Tag: Smithsonian Folkways

Pete Seeger: Effecting Change With Music (Part 2 of 2)

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Pete Seeger was a prolific songwriter, a dogged activist, and a folklorist who believed in magnifying voices from every corner of America. He used his music to further causes from Civil Rights to environmental preservation, and he never let the magnitude of a task scare him away from a fight for what he believed in. The spirit of servitude that Seeger brought to the world didn’t die when he passed away in 2014, and that fact is perhaps most evident at Newport Folk Festival, the now-iconic event that Seeger helped George Wein get off the ground in 1959. “The spirit of Pete, and of Pete’s egalitarian nature, is in every ounce of this festival’s DNA,” says Jay Sweet, executive producer of Newport Festivals.

To coincide with what would have been Seeger’s 100th birthday this month, Smithsonian Folkways released a six-disc anthology celebrating Seeger’s astounding career, complete with twenty unreleased recordings and a hardcover book detailing the many ways Seeger was a catalyst for positive change, both in American culture and the world at large. Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection is a window into the life of a musician who shaped American folk music, but it’s also a road map for those who hope to advocate for positive change themselves.

“We can’t complain about what’s happening to us in the present day unless we start giving the kids the strength and the wisdom and the history of what came before them, and ask them to really pay attention,” Sweet says. Here, the festival producer discusses what Seeger taught him and how he’s using Newport to spread Pete’s message to a new generation.

Editor’s Note: Read the first part of our BGS interview with Jay Sweet.

BGS: You can tell a lot about a person by how they handle a disagreement. Did you ever argue with Pete?

The biggest disagreement I had with Pete was never about any kind of problem he had with rock or electric guitar or any of that. It was that he didn’t think we were doing enough. For a while, the nonprofit’s mission statement was, first and foremost, to keep the Newport Folk and Newport Jazz Festivals going in perpetuity, and then to help continue introducing these genres of music to students and young people. Well, Pete thought that was back asswards, and he let me know it.

The thing is, we’re not publicly traded — there’s no AEG, there’s no massive underwriting sponsor. Newport is hand to mouth, like most nonprofits. But he thought it was wrong to take the financial benefit from the festival and put it back into an endowment to ensure that we could keep this festival going. Pete wondered why we did that—to which I replied that I happen to think it’s important to keep this festival going! [Laughs] But his point was that every year we should be giving every dollar we can back. He didn’t care whether it was music education, environmental issues, housing for the homeless. It was, “Why save for the future if you can affect the present?”

That mantra seems like it’s become more and more a part of what you do.

Because of Pete, we realized maybe we did have it back asswards, in some respects, and that the best way to do this would be to flip our mission statement—now, it’s primarily to provide music education for those in need, and to use these festivals to draw attention to the need. We’ve gone from being a company that works year-round to put on two festivals to being a nonprofit that works year-round on music education, and celebrates that yearlong work with two big supporting parties.

For years, Pete was shaking his head and saying we could do more. [His disapproval] was really tough to hear—if we don’t have enough money, [I worried] we might not be able to do [the festival] at all. We had it backwards because we were trying to look out for the future, but the future is now. Pete’s reason for starting [Newport] was to effect change by giving a platform for the freedom of speech, freedom from rules. And if you’re always giving money away, you’ll find a way to do it. You will find a way to throw the festival if you’re helping people.

One of the ways Pete used Newport to effect change was during the Civil Rights era—he will always be known as a fierce advocate for equality. How can you honor that with what you do at Newport?

Equal rights was one of Pete’s biggest causes. Newport was one of the meeting points for the Civil Rights movement—[the festival] was always being watched by the government, and people learned how to sing the marching songs in workshops with Pete at Newport. All these Cambridge, Mass., and Ivy League people would come, and he’d say, Let’s get on these buses now, and go South and stand with our brothers and sisters. It was very politicized and very political at the time.

But the spirit that I take away, that I continuously turn to almost daily, is the egalitarian nature of Pete. At Newport Folk in particular, that egalitarian nature lives on. We’re all in general admission, and there’s no VIP pass to purchase. We don’t do a poster where [artists’] names are in different font sizes, or anything like that. If you’re playing, you get the same treatment whether you’re a five-hundred dollar artist or a five-thousand dollar artist or — well, I won’t say fifty-thousand because we won’t really ever pay artists that much. [Laughs] There are plenty of five-hundred-thousand-dollar artists who play Newport, but we basically tell them, ‘You need to check your ego at the Pell Bridge, because it will not fly at Newport.’ Because of that, we’ve been able to foster a community, that does go back to “We are all equal,” but it also promotes all opportunity for all people beyond the festival.

Pete stood for using music to effect change. As a person who always had an instrument on him — walked around with a banjo and a guitar for his entire life, or a penny whistle — Pete took for granted, I think, that music would always be in the curriculum for all kids. I never once think he considered there might be a world where there are five million kids in the United States who don’t have access to music education. And that’s just access to any music education—I’m not talking about the uncounted amount of broken instruments, or the fact that sports teams get brand new uniforms and stadiums and lights, when the music departments get nothing. Those things would shock Pete because he used music as his medium. We think the best way to create more Pete Seegers is to actually give more people access to music.

One could argue that, with Newport, you are fostering the next generation of legends. What do you look for in up-and-coming artists, and how do you help bring those attributes to the forefront?

I think it goes to what we were just talking about. It’s the people who I can’t see doing anything else. There is no separation between showperson and who they are off stage. To me, a folk artist is not necessarily someone who puts on a persona and comes out and creates. And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ll say some of the best pop performers in the world come off the stage and they resemble nothing of the personality they bring to a show. But I think a true folk artist is somebody who can’t separate it. What you see is what you get. …

Newport, to me, is not just a platform for artists to be able to speak their mind in a safe environment. Yes, that was its blueprint from the minute it was conceptualized but that was when other platforms didn’t exist. [“Needing a platform”] meant that you couldn’t break into radio and you couldn’t break into TV. Now there’s a festival on every g-ddamn street corner, and with the Internet, everybody can get their fifteen minutes of fame.

