Alan Lomax’s Music Archive Houses Over 17,400 Folk Recordings From 1946 to the 1990s

in Archives, Education, History, Music | October 1st, 2013

The work of folklorists and musicologists like Alan Lomax, Stetson Kennedy, and Harry Smith has long been revered in countercultural communities and libraries; and it occasionally reaches mainstream audiences in, for example, the Coen Brother’s 2000 film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and its attendant soundtrack, or the playlists of purists on college radio and NPR. But their recordings are much more than historical novelties.

Archives like Lomax’s Association for Cultural Equity—which we’ve featured before—help remind us of our origins as much as bottom-up accounts like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Lomax and his colleagues believed that folk art and music infuse and renew “high” art and provide bulwarks against the cynical destitution of mass-market commercial media that can seem so deadening and inescapable.

That is not to say that notions of authenticity aren’t fraught with their own problems of exploitation. Approaching folk art as tourists, we can demean it and ourselves. But the problem is less, I think, one of gentrification than of neglect: it’s simply far too easy to lose touch, a much-remarked-upon irony of the age of social networking. Lomax understood this. He founded ACE “to explore and preserve the world’s expressive traditions with humanistic commitment and scientific engagement.” The organization resides at NYC’s Hunter College and, since Lomax’s retirement in 1996, has been overseen by his daughter, Anna Lomax Wood. Through an arrangement with the Library of Congress, which houses the originals, ACE has access to all of Lomax’s collection of field recordings and can disseminate them online to the public. Lomax’s association has also long been active in repatriating recorded artifacts to libraries and archives in their places of origin, giving local communities access to cultural histories that may otherwise be lost to them.

Lomax underscored the significance of his organization’s name in a 1972 essay entitled “An Appeal for Cultural Equity,” in which he lays out the importance of preserving cultural diversity against the “oppressive dullness and psychic distress” imposed upon “those areas where centralized music industries, exploiting the star system and controlling the communication system, put the local musician out of work and silence folk song.” Are we any more improved forty years later for the shocking monopolization of mass media in the hands of a few conglomerates? I’d answer unequivocally no but for one important qualification: mass media in the form of open online archives allows us unprecedented access to, for example, the awesome late-seventies film of R.L. Burnside (top), who like many Mississippi Delta bluesmen before him, would only achieve recognition much later in life. Or we can see native North Carolinian Cas Wallin (above) sing a version of folk song “Pretty Saro” in 1982, a song Bob Dylan recorded and only recently released. Then there’s one of my favorites, “Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor,” picked and sung below by Mississippian Sam Chatmon—a song played and recorded by countless black and white blues and country artists like Mississippi John Hurt and Gillian Welch.

These and thousands of other examples from the ACE archive bring musicologists, historians, folklorists, activists, educators, and everyone else closer to Lomax’s ideal—that we “learn how we can put our magnificent mass communications technology at the service of each and every branch of the human family.” The ACE catalog contains over 17,400 digital files, beginning with Lomax’s first tape recordings in 1946, to his digital work in the 90s. The archive includes songs, stories, jokes, sermons, interviews and other audio artifacts from the American South, Appalachia, the Caribbean, and many more locales. The archive features recordings from famous names like Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly but primarily consists of folk music from anonymous folk, representing a variety of languages and ethnicities. And the archive is ever-expanding as it continues to digitize rare recordings, and to upload vintage film, like the videos above, to its YouTube channel.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Watch Dating Dos and Don’ts: An Old-School Instructional Guide to Teenage Romance (1949)

in Animation, Education, Film, History | September 26th, 2013

From the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, Coronet Instructional Media, that formidable factory of classroom educational films, taught America’s schoolchildren how to study, how to land a job, how to perform their societal and filial duties, how to bathe. Certain generations no doubt retain vivid memories, fond or otherwise, of such 16-millimeter standbys as Good Eating Habits, Joan Avoids a Cold, Are You Popular? and Communism. In 1949, Coronet came up with a short subject rather closer to the eternal interests of the teenager: Dating: Do’s and Don’ts. This twelve-minute film, directed Gilbert Altschul with the assistance of Reuben Hill, Research Professor of Family Life at the University of North Carolina, navigates the garden of forking paths formed by all the choices, from ideally gentleman-like to potentially disastrous, that confront young Woody on his very first date.

