In some regards it is a miracle
that so much of traditional music was salvaged, including the good with the
doubtful. That artists also slipped
through the cracks was also inevitable.
That great voices have never been heard is attested to today in shows like
America’s got Talent and its like.
What I do want to see more of is
a mandated local content rule as part of broadcast licensing. It worked wonderfully in Canada and applied
in some form everywhere makes perfect sense.
It could be even be driven by a distance formula, just for fun. After all, distance has controlled physical
access to music anyway. All this
incubates a huge pool of talent and keeps developing talent from ever been
discarded.
This is a great story whose
background I had some awareness of and this helps focus it a lot better. We also need to find better ways to support
our true archivists with capital accounts and maintenance support. This needs to be done through libraries and
museums. We have to escape the cycle of
poverty collection and dissolution on the collector’s death. Let the libraries and museums decide
what is the final disposition of these
great collections.
THE BALLAD OF GEESHIE AND ELVIE
On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music
and then vanished without a trace.
BY JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
APRIL 13, 2014
IN THE WORLD of
early-20th-century African-American music and people obsessed by it, who can
appear from one angle like a clique of pale and misanthropic scholar-gatherers
and from another like a sizable chunk of the human population, there exist no
ghosts more vexing than a couple of women identified on three ultrarare records
made in 1930 and ’31 as Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. There are musicians as
obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and musicians as great, but in none does the Venn
diagram of greatness and lostness reveal such vast and bewildering co-extent.
In the spring of 1930, in a damp and dimly lit studio, in a small Wisconsin
village on the western shore of Lake Michigan, the duo recorded a batch of
songs that for more than half a century have been numbered among the
masterpieces of prewar American music, in particular two, Elvie’s “Motherless
Child Blues” and Geeshie’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” twin Alps of their tiny
oeuvre, inspiring essays and novels and films and cover versions, a classical
arrangement.
Yet despite more than 50
years of researchers’ efforts to learn who the two women were or where they
came from, we have remained ignorant of even their legal names. The sketchy
memories of one or two ancient Mississippians, gathered many decades ago,
seemed to point to the southern half of that state, yet none led to anything solid.
A few people thought they heard hints of Louisiana or Texas in the guitar
playing or in the pronunciation of a lyric. We know that the word “Geechee,”
with a c, can refer to a person born into the heavily African-inflected Gullah
culture centered on the coastal islands off Georgia and the Carolinas. But
nothing turned up there either. Or anywhere. No grave site, no photograph.
Forget that — no anecdotes. This is what set Geeshie and Elvie apart even from
the rest of an innermost group of phantom geniuses of the ’20s and ’30s. Their
myth was they didn’t have anything you could so much as hang a myth on. The
objects themselves — the fewer than 10 surviving copies, total, of their three
known Paramount releases, a handful of heavy, black, scratch-riven shellac
platters, all in private hands — these were the whole of the file on Geeshie
and Elvie, and even these had come within a second thought of vanishing,
within, say, a woman’s decision in cleaning her parents’ attic to go against
some idle advice that she throw out a box of old records and instead to find
out what the junk shop gives. When she decides otherwise, when the shop isn’t
on the way home, there goes the music, there go the souls, ash flakes up the
flue, to flutter about with the Edison cylinder of Buddy Bolden’s band and the
phonautograph of Lincoln’s voice.
I have been fascinated by
this music since first experiencing it, like a lot of other people in my
generation, in Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary “Crumb,” on the life of the
artist Robert Crumb, which used “Last Kind Words” for a particularly vivid
montage sequence. And I have closely followed the search for them over the
years; drawn along in part by the sheer History Channel mysteriousness of it,
but mainly — the reason it never got boring — by their music.