But Newport continues to represent a true sense of community. You are not alone out there, in a van doing three thousand miles every month. You have a place. No matter how far you go, you can feel tied, feel a weight off your shoulders, and have a rest from the corporatization of music and the sludge factory that’s out there for a lot of these people to make a living. If I can offer that respite and a sense of community and a sense of home, that, to me, is just as much a part of Pete’s legacy as anything else. This idea that we’re in this together. If you’re part of our tribe, we’re fiercely loyal. And the door is pretty open if you leave your ego behind.

Illustration: Zachary Johnson

Pete Seeger: Listening from the Rafters (Part 1 of 2)

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Pete Seeger would have turned 100 this month, but he fit well over a century’s worth of impact into the ninety-four years he had. His accomplishments as an activist, musician, folklorist, and organizer have long been numerous enough to fill an anthology—and this month, Smithsonian Folkways has finally released one, complete with six CDs, a 200-page book, and twenty previously unreleased recordings.

The release, Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, is just one way to celebrate his centennial. Fans and admirers have also marked the occasion with “Spirit of Seeger” concerts nationwide, and a special set at this summer’s Newport Folk Festival, an event where Seeger’s impact is perhaps most evident.

But Pete’s legacy is about more than a single release or celebration. Jay Sweet, executive producer at Newport Folk and a friend to Seeger, says the late folk music icon wouldn’t want any fanfare for his birthday—he’d rather see a new generation put that energy towards helping others. Here, in the first of a two-part interview, Sweet recalls conversations and memories with Seeger and discusses the way Pete’s egalitarian spirit and fiery pursuit of truth continues to propel the Newport Folk Festival forward.

BGS: You met Pete for the first time after he was a well-established icon in the American folk scene. What was that like for you?

Sweet: They say to be careful when you meet your heroes. For me, with Pete, it was the exact opposite, and it was mostly because he wasn’t Mister Positive. When I met him in his late eighties, he was a bit of a curmudgeon. I actually really liked that. He was feisty, he was disgruntled with the state of everything that was happening in the world, and he was questioning why the younger generations weren’t doing more. I think he kind of considered them soft, and I liked that he was calling it like it was.

Did that attitude reveal itself more as you grew closer over the years?

A story that I love happened few years after I met him, at Newport the first time I brought the Decemberists there. I was really excited to see them—they were going to do a funny reenactment of Dylan Goes Electric, including Pete with an axe. (I’d even told them it’d have to be kind of tongue-in-cheek, because, y’know, uh, Pete’s here.) But during the set, I get this security guard running up to me: “We’ve lost Pete. You told us to keep an eye on Mr. Seeger. We don’t know where he is.” Then, immediately, there’s another security guard running up to me. “There’s somebody in the scaffolding up on stage left, thirty-five feet up in the air. We’ve asked him to come down, but the music has started and we don’t want to interrupt the band on stage. What do we do?”

So I go, and I look, and lo and behold—in his Wranglers and a purple-pink button-down work shirt, with his little hat—was Pete Seeger at ninety-plus, thirty-five feet up in the air, looking down at the Decemberists. I remember being terrified, thinking, Well, the best thing to do is to not scare him, to wait til he comes down. There were no stairs or anything, he had just climbed.

So when he got down, I was like, Pete… what?! And he said, “I was so sick of people asking me to take pictures with them and sign autographs. You told me that this band had a lot of good stuff—that their music was based in old-time sea shanties, had all these metaphors, took from these old tales. And I was fascinated. I had to see it. And they’re fantastic!” And I just remember thinking, I know Newport is onto something when Pete Seeger is climbing the scaffolding to be left alone, just to see good music.

I’ve heard that it was actually Pete’s idea, decades ago, to pay all of the performers the same fee to play—$50. And I know that’s not how it works now, but—

It’s pretty close! [Laughs]

What elements of that spirit are still around?

Well, we perhaps overpay up-and-coming artists — those who need it, really, in order to be able to take the dog-crap offers they get all over the place and still survive. If we don’t overpay them, we give them the opportunity to collaborate with somebody that is gonna help their star shine a little brighter, give them a platform to succeed. With anybody bigger than that, we basically ask to take a zero, or even more than a zero, away from their normal asking fee. And then we make a donation in their name to something that they believe in.

And the reason that works is because there’s an understanding. You can look at, say, the Avett Brothers, who I booked three or four times before they ever headlined. Hozier — his very first, basically, gig, in the United States? It was Newport. Courtney Barnett and Leon Bridges and Margo Price, all these amazing people that came to Newport before they became the names that you might recognize. We need to support the hell out of them, and not just for altruistic reasons. Bands like the Avett Brothers and Wilco and Hozier and the Alabama Shakes and My Morning Jacket, you don’t get those bands to come back year after year if you didn’t support them when nobody else did.

And I think that is all about that $50 model, and a general understanding of it. Fleet Foxes’ Robin [Pecknold] said it really well on a PBS special: He said, when we first came here, they didn’t pay us much, but we hadn’t proven ourselves. Then I think they paid us the exact same amount when we came back to Newport to headline. The interviewer was confounded by that, he asked — why? And [Robin] essentially said, “Because now there’s another band that Jay needs to book. They’re the Fleet Foxes from ten years ago, and they need that help. Me playing it, it’s a giving back.”

And that? It’s very rare. But it comes from the spirit of Pete saying that regardless of whether you’re Bob Dylan at the height of his popularity or church singers from Appalachia, you’re getting fifty bucks. That we’re-all-in-this-together mentality comes from that fifty dollars. And if during my tenure, if the whole thing is as close as I can get to the ideal of Pete Seeger, the better off the festival will be.

