The Celestial Monochord

Moonshiner's Parking Lot?

A piece of St. Paul's cultural history may be torn down for a parking lot.

The Victoria Cafe produced a recording of absolutely unique importance, as illustrated by this rough map of the origins of all 84 recordings on the seminal Anthology of American Folk Music.  Even the two Chicago recordings were by recent arrivals in the Great Migration from southern states.

—

In May 2006, I realized that an internationally notorious recording from 1927 — "Moonshiner's Dance, Part One" — was the work of the house band of a nightclub at 825 University Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Nobody had understood this before, so I was astonished and overjoyed to find the building still standing 79 years later.  Since then, I drive by it often, and each time my heart skips a beat until I see that the Victoria Theater is still there.

But now, not even 4 years into my researchfor a book on "Moonshiner's Dance," the Victoria building is being eyed for demolition to make way for a parking lot. 

What disturbs me most is that, while my findings are enormously suggestive, the building's historical importance is not yet well understood.  Like a species allowed to go extinct before biologists are even able to describe it, the Victoria Theater may be destroyed in the near-total absence of knowledge. 

Other community members have great reasons to want the building saved.  

I have my own reasons.  Below, I've cracked my research notes wide open, in hopes of helping in the effort. 

These unpublished findings, focusing on the historical importance of this endangered landmark, show that the demolition of the old Victoria Theater for a parking lot would be shortsighted at best.

Minnesota and The Anthology of American Folk Music

The Anthology of American Folk Music was crucial in setting the terms in which American folk arts would be understood and institutionalized after WWII.  In particular, it was a founding document of the Folk Revival and of 1960s Rock. 

Countless influential and popular musicians have used it as their first music instructor, openly borrowed from it, and/or paid tribute to it — notably Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, The Byrds, Lou Reed, Marianne Faithful, Elvis Costello, Philip Glass, Wilco, Beck, Steve Earle, John Fahey, The New Lost City Ramblers, Dave van Ronk, and David Grisman. 

Poet Allen Ginsberg rescued the Anthology's editor, Harry Smith, from homelessness near the end of Smith's life.

Given its deep importance to America's cutlural history, it's striking that one — and only one — of the Anthology's 84 recordings was clearly from outside the American South.  That sole northern recording was "Moonshiner's Dance, Part One" by Frank Cloutier and The Victoria Cafe Orchestra, the house jazz band at 825 University Avenue.

Before 2006, when I began my research, "Moonshiner's Dance" had never been studied before by anyone. In their 1997 reissue of the Anthology, everything the Smithsonian Folkways had to say about the circumstances of its recording was this:

"The Frank Cloutier Orchestra does not appear in any jazz or dance band discographies but is assumed to have been from the Minnesota area."

Despite its unique status and high profile in American musical history, previous research has utterly ignored the Victoria Cafe.  Two separate, professional, officially commissioned historical surveys failed to even grasp that the building had ever been a nightclub at all.

Because its significance to national, regional, and local culture has never been understood, the demolition of the Victoria Theater would represent a reckless act of collective ignorance.

 

Polka and Jazz

"Moonshiner's Dance" is a strange record — difficult to grasp, especially when heard within the Anthology's original sequence. 

My research has led me to see it as a very early blend of ethnic oldtime music (in this case, polka) and "hot" 1920's dance (or jazz) music. 

Comparable blends of immigrant traditions and African American-inflected music became deeply consequential in the following decades.  Think of the Cuban jazz of Cab Calloway and Dizzy Gillespie, or the polka-swing blends of Minnesota's own Andrews Sisters or Whoopee John.  Such syntheses would also become critical to post-war jazz and rock.

"Moonshiners Dance" was the Anthology's only cut featuring either jazz instruments or immigrant ethnic music.  I think the multi-cultural complexities of American folk music might have been perused earlier and more often had Harry Smith more rigorously followed the train of thought implied by the moonshiners of St. Paul. 

The Victoria Cafe — founded by European immigrants and briefly known as the Casa Grande in the 1930's — clearly represents the richly multi-ethnic cultural history of St. Paul.

Minnesota's Ethnic Groups and the Victoria Cafe

According to M. L. Wingerd's 2001 history of St. Paul's civic identity, residents of Minnesota's capitol city felt unusually strong ethnic ties, even across class lines. 

And yet, unlike Minneapolis, St. Paul was also remarkably tolerant across ethnic divides, in part because the city's Irish political machine preferred it that way.  Ethnic diversity could have a funny way of drawing this insular city even closer together.

The Victoria Cafe is emerging as a vivid case in point.  The Cafe was initially financed, managed, and staffed by German and eastern European Jews, and its advertisements were targeted primarily to the Jewish community.

Beginning in late 1926, I find hints that the Cafe may have been purchased by two powerful Irish brothers — a County Commissioner and a leading real estate developer — sons of a railroad worker from County Kerry.

Their new manager, Sammy Markowitz, then made deliberate appeals to the wider community in major newspapers.  The Victoria's top singer was a White Earth Native American woman, and its bandleader, Frank Cloutier, was a French-Canadian Catholic.  Indeed, "Moonshiners Dance" itself is a medley of tunes drawn from a variety of traditions, as well as being a stylistic fusion.

Nonetheless, researching the business history of this venue is slow and subtle work — the Victoria Cafe was a notorious speakeasy frequented by mobsters, after all, and its owners thus left a very slim paper trail.  Much careful research remains to be done.

St. Paul in a Regional Context

"Moonshiner's Dance" is more familiar to national and international roots music enthusiasts than to local historians, which might explain why its striking regional implications have gone unnoticed.

My research very strongly suggests that "Moonshiner's Dance" was essentially a vinyl flier — a 78 rpm record advertising the musical and theatrical offerings of the Victoria Cafe.

The target audience for this flier was potential visitors from outside of St. Paul, in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the Upper Midwest, where it was well known that Minnesota's capital city was ignoring Prohibition and enjoyed a strong vice economy. 

"Moonshiner's Dance" was thus an audio postcard for the rest of the Upper Midwest, a self-conscious statement of St. Paul's civic identity in a regional context.  

During 4 years of research, I've found the recording to be rife with references to the region's complex ethnic and urban-rural divides — most obviously in its jazzy urban approach to the rural polka form. 

Judging from my only visit inside the Victoria Theater (in near-total darkness), the surviving hand-painted murals and architectural details also strongly suggest deliberate commentary on St. Paul's role in the region.

The Politics of Prohibition and the Culture of St. Paul

Due to two controversial actions by Federal authorities, the Victoria Cafe twice made front-page headlines across the region and was the subject of editorials in multiple newspapers.

The first action occurred only weeks after the recording of "Moonshiners Dance" — a recording that, in a way, openly mocks Federal authority and the 18th Amendment.  In fact, "Moonshiners Dance" pretty overtly advertises the Victoria Cafe's frequent clientèle, gangster culture being the subject of intense fascination throughout the region.

A year later, a late-night raid resulted in injury to both a Federal agent and a former Assistant Ramsey County Attorney.  It also ignited a very heated political struggle between the U.S. Congressman from St. Paul's district and Federal authorities in Washington. The Mayor of St. Paul spoke at the Victoria Cafe before a gathering of University Avenue businessmen the very day the main Federal indictment was expected as a result of this raid.

Both Federal actions put the Victoria squarely in the middle of freshly exposed tensions between local opinion and the U.S. Constitution.  Further research on these incidents are proceeding very slowly, because they now require me to become a kind of paleo-paralegal. 

What is already obvious is that the Cafe is symbolic of the long history of brewing in the city of Pig's Eye.  Thanks to that symbolism, The Victoria Cafe found itself at the center of American musical history.  But beyond symbolism, the Victoria Cafe of St. Paul was an active player in one of that history's most pivotal moments.

 

Twin Cities Women, Victorian Values, and the Victoria Cafe

"The Victoria Cafe Orchestra" is the name given on the original 78 rpm record, and The Anthology followed suit.  But I have discovered that the band was otherwise always called by a different name — "The Victorians."

This would have been a rather obvious quip to make if you were the house dance band at the Victoria Cafe in 1927.

After all, a lively and persistent debate swirled in the press, relentlessly contrasting the current "Jazz Age" with the "Victorian Era." The debate constantly centered on women and changing gender roles, with Jazz Age flappers compared (always unfavorably) with that civilizing angel of the house, the Victorian woman. 

"Moonshiners Dance," as you might expect, sides with the flappers.  It is a medley of old-fashioned Victorian songs — mostly sentimental love songs — rendered in the ironic, worldly, intoxicating light of Prohibition jazz. 

The Twin Cities boasted a strikingly high percentage of working women living independent of families.  And as the author of Women Adrift writes, "Wage earning women who lived apart from family were a vanguard in the decline of Victorian culture." 

Considering that women bought the vast majority (by a wide margin) of Jazz Age dance records, music such as "Moonshiner's Dance" should often be heard with a woman listener in mind.

And so, my research shows that "Moonshiners Dance" advertised the glamor of the Victoria Cafe's gangster clientèle — and that it simultaneously took sides in a kind of early "culture war" by satirizing Victorian-era gender roles for a substantially female audience. 

Although this line of research is very new, it's already very clear that the Victoria Theater was a complex battleground in the cultural history of women in the Twin Cities.

 

Save the Victoria Theater

Saving the building will take more than just raising hell about tearing it down.  The community needs a long-term plan for finding a proper use for the Victoria.

