-like intertwining of study and performance. He inspired scholars and musicians alike (see, for example, Dylan 2004: 69-72). He used his keen intellect [End Page 329] and musical charisma to advocate generously for the understanding and preservation of the music cultures he knew and loved. Neil V. Rosenberg Memorial University Works Cited Dylan, Bob. 2004. Chronicles. Vol. 1. New York: Simon & Schuster. Google Scholar Lomax, John A., and Alan Lomax, eds. 1941. Our Singing Country: Folksongs and Ballads. New York: Macmillan. Google Scholar National Endowment for the Arts. n.d. National Endowment for the Arts Announces 2009 NEA National Heritage Fellowship Recipients. http://www.arts.gov/news/news09/2009-NEA-Heritage-Fellows-Announced.html, accessed October 17, 2009. Seeger, Michael. n...

Self-Publishing and Musicology: Historical Perspectives, Problems, and Possibilities

Although the terms "publishing" and "self-publishing" have meant quite different things at various times and to various individuals, publishers today decide which documents will be produced and for what purposes. This article examines the evolution of self-publishing past and present, especially (but not exclusively) insofar as musicology is concerned. Important self-publications discussed or at least mentioned are John Milton's Areopagitica ; editions of music by Telemann, C. P. E. Bach, and Muzio Clementi; some of the books and magazines written and sold by Upton Sinclair; the samizdat of 1960s and 1970s Soviet dissidents; Richard Wagner's autobiography Mein Leben and Mary Burrell's unfinished documentary Wagner biography; fanzines of various kinds; and the celebrated Anthology of American Folk Music , for which editor Harry Smith compiled an influential set of homemade program notes. Since the 1960s the rise of desktop publishing, new forms of digital word-formatting and -retrieval systems, and the Internet have challenged musicologists and other scholars to think outside the box of traditional, hard-copy, peer-reviewed monographs; in a few cases, online periodicals and other kinds of publications have begun to be accepted. One example of recent self-publishing is Anthony Linick's biography of his stepfather, composer Ingolf Dahl, also reviewed separately in this issue of Notes . Whatever the problems associated with it, virtual publishing offers libraries as well as scholars and their audiences a variety of new opportunities.

Weird Americas Old, New, and Ongoing

In 1997's Invisible Republic , Greil Marcus coined phrase the old, weird America to designate that opens up out (Marcus 1997, 89) Harry Smith's six-LP Anthology of American Folk Music , which he elsewhere describes as Bob Dylans first true map of republic that still hunch to him and a backdrop to basement (88), archive of over hundred Americana-style songs Dylan recorded with lhe Band in summer of 1967. In describing Anthology , Marcus works hard to try to generate sense of uncanny and of paradox. More deeply, he immediately adds, 1952 anthology version of [the tapes], and basement tapes shambling, twilight version of Smith's Anthology , which itself anything but obvious (88). What speaks and spooks here, shambling through twilight, is no mere territory or map, but ghosts, and apparently foreign ones: basement tapes constitute palavers with community of ghosts, . . . specters from foreign country (86). The anthology itself, as Marcus quotes Bruce Connor, was like field recordings, from Amazon,

Natural Born Ease Man?: Masculinity, Vagrancy Law, and Furry Lewis’s “Kassie Jones”