What were some of your last interactions with Pete, and how do they affect the way you move forward with Newport?

My last conversations with Pete were much more interesting than my first ones, in some respects. One is that he said to me, “Jay, if you’re not upsetting someone, you’re doing it wrong.” That’s a mantra I keep with me — a what-would-Pete-say kind of thing. That’s what makes Newport, this festival that Pete basically co-founded with George Wein, iconic in American music and around the world, even though it’s so small—why its name gets continuously mentioned in the same breath as the Glastonberrys and Bonnaroos and Coachellas. I remember him saying, “You’ve gotta keep challenging the ears of our audience. Unless you’re upsetting a certain faction, you’re doing it wrong. Take the opportunity.”

About four months before he died, he asked me, “How are you going to keep booking people that speak truth to power, speak on the human condition? Who is doing that now?” I said, “Well, at this point Pete, it’s hip-hop.” I sent him some lyrics—just lyrics at first, no music—and he wrote back and said, “These are fascinating. Does any of this stuff get radio play?” And I was like “Actually, no. It’s somewhat like when you started the festival.” Because when people like Pete and Joan Baez and others had lyrical messages that, due to the lingering effects of McCarthyism, were not “fit for radio,” Newport was created out of that blacklisting.

Pete figured, if I can’t get my message to the masses via these mediums, I’m just gonna do it in person, all over the country and all over the world. I’ll take it to union halls and VFWs and town assemblies, and whatever it is—gymnasiums at public schools. The festival was basically just a massive culmination of the grassroots effort to play for the island of misfits. So I think there was a lot of connection there, for him, with hip-hop—Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper. It was fascinating to me. But white Pete was alive, we could never bring that to fruition for him. Bring somebody to Newport in a free rhyme, just a beat and somebody freestyling. I think he actually would have climbed that scaffolding again: “Leave me alone—I want to go see this truth.”

Illustration: Zachary Johnson
Editor’s Note: Read the second part of our interview with Jay Sweet.

ARTIST OF THE MONTH: Pete Seeger

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Beyond the significance of May 2019 being BGS Artist of the Month Pete Seeger’s 100th birthday month, this is a chance to recognize that Pete is an artist for every month. His gentle cantor, amiable smile, expertise on both banjo and guitar, rattling voice, respect for the music of the past while making it relevant for the present, political awareness, and constant fight for social justice make him a man for all seasons.

All month long, BGS will be celebrating Pete’s legacy — a legacy that lingers years after his passing. To kick things off, here’s our all-encompassing playlist of the Essential Pete Seeger to get you up to speed. And if you want to dig deeper, check out Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, which includes a 200-page book with essays, commentary, photographs, and liner notes, along with six CDs of classic and unreleased music.

Illustration: Zachary Johnson

Addressing Indigenous Rights and Hometown Shame, Lula Wiles Look for Nuance

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Folky string band Lula Wiles’ brand new album immediately asks What Will We Do? The project’s title is the first of many thought-provoking questions and prompts sprinkled throughout the album, like tasty musical morsels that lead listeners to explore our culture’s social norms, power structures, and political realities.

But the three women — Isa Burke, Ellie Buckland, and Mali Obomsawin — aren’t being needlessly combative, pushing buttons or grinding gears to elicit equally combative and grinding responses. The goal, evident throughout the album, isn’t protest. It’s empathy. These conversations tease out the slight nuances that define each of us, rather than hiding them away for the sake of convenience and tidy generalisms.

What Will We Do has a quiet, introspective, power to provoke — or perhaps more accurately, evoke — a reality that is stripped of its normative, predictable infrastructures and replaced with person-to-person, human-to-human connection as its keystone. And without condescending even the least to offer a paramount answer to the album’s titular question, the music — and the nuances within — will guide open-minded and open-eared listeners to the answers.

BGS: In the press materials for the album, it’s described as “provocative,” but when I listen to it I don’t find it… incendiary. You aren’t necessarily just sticking a poker into the fire or fanning the flames; you’re trying to accomplish something more productive than that. In the writing process and the creative process what went into striking that balance? Was it conscious or subconscious? Was it overt or covert?

Mali Obomsawin: We had a lot of conversations about how to write political songs, or songs that capture certain elements of the political climate right now and the cultural climate in general. It is a really delicate thing to confront current issues that people aren’t agreeing on. It’s not like we’re talking about World War II. Yes, Germany was in the wrong, everybody knows that. I think we have a lot of listeners that agree with us politically, so to speak, but we still wanted to write about topics that have nuance. We didn’t want to be reductive. The most incendiary approach to talking about current issues is being reductive, deleting and erasing that nuance. We aren’t interested in doing that because that doesn’t get anything done.

“Hometown” feels like it’s painting a picture of a pretty normative, small-town America, but then you have lines like “Flip a coin and choose pride or shame” that really stick out to me. That’s the difference between a marginalized person and a privileged person growing up in the same place — it’s a coin toss whether they’ll feel that hometown pride or shame. How does that song relate to each of you? Where did that idea come from? What’s the connection or nuance in that line?

EB: First of all, “Hometown,” the whole song, is deeply personal to me. I think it was originally inspired by specific people in my family and the fact that I vote differently than a lot of people in my family, that I love. Then, as a lot of writers do, there are a lot of characters in the song that are not coming from my exact life, but come from my experience growing up in this place, going to high school with people who were using drugs and becoming addicted to drugs, girls who were having kids when they were fifteen or sixteen, and just a lot of working class people as well.

I remember thinking about the divide that people feel about being on welfare. Specifically, this idea that of the people who are so critical of welfare and feel that it is just people mooching off the government, in fact, a lot of those people would greatly benefit from welfare because they are struggling financially. But they feel a sense of pride on their own. Like, “I will pull myself up by the bootstraps. I will follow all of these sort of rules that will create. I am the American dream, I am the future millionaire.” They’re critical, they think it’s shameful to accept these benefits.

