I’m a little sad today to announce a hiatus here at Prairie Hymnal. The heart, soul, and energy of the site has moved, for now, into a dissertation project. The PH project has meant a lot to us over the year and a half that we’ve worked on it as Cody and I have had the opportunity to meet, work, and make friends with a number of wonderful musicians. We’re grateful for their association and time and wish them all the best.

When the dissertation is done, I hope to rev this space back up. As I mention, the goals of the site–to explore the notion of roots and music and think about the way that music ties us in to the places, people, and purpose of our pasts–is now one of the guiding elements of my dissertation. I’m writing there about the rhetorics of America’s first folk renaissance: 30s-era vernacular performance, oral/aural history, and the politics of sonic “authenticity.” When I emerge, I think that I’ll be set up to make a much stronger contribution to the group of smart folks on the internet writing about roots music and American cultural and political history.

Until then,

Jon

P.S. Special thanks to Cody C. for being a partner on this project from day one and also to Dan B. for help on the initial setup of the site. These are best kind of dudes.

Also, if you please, you can keep up with all of us on twitter:

Jon - @jwstone.

Cody - @CodyJCaudill

Dan - @HeyMrBass

A fantastic mini-documentary came across my desk today. In it, you’ll find one of our favorite artists Damien Jurado talking about his music and his city, Seattle — including details about when, where, and how the songs “Nothing is the News” and “Yuma, Arizona” were written. The 25-minute doc is situated squarely in the space that Prairie Hymnal is committed to: one that explores roots in terms of place and shared cultural experience.

You can find the video by visiting BYUtv’s Audio-Files page which also features similar short-form documentaries on Low and Trampled By Turtles among others.

As you’ve probably heard, Woody Guthrie would have been 100 years old last Saturday. Though I’ve been a fan of Guthrie’s for years, I feel like that relationship is still in its infancy. I’ve just proposed to write a chapter in my dissertation about him and his connection to the labor movement in the 30s, so that relationship is about to get much more intimate.

I celebrated Woody Guthrie’s centennial by teaching my kids all of the verses to the songs “This Land is Your Land” and “So Long, its Been Good to Know Yuh” and we sang them over and over again all last week. I’ve caught them several times in their rooms or riding their bikes singing Woody’s lyrics to themselves. They love those songs. I can’t wait to teach them a bunch more.

Despite all the singing, I’m still combing through all of the articles published last week to celebrate Guthrie’s legacy. I’ve collected as many as I could here. Let me know if there are any good ones that I missed.

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On Woody Guthrie’s Centennial, Celebrating the Life, Politics & Music of the “Dust Bowl Troubadour” - Interview with Nora Guthrie (daughter), Anna Canoni (granddaughter) and Steve Earle on Democracy Now!

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From NPR

At 100, Woody Guthrie Still Resonates - Bradley Klein

The Mix: The Woody Guthrie Collection (via Folk Alley)

Fresh Air Celebrates Woody Guthrie at 100 (Interview with Jeff Place and Ed Cray)

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From No Depression

Woody Guthrie, Margorie, Mamma & Me: A Memory for the Woody Guthrie Centennial - Terry Roland

What Woody Guthrie Did - Kim Ruehl

Sara Lee Guthrie Talks Her Legacy, Her Family, and Where They Go From Here - Nancy Dunham

Interview: Archivist Jeff Place Discusses “Woody at 100″ (Smithsonian Folkways) - Chris Mateer

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Why Woody Guthrie Endures - Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic

‘Your Land,’ and Guthrie’s, Preserved - Larry Rohter, New York Times

Happy Birthday Woody Guthrie - Baron Lane, Twang Nation

In a 5th season episode, the astronaut hires the shaman-in-training, Ed, to put together a film festival to attract tourists to the small Alaskan town. Ed (who’s also a film-buff) decides to make it an Orson Welles festival. At one point Ed is watching Citizen Kane and Leonard (the shaman) asks how he can stand repeated viewings. Here’s their conversation:

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“You’ve seen this movie a number of times?”

“Of course”, Ed says.

“Yet you want to see it again. Why?”

Ed replies, “It’s a great story, it’s beautiful. It’s fearless. You know that quote in the beginning where Kane says it might be fun to run a newspaper? Well, I think that’s the way Orson Welles approached this. It might be fun to make a movie. He didn’t know what he was doing and yet he did something that was perfect. Makes you think about what’s possible.”

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Welles did something that was perfect. And I’d agree. But what is that?

The episode got me thinking about perfection. It’s such a subjective assessment, yet when something is perfect — when it hits all the right notes — there is consensus.

Last week I posted about the Beach Boys song “God Only Knows” — widely acknowledged for its perfection. But why? What are the criteria?

I came up with five standards.