Outside any bullyingly
hyperbolical attempts to describe the technical beauty of the songs themselves,
there’s another facet to them, one that deepens their fascination, namely a
certain time-capsule dimension. The year 1930 seems long ago enough now, perhaps,
but older songs and singers can be heard to blow through this music, strains in
the American songbook that we know were there, from before the Civil War, but
can’t hear very well or at all. There’s a song, Geeshie’s “Last Kind Words,” a
kind of pre-blues or not-yet-blues, a doomy, minor-key lament that calls up
droning banjo songs from long before the cheap-guitar era, with a strange
thumping rhythm on the bass string. “If I
get killed,” Geeshie sings, “if I get killed, please don’t bury my soul.” There’s
a blues, “Motherless Child,” with 16-bar, four-line stanzas, that begins by
repeating the same line four times, “My
mother told me just before she died,” AAAA, no variation, just
moaning the words, each time with achingly subtle microvariations, notes blue
enough to flirt with tonal chaos. Generations of spirituals pass through
“Motherless Child,” field melodies and work songs drift through it, and above
everything, the playing brims with unfalsifiable sophistication. Elvie’s notes
float. She sends them out like little sailboats onto a pond. “Motherless Child”
is her only song, the only one of the six on which she takes lead to my ears —
there are people who think it’s also her on “Over to My House.” On the other
songs she’s behind Geeshie, albeit contributing hugely. The famous Joe Bussard
(pronounced “buzzard”), one of the world’s foremost collectors of prewar 78s,
found one of two known copies of “Motherless Child” in an antique store in
Baltimore, near the waterfront, in the mid-1960s. The story goes that Bussard
used to have people over to his house to play for them the first note of
“Motherless Child,” just the first few seconds, again and again, an E that
Elvie plucks and lets hang. It sounds like nothing and then, after several
listens, like nothing else. “Baby, now
she’s dead, she’s six feet in the ground,” she sings. “And I’m a child, and I
am drifting ’round.”
Before there could be the
minor miracle of these discs’ having survived, there had to be an earlier,
major one: that of people like Geeshie and Elvie ever being recorded. To
understand how that happened it’s needful to know about race records, a
commercial field that flourished between the world wars, and specifically the
Paramount company, a major competitor in that game throughout the 1920s.
THE STUDIOThe Paramount Records
factory and recording studio in Grafton, Wisc., circa 1915. Alex van der Tuuk Archives
A furniture company, that’s
how it started. The Wisconsin Chair Company. They got into making phonograph
cabinets. If people had records they liked, they would want phonographs to play
them on, and if they had phonographs, they would want cabinets to keep them in.
The discs were even sold, especially at first, in furniture shops. They were
literally accessories. Toys, you could say. In fact, the first disc “records”
were manufactured to go with a long-horned gramophone distributed by a German
toy company. So we must imagine, it’s as if a subgenre of major American art
had been preserved only on vintage View-Master slides.
In 1920, when the
white-owned OKeh label shocked even itself by selling hundreds of thousands of
copies of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (the first blues recorded by an
African-American female vocalist), the furniture-phonograph complex spied a
chance. Two populations were forming or achieving critical mass, whites willing
to pay for recordings of black music and blacks able to afford phonographs, and
together they made a new market. It’s around then that the actual phrase “race
records” enters the vernacular. In 1926, Paramount had game-changing luck on a
string of 78s showcasing the virtuosic Texas songster Blind Lemon Jefferson —
his “Long Lonesome Blues” sold into the six figures — and as in Mamie Smith’s
case, he touched off a frantic search among labels to find performers in a
similar vein. The “country blues” was born, though not yet known by that name.
It was men, for the most part, but with an important female minority, a “vital
feminizing force,” in the words of Don Kent, the influential collector and poet
of liner notes.
For the preserving of that
force we have to thank not the foresight of those recording companies but their
ignorance and even philistinism when it came to black culture. They knew next to
nothing about the music and even less about what new trends in it might appeal
to consumers. Nowhere was this truer than at Paramount. These were businessmen,
Northern and Midwestern, former salesmen. Their notions of what was a hit and
what was not were a Magic Eight Ball. So, when the mid-1920s arrived, and
Paramount went looking farther afield for new acts, they compensated by
recording everything and waiting to see what sold. Not everything, but a lot. A
long swath of everything. The result was an unprecedented,
never-to-be-repeated, all-but-unconscious survey of America’s musical culture,
a sonic X-ray of it, taken at a moment when the full kaleidoscopic variety of
prerecording-era transracial forms hadn’t yet contracted. Hundreds of singers,
more thousands of songs. Some of the greatest musicians ever born in this
country were netted only there. It was a slapdash and profit-driven documentary
project that in some respects dwarfed what the most ambitious and well
intentioned ethnomusicologists could hope to achieve (deformed in all sorts of
ways by capitalism, but we take what we can get).
