Let’s go back in time to December 12, 1940 and turn our radio dial to 830 AM WNYC. It’s 6 p.m. in New York and blues singer Lead Belly has his weekly half-hour show (Folk Songs of America) where he sings songs and invites on a guest each week. On this episode he welcomes folk singer “The Dustiest Dustbowler of them all”——as the announcer calls him——Woody Guthrie, who, like the host, delivers three songs with some in between song patter.
This recording sat in the WNYC archives until being dusted off for a rebroadcast in 2007 as part of the Down Home Radio Show. The first year of the Down Home Radio Show coincided with the last year in the life of Professor Henrietta Yurchenco (1916–2007), who was a well known folk and world music radio personality, as well as an ethnomusicologist. One of her earliest radio jobs was producing this very episode for Lead Belly’s Folk Songs of America, when she was only 24. She later went on to work with other stars in the business such as Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan.
The 1940 episode was unearthed for a show on outlaw songs, both blues and folk songs that glamorize people that the law saw as common criminals, but the people loved regardless. Lead Belly sings “Frankie and Albert” and Guthrie sings “John Hardy” and “Jesse James.”
Also on the show, Guthrie introduces his own “Ballad of Tom Joad” with a story about watching The Grapes of Wrath movie (1940) three times and then writing his own version. Lead Belly ends the show with “Boll Weevil,” which, being about a much hated insect, is kind of an outlaw ballad of sorts.
The only shame is not hearing the two together, and it’s not known whether they were in the same studio at the time.
Finally the announcer adds that if you like the show, drop a line to Lead Belly courtesy of WNYC and they’ll send you all the lyrics. I wonder if anybody still has a copy of that?
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
These days everyone’s hung up on identity. But I don’t mean to talk politics, though my point is maybe inescapably political: the identities our jobs and incomes give us—the status or lack thereof—become so central to who we are in the world that they eclipse other essential aspects, eclipse the things we do strictly because it gives us pleasure to do them.
Music, dance, art, poetry.… These fall under what Alan Lomax called an experience of “the very core” of existence, “the adaptive style” of culture, “which enables its members to cohere and survive.” Culture, for Lomax, was neither an economic activity nor a racial category, neither an exclusive ranking of hierarchies nor a redoubt for nationalist insecurities. Cultures, plural, were peculiarly regional expressions of shared humanity across one interrelated world.
Lomax did have some paternalistic attitudes toward what he called “weaker peoples,” noting that “the role of the folklorist is that of the advocate of the folk.” But his advocacy was not based in theories of supremacy but of history. We could mend the ruptures of the past by adding “cultural equity… to the humane condition of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice,” wrote the idealistic Lomax. “The stuff of folklore,” he wrote elsewhere, “the orally transmitted wisdom, art and music of the people, can provide ten thousand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, ‘You are my brother.’”
Lomax’s idealism may seem to us quaint at best, but I dare you to condemn its results, which include connecting Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie to their global audiences and preserving a good deal of the folk music heritage of the world through tireless field and studio recording, documentation and memoir, and institutions like the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), founded by Lomax in 1986 to centralize and make available the vast amount of material he had collected over the decades.
In another archival project, Lomax’s Global Jukebox, we get to see rigorous scholarly methods applied to examples from his vast library of human expressions. The online project catalogues the work in musicology of Lomax and his father John, who both took on a “life long mission to document not only America’s cultural roots, but the world’s as well,” notes an online brochure for the Global Jukebox. Lomax believed that “music, dance and folklore of all traditions have equal value” and are equally worthy of study. The Global Jukebox carries that belief into the 21st century.
Since 1990, the Global Jukebox has functioned as a digital repository of music from Lomax’s global archive, as you can see in the very dated 1998 video above, featuring ACE director Gideon D’Arcangelo. Now, updated and put online, the newly-launched Global Jukeboxweb site provides an interactive interface, giving you access to detailed analyses of folk music from all over the world, and highly technical “descriptive data” for each song. You can learn the systems of “Choreometrics and Cantometrics”—specialized analytical tools for scientists—or you can casually browse the incredible diversity of music as a layperson, through a beautifully rendered map view or the colorfully attractive graphic “tree view,” below.