But raising hell is definitely the first step. 

Please join the Save the Victoria Theater Facebook group, if you're into that — you'll be able to catch up on the background and the discussions there. 

Mostly, please contact anyone and everyone who you think can help.

Particularly if you are a resident of the neighborhood, you could start with polite contacts with the following St. Paul City Council Member, as well as the CEO of the company that wants a new parking lot:

Melvin Carter III, Council Member

310-A City Hall
15 Kellogg Blvd.,
West
Saint Paul, MN 55102
EMAIL: ward1@ci.stpaul.mn.us 

Phone: (651) 266-8610

Beverley Oliver Hawkins, Ph.D. 

Chief Executive Officer 

Model Cities, Inc.

Phone: (651) 632-8350

Update: The offer to purchase has been withdrawn. But until a buyer or tenant respectful of the site's heritage is found, the Victoria remains a cultural resource in grave danger.

 

 

See also:

North Country Blues

The first — mostly outdated — entry on The Victoria Cafe

 

 

 

"Minglewood Blues" Sweetly Sings of Anthology

If you expect to be in Wisconsin in the next few weekends — or can arrange to be — I urge you to see Minglewood Blues at the Broom Street Theater in Madison.  Inspired by The Anthology of American Folk Music, this new play must be among the most amusing, heartfelt, and original responses to that influential document in quite a few years.   

In the flesh-and-blood medium of the stage, Broom Street has made manifest the strange pleasures and confusing revelations most people go through after discovering this collection of early 20th century recordings. 

The play should interest anyone with a passing acquaintance with a few of the old American legends — maybe Casey Jones, or John Henry, or Stagger Lee, or the froggie who went a-courtin' a mouse.  But the play's depth and wit do "telescope" with audience knowledge, and it really excels as an introduction to the Anthology's strange mindset, and as a sort of luxury spa for Anthology veterans.

In Minglewood Blues, the events, images, and characters scattered throughout the Anthology rise up in Broom Street's humble little space and take over the joint, much as they do in our minds — with birds and trains and mountains and murderers vying for our confused attention, exchanging gunfire and one-liners, exposing one another's crimes and pleading one another's case.

Becoming Anthology-obsessed makes you dizzy like that.  Playwright Doug Reed has taken that dizziness seriously as part of the Anthology's aesthetic and made it the basis of his play.

In bouncing motifs off one another and splicing narratives together, the script performs one illuminating stunt after another, proposing dozens of fascinating possibilities. 

Why moles are blind is explained, as is the nature of lawyers. The deep geology and the whole ecosystem of a place called Minglewood are made to mingle with Scandinavian immigrants and Southern labor history. The sheer body count makes the play a kind of Hamlet-meets-Wisconsin Death Trip.

There are so many new angles to see, in fact, that a law of diminishing returns eventually sets in (even if rather later than you might imagine).  Once Minglewood Blues blows your mind many times, and then many more, and then some more, your mind is neatly blown. 

Some moderate editing would be welcome in the second half — perhaps Frankie and Albert's wedding could be deleted, or some bits about Alan Catcher's business dealings.  I would hate to miss the rebellion of Free Labor, but the resulting sharper focus on John Henry's regrets might be worth it.

A death-row scene between Alice Frye and Frankie, intended to be a culmination and summation, tries to accomplish too much on too many levels.  I wanted to see these two actors switch roles, but it's unlikely that better acting or directing could carry all the weight packed into the scene.

Incidentally, Harry Smith's Anthology was history's first great case of "color-blind casting" and I would have been interested to see this somehow integrated into Minglewood Blues.  As things actually played out (perhaps out of practical necessity), I sometimes wondered if Broom Street hadn't actually worked against the progressive intent of Smith's treatment of race, which remains ahead of its time to this day.

I was usually impressed with the quality of the actors, musicians, direction, and production standards at this humble venue.  In fact, some of the rough edges left on this particular material only served to magnify its meaning and emotional impact.

The actors and operators of the Broom Street Theater are unpaid volunteers — the hat is passed for the cast before the show.  Still, ever since its birth in the cultural ferment of 1968, the theater has been a very small animal with big artistic ambitions.

As a result, an especially deep and moving kind of sense gets made when this particular group takes on Harry Smith's Anthology, which achieved very high art through a collage of folk art. 

And they've gone to extraordinary lengths to do it.  As a keepsake for the audience, the playwright himself has lovingly designed the program for this production by hand, borrowing elements of Smith's original hand-made liner notes. 

The theater has sacrificed perhaps a third of its already-scarce audience space to make way for a bandstand.  Its musicians competently play autoharp, clawhammer-style banjo, fiddle, accordion, jew's harp, harmonica, two guitars, and jug. 

Very appropriately, this music is intimately involved, top to bottom, in the play's action and themes — not only punctuating and bridging scenes, but deeply involving itself in the action and meaning of the story.

In fact, the band is composed largely of cast members, and visa versa.  Its fiddler grows wings and accompanies a character to heaven.  After a young boy is lured to his death in a flower garden, he gets up and straps on the accordion.  And Satan, it turns out, plays a mean harmonica.

_

Mike Seeger's Legacy: To Be Continued

I've been out of town the last few days — at a funeral, coincidentally — so you presumably knew before I did that Mike Seeger has died. 

I don't see a heck of a lot on the web that seems to capture Seeger's significance, and it may take a long time before his true importance is widely and well understood.  Maybe Bill C. Malone's rumored biography will advance that project.

I like quoting what Bob Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles, says about Mike — not only to borrow Dylan's clout, but because nobody else has expressed it so vividly, before or since.  Buy Chronicles and read it. 

Only in Dylan's writing about Mike do I really recognize the guy I encountered — maybe only Bob and I saw it, but I bet a lot of people have the same feeling.

Here's a small sample of the thirteen-page ode dramatizing the impact Mike Seeger had on the young Dylan's sense of himself as an artist:

Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it ... But then something immediate happens and you're in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it — you're set free ... Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door — something jerks it open and you're shoved in and your head has to go into a different place. Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it. Mike Seeger had that affect on me.

He was extraordinary, gave me an eerie feeling. Mike was unprecedented. He was like a duke, the knight errant. As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula's black heart ... It's not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them ... it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns ... the thought occurred to me that maybe I'd have to write my own songs, ones that Mike didn't know. That was a startling thought.

The main thing I want to add tonight (because it might otherwise go unsaid) is how much I admired Mike's ethics as an intellect. 

He understood that trying to understand and explain things is difficult, and carries an ethical burden.  You OUGHT to be careful and humble in drawing conclusions, and you SHOULD get your facts right.  Be mindful of what you know to be the case, and what you don't. 

When he spoke, and when he wrote his liner notes, you could hear his great care in selecting words that said exactly what he knew, nothing less and nothing more.  I respected that in him.

Here's a round-up of selected previous writings about Mike Seeger.

_

Mike Seeger: Articles at The Monochord

Mike Seeger has entered hospice care and members of his family are gathering at his home in Virginia, according to media reports. 

Over the years, the Celestial Monochord has written about Mike often, sometimes obsessively, because he's a hero of mine.

Below are links to my most substantial essays dealing with Mike Seeger. They're mostly in order of writing quality and/or relevance to Mike.

• How the Folk Revival affected Dock Boggs (indebted to Seeger's liner notes and Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus):

Dock Boggs: Revival  

• On innocence and experience, in the context of Mike Seeger:

The Young Musicologist

• A two-part screed in which I realize that Bob Dylan (and his generation) were not directly influenced by Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music as much as they were second-hand, through the New Lost City Ramblers:

Harry Smith, Dylan, and "The Rambler's Step"

• How Mike turned a simple love song into a contemplation about the relationships between art, and death, and love:

Little Birdie

• Thoughts about Hollis Brown, mentioning the version Bob Dylan did with Mike:

Hollis Brown's South Dakota

• Mike's version of a song about Slick Willie:

Late Last Night When My Willie Come Home

• With my facts a little rumpled around the edges, the vast importance and tiny reputation of the New Lost City Ramblers:

Math and Memory in New Lost City

• "Suggested listening" for fans of the Harry Smith Anthology:

Beyond the Anthology

• About my favorite cut on Mike's brilliant collection of field recordings:

A Talk on the World

_

NPR: Mike Seeger enters hostpice

According to NPR, Mike Seeger has entered hospice.  I hope they have this wrong, of course, but I know he's had health problems for some time. 

Here's a round-up of articles about Mike Seeger previously publish at The Monochord.

  

   

    

  

_

The Anthology and Carbine Williams

    

OK, I'm officially declaring myself a Turner Classic Movies fan.

Lately, movies hardly seem worth watching if Robert Osborne isn't there, just before and after, to give a cheery commentary about them.  Bruno is probably fine, I guess, but I'll wait until it comes to TCM and Osborne can tell us who ALMOST played Bruno before they finally cast Sacha Baron Cohen.

More seriously, TCM has mattered to my development as a cultural historian.  I live much of my life in a pre-WWII "immersion program" of my own design, and it helps that movies carry a lot of dense and very palatable cultural information. 

Consider the relatively obscure Jimmy Stewart movie Carbine Williams — a biopic about an inventor who helped create the M1 carbine rifle, a standard gun used in WWII.

Aside from this seemingly unpromising subject, TCM's viewer guide said that Williams was a bootlegger in the 1920's, and created his invention while in a North Carolina prison.  I figured hillbilly stringband music had to appear somewhere, right? 