IB: Also, I think a lot of the time pride is like armor against shame. The force of pride can be, “I’m choosing to be proud of this thing, because I’ve been made to feel ashamed of it.”

MO: Right now, for instance, there’s a lot of Indian mascot drama going on in Maine. We Natives almost have a superiority complex in that we’re so proud of who we are and where we come from. We have to be, because we’re so shamed by things like mascots. I think a lot of marginalized people feel this way. It’s a form of self-protection.

I do want to spend a little time talking about Indigenous rights and issues, because it’s been a topic that through the lifespan of this column we haven’t been able to cover yet. I think that in itself is indicative of what I want to talk about, which is — and I wanted to say Indigenous rights are the “final frontier” of intersectionality, but even that is colonialism! This is how deeply entrenched colonialism is. How would you like to see the music community respond to these issues that you’ve brought up in the music and on the album?

MO: It is so entrenched in American society to be anti-Indigenous. It’s in so many of our colloquial, everyday phrases even. Like, “the final frontier” or “have a pow-wow.” Even smaller things like, “lower on the totem pole.” Natives are used as tropes… which just adds to the erasure. This is all a product of the erasure we’re taught by textbooks: “Indians are history, Indigenous people don’t exist anymore, it’s not even something you need to think about anymore.” It’s to a point that if you bring up any Indigenous rights topic, or address any issue, you instantly become the most radical person in the room. You end up disassembling the whole house of cards of social norms in which we exist.

[In] the folk scene, the songwriter scene, there are things to be done. Maybe someone wants to do a land acknowledgement in a new town. That’s fine, that’s good, I encourage it, but also just look at your colloquialisms and the tropes you use in your lyrics. There are so many! Natives are used for imagery and turns of phrase to give your lyrics a little hip touch.

Authenticity signaling.

MO: Yeah. People use it so much! And all of my favorite artists do it! Every time it happens I’m just like, it’s Tom Petty with, “Til an Indian shot out the lights” and Joni Mitchell with “Little Indian kids on a bridge.” It happens all the time, when we’re just driving in the car, like, “Oh shit, damnit. Paul Simon’s out, too?”

I want to end with “Shaking As It Turns” and make it our call to action for this column. How do we take an album like this, and a song like “Shaking As It Turns,” and help people understand that this poor fucking world has been shaking all along? We’re just at the point where we’re feeling it shake more and more and so intensely. What do we do now that we have this awareness? What do we do now that our thoughts have been provoked?

IB: What will we do?! [All laugh]

EB: What will we do? It’s almost like this is what the record is about!

IB: I feel like the last verse is the closest we get to protest music, to that galvanizing call to action type of thing. That’s the “Don’t talk about love if your love won’t burn” verse. I wrote the song in July of 2017, right after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where [Heather Heyer] was murdered. That verse was kind of a response to all of the “love trumps hate” rhetoric that was going around at the time. That phrase always rang hollow to me, especially when it was in response to something like murderous neo-Nazis. I think sometimes you can’t just respond by saying, “Well, just be loving to them and that will fix it.” Because it won’t fix it!

That verse is trying to say that love is a good response to hate, but it has to be the kind of love that calls you to do something. The “love trumps hate” thing always felt like a cop out. [We’re] trying to get people to not disengage, but to go deeper into these issues, get down to the very foundation of why things are the way they are. If confronting Indigenous rights means questioning the very nature of reality, then do that. Ask those tough questions. Ask them of the people that you love, ask them of people you disagree with, and do it in a way that’s honest and isn’t disingenuous.

Photo credit: Laura E. Partain

Dom Flemons: Many Pieces to the Puzzle

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s fitting that Black Cowboys, the latest record from writer, storyteller, historian, and songster Dom Flemons, was released on Smithsonian Folkways, the non-profit label arm of the eponymous museum and its Center for Folklife — the album plays and reads like a museum exhibit in musical form. This collection of songs, from traditional Western folk melodies to African slaves’ field hollers to Flemons’ timeless originals, celebrates the heritage of African American cowboys in the Wild West.

The existence of black cowboys has largely been omitted from the greater historical record, relegated to forgotten dime store novels, dusty biographies, and seldom-sung songs. The commercial narratives that took the nation by storm in the last century, such as Wild West rodeo shows, singing cowboys, and myriad television shows and films, largely centered on whiteness and white heroes as the keystones of the pioneer West. Flemons understood the larger, more complicated picture — in part due to his African American and Mexican American heritage and growing up in Arizona. With this record and its exhaustive liner notes he brings these integral stories, these neatly interlocking puzzle pieces of black identities shaping the American West, out into the mainstream.

When I listen to this record and read through the liner notes it strikes me that the crux of the entire project is revisionist history and figuring out how to undo it.

One of the things I’ve found most interesting about the issue of revisionist history is that it creates even more weight to the work of people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, because you start to understand why they were working for civil rights and first-class citizenship, compared to second-class citizenship. Up to that point, no matter how far you got in the status as a citizen, you could not be considered a first-class citizen if you were an African American person. This becomes extremely prevalent when speaking of early Western history. To put a black person on the same level as a white person was taboo up until even the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Nowadays it’s really hard for people to grasp that concept. When you aren’t in control of the narrative, you’ll find there are holes in it. My notion has been to add and to elevate different parts of the narrative so that when you bring all of the narratives together you get a truer picture of what the history is supposed to be. That was part of the reason I felt that this album was very important to get out there.