Who, for instance, should Woody ask to join him at Central High’s Hi-Teen Carnival? “Whose company would you enjoy?” asks the voice-of-midcentury-authority narrator.” “Well, one thing you can consider is looks. Woody thought of Janice, and how good-looking she was. He really had to rate to date somebody like her.” Still: “It’s too bad Janice always acts so superior and bored. She’d make a fellow feel awkward and inferior.” Perhaps the more grounded Betty? “And yet, it just doesn’t seem as if she’d be much fun. What about Anne? She knows how to have a good time.” Even 64 years on, I daresay fellows would still do well to cleave to the Annes of the world. But given how far the pendulum of sexual politics has swung since Coronet’s heyday, other pieces of of Dating: Do’s and Don’ts advice seems more quaint than current. For a more modern perspective, see also How to Be a “Mr. Good-Date,” a Looney Tunes parody starring Bugs Bunny as the hopeful suitor Reggie Gerandevu and Elmer Fudd as the protective homeowner of whom he runs afoul.

When you’re done watching Dating: Do’s and Don’ts, don’t miss Coronet’s 1951 sequel of sorts “Going Steady.”

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Discover Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Version of the Bible, and Read the Curious Edition Online

in History, Religion | September 24th, 2013

Had he lived during the Inquisition, Thomas Jefferson would have been burned at the stake. His ideas about Jesus and Christianity were far from orthodox. A product of the Enlightenment, Jefferson believed that everything, including religion, should be examined in the light of reason.

When Jefferson examined the Gospels he came away with a strongly divided opinion. “I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence,” he wrote in an 1820 letter to William Short, “and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.”

As early as 1804, when he was still president, Jefferson began separating “the diamond from the dunghill,” as he later put it, to assemble his own version of the Bible. He continued the project in earnest during his later years at Monticello, poring over various editions in Greek, Latin, French and King James English. He clipped the passages he thought were genuine teachings of Jesus and pasted them, in the four languages side by side, onto pages.

In 1820 — six years before his death at the age of 83 — Jefferson produced a leather-bound, 84-page volume titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extracted Textually From the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English. Jefferson eliminated everything in the Bible concerning miracles. He ended the Gospel story with the execution and burial of Jesus, omitting the resurrection. The retained passages, Jefferson explained in an 1813 letter to John Adams, contain “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

You can examine and read Jefferson’s complete 1820 Bible online by visiting the Smithsonian Institution’s interactive Web display.

Reproductions of Jefferson’s Bible can be purchased online.

The images above come courtesy of The Smithsonian.

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 13 ) |

Sci-Fi Writer Robert Heinlein Imagines the Year 2000 in 1949, and Gets it Mostly Wrong

in History, Sci Fi | September 19th, 2013

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Two giants of 20^th century science fiction: Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov (see them together above, with L. Sprague de Camp in-between). Like every young sci-fi geek, I read them both assiduously, got lost in their dizzying universes that stretched across novels and significant teenage milestones. Even as an awkward kid, I could clearly identify an essential difference in tone between their forecasts of the future. Heinlein, the Navy man forcibly retired from service by tuberculosis, had the darker vision, in which the brute force of mass militarism continued to thrive and heroic men of action carried the day. Asimov, the practicing scientist—whose “Norby” series of kids books might be the cutest introduction to sci-fi ever written by an American—favored a future that, if still quite dangerous, was managed by robots and their creators, the technocrats.

As we can plainly see, we are no less a bellicose species than when these two authors wrote of the future, but Asimov seems to have had it right. The technocrats came out on top; too many battles are fought not by massed battalions but by deadly flying robots making (so we’re told) “surgical” strikes. A few weeks ago, we brought you a series of technocratic predictions of the year 2014 from Asimov, many of them surprisingly accurate. Today, we have a list of predictions from Heinlein, this time of the year 2000, and written in 1949 and published in 1952 in Galaxy magazine. How does his predictive ability stack up against his contemporary? Well, I’d say that 2 (stripped of some exaggeration), 8, and 11 either hit the mark or come pretty damn close. 19 is self-evidently true, and 15 is arguably not terribly far away, though it may not have seemed so in 2000. 4 is painfully ironic. The rest? Eh, not so much. Take a look and try to imagine yourself in Heinlein’s shoes in 1949. Not an easy task? Try to imagine what the world will look like in 2063. Which version of IOS will you be running then?

1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door — C.O.D. It’s yours when you pay for it.

2. Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.

3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from outer space.

4. It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a “preventive war.” We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend.

5. In fifteen years the housing shortage will be solved by a “breakthrough” into new technologies which will make every house now standing as obsolete as privies.

