HUM 223: Midterm study questions

Humanities 223: Ethnic music
Springfield College in Illinois
Instructor: Pete Ellertsen
Beata Hall 211

Midterm · Fall 2007

Below are three essay questions – one worth fifty (50) points out of a hundred, 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 in the textbook, the internet and handouts I have given you, as well as class discussion, to back up the points you make. Your grade will depend both on your analysis of the broad trends I ask about, 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.

1A. Essay (50 points). African American forms of musical expression have reapeatedly crossed over to wider audiences and incorporated features of popular or art (classical) music in the process. Considering the definitions of folk, popular and/or art music in our textbook, compare and contrast the way in minstrel show songwriter Stephen Foster and opera/Broadway musical composer George Gershwin adapted African American forms of musical expression in writing for a wider audience. Consider these questions: How respectful were they of African American culture? How much African American influence is there in their adaptations? How well does the music of each transcend the limitations of time, place and culture? Would you call it folk, popular or art music?

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. 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). Gospel songs like “Amazing Grace” and black spirituals like those sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers have been sung by rural congregations and opera singers alike. Do religious songs lose anything when they go from “fairly close-knit homogeneous communities possessing a strong sense of group solidarity” (one definition Daniel Kingman, author of our textbook, gives for folk music) to being sung by popular singers and by classically trained musicians? Do the songs gain anything when they cross over to popular or art music? Or is it a trade-off?. Does the music transcend the specific cultural and religious norms of the people who sing it? If so, how? Be specific.

HUM 223: Porgy & Bess

Today we'll supplement the discussion of American songs and theater music in our textbook by looking at the work of George Gershwin, who with his brother Ira wrote songs for Tin Pan Alley (as the commercial songwriting district in New York City was called), the Broadway stage and classical music venues.

(But first a tangent. Once I had the opportunity to see a concert at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, famous for its performances of Russian composers like Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, and what did they play? A Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin!)

We'll go first to the official George and Ira Gershwin website. Enter the site, click through to the page with links to selected (rotating) clips of favorite songs displayed in the middle. In the menu at top, click on "History" to read about the Gershwin brothers, their musicials and their art. They were Jewish, of a Russian-American family, but when George wrote an opera about blacks in Charleston, S.C., he visited there to make sure he got the details right. The result was Porgy and Bess, and we'll see portions of it in class today.

On the Gershwin brothers website, click on "Anthology," "Selected Shows" and "Porgy and Bess." Read both screens. We'll watch portions of the Trevor Nunn production. Porgy and Bess is discussed in our textbook (pp. 218-20 in the 3rd edition). Originally written as a four-hour-long "folk opera," it has been cut down and adapted as a musical by Trevor Nunn. His production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess was previewed in The New York Times, and its promotional website has sound clips of some of its most famous songs, including one that's discussed in our textbook, "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'." Listen for the "blue" notes -- they'll sound slightly flat to you -- in all the songs. They're distinctively part of African American music, and Gershwin has them nailed!

We'll also watch a segment of the full opera version of Porgy and Bess directed by Nunn and conducted by Sir Simon Rattle of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1986. It showcases both Gershwin's operatic style and its rootedness in vernacular African American music, especially a song "Oh Doctor Jesus" that echoes black gospel singing traditions.

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you listen to the audio and watch the video clips (or as you write your midterm next week). In what ways does the singing sound like "Sheep Don't You Know the Road" and the singing of African American congregations we heard earlier this semester? In what ways is it different? How does Porgy and Bess compare to the artistic treatment of African American themes in the 19th-century minstrel shows and the spirituals arranged by classically oriented musicians like the Fisk Jubilee Singers?

HUM 223: Minstrel shows and their legacy

Here are links to some resources on minstrel shows, including supporting material for the documentary on Stephen A. Foster we watched in class. There's a good overview of Blackface Minstrelsy with comments by historians and musicians linked to a directory page. Be especially sure to read how historian Eric Lott and rock music critic Ken Emerson answer the question, "What's the connection between blackface minstrelsy and rock and roll?" Several people are interviewed for this feature, and they give varied but thoughtful critiques of the racial and artistic issues it raises.

Questions to ask yourself as you read about the minstrel shows: (1) Does the music of the ministrel shows, especially Foster's, transcend boundaries of race and culture? (2) Do Stephen Foster's songs, like "My Old Kentucky Home" or "Oh Susannah" hold up 150 years later in the 21st century, or are they sentimental and dated? (3) How should we approach American works of art, like the minstrel show songs or Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," that reflect racist attitudes?