Being from the Southwest, I know that it’s a diverse community. The story isn’t just black and white. There are the Native American populations as well as the Mexican American populations and the different refugee groups as well. The Southwest and Western culture tends to have a very diverse population, because the open expanses of land give a lot of room for people to build a new life for themselves. Where there aren’t a lot of people, you don’t want to upset your neighbor, because they could help you in your time of need. When you read about the cowboys you start finding that the ideas of discrimination and segregation in the classic sense break down in certain situations where, because of the lack of numbers, everybody had to be working together. That called for a brotherhood and a kinship between all these different cultures, in a way that is very unique and is very reassuring, especially in modern times when it seems that the whole world is connected, but we still feel like, “Why have we never been able to get along?” But you find in different situations along the way people have figured out how to work together and get along with each other just out of necessity.

Are people surprised by the concept of the album? I can just imagine someone saying, “Black cowboys? That’s a thing?” How do you unpack for people that black folks have been everything and everywhere, just like white identities?

It’s a matter of perspective and a matter of representation in the mainstream. When it comes to cowboys, three things happened. First, you had the birth of dime store novels, sensationalized Western fiction that were written by people [back East]. They took Western stories and created a sensational picture of Western culture. It’s interesting to read about these too, because you do have several pulp novels that feature black cowboys in them, so you still have a bit of that culture in there.

The second wave was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. It was the first internationally recognized Western program. [Buffalo Bill] was definitely a Confederate-leaning individual, even though he was part of the communities in Kansas that fought against slavery. Buffalo Bill, he had black friends, he had Native American friends, he was good friends with Sitting Bull. But at the same time, ideologically, when the Wild West show went out there [on tour], it painted Buffalo Bill as a white savior, at the forefront of all of this. With it being presented at Madison Square Garden and all over the world, including Australia, Germany, England, France, and Spain it painted the picture of Western American culture being a white phenomenon and having white heroes that are in the forefront. That’s the second level.

The third thing that really cemented the image of the cowboy in place were the singing cowboys: Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and a whole slew of other folks following behind — like Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music. That set the stage for the cowboy being a white man in a cowboy hat and chaps, saving the day. It caught on with the adults and the kids, and the kids carried on these same traditions. Once you see that sort of representation and there’s no narrative that conflicts with that, there’s no need to consider that there might be a different narrative.

Now we’re over a hundred years down the road from all three of those things. The idea that black cowboys are representative of cowboy culture is something that’s been chipped away for many years. When it comes to representation and African American culture in the West you’ll find that there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle.

How do you take an album that might come across as a “time capsule” or historic novelty music and show it’s more than just a bridge to yesteryear? How do you view this music today, in a modern context?

There was one thing that really set this off. At first I faced that problem. Of course, I had my interest in cowboy music in general; I love Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, Riders in the Sky, etc. That interested me in general, but I came into this particular issue as I started trying to make this into a compelling narrative so that people won’t just pass it off as nostalgic music.

I was talking with my father about one of the cowboys I was reading about, a fellow by the name of Nat Love, who was one of very few black cowboys to write an autobiography. He worked out of this town called Holbrook, Arizona. Then he became a Pullman porter working on the railroad lines. The history of Pullman porters was what we would call a catalyst for the early civil rights movement. One of the main Pullman porters, a man by the name of A. Philip Randolph, started the very first all-black union called the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Black people who were Pullman porters were able to elevate themselves socially, because they began to know the most prominent white patrons from traveling with them. At first they just worked for tips, but then they wanted to work for a salary, so A. Philip Randolph helped the porters raise their wages.

The porters were also the connecting point between every black section of town in the United States. When it came to delivering the all-black newspapers and when it came to 78 RPM records, the porters had supplies that they would sell to people. They connected the North, South, East, and West of the United States. Later on, in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, Randolph was one of the people who helped Martin Luther King Jr. organize the bus boycott. My father told me that; he was a porter for a chair car, the local/regional train car.

Seeing that someone like Nat Love was a cowboy and later a Pullman porter connected this ancient story of dusty old cowboys on the range into a very modern African American context. That was how I connected the narrative so it would be modern. This gave me a strong sense of why we don’t think about black cowboys. White cowboys continued to ranch and become proprietors on their ranches. But of course in the African American community nostalgia, looking backwards, thinking about the old home place is a whole different story. Cowboy music is connected to country music and one of the biggest parts of country music is nostalgia. In the African American community, nostalgia has always been a double-edged sword.

When I hear you talk about your connection to your music, the dots seem to connect pretty directly, but you’ve put in time, done the research, given it care, and given yourself an in-depth education. How do we make it as easy as possible for people to also trace those threads without all of the rigorous work you put in? Or do you think that work is necessary and maybe something everyone should experience?

Well, I think technically everyone should work through all of that. That’s something that I would like to have happen.

Especially since there are so many of us who haven’t had a choice but to put in that work.

Absolutely. [It all started for me by] being a big fan of Texas country blues music, which is part of my grandfather’s culture. It was very natural to listen to people like Lead Belly, Henry Thomas, and Lightnin’ Hopkins even. All of that stuff is black Western culture from the descendants of these cowboys. I wanted to bring that stuff into a single room. I also went to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and I met several of the cowboys. Don Edwards, a legendary cowboy singer who has spent a lot of time talking about the influence of black cowboys, told me about how all the black cowboys were called black vaqueros. He told me about Mexican vaqueros and how they were the original cowboys. It opens up Spanish and Mexican culture being part of Western culture starting three hundred years before the time period we cover on the album. That’s a piece of the puzzle.

It’s obviously a very complicated and complex puzzle, but it’s not necessarily more complicated than just the narrative of America we’re already familiar with — the melting pot of cultures and backgrounds. It’s a matter of putting those pieces together. You’re adding more colorful pieces to the puzzle they already have half-built in their heads.

Overall, I really wanted to be able to give Black Cowboy 101. Like the quote from Mike Searles that I used in the introduction. When people think of the birth of the West they think of it as the birthplace of America. If you think of it as only white America, you would get the impression that only white people are true Americans and everyone else is an interloper. If you start adding these other people — Mexican vaqueros, African American cowboys, and even Native American cowboys — you get a better sense that it’s not only the birthplace of America, but it’s always been multicultural, from the beginning.