Stop by the Global Jukebox’s “About” page to learn much more about its technical specificities and history, which dates to 1960 when Lomax began working with anthropologist Conrad Arensberg at Columbia and Hunter Universities to study “the expressive arts” with scientific tools and emerging technologies. The Global Jukebox represents a highly schematic way of looking at Lomax’s body of work, and its ease of use and level of detail make it easy to leap around the world, sampling the thrilling variety of folk music he collected.
It is not, and is not meant as, a substitute for the living traditions Lomax helped safeguard, and the incredible music they have inspired professional and amateur musicians to make over the years. But the Global Jukebox gives us several unique ways of organizing and discovering those traditions—ways that are still evolving, such as a coming function for building your own cultural family tree with a playlist of songs from your musical ancestry.
Link Wray’s 1958 song “Rumble” remains the most dangerous-sounding instrumental blues vamp ever recorded, unmatched in its raw, slinky cool until, perhaps, John Lee Hooker’s Endless Boogie or the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. But unlike Lou Reed, Wray didn’t need lyrics about heroin addiction and sadomasochism to freak out the parents and turn on the kids. All he needed was his fuzzed-out guitar, soaking in reverb and tremolo, and a rhythm section with the minimalist instincts of Bo Diddley’s band, who were making a similar kind of sound at the same time “Rumble” hit the airwaves. But where Diddley’s songs invited listeners to dance, Wray’s “ragged, ominous chords, overdriven and dragged to a crawl,” wrote Rolling Stone, “sounded like an invitation to a knife fight.”
The song’s title capitalized on fifties panic over juvenile delinquency and gang violence, anxieties responsible for the popularity of entertainments like The Wild One, West Side Story, and Blackboard Jungle. Wray’s menacing, seductive song made the kids “go ape,” he said, the very first time he played it, improvising on the spot at a 1957 dance in Fredericksburg, Virginia, after the band received a request for a hit song they didn’t know how to play. Instead “Rumble” was born. In order to recreate the raucous, distorted sound of that first night in the studio, Wray famously punched holes in the speaker of his guitar amp and turned it into a fuzzbox, the first of its kind.
The gritty tune is said to be, writes critic and curator at the Library of Congress Cary O’Dell, “the connecting force between early blues guitarists and the later guitar gods of the 1960s (Hendrix, Clapton, Page.)” Wray was “the father of distortion and fuzz, the originator of the power chord and the godfather of metal. He seems to be as well the reason the world ‘thrash’ was invented, or at least applied to music.” These are large claims indeed, but Wray’s raunchy, shimmering guitar sounds like nothing that had come before it, and a harbinger of so much to come. Jimmy Page has described hearing “Rumble” as a pivotal moment. Iggy Pop credits it as the reason he became a musician.
Like all the best rock and roll, Wray’s brief masterpiece had the power to shock and upset the squares. The song was banned from radio stations in New York and Boston for fear it might actually incite gang violence—the first and only instrumental song to be banned from the air. “Rumble” acquired its name from the stepdaughter of Archie Bleyer, who released it on his Cadence Records. It reminded her, she said, of West Side Story’s gang fights, portrayed in the memorable Act I dance scene called “Rumble.” No other piece of music lived up better to radio network Mutual Broadcasting System’s 1958 description of the “distorted, monotonous, noisy music” they wanted to get rid of. The network meant these as derogatory terms, but they are high virtues in so much great rock and roll, and few songs have embodied them better than Wray’s biggest hit.