Also, the movie was released in 1952, the year that Folkways Records released Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.  Maybe the movie might shed light on ... say, the prevailing attitudes about southern Appalachian culture that The Anthology had to contend with upon its release.

I hunkered down to watch TCM's broadcast on May 3rd.  What blew my mind turned out to be the way the filmmakers tried to compensate for the dry subject matter — how they tried to draw you into the biography. 

The film begins "now" — in 1952 — with the son of Carbine Williams having had schoolyard fights about his father's criminal past.  The son is otherwise a typical 8-year-old of 1952, with the greasy kid stuff in his hair, the rolled up jeans, the stripped t-shirt. 

To help the son understand him, Carbine Williams brings the boy to his old prison warden, who tells the boy — and us — the remarkable story of how a convict in his prison went on to win WWII for America. 

In the end, the boy now understands and appreciates his father's experiences as a Prohibition outlaw, a convict in the Depression, and finally an engineer of the military-industrial complex that won the war.  A heart-warming hug closes the film.

The emotional appeal of this framing storyline seems rooted in a sense that the events of the first half of the century would be incomprehensible, or at least misunderstood, by the baby-boom generation. The fantasy proposed and fulfilled by the movie is that the titanic and wrenching experiences of two World Wars and the Depression could somehow be appreciated and acknowledged by the children of The New Prosperity. 

This yawning divide in experience could someday, somehow be bridged, and that is an entertaining dream.

•

Writing about the musicians whose 1920's recordings were reissued in 1952 on The Anthology, Greil Marcus says:

In 1952 [they] were only twenty or twenty-five years out of their time; cut off by the cataclysms of the Great Depression and the Second World War and by a national narrative that never included their kind, they appeared now like visitors form another world, like passengers on a ship that had drifted into the sea of the unwritten.  "All those guys on that Harry Smith Anthology were dead," Cambridge folkies Eric von Schmidt and Jim Rooney wrote in 1979, recalling how it seemed in the early 1960's, when most of Smith's avatars were very much alive.  "Had to be."

The Anthology derived some of its power from exploiting the same radical break in memory that Carbine Williams uses as a dramatic frame.  To young people the age of the Williams boy — that is, people Bob Dylan's or Joan Baez's age — the world that gave birth to their parents, as well as to the recordings on The Anthology, seemed about as foreign as any world could, no matter how remote.

•

At some level, the cataclysms of the first half of the century were not just events Carbine Williams witnessed, but also projects he undertook.  His son could be forgiven for viewing his father's life as a proposed path for the boy himself to follow, and that path must have seemed like a nightmare.

 

The movie Carbine Williams neglects the possibility that the young Williams boy might rightfully be less interested in the life his father had lived than in the world his father had created and left as an inheritance.  And in 1952, the world looked like an awfully mixed bag.

Many baby boomers came to see the entertainment industry that produced Carbine Williams — the one that failed to anticipate this perspective — as a purveyor of bad dreams thin enough to be transparent.  They were thus drawn to cultural alternatives that were more opaque, and therefore less available through America's efficient new systems for the distribution of culture.

The most committed Folk Revivalists of the early 1960's traded their father's M1 carbine rifle for their grandfather's banjo. Staging a kind of identity insurrection, kids like the Williams boy would try on identities that their fathers had either ignored or abandoned while growing into architects of the Cold War — identities inspired by Pete Seeger, Charlie Poole, Jessie James, or Henry Lee's jilted lover.

Or Harry Smith — whoever he was.  His Anthology was like a Ouija board capable of communicating messages from spirits the rehabilitated Carbine Williams, and his invention, had long before left for dead. 

Some of the Williams boy's generation sought to retrace the occult thinking that organized the Anthology's contents.  Others reenacted its obsolete performances.  Many sought, in the most obsolete available songs, the stories their fathers (or his wardens) didn't know or wouldn't tell.

Patty Hearst's famous rifle was an M1 carbine.

_

Moonshiners Dance - On the Air

(a relief in the Hibbing High School Library)

 

 

Tomorrow morning, May 21, I'll be on the radio to talk about my research on "The Moonshiners Dance, Part One," from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.  

There'll be more music than talk.  We'll be playing records that put Moonshiner into some sort of context —  notably, the very rare and much speculated-about "The Moonshiners Dance, Part TWO."

The program is The Dakota Dave Hull Show, on KFAI from 9 to 11 central time.  You can listen live, and the show will also be archived online for two weeks ONLY:

http://www.kfai.org/thedakotadavehullshow 

Enjoy!

 

 

Update: The show went beautifully — it really couldn't have gone better.  Here's the direct link. Remember that the show will become unavailable on the morning of June 4.

 

_

Music for Moonshiners - Whoopee John

Part of a series wherein I propose musical contexts for
"The Moonshiners Dance Part 1," aside from The Anthology
of American Folk Music, and present illustrative sound files.

Older Minnesotans always seem to remember Whoopee John Wilfahrt — so much so that it's startling how little-known he is to everyone else.

Whoopee John made his first recordings in Minneapolis in September 1927 — just across the river and about a week before Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra recorded "The Moonshiners Dance."

He would later become hugely influential across the Upper Midwest, and because they circulated in a small world, Cloutier and Wilfahrt were probably aware of each other. Still, I don't see Whoopee John's influence in "The Moonshiners Dance." 

Instead, his early recordings can serve as a good example of the old time ethnic music being played across the region at the time.  "The Moonshiner's Dance" is also a good example of that music, and is partly a satire of it.

 • 

Explanations of Whoopee John's nickname differ, but it's pretty clear to my ears — Whoopee John whooped, just like Frank Cloutier's boys, except at very deliberately chosen moments in the performance.

Neither the whoops nor the nickname appear on Wilfahrt's 1927 recordings, but they're both firmly in place by 1933.  Perhaps "Moonshiners Dance" inspired Whoopee John to start whooping — but then again, similarly exuberant interjections were common across pre-War genres of vernacular social dance music.

Although Whoopee John's style doesn't sound much like "The Moonshiners Dance," it doesn't sound much different either.  To get from Wilfahrt to Cloutier, you mostly need a small shift in meter and tempo, and a huge change in attitude.  The Victoria Cafe Orchestra satirizes rural polka music like Whoopee John's from a cosmopolitan, Jazz-Age perspective. 

But keep in mind that old-time ethnic performers themselves relentlessly goofed on their own rustic, old-world personas.  "Whoopee John" was, in essence, a satirical character played by John Wilfahrt.  There's an economy of satirical exchange here ... with its liquidity provided by good times and bootleg alcohol.

Cloutier and Wilfahrt used similar instruments — after all, this is music from the "Brass Age" to which The Anthology otherwise turns its back. Both bands use instruments you'll also find in 1920s Chicago jazz bands, and most everywhere else at the time — trumpet, clarinet, bass horn, a little drum set.  A signature of Wilfarht's band was the addition of the German button accordion.

Wilfahrt's later stuff is much easier to find due to its great popularity. To my ears, it takes on a slightly slick big-band aesthetic that I find a bit bland and cloying.  I much prefer Whoopee John's early stuff from the 1920s and early 1930s — the New-Ulm, Knights-of-Columbus-hall-wedding Whoopee John. 

It's clearly played by a small, spirited combo of townspeople.  I like the hint of parlor, or even chamber music formality.  I don't know, maybe it's a DNA thing, given that this music's genealogy so closely mirrors my own.

 • 

The sound file is an MP3 of about 2.6 MB, and it chains together three abbreviated clips from early Whoopee John 78's.  I chose the cuts because I like them, and because they sound most like "The Moonshiners Dance."  Wilfahrt also recorded appealing waltzes, schottishes, marches, etc.

Download WoopeeJohn.mp3

 •  0:00 to 1:35 - "Old Time Polka #1" from October 1933.

 •  1:35 to 2:42 - "Kinder Polka" from September 1927.

 •  2:42 to 3:50 - "Linderman Polka" from October 1933.

The best source for Whoopee John's music seems to be his grandson, Dennis Brown.  His website has an order form you can print out, fill out, and snail-mail with a check or money order. 

I've done this several times with excellent results. It's great to have this music available in such a high-tech fashion — usually, I'm crawling around on the floor in the basements of used vinyl stores.

I recommend getting either the Whoopee John Historical Music CD #1, or #2, or both.

_

Alchemist Transforms Breslin into Ace

Avid fans of Harry Smith will recognize the name of the Hotel Breslin.  For one thing, it was one of the many roach motels he called home until he was thrown out for lack of payment. 

Allen Ginsberg reported:

Then Harry went into a funny kind of amphetamine tailspin.  He got really paranoid and got moved out of the Chelsea, I think, or expelled or something.  He couldn't pay his rent, and wound up in a series of other hotels, including the Breslin Hotel, by 1984.  But he wouldn't talk to anybody, wouldn't talk to me, maybe because I didn't supply him with money, because I was broke at the time ...

I didn't see Harry for a long while and began visiting him again at the Breslin Hotel, on 28th Street and Broadway.  Same problem, still wanting money ...

In that room at the Breslin, the whole room was taken up with shelves of books and records, then a movie editing table, and a tiny bed.  I have some photographs of that, of him pouring milk, The Alchemist Transforming Milk into Milk. 

