HUM 223: Links for midterm

Here are links to information you need in order to answer the questions on your midterm exam (posted below).

Question 1

Question 1, the 50-point essay, is based on the video we watch of the Public Broadcasting System show Stephen Foster. PBS has a website at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/ full of supporting material on the show, including a summary and a transcript of the show. I very strongly recommend that you follow this link and have the transcript in front of you as you watch the show. You also can - and should - quote from the transcript as you write your essay for the midterm.

Also on the Stephen Foster website is a set of 12 very brief essays on blackface minstrelry. The essays come from interviews with historians Dale Cockrell, Eric Lott, Deane Root, Fath Ruffins and Josephine Wright, writers Ken Emerson and Mel Watkins, and performers Nanci Griffith and Thomas Hampson. Topics are:

1. How did blackface minstrelsy begin?
2. Why did it spread in the 1830s?
3. What was a blackface minstrel show?
4. Who went to the shows?
5. How were the minstrel shows racist?
6. Was blackface minstrelsy only about caricaturing blacks?
7. How did class frictions relate to blackface minstrelsy?
8. How did class issues relate to the race issues?
9. Although blackface minstrelsy was racist, did it have any benefit for African Americans?
10. What's the connection between blackface minstrelsy and rock and roll?
11. What legacy did blackface minstrelsy create for American culture today?
12. Should we change Foster's songs to remove their racist aspects, or not perform them?

On the PBS website, each of these topics is a working link. No. 10, for example, takes you to rock critic Ken Emerson, who says, "... in a way rock and roll led me to a long, tortuous path to Stephen Foster because that's where really this interplay and intermix of black and white culture that so defines American music to this day really began." Agree or disagree, it's worth thinking about.

If you want to review what we said about folk music, popular music and art music on the first day of class, and I'll bet you do because you'll be writing about it, this link will take you to our blog "HUM 223: First day, syllabus, etc. [folk, pop, art]" that explains the terms.

Question 2A

Linked to my faculty page is my tip sheet on reflective essays ... the main thing you should know is that while I'll grade you on how specific your answer is and how well you understand the main concepts of the course, I also use these essays as I plan for the second half of the semester.

Question 2B

Here's a link to the video of Michael Franti and Spearhead singing "Hole In The Bucket"(1994):

And here's a link to the lyrics of "Hole in the Bucket". Again, I strongly recommend you have the lyrics open in another window as you watch the video and that you quote from them as you write your midterm.

HUM 223: Midterm, due in class Oct. 9

Humanities 223: Ethnic Music
Springfield College-Benedictine University at Springfield
Midterm -- Fall Semester 2009

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. -- Charlie 'Bird' Parker

Below are three essay questions – one worth fifty (50) points, and two shorter essays worth 25 points each. Please write at least two to four pages (500-1,000 words) on the 50-point essay and one to two pages (250-500 words) on each of the 25-point short essays. That adds up to three essays. Use plenty of detail from your reading, class discussion, the Internet (including our class blog) and handouts I have given you to back up the points you make. Your grade will depend on your analysis of the music, and on the specific detail you cite in support of your analysis. I am more interested in the specific factual arguments you make to support your points than in whether you like or dislike a particular piece of music. So be specific. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college-level writing. Always be specific. Due in class Thursday, Oct. 9.

1A. Essay (50 points). According to critic and author Mel Watkins, 19th-century song writer Stephen A. Foster “was at the forefront of when white [American] culture started to integrate black culture with their own. Foster's music is a combination of these strains. He brought it together, and he made it into something that was quintessentially American.” And historian Fath Ruffins, “Foster's music is seen as fundamental Americana. When you listen to these songs, you're listening to the history of the United States.” From watching the PBS American Experience video Stephen Foster and reading the PBS background material linked to our class blog Hogfiddle, how much was African American culture incorporated into Foster’s songs? Do they sound Irish, or African American – or some of both? Were they like folk, popular or art music? How did Foster want his music to be regarded? How did the public regard it? What does Foster’s career suggest to you about the ways that artists can make a living in American culture? Do they compromise their artistic vision?

2A. Self-reflective essay (25 points). What have you learned about American roots music in this class so far that you didn’t know before? Consider what you knew at the beginning of the course and what you know now. What point or points stand out most clearly to you? What points are still confusing? In answering this question, please feel free to look at the “Tip Sheet on Writing a Reflective Essay” linked to my faculty webpage (and to Hogfiddle). In grading the essay, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make.

2B. Short essay (25 points). Watch the video of video of Michael Franti and Spearhead singing "Hole In The Bucket"(1994) linked to Hogfiddle. It’s an old children’s song from Europe, but Franti’s version is influenced by hip hop, reggae and more than a century of African American music. Write your response as a listener to the song, asking yourself: (1) What about this work stands out in my mind? (2) What in my cultural background, values, musical taste and interests makes me react that way? (3) What, specifically, about the performance makes me feel that way? Is there anything in the song that transcends cultural boundaries?

HUM 223: What role does music play in your daily life?

Today, we'll continue our discussion of music, art and culture by taking a little survey: What role does music play in your daily life? It will help us see what role plays in our own culture as 21st-century Americans.

Please post your answers as comments to this post. Write four or five sentences. Be specific. Always be specific.

If you sing or play an instrument, mention it. If you don't and all you can play is a radio or a CD changer, mention it. If your voice is so bad you scare the cats when you try to sing (don't ask), mention that too. Where are you when you listen to music? What are you doing? When do you first hear music in the morning? Through the day? At night?

If you're short on inspiration, here's results of in-class survey in HUM 223 three years ago that may give you some ideas.

And here's a quote from an Englishman in Russia who compared the music he heard there in the 1600s to "a flight of screech owls, a nest of Jackdaws, a pack of hungry Wolves, seven Hogs on a windy day and as many cats."

HUM 223: 'Sounds of Slavery'

We can't go back in time, and we don't have sound recordings before the early 20th century. But we can get a feel for what early African American music would have sounded like from a book called "The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech" written in 2005 by two Australians, Shane White and Graham White.

If you want to read the first chapter, follow the link to the PDF file on Beacon Press' website. It explains the role of music in the daily life of African American slaves. Gena Caponi Tabery, former professor of American studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a church pianist in Austin, Texas, says in a review in Christian Century magazine, compares it to the role of music in today's society. She says:

Thanks to our individual, portable, downloadable personal stereo units, we are the most aurally privatized society that has ever lived. More than ever we work, walk and drive to the beat of different drummers. We create our own soundtracks.

So did the communities of slaves trying to make a life for themselves in foreign lands. And because their cultures and those of their captors were so radically different, the collision of those soundtracks created cultural dissonances that American music is still trying to resolve. The Sounds of Slavery tries to reconstruct the aural universe of these slaves - the sounds they made and the sounds they heard. It calls us to roll down the windows of history, to take off our headphones so that we tan listen to the sounds of their past and ours.

Since we listen to music when we're by ourselves so often, and we tend to regard music as entertainment, it's difficult for us to imagine a culture in which "... there was a continuity of the sacred and secular, of work, worship, leisure and play, so that no part of daily life was too lofty or too trivial to be excluded from the commonest work chant or song of praise." Difficult, but not impossible.

White and White wrote their book around a collection of "recorded hollers, stories, prayers, sermons, work songs and, yes, spirituals" dating from the early days of sound recordings. They were sung by the children and grandchildren of slaves, but they give us the only window we'll ever have into the actual sounds of slavery.

Here's a list of tracks on the album, available on line at Beacon Press. We'll listen to a few of them in class.