• Time-tested – the Perfect Song has to be at least a generation old, and the perfection exponent increases after every new generation passes in continued agreement about the song.
• Wide Popular Appeal – Nearly everyone has to agree that it’s a wonderful song. As we move away from the mono-culture that existed well into the 90s, popular appeal is becoming more difficult to parse. Since so-called perfection under the previous determinate needs to be at least a generation old, we’ll let critics 25 years from now decide if Bon Iver’s “Holocene” or Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” is closer. Tough call. Probably both.
• Emotion – Here’s where subjectivity reigns, but paradoxically, the ability to consistently draw emotion from the listener is also the Perfect Song’s most arguable (and provable) quality. The Perfect Song captures and represents its intended emotion without flaw.
• Repeatability – The Perfect Song, within reason (and as Ed points out as a moot point above), bears repeating.
• Sing-along-ability – You can’t help yourself.

Right now NPR is working on putting together a list of universally awesome albums or “Albums Everyone Can Love” — a noble pursuit — but I thought it would be fun to get a list of perfect songs together. I’d love for some help here.

Other than the Beach Boys tune, at the top of the list for me is Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered”. It meets all of the above criteria which includes the fact that I cannot hear the song without smiling and singing along. It’s my go-to happy song.

What else?

As a fan of Brian Wilson’s genius, I never paid much attention to Carl, but that changed recently when I went YouTube diving for old Beach Boys live performances. I learned that it’s Carl’s voice, not Brian’s, on “God Only Knows” (one of my top-five favorite songs of all time) and he also contributes prominently to “Good Vibrations”. In the later period of the band (post 1966) he moved into the lead singer roll, offering an anecdote for the cheesiness of Love and bringing some sanity back to the Wilson name. He sings on many of the songs on Smiley Smile and Wild Honey.

Carl was diagnosed with cancer in 1997, but continued to tour even after becoming very ill and weak. He would sit during his performances, an oxygen tank nearby for use between songs. During “God Only Knows”, though, he would respectfully stand. Pretty cool.

Here’s Carl with the band doing the tune in 1980.

It’s been a while. Too long. I’ve had to take a bit of a hiatus on the blog here in order to get my dissertation project situated and underway. I’m pleased to say that it is all but approved. I’ll be writing — big surprise — about rhetoric, music, the 1930s and Alan Lomax’s archive. So big projects loom large in my future, but I’m committing now to more frequent posts here at Prairie Hymnal — for sanity’s sake. We are working on booking more artists for our video sessions and will have some exciting news on that front here soon.

In the meantime we’ve got summer. Indeed, it’s summer and I’m trying to soak it up as best I can.

 I work in an office where the oldies radio station plays all day and some of those tunes are so sweet I don’t care that I hear them over and over. Songs like Franki Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” and the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby“, Sonny Robinson and the Miracles “Tears of a Clown” and the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” — great tunes that somehow never get old. Oh, and Lighter Shade of Pale! Amazing summer tune. It reminds me of fireworks and the Wonder Years.

It got me thinking about this old post that I put together for Ryan over at Muzzle of Bees a few years ago. It seemed like a good time to revisit it. We carry around our musical roots as personal histories and sometimes, as is the case with the songs I’ve listed above, we carry around the musical genealogies of our culture. I’m intrigued by this still.

 Here’s the piece, edited slightly for Prairie Hymnal. If you have a moment, post a comment about your own root system…

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In 1991, Boyz II Men and DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince put out the unforgettable singles Motownphilly and Summertime. If you were 11 or 12 like I was when those tunes came out, those were THE songs, right? You know you loved them. That summer, though, with high school on the horizon, I abandoned them—openly disdained them even. I hid my cassette singles and in their place new, shiny CDs appeared with pale, British faces on them: from Boyz II Men to Boyz Don’t Cry faster than you can say goodbye to yesterday.

This ebb and flow of our musical interests is common, I think, and though it may not happen as frequently (or dramatically) as it did when we were kids, I think it’s fun to think about how what we listen to changes over the years. My musical tastes certainly have changed and expanded over the last decade. I suspect yours have too. And thank goodness, really.

I think the watershed moments of our musical pasts are important to reflect on.  What we listen to seems to be indicative of other shifts in our often tenuous world-views and brought about by other life changes, subtle or serious. No wonder songs and bands become both touchstones and course markers along the way.

A standout moment for me in the last ten years was when M. Ward and Jim James took the stage with Bright Eyes—Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis—during a 2005, pre-Monsters of Folk  Austin City Limits performance. I was in the midst of a shift that year and was looking to shows like ACL and podcasts like NPR’s All Songs Considered for nudges in new sonic directions. Bright Eyes is a force to be reckoned with, to be sure. Oberst was (then even more) strange and catlike and I remember being intrigued (if in a pseudo-literary sense) by his poem-song “Waste of Paint.” He also did a lovely waltz with Mogis on mandolin called “We Are Nowhere and It’s Now” from the critically acclaimed album I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning. But it was when M. Ward and Jim James came out and played songs from their respective main projects that ears perked. Ward played “O’Brien” — a great song from his now classic, break-through record End of Amnesia (2001). Next, Jim James played the My Morning Jacket tune “Golden” (from It Still Moves, 2003) with Mogis on pedal steel.  Something clicked. That Gibson, those chords, that melody, and the lyrics:

Watchin’ a stretch of road, miles of light explode.
Driftin’ off a thing I’d never done before…
Watchin’ a crowd roll in. Out go the lights, it begins.
A feelin’ in my bones I never felt before…

I watched and listened again and again. In the process, I discovered—from the first half of that episode—a little band called Wilco (tragically late, I know). And while I can’t trace back all of my current musical interests to that moment, it was very significant.