In that bathroom he had a little birdie that he fed and talked to, and let out of his cage all the time.  When his little birds died, he put their bodies in the freezer.  He'd keep them for various alchemical purposes, along with a bottle, which he said was several years' deposits of his semen, which he was also using for whatever magic structures.
[ introduction to Think of the self Speaking, pages 7-8 ]

His evictions from such places must have been difficult for Smith, of course, but they're also an on-going tragedy for all of us. 

They often resulted in catastrophic losses of Harry's original artwork, as well as his inspired collections of objects much more interesting than what he kept in that freezer.  We're all somewhat impoverished by Harry's housing problems.

In a sad irony, Harry's chronic homelessness also had a small upside. As I understand it, he sometimes sold his stuff to keep a roof over his head a little while longer — typically to buyers who preserved it better than Smith could have, or would have, given that he sometimes intentionally destroyed is own artwork.

He first approached Moses Asch of Folkways Records to try and pawn his 78 collection.  Asch had the idea of instead paying Smith to edit the Anthology of American Folk Music, using Smith's own collection as its basis.

Smith later sold that 78 collection to the New York Public Library, where Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler were allowed to copy the whole thing in exchange for cataloging it.  Those bootlegs were a wellspring for the repertoire of the New Lost City Ramblers, one of the most influential bands in history. 

Anyway, point is, the Hotel Breslin is now being opened as the "gleaming new super-hip Ace Hotel," according to the Observer.  If you have enough money, you can stay where Harry couldn't. 

My wife and I love to stay in old renovated hotels — most recently, the Palmer House in Chicago and the Biltmore in Los Angeles — in part because it's possible to get some surprisingly good prices in some of these amazing places at the moment. 

Therefore, I can't hold my snout too high about the Breslin/Ace project.  I would like to stay there. 

But if you have heretofore missed the ironies that gentrification sometimes presents, the Breslin/Ace project is a good place to get up to speed.

The hotel management is hoping to incorporate some of Smith's artwork into the interior design.  They also hope to offer his pioneering abstract animated films on the hotel's pay-per-view TV system. 

Some rooms feature turntables and selected vinyl, and the management hopes to get permission to press new vinyl copies of The Anthology for the enjoyment of guests. 

( This raises an intriguing question I've been wondering about too.  Could Smithsonian/Folkways re-issue The Anthology on vinyl to the general public? 

Vinyl is back, at least among a certain segment, and I think it's probably the same segment that would love to own The Anthology on LP. 

For the 1997 CD reissue of The Anthology, Smithsonian/Folkways worked hard to approximate, as much as possible, the experience of encountering The Anthology in its original form.  Well, what better way to approximate it than to actually, in fact, reissue The Anthology in its original form?  Eh?  Hello? )

The Breslin/Ace Hotel project has been controversial, in part because there are many "legacy" residents in the building, until recently a rent-controlled apartment building. 

Some residents haven't appreciated the hassles of living in a construction zone, and some presumably just don't like hipsters, tourists, rich people, and whatnot.  There's a little uncertainty over just how well residents and guests will mix in the building.

The same investors also recently renovated the Chelsea, where Harry Smith died on November 27, 1991. 

Disk Sift Yields Smith-Newsie Link

(newsboy, 1921, Library of Congress photo)

            

I was wading through the Archeophone catalog yesterday, planning my next purchase. 

... It's an incredible record label.  Everything I've gotten from them has been a hoot to listen to, and has revolutionized my perceptions and tastes ...

And I finally noticed their series of reissues of "Hit of The Week" records.  As the Archeophone website describes them,

They sold on newsstands during the Great Depression for 15 cents and quickly became the best-selling records of the early 1930s: the laminated flexible cardboard records known as "Hit of the Week." Featuring the top songs of the day, performed by some of the most noted jazz and dance musicians (often under pseudonyms), Hit of the Week records provided just that — one hit, once a week — to an American public with hardly a dime to spare but hungry for great music by great artists.

As always, it seems, I thought of Harry Smith and the Anthology.

Back in July, I first realized that phonograph records were once distributed on city streets at newsstands and by newsboys. 

Those tough, tragic little kids in short pants and floppy caps hollering "Extra! Extra!" sometimes sold 78's along with newspapers. 

As William Howland Kenney wrote in his brilliant Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930:

... the newsboys of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Defender regularly carried copies of the latest records of the week along with their newspapers.  They sold the disks at $1 apiece; for many customers the records were as important as the news.

Something now made real sense for the first time.  The funny, fake headlines Harry Smith wrote for his liner notes to volume one of the Anthology of American Folk Music may have been based on actual experience. 

Newsboys might really, in fact, have yelled something very much like "Georgie runs into rock after mother's warning!  Dies with the engine he loves!" 

Interestingly, two of the performers on Archeophone's "Hit of the Week" CDs — Vincent Lopez and Rudy Vallee — have loose connections to The Victoria Cafe. 

Therefore, I might have to buy these ... although, times being what they are, I may have to wait until this music is finally released on cheap pieces of Durium.

_

The Old French Weird America

Someone has started an amazing blog about Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.  If he keeps going along these lines, it will end up being one of the most important things to happen to the Anthology since its reissue on CD in 1997.

Apparently the work of an obsessive French collector, The Old Weird America (TOWA) is posting at least one entry on each Anthology cut, with large zip files containing wonderful batches of mp3s. These mp3s are other recordings by each Anthology artist, as well as other "covers" of the same song.

TOWA also provides a little writing of his own about the Anthology artists, although that text is often the standard, sturdy, reliable consensus view of the subject.  Very nice, but not usually new.  The real eye-popping, one-of-a-kind value of this blog is the audio files.

Really, the project comes off a lot like the interactive, online version of the Anthology-with-notes that I dreamed of at the end of this post back in July — except for its, let's say, "independent" attitude toward copyright law. 

Two thoughts:

Of course, I'm dying to see what TOWA does with "The Moonshiner's Dance" ... and whether he bothers to contact me to see what I have up my sleeve.  He is not good about citing his sources of information or audio, so I don't know if he swings that way.

Also, I've always wondered what I'd do after my Diamonds in the Rough series is finished.  I guess I've dragged my feet about writing that last entry because I have no substitute for the series.

One idea has been to write one piece on each of the 84 entries in the Anthology.  At my usual pace, the project would take nearly a decade.

Well, in a way, TOWA has beaten me to it.

Certainly, his contribution is these amazing audio collections he's posting, whereas I would do my usual Carl Sagan meets Robert Cantwell routine. 

I would really have new things to say about these cuts ... long, dense, ponderous, new things to say ...

_

North Country Blues

 
A mural in the library of Bob Dylan's high school depicts Hibbing's multi-ethnic iron miners. What did their music sound like?

Around 1965, Bob Dylan turned his back on folk music, confirming the break by "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival. 

At once fact and fiction, the story has emerged as one of the more familiar parables from the 20th century.

But lately, I've been thinking about an earlier moment of decision when Dylan walked away from another set of folk music traditions — those of the Upper Midwest.  Today, that decision seems more consequential in the long run, all the more so the longer it goes unrecognized.

When Dylan walked away from Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range and the rest of the Upper Midwest, he left behind what was then a dying economy, as portrayed in his song "North Country Blues".  It was a dyin' town, it was a dyin' town, he chants in the album's liner notes. 

But Dylan was also walking away from dying forms of music as varied and complex as any in the world, including those of the American South.

At the time, old musical ways of life were changing just as fast in the South, of course, but important elements of the Folk Revival were bent on preserving Southern traditional music — and Dylan was about to help out.  

Suddenly, the critical difference between the traditional music of the North and the South hasn't turned out to be a matter of quality or inherent interest.  

Instead, it's that the music of the South — against all odds, and to our inexpressible benefit — was resuscitated when it needed it most.  Up North, in Zimmerman country, a comparable revival just never arrived.

•

I've been working on a study of the only recording on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music clearly representing northern music — "The Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Minnesota in 1927.  It has never been studied before.  

Early in my project, I knew I would eventually have to know — and I mean have to, and I mean know — the musical environment in the Upper Midwest before World War Two.

Consider the 1913 mural in the library of Hibbing High School depicting iron miners at work.  Each of its 16 human figures represents another ethnic group that mined the Mesabi Iron Range — a deep diversity of cultures that, presumably, intermingled to create distinctive new American sounds.  

Those miners were silent as they watched the young Robert Zimmerman browse the library books — but they must've danced to something sometime.

During the early phases of my research into "The Moonshiner's Dance," I often thought about them, knowing I would need to hear their music in my head, loud and clear. 

Unfortunately, when I finally turned my attention to the problem, I saw there was going be trouble. 

I had first committed myself to traditional music 14 years prior, when there were already mountains of products on the market vying to help me navigate pre-War Southern blues and country.  But now, up North, even in 2008, I was pretty much on my own.

There is no such thing as, say, The Anthology of Northern American Folk Music (edited by Harry Smithovich).  There's no O Brother Where Art Ya Once?  There was no "Song to Otto Rindlisbacher" on Bob Dylan's first album.

Alan Lomax made a thousand recordings during fieldwork in the Upper Midwest in 1938, declaring it possibly "the most interesting country I have ever traveled in" with "enough material in the region for years of work".  But unlike every other region where Lomax conducted fieldwork, no release in any format has ever been devoted to his Northern journey.  The website of Lomax's foundation, its name apparently a bit of self-deprecating humor, makes no mention of it.

There is an amazing record store here in Minneapolis that sells only 78 rpm records, and it has hundreds of pre-War old-time ethnic recordings — cheap, in great condition, with unpronounceable titles.  But what do I buy?  And what sense do I make of it?