Some other good links. A very good history of ministrel shows and vaudeville by John Kenrick on the "Musicals101.com" website takes them up into the 20th century. (Did you know the first popular "talking picture show," or movie with sound on film, featured a white blackface singer named Al Jolson?) Be sure to click through to Kenrick's discussion of how black vaudville performers changed the art form.

Vaudeville did much to to teach audiences of different ethnic and social backgrounds to get along. Defying the racist norm that dominated American society, vaudeville had black and white performers sharing the same stage as early as the 1890s. But managers had to deal with the legal and social realities of their time. Most southern states did not allow blacks and whites to sit in the same theatre, and even most Northern cities barred blacks from the best seats as late as the 1920s.

The TOBA Circuit ("Theatre Owners Booking Agency," which performers re-named "Tough On Black Asses") were the only venues below the Mason-Dixon Line that welcomed "colored" customers in the early part of the 20th Century, offering all-black bills for all-black audiences. For midnight performances on Saturdays, some TOBA houses allowed whites to sneak into the balcony.

This discussion on "Musicals101.com" is much better than what we have in our textbook. You may want to bookmark it so you can consult it when you write your midterm.

Dance. Song and dance was an important part of the legacy of the minstrel shows. As early as the 1840s, William Henry Lane, a black dancer who went by the stage name of Master Juba, was an international success. He combined Irish and African American steps, and is credited as the person who invented tap dance. A London theater and dance troupe is now touring the United States with a tribute to Master Juba. Years later, at the turn of the 20th century, a dance known as the Cakewalk became a nationwide craze. It is said to have originated with slaves mocking the "high-falutin' airs" of their masters (without the masters realizing it). Two very early motion pictures, both from 1903, show a professional dance troupe doing the cakewalk on stage and people cakewalking in the surf along a beach. Note the bathing suits!

"Old Dan Tucker": A minstrel song. I've linked to several files on the Internet that suggest how widespread the song got to be, especially after it went back into oral tradition as a fiddle tune.

• Original lyrics, as they were published in 1843, played by Japher's "Original" SANDY RIVER MINSTRELS, show the typical nonsense lyrics of the ministrel shows without some of the more egregious racial stereotyping.
  
• Old-time string band musicians jam on "Old Dan Tucker" at the 2006 Early Banjo Gathering in the barn of the Pry House Field Hospital Museum at Antietam Civil War battlefield. They're in period clothes (except for the guy with the white ballcap), playing fiddle, banjo and bones -- or spoons, which jug bands often use instead of castanets.
  
• "Old Dan Tucker" was a favorite during the Civil War. Played at a slightly slower tempo, it made a good march. Here historical reenactors of the Excelsior Brigade Fife and Drum Corps play it during a Mardi Gras parade in 2007 in Brockport, N.Y. In the spirit of equal time, here's the Towpath Volunteers fife and drum corps of Macedon, N.Y., in Revolutionary War uniforms playing it.
  
• Grandpa Jones, a "hillbilly" performer whose act was directly descended from the ministrel shows -- by way of rural "medicine shows" that featured string bands and went from town to town selling patent medicine -- played "Old Dan Tucker" on the Porter Wagoner Show in the early 1960s.
  
• Spanish television broadcasts Bruce Springsteen and a band he assembled for an album of roots music called "The Seeger Sessions" playing "Old Dan Tucker" (and, later, part of "John Henry") when they played in Madrid in 2006. Also Springsteen talks (in English) about the "raw democracy" he finds in American roots music. Notice his band combines the instrumentation of an oldtime string band (fiddle, banjo, guitar) with the brass instruments of a Dixieland jazz band.

COMM 337: Spirituals, links to sound files

To hear brief sound clips of "Lay Down Body," "Row, Michael, Row," and "Reborn Again" from the album Been in the Storm So Long: Spirituals and Shouts, Children's Game Songs (which I have played in class), go to the University of Virginia website on Thomas Wentworth Higginson's 1867 article on singing by black soldiers he commanded during the Civil War. The Fisk Jubilee Singers are still around, and clips from their latest album In Bright Mansions are available on Fisk's website. (I have also played songs from this album in class.)