Tell us a little about your musical histories: What were the moments, songs, albums, artists, blogs, podcasts, tv shows etc. that brought on some kind paradigm shift in your musical world over the last five or ten years? How dramatic were your shifts? And, if you please, what brought on those shifts?

Before I dive back into Lomax, I wanted to acknowledge the passing of one of the world’s genius innovators, Mr. Earl Scruggs. As Noam Pickelny says in this short NYT video piece, he was the Babe Ruth of the banjo. His influence is immeasurable. He’ll be sorely missed.

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The Lomax archive got another huge press mention a few days, this time over at NPR. The story mentions the thousands of artifacts that have moved online but also makes mention of one of the things that I’ve been struggling with related to how to approach the enormous archive: Where do you start? It’s easy to jump over to the site and just throw a proverbial dart. You’ll find something to listen to after just a few clicks. That’s basically what I’ve been doing in my visits thus far. But accessing the “Global Jukebox” in all of its depth and breadth requires a more informed approach. What’s more, critically thinking through this digital space as both a historical repository for vernacular musics (that have been transfered from analog sources) as well as a product of Lomax’s very distinct kind of situated enthnographic practices (with all of his attendant personal and cultural baggage) should require a kind of guiding principle or method, at the very least. A thorough approach to accessing and understanding the archive could be the work of major academic studies — and surely there are those who are invested in scholarly ways.

But many of us are first and foremost interested in the music. In my posts, I’ll do my best to fall somewhere in the middle. While this archive is of scholarly interest to me (I just proposed to write a chapter of my dissertation on it), I’m also a music fan and am anxious to uncover gems and polish them up.

What I’m getting to here is a call for a more deliberate approach to the Cultural Equity archive. I’ll begin my own studied inquiry here, but would like to encourage others, popular and academic bloggers alike, to do the same. My plan is to start working chronologically and to move through the archive as a way of not only mapping Lomax’s career but also to get a sense for who his subjects were. What were their stories? How is their music a representation of those stories? What gets left out?

In short, I’m interested in the listening. My hope is that by listening closely to these artifacts, I’ll be able to piece together a larger narrative of both the importance of the archive itself, and also what our responsibilities as listeners are to that archive. I’ll have a few other resources to guide me including Lomax’s book and Szwed’s monograph,  but will also seek mainly to draw from the archive itself as a source for teaching me about what is there.

Now that I’ve made a case for a measured approach, I’m going to break with my new methodology immediately and point you towards this recording of Earl Scruggs with Lester Flatt and the Foggy Mountain Boys at the 1966 Newport Folk festival.

Here’s to hoping there are banjos in the foggy mountains beyond.

I’ve started poking around in what is available over at the Cultual Equity site but am only just starting to get a feel for the mountains of content there. I thought I’d start this week in a fairly recognizable place: Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton and his long-form interview/oral history with Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1938. At the time of the session, Morton’s career was in decline and the long interviews with Lomax gave the pianist a welcomed stage from which to voice his unique story, sometimes speaking, sometimes playing the piano. Having that keyboard under his fingers allowed Morton to punctuate the telling of his history with chords and melodies giving the story a multi-modal richness not possible in a typical interview. (It should be noted that Lomax’s approach to interviewing is not without criticism. The strengths and weaknesses of Lomax’s methods as an ethnographer will likely be a subject of many posts to come.)

As great as this session is — indeed, you can purchase the complete sessions (nine hours worth!) in a Grammy Winning box set from Rounder Records — this post is pointed specifically to the Radio Programs section of the Cultural Equity archive. Currently on the site, there are several hours worth of radio programs, spanning from the early 40s to the mid 50s, but Lomax’s radio presence stretched far beyond that. For now, check out the page’s first listing and you’ll find Lomax talking about and playing excerpts from the’38 sessions with Jelly Roll.

This initial crop of streaming radio programs give the archive visitor a sense for the immensity of what is currently available for streaming in the archive. Listening to each program leisurely might take months and these radio shows represent only the tip of the vast iceberg of holdings.

Frankly, I’m both excited and intimidated. There is so much to listen to, so much to learn.

*illustration by Brett Affrunti

WordPress and CR’s flash videos don’t get along, so find the video here.

The song “Clover Tune” is from the band’s new double album Haste Make | Hard Hearted Stranger and was produced by Anson Burtch. Anson has one of the best ears I know and is my go-to guy for all things bluegrass. Enjoy the video and be sure to check out both albums from MO’s Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz.

We’ll be back with much more regular blogging going forward. I’m especially excited about the recent announcement that the Lomax archive that I have talked about here before is now wide open. All of the archive’s 17,000 songs are now (or will be very shortly) available for streaming on the site. We’ll be exploring a song a week.