There's simply no ... there's no ...

There's no Northern canon.  Or worse, and more exactly, the canon of "American roots music" has bypassed my part of the country entirely. There are no names from the Upper Midwest like Dock Boggs, or The Carter Family, or Robert Johnson — names of musicians whose work everybody knows is great, even if they haven't actually bothered listening to it. 

How do you connect the dots when you have no dots to begin with? 

•

I spent much of 2008 trying to crack the case.

I've camped out in university and historical society libraries, scouring the footnotes of academic journal articles.  I've literally spent hours clutching photocopies of typewritten discographies while crawling on the floor in used vinyl stores — including one where the owner chain-smokes behind the register.  I've found music that's never been issued, is out of print, is on formats I can't play, lacks any intelligible context.

So far, there appear to be no easy solutions.  But I have found a few extremely valuable maps of this occult terrain — so valuable, in fact, that I hate to bury reviews of them this deep in an already too-long blog post.  

If I could press only three things into your hands today, they would be: (1) a brilliant box set, Down Home Dairyland, containing 40 episodes of a radio show about the traditional music of the Upper Midwest, and (2 and 3) a pair of absolutely essential books with unfortunate titles, Victor Greene's A Passion for Polka and James P. Leary's Polkabilly.  

They're hardly the only materials available, but taken together (including their footnotes, discographies, etc.) they allow an incipient canon to emerge — a list of things you probably should recognize if you want to be taken seriously on the subject.  They also provide — most pointedly in the first and last chapters of Leary's Polkabilly — clues to explaining why these musicians and their work aren't more widely seen as part of the canon of American roots music.

•

Following various threads into and out of such material, I sometimes return to the mural in the library of Hibbing High School.  

Like the rest of present-day Hibbing, the mural was once moved to its current location from the ghost town of North Hibbing, "where even the markin stones were dead, an there was no sound except for the wind blowin thru the high grass," as Dylan described it. 

Slowly, as I've started to hear a few strains of music coming from those miners in that mural, what's begun to strike me most about the thing is how deadly silent it first seemed to me, and how silent it must have seemed to Dylan, there in that hushed library.  

Why wasn't there a revival of Northern folk music for Dylan to join?  And what would one have sounded like?  Until 2008, I would have faintly assumed the answer to the first question was the answer to the second.  The music down South was just better or more plentiful.

And maybe it was, I haven't quite decided.  But the reasons for the historical neglect of the Upper Midwest turn out to be far more complex than that — so much so they deserve their own research institute ... or at least their own blog post.  I do know it certainly wasn't just about the music.

If we want to keep thinking that Southern music is better, that's ok with me.  But shouldn't we be able to say, confidently and in specific detail, "Better than WHAT?" 

    

 

    

 

    

_

My Book Report About "On the Road" Which I Read By The Celestial Monochord

Kerouac playing football, 1938

    

I was extruded out the other end of the 2008 presidential election like John Goodman birthing himself from the mud in Raising Arizona. I clawed my way out, hollering, triumphant, relieved — but in the middle of nowhere, wondering "NOW what do I do?"

Much of my intellectual life during the Bush years has been an escape and a rummaging around for some kind of SENSE. 

At the start of Bush's second term, I dove head first into trying to understand every last thing about "The Moonshiner's Dance," a recording from another time — practically from another planet — the main theme of which is alcohol delirium and the razzing of meaning itself.  It had to be sorted out.  Somewhere along the line, I even quit drinking. 

Now, I will have to rejigger yet again somehow.

So with Palin sent back to Alaska, I felt it was time to clear my mind.  Cleanse my palate.  Get a little fresh air and perspective before beginning anew.  It seemed a good time to finally read Kerouac's On the Road.

I'd recently started reading classics I hadn't read before, ones I now think I should've read before getting that Master's Degree in English Literature I have framed on my wall. 

Last winter, for example, I'd finally read The Great Gatsby — oh, so THAT'S the answer to that GRE question! 

Besides, I'd always liked the idea of it.  Kerouac's sad and feverish and lost patriotism, his REAL "real America" Americanism.  It looked good on the menu after nearly two years of 21st-century stump speeches and echo chambers.

One of my many brothers — the one who'd used Kerouac as a roadmap throughout his early adulthood — had given me a copy of On the Road when I was 18 and he was 30.  I must've lost it during a move over the years. 

I bought my current copy a few years ago as a tourist in San Francisco, when my wife Jenny and I stopped by City Lights bookstore.  I knew it was the most obvious purchase to make, felt sheepish handing it over to the clerk. 

I felt the urge to tell him I'd already taken varying-sized doses of Ginsberg, Borroughs, Ferlinghetti, Corso, even Bob Kaufman — just never really Kerouac.  But it would've only made matters worse.

----

I can't remember reading another book that relies so heavily on the reader to romanticize it, to buy into it.  The presumption somehow gives it the feel of "young adult fiction" — my brother had given it to me at the right time.

At some point, for example, narrator Sal Paradise assures us that this next trip across the country was the gonest, most profound, most epically heroic yet!  Yass yass, whoop, harumph! 

That trip's high points, to my memory, turn out to be getting a speeding ticket, picking up a hitchhiker with one arm longer than the other, getting stuck in the mud, and stealing some cheese. 

Ordinarily a quick read, it took me a month to get through, so evanescent was my romanticization. 

One tension that's supposed to sustain interest is a kind of low-simmer debate — Dean Moriarty: saint or demon?  But today, On the Road reads more like a muck-raker exposing the limited treatment options available to the mentally ill.  It's angering to know there were no good pills for the guy.

Actually, a lot is angering. 

Kerouac wonders faintly at his urge to murder gay men.  The absolute greatest wife they encounter is the one who stays in bed and silently smiles when they rudely wake her up to drink until dawn with her husband. 

"The Beats were single-handedly responsible for feminism," Jenny quipped.  But I think measuring the exact distance from that quip to the unsnarky truth would be a good senior thesis topic, if you're looking for one.

Part 3 Chapter 4 details the performance of an African American jazz trumpet player in San Francisco — how he commits himself body and soul to his performance, transfixes his audience, eventually finds the essence of the global moment as embodied in the room at that instant, and everybody recognizes it.

Moriarty and Paradise get to hang with the guy for a few precious minutes, during which Moriarty wants the black musician to go find his wife and hand her over to them — these drunk white tourists — to fuck.  The musician politely declines and the meeting comes to an end.

----

My will flagging, I was close to giving up with only 30 pages to go, so Jenny offered to read the next chapter to me aloud.  It turned out to be Part 4 Chapter 5 — the whorehouse chapter.

Wise wife.  If you need to read On the Road, go with someone on a long car trip and take turns reading and driving.

When read aloud, of course, Kerouac's lyricism greases the skids a bit.  His voice is unmistakable in the book's grander passages on the meaning of the land and the night and the road, but the more mundane plot points — how much money we had, who drove, where we found a pay phone — have a rhythm of their own.

And read aloud, the deadpan jokes are funnier.  Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise are idiots, and Kerouac seems to acknowledge this more readily as you roll the language on your tongue. Ask your wife to help you.

"Man," said Dean to me, "ain't this a nice way to spend an afternoon. It's so much cooler than Denver poolhalls. Victor, you got gurls? Where? A donde?" he cried in Spanish. "Dig it, Sal, I'm speaking Spanish."

When it came out in 1957, this spoken quality of On the Road must've been one of its many startling elements that aren't as startling today. 

As another survival strategy to get me through the reading, I went back to Tom Waits' early stuff, listening to that startle that so animated Waits in the 1970's.  Foreign Affairs, for example, careens between Kerouac and Raymond Chandler — sometimes from line to line. 

Jenny, who is vastly better read than I am, nodded.   She noted that if you go back and read some of the books that got Pulitzers at mid-century, and the books they thought were The Great Novels of the past, they're often horrible.  Unreadable, ponderous, stultifying.  She always keeps some genre fiction around — mysteries, detective novels, horror. 

The Beats and the pulp writers, Jenny reminds me, wrote books you actually want to read.  I think Tom Waits and Bob Dylan before him were beneficiaries of that democratization of artistically ambitious writing.  They also vastly expanded it beyond poetry and the novel.

Allen Ginsberg famously said Dylan took on "an artistic challenge to see if great art can be done on a jukebox. And he proved that it can."  In some sense, it was Ginsberg and Kerouac themselves who had proved it can.  The song "Jack & Neal" from Foreign Affairs is almost like Cliff Notes for On the Road set to music. 

If you wanted to write an album for the ears of Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg — one that would actually impress those men personally — you could do worse than Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde.  Then again, those albums have held up better than On the Road over time, so maybe their goal was to surpass rather than impress.

As soon as it hit the streets, On the Road was apparently made to carry more baggage than it could bear — like Kerouac himself, they say. He didn't know what he was unleashing when he typed it out and, like most books, it's better the more you can see it as a gesture made in its moment. It's an innocent thing, On the Road, for all its malfeasance. 

It again brings me face-to-face with the mindset of young people after WWII, possessed as they were by the knowledge that the whole damned century so far had been badly muffed, a gutter ball, and the options looking forward were pretty vapid.

Everybody could see that young people's disillusionment was about to hit the fan, and the Beats were either lucky or unlucky enough to be there, trying to capture where their heads were at.  Though they worked hard to get famous, they were more sucked into their fame by prevailing anxieties.