Photo by Timothy Duffy

Fiver Gives Voice to the Voiceless on Fascinating New LP

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From her work with the country outfit One Hundred Dollars and the psych-rock band the Highest Order to her solo output under the moniker Fiver, Canadian musician Simone Schmidt has been churning out sharp songs for nearly a decade. For her latest project as Fiver, Schmidt adapted the North American folk tradition in order to dig deep into political systems and colonial power. The result is Audible Songs from Rockwood, an album of fictional field recordings that each tell a different story of a patient at Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane, an institution which operated in the 1800s.

“I was researching incarceration in Canada, where I’m from, just out of personal interest, and I came upon this article in a newspaper that described Rockwood as the first asylum for the criminally insane in what was called Upper Canada, at the time,” Schmidt explains. “It was built to house this class of criminal that couldn’t conform to the social order of either the Kingston penitentiary or the insane asylum at Toronto.”

There was one detail that Schmidt couldn’t shake: Inmates were housed in horse stables on the estate while Rockwood was being built.

“That image came to me so vividly — walls washed with lyme, darkness, slats through which food was pushed — and I wrote a song that I performed for a few years; it’s called “Stable Song” on the album,” she says.

Schmidt continued to wonder about the inmates — all of whom were women — and began a two-year stint researching the asylum and sorting through case files from 1856-1881.

“Mostly my process was that I would get into the case files, which were really sparse, and if they had an interesting detail — an image that struck me as best conveyed in song — I would try to understand the context in which the inmate was living, which requireda lot of learning on my part, because my grip on the history of that time was pretty loose,” says Schmidt. “So I was reading the superintendant of the asylum’s diary, notes to the legislature about it, newspaper articles that mentioned specific inmates, and then doing further research into farm life in the mid-19th century, coffin ships, typhus, to medical practices of the time, settler law, and on and on. With that information, I’d flesh out the inmate’s backstory, which effectively became a work of historical fiction, and then I’d journal as the character. If that character seemed like they’d have a song, I’d carve their journal into verse.”

An extensive booklet of liner notes a la Smithsonian Folkways acts as a supplement to the record, providing historical context and analysis. In order to further achieve the Folkways sound of recordings gathered place to place in real time, Schmidt used a variety of tape machines.

“I recorded myself on a Sony Song-O-Matic at my friends Martha and Charlie’s house which doesn’t have the streetcar track noise my house has. I wanted the voice to be kinda blown out on the high range for some of them, hard to grasp, and crisp on others,” she explains. “Gavin Gardiner and I mixed them at this home studio he has a few doors down from me. He has all kinds of tape machines, and we were just bouncing songs all over the place and getting really picky about things I can’t hear now. It can get that way — messing with tape speeds by baby increments and such, fooling yourself. But all these things result in slight differences from song to song, that are meant to infer that the album is a variety of field recordings, similar to the Smithsonian Folkways approach to song collecting. The performances were all live, too, but for some backwards fiddle overdubs, so there’s that feeling of the tunes actually being played, rather than constructed in some image of perfection.”

Through her intricate finger-picking and vocal adaptations, Schmidt breathes new life into the stories of women who have otherwise been forgotten, ensuring their place in history.

Photo credit: Jeff Bierk 

Woody Rolls On: Cahalen Morrison in Conversation with Jon Neufeld

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The Great Depression was just sputtering to a close, Europe was a mess, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was still several months away when Woody Guthrie moved his family from New York City to Portland, Oregon. He’d been hired by the Bonneville Power Administration to pen a series of songs for a documentary film about various engineering projects in the Pacific Northwest — namely, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State and the Bonneville Dam across the Columbia River. Spearheaded by the Public Works Administration and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, these feats of American ingenuity would bring water and power to areas that had previously seemed uninhabitable or unfarmable.

The film was never completed, but during the month he and his family lived in the Pacific Northwest, Guthrie wrote 26 songs — which itself seemed a feat of American ingenuity. The populist folkie extolled the achievements of industry, as well as the heroic fortitude of the common American worker. Some of the lyrics never made it off the page of his notebook, while others became … well, Guthrie never had what you might call hits, but “Pastures of Plenty” and “Grand Coulee Dam” and even “Roll, Columbia” became popular tunes within his catalog.

To mark the 75th anniversary of Guthrie’s short but productive tenure with Bonneville, Smithsonian Folkways is releasing a rambunctious double album of new covers called Roll Columbia: Woody Guthrie’s 26 Northwest Songs, featuring mostly musicians based in the Pacific Northwest and still affected by these engineering projects. Contributing their own interpretations of these tunes are members of the Decemberists, R.E.M., the Minus Five, Timberbound, and Dolorean, along with Orville Johnson, Martha Scanlan, David Grisman, and Michael Hurley, among others.

(The album follows the excellent book, 26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest, by KEXP radio DJ Greg Vandy and journalist Daniel Person.)

While neither Jon Neufeld nor Cahalen Morrison are Pacific Northwest natives, they both have lived there long enough to call the region home and have been active in the Portland and Seattle folk scenes, respectively. A veteran of Dolorean and Black Prairie, Neufeld oversaw nearly every aspect of Roll Columbia, while Morrison covers two songs: the rip-roaring industrial cautionary tale “Lumber Is King” and the majestic “Ballad of Jackhammer John,” which rolls along like the Columbia itself.

What is your experience with Guthrie’s Columbia songs? How familiar were you with them before you started this project?

