Category Archives: Nacirema

So Very American

The Finding Aid for my collections of Nacirema Music is progressing slowly, and lately my ears have been reimmersed in musical genres I haven’t paid much attention to in recent years. One of my ad hoc categories is “So Very American”, containing tunes that just couldn’t have any other source or identity, and that rend the patriot heart. Not that they’re ‘patriotic’, not at all, but they evoke a warm feeling of recognition of shared understanding that might be difficult to explain to auslanders. Here are two that surfaced today in my Spotify Discover Weekly:

Chris Smither No Love Today

Spotify
and

No Love Today
Chris Smither

I don’t know much, when I knew less
And I was heartbroke for the first time
I was drowning in my tears
I went looking for a lifeline
Trying to find some comfort
A simple tender touch
Searching for some little cure
That would not cost too much
And I could hear that produce wagon on the street
I could hear that farmer singing
As I cried myself to sleep

I got ba-na-na, watermelon, peaches by the pound
Sweet corn, mirleton, mo’ better than in town
I got okra, enough to choke ya
Beans of every kind
If hungry is what’s eatin’ you
I’ll sell you peace of mind
But this ain’t what you came to hear me say
And I hate to disappoint you
But I got no love today
I got no love today
I got no love today
No love today

I could not love to save myself
From lonesome desperation
Everything I thought was love
Was worthless imitation
My concept of commitment
Was to take all you could give
I thought the cheapest thrills I loved
Were teachin’ me to live
But nothin’ seemed to last or see me through
Nothin’ but that little song
That I still sing for you

I got ba-na-na, watermelon, peaches by the pound
Sweet corn, mirleton, mo’ better than in town
I got okra, enough to choke ya
Beans of every kind
If hungry is what’s eatin’ you
I’ll sell you peace of mind
But this ain’t what you came to hear me say
And I hate to disappoint you
But I got no love today
I got no love today
I got no love today
No love today

No love today, none tomorrow
Not now, not forever
You can’t see what comes for free
I think you much too clever
For your own good I will tell you
What’s right before your eyes
Intelligence is no defense
Against what this implies
In the end no one will sell you what you need
You can’t buy it off the shelf
You got to grow it from the seed

I got ba-na-na, watermelon, peaches by the pound
Sweet corn, mirleton, mo’ better than in town
I got okra, enough to choke ya
Beans of every kind
If hungry is what’s eatin’ you
I’ll sell you peace of mind
But this ain’t what you came to hear me say
And I hate to disappoint you
But I got no love today
I got no love today
I got no love today
No love today

*****

Birds of Chicago American Flowers

Spotify

and

[Chorus]
I have seen American flowers all across this land
From the banks of the Shenandoah, along the Rio Grande
Do not fear the winter blowing in the hearts of men
I have seen American flowers they will bloom again

[Verse 1]
On the Southside of Chicago, a man who’s not yet grown
Went out for a ride but the car was not his own
He did not see the stop sign or the boy on a skateboard
Now he’s lying broken on the ground
Nobody around he coulda, he coulda drove away
But he pulled on over to the curb and he ran out where he lay
Used his hoodie for a pillow said “little man you’re gonna be ok”
And he waited for the ambulance to come

[Chorus]
I have seen American flowers all across this land
From the banks of the Shenandoah, along the Rio Grande
Do not fear the winter blowing in the hearts of men
I have seen American flowers they will bloom again

[Verse 2]
Tender was the night down in the Tenderloin
In an alley off O’Farrell Street, in the neon glow
Well she finally caught that dragon a mile from Chinatown
She took her wings and eased her body down
She gave a little shudder, but no pain, she felt no pain
And she knew that she was back on home in Morgantown again
She could smell the lady slippers and the wild thimble weeds
“Mama I was just mad, I never meant to leave”

[Chorus]
I have seen American flowers all across this land
From the banks of the Shenandoah, along the Rio Grande
Do not fear the winter blowing in the hearts of men
I have seen American flowers they will bloom again