There are agonies involved in reading On the Road, but the past needs more attention and explication as it recedes, not less. 

The book broke open several crates of valuable material I'd almost forgotten I had — early Waits, Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound, Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good, and much else.  My earliest toddler-memory of the public life of the nation pertains to the Funky Chicken dance craze, and I feel a need to revisit the lessons of earlier eras again and again.

It also turns out that Jack Kerouac and Frank Cloutier were born in the same town, and I'm now wondering if, God help me, the next book I read might be Visions of Gerard.

       

_

Rollingstone out on Highway 61

Along Highway 61 on your way out of Minnesota, you pass two towns called Minnesota City and Rollingstone. Their histories began with a Utopian crackpot and his followers, who soon became his victims in one of the more ghastly episodes in the state's history.

 

The Rollingstone Colony was a little like the Donner Party, if a lot less famous. It also reminds me a bit of the Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre, and certainly adds a new dimension to the song "Like a Rolling Stone."

 

In 1851, a New York printer persuaded a group of New York professionals to join a Utopian community. They would start fresh in a well-planned city out west in the health-promoting climate of the new Minnesota Territory.  The town was to be called Rollingstone.

The leader went west first to found the beautiful city, and when 400 people followed him, they were surprised to find him stuck in a swamp. The women and children slept in a large tent, the men in gopher pits.  About three quarters of them soon died in the epidemics that swept the settlement.  

Wait. Come to think of it, that's more or less how I came to live here too ... 

Anyway, the survivors founded Minnesota City.  A small village two miles away is today called Rollingstone. Pinning down which of the two towns was the location of the Rollingstone Colony and how exactly they relate to each other historically would take more digging than I've done.

In any case, I'm thinking more about Bob Dylan and the mid-1960's.

 

It seems hard to believe that a Minnesotan would write a song called "Like A Rolling Stone" — a song about what it's like to find yourself all alone and boondoggled out on the new frontier — and that he'd put it on an album called Highway 61 Revisited without knowing anything whatsoever about the story of the Rollingstone Colony.  

But then, a lot of true things are also hard to believe. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that Dylan seemed preternaturally relevant — that his empathetic imagination would insinuate itself convincingly beyond what seems possible. I've written about that before.  

Maybe it's all a coincidence, but it's worth doing the legwork to understand how well-known this incident could've been to Dylan in the early 1960's. My research time is booked at the moment.

I also don't know if anybody has ever asked Bob when, if ever, he first heard about the Rollingstone Colony down on Highway 61.

    

     

Sources:

Cathy Wurzer's just-published book, Tales of the Road: Highway 61, provides an efficient telling in two pages.  She also talked about it today on Minnesota Public Radio.

Christopher M. Johnson's article in Minnesota History (49:140-148) provides much detail on how the community got to Minnesota.

_

 

Barack Obama: Secret Banjoist? - UPDATE!

In late July, I wrote a "fake news" item about Barack Obama trying to appeal to fans of Oldtime music.

Well ... now Barack Obama really is, in fact, trying to appeal to fans of Oldtime music (my consulting fee is in the mail, I'm quite certain).  

To wit, Ralph Stanley — best known as the elderly "Oh Death" guy on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack — has recorded a radio endorsement to run in southwestern Virginia.

The area is hotly contested in the presidential race, and was also the home of many pioneers of the style today called "Oldtime" — Tommy Jarrell, Henry Whitter, The Carter Family, The Stonemans, and many, many, more.

I wrote that dorky fake news item because I kept doing double-takes at photos of Obama at a meeting of NCLR, which looks a hell of a lot like NLCR, which to Oldtime fans is as immediately recognizable as NASA or FBI. After a little slap-dash Photoshop work (above), I was in business.

Several years ago, I drove to Moorehead, Minnesota, and stayed at a Red Roof Inn just to see my first concert by Mike Seeger, cofounder of the NLCR.  At the end of the concert, Mike said he was going to go sit at the CD table and press the flesh. 

He'd just been touring with Ralph Stanley, you see, who stays at the CD table until the last dog dies — and Seeger saw that Stanley sells a lot of CDs that way.  After about 50 years in show business, Mike was apparently still learning from old Ralph Stanley. 

_

Three Vignettes on Music and Geography

 

John Cohen signs his book of Dylan photos, Young Bob
Minneapolis, April 15, 2007

  

#1
  
I heard John Cohen tell a story.  It was at a private party, so I'm not certain it's appropriate to write about here. But ... but ... it was such a GOOD story.

As I remember it, at least, he was teaching or lecturing a couple years back at a college in North Carolina.  There, he discussed his work in the late 1950s, finding old people in the hills of Madison County, North Carolina, who still sang very old ballads without instrumental accompaniment.  They just opened their mouths and sang 500-year-old songs, all alone.  It had a spooky, lonesome, ancient-sounding effect.  

And in those 1950's, that style seemed to be dying right before Cohen's eyes as the old folks themselves died and their grandchildren were passionately seized by jukebox rock 'n roll.  Cohen, he felt sure, was capturing this music's death mask at the instant of its extinction.

After the lecture, a young woman in the class came up and told Cohen that her family was from rural North Carolina and was still singing these old ballads in this same way.  The tradition had, in fact, survived and was thriving, having been passed down to her through many generations of her family.  She even sang a little for Cohen to show him what she meant.

Cohen was puzzled, knowing that he and people who took an interest in this work had scoured every inch of those hills, looking under every rock in all of Appalachia trying to find the last remnants of this folk tradition.  Those hills had been picked absolutely clean decades ago.

On a wild hunch, Cohen asked her if anybody in her family had ever gone to the University of California at Berkeley, where Cohen's work on these ballads became very popular.  Oh sure, she said.  Everybody in her family went to Berkeley — her dad, all her aunts and uncles, her grandparents, her family pets, and so on and so forth, etc.  I seem to remember she was about to go there herself.

This young woman and her family were indeed from North Carolina, and this style of singing was indeed a folk tradition from their part of the country.  And it was indeed being passed down to her via her family, one generation to the next.  Being young, and perhaps not a history major, she neither knew nor much cared that the singing style had gone into exile in Berkeley for a little while before coming back home to the North Carolina hills.  

And she was not wrong.  The authentic bearers of real folk traditions — if you wanna talk that way — almost never know exactly how the music comes down to them.  In her case, this folk music is thriving in her family as a folk tradition, just as sure as it ever did in anybody else's family.  She had plenty reason to be proud.  She was not wrong.  She was right.

#2

In the 1950's and 1960's, Barry Ancelet grew up in Louisiana speaking Cajun French.  He studied the French language in Louisiana high schools and colleges, where teachers always insisted that Cajun French wasn't French at all — that it literally had nothing to do with the French language.  Ancelet accepted this without too much worry.  

And he never paid much attention to Cajun music, even though (or because) it was always around.  In many similar stories I've heard, the protagonists often think of the traditional music they grew up with as low — a weakness of ignorant country trash.  In his article in the great collection Sounds of the South (which is where I get this information), Ancelet isn't explicit about his own early attitudes toward the music.

In any case, in the early 1970's he spent an academic year in France, where he felt homesick and isolated.  One momentous night in Paris, at a concert of Cajun music, he underwent a shattering conversion experience.  He realized that he'd been systematically trained to be ignorant of himself and his own surroundings.  Everything he thought he knew about his own language and his own culture turned out to be crazy.

He immediately sensed what he should do with the rest of his life — he went back to Louisiana and ultimately became one of the founders of the academic study of Cajun and Acadian culture.  Tonight, I see that Wikipedia tells us he's from Louisiana and what he does now, but doesn't mention any conversion experience — least of all in France.

#3

In the past several months of my research into the Moonshiners Dance, the trail has finally led me to the mostly unknown, yet much-maligned traditional music of my various homelands.

In the past few weeks, for example, I've been listening with mounting enthusiasm to Down Home Dairyland.  Originally a radio show, I know it as 40 episodes released on CD, with an accompanying listener's guide. 

 

The hosts are Jim Leary and Rick March — the Gilbert and Gubar of polka music — two folklorists who've been exploring the traditional and ethnic music of the Upper Midwest since the late 1970s. 

Their work, and that of other musicians and scholars in their field, is rapidly being hauled aboard here at the Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues. 

For now, I draw your attention to program #21 of Down Home Dairyland, which deals with the ethnic music of Stevens Point, Wisconsin.   Apparently, if you walked into a hall in Stevens Point today, you'd have a good chance of hearing polka that's audibly and vividly Polish, feeling a little like the crooked-metered concertina recordings made by Polish immigrants in the 1920's. 

And why not?  The area was heavily settled by Poles in the mid-1800's and again in the early 1900's.  Wouldn't the ethnic music of Stevens Point sound pretty damned Polish?

Not necessarily, it turns out.  In the mid-20th century, the sound that dominated among Stevens Point polka bands was the German-sounding oompah style popularized by Minnesota bandleaders Whoopee John Wilfahrt and Harold Loeffelmacher.  Their styles influenced bands far and wide as Whoopee John, especially, became a kind of regional hero like Charlie Poole did in the southeast.

By the late 1950's, though, some younger Stevens Pointers grew weary of the "arranged and mannered" German sound and the sedentary stage presence of the bands.  The more authentically European Polish styles they found among bandleaders from Chicago and Milwaukee were aggressive, improvised, visceral — they felt more like rock 'n roll, and more authentic at the same time.  

