Chicago City Blues

NOTES:

William Ferris quoting Shelby Brown: 

One thing about Chicago, people told me that money was even growing on trees there. I went and got me two sacks to carry with me for that money tree in Chicago. I went there and my brother, he saw me with two sacks. He say, "Shelby, what you carrying them sacks for?"... He grabbed the sacks and throwed them in the garbage can and said, "Don't do that. You let the folks make a fool out of you. Chicago is a free place, but don't come looking for money on the tree. They'll know you ain't nothing but a country fool."

The story of migrating people from the Mississippi Delta into Chicago at the promise of prosperity reminds me of how my parents ventured into the city and to the United States, eventually getting me here. In 1960, my mother moved on her own to Taipei to attend junior high. She was coming from the country side in Miaoli where my grandpa worked for an oil company and my grandma ran a grocery store. In the country, they had a house with three rooms for two large families. The floors were made of compacted, swept ground, and everyone had tatami mats to sleep on. Everyone got enough water, rice, vegetables, and sometimes, the oil company would host film screenings for the neighborhood. When Christmas came, Western missionaries would visit the neighborhood and give out food and treats. My mother recounts getting used Christmas cards with beautiful prints of Western families on them enjoying Christmas and words written in English. 

My father's side also ended up in Taipei. My grandpa sold lunch boxes at the Taipei train station as a child, and my grandma was a maid for a Japanese family. In 1960, my father had made it through high school and entered a college for technology. He eventually became an engineer for Fairchild, a prestigious American company, and was the first one to afford a car while giving the majority of his income to his mother until he was married in 1976. My parents moved to Fresno with my brother in 1980 with ambitious hopes to make it rich, followed by ups and downs, and me, here, wondering why I became a gardener and why my brother became an auto mechanic.

My parent's story is vastly different from the Mississippi-Chicago route, but at the heart of it may be a hope for a better life, for money or freedom, and an eventual sequence of reality checks of sorts that are grounded in one's relationship to a place, home, and history. 

Taipei in 1960 -

Delta Blues

 

Woody Guthrie

NOTES:

p. xiv - "The songs Woody sang and wrote all his life were inexorably bound to his own being."

p. xxiv - "Let me be known as just the man who told you something you already knew."

I wonder if it is possible for folks these days to wander and observe the world the way Woody Guthrie did. You need time and commitment and a certain level acceptance of spontaneity, I imagine. With digital navigation systems at my fingertips, I find it really difficult to be in a position where no one knows where I am, including myself. I wonder if in order to command a language of observation that is independent in the way Woody Guthrie's might have been, one would need to create their own map of the places they traveled, figuring it out step by step. Not to say that Woody Guthrie didn't have maps he could read, but that the presence of maps at particular moment would have been limited to the weight and volume of those maps.

Leadbelly

NOTES:

The scenes from the re-enactments of Leadbelly's story are striking. The March of Times Newsreel production makes me think of a term I'm not sure is correct: the term, exceptionalism, where narratives that are few and far between are tactically used to dispel certain harsh realities amongst the public consciousness. It seems that Leadbelly's story may have been especially fascinating to the American newsreel viewers because it is a narrative that is dramatic enough to fit within the racial narrative of the time - he is characterized, understood, and made comfortable within White American media. The snapshot of the stage scene where Leadbelly says his lines, acting as "himself," to the patriarch character, Alan Lomax, is especially fascinating. The composition of the frame exposes the dynamic while keeping it hidden in plain view. What else is hidden in plain view? 

Anthology of American Folk Music

NOTES: 

Anthology, from the mid 17th century, meaning 'flower' + 'collection' via anthos + logia

The songs in the anthology strike familiarity, giving contemporary popular music some context. As a whole collection, it is difficult to imagine it was compiled in 1952, before its aftermath. When consuming contemporary music on a daily basis from place to place, I find that I overlook the connections between music and the dimensions of time and place, fetishizing the commodity like a free packet of sugar. 

The idea of commoditization is not new to me, but the realization of it comes slowly. This week, I was introduced to the idea that space can be succinctly framed by the words, be here now. In being, in place, in time. As simple and mundane as that sounds, I find it very difficult to acknowledge it in day to day experiences; the cues deflect. Maybe there later. 

Back to the idea of the flower collection, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music offers a collection of precious, homegrown pieces that make up a powerful arrangement of texture and color. A poem by Czeslaw Milosz comes to mind. 

By the Peonies, 1945

The peonies bloom, white and pink.
And inside each, as in a fragrant bowl,
A swarm of tiny beetles have their conversation,
For the flower is given to them as their home.

Mother stands by the peony bed,
Reaches for one bloom, opens its petals,
And looks for a long time into peony lands,
Where one short instant equals a whole year.

Then lets the flower go. And what she thinks
She repeats aloud to the children and herself.
The wind sways the green leaves gently
And speckles of light flick across their faces.

Mississippi John Hurt

NOTES: to come

Appalachia II - the British balads

NOTES: Some points from the reading on Cecil Sharp via Mike Yates - the idea of isolation from the city and the intimacy between landscapes that are far apart - basically, the idea of geographical distance as a static measure versus cultural distance as an intimate relationship. First, the sentiment on isolation:

"Mr Sharp told of rescuing English folk music; how he and his associates, seeking out persons untouched by the on-rush of education, had entered the workhouses and jotted down the songs of old peasants now living on the parish.  No one under 70, he said, had yielded a song worth the taking.  Another twenty years and English music would assuredly have dissolved in sophistication ...  By Mr Sharp's definition a new folk music is impossible without a complete reversion to a feudal state.  This is true, because folk music is the product of an unselfconscious peasantry; a peasantry which refuses to transmit the eccentricities of any individual; which simply omits and forgets what does not belong to the spirit of the people ...  But this is a doleful theory to propound to Americans who feel the urge of nationality.  How can we have any folk music?  We are in the clutches of compulsory education.  The farest backwoods farmer has a phonograph with records of Rubinstein's melody of F and Mischa Elman's richly sentimental reading of Dvorak's humoresque ...  Thus Mr Sharp leaves us to a barren fate, not possessing a folk music and not able to get one." (Campbell)

Second, the sentiment on intimacy:

I have been very interested in the wild flowers and ferns, comparing them with our English ones.  It is quite exciting to find every now and again exactly the same flower growing under precisely the same conditions as in England. (Sharp)

It's interesting to me the positions of isolation and connection between two seemingly distinct places, such as a "the city" and "the country." One is not itself without the other. 

What is the value of folk music outside of being an historic resource if it is not part of a future. The question Campbell asks, does "Mr. Sharp leave us to a barren fate, not possessing a folk music and not able to get one?" What does it mean to posses a folk music? In Sharp's case, it meant collecting and recording it for "posterity's sake." 

Sharp recognizes "exactly the same flower growing under the precisely the same conditions as in England." I think this observation may have something to do with this question of cultural adaptation and migration. I'm still left with a lot of questions about how this fits into our often global framework today - speaking and framing in global terms that are not clearly placed. 

A passage from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind:

"How may of you are there?"
"Thousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks, tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside. It wasn't planned at first. Each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did. Then, over a period of twenty years or so, we met each other, traveling, and got the loose network together and set out a plan. The single most important thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we mustn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust jackets of books, of no significance otherwise."