[Verse 3]
Layin’ roof in Texas is the job for someone younger
And so is catching fastballs from your Grandson in the summer
But there you are saying “Come on kid, lemme feel that hummer”
With your back and hips and knees on fire
And he says “Come on Grandpa, when you gonna let me throw a curve?”
And you’re looking back at him in the sun and you feel your heart is bursting
Let me keep him from himself and those that mean to hurt him
If that be your will, oh Lord

[Chorus]
I have seen American flowers all across this land
From the banks of the Shenandoah, along the Rio Grande
Do not fear the winter blowing in the hearts of men
I have seen American flowers they will bloom again

[Verse 4]
Right there off the interstate in Northwest Ohio
In the amber waves of grain and the assemblies of crows
There rose the two twin spires beside a golden dome
The Islamic Mosque of Greater Toledo
I was flying down the highway when it caught my eye
I was sipping red cream soda, I was listening to Johnny Prine
And I saw that golden dome against a pink and purple sky
I was singing “don’t let your baby down”

[Chorus]
I have seen American flowers all across this land
From the banks of the Shenandoah, along the Rio Grande
Do not fear the winter blowing in the hearts of men
I have seen American flowers they will bloom again

Lebowskiana

This post may be tl;dr for some, but seems a necessary attempt at summary for me, and may be useful to other Convivium participants who might still be puzzling over things I invoked in last week’s bout


Yesterday Betsy asked what did I mean in citing “the Dude abides” in answer to her “no-self” citation of the Diamond Sutra, in the continuing discussion over personal response to the question of how we severally think about The Big Picture. I fumbled an explanation along the lines of Here I am, I’m doing what I do and further cited the Kurt Vonnegut tagline “and so it goes…”. Unsatisfactory, and ever since I’ve been thinking about how to explain more fully.

Here’s how one explicator of the Vonnegut quote puts it: “the inexorable universe doesn’t care one whit about our lives and it’s up to us to make of them what we will… it’s just me and my mind making things up.”

(“And so it goes” appears more than 100 times in Slaughterhouse 5, each a reflection on a death observed.)

My impulse to make light of serious things, to resort to the cynical and sardonic, to voice extreme sentiments that exaggerate what I actually believe … is sometimes baffling and even hurtful to others, or at least confusing. This wants explication.

Perhaps I should be asking: whom do I really Respect and why and how? Kurt Vonnegut would be pretty high on the list, and his Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons would be a primary text, hot stuff from its very first pages and a distillation of his thoughts on self and writings. If you’re not already familiar with the titular terminology, Vonnegut explains:

A wampeter is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point. Foma are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: “Prosperity is just around the corner.” A granfalloon is a proud and meaningless association of human beings… [a college class, viz. Harvard 1965, would exemplify]

I have a long history of wee-hours pondering, in which I’m awake at 3 AM, thinking in words and phrases that evaporate like dreams unless I arise and write them down. This morning’s iteration was spawned by the “the Dude abides” showstopper from this week’s Convivium—in which I said something that the others found Delphic, impenetrable, completely off the wall… being, as they were, unfamiliar with the allusion to The Big Lebowski, and thus completely at a loss to know what I meant. The 3 AM phrase that got me up and writing was a characterization of my state of mind in alluding to “the Dude abides” as my take on the Big Picture and how to characterize it:

frivolous, flippant, profane

and I soon added ‘transgressive’ to those three.

So now, a few hours later, I’m trying to unpack all of that, explain it to myself and perhaps to others, and make sense of the incident… which will take us pretty far afield, for who knows what constructive purpose.

The Wednesday evening Convivium sessions (these days conducted over Zoom) are, so it seems to me, opportunities for 4-5-6 of us to explore how we see, interrogate, and experience the world… which may not be what my interlocutors think/perceive/wish. Generally they seem to me to be of the Spirit and the spiritual to a greater degree than I think I am. I have a pretty agnostic view of Spirit and spiritual for myself, but am thoroughly willing (I hope, or maybe wish) to cut others slack in their own conceptions and practices.