6. We’ll all be getting a little hungry by and by.

7. The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called “modern art” will be discussed only by psychiatrists.

8. Freud will be classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer and psychoanalysis will be replaced by a growing, changing “operational psychology” based on measurement and prediction.

9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered; the revolutionary new problem in medical research will be to accomplish “regeneration,” i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an artificial limb.

10. By the end of this century mankind will have explored this solar system, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be a‑building.

11. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision.

12. Intelligent life will be found on Mars.

13. A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speed.

14. A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity.

15. We will not achieve a “World State” in the predictable future. Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet.

16. Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population. About 1990 a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance.

17. All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continent-wide basis by a multiple electronic “brain.”

18. Fish and yeast will become our principal sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear.

19. Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will “Civilization” be destroyed.

Here are things we won’t get soon, if ever:

– Travel through time

– Travel faster than the speed of light

– “Radio” transmission of matter.

– Manlike robots with manlike reactions

– Laboratory creation of life

– Real understanding of what “thought” is and how it is related to matter.

– Scientific proof of personal survival after death.

– Nor a permanent end to war.

Curiously, neither Heinlein nor Asimov foresaw that most terribly banal and ubiquitous phenomenon of reality TV, but really, what kind of monster could have imagined such a thing?

via Lists of Note/i09

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

The Art of Handwriting as Practiced by Famous Artists: Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning & More

in Art, History | September 17th, 2013

Click each image for a larger version

Didn’t we used to hear all sorts of grumbling about the disappearance of the handwritten letter? What a relief those complaints seem now to have subsided, leaving us in peace to efficiently type to one another about how we find pieces of longhand correspondence fascinating purely as artifacts of our favorite historical figures. If you share that fascination, have a look at The Art of Handwriting, an exhibit from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art now on display through October 27 at Washington D.C.‘s Lawrence A. Fleischman gallery, which showcases not only the artistic aspects of handwriting, but the handwriting of actual artists. “An artist might put pen to paper just as he or she would apply a line to a drawing,” says the exhibition’s site. “For each artist, a leading authority interprets how the pressure of line and sense of rhythm speak to that artist’s signature style. And questions of biography arise: does the handwriting confirm assumptions about the artist, or does it suggest a new understanding?” Plus, we have here the ideal test of those handwriting analysis booths at county fairs — could they detect these artistic personalities?

Just above, we have a page of abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning’s missive in light-blue ink of March 28, 1966 to friend and fellow abstract expressionist Michael Loew. (They’ve even included the envelope.) At the top of the post, you’ll find a page another painter, the famously blossom-focused Georgia O’Keeffe, wrote to New Mexico modernist Cady Wells in 1939. The subject of the letter? “O’Keeffe worries that Wells doesn’t like a painting she has bought and suggests replacements; and describes an argument she had with a friend.” That description comes from the Smithsonian’s catalog, as does this one: “[Jackson] Pollock writes with descriptions of his new home in Springs, on Long Island, and discusses his work and that of other artists.” You can also view both pages of that evidently unscandalous piece of communication on the site. They’ve even got letters composed by hand in other languages, such as Marcel Duchamp writing to his sister Suzanne (below) on January 15, 1916. Don’t worry if you can’t read French, or if you think you can’t contextualize the personal content of any of the letters at all; focus on, as the Archives of American Art suggests, how “every message brims with the personality of the writer at the moment of interplay between hand, eye, mind, pen, and paper.” That, and the that hope schoolchildren won’t have to endure cursive lessons many generations longer.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

What Shakespeare’s Handwriting Looked Like

in History, Literature | September 16th, 2013

Last week, we posted on how scholars have tried to recover the original pronunciations of Shakespeare’s plays and poems when performed on the stage. Today, we bring you the bard’s original handwriting. Shakespeare’s handwriting has recently become the focus of a new article by Professor Douglas Bruster at UT Austin, who is using an analysis of the playwright’s quirky spellings and penmanship to solve a very old question of authorship. The page of handwriting you see above is a fragment of a lost play called Sir Thomas More and it goes by the name of “Hand D” (click the image above, and then the image that appears — for a much larger version).