1 "Arwhoolie." Holler by Thomas J. Marshall. A "holler" was the music of solitary man crying out in the field.
2 Levee holler. By Enoch Brown. An individual singing in a group of men working on a levee.
3 Field holler. By Roosevelt "Giant" Hudson.
4 "Oh If Your House Catches Fire." A levee camp holler, by Willie Henry Washington. As hollers become more elaborate, they're more like songs. But they're still mostly to pass the time and set a rhythm for the work.
5 "Roxie." Convicts, Parchman prison farm, Mississippi. A widely known song in slavery days, and one of the forerunners of the blues.
6 "New Buryin' Ground." John Brown and African American convicts, singing in harmony.
7 "Long Hot Summer Day." Clyde Hill and African American convicts
8 "Go Preach My Gospel" Deacon Harvey Williams and the New Zion Baptist Church congregation
9 "Jesus, My God, I Know His Name." Willie Henry Washington, Arthur Bell, Robert Lee Robertson, and Abraham Powell
10 "Go to Sleep." Florida Hampton. A lullaby.
11 "The Buzzard and the Cooter" Demus Green. A Gullah folk tale from the low country of South Carolina and coastal Georgia.
12 "Prayer." Rev. Henry Ward
13 "Run, Old Jeremiah." Joe Washington Brown and Austin Coleman. The only recorded "ring shout," an ancient type of religious exercise that predates Christianity.
14 "Job, Job." Mandy Tartt, Sims Tartt and Betty Atmore.
15 "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child." Clifford Reed, Johnny Mae Medlock and Julia Griffin. Approaches a high level of art.
16 "Have Mercy, Lord." Mary Tollman and the Rev. Henry Ward. The 23rd Psalm sung by a rural congregation.
17 "The Unusual Task of the Gospel Preacher." Rev. Harry Singleton preaches as a young minister named Green is ordained. Listen to his voice as he goes from speech to chant to singing and back again.
18 "The Man of Calvary." Sin-Killer Griffin. Another preacher who bursts into song. Two minutes in, he raises the old Doctor Watts hymn "I'm not ashamed to own my Lord."

Blacks, whites and Southern old-time music

When Sparky and Rhonda Rucker played a Prairie Grapevine concert recently at Springfield's Unitarian Universalist church, they combined southern Appalachian and African American musical traditions. But they were following in a tradition that's literally as old as the hills. Well, at least the people from outside who came to the hills, black and white alike, and displaced the Cherokee people who had been living there originally. We think of Appalachian culture as being Scots-Irish, the source of modern "redneck" America, but it's more complex than that.

"Unfortunately, when people think of Southern Appalachian music, they often neglect to recognize that there have been plenty of African Americans in Southern Appalachia since the 1600s, and that these eople have made their own contribution to what we think of as Southern Appalachian culture today," Rhonda Rucker wrote in the liner notes to their 2007 CD The Mountains Above and the Valleys Below. "Without these 'Affricalachians,' we would be without such gems as 'John Henry,' 'John Hardy,' and all the Brer Rabbit tales. And where would Southern Appalachian music be without the banjo, which of course has its origins in West Africa."

Sacred music, of course, was influenced heavily by the camp meetings of the 1800s, which were attended by blacks and whites alike. is especially But we also find the African American influence in songs like "C.C. Rider" and "Reuben's Train." Sparky and Rhonda say "C.C. Rider" originally stood for "Country Circuit Rider," by the way. I've been hearing "C.C. Rider" since Chuck Willis' version was on the R&B charts in 1957, and I never knew that. Rhonda said the heritage is mixed more often than not.

"There are some instances in which a particular song has a predominantly white or predominantly black origin, but in many cases, the two traditions are often inextricable," she writes. "For example, in researching a song that people often associated with the 'white tradition,' we would find numerous sources that told how African Americans had been singing the song for so long that it was unclear who first sang the song (and vice versa)."



According to Alan Jabbour, old-time southern Appalachian fiddle virtuoso and former director of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, the influence runs deep. Here's how he explained it in a lecture on "Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier" at Indiana State University in 2001. He said as he collected fiddle tunes from the upper South, especially Virginia and Maryland, he noticed they were different from Scotland, Ireland and the northern U.S.:

Many of them used bowing patterns in which were imbedded elaborate forms of syncopation. Now it should be stipulated that syncopation has many forms. Any performance that establishes one rhythmic pattern, then superimposes a different pattern in contradistinction to the original pattern, is using syncopation. But the syncopated bowing patterns of my fiddling mentors were precisely what we all think of as “American syncopation,” appearing in jazz and popular music and commonly presumed to be an African American contribution to our musical heritage.

I think Jabbour argues convincingly, both at Indiana State and elsewhere, that: (1) the influence is African American; and (2) it runs deep. Very deep. He cites his mentor in old-time fiddling, Henry Reed of West Virginia

He used this syncopated pattern constantly – so much that it can be described as imbedded in his fundamental style. It is not an added feature or an ornament, but a basic feature of his playing. One could say that he couldn’t avoid using it. One can find the same identical pattern in the playing of older fiddlers from Virginia to Texas whose style took shape before the advent of recordings and radio. Such a broad distribution among fiddlers who learned their art before the turn of the century can best be accounted for by supposing that the pattern spread with the settlement of the trans-Alleghany West during the 19th century.

While Jabbour doesn't find the same pattern of syncopation in British and northern American fiddle playing, he does find it in all kinds of African, Arabic and South Asian music. Here's his hypothesis:

Casting our net even wider, we may encounter the same precise syncopated pattern from Africa and the Mediterranean to musical styles as far away as India. But it seems clear that it came into the fiddling of the Upper South through African American influence. If one examines the historical record from the Upper South more closely, it becomes clear that the fiddle in places like Virginia was the favorite instrument of Black as well as White instrumentalists in the later 18th and early 19th century. One comparative study of runaway slave posters by banjo scholar Robert Winans notes that the instrument mentioned far more often than any other instrument in describing the capabilities of runaway slaves was the fiddle. (The Africa-derived banjo and the flute are tied for a distant second.) Fiddle and banjo continued to be central to the African American tradition of the Upper South till the end of the 19th century, when piano and guitar began to replace fiddle and banjo as the most favored instruments.

So we know that Whites and Blacks were all playing the fiddle in the Upper South during the Early Republic period. In fact, they were playing it in roughly equal numbers, and we also know from historical accounts that they were often playing it together or in each other’s presence. It was a revolutionary period, and the evidence seems to me compelling that African-American fiddlers simply added this signature syncopation to the bowing patterns on the fiddle. White fiddlers quickly embraced it, and it quickly moved from being an ethnic innovation to being a regional standard. The pattern could have been present as an abstract pattern in African tradition, and also (though quite recessively) in European tradition.
Once it had become a regional hallmark, shared by Black and White fiddlers, it spread in three ways. First, it spread directly through western migration – to a degree by Blacks but, more importantly, by Whites who had incorporated the syncopated bowing patterns into their own playing and cultural values. Second, it spread into wider popular consciousness through the minstrel stage of the 19th century. And third, African American musicians transferred the same patterns to other instruments, like guitar and piano, thus reintroducing the patterns in all the successive waves of folk-rooted popular music, including ragtime, blues, and jazz in the 20th century. By the mid-20th century it had become a general American pattern of syncopation, and by later part of the 20th century all the world would recognize the pattern as a stylistic hallmark of American music.

"Johnny Booker" as printed in Sweeny's Virginia Melodies (1840)

JPEG in Johns Hopkins library ...

Sweeny's Virginia Melodies. Jonny Boker, or, De Broken Yoke in de Coaling Ground. The Original Banjo Song. [1840] Johns Hopkins University, Levy Sheet Music Collection, Box 020, Item 012.