As I’ve said rather tiresomely, I take refuge in projects and explorations, defined by a lifetime of exploring edges and interstices, of finding the joke and exploring the significance of the preposterous. There: ‘exploring’ 3 times in one sentence. It’s what I do. Why, and whither, and whence I only barely understand. Occasionally I encounter others of similar proclivities, and some of those have been lifelong friends.

For many years (at least since the late 1960s) I’ve considered that I was engaged in Nacirema and Naidanac studies, which specialty is ultimately inspired by Horace Miner’s Body Ritual among the Nacirema (American Anthropologist 1956).

…According to Nacirema mythology, their nation was originated by a culture hero, Notgnihsaw, who is otherwise known for two great feats of strength – the throwing of a piece of wampum across the river Pa-To-Mac and the chopping down of a cherry tree in which the Spirit of Truth resided…

The documents of this backwater of anthropology include many films that could only be American (there are films that could only be English, or Swedish, or French, etc.—that have contents and characters that simply are not thinkable as American). Translation across cultural boundaries is perilous, as exemplified by [perhaps] well-meaning efforts to translate dialog. Yesterday I watched The Big Lebowski with French subtitles, which obscured about 90% of the humor as it would be appreciated by a native speaker. “Dude” is glossed as “Mec”, for example…

So the immediate problem is to explicate what I see in The Big Lebowski, why I regard it as “one of the best…”, why I’m gobsmacked that everybody doesn’t know it for the cultural icon I believe it to be, and so eventually to arrive at why I cited “the Dude abides” as my own take on elements of The Big Picture. I do have to recognize that some of this is, as we say, non-transitive—it may not be explicable/understandable to others, and my take may reduce in their perception to another example of oook’s frivolous, flippant, profane stance toward the sublime and numinous, toward what really matters. So it goes, to invoke Vonnegut again.

I think a substantial element in my Umwelt (“self-centered world”—a coinage of Jakob von Uexcüll [1909]: “the small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect“) arose from/in California 1956-1961. Just how might be discoverable via introspection, but the details are for another time. The notion that fictional characters in literature, in films, in songs, in visual imagery can encode and express verities is surely at the core of what California taught me in those years, and is obviously the bedrock of the movie industry. The Sam Elliott character who NARRATES The Big Lebowski is obviously a necessary/essential fabrication; and the Dude may be, as Sam Elliott says, “a man for his time and place”… We enter a world of total fantasy, populated by preposterous characters who nonetheless REFLECT realities we recognize as possible, plausible. Walter Sobchak is a Type; Maudie and the Big Lebowski himself and the other goofballs who populate the film are not without some relation to reality. Or Reality. Julianne Moore [Maude Lebowski] puts it thus:

I feel like we all kind of know people like the Dude, or have known people like the Dude in our lives, this whole idea that the Dude abides. He’s always there, always doing his thing. There is something about him that is straightforward and honest, and he is who he is. And he’s hung onto that, you know? He hasn’t been deterred by time changing.
(I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, and what have you, pg 40)

It’s the preposterous that makes the film memorable, that captures our attention in every scene. NB other books: The Abide Guide: Living Like Lebowski, The Dude De Ching: New Annotated Edition, and The Tao of the Dude: Awesome Insights of Deep Dudes from Lao Tzu to Lebowski, all by by Oliver Benjamin…

But would I read the film in that way if I hadn’t been transported from New England sensibilities in 1956, at age 13, and immersed in Southern California for the next 5 years? And if I hadn’t spent another formative 5 years in the Bay Area, 1967-1972?

Cajun interlude

Listening to the CDs that accompany American Epic, I was brought up short by “La Danseuse” by Delma Lachney & Blind Uncle Gaspard (1929)


I know that tune, I thought… it’s “Jeanine’s Dream” by the Holy Modal Rounders (Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber):

So of course I did a Google search, which landed me with this, from Last Forever’s 2013 album, No Place Like Home:




…and with a blog post from 2009 that I had forgotten (that link is worth clicking for the lyrics to “Jeanine’s Dream”). A bit more digging disclosed that the singer was Sonya Cohen, daughter of New Lost City Ramblers member John Cohen (and niece of Mike Seeger, Pete Seeger, Peggy Seeger). Alas, Sonya died in 2015.

