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I Hear America Singing:
Pete Seeger's American Favorite Ballads
Re-released on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
With Notes by Dr. Guy Logsdon and Jeff Place
By Ross Altman
The last time I saw Dr. Guy Logsdon, former Head Librarian
at the University
of Tulsa, he was singing
dirty cowboy songs. I don't mean dirty as in dusty, or straight off the trail,
I mean dirty as in unprintable in a family magazine, daily newspaper, or any
media outlet controlled by the FCC. His classic book, "The Whorehouse Bells
Were Ringing" and Other Songs Cowboys Sing, was the result of a lifetime
fascination with the songs that John Lomax missed when he pioneered the field. Lomax's
late Victorian sensibility had some blind spots when it came to appreciating
the less cultivated aspects of the folk.
There are a dozen collections of cowboy songs wherein you
will find The Strawberry Roan, for example, but if you want to learn The
Castration of the Strawberry Roan you will need to find Logsdon's book.
We shared the stage once during an evening devoted to Woody
Guthrie at the late great folk venue The
Barn at UC Riverside, created and kept going for nearly twenty years by
Dot Harris and her late husband, Professor of English Bill Harris. Dr. Logsdon
has also made Woody Guthrie one of his scholarly specialties, devoting two
years of his life just to compiling a bibliography of Woody's prolific
output for the Woody Guthrie Foundation in New York City.
And now he has teamed up with Jeff Place, librarian and
archivist for the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections at the
Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, to compile and
extensively annotate a CD re-release of Pete Seeger's classic series on Moses
Asch's original Folkways Records, American Favorite Ballads,
which I am proud to have acquired on the original five volume LPs. They form
the basis for Pete's first song collection published by Oak Publications, and
still in print, American Favorite Ballads, Tunes and Songs, as sung by Pete
Seeger, (of which I am proud to have a signed copy!).
But enough about me; let's talk about me. I also have a
goodly portion of Pete's surrounding Folkways recordings, going all the
way back to his first 10 inch album on Folkways, Darling Cory, in which
you can still hear the traditional sources for his unique banjo style that
emerged some years later with the Weavers. On these early records he played
traditional songs the way he learned them in the field, from Pete Steele, Doc
Boggs, Uncle Dave Macon and others. If you recall my FolkWorks essay on
the development
of the American folk festival, Pete's father (musicologist Charles Seeger) took
his 16 year-old son to his first festival in Asheville, North Carolina. That's
when Pete Seeger fell in love with the five-string banjo, and began his
lifelong love of folk music.
You can trace Pete's development as a musician in many of
the tracks on this newly packaged and annotated seminal boxed set, American
Favorite Ballads. It includes recordings from many of Pete's Folkways albums
in addition to the five-volume original series which provides the series title.
There are 139 songs in this remarkable collection; whereas there were only 84
in the Oak Publications book with the same title.
Smithsonian Folkways could not have picked a better
series to re-release on CD, and just in time for Pete's 90th
birthday, coming up on May 3rd. It is required listening and
reading. The original liner notes were tentative and sketchy compared to this
new masterpiece of historical scholarship. Let me give you one telling example
of the difference.
In Pete's note to the gold rush classic, Clementine,
you find the following:
"A popular song of the California gold rush of
1849. The tune is probably much older. Sounds German to me, but I've been told
it was Mexican, early 19th Century." (American Favorite Ballads, Oak
Publications, NYC, 1961.)
Here is Guy Logsdon's and Jeff Place's elaborate, if inconclusive,
note on the same song:
"Also known as Darling Clementine,
My Darling Clementine, and Oh, My Darling Clementine, words and
music by Percy Montrose."
But that's just the head note; they go on to add:
"In 1863 lyrics similar
to Clementine were published as sheet music under the title, Down the
River Lived a Maiden (Oliver Ditson & Co. Boston) with H.S. Thompson
credited for "Song and Chorus," but in 1884 the melody and lyrics were
published by the same company under the title, Oh, My Darling Clementine,
with Percy Montrose credited with words and music. The following year, a
variant was published as Clementine by Willis Woodward & Co., New York, with credit
given to Barker Bradford. Even though reference is made to "miner,
forty-niner," no lyrics remotely similar appear in songsters related to the
gold rush. It became identified as a western song in 1946, when John Ford's
film about Wyatt Earp and the Tombstone
shootout, hit the screens, and the song was constantly played as the theme
music."