FYI: In honor of Jazz Appreciation Month, Viola Davis treats us to a reading of Rent Party Jazz, a children’s book written by William Miller and illustrated by Charlotte Riley-Webb. Here’s a quick synopsis of the story:
This story is set in New Orleans in the 1930s. Sonny and his mother are scraping by to pay their rent. Mama works in a fish canning factory, and Sonny works for the coal man before school each morning. When Mama loses her job, they no longer have enough money for the rent and fear that the landlord will turn them out. One day Sonny meets Smilin’ Jack, a jazz musician who is playing his trumpet in Jackson Square. Smilin’ Jack offers to play at a party at Sonny’s house to help raise money for the rent. The neighbors all come to sing and dance and before they leave, drop some coins in a bucket. Sonny learns how people can help one another “if they put their minds and hearts to it.”
For anyone not familiar with them, rent parties started in Harlem during the 1920s, when jazz musicians would play at a friend’s apartment to help them raise enough money to pay the rent. If you hop over to the website of Yale’s Beinecke Library, you can see a collection of rent cards that belonged to Langston Hughes.
I’ll be honest, for a long time when I thought of Frank Sinatra, I thought of Marilyn Monroe, ratpack films, and the Olive Garden. That is, until I lived for a short time near The Bronx’s Arthur Avenue, the best Little Italy in New York. Sinatra poured from the speakers of Italian eateries and cigar and pastry shops. It dramatically increased the quality of my pleasant associations with his music. Still, I rarely listened very closely. I can’t entirely blame pop culture for turning him into background music—it happens to nearly every major star. But overuse of his voice as accompaniment to olive oil, cigars, and martinis has perhaps made us tune him out too often.
Treating Sinatra as mood music would not have sat well with some of the singers many of us grew up idolizing from a young age, like Paul McCartney and David Bowie, who both found his work formative. McCartney thought so highly of it, he sent Sinatra one of his earliest compositions, an off-kilter lounge crooner called “Suicide” that he wrote at the age of 14. (Hear an unreleased recording below.)
“I thought it was quite a good one,” he remembered, “but apparently [Sinatra] thought I was taking the mickey out of him and he rejected it.”
Bowie, in 1977, wrote what he expressly intended as a parody of Sinatra—“Life on Mars.” But the story is even stranger than that. He specifically tried to “take the mickey” out of Sinatra’s “My Way,” a song credited to Paul Anka that just happens to have first been written, with different lyrics, by Bowie, as “Even a Fool Learns to Love” in 1968 (hear Bowie sing it above). “Life on Mars,” one of the most beautifully melodic songs in all of pop music, with one of Bowie’s best vocal performances, shows how much the Thin White Duke owed to Ole Blue Eyes.
These are just two of hundreds of male singers whose melodies have taken up immortal residence in our brains and who owe a tremendous debt to Frank Sinatra. In addition to his keen melodic sensibility, Sinatra also set a high bar with his technique. In the video at the top of the post from 1965, we see the consummate artist record “It Was a Very Good Year” in the studio, while smoking a cigarette and casually sipping what may be coffee from a paper cup in his other hand.
At one point, he stops and banters with the engineer, asking him to stop for any “P popping,” the explosive sound resulting from singers putting too much force into their “p” sounds and distorting the microphone. Nowadays everyone uses what’s called a “pop filter” to catch these bursts of air, but Sinatra doesn’t have one, or seem to need one. “I don’t thump,” he tells the recording engineer, “I’m a sneaky P popper.” Indeed. One commenter on YouTube pointed out Sinatra’s graceful mic technique:
Notice how he turned his head when he sang “it poured sweet and clear” to avoid the spike on the P. In fact, he backed away from the mic just a bit for that whole last verse because he was singing much stronger for the last statement of the song. Think about it… this was a live studio recording. One take. No overdubs, No added tracks. Just pure talent. The only thing the sound engineers had to do was adjust the eq levels a bit and that’s it. This is what you hear on the album. You’d be hard pressed to find ANYONE who could do that today.
Most vocal performances get recorded in booths, and certainly not in big open rooms with an orchestra and no headphones. Some singers learn to handle a microphone well. Many do not. Audio compression supplies the dynamics, performances get processed digitally and edited together from several takes. Young producers often wonder how people made great sounding records before improvements like pop filters, isolating monitoring systems, or software that allow a nearly infinite number of corrective techniques. The answer: perhaps many of these things aren’t always improvements, but props. As Sinatra shows us in this footage, great sound in the studio came from the professionalism and attentive technique of artists and engineers who got it right at the source.