So round and round we go, rediscovering forgotten music and being whirled into explorations of Cajun music. Another that nailed me is Blind Uncle Gaspard’s Sur Le Borde De L’Eau, of which Amanda Petrusich says

Whatever he’s communicating, it’s extra musical. It’s something in the tone of his voice, the way that he’s plays the guitar. It’s extraordinarily sad. When I try to imagine the circumstances that would lead someone to sing this way, it’s devastating.


And here’s Feufollet’s updated version, as full of sadness as the original.

diverted

Diverted

A lot of thought and experimenting has gone into the Finding Aids project lately, and I’m discovering how easily I can be diverted from the grander overall scheme of developing orderly summaries by things encountered along the way. Every Thing that one picks up has edges that potentially link to other Things, and I’m sometimes sidetracked by shiny somethings. A few days ago I started to explore the vastnesses of my American music holdings, and so I’m wrestling with the sliding panoply of genres that belong within “Music of the Nacirema” (blues, jazz, old timey, bluegrass, folk, etc. etc.). Pretty much every item spins out into another Story, a facet (or several) of the glorious complexity of a musical landscape that spans more than a century.

The epic of Stagolee is one such: a tale of Shakespearean scope and perennial fascination, based on an incident that took place in St. Louis in 1896, centered on a shooting over a John B. Stetson hat. There are hundreds of variants since the story was first published in 1911. Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians released an instrumental version in 1923, soon followed by Lovie Austin’s version with words in 1924, Ma Rainey’s (with Louis Armstrong’s cornet) in 1925, and Frank Hutchison’s in 1927. See the Wikipedia article for more detail, and enjoy the variety in these examples:

Hogman Maxey, Angola penitentiary, 1959:

Dr. John, 1972

Keb’ Mo’ from the film Honeydripper, 2008

Amy Winehouse, in Brazil 2011

Mikołaj Woubishet Wrocław, 2008

Grateful Dead, NY July 4, 1989


There are many possible readings of the story itself. See Bad-Ass Liberator, Singout!’s sanitized take, and a range of opinions via Mudcat.

Some of the quite different but similarly exemplary tunes that surfaced as I wandered in the Blues world are:

Bertha “Chippie” Hill’s “Pratt City” (Louis Armstrong, cornet) (1926):

Pratt City, is where I was born
Pratt City, is where I was born
If you get to there, you can get your water on

Get full of high‑powered liquor, it's bound to make him scream
Get full of high‑powered liquor, it's bound to make him scream
Going back to Pratt City, if it takes nice and mean

You walk Sandusky, keep your head hung down
You walk Sandusky, keep your head hung down
Don't worry hot papa, I'm driftrack bound

There’s a 1929 version on Spotify:

Pratt City, is where I was born
Pratt City, is where I was born
If you get to there, you can get your water on

Get full of high‑powered liquor, on eighteenth street
Get full of high‑powered liquor, on eighteenth street
Going back to Pratt City, get sick nice and neat

You walk Sandusky, keep your head hung down
You walk Sandusky, keep your head hung down
Don't worry hot papa, I'm driftrack bound

Pratt City girls should do treat you right
Pratt City girls should do treat you right
With those Birmingham girls, drink with you day and night


Hogman Maxey’s “Duckin’ and Dodgin'” (1959, recorded by Harry Oster in Angola penitentiary):

Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas’ “Last Kind Words” (1930):

The last kind words I heard my daddy say
Lord, the last kind words I heard my daddy say
If I die, if I die in the German war
I want you to send my body, send it to my mother, lord
If I get killed, if I get killed, please don't bury my soul
I p'fer just leave me out, let the buzzards eat me whole
When you see me comin' look 'cross the rich man's field
If I don't bring you flour I'll bring you bolted meal
I went to the depot, I looked up at the stars
Cried, some train don't come, there'll be some walkin' done
My mama told me, just before she died
Lord, precious daughter, don't you be so wild
The Mississippi river, you know it's deep and wide
I can stand right here, see my babe from the other side
What you do to me baby it never gets outta me
I may not see you after I cross the deep blue sea