Then they go into its recording history:
"The song was recorded by Floyd Thompson & His Hometowners in 1928
in Indianapolis, Indiana, for Vocalion Records (Vo 5242) and
six years later by Bradley Kincaid for Decca (DeW4271). It is strange that only
two commercial recordings prior to 1941 have been documented, but the song was
being sung for decades by people of all ages. Many variants, including bawdy
lyrics [Dr. Logsdon couldn't let that pass], and the song has been included in
numerous popular collections. Folklorists have not listed it in field
collections-which makes it one of the songs Pete considers an American favorite
without being classified as a folk song."
In other words, it was not a "gold rush song" at all, but a
late popular addition that got folded back into twentieth century retellings of
the gold rush. (For an additional source, see Songs of the Gold Rush; Edited
with introduction by Richard A. Dwyer and Richard Lingenfelter; Music edited by
David Cohen. Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 1965. 200p.)
You get the idea: If you have been wondering where these
songs we call folk songs come from, when and where they have appeared in print,
and who first recorded them-in short, if you want a genealogy of folk music,
you have come to the right place.
As you go through the collection, you will not only hear
Pete's growing mastery of the banjo, but his 12-string labor of love on behalf
of preserving the music of Huddie Ledbetter-Leadbelly-whose theme song Goodnight
Irene was the Weaver's biggest selling record. It was on the Hit Parade in
1950 for 17 weeks, and was Life Magazine's
choice for "The Song of the Half Century." Pete plays it, and many other songs,
on his 12-string guitar, including, surprisingly, I've Been Working On the
Railroad, with which he backs up the line "strumming on the old banjo."
Maybe he left his banjo back at the log cabin for that recording session.
What was so revealing to me, however, as I began my own
labor of love in listening to this amazing set of performances, is how Pete's
musical personality kind of sneaks up on you, almost like the old John Wayne
movie, Big Jake, where the opening scene slowly and cryptically unfolds
until the camera suddenly pans onto John Wayne behind a tree, gun at the ready,
watching the same scene develop as you did, of a sheepherder about to be hung,
and Wayne muttering to himself, "No sir, I ain't a gonna do it; everytime I get involved in somebody else's
business I live to regret it." Of course, he then saves the sheepherder's life.
With Pete, it's a banjo and 12-string instead of a gun, but
the effect is similar: for the first three songs I recognized Pete's voice and
knew the song, but there was something missing. Pete's full musical personality
had not quite developed yet. And then, before he sings a note, he starts to
play Skip To My Lou on the banjo, and you realize it's Pete Seeger
playing-and no one else in the whole world. Like looking at John Wayne for the
first time, that's when the movie begins-and that's when the record takes off,
you can sit back, relax, and know you are in the presence of an American original-the
Yankee troubadour who captured the songs and stories of this land and made five
generations of young people fall in love with their folk music heritage.
Did I mention that Pete got a Grammy this year, at the
tender age of 89! He got it for another great collection of his songs-many of
which he wrote: Pete Seeger at 89. I mention it because to fully
appreciate the depth and breadth of Pete's musical journey you really should
hear both collections back to back. Pete at 89 singing his classic antiwar
song, Waist Deep In the Big Muddy, and Pete at 39 a half century before,
singing a simple children's play party song like Skip To My Lou.
Today when we think of Pete Seeger it is more as the creator
or co-creator of some classic modern songs like Where Have All the Flowers
Gone, Turn, Turn, Turn, and If I Had a Hammer, than as a folk singer
who sang and recorded most of the traditional songs that make up "the American
song-bag." But had Pete never written a song he would still be America's
greatest folk singer, and this landmark multi-volume set documents why. Pete
chose his songs carefully, and together they create an immense sound mural of
American history, from early American hymns like Wond'rous Love, to Yankee
Doodle during the Revolution, John Brown's Body in the Civil War,
the Greer County Bachelor of the westward expansion, immigrant ballads
like Paddy Works On the Railroad and No Irish Need Apply, sea
shanties like Shenandoah, and African-American spirituals like Go
Down, Moses. And these titles just scratch the surface. Taken together,
this astonishing collection is a core curriculum of American folk music.
In the midst of recording this paean to his country, and
just ten years after serving his country in the Pacific during World War II, Pete
was unaccountably called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, where his refusal to name names led to a six-year long battle to
clear his name and stay out of prison. In typical Pete fashion, he did it his
way, relying not on the 5th amendment designed to protect him
from self-incrimination, but rather the 1st amendment
designed to protect everybody from being asked-as he memorably put it-questions
no American should be asked. (I explore this turning point in Pete's life
in a previous FolkWorks column, Pete Seeger's
Finest Hour.)