Jon Neufeld: Well, my initial experience was, “Oh, I recognize some of these songs.” Nothing further than that. I didn’t recognize them as being songs that he wrote after he was hired by the Bonneville Power Administration or any of the specific history that goes along with it. My dad’s a folk singer, so I grew up on Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and all that classic folk music — a lot of the peace-and-justice songs. A lot of Guthrie’s songs were familiar to me, but when [executive co-producer] Joe Seamons approached me about doing the project, I started listening further and could see a thread through these songs that had been somewhat invisible to me. That made me think about the music a little differently because it seemed so obvious, in retrospect, that they were all connected.

Cahalen Morrison: I had a similar introduction, I guess, in that I was familiar with a handful of the songs, the more well-known ones — “Pastures of Plenty” and things like that. But I wasn’t familiar with the majority of it. I’ve never been a huge Woody-head or anything like that. Joe approached me, as well, and offered me the gig, which turned out to be fantastic. I’m not originally from the Northwest, but I’ve been living here for quite a while now. It was fun to hear all this music written so specifically for the area. I’ve done a lot of touring and traveling around, so I’m familiar with the countryside around it and really enjoyed digging into these songs and seeing how they represented this part of the world. That it was all bought and paid for by Bonneville was a funny thing to discover, but it didn’t make it any less cool or discredit the songs in any way. I find it impressive that he did what he did.

JN: Twenty-six songs in 30 days is a lot.

CM: I’m a songwriter and a fairly prolific one, I suppose, but that is pretty insane. I can’t even fathom that.

Did this project change the way you see this area that you both moved to?

JN: I’ve lived here for 20 years now, longer than I’ve lived anywhere else, and these songs described the area pretty much to a tee. They reminded me of the beauty that’s around here, but also of this issue of self-sufficiency. You want to provide your own electricity and jobs, but at what cost? Harnessing the environment around you, in order to derive your own power initially seems like a good idea, because you can be self-sufficient. You can have light and power and jobs and you don’t have to borrow them anybody else. It’s right here in this rushing river, and the feats of engineering were really celebrated at the time. But you end up losing sacred land of the Native Americans. You have erosion in places that never had it before. But you also have water coming to places that were never able to grow wheat before. Basically, you’re changing the landscape and, at first, I think that was seen as a good thing. For some places, it certainly is. But overall, maybe not so much.

CM: You can look at it from both an environmental perspective and from a social or humanistic perspective, and it’s a double-edged sword. It does give water to places that weren’t getting water, which allows people to grow food and attract jobs. But, at the same time, it does take away from the natural beauty of the area and it does completely change the habitat for people and for wildlife. So you can look at it as thing that was great for humans and culture and society, at that point in time, but it has swung the other way now. Now we’re trying to get rid of dams.

JN: We’re still discussing these same issues right now in the same places, but back then it must have seemed like uncharted waters. They were a lot more excited about it then; these are songs of hope. They’re historical documents about that time.

CM: I had a similar experience. The songs sound really accurate and contemporary even though, at this point, they’re historical documents. None of these issues have changed. In fact, I feel like it’s only gotten more severe, so maybe it’s even more poignant now than it was then. Guthrie is more famous now than he was then, but I don’t feel like he has the reach he had then and the gusto that came along with being a current icon. Now, people are more able to write off historical songs like these as some cute thing that happened long ago and don’t really apply to anything going on right now.

That was one thing that struck me about Roll Columbia. It walks a fine line between celebrating these songs and exploring the consequences of the Bonneville Power Administration.

JN: I strongly believe that, if Woody were alive today, he could still sing these songs. He might have to change a word or a turn of phrase here and there. I recently read a biography of him and, during this time in his life, he was looking for work. He had a family, three kids, and he would go back and forth between being completely broke and having a job. So this place wants to hire me to write these songs and move the family up there and I’ll have work for a month? Sure. In some ways it was just another gig for him, but just another gig for an artist with his perspective turned out to be another batch of great songs. I think the beauty of the Northwest really overtook him and was the catalyst for these songs, but it’s interesting when you look at it in the context of his life: This was only 30 days out of all those years.

Cahalen, you address some of these issues in your version of “Lumber Is King.” What drew you to that song?

CM: Lyrically I thought that song was fantastic. I love the lyrics. It goes back to what I was saying about the double-edged sword. It’s all about these booming lumber towns that were making all this money. People were happy and prosperous. But then it all dries up and everything is gone: the jobs, the money, the land. It just destroys everything. As a piece of art and as a political statement, I thought “Lumber Is King” was really powerful. Woody did a great job on that one.

That was a set of lyrics that he had never set to music, much less recorded. What was it like taking it that next step?

CM: I did that for both of the songs I sing on here. It’s another reason why I chose them, because they didn’t have music. Being a songwriter, I thought it would be a fun thing to take a whack at. For “Lumber Is King,” I wrote this romping bluegrass waltz sort of thing, and I was inspired by a town called Darrington, up north of Seattle. It has a big Tarheel population, from when people relocated from North Carolina for logging. There’s a big bluegrass festival there now and there’s a funny pocket of bluegrass culture there. I liked the continuity of arranging this song in a fast bluegrass style. It felt natural to me, even though — and I don’t mean this in a negative way — it was written in a very obvious cadence that fits well within whatever kind of tune you wanted to write to it.

And you both worked on your other song, “The Ballad of Jackhammer John.”

JN: There’s a funny story behind that one. Some of Woody’s titles are really similar, and I was in the studio with [Montana-based singer-songwriter] Martha Scanlan and Joe Seamons working on a song together. I thought, “Wow, this is really working. It sounds great.” Totally different song than the one we were supposed to be doing. It wasn’t “The Ballad of Jackhammer John,” but “Jackhammer Blues (Jackhammer John).” Completely different song. I got a call at 8 o’clock the next morning, about an hour before we were supposed to start the next day’s session. It was Joe saying we had a problem. Martha had recorded a song that we had already recorded with another artist [Orville Johnson]. Well, that is a problem because Martha just left for the airport. We had to figure something out. Was it your idea, Cahalen, to record it yourself?

