If you have any taste for eclectic acoustic guitar music, you’ll surely enjoy Chris Lydon’s interview with Ghanaian master Koo Nimo, an hour which includes many live examples, redolent of a brew of influences that spans West African traditions, Cuban and Brazilian and American jazz and blues descendants, and even bits of classical repertoire.

I’ve been following the wonderful unpacking of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music at The Old, Weird America, and the project is now up to #31, the Cajun number “La Danseuse” by Delma Lachney & Blind Uncle Gaspard. Usually the compiler (gadaya, “a young french guy who loves to mentally travel through time and space by listening to some records”) provides variants of each tune, but he notes for #31 that he had found none. As I listened to the original, I immediately thought of “Jeanine’s Dream” from the out-of-print Stampfel and Weber LP Going Nowhere Fast (1981) and sure enough it’s the same tune: first bit. The lyrics (by Antonia) are wonderful, and not readily available:

In a trunk on the attic floor
The record lay 40 years or more
‘Til Jeanine came to poke about
In the attic she pulled it out
She decided to let it play
Unplayed music will waste away
So it spun on the old machine
It put her feet in a dancing dream
She was Queen of the Ball
Her surroundings fell away
And she danced in a fairy carnival
Out of lost time

The record player was turned up loud
As she danced with the fairy crowd
A mean old grandma who lived next door
Heard the racket and called the law
The record player was still turned high
When the new rookie cop came by
Jeanine came dancin’ up to the door
She let him in and she danced some more
First he stared as she danced
Then the music that was playing caught him in its spell
And so he danced with her

Grandma came in and hollered “Stop!
This crazy music and crazy cop!”
But Jeanine didn’t seem to hear
Then the music caught Grandma’s ear
She remembered those bygone days
And how she danced while the fiddle played
So she left them and went to bed
With the tune playing in her head
And she danced in her dreams
With her husband one more time
And the record he had bought for her
Spun on ’til dawn

see a Robert Christgau piece (1999) and Wikipedia on The Holy Modal Rounders for more background; the truly obsessed will seek out the DVD The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound to Lose

A posting at Excavated Shellac got me started on this threadlet. It links to an mp3 of a ca. 1911 Turkish-language record (though probably sung by two Christian or Jewish women) that’s in the Pretty Boy Floyd tradition. Or so I learned by reading Ian Nagoski’s masterful summary, which served to connect up a bunch of dots I already knew something about, having to do with pre-1921 Smyrna, its ethnic composition and its various musics. I’ve been acquainted with Nagoski’s enterprise since acquiring his compilation CD Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics 1918-1955, but I hadn’t turned Google loose on the case until today, and the documents linked below tell a tale that I could only wish was my own:

Distant Transmissions: Ian Nagoski brings obscure World Music 78s to CD

News from Home: a short tour of non-English language music for sale in Baltimore

Ian Nagoski: Musician and Writer (2001 interview, before his immersion in ‘World’ stuff, but there’s a money quote: “…curating and re-presenting consensus-reality culture with insight [as in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music] can be completely mind-shattering.”)

I have wrestled for years with the enormous potential represented by my own music collections, and with the question of how to link stuff up, how to distribute the gems to audiences who would be glad to hear them, how to narrate the stories that are immured in the grooves and the lyrics. I don’t expect to solve those problems, but it’s heartening to see examples like Ian Nagoski, and to know that others are after some of the same things.