Content advisory: Racist language in original

Tim Twiss, of Highland, Mich., playing the song on a fretless banjo (he also does "Old Jim River" or "'Twill Nebber Do To Gib It Up So" by Dan Emmett)





The National Park Service has material on Sweeney on the Appamattox Court House national historical park's website linked to the directory of Curriculum Materials for secondary school teachers. Correlated with Virginia K-12 learning standards. Here (minus links) is the blurb:

"The Sweeneys are indeed a Wonder!" (Lesson Plan) and "The Sweeneys are indeed a Wonder!" (Supplementary Materials) The Sweeneys of Appomattox brought the banjo – America’s instrument - into the world of popular music before and during the Civil War.

Lyrics of "Johnny Booker" are also printed in PUBLIC DOMAIN MUSIC Copyrighted MIDI files, and text files of their lyrics, created by Benjamin Robert Tubb, based on original sheet music sources in the public domain.

Sweeny's Virginia Melodies.
"Jonny Boker, or,
De Broken Yoke in de Coaling Ground" (1840)
The Original Banjo Song.
As sung with great applause at the Tremont Theatre,
By J.W. Sweeny
[Words and Music -- anon.]

Boston: Henry Prentiss, 33 Court St.
R. Cooke, del. B.W. Thayer's Lith. Boston
Plate Number: 133
[Source: 020/012@Levy]

Lyrics - as I've standardized spellings and cleaned them up:

As I went up to Lynchburg town,
I broke my yoke on the coaling ground;
I drove from there to Bowling Spring,
And I tried for to mend my yoke and ring.

O Johnny Booker … O Johnny Booker, do.

I drove from there to Wright's old shop
Hollered to my driver and told him to stop;
Says I, Mr. Wright, have you got a yoke?
He seized his bellows and blew up a smoke

O Johnny Booker, etc.

Says I, Mr. Wright, haven't long to stay;
He caught up his hammer, knocked right away;
Soon as he mended my staple and ring.
Says I, Mr. Wright, do you charge anything?

O Johnny Boker, etc.

Says he to me, I never charge
Unless the job is very large;
For little jobs that is so small
I never charge any thing at all

O Johnny Booker, etc.

I drove from there to Anthony's mill
And tried to pull up that ‘ere hill;
I whipped my steers and pushed my cart
But all I could do, I couldn't make a start

O Johnny Booker, etc.

I put my shoulder to the wheel
Upon the ground I placed my heel;
Then we made a mighty strain
But all our efforts proved in vain

O Johnny Booker, etc.

There come a waggoner driving by
I sat on the ground and 'gan to cry;
Says me to him some pity take
And help me [please] for conscience sake

O Johnny Booker, etc.

Says he to me, I will help thee
Took out his horses, No. 3
I wiped from my eyes the falling tears;
He hitched his horses before my steers

O Johnny Booker, etc.

Then to me he did much please
He pulled me up with so much ease;
His horses were so big and strong
The way they pulled this [cart] along

O Johnny Booker, etc.

HUM 223 - notes from class discussion -

Art - definition

What is art?

• self-expression of emotions and feelings, background of artist/creator, share emotion w/ others thru music, dance, drawing, etc.
  
• a worthy creation produced from a person's expression that has esthetic value
  
• quality of your skills, applied, designed --
  illustrative expression of emotions -- what you're making stands out, means more than what you actually see
  
• unique ideas, expression or methods refecting emotions -- self-exprssion plain and simple
  
• something made intentionally to express the inner emotions and/or culture of its creator
  
• depends on past experience, things that inspired creators of art
  
• craftsmanship, creative
  
• creative, applied and designed by someone
  
• a way of expression
  
• expression of thoughts feeling thru activites, like painting
  
• personal stimulant expressed emotion through an exposure form

Wisdom from the Internet

Cross-posted to my blogs for the edification of my students, one of those emails that go around. From my cousin on Long Island:

----- Forwarded Message -----

One day an old German Shepherd starts chasing rabbits and before long, discovers that he's lost. Wandering about, he notices a panther heading rapidly in his direction with the intention of having lunch.

The old German Shepherd thinks, 'Oh, oh! I'm in deep doo-doo now!' Noticing some bones on the ground close by, he immediately settles down to chew on the bones with his back to the approaching cat. Just as the panther is about to leap, the old German Shepherd exclaims loudly, 'Boy, that was one delicious panther! I wonder, if there are any more around here?'

Hearing this, the young panther halts his attack in mid-strike, a look of terror comes over him and he slinks away into the trees. 'Whew!' says the panther, 'That was close! That old German Shepherd nearly had me!'

Meanwhile, a squirrel who had been watching the whole scene from a nearby tree, figures he can put this knowledge to good use and trade it for protection from the panther. So, off he goes, but the old German Shepherd sees him heading after the panther with great speed, and figures that something must be up.

The squirrel soon catches up with the panther, spills the beans and strikes a deal for himself with the panther.

The young panther is furious at being made a fool of and says, 'Here, squirrel, hop on my back and see what's going to happen to that conniving canine!'

Now, the old German Shepherd sees the panther coming with the squirrel on his back and thinks, 'What am I going to do now?', but instead of running, the dog sits down with his back to his attackers, pretending he hasn't seen them yet, and just when they get close enough to hear, the old German Shepherd says....
'Where's that squirrel? I sent him off an hour ago to bring me another panther!'

Moral of this story ...

Don't mess with the old dogs ... age and treachery will always overcome youth and vigor!

Du Være Lovet, Jesu Krist / Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ

Heard on Religiøse Folketoner CD by Arve Moen Bergset - Norwegian version of Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ [All praise to Thee, Jesus Christ], an early Christmas hymn with words by Martin Luther. Detailed history in Chorale Melodies used in Bach's Vocal Works under the German title. See also Cantata 91 by Johann Sebastian Bach.

HUM 223: A view of culture from Alaska

In class Tuesday, we were talking about how culture and art depend on each other, and I mentioned a Russian Orthodox priest who had worked with Alaska Natives for most of his career and had some interesting things to say about culture. Rather than try to quote him from memory, I promised to find what he said and link it to the blog so we can discuss it Thursday.

He's the Very Rev. Archpriest Michael J. Oleksa. He has worked for many years with Alaska Natives, and his website has a nice common-sense definition of culture:

What's a culture? What's your culture? Do you have a culture?
Everyone does. The best definition of culture is "the way you see the world." But you can't SEE the way you see the world. Your own culture is always invisible to you. We can look at other people's cultures and not how they differ from our own, but we can't articulate our own very well.

There's more in a lecture called "Listen to the Other Guy's Story" ... it is taken from his keynote address to the Alaska 20/20 Conference: On the Future of Alaska sponsored by the Alaska Humanities Forum and the First Alaskans Foundation. An edited version appears on the LitSite Alaska website.

Oleksa begins with a definition ... oh, I'll just let him speak for himself:

What’s your culture? It’s a hard thing to define, isn’t it? Look it up in the dictionary -- Webster is of absolutely no help. They’ll start with bacteria for one thing … But when we ask, “What is your culture?” how do you define that? How do you conceptualize it? Talking about your own culture is one of the most difficult things to do, because your culture is the air you breathe. It’s the aquarium into which you were born, and it’s very hard to imagine what life would have been like if you had been born in a lake or in the ocean. Your aquarium is your world. That’s one way of thinking of culture, but that’s limiting.

I’d like to think of culture as the way you understand the game of life. All games have certain rules and regulations that govern them, basic skills that have to be learned in order to win. If you were born into the culture that organizes conferences like this, you were born into a culture that takes time very seriously. It measures time. You have proverbs like “time is money,” and “don’t waste time.” You talk about time as if it were a quantity or a location. Time is something you can be on or ahead of or behind, and that’s why you have to kill a lot of time before it gets you.