HUM 223: Black spirituals, links and quotes

One of the most remarkable chapters in American music history was written by recently freed slaves and their children during the years after the Civil War. Taking a musical tradition with its origins in plantation life, they transformed it into a form of sophisticated art music and attracted the attention of one of the foremost European composers of the time.

They are the black spirituals, or "Negro spirituals" in the language of the day. Anton Dvorak, the Czech composer, used them as thematic material for his New World Symphony (Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, 1893). And African American composers brought the spirituals to the same level of musical sophistication as the lieder (songs) of Schubert or Brahms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The African American spirituals grew out of "shouts" and ceremonies that were essentially religious, involving both singing and dance. Their history is sketched in briefly at the Spirituals Project website, a project of the University of Denver. More background, including sound files, is available from the Spiritual Workshop of Paris, France. Be sure to listen to "Heaven” by JoAnne Stephenson, accompanied by Lorna Young-Wright, to hear some pretty fine left- and right-hand syncopation in a classical piano style. All the sound files on the Paris website show how African American music was adapted to the styles of art music, but Young-Wright's playing has a "swing" to it you just don't get in a Schubert art song.

Central to the flowering of the black spirituals were the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who took their polished arrangments on the road during the 1870s to raise money for their school, Fisk University. They suffered poverty, ill health and initially hostile audiences, but they sang before Queen Victoria and they won over the musical intelligensia of their day. They are still around, and their website tells their story. A slightly more detailed history is available on the Primarily A Cappella Singers.com website. It is as dramatic as a romance novel, but the story is true.

For some of the back story, we'll watch two segments of a local Nashville television show hosted by as Fisk history prof Reavis Mitchell and choir director Paul Kwami explain how the Jubilee Singers got started and what they contribute now to the college, the community and the world. (

W.E.B. DuBois, who studied at Fisk in the 1880s, was especially stirred by the spirituals. "Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past," he said. DuBois called them the "sorrow songs," and in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he said of them:

... by fateful chance the Negro folk-song — the rhythmic cry of the slave — stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.

In the 1890s, Dvorak taught at a conservatory of music in New York City, and there he learned of the spirituals from Harry Burleigh, a student of his, whom he asked to sing them repeatedly. Burleigh went on to arrange "Deep River," which may have served as a theme for Dvorak's New World Symphony, and compose his own art songs. Burleigh wrote in 1917 of the values in his artistic arrangments of the spirituals:

Success in singing these Folk Songs is primarily dependent upon deep spiritual feeling. The voice is not nearly so important as the spirit; and then rhythm, for the Negro's soul is linked with rhythm, and is an essential characteristic of most all Folk Songs.

It is a serious misconception of their meaning and value to treat them as "minstrel" songs, or to try to make them funny by a too literal attempt to imitate the manner of the Negro in singing them, by swaying the body, clapping the hands, or striving to make the peculiar inflections of voice that are natural with the colored people. Their worth is weakened unless they are done impressively, for through all these songs there breathes a hope, a faith in the ultimate justice and brotherhood of man. The cadences of sorrow invariably turn to joy, and the message is ever manifest that eventually deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come and man - every man - will be free.

I haven't been able to find Dvorak's article on American music online, but a University of Texas feature story on the New World Symphony quotes from it:

[Dvorak] reveled ... in African American music, such as spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the likes of which he had never heard before. In fact, Dvorak recognized in black music the future music of America, and his prediction was borne out in the ragtime, blues, jazz and various forms of rock that would be so central to the music of the 20th century.

“In the [N]egro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music,” he wrote. “They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay, or what you will…. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.”

Most of the influence of black American music has been in blues, jazz and rock. But I think it's important to remember some of it was sung before the crowned heads of Europe and flourished at the highest artistic levels, too.

HUM 223: "Sounds of Slavery" -- mp3 files

Sound files of 18 field recordings of African American musicians of the 1930s are available on Beacon Press' website for a book called The Sounds of Slavery by Shane White and Graham White. They are, as the authors note, as close as we'll ever get to the roots of African American music. And there's no charge for downloading them.