…and see The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie (John Jeremiah Sullivan)


Lonnie Johnson’s “To Do This, You Got To Know How”

(see how it’s played by Josh Baum)

Ma Rainey’s “Prove It On Me Blues”

Went out last night, Had a bad big fight 
Everything seemed to go on wrong
I looked up, to my surprise
The gal I was with was gone.
Where she went, I don't know
I mean to follow everywhere she goes;
Folks say I'm crooked. I didn't know where she took it
I want the whole world to know.
They say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me;
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.
It's true I wear a collar and a tie,
Makes the wind blow all the while
Don't you say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
You sure got to prove it on me.

Say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me.
I went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
It must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.
Wear my clothes just like a fan
Talk to the gals just like any old man
Cause they say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me.

…and see more backstory

Skip James “Hard Times Killing Floor Blues” (original 1931, this version 1967)

Hard times is here and everywhere you go
Times are harder than ever been before
You know that people, they are are driftin' from door to door
But you can't find no heaven, I don't care where they go
People, if I ever can get up off of this old hard killin' floor
Lord, I'll never get down this low no more
When you hear me singin' this old lonesome song
People, you know these hard times can last us so long
You know, you say you had money, you better be sure
Lord, these hard times gon' kill you, just drag on slow

Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues” goes around the world:

Omnia disce

If I have a patron saint, it’s probably Hugh of St-Victor [12th century, author of Didascalicon], whose advice was

Omnia disce, videbus postea nihil esse superfluum
(Learn everything, you will see later that nothing is superfluous)

One can’t, alas, Know Everything, but elaborating one’s understanding of the world around has been a lifelong Odyssey, and a great joy. Sometimes the piling up of knowledge and the interweaving of threads of understanding leads to precipices, viewpoints where an unanticipated vista opens to disclose a chasm of personal ignorance. Happens all the time…

It’s a measure of something that I have read NONE of the reading list on issues of race in this issue of Harvard Gazette. I am uninformed in these matters, and forever surprised/chastened to discover vast realms of ignorance of important things I should have known about. Just now I happened upon May Jeong’s Ah Toy, Pioneering Prostitute of Gold Rush California, which considerably enlarges my knowledge of the history of Chinese immigration into California, and raises a host of other issues and questions about intersectional matters.

It’s easy to find examples of “I’m not responsible for…” with respect to evils of the past (slavery, the extirpation of aboriginal populations, anti- stances toward various Others, etc.), and indeed I’ve mouthed the formula myself in defense of one thing or another. The question of ‘responsibility’ might be reframed into a discussion of how does/should/might one take account of complicities in distant (temporally, spatally, socially…) iniquities and inequities. At the very least, one ought to be ready to inform oneself when a chasm of personal ignorance presents itself. Books like 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, the works of Eduardo Galeano (among them Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, The Memory of Fire trilogy) and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States tend to blow the wheels off the wagon of complacency.

Lately I’ve been reading Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (which sports Kate’s beautiful maps) which provides a potent backstory to recent events like Ferguson (Amazon blurb: “…exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation’s past…”). So much of our national mythos is built upon glorifications of events and people, of wilful self-deceptions under the rubrics of Patriotism and exceptionalism, of flaunted symbols like The Flag and the honored dead of glorious wars, and of notions of Progess and Victory. The Emperor’s Raiment, the thumping of tubs, demagoguery, coming to a screen near you…

A brace of haiku in praise:

moral certitude
inspires the cannon fodder
waving flags: Huzzah!!