Among the first to wake up
to these riches was, as it happens, the most prominent of those great
ethnomusicologists, Alan Lomax. He had been traveling the back roads with his
father, John A. Lomax, making field recordings for the Library of Congress’s
Archive of American Folk Song, and he had seen firsthand that all of this
culture, which had endured mouth-to-ear for centuries, was giving way, proving
not quite powerful enough to resist the radio waves and movies. In the late
’30s, Lomax was record hunting one day and came across a large cache of old
Paramount discs in a store. At the time they were a mere 10 or 15 years old and
couldn’t have appeared less valuable to a casual picker. Lomax listened,
transfixed by an increasing realization that Paramount offered him an earhole
into the past, into the decade just before he joined his father on the
song-collecting scene, an enormous commercial complement to what the two of
them had been doing under intellectual auspices with their field-recording.
Lomax started digging. In 1940 he created a list, with the title “American Folk
Songs on Commercial Records,” and circulated it in the folklore community.
This list is a very precious
little document in 20th-century American cultural history. It was published in
only a limited library report, but copies were passed around. It marked the
first time someone had publicly recognized these commercial recordings as
something other than detritus. Most important, it made space for, even
emphasized, the more obscure blues singers.
To grasp the significance
of that, you have to bear in mind how fantastically few record collectors
possessed such an interest at the end of the 1930s. Early jazz was a thing in
certain hip circles, but only a few true freaks were into the country blues.
There was twitchy, rail-thin Jim McKune, a postal worker from Long Island City,
Queens, who famously maintained precisely 300 of the choicest records under his
bed at the Y.M.C.A. Had to keep the volume low to avoid complaints. He referred
to his listening sessions as séances. Summoning weird old voices from the
South, the ethereal falsetto of Crying Sam Collins. Or the whine of Isaiah
Nettles, the Mississippi Moaner. Did McKune listen to Geeshie and Elvie? It’s
unknowable. His records were already gone when he died — murdered in 1971, in a
hotel room. Another early explorer? The writer Paul Bowles. The Paul Bowles,
believe it or not, who started collecting blues records as an ether-huffing
undergraduate in Charlottesville, Va., in the late 1920s, “at secondhand
furniture stores in the black quarter.” Out West there was Harry Smith, who
went on to create the “Anthology of American Folk Music” for Folkways Records,
the first “box set,” of which it can be compactly if inadequately said: No
“Anthology,” no Woodstock. Wee, owlish Smith. He and McKune came to know each
other. No less important, they both came to know Alan Lomax’s list, which
galvanized their passion for this particular chamber of the recorded past,
giving shape to their “want lists.”
In the ’50s McKune would
become a sort of salon master to the so-called Blues Mafia, the initial cell of
mainly Northeastern 78-pursuers who evolved, some of them, into the label
owners and managers and taste-arbiters of the folk-blues revival. An all-white
men’s club, several of whom were or grew wealthy, the Blues Mafia doesn’t
always come off heroically in recent — and vital — revisionist histories of the
field, more of them being written by women (including two forthcoming books by
Daphne Brooks and Amanda Petrusich). Still, no one who seriously cares about
the music would pretend that the cultural debt we owe the Blues Mafia isn’t
past accounting. It’s not just all they found and documented that marks their
contribution. It’s equally what they spawned, whether they would claim it or
not. Dylan didn’t listen to 78s, after all, on the floors of those pads he was
crashing at in Greenwich Village, but to the early reissue LPs. By Dylan I mean
the ’60s. But also Dylan. “If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record when I
did,” he wrote 10 years ago, “there probably would have been hundreds of lines
of mine that would have been shut down.”
THERE WAS, in those early days,
another individual, one less easily slotted into the Wikipedia story line of
blues history. A young man named Robert McCormick, who went by “Mack.” In Ohio
as a teenager, he fell under the wizardry of jazz, listening to the bands at a
nearby amusement park. The musicians, he learned, were invariably curious about
the availability of certain species of contraband; he knew where to get it and
found that this could put him pretty much anywhere, into any room. He had a
mind bent in the direction of curating undervalued things. In his teens, he
went to burlesque shows, presumably the only one in the audience with a
notebook, and wrote down accounts of the comedy skits, stock bits with vulgar
names, the Pickle Caper, things no one would have thought to remember, and
possibly no one did, but they’re in McCormick’s files.
CULTURE GATHERINGMack McCormick, right, and
record executive Chris Strachwitz in South Texas in early 1963, where
Strachwitz was working on a documentary about blues music. Mack McCormick
From the musicians, he got
the idea that if you wanted the realest jazz, you had to go to New Orleans, so
when he wound up in East Texas after the war and found himself within
hitchhiking distance of the city, he started making trips there. He became a
regular at a place called the New Orleans Record Shop, on Baronne Street, run
by a journalist and pioneering discographer named Orin Blackstone. Blackstone
knew that McCormick was going back and forth to Texas, so he asked him to keep
his eyes peeled for old records there. Before the war, they made recordings in
Texas, he said, in “field studios,” hotels, warehouses. He showed him the
labels to be on watch for, what they looked like. He dubbed McCormick the
first-ever Texas editor to the Index to Jazz. It was 1946.