So, there was a Revival — Leary and March call it a "resurgence" and a "revitalization" — of explicitly Polish music among Polish bands around Stevens Point.  I imagine that, today, those mid-century revialists are easily old enough to have great grandchildren who might know only that their family came from Poland in the 1850's, and that they're learning to play Polish styles from great grandpa. 

I won't try to squeeze my own sudden attentiveness to the ethnic-American styles of the Upper Midwest into a little vignette.  Maybe that's for you to do.  But I've been brought back north precisely because I wanted to contribute to the understanding of Harry Smith's influential collection of southern music. 

 

I've seen that pattern over and over again in other people, and one of the things that surprises me most is my own surprise that it's happening to me.  

_

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (part three)

This is the third in a series about the first seven seconds of "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Saint Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra.  It was included in the Anthology of American Folk Music, sometimes called the Harry Smith Anthology.
See also Part One and Part Two.

Tonight, the Bedlam welcomes the Republicans with a circus (link)

         

At the start of the Moonshiner's Dance, the leader of The Victoria Café Orchestra grandly calls out to you, the listener, and he renames you "Mister Larson."

I've explained why I think Mister Larson was probably not a specific person but a cultural caricature — a generic audience member being welcomed into The Victoria Café.

He's a butter-and-egg man, in other words, getting a Texas Guinan routine in a 1920s speakeasy.

Hey hey, Mister Larson!

Thinking over questions like Mister Larson — trying to reconstruct the meanings the recording would have had in Minnesota in 1927 — has fundamentally rejiggered the Moonshiner's Dance in my imagination. 

And those reconstructed meanings, I've come to decide, reverberate across the meaning and argument of the Anthology itself.

Today, as the Republican National Convention slouches toward Saint Paul, I insist that Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra were definitely NOT "from the Minnesota area," as the 1997 liner notes to the Anthology "assumed."

They were not even from Minneapolis.  They were vividly, and elaborately, and specifically from the city of Saint Paul. Should it surprise us that the Moonshiner's Dance is about its place and time, and that the geographical specifics matter to the music?

As with Dylan and Hibbing, if we want to understand the Moonshiner's Dance, we need to understand a little about the history of Saint Paul.

—

In the early 1900's, the city of Saint Paul operated under a semi-official policy called the O'Connor System.  It's goal was to maintain the city as a safe haven for organized crime, with the understanding that major crimes would be committed outside city limits.

I've chosen these words carefully. They sound like they might be some sort of local jack-a-lope folklore of the sort fed to tourists visiting any city. They aren't.

The O'Connor System's method was this: protect all criminals from prosecution under the conditions that they (A) announce themselves upon arrival in the city, (B) pay protection money bribes, and (C) limit themselves to vice and conspiracy within city limits. 

Violators of this compact were treated harshly, either by the city's legal infrastructure, or by its criminal infrastructure, or both.

And benefit they did, for more than 30 years. In 1932, for example, 21% of all bank robberies in the USA occurred in Minnesota, but exactly zero occurred within Saint Paul's city limits.

Liquor, prostitution, and gambling (and so, music) flourished within the city limits, and residents enjoyed them with gusto and relative impunity.  So did visiting tourists. Larry Craig could have tapped his foot all day and all night.

—

Chief O'Connor's system was not a huge break from the past.

Saint Paul began as a little encampment on the Mississippi around Fort Snelling, providing the fort's soldiers with all the comforts not issued to them by the government. 

In 1838, thanks to "beastly scenes of intoxication among the soldiers of this garrison," the fort's administrators had had enough — especially of a moonshiner named Pierre Parrant, known affectionately as Pig's Eye.

The little village was burned to the ground and its residents were moved eight miles upstream.  The new location was called Pigs Eye for several years, until its first Catholic priest proposed the name Saint Paul.

As it grew, the city continue to focus on trade and transportation, unlike industry-heavy Minneapolis. Brewing was the main manufacturing activity in Saint Paul, and a vice economy was supported by, and supported, these other sectors.

Prohibition, in particular, did not go well for the Feds in Saint Paul.  The city — with its profoundly anti-prohibition population, its proximity to the Canadian border, and its great regional transportation system — was one of the wettest places in America.

Businessmen from all over the US knew Saint Paul was a good destination for business trips.  Truly, what happened in Saint Paul stayed in Saint Paul. 

—

It was Mister Larson, and not the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, who was from "the Minnesota area."

Saint Paul was insular — a cultural island — and thus a peculiar state capital. Most Saint Paulites had ethical qualms about traveling and spending money beyond city limits, with Minneapolis in particular being another planet, and a hostile one. 

Larger and wealthier Minneapolis was, especially in the popular imagination, a straight-laced, class-stratified, Republican town of Lutheran factory owners and non-union workers. The workers were Scandinavian, even more so than the rest of the state, and the owners were old-stock Yankees.

By contrast, especially in the popular imagination, Saint Paul was an island of drunken, unionized, Irish-Catholic Democrats who were not enamored of the law.

And the popular imagination was tolerably close to the truth.

Saint Paul's political machine was overwhelmingly Irish, and the city's many Yankees, Germans, and Scandinavians figured they may as well be Irish too, given the circumstances. In Saint Paul, ethnic diversity could have a strange way of drawing the city even closer together, increasing its insularity.

—

Hey hey, Mister Larson! 

So Saint Paul welcomed a generic son of Lars — a pleasure-seeking visitor from the more culturally conservative city of Minneapolis or from the mining and farming communities across "the Minnesota area."

Here we are now — entertain us. 

After one strong whiff of cultural history, the Moonshiner's Dance morphs into the shape of countless other recordings, one after another.

Viva Las Vegas, New York New York, I Love LA — the Moonshiner's Dance is an advertising jingle. 

In the shadow of its richer and more sober neighbor across the Mississippi River, Saint Paul knew its place and was not afraid to advertise. The name of the Victoria Cafe is right there on the record label, as are the cafe's main attractions of moonshine and dancing. 

Suddenly, I hear a lot of Rum And Coca-Cola — a lot of working for the Yankee dollar — in the Moonshiners Dance.  Whether the Andrew Sisters' version or Lord Invader's, who's to say?

It's a cynical thing — a small, casual violence — to rename your listener with a cultural stereotype. Living and working in a place like Saint Paul, a satirical ear must've come easily to a cafe musician like Frank Cloutier.

So Cloutier makes it seem natural to me, for the first time, that F. Scott Fitzgerald was from Saint Paul — both men must've seen the Jazz Age in something like the way a blackjack dealer sees Las Vegas.

Mister Larson now becomes Mister Jones, the unprepared square of Bob Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man.  In the Moonshiner's Dance, you, Mister Larson, have sneaked into The Victoria Cafe the same way you, Mister Jones, were about to find yourself squarely in the middle of Woodstock.

Suddenly, as Larson and Jones stroll into the Victoria Cafe together, Cloutier's Jazz Age comes into view as Dylan's sixties, with their respective collisions of cultural whiplash and bootlegged intoxicants.

—

But for now, obviously, much of this oversteps the evidence I've shown you.  It's in the actual music later in the recording, for example, that you really get to know Cloutier's satirical cynicism.  All in good time.  For now, I think I know who Mister Larson is and what he meant in his place and moment. 

Now I have to write about the meaning of the other, unintelligible part of the introduction — and about the first seven seconds as a whole.  It has to be done before I put this series of entries to rest.  In the last installment, I'll try to work out some of what I can say about what I can't understand.

_

Selected References (more than any other blog!)

Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place by Mary Lethert Wingerd — The best book on the Moonshiner's Dance so far, and she may not even know the recording exists.  Hugely important.  I've made Saint Paul sound more like a riot, but Wingerd emphasizes the compacts and balances and civic identities that made Saint Paul a great place to live.

John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks' Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936 by Paul Maccabee — The title makes it sound like it could be about any city.  Every place thinks it was an Al Capone hangout.  But Maccabee has written, in a sense, a chronicle of the consequences of the O'Connor System.  Fun read, too. 

They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State's Ethnic Groups edited by June Drenning Holmquist — An unbelievable, exhaustive treatment of every damned ethnic group that ever set foot in the state.  That it was done at all is dumbfounding. 

  

_

A Geography of the Anthology

Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music as a Google Map
by The Celestial Monochord



For two and a half years, I've tried to explain to people why I'm dedicating so much time, energy, and earnings to researching "The Moonshiners Dance," recorded in Minnesota by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra in 1927. 

It's impossible to express in a few words.

Usually, I've waved my hands in the air, describing a hypothetical Google Map showing the geographical origin of each cut on Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music. 

On such a map, "The Moonshiners Dance" would stand out like a sore thumb, completely alone as the only selection from anywhere near "us" — me and the person I'm boring.  In the past week, I asked myself, seriously, why does it have to be hypothetical? 

And so, Google Maps and I present A Geography of the Anthology.

The Methodology of a Geography of the Anthology

In creating the map, I used the 1997 Anthology liner notes and some Wikipedia to choose a location that most shaped each Anthology selection.  This was not easy, especially limiting myself to one "pin" per recording. 

But I gave it a shot and didn't much fret about it.

For example, Henry Thomas' work is a profound contribution exactly because it's so richly about being unstuck from any particular place — it's all about the road.  I put him in his home town in the state of Texas.