another martyr
ours or theirs: keep careful count
a winner someday

Another Rabbit Hole

A couple of days ago I was organizing books in the Auxiliary Library in the barn and happened on Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination (which I had bought in 2008, on just what inspiration I can’t recover, 12 years later). Many of the 40 essays contained within are interesting to probe again, touching as they do on interests and enthusiasms and questions that have arisen during those dozen years. The last third of the eponymous and first (“The Geography of the Imagination”, originally a Distinguished Professor Lecture at University of Kentucky in 1978) is an extended riff on American Gothic, Grant Wood’s evocation of American essence:


(Art Institute of Chicago)
(see Wikipedia entry)

Davenport’s four pages of deconstruction of this eidetic image is a lovely mapping of implications, of allusions, of in-knottings. Some are explicit references by Grant Wood, others seem imbricated [an overlapping of successive layers], where the pointer is to bricolage, in the sense of ‘creation from a diverse range of available things’, rather than to an orderly pattern of overlapping, as with shingles (bricoler is “to tinker”). A similar unpacking can be visited upon other familiar images, to get at the question of how and why they come to be eidetic, and I’m tempted to try some of that myself (stay tuned…).

It’s no surprise that American Gothic has been praised as representing “steadfast American pioneer spirit”, derided as Norman Rockwellish cliché of a[n imaginary] small town America, and widely replicated in satire and parody (see a blog devoted to instances). Here’s an instance from my own archives:

Kent and Shel 1969
Shel and Kent Anderson, 1969

At Any Price

Amanda Petrusich’s Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records comes as close as anything I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot in this vein) to my own feelings and intuitions about musics, and then extends them into new territory.

With a few notable exceptions, blues music was rowdy and social, and its creators led brash, lustful lives. They drank and roamed and had reckless sex and occasionally stabbed each other in the throat. There was something incongruous about sitting in a dimly lit room, meticulously wiping dust and mold off a blues 78 and noting the serial number in an antique log book. Why not dance or sob or get wasted and kick something over? Some collectors, I knew, did exactly that, but for others, the experience of a rare blues record involved a kind of isolated studiousness, which of course was fine — there’s no wrong way to enjoy music, and I understood that certain contextual or biographical details could help crystallize a bigger, richer picture of a song. But I continued to believe that the pathway that allowed human beings to appreciate and require music probably begins in a more instinctual place (the heart, the stomach, the nether regions). Context was important, but it was never as essential — or as compelling — to me as the way my entire central nervous system involuntarily convulsed
whenever Skip James opened his mouth. (pg 62)

Petrusich interviews a broad array of collectors for their perspectives and personal histories, and has a gimlet-eared instinct for the trenchant quote. Here’s Ian Nagoski on collectors, and more generally on dudes:

It’s dudes hanging out, relating to each other through objects. It’s such a manifestation of dude culture, where guys tend to gather and not talk about their actual lives, if they can avoid it, but instead refer to the engine of their car, or whatever third thing they can talk about. And then through the aesthetics of that, they’ll relate to one another and get a sense of whether somebody is trustworthy or not and if they can actually open up to them. It’s a compensation for all kinds of male skills that are supposed to be present in adolescence that may not be present, so you compensate with other things — the superiority of specialization in some arcane field Science-fiction nerds and baseball-card guys, motorheads. Wanting to talk about your sound system first and your marriage months later. But literally having a shared aesthetic experience of a particular style of speaker could be the foundation of a lifelong, very, very deep male friendship. (pp 184-185)

Dave Van Ronk

Among the Great Joys is discovering and reading books that further enlarge what I already know about subjects I’ve been following for a while. As a lifelong collector of fugitive materials and odd bits of knowledge, my own personal landscape of such subjects is pretty well populated, and for some areas the prospect is highly articulated —musics being a case in point. My holdings threaten to overflow shelves and disk space, but there’s always room for more, and any given subdomain is always open for elaboration, via sound, print, video, and my own experiments.

Lately I’ve been reading two books that at first glance might appear to have very little in common: John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven and Dave Van Ronk’s The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir. The two are in very different registers: Gardiner’s is über-scholarly and quite long, while Van Ronk is breezy and colloquial. Both are loving recreations of past time and place, full of outward links and references to things and people one already has some familiarity with. Both are significant social/cultural documents all by themselves, and both provoke orgies of listening and further ferretings. I’ll try to tempt you to further explorations of Van Ronk in this post, and save Gardiner for later.