If you were born in rural Alaska, however, you don’t necessarily have that sense of time at all. It’s a different ball game, and that’s the first point I want to make. If your culture is the game of life as you play it, because it’s the only aquarium you’ve ever been in, we often assume that our ball game is the only ball game there is -- that everyone plays life the same way, according to the same rules, with the same presuppositions and with the same goals. Then, when you go to another culture, you’re suddenly up against another ball game and you realize not everybody’s playing on the same field with the same equipment, using the same skills to score the same points.

See what's going on here? Alaska Natives, to generalize way too much, are not as bound by time constraints as most Americans. They're not as likely to keep watching the clock and split their time into five- and 10-minute segments as the rest of us are. That means they operate at a disadvantage when they get to a big city like Anchorage (250,000 population) where buses run on time, appointments are scheduled exactly and people live by the clock. It's like playing a different ball game.

But Oleksa also says cities like Anchorage have an advantage because they're culturally diverse. You get Eskimos, Athabascan Indians, Aleuts, recent immigrants from at least a dozen Asian nations, Russians, Europeans and Americans of all different ethnic backgrounds. He continues with his culture-as-ball-game metaphor, and then he says culture is also like a story. Let's follow him:

There are more than a hundred cultures in Anchorage. This means we have the opportunity here to learn a whole lot of other ball games. We can all be like Michael Jordan who is competent in his own culture, as he was in basketball, but who took the risk of going off to the White Sox to play baseball for a change. I’d like to interview him about that experience. He was very competent, one of the best ever in his own ball game, but he left it behind to attempt to learn somebody else’s game and did not succeed with nearly the same glory. I’d like to ask him how much more he appreciates baseball players and the game of baseball now that he tried and didn’t become a superstar.

You see, that’s the problem. With our own culture, we can be competent. We grew up with it. We absorbed its rules without even noticing. We understand time and space and nature our way, the way our friends and neighbors do, the way our own native culture did. But here in Alaska, we have the tremendous opportunity to discover new ways of seeing the world, of understanding reality, of comprehending what it means to be a human being -- and not just by learning one more game, but potentially dozens.

We may never be good at the other guy’s game. We should admit that. We’ll always be more competent, I think, at our own. But we can enjoy and delight in the fact that ours isn’t the only game in town. That’s one definition of culture – the game of life as you play it.

There’s another definition that someone pointed out to me a few years ago. It comes from a book, actually. Similar to my idea of culture as game, it’s culture as story. What’s your story? Not your own story, but the story that started in your culture before you were born. Who were your grandparents? How were they educated? Did they have any formal schooling? Where were they born? In what kind of a community? In what part of the world? And your parents -- how did they meet? Where did they come from? What were their collective expectations for you?

This is how culture is transformed into community. A community in the modern world is a collection of cultures harmoniously interconnecting and interrelating. We have to build community deliberately in the modern world. Community used to be there as a given -- your village community, the village of Koliganek that I just left, the village of Old Harbor where I first entered Alaska.

The village is pretty much a homogenous community, already intercultural, because the village has absorbed the newcomers of the last century or two, and indigenized them. It made them members of that community, part of that community’s history, part of its story, members of its church, parents to its children, Godparents to its other kids -- connected harmoniously.

This is harder to do when you have a city of a quarter million and over a hundred cultures. To build community will take commitment and effort. We have to be committed to it. We have to want it. We have to work toward it. ...

So culture and community are connected, and basically culture is the whole system of beliefs and attitudes and customs, art, music and everything else that surrounds us and makes us who we are. Like any other metaphors, Oleksa's are inexact. They don't fit precisely. But they're worth thinking about. How does culture shape us? How does it shape our art? How can our art help us transcend culture?

And what does any of this stuff about culture and community have to do with what jazz sax player Charlie Parker said in the quote at the top of our syllabus? The one that says: "Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."

COMM 337: African roots, polyrhythm, call-and-response

Polyrhythm is just a $13.95 word for playing two (or more) rhythms at the same time. According to Lorenzo Candeleria and Daniel Kingman, authors of "American Music: A Panorama," all African music is marked by polyrhythm, which they define as "the dominance of rhythm, manifested in ... the sense of an inexorably steady pulse governing the music [at the same time as] a high degree of rhythmic complexity and diversity" (18) In vocal music Candeleria and Kingman speak of the same "steady pulse governing the music" as in the instrumental piece, with "the basic 'drumbeat' is present in the foot tapping that is steadily followed by a clap of the hands ... on what is called the offbeat (or backbeat)." They were talking about American church music, but it also holds true for work songs or any other group singing. Before we listen to anything else, let's go to Wikipedia's explanation of polyrhythm. Listen to the sound files as I play them, and compare the 3-against-4 polyrhythm (the second clip) with the musical notation in 4/4 time.

Candeleria and Kingman also have a simple definition of "call-and-response singing," which is another common feature of African vocal music: "In call-and-response we typically hear a lead vocalist 'call out' a statement, or even a question, that is followed by a 'response' from a group of participating singers" (10). We will hear both again and again.

On YouTube today we'll watch several video clips. As we do, listen carefully for the rhythms. Do you hear what Candeleria and Kingman would hear? Polyrhythms or other complex patterns? Any call-and-response?

First we'll watch a short clip of "Singing Fisherman of Ghana," work songs of a fishing community in Ghana shot on location in 1964 by Pete and Toshi Seeger. It's old, and the music is a very traditional work song. Listen for the polyrhythms, and note especially the call-and-response vocals toward the end as the guy standing up in the boat calls out a phrase and the oarsmen respond to it.



When Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji died in 2003, NPR's Scott Simon remembered the musician and played some of his music (3:32). "He opened up the world of African music to many people in the West," said Simon.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1230139

We'll also watch schoolchildren learning a variety of traditional dances at secondary schools funded by the WildiZe Foundation in Tanzania. Listen for complex patterns of rhythm, also for all and response. As you watch, think: This isn't just about music, it's about kids learning their cultural heritage.



African influence is worldwide. Listen for African-sounding polyrhythms in this performance of a dance called the Cutumba by Ballet Folklórico Cutumba de Santiago, Cuba. They sound African because they're derived from Africa. Cuba and the United States share a cultural heritage derived in large part from Africa.



And a steel drum band from Trinidad and Tobago, an independent nation in the West Indies that was once a British colony and now belongs to the British Commonwealth of Nations, playing in London's Trafalgar Square.



We hear it in reggae as well. We'll watch a performance by Bob Marley of his song "Exodus" live In Dortmund, Germany. Marley, of course, was from Jamaica, another former colony and Commonwealth nation with a culture that is heavily influenced by Africa. American music, in turn, has been heavily influenced by Jamaica. Hip hop, in fact, owes its origins to Jamaican deejays in New York City.



Finally, we'll see a video of Michael Franti and Spearhead singing "Hole In The Bucket"(1994). The song is old, a traditional ballad from Europe, but this version takes the old song in a new direction. Music, as jazzman Charlie Parker keeps reminding us, knows no boundaries.



If we get time ... We can't go back in time, and we don't have sound recordings before the early 20th century. But we can get a feel for what early African American music would have sounded like from a book called "The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech" written in 2005 by two Australians, Shane White and Graham White.

If you want to read the first chapter, follow the link to the PDF file on Beacon Press' website. It explains the role of music in the daily life of African American slaves. Gena Caponi Tabery, former professor of American studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a church pianist in Austin, Texas, says in a review in Christian Century magazine, compares it to the role of music in today's society. She says:

Thanks to our individual, portable, downloadable personal stereo units, we are the most aurally privatized society that has ever lived. More than ever we work, walk and drive to the beat of different drummers. We create our own soundtracks.