That unofficial knighting
launched one of the postwar period’s most storied careers in American cultural
fieldwork. Searching for records led to searching for the people who made them,
and McCormick had natural gifts when it came to approaching strangers and
getting them to talk, or if they could, to sing and play. He had a likable,
approachable face, with pronounced ears and intelligent eyes. He took a job
with the census, expressly requesting that he be assigned the Fourth Ward, the historic
African-American neighborhood in Houston settled by freed slaves who migrated
there from all parts of the South, where he knew he would find records and lots
of musicians, going house to house. The fables of his research are legion. He
drove unthinkable miles. At one point he started traveling county by county or,
rather, he started moving in a pattern of counties, from east to west, marking
a horizontal band that overlapped the spread of slavery west from the Atlantic
colonies. He investigated 888 counties before he was finished. He asked about
everything, not just music but recipes, dances, games, ghost stories, and in
his note-taking, he realized that the county itself, as an organizing
geographical principle, had some reality beyond a shape on the map, that it
retained in some much-diminished but not quite extinguished sense, the old
contours of the premodern world, the world of the commons, how in one county
you would have dozens of fiddle players, but in the very next county, none —
there everyone played banjo. He began to intuit a theory of “clusters,” that
this was how culture worked, emanating outward from vortices where craft-making
and art-making suddenly rise, under a confluence of various pressures, to
higher levels. Elaborating that theory would be his great work, or part of it.
He never elaborated the
theory. It’s frank, but I don’t think unfair, to say that he won’t. He’s in his
mid-80s; his health is shaky. His archive of tapes and transcripts is a
labyrinth even to him. He calls it the Monster. He has been open, too, about a
lifetime’s battles against psychological obstacles, specifically a sometimes
paralyzing bipolar disorder. The mania that drove him to those superhuman
exploits of cultural questing could turn on him and shut him down when it came
time for the drudgery of organizing facts and notes. You can find a very moving
“open letter” from him, published in Blues Unlimited in 1976, saying,
essentially, “Help”; saying, “I’ve gathered this material, this data, and it
has swallowed me.” In one letter he mentions having been made aware, at a
recent meeting of the American Folklore Society, that certain people in the
community were upset with him, because he was hoarding so much knowledge. He’d
uncovered more than almost anyone, about this music they worshiped, yet he had
published less than almost anyone. It was holding them back, holding the
discipline back. But what did they want him to do? Give it away? It was his
work.
He has given a lot away
over the years, most famously in the case of Robert Johnson. You know Johnson:
hellhounds, crossroads, death by poison. Have you heard of a man who has a
picture of Johnson no one has ever seen? That’s McCormick. The story goes that
they’re in a safe place in Mexico, where McCormick lived for a period. Peter
Guralnick, whose “Searching for Robert Johnson” has a permanent place on the
high shelf of writing about the blues, saw the pictures. McCormick let him.
Guralnick very openly and
graciously makes clear in the notes to his book that it draws deeply on
McCormick’s research, and was meant, in fact, to lay the groundwork for what
McCormick had gathered and put together about the singer’s life. Guralnick sent
a copy of the book to McCormick when it was published, with an inscription that
said, in a gentle way, “Here’s my book, now it’s time for yours.”
Guralnick’s book came out
25 years ago. McCormick, needless to say, hasn’t finished his own. He is on
record (in one of two or three notably good profiles done on him over the
years) as saying that the subject of Johnson has gone dead on him. And he has
said since that part of him wishes he hadn’t let that one singer, that riddle
of a man, consume him. Which is a human thing to feel . . . except for when you
happen to know more than anyone on earth about a subject that loads of people
in several countries want to know more about. Then your inability to produce
becomes not just a personal problem but a cultural one. It’s plausible that the
scope of research finally got too large for any one mind, even a uniquely
brilliant one, to hold in orbit. The point here is not to accuse or defend him,
but rather to point out that even his footnotes, even the fragments from his
research that have landed in other scholars’ pages, have been enough to place
him among the two or three most important figures in this field. He’s one of
those people whose influence starts to show up everywhere, once you’re
sensitized to it.
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