Many of the Memphis performers were from other communities in the same region, but it matters that the Memphis Jug Band is from Memphis, regardless of where its members were born.  So there they are on Beale Street.

I've made an attempt to be accurate but not precise.  Look very closely at Memphis.  Nine Anthology selections belong in Memphis, in all fairness.  I've stuck my pins every block or two all the way down Beale Street, even though I don't really know where in Memphis these people did their thing.

Sometimes, it was tempting to emphasize the isolation of "The Moonshiners Dance" by skooching my decisions southward. 

The leader of the Cincinnati Jug Band, according to the 1997 liner notes, "was apparently from around the Alabama-Georgia state border." But it would've been too absurd to follow such vague instructions just to keep the Cincinnati Jug Band out of Cincinnati.  

The two selections by Chicago church congregations complicated my visual argument.  Those congregations and their recordings are products of the "great migration" of African Americans from the South to the great industrial cities of the North.  In a sense, they illustrate how far north the southern culture represented in the Anthology managed to flow.

I could have placed those congregations in the southern states where their leaders were born, but that would have been so wrong on too many levels.  For one, the music came out of a very distinctly Chicago experience.  I decided to trust the viewer to understand what those pins represent.

Ken Maynard was probably the hardest to place.

He was raised somewhere in Indiana, but "claimed Texas as his home," according to the liner notes.  He traveled around as a rodeo and circus performer, worked as a real cowboy, and went to Hollywood in 1923, where he was billed as "the American Boy's Favorite Cowboy."  His photo makes him look like a little Midwestern kid playing dress-up.

So where do you put Ken Maynard?  A random spot in Indiana?  A random spot in Texas or in "The West"?  In Hollywood?  I decided that his song describes an image of the West in the mind of somebody who was from somewhere else.  I placed him as an Indiana boy dreaming of cowboys and Indians.  Maybe you have another idea.



_

Hey Hey Mister Larson! (Part Two)

This is the second in a series about the first seven seconds of "Moonshiner's Dance," recorded in Saint Paul in 1927 by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra.  It was included in the Anthology of American Folk Music, sometimes called the Harry Smith Anthology.
See also Part One and Part Three.

Early in my research into "The Moonshiner's Dance," I knew the identity of Mister Larson would be easy to uncover.  It's the low-hanging fruit. 

After all, Frank Cloutier addresses him the instant the recording begins. Hey hey, Mr. Larson! 

I knew Larson would wind up being a musician in Frank's band, or the owner of the Victoria Cafe, and I'd write up a neat biography of this Larson guy and explain why he's so prominently placed at the start of Frank's only recording.

 

Today, deep into my third year of research, it hasn't turned out that way. 

 

I've seen hundreds of thousands of advertisements, newspaper articles, obituaries, theater programs, union newsletters, graves, birth and death certificates, draft cards, photos, letters, and much else.

 

I'm a resident of the Twin Cities of 1927.  Driving around St. Paul, I once saw a product of the WPA and caught myself thinking, "Hey, THAT'S new."

Living like this — hanging around the dance music scene of Prohibition-era Saint Paul— I keep encountering the same guys over and over.  I notice when their wives have kids.  I know when they finally get their own bands.  I hear about it when a good pitcher joins their kittenball team. 

 

And I'm sorry.  I don't know any Larson — at least nobody associated with Frank Cloutier or the local dance scene or the management of the Victoria Cafe. 

 

—

 

Maybe I'm not hearing the muffled 1927 recording correctly.  Maybe it isn't "Mister Larson" at all, but something else.  Here's an mp3 of the first few seconds.

I briefly considered whether Frank might instead be saying "Mister Nelson" as in Gordon Nelson, the drummer who seems to have played on "The Moonshiner's Dance."  For a bit longer, I considered the Cafe's manager at the time of the recording, Sammy Markus. 

 

But listening again to the recording, I find they just won't do.  Hey hey Mr. Markus.  Hey hey Mr. Markus.  Hey hey Mr. Markus. 

 

No.  It's "Hey hey Mr. Larson."

As a last resort, I scoured the entries for "Larson" and "Larsen" in the St. Paul and Minneapolis city directories, which they started to call "phone books" once everybody got phones. 

 

Ordinarily, I adore city directories, intimate and teasing as they are.  But searching every Larson in the Twin Cities directories is tedious work — there are roughly 2700 entries in the 1927 editions and they have to be scanned line by line, by hand and eye. 

St. Paul is striking for its lack of prospects. I found one music teacher named Bertha Larson who was presumably not a Mister. 

There are more prospects in Minneapolis.  There was a piano mover named Gustaf Larson and a piano tuner named Martin Larson — unlikely professions for Mister Larson, even though Frank Cloutier was a keyboardist. There was also a movie house manager, a cashier at a dance hall, a radio salesman, and another woman music teacher.

There was a family of musical Larsons, and I've done a longitudinal study of them — followed them around town like a shamus.  So far, none of these Larsons seems to have a connection to Frank or to the Victoria Cafe or even to St. Paul.  They were not well known, and other than their name, nothing seems relevant about them. 

The 1930 census counted about 11,900 individuals named Larsen or Larson in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, the counties of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Limiting myself to the right age and gender brings the number down, but I have to face the fact that I may never find the Larson that Frank had in mind.

—

One last prospect has occasionally troubled my mind for about two years.  In 1927, the leader of the Minneapolis Police Department's band was a cop called Curly Larson. 

I've tried to find out more about him, but so far, he's been a tough nut to crack, probably because of that Curly nickname. We know he was probably bald.  I'll keep searching.

But no matter the details, it's a delicious idea. 

Smack in the middle of Prohibition, the leader of the Minneapolis policeman's band puts on his uniform every Friday and Saturday night, crosses the river into St. Paul, and plays "The Moonshiner's Dance" at the Victoria Cafe with Frank Cloutier and his boys. 

Playing that soused polka in uniform on the bandstand ... I desperately want him to have done this. There is exactly zero evidence that he did.

But could he have?  Could a Minneapolis cop have played such a drunken, reeling tribute to bootleg liquor without being fired, or even arrested?  Especially if he was prominently featured on a 78 rpm record?  And might a St. Paul officer have made the same trip to Minneapolis, maybe in a pickled cop exchange program?

During many long days in archives and libraries, I've often bounced these questions about Curly Larson off my findings.  Partly thanks to that habit, I've slowly evolved from being the archivist of "The Moonshiners Dance" to being its cultural historian.

The shift felt complete the day I finally decided to trust my findings about all these Larsons.  There's always so much more work to be done, but so far, nobody has presented himself as the likely Mister Larson.

Therefore, according to my current research results, there probably was no Mister Larson. Or rather, there were many thousands of him.  I've come to suspect that Mister Larson is a product of Frank Cloutier's imagination.  He's the generic audience member — just your typical Minnesotan off the street. 

Hey hey Mister Larson!

If so, this would make him a founding citizen of Lake Wobegon. Like Garrison Keillor's townspeople, he's a caricature invented for the sake of Minnesota humor.  To this day, Mister Larson still lives next door to Pastor Inkvist and across the street from Carl Krebsbach.

It would also make Mister Larson an ancestor of Mister Jones, Bob Dylan's main character in "Ballad of a Thin Man."

Just as with Dylan's character, the inclination is to imagine Mister Larson as somebody other than you.  But Frank and Bob both address the listener — both are talking to and about you, no matter what name they give you.  You are Mister Larson.

Something is happening, therefore, and you don't know what it is.  To understand who Mister Larson was, we have to sort out what he might have meant to somebody like Frank Cloutier in a place like Saint Paul at a time like 1927. 

We have to reconstruct a meaning that no longer exists.  We have to do cultural history. 

I'll present some initial findings in Part Three.

_

Barack Obama: Secret Banjoist?

Obama interrupts "Hopalong Peter" at a New Lost City Ramblers concert

   

In another clear sign that his campaign is in financial trouble, presidential hopeful Barack Obama is now fundraising among devotees of the southern Appalachian stringband music known as "oldtime." 

Apparently conceding bluegrass donors to his Republican rival, Obama's campaign is appealing directly to less affluent and less numerous oldtime contributors.

Senator Joe Biden, asked for comment while attending a joint New Lost City Ramblers concert / Obama rally, said "This makes perfect sense. I mean, you got the first mainstream oldtime stringband who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guys. I mean, that's a storybook, man!"

According to John Edwards, also in attendance, "This is a great idea! You know, Kelly Harrell was a textile worker, just like my fath -- Ow! Hey! Ow! Not the face! Watch the hair! Security!"

The oldtime demographic has been ignored by major candidates ever since its support doomed the otherwise front-running candidacy of Henry A. Wallace in 1948. 

Understandably, Obama's sudden embrace of the clawhammer banjo-playing set has left even some campaign staff puzzled.

"You know how you tell the difference between a bluegrass band and an oldtime band?" asked a high-level adviser to the Obama campaign on the condition of anonymity.

"The oldtime band is skinnier than the bluegrass band," he said, citing the previous testimony of Garrison Keillor.

To appeal to oldtime jammers, the campaign has even changed its official theme song more than forty-two times. 

"First it was Sally Ann, and then we changed it to Sally Goodin, and then Sally in the Garden," said the exasperated campaign insider. "But the oldtimers didn't even notice! Apparently, they can't even tell their own songs apart!"

"Barack has got to put an end to this!  He has to lift his foot up!"

    

  Editor's Note: There is a (real-life, no joke) update to this article!

_