That makes it difficult for us to get into a culture in which ".. there was a continuity of the sacred and secular, of work, worship, leisure and play, so that no part of daily life was too lofty or too trivial to be excluded from the commonest work chant or song of praise." DIfficult, but not impossible.

White and White wrote their book around a collection of "recorded hollers, stories, prayers, sermons, work songs and, yes, spirituals" dating from the early days of sound recordings. They were sung by the children and grandchildren of slaves, but they give us the only window we'll ever have into the actual sounds of slavery.

We'll listen to some of them in class.

HUM 223: Journal for listening, videos, whatever

HUM 223: Ethnic Music
Springfield College in Illinois
Fall Semester 2009

http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/humanities/hum223syllabus.html

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. -- Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker

In-class Journal

Filling out this questionnaire will help you focus your thoughts on a text, no matter whether it’s a written document, a video, a song, a musical technique or even a dance step, and respond to it analytically. To print it out, I would copy this text into a blank Microsoft Word document and adjust the leading (vertical space) so it fits on one page. The questions are adapted from a tip sheet on literary reading journals by the Writing Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., at http://www.gmu.edu/departments/writingcenter/handouts/puller.html.

What about this video and its music stands out in my mind? The George Mason writing center advises: “Write first. Write what you see in the text [in this case, the video].” Freewrite, in other words. It’ll get you thinking about what you saw and heard.






What in my cultural background, values, taste and interests makes me react to it that way? More advice from George Mason: “Next, write what you feel about what you see.” Freewriting about your feelings is an especially good way to respond to a text, an artifact or a piece of music that’s not from your own culture.






What, specifically, in the text [in this case the video] makes me feel that way? Does it speak to me across cultural boundaries? Says the GMU tip sheet: “This step helps you develop perceptions.” In other words, you elaborate on your thoughts and feelings and thus gain more insight into the work.





Name: __________________________

HUM 221: Profiles, live music reviews

When you write your review paper on a live music performance, basically you'll be writing a profile like many of you did in freshman English composition.

Coming up are a couple of opportunities:

• If you're interested in sacred music or the roots of gospel, the Illinois State Convention of Sacred Harp singers will be at the Christian County Historical Society, at the intersection of Ill. 29 and Ill. 48 in Taylorville from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
  
• Sparky and Rhonda Rucker will perform old-time, Appalachian, blues and other Ameican roots music at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday night at the Abraham Lincoln Unitarian Universality Church, 745 Woodsie Road, Springfield. Admission is $5 for students (which would be you).

In addition to the discussions we're posted to the blog on how to write about music - tempo. rhythm, melody, feeling, emotion, etc. - here are some tips on how to write a profile from my faculty website:
"Profiles - A guide for freshman English (and journalism) students. Here's something I wrote then that is still good advice now.

I won't alarm you with the "r" word, but this is really about research. Journalists call it reporting. It's the same thing. "The power of [news] stories lies not just in their evocative use of language, also in the compelling power of facts," says Christopher Scanlan, director of writing programs at the Poynter Institute for journalists. "To gather these facts," he adds, "the reporter should always try to be on the scene ... [b]ut even if the writer can't be present and must reconstruct the action, specific details are needed to bring the story alive in the reader's mind" (423-24). Scanlan's advice for student writers: "Get out on the streets. Don't hang around the campus newsroom or your dorm. Storytellers aren't tied to their desks. They're out in the streets. ... In your reporting use the five senses and a few others: sense of place, sense of people, sense of time, sense of drama. How did it look? ... What sounds echoed? If music is playing, is it the lush strings of a classical piece or the head-banging clang of guitars? Is the wind whistling through the leaves? Are children's cries filling the air? Close your eyes and record in your notebook every sound you hear" (415). Take notes. What do you see? What are people wearing? Is there graffiti chalked on Gingko Square? What does it say? What do you hear (and overhear)? What are people saying? What do you smell? What do you feel? Is it hot? Cold? Get it down. Take notes on everything you might not remember later. That's what notes are for.

"We should all try to make readers see, smell, feel, taste and hear," say Brian Brooks and other journalism professors at the University of Missouri. "One way to do that is to write using scenes as much as possible. To write a scene, you have to be there. You need to capture the signs, the sounds and the smells that are pertinent" (188). Missouri is one of the best journalism schools in the country, and their advice is good: "To create such scenes, you must use all your senses to gather information, and your notevook should reflect that teporting Along with the results of interviews, your notebook should bulge with details of signs and smells, sounds and textures. David Finkel, winner of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinuished Writing Award in 1986, says, 'Anything that pertains to any sense I feel at any moment, I write down.' Gather details indiscriminately. Later, you can discard those that are not germane. Because you were there, you can write the scene as if you were writing a play" (189). When I started reporting for newspapers, I was told I needed to know 10 times as much as wrote in the paper. If I didn't know all the facts, I wouldn't know which ones I could leave out.

Here's the Missouri Group again: "Interviewing -- having conversations with sources -- is the key to most stories you will write. ... Information is the raw material of a journalist. While some of it is gathered from records and some from observation, most of it is gathered in person-to-person conversations" (49-50). You probably already have some of the basic note-taking skills you need from taking class notes in school.

A couple of basics from my experience: (1) take down enough key words so you can reconstruct the quote; but (2) don't take down too many. Don't get bogged down. The person you're interviewing might say, "We lived, uh, like, in New Mexico." All you need to take down is, "We lived in New Mexico" -- which might look more like "w lvd N Mex" handwrittten. You'll get in the habit of doing what experienced reporters do: Use abbreviations. Make 'em up on the spot. Write fast. Scribble. Get it down, and fill in the blanks later.

HUM 223: Roots music ... keeping it real

So far we've concentrated on three categories of music ... folk music, popular music and art music like classical or jazz. So let's recap briefly. You fill in the blanks. Folk music is __________. Popular music is like folk music because it's __________. And it's different because it's __________. Art music is __________. How is it like folk music? How is it different? How is it like popular music? How is it different?

Now we're going to add a fourth category, roots music, which combines features of all three at times but is grounded in folk music. Here's a definition from a Wikipedia article on American folk music:

American folk music, also known as roots music, is a broad category of music including Bluegrass, country music, gospel, old time music, jug bands, Appalachian folk, blues, Cajun and Native American music. The music is considered American either because it is native to the United States or because it developed there, out of foreign origins, to such a degree that it struck musicologists as something distinctly new. It is considered "roots music" because it served as the basis of music later developed in the United States, including rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and jazz.

And this:

Many Roots musicians do not consider themselves to be folk musicians; the main difference between the American folk music revival and American "Roots music" is that Roots music seems to cover a slightly broader range, including blues and country.

Roots musical forms reached their most expressive and varied forms in the first two to three decades of the 20th century. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were extremely important in disseminating these musical styles to the rest of the country, as Delta blues masters, itinerant honky tonk singers and Latino and Cajun musicians spread to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. The growth of the recording industry in the same approximate period was also important; increased possible profits from music placed pressure on artists, songwriters and label executives to replicate previous hit songs. This meant that fads like Hawaiian slack-key guitar never died out completely as rhythms or instruments or vocal stylings were incorporated into disparate genres. By the 1950s, all the forms of roots music had led to pop-oriented forms. Folk musicians like the Kingston Trio, pop-Tejano and Cuban-American fusions like boogaloo, chachacha and mambo, blues-derived rock and roll and rockabilly, pop-gospel, doo wop and R&B (later secularized further as soul music) and the Nashville sound in country music all modernized and expanded the musical palette of the country.

The roots approach to music emphasizes the diversity of American musical traditions, the genealogy of creative lineages and communities, and the innovative contributions of musicians working in these traditions today. In recent years roots music has been the focus of popular media programs such as Garrison Keillor's public radio program A Prairie Home Companion and the feature film by the same name.