CM: It was not my idea, no. I remember the initial idea was that we were going to trying to get everybody to sing a verse, but we were still trying to figure out the lyrics. Talk about not an easy cadence! With that one, I felt like Woody was like, “I gotta get 17 more verses,” so he just sat down and pounded them out. There’s some really awkward phrasing and strange words in there. So I sat down right before I left, figured out how to sing all those verses, and recorded myself reading off the lyrics sheet. It was just to have a blueprint for everybody to follow, but later I found out it’s just me on the final recording!

JN: I don’t remember how we came up with it, but it was Joe Seamons playing banjo and I was playing a guitar. It’s an eight-minute song and we didn’t have any vocals to play to, so he had to develop a system of signals for when we would change. Joe would turn his head to the left, and we would switch to the minor chord. If he put his head down, we went to the 5-chord. We did it all in one take — about nine minutes’ worth of playing. Then Cahalen went in there and did all the verses in one take. After he had gone home, I remember listening to it and thinking, “Hey, this really works!” The song is this eight-minute monster with all these complicated verses, but it ended up being the simplest one of them all.

When did you find out that they were using your take, Cahalen?

CM: I don’t remember. I think it was when the mixes came. “Oh, okay, I guess we’re doing it that way.” I would have done another take or two to get some of that squirrelly stuff figured out, but hey, at least it was organic.

JN: That was one of the things I was aware of most during the production. There was zero polish on Woody’s songs, so I felt we should lean toward grittier takes. That seemed to reflect where the songs came from. And “The Ballad of Jackhammer John” is a perfect example of knowing how you’re going to do it and just doing it.

At what point in the process did you decide that you wanted to emphasize regional musicians?

JN: That was from the very beginning, the first conversation we had. The songs are about the Pacific Northwest, and there are a lot of great musicians in the Pacific Northwest, so let’s do that. It’s not like we were only going to use musicians from this area; if we thought someone on the East Coast could be great, or from the South, or from wherever, we’d consider them. But when you live out here or on the West Coast, in general, there are just so many great musicians that you meet but never get to hang out with until there’s a project to do. So it becomes a perfect reason to reach out and say hello. I met Pharis and Jason Romero when I was on Vancouver Island touring with my friend Kristin Andreassen, so I thought of them for this project. They recorded all the way up in Horsefly, which is way up there in northern British Columbia, and they sent the tracks back to me. There are all these little connections between different people, even though it’s a big area up here. It starts to seem pretty small when you tour for a long time.

CM: That’s true. It’s good to hang with people you don’t get to see very often. When you hear other people’s takes on their tunes, even though I didn’t get to see them, it can have a nice effect and make it seem like a community project. It’s good to have friend along for the ride.

That’s an enormous amount of territory to seem like a small community.

JN: The Pacific Northwest is Montana all the way down diagonally to California and up into Canada. It’s all different kinds of music, too. Not just folk or old-time or bluegrass, although those are some of the most tight-knit communities I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why there is so much music out here. It may have a lot to do with the land because, when I go out to the East Coast, it feels very different. There are tight-knit communities in certain boroughs of New York, but those people wouldn’t necessarily be tight with people in Boston, even though that’s the equivalent of us going to southern Oregon. On the East Coast, though, you cross a couple of states. So I think it has a lot to do with landscape.

How does the landscape inform the music you make?

JN: Cahalen, do you find yourself pulling from the things around you that are outside the realm of relationships?

CM: I would say it’s equally inspiring, even if it just reminds you of your relationships and experiences with people. Not to sound cheesy, but being out there in the wilderness and seeing those big vistas really does open your mind up. It has a very strong effect on me, and that’s mostly what draws people to the West. You get a lot of likeminded people who have chosen to be here. Outside the West, I think people just live where they live because they live there. It’s maybe not as intentional. I know there are communities like that outside of the West, but I would say it’s a prevailing thing that the West has in common with the Southwest, which is where I’m from. People move to New Mexico because they want to live in New Mexico.

Photos courtesy of the artists.

Smithsonsian Folkways Brings New Life to Arhoolie Records Catalog

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Arhoolie Records is one of the most important labels in roots music history. Founded by Chris Strachwitz in 1960, the El Cerrito, California-based label, which has built a reputation for sharing and preserving traditional American music, was responsible for releases from such roots, blues, bluegrass, and R&B greats as Lightnin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Flaco Jiménez, and Del McCoury. In May of 2016, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings acquired the extensive Arhoolie catalog from Strachwitz and and his Arhoolie partner, Tom Diamente, with plans to make the label's 650+ albums available to the public across a variety of media. 

Since its acquitsition of Folkways Records in 1987, the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution has amassed a vast catalog of diverse music, including collections from the Blue Ridge Institute (music from Ferrum College's collection of recordings made between the 1920s and 1980s), Fast Folk Records (a project of Fast Folk Magazine boasting cuts from Tracy Chapman and Shawn Colvin), Paredon Records (an assortment of songs, spoken word, and poetry recorded at the tail end of the Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s), and the UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music (an impressive collection of out-of-print world music). 

The Arhoolie collection featuring music from more than 1,000 artists launched on October 21 by making a number of the label's catalog album available digitally, on CD, and on limited edition vinyl LPs. A glance at the 395 titles currently available shows a number of rarities, like out of print 7" records from Big Mama Thornton and Hank Williams, as well as CDs and digital downloads from everyone from Freddy Fender to Elizabeth Cotten. The collection also features albums from Peruvian label Discos Smith and regional Mexican labels Ideal, Falcon, and Rio.

Look for more titles from the Arhoolie catalog to be released in coming months. In the meantime, listen to a selection of Smithsonian's Arhoolie titles on Spotify and browse titles available for purchase here.