This weekend, YouTube is live streaming Coachella 2017, which will feature performances by Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead, Lorde, Bon Iver, New Order and more.
To watch the shows, you can tune into three channels throughout the weekend, plus a Live 360 channel for select performances. The channels all appear below. And further down the page, you can find the schedule for the entire weekend. Enjoy!
The ‘Sad Clown with the Golden Voice’ has taken to releasing emotionally-freighted covers on select Fridays.
There’s something about a giant sad singing clown that comforts us, let’s us know it’s ok to feel, to show our feelings. It’s a sad and beautiful world, and we’re all in it together, even when we’re totally alone.
So quoth Big Mike Geier, the founder and frontman of the band Kingsized, and the man behind Puddles’ white makeup and rickrack-trimmed clown suit.
Whatever he’s tapped into, it’s real. The New York Times’ Jason Zinnoman, in a slightly skeeved-out think piece on clowns last year, wrote:
What makes him transcend the trope is his vulnerability. When you first see him charging down the aisle, he’s an intimidating figure, but his body is actually not aggressive. It slumps, passively. When he asks for a hug, it looks as if he really needs it. He makes you feel bad for finding him off-putting, and then he belts out a lovely song.
Friday, March 3 found Puddles accompanying himself on a red guitar for “It’s a Heartache,” a hit for Bonnie Tyler and later, Rod Stewart. They both have their strengths, but Puddles is uniquely suited to tap into the heartache of ‘standing in the cold rain, feeling like a clown.”
A previous Friday Feel, Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” was a fan request. (Yes, he’s still taking them.)
February 10’s Friday Feel brought new listeners to a younger artist, Brett Dennen. Puddles praised his “Heaven” as “beautiful and thoughtful song,” confessing that he “barely held it together on this one.” Also see Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me” down below.
The piece de resistance, wherein the lyrics of Pinball Wizard are sung to the tune of Folsom Prison Blues, is at the top of the page. It’s no great surprise that that one’s gone viral. Puddles is transparent, however, giving credit to the late Gregory Dean Smalley, an Atlanta-based songwriter who died of AIDS in the late 90s:
Back in 1994 or so, I saw (him) perform this mashup at the Star Community Bar. I was floored. Greg was a force of supernatural proportions and he is missed. Many people have done it prior to me doing it. I guess it was always meant to be.
Last year we alerted you to a short doc about authors and their relationship with writer’s block. Many were philosophical. Others like Philipp Meyer dismissed it: ““I don’t think writer’s block actually exists,” he said. “It’s basically insecurity.”
How seriously you take it or how terribly it affects you, we have a Spotify playlist created by Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame called “Write Your Way Out.”
He revealed the playlist on his Twitter feed on March 20 with an apology that the mix took longer to make than expected. It is a mix, he said, “about writing, songs that feature great writing, and everything in between.” Like his other mixes, he’s thinking about us, that kindly Mr. Miranda.
The eclectic mix begins with “Happy Birthday Darling” from Bright Lights Big City (“Now when you write my son, make the choice, find your voice, look down deep in your heart”), then features English-language hip hop from the Hamilton Mixtape (Nas’ “Wrote My Way Out”) and Spanish-language hip hop from Calle 13 (“Adentro”), folk classics (Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning”, Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages”), even some jaunty pop from Vampire Weekend (“Oxford Comma”) and Sara Bareilles (“Love Song”). He ends with Raúl Esparza’s ballad “Why” from the musical Tick, Tick, BOOM!, which closes the mix with a paean to the healthy addiction of creativity. (“I make a vow, right here and now / I’m gonna spend my time this way,” he sings.)
It’s nice to know that Miranda fussed over this selection like one used to do back in the days of cassette tapes. Does that mean he has a crush on all of us?
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