Here's a good definition from a Public Broadcasting System series shown in 2001. (We'll watch it, too, later this month.) Here's what PBS says:

The term "American roots music" may not be a familiar one, and requires some explanation. At the beginning of the 20th Century, the term "folk music" was used by scholars to describe music made by whites of European ancestry, often in the relatively isolated rural South. As the century progressed, the definition of folk music expanded to include the song styles - particularly the blues - of Southern blacks as well. In general, folk music was viewed as a window into the cultural life of these groups. Folk songs communicated the hopes, sorrows and convictions of ordinary people's everyday lives. Increasingly, music made by other groups of Americans such as Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Cajuns came under the umbrella of "folk music." It was sung in churches, on front porches, in the fields and other workplaces, while rocking children to sleep, and at parties. The melodies and words were passed down from parent to child, though songs - and their meanings - often changed to reflect changing times.

In the 1960s, awareness of folk songs and musicians grew, and popular musicians began to draw on folk music as an artistic source as never before. "Folk music" then became a form of popular music itself, popularized by singer/songwriters such as Bob Dylan, who helped pioneer the intimate, often acoustic performing style that echoed that of community-based folk musicians. Music writers, scholars and fans began to look for new ways to describe the diverse array of musical styles still being sung and played in communities across America, though most often not heard on radios. The term "roots music" is now used to refer to this broad range of musical genres, which include blues, gospel, traditional country, zydeco, tejano, and native American pow-wow.

Here's why this stuff matters: The blues and jazz we're studying in HUM 223 qualify as one of the most important kinds of American roots music. But this semester, partly in response to things you guys have said in class, I want us to look at it in a context of what happens as other kinds of roots music "cross over" and become pop hits. I think if we do it that way, ask ourselves a lot of questions and make a lot of comparisons, the music of artists like Muddy Waters and his crossover disciples like Eric Clapton will come more alive to us. As jazzman Charlie Parker says, there are no boundaries to art. What is gained as the music crosses over? What is lost? How do crossover musicians keep it real? Or do they?

Today we'll watch a documentary called "To Hear Your Banjo Play" (16:09) produced by song collector Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress and narrated by folk revival singer Pete Seeger in 1947. It's hokey, but it shows the attitudes of the highly educated people who championed folk music as it crossed over in the 1930s and 40s. If you can overlook the ridiculous "country-fied" costumes the producers have the performers wear, it gives a decent ... but romanticized ... history of American roots music. And it features cameo performance by talented musicians including songwriter Woody Guthrie (best known for "This Land Is Your Land") and bluesman Brownie McGhee, among others. Which parts of it strike you as real? Which ones don't?




Recent documentary by West Virginia Public Broadcasting (26:51) on the Appalachian String Band Music Festival at Clifftop, W.Va. How, specifically, do these people keep their traditions alive? Can West Virginia teenager really play like someone old enough to be their grandfather? Is it real when they do? To whom? Why? How? What does it tell you about the nature of music?

HUM 223: Writing assignment for next week

Write a 2- to 4-page reaction paper on the performance of "When the Saints Go Marching In" we watched in class Thursday. Double-space in a standard typeface, 12pt Times New Roman or 10-point Verdana preferred. Due either Tuesday or Thursday (I like to have my assignments fall due anytime during the week so you can plan ahead better).


In 2006 Bruce Springsteen toured the U.S. and Europe, performing American roots standards with a group he called the Sessions Band. In this version of the old jazz standard "When the Saints Go Marching In," he switched off the vocal lead with Patti Scialfa and Marc Thompson. "The Saints" has a beloved place in American popular culture as a rowdy, up-tempo Dixieland jazz song, but its roots are in gospel music and its words are from the Bible. Do Springsteen and the Sessions Band succeed in going back to those roots? Does it work for you? Why? Or, why not?

xxx Copeland xxx

Here is a link to the lyrics on a Lebanese fansite. Here's the video:



Write a two- to four-page reaction paper on Springsteen's performance with the Sessions Band of "The Saints." Here are those three questions again. (They never go away!)

1. What about this piece of music and/or performance stands out in my mind?
2. What in my background, values, taste and interests makes me react that way?
3. What specific things about the performance trigger that reaction? [These will be the things Copeland mentions in Seiler's tip sheet.]

The questions are adapted from a kind of assignment you may have written in English or language arts classes, but they're the best way I know of staying on track when you write a response paper to music, too, or any other work of art.

This paper is a journal -- i.e. it's not a formal English-class type paper -- and I consider it part of your class participation grade rather than a formal writing assignment. That means I'm more interested in what you say, in other words the content, than I am in how you say it, i.e. the grammar and punctuation. Write as well as you can, but don't freeze up over grammar.

HUM 223: Dancing about architecture ... about writing ... about music ... is really about listening (WHICH LEADS UP TO TUESDAY'S ASSIGNMENT)

Several days ago, I posted a link to a tip sheet on "Writing About Music" by Robert M. Seiler of the University of Calgary in Canada. He suggests it's all about listening, and he says something that makes me sit up and, well, sit up and listen ... 'cause I know he's talking about me. Seiler: "Many of us have acquired some bad habits - like listening to music as a background to other activities. In this way, according to [French classical piano player] Eric Satie, we turn music into wall-paper or furniture."

Ouch. I do that.

Nothing against wallpaper or furniture. But to really get into music, Seilert says we've got to listen ... pay attention to it. (I guess if I were really into wallpaper, I could listen to that, too. But let's not go there.) What to listen for? Seiler tells his students at Calgary that when they write about music, they actively listen for the sound of vocals or instrumentals, and the “dynamics or the intensity of the sound, in terms of loudness, uniformity, and change.” He also suggests they listen for:

a. the movement of the piece, i.e., concentrate on its rhythm, meter, and tempo,

b. the pitch, i.e., in terms of its order and melody, and

c. the structure of the piece, i.e., its logic, design, and texture.

Let's go through Seiler’s entire tip sheet. He has lots of suggestions, and you may find some you especially like. We all react differently, especially to instrumental music, so I don't mind it if we're all over the map. And I don't expect all of you all to agree with me. But I especially like it when he quotes American composer Aaron Copeland and says "music expresses serenity or exuberance, regret or triumph, fury or delight. Music expresses these moods, and many others, in a variety of subtle shadings and differences. It may even express a state of meaning for which there exists no adequate phrase in any language." I think Seiler's suggestions will help you when you go to write about music. I know I like to go back to them when I'm doing my own articles.

Then let's take a trial run ...

We'll listen to Sparky and Rhonda Rucker singing "C.C. Rider at a house party in Chattanooga, Tenn. (They're the couple who will do the Prairie Grapevine concert in Springfield later this month.) It's an old blues standard - actually a "bad man" song that probably goes back a lot farther than blues. As you listen, skim-read Seiler's tip sheet and see which of his suggestions work for you. Take them down, so we can talk about it in class for a while. No "right" answers. But what works for you may work for some of your classmates.

And then, the main assignment



In 1966 Bruce Springsteen toured the U.S. and Europe, performing American roots standards with a group he called the Sessions Band. In this version of the old jazz standard "When the Saints Go Marching In," he switched off the lead vocal with Patti Scialfa and Marc Thompson. "The Saints" has a beloved place in American popular culture as a rowdy, up-tempo Dixieland jazz song, but its roots are in gospel music and its words are from the Book of Revelations in the Bible. Do Springsteen and the Sessions Band succeed in going back to those roots? Does it work for you? Why? Or, why not?



Write a two- to four-page reaction paper on Springsteen's performance with the Sessions Band of "The Saints." Here are those three questions again. (They never go away!)