Bruster’s short essay, published this month in the Oxford journal Notes & Queries, is far too inside baseball for anyone but hardcore textual scholars to make much sense of, but this New York Times article does a good job of distilling the finer points. Suffice it to say that thanks to Bruster’s painstaking analysis of Shakespeare’s distinctive handwriting, we can be fairly certain that a 1602 revision of Thomas Kyd’s enormously popular Renaissance play The Spanish Tragedy—in the words of Shakespeare scholar Eric Rasmussen—has the bard’s “fingerprints all over it.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Visualizing Slavery: The Map Abraham Lincoln Spent Hours Studying During the Civil War

in History | September 13th, 2013

If you look closely at Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s 1864 painting “First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln” (see above — click image for a larger version) you will notice a map in the lower right-hand corner, next to the group that includes Lincoln and his cabinet.

The map in the painting was a document Lincoln consulted often during the Civil War. It was created by the United States Coast Survey using data from the 1860 Census to show the geographic distribution of the South’s vast slave population.

Carpenter lived in the White House for six months while working on his painting, and according to historian Susan Schulten, author of Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in 19th Century America, the artist encountered Lincoln poring over the map on more than one occasion.

The map (click it to see a larger version) is an early example of statistical cartography. The slave population of each county is represented numerically and through a graded scale of shading. The higher the number of slaves, the darker the shade. In a 2010 piece in the New York Times “Opinionator” blog, Schulten writes:

The map reaffirmed the belief of many in the Union that secession was driven not by a notion of “state rights,” but by the defense of a labor system. A table at the lower edge of the map measured each state’s slave population, and contemporaries would have immediately noticed that this corresponded closely to the order of secession. South Carolina, which led the rebellion, was one of two states which enslaved a majority of its population, a fact starkly represented on the map.

The map helped Lincoln visualize what he was up against. Areas along the Atlantic coast and Mississippi River, for example, are darkly shaded. The white populace in those areas was fanatically resistant to emancipation. “Conversely,” writes Schulten, “the map illustrated the degree to which entire regions — like eastern Tennessee and western Virginia — were virtually devoid of slavery, and thus potential sources of resistance to secession. Such a map might have reinforced President Abraham Lincoln’s belief that secession was animated by a minority and could be reversed if Southern Unionists were given sufficient time and support.”

For more on Lincoln’s map, visit Rebecca Onion’s post at Slate.

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by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

“Ask a Slave” by Azie Dungey Sets the Historical Record Straight in a New Web Series

in Comedy, History | September 13th, 2013

Anyone whose job involves interaction with the general public will be subjected to a certain number of boneheaded questions on any given day. Those numbers skyrocket when one must remain in both costume and character, charged with bringing history to life.

Azie Dungey, the creator and star of the new web series, Ask a Slave, claims to have “played every black woman of note that ever lived” when she was employed as an historic interpreter in the Washington DC area. These included Caroline Branham, Martha Washington’s enslaved lady’s maid, a gig that compelled her to keep a record of questions posed by visitors to Mount Vernon.

Now, as the tea-sipping, fictional Lizzie Mae, Dungey is able to answer those questions with greater freedom. A middle-aged, seemingly educated white man wonders if a newspaper ad is what led to Lizzie Mae’s position in the home of “such a distinguished Founding Father” as George Washington.

“Did I read the advertisement in the newspaper?” Lizzie Mae echoes pleasantly. “Why, yes. It said Wanted: One housemaid. No pay. Preferably mulatto, saucy with breeding hips. Must work 18 hour a days, seven days a week, no holidays. But you get to wear a pretty dress, and if you’re lucky you just might carry some famous white man’s bastard child. So, you better believe I read that and I ran right over and said, “Sign me up!””

Her default tone is one of professionally patient indulgence, though occasionally, the mask slips, as when another visitor asserts that “slavery isn’t really that bad.”

Sticking to the historic interpreter’s schtick of not recognizing non-period inventions like cameras pays dividends when the subject turns to internships, the underground railroad, and what George Washington thinks of Abraham Lincoln freeing all his slaves.

The best material, as they say, writes itself.

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by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Alan Lomax’s Music Archive Houses Over 17,400 Folk Recordings From 1946 to the 1990s

Watch Dating Dos and Don’ts: An Old-School Instructional Guide to Teenage Romance (1949)

Discover Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Version of the Bible, and Read the Curious Edition Online

Sci-Fi Writer Robert Heinlein Imagines the Year 2000 in 1949, and Gets it Mostly Wrong

The Art of Handwriting as Practiced by Famous Artists: Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning & More

What Shakespeare’s Handwriting Looked Like

Visualizing Slavery: The Map Abraham Lincoln Spent Hours Studying During the Civil War

“Ask a Slave” by Azie Dungey Sets the Historical Record Straight in a New Web Series

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