Van Ronk’s perspective on The Great Folk Scare of the early 1960s is Greenwich Village-centric, and sometimes at odds with the Cambridge-centric version that populates Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years, but there are many viable versions of those realities. YouTube has lots of Van Ronk, and this clip gives a pretty good taste of what the written memoir is like:

Van Ronk’s book is full of quotable bits, stories and commentary both. For example, he says of jazz ear-training:

…There are people you can’t fool, people who can tell you, “No, that’s not Ben Webster, that’s Coleman Hawkins,” or “That’s not Pres, that’s Paul Quinichette,” and be right every time, and to do that, you can’t just groove with the music. You have to listen with a focus and an intensity that normal people never use. But we weren’t normal people, we were musicians. To be a musician requires a qualitatively different kind of listening… (pg. 10)

On toward the end of the book, Van Ronk offers this summary of the 60s folk era:

In fact, looking back on that period, very little of what got put down had much permanent value. There was a genuine artistic impulse, but the paradigms were flawed, and if you compare it to what was happening on Broadway in the 1930s, that scene was infinitely more creative and important than ours. The forms that were accepted as part of the folk matrix were too limited, both technically and in terms of staying power, and the ideology of the scene allowed for a great deal of sloppiness, which meant that nobody had to push themselves. Most of the songwriters were writing well below their abilities, and people who were capable of learning and employing more complicated harmonies and chord structures confined themselves to 1-4-5 changes. Some of them were enormously talented, but they were like an enormously talented boxer who insists on fighting with one hand behind his back. The result was that we produced a Bob Dylan, a Tom Paxton, a Phil Ochs, a bit later a Joni Mitchell –but we did not produce a Johann Sebastian Bach or a Duke Ellington…(pg 212-213)

I’m anticipating the release of the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis a few days hence –it’s rooted in Van Ronk’s book, and I expect to love the film.

So I’m once again plunged into thinking about the ‘folk’ side of my musical interests, though I’m not much closer to a solution to the problem of organizing and interpreting their vastness.

On the supermarket frontier

Lately I’ve been taking my 87-year-old neighbor Don Miller shopping in Rockland. He’s a garrulous and interesting dude, long-time mechanic and lifelong Midcoast Maine resident, pretty fiercely independent (“they wanted to put me in a nursin’ home, but I wouldn’t have none of it…”) but no longer able to drive himself. I’ll hope to do him more justice another time, but here he is in his usual plumage:

DonMiller

He likes to shop at Shaw’s, a grocery store I don’t usually frequent (Midcoast folks tend to be fiercely loyal to one or another of the chain supermarkets), and I had time to wander in parts of the store that I don’t usually visit (I tend to shop the peripheries, not venturing into the land of High Fructose Corn Syrup that makes up the core of most supermarkets) and gather up bits of intelligence on what’s on offer these days.

Midcoast Maine is pretty far from the Big Time of American food crazes, but I was interested to see the variety that demands shoppers’ attention these days. Take couscous, scarcely a staple of the traditional diet of this region:

Couscous1 Couscous2
(below: Herbed Chicken, Original Plain, Mediterranean Curry, Roasted Garlic and Olive Oil, Parmesan, Toasted Pine Nut, and Basil and Herb –but see Near East for mooooore…)
Couscous3
And who knew that farro had made it into quick-fix packaging?
Farrotto
and as for Moroccan cuisine, packaged for American tastes:
Moroccan
The old reliable Boyardee appears in many guises, and here exemplifies the American genius for BIG:
OhAmerica
Now I wish that I’d thought to track the evolution of these innovations in American foodways, which I’m sure has been both rapid and punctuated. I mean, cranberries are a long-time New England staple, but what is one to make of infused dried cranberries? And just think what other flavors may show up on next year’s shelves…
Craisins
There’s a world of Anthropology of Food out there, begging to be studied and deconstructed.