1. What about this piece of music and/or performance stands out in my mind?
2. What in my background, values, taste and interests makes me react that way?
3. What specific things about the performance trigger that reaction? [These will be the things Copeland mentions in Seiler's tip sheet.]

The questions are adapted from a kind of assignment you may have written in English or language arts classes, but they're the best way I know of staying on track when you write a response paper to music, too, or any other work of art.

This paper is a journal -- i.e. it's not a formal English-class type paper -- and I consider it part of your class participation grade rather than a formal writing assignment. That means I'm more interested in what you say, in other words the content, than I am in how you say it, i.e. the grammar and punctuation. Write as well as you can, but don't freeze up over grammar.

Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet

Swedish-language website of the Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet with history, biographies of Johan Dillner, Lars Roverud and sifferskrift for 25 or 30 songs including

130 En stjärna gick på himlen fram
190 Bred dina vida vingar
248 Tryggare kan ingen vara
297 Härlg är jorden

HUM 223: New Salem story in Springfield, Peoria papers

A Sunday story in Springfield's State Journal-Register previews the upcoming Traditional Music Festival this weekend at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site in a way that sheds light on what your instructor thinks about the festival. It may be of interest, because the New Salem festival is one of several you can write about for your live music review for Humanities 223. I'll post an assignment sheet this week, and it will be due at any time this semester. Basically you will be assigned to write a review of a live music event, and consider how the player(s) maintain the tradition of the music.

So one event coming up this weekend is the Traditional Music Festival at New Salem. There are other possibilities: On Sept. 22 traditional musicians Sparky and Rhonda Rucker will appear at a Prairie Grapevine concert at the Unitarian Universalit fellowship south of town, and the weekend of Sept. 19-20 a Sacred Harp gospel singing convention will be held in Taylorville. I'll post information on it later.

And I'll post information on other events as I hear about them. You are invited to keep an eye out for performances, too, of anything from a gospel quartet, a choir, a jazz band or a garage band that covers old Grateful Dead and Phish songs.

Back to New Salem. The State Journal-Register's story leads with this:

Listen and learn at New Salem’s bluegrass fest
By DAN NAUMOVICH
GateHouse News Service
Posted Sep 06, 2009 @ 12:02 AM

Pete Ellertsen is a communication arts professor at Benedictine University at Springfield. He’s also a dulcimer player who has attended the Traditional Music and Bluegrass Festival for 10 years.

So listen when he says where to find the music worth hearing.

“This is how music festivals work. You attract people and the good players by having the stage show,” he said. “And once they’re there, everyone’s picking in the parking lot, or at New Salem they’re picking in the campground. The rule on all of these things is that the best music can be found in the parking lot and campground. That’s the ethos of an old-time music festival.”

In Peoria, the Journal-Star ran the same story under the following headline:

Some of the music will even be played onstage
New Salem bluegrass festival will feature great music - even in the parking lot

Several of the people interviewed for the J-R's article talked about roots music. Although they didn't use that word, they were conscious of tradition, of passing down the old ways of making music.

Ellersten is a volunteer interpreter at the historic site. He said it is an ideal place to tap into the old-time music vibe that’s still strong in many rural communities.

“Part of what they do at New Salem is to keep the old ways alive and be mindful of tradition. It’s not just Lincoln. It’s about heritage,” he said.

Steve Clark agreed that the period setting enhances the musical experience.

“At New Salem, with all of the jamming around the log cabins, that really adds some extra flavor to it,” the Herrick resident said.

Clark and his bluegrass band, Rural Rights Revival, are one of the acts slated for an evening performance.

He grew up listening to folk artists such as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, but then heard bluegrass star Earl Scruggs about 30 years ago and fell in love with the 5-string banjo. For him, it was a natural transformation.

“It’s all music of the common people. Bluegrass is nothing more than folk music in high gear,” Clark said.

Although Ellersten said the people of Menard County commonly refer to it simply as the bluegrass festival, the New Salem event covers a broader spectrum of traditional music.

“What’s great about New Salem is that it’s a folk music festival and you’ll hear everything. You’ll hear bluegrass, Celtic, your old-time music. There’s something there for every taste. It’s just a great festival,” Joe Readnour said.

Readnour and Jeff Runyon perform and record as R&R. The Celtic music they specialize in, some of which was popular with Civil War soldiers of Irish and Scottish descent, dates back to the 1750s.

The other common thread that runs through the article is the idea everybody can play it. It isn't music to be listened to in an electronic format, it's music people can play for themselves and each other.

Readnour is a multi-instrumentalist who plays several instruments including mandolin, violin, highland bagpipes and Irish pennywhistle. Although he played clarinet in school and is the son of a talented musician, the 51-year-old from Moweaqua took up the traditional music instruments he plays today only about a dozen years ago.

He thinks a similar bug might bite non-musicians who attend the New Salem festival.

“They’ll have a good time. They’ll hear all kinds of music — beautiful acoustic music. And if anybody’s interested in learning how to play, they can approach somebody and they’ll help them get started. You don’t have to be a young person to pick it up. I’m a testament to that,” he said.

Runyon, also a multi-instrumentalist, said some flashy pickers might get defensive if they think someone is trying to rip off their chops. But most often a more experienced player is willing to help someone who is less accomplished.

He recommends that a beginner start on guitar, which is more accessible than mandolin or banjo. Guitar offers a quicker route to go from being a spectator to joining in the impromptu jam sessions that pop out all over a music festival.

“Even if you’re just standing in the back playing rhythm on a three-chord song, man, that’s just the greatest feeling,” Runyon said.

“You might never be a spectacular player when you start later in life, but you’ll enjoy yourself and get a lot of pleasure out of the music you play,” Readnour concurred.

'Amazing Grace,' Scotland, Ireland, Africa and the roots of American music

Watching Thursday's video on "Amazing Grace," I was reminded how much the roots of our popular music are a blend of African American and Scots-Irish traditions. Some of the people who spoke about the origins of the song said it cmae from a West African slave melody, and others said its origins were in Scotland and Ireland, or with Scots-Irish settlers in the southern Appalachians.

My take on it (for what it's worth): "Amazing Grace" has deep roots in both cultures. So it's not African American or Scots-Irish, it's both. We'll never know exactly where it comes from, but that doesn't matter. Music transcends cultural boundaries.

But today I want us to explore one of those boundaries. Our popular music in America first came to these shores from Scotland and Ireland, as well as Africa, and I think it will help us to hear some of the Celtic roots of the music. I think a lot of it is universal. People of all cultures join in on songs, for examples, and kids get up and dance when they hear dance music. (We'll see that, too.) But there are also common threads. Listen for things like tempo, the way the musicians listen to each other and build on each others' playing ...

In the first video clip, American folk singer Jean Ritchie visits a village in Ireland. She was in the Bill Moyers video, by the way, playing the dulcimer (or "hogfiddle," the instrument this blog is named for). The family reunion in the Kentucky mountains at the beginning of the video was hers. In this clip from YouTube, she shares a folk hymn from her native Kentucky with Irish musicians who sing and play in the traditional Irish style (in Gaelic, "sean nós" pronounced shawn-NOS"). Listen for the man in the cardigan sweater singing in Gaelic, followed by Ritchie singing the Old Regular Baptist hymn, "Look away ... you can see the promised land." She sings in a traditional Appalachian style, but notice how much it sounds like Irish sean nós.



Here's a brief clip of an unidentified woman singing in the sean nós style at a folk festival in County Kerry, Ireland. (Next year's Benedictine University tour of Ireland will go through Co. Kerry, by the way.) Notice the older folks joining in.



Next we'll hear bluegrass artist Ralph Stanley and the Country Gentlemen of southwestern Virginia sing "Angel Band." Compare his voice to the Irish singers' and notice the way the band joins in. Hear the similarity?