Long after the release of his last pre-war recordings Furry Lewis's creative voice contin- ued to reverberate through American music, inspired and inspiring, humorous, poignant, and often more recognized for his influence on later musicians than for the recordings of his own artistic peak. An image of him, aged and cantankerous, alternately perform- ing and sweeping the streets of Memphis, has blurred indistinctly into a caricatured vi- sion of a whole period of black life, labor, and artistic expression. As Lewis's recordings worked their way into white circles—appearing on Harry Smith's iconic 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, influencing rock musicians like Keith Richards, and becoming the coveted prizes of record collectors—listeners increasingly romanticized his music through an aesthetic which, George Lipsitz has argued, privileged individual emotions over collective conditions (120). For these new audiences, the value of blues and related styles lay in the music's perceived distance from the economic realities of the marketplace. Thus, seldom has Lewis's occupation as both sanitation worker and musician informed understandings of his music. Yet, when Lewis recorded Kassie Jones—perhaps his most legendary performance—he gave personal voice to a collective black masculine experience at the hands of the white economy. Bringing an appreciation of what it means to survive by wielding a broom to his manipulation of the guitar, Lewis transformed a traditional folk song into a subtle political expression of black laborers' struggles to maintain their identities as workers and men. In 1928, Furry Lewis recorded Kassie Jones for the Victor record label. A unique in- terpretation of the traditional railroad ballad Casey Jones—generally recounted by the black fireman who leaped from the train before the wreck—Lewis's recording re-imagined the narrator as an independent character rather than a conduit for the valorization of white subjectivity. Although Kassie Jones did not sell many copies (Cohen, Long Steel Rail 148), it addressed a context in which racism and exploitative vagrancy laws excluded black workers from skilled union jobs and funneled them toward unpaid or poorly paid physi- cal labor. Lewis's transformation of the voice of the fireman from mere narrator to leading role was both an aesthetic choice and a political one, and afforded him the opportunity to insert an African-American perspective on work, race, and public space into a narrative of heroic and hard-working white manhood. Incorporation of this point of view allowed Lewis to engage in a comparison of two disparate conceptions of work and masculinity in order to critique the ideologies that governed vagrancy law, access to employment, and status as a working male citizen. In effect, Kassie Jones offered an alternative vision of masculine gender identity by asserting that illegal work was merely work.

Collecting, Collage, and Alchemy: The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music as Art and Cultural Intervention

In 1952 Folkways Records released a series of compilations of early 20th century music titled The Anthology of American Folk Music, assembled by artist and record collector Harry Smith. A major influence on the folk revival of the 1950s, the Anthology was also an artwork in itself, one that challenged a range of conventional assumptions about not only music but also broader social and cultural processes. Smith’s strategy in constructing the Anthology combined the practice of collecting, collage aesthetics, and the philosophy of alchemy, transmuting seemingly simple materials (recordings of folk music of the 1920s and 1930s) into new and different forms that suggested fresh cultural possibilities grounded in these seemingly “lost” traditions. This article discusses the Anthology in terms of its cultural and aesthetic approaches, with a particular focus on their relevance for and continuing influence on contemporary postmodern culture.

‘Must Be Born Again’: resurrecting the Anthology of American Folk Music

Since the 1997 reissue of the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, journalists, scholars and musicians have promoted this collection as the ‘founding document’ (Marcus 1997) and ‘musical constitution’ (Cantwell 1996) of the urban folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. This reception differs markedly from that of its original issue, which sold few copies and attracted only minor critical attention. This article provides an account of the transformation in the Anthology's cultural status – showing that the canonisation of the Anthology stems not just from its content, but from the interplay of its content and its sociohistorical context. I identify some of the factors that influenced the retrospective consecration of the Anthology, including the important work of key people, the growth of a new field (‘Americana’ music) and changes in the organisational structures of the recording industry.

The writing of America: literature and cultural identity from the Puritans to the present

Acknowledgements. Introduction: ParadiseTM. 1. Maps and Legends. 2. American Literature and the Body Electric. 3. Melville: Crises in Representation. 4. 'Eden is burninga : Literature of the Popular Imagination. 5. Going Fishing: Harry Smith, the Anthology of American Folk Music, and the Fan. 6. Modernism and the Subversive Imagination. 7. 'Dedicated to America, whatever that isa : Contemporary Literature and the Egress. Afterword: Meditations in an Emergency. Notes. Select Bibliography. Index

Invisible republics and secret histories: A politics of music

How does music ‐ or any cultural artefact ‐ assume significance for those who encounter it? Why does one sound or image come to matter, while others are overlooked or forgotten? The answer is not to be found in the sounds alone, but in the context and conditions in which they are heard. This article explores this argument by considering the case of The Anthology of American Folk Music, a set of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, which has exercised an extraordinary power over popular music since its release in 1952. Using the arguments expounded by Robert Cantwell and Greil Marcus, and pointing to the uses of music in establishing national identities and mobilising social movements, the article argues for an understanding of music's significance that links social experience, aesthetic pleasure and political values.

"The Anthology of American Folk Music" and Working-Class Music

"The Anthology of American Folk Music" and Working-Class Music

Anthology of American Folk Music

Anthology of American Folk Music