The Supreme Court of the United States decided his case in
1961, cleared him of the contempt of Congress charges that stemmed from that August
18, 1955 appearance before HUAC, and let him get back to the life of a
traveling musician who blazed the trail for countless folk troubadours and
songsmiths since. And yet it would be another six years before his blacklisting
from network TV would finally be successfully challenged by The Smothers
Brothers, so Pete could appear on their show and (on his return visit in 1968)
finally sing Waist Deep In the Big Muddy.
My admiration for and indebtedness to Pete Seeger is
incalculable, so permit me one cavil about this collection-I wish I could say
there is not one sour note in the magnificent six hours of recorded music and
annotations in this beautiful boxed set, but there is one song I wish they had
left off, and let find its way to the dustbin of folk music history. That would
be Ain't It a Shame, another song Pete learned from Leadbelly, which
goes, in part, Ain't it a shame to beat
your wife on a Sunday, ain't it a shame? Dr. Logsdon and Jeff Place try to
ameliorate its macho down home advice to rustic husbands by writing in the
notes, "The verse Ain't it a shame to
beat your wife on a Sunday is true for all other days, months and years; it
is a shame and sin." Except that is not what the song says; what the song says is, Ain't it a shame to beat your wife on a Sunday, when you got Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Friday, Saturday-ain't it a shame. To
which I say, ain't it a shame to keep this song making light of domestic
violence in circulation.
But perhaps that only demonstrates what makes this
collection a true treasury of American folk music: it was created at a time
when every song did not have to pass a political litmus test before it could
enter the folk canon, when folk music was understood to document what real
people actually say and feel, rather than what they ought to say and feel,
when, in short, folk music was played for fun more than for profit or to
impress a willing audience of fellow true believers.
This was the music I grew up on, and thanks to Pete Seeger
and Jeff Place
and Guy Logsdon and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, yet another
generation of young people can grow up on it too. And finally, unbelievably in
the face of the modern economics of recorded music (see my last column, Bob Does Pepsi: The
Surreal Thing, for a summary of what working musicians and songwriters
are now up against if they seek to earn a living from their music), Smithsonian
Folkways has held the price on this set to just $38 and change. Considering
all that went into its original production, and its recreation here as a
masterpiece of scholarship as well as music, I'd call that dirt-cheap. If there
is any one essential recording of traditional American music, this is it. And
did I mention, it also includes Curly Fletcher's cowboy classic, The
Strawberry Roan, to whet your appetite for the cowboy's after-hours
version-but that's another story.
In sum, if you are concerned about what your government is
doing with your money, in bailing out Wall Street bankers, brokers and Detroit
CEOs, here is a reason to rejoice: One government agency is using your tax
dollars to preserve something truly worth preserving, America's priceless
musical heritage. Quick, go out and buy a copy, or order it directly from the
source, before some senator on the Budget Committee figures out that the
Smithsonian is spending your money on an un-American folk singer. Meanwhile,
God bless Smithsonian Folkways; and Happy 90th Birthday, Pete
Seeger. And Toshi too!
Ross Altman may be reached at
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Ross will be
doing a tribute to Pete Seeger at the Sunset Hall Garden Party at Paramount
Studios on Sunday, May 3rd, and a second tribute to Pete and other
"Unquiet Americans" at the Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest and Folk Festival
on Sunday afternoon, May 17, at 4:00pm on the Railroad Stage.
You may order your own personal copy of Pete Seeger: American Favorite Ballads, Vol
1-5, listen to samples from the recordings and download the complete tracks
of Buffalo Gals and Oh Mary Don't You Weep for free from
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings by visiting the Smithsonian
Folkways website.
To explore their remarkable catalog, which now includes a
number of other independent folk music labels such as (Richard) Dyer-Bennett
Records (about whom I wrote in a previous FolkWorks essay, A Minstrel Out
of Time), Monitor Records and Fast Folk Records, you can visit their web
sites www.folkways.si.edu and www.smithsonianglobalsound.org
Their direct mail address is: Smithsonian Folkways
Recordings, 600 Maryland Ave. SW
Ste 2001, Washington, D.C. 20024
Ross Altman has a Ph.D. in English. Before becoming a full-time
folk singer he taught college English and Speech. He now sings around California for
libraries, unions, schools, political groups and folk festivals. You can reach
Ross at
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