A lot of Scots-Irish music was dance music, and the rhythms and some of the feeling carry over into southern Appalachian roots music. Bluegrass, too.

Here's a performance by Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh fronting the Irish roots band Altan, on a "Balcony TV" show shot on, yeah, a balcony in Dublin. How is Ní Mhaonaigh's vocal like the Irish folk singers' even though the type of music is different from their ballads and hymns? How is it like Ralph Stanley's? How is it different?



Next Ralph Stanley and Patty Loveless sing "Pretty Polly," a bluegrass version of an old Scots-Irish ballad. Compare their vocals to the Irish singers' ... both the traditional singers and Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh.



Traditional music session in 2008 at J.J. Killeen`s Pub in Shannonbridge, Ireland:



And American old-time musicians jamming at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, W.Va. The dulcimer player at right is one of my teachers, Don Pedi of Madison County, N.C.



Altan, the Irish band that played the promo TV spot on balcony in Dublin, at a 2003 folk festival in Cambridge, England.



A little girl starts dancing during a pub session in Oughterard, Ireland



Another little girl dances as the Southern String Band plays "Cumberland Gap" in Raleigh, N.C.



The Hoorah Cloggers dance to music by the Wild Turkeys Old-time String Band in Floyd, Va.



"To Hear Your Banjo Play" (1947). Pete Seeger narrates Alan Lomax's 16-minute documentary on the evolution and appreciation of American folk music. Production values - and the film's message - are really, really old-fashioned and hokey, but it gives a capsule history of what we now call American roots music.

'Complaints Choir' in Finland

From the Multe Music traditional Scandinavian music blog out of Northfield, Minn. It's been up since March, but I just found it today. A post on the Helsinki Complaints Choir with back story and a YouTube Clip. Here's the original:


In Finnish slang, a Valituskuoro (translated "Complaints Choir") is what you get when a lot of people are complaining at the same time. Think of a faculty meeting ...

So Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen wrote the lyrics and enlisted Esko Grundström to write the music. The result, a seven-minute choral airing of complaints ranging from the weather and annoying ringtones to a foul odor on the No. 3 tram in Helsinki. Delightful.

Universal, too. We don't have trams in Springfield, Ill., but we do have venues that smell like that.

HUM 223: 'Amazing Grace' reaction journal for Tuesday

If you missed class Thursday, you will need to get a copy of the video and watch it if you want to make up the assignment. You're looking for "Amazing Grace with Bill Moyers," but it may be hard to find. It appears to be out of print, and I'm not sure Becker Library has a copy. So if you can't watch the video, consider it as an opportunity to meditate on what I meant when I said in the syllabus, "... in-class work, by its very nature, cannot be made up. Class attendance will directly impact your final grade."

Due Tuesday: Write a 1.5 to 2- page reaction paper on Bill Moyers' TV special "Amazing Grace." I prefer to get papers typed, doublespaced (easier to read that way) in 12pt type ... New Times Roman or any other typeface that's "plain vanilla" and easy to read. This will be a graded paper, but it's a "journal," which means in my classes that it's part of your class participation grade rather than an announced writing assignment. I am much more interested in what you say than in how you say it. In other words, I want you to write as well as you can, but I'm not going to grade you on grammar per se.

As we watch the video, we'll see people from different walks of life singing the music, including a family reunion in the Kentucky mountains, a youth choir in New York City, convicts, popular musicians, opera singers. I'll post some of the names:

• Jean Ritchie, folk singer, and relatives at a family renuion in rural Kentucky.
  
• Jessie Norman, opera singer who learned the song growing up in a Baptist church.
  
• Judy Collins, folk singer of the 1970s.
  
• Hugh McGraw, shape-note Sacred Harp singer of Georgia.
  
• Dewey Williams, 91, and family of rural Alabama
  
• Johnny Cash and prisoners in Huntsville Prison in Texas
  
• Walter Turnbull, director, Boys Choir of Harlem
  
• Marlon Williams, gospel singer, who sang at the end of the video

Take notes as you watch. Ask yourself: How many different types of people are featured? How do they relate to the song? What, specifically, do they get out of it? How do you react to their singing? What do you learn about music as you listen to all these different people? What do you learn about yourself? Here are three questions to ask yourself. You've seen them before, and you'll see 'em again:

1. What about this piece of music and/or performance stands out in my mind?
2. What in my background, values, needs and interests makes me react that way?
3. What specific things about the performance trigger that reaction?

You'll also find some tips in Sunday's blog post headlined HUM 223: Writing about music, writing about 'Amazing Grace' ... I'll repeat them here, too.

Robert M. Seiler of the University of Calgary in Canada suggests that when his students write about music, they actively listen for the sound of vocals or instrumentals, and the “dynamics or the intensity of the sound, in terms of loudness, uniformity, and change.” He also suggests they listen for:

a. the movement of the piece, i.e., concentrate on its rhythm, meter, and tempo,

b. the pitch, i.e., in terms of its order and melody, and

c. the structure of the piece, i.e., its logic, design, and texture.

Seiler’s entire tip sheet is available at http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~rseiler/music.htm -- his examples are from classical music, but his suggestions work for blues, gospel, jazz, rock or hip hop, too. They’ll work for "Amazing Grace," too.

Trio Mio / Danish-Swedish roots band combines folk, classical, jazz influences

"Roots music can be a springboard to many worlds, touching on everything from pop to classical," says the British world music website GlobalVillageIdiot. "Keeping a grounding in there isn't always easy, but Danish fiddler Kristine Heebøll has achieved an excellent balance with her debut, Trio Mio. Working with bouzouki/guitar player Jens Ulvsand and keyboard player Nikolaj Busk as a core, she's created a warm, inviting work whose heart is in Danish folk music."

"Glade Herte" (music from Højby stævne 2004)


Kristine Heebøll tells a writer for Global Village Idiot how the trio got together:

Nikolaj heard me playing with HeebøllVintherDuo on the Tønder Festival, and asked me to play with him for his exam on the academy of music in Copenhagen. After this we met a couple of times just for fun and to play some of my tunes, arranged for piano and violin. The same autumn I took classes in the Carl Nielsen Academy with Jens Ulvsand as a teacher, and we played well together from the start. So therefore I went to Sweden and visited him and we played both his and my tunes. I had these two "swinging" dates at the same time, and I just had to try to combine them. And this trio could easily cope with playing most of the tunes on my new record.

More from the members of Trio Mio from an article in RootsWorld magazine of New Haven, Conn.:

"The tradition is not really a big part of my musical consciousness," says Nikolaj Busk. "For me, it is enough to be aware of the style we are playing as long as I feel I can contribute something personal within an understanding of the music. I love all good music - jazz, electronic, classical, rock - and I love traditional music. I lean on various sources when I'm composing. The music I compose reflects what I am listening to at any given moment. It's a periodic thing."

Jens Ulvsand has a slightly different view of the tradition, for though he did not grow up with it, he has a clear attitude to traditional music. "If, for example, I'm composing a waltz, it is important to me that people can actually dance a waltz to my tune. And the same goes for other types of dance tune. I play a lot of traditional music too, so it means a great deal to me, even though I did not pick up the music from my own family members. On the contrary, I began playing music because I liked rock n' roll. When I was 25, I thought folk music sounded pretty corny, but that changed."

Kristine Heebøll has roots in traditional music, and, as she puts it, "I grew up with the tradition in my backpack, so to speak, so it is always with me to some extent. I don't necessarily think of the tradition when I'm composing, but it tends to define the tune structures and their contexts - whether they come out as a waltz, a polska, a march or something completely different. In recent years I have been composing very different things, more soundscapes and atmospherics, experiments that seem to rub off on everything else I do."