The sound files go with the book, which can be ordered from Beacon Press or online vendors like Amazon.com. It's simply one of the most interesting books I've ever read. WNYC, the classical music radio station in New York City, has an online excerpt from the first chapter of the book that describes the recordings, many of which were made by 1930s-vintage musicologists John and Alan Lomax:

The African Americans whom the Lomaxes auditioned and then recorded on what John Lomax called their “portable-machine for electrical sound-recording”28—on the 1933 trip the machine weighed 350 pounds—were the children and grandchildren of slaves. Unlike earlier collectors, whose transcriptions of performances depended on the transcriber’s skill and judgment, the Lomaxes relied on technology to secure what they believed was the unmediated original. After one field trip, John Lomax described the 150 tunes with which he had returned as “sound photographs of Negro songs, rendered in their own element, unrestrained, uninfluenced and undirected by anyone who has had his own notions of how the songs should be rendered.” But like the photographs to which Lomax compared his recordings, they contain ambivalences. Recordings, too, can strike a pose. For even though the Lomaxes used machines, they saw themselves as being in pursuit of subjects whom modernity had passed by. And this vision, in turn, shaped both their journeys and the sounds they enshrined. In search of an older, more “authentic” African American culture—in our terms, one closer to the time of slavery—the Lomaxes rummaged through the “eddies of human society” in remote cotton plantations, lumber camps, and, most famously, segregated southern prisons. Part of the reason they were so excited by their “discovery” of the talent of Leadbelly was that they felt that the great blues singer’s “eleven years of confinement had cut him off both from the phonograph and from the radio”—the fact that Leadbelly felt otherwise was beside the point.29 What is exciting about listening to the material from the field trips into the South of the 1930s is that the folk artists whose voices one hears reveal ways of singing and talking that had been heard from the lips of former slaves. It most definitely is not as though a tape recorder had been left on in the woods near the plantation on which Frederick Douglass toiled as a slave, but these recordings bring us about as close as we are ever going to get to hearing some of the familiar— and to white ears often “weird” and “unforgettable”—sounds of slavery.

HUM 223: A new citation generator

Here's a citation generator that will help you get the commas and quotation marks right in both MLA and APA citations. It's put up on the Web by Calvin College of Grand Rapids, Mich.

To demonstrate how it works, let's do my faculty page in MLA format. Open a new window, and follow these steps:

1. In the ribbon on the left, underneath the Calvin College seal, click on "MLA" under the heading Citation Styles.

2. Just below it, click on "Electronic" under the heading Source Type.

3. Under the heading Resource, scroll down to the Website subsection and click on "Entire Site."

4. You'll get a screen headed "Citing a Website Document in MLA Format." Just fill in my name in the fields under "Author Name."

5. Under "Web Site Title," type in "Faculty page."

6. Go to my faculty page, highlight my address (or URL, which stands for Uniform Resource Locator) in the address field and copy it.

7. Go back to the Calvin College page and paste the address into the field that says "Full URL."

8. Other parts of the citation, including the punctuation and the date of access, will be filled in automatically. So you just click on the button that says "Submit."

9. A new page will appear, with the following citation under the heading MLA Works Cited Entry:

Ellertsen, Pete . Faculty page. Springfield College/Benedictine University. 14 Sep. 2007 <http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/facultypage.html>.

Highlight it, copy it and paste into your Works Cited list in alphabetical order.

10. Check to make sure there aren't any extra commas or apostrophes hanging there, and marvel at the wonders of modern technology. It's easier to do it than to read about how to do it.

HUM 223: Live music, 'Sacred Harp,' etc.

Two more opportunities to write a paper on a musical event. The first is a Sacred Harp "singing convention" Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 15-16, in Taylorville. It's a kind of old-fashioned gospel singing. Very old-fashioned. In fact, technically it predates gospel. The white people who were shown in Bill Moyers' show "Amazing Grace" singing in a Primitive Baptist church in Georgia were Sacred Harp singers (in fact I know some of them). The other is the tribute to Jerry Garcia Sept. 23 in Douglas Park.

I like the papers I've been getting back from the blues festival in downtown Springfield and last week's bluegrass festival at New Salem. Some suggestions reproduced below from earlier blogs and assignment sheets. And some more on the Sacred Harp singing at the bottom of this page.

Writing about music

I'll link to a couple of handouts I've written and posted to my faculty webpage on how to do different types of writing assignments.

Not sure how to write a profile? Read my handout on profiles for English 111 and newswriting [COM 209] students. Basically, here's what you do. Go there. Look around. Talk to people. Listen to the music. Take notes. Go home. Write it up. We'll talk some in class Monday about how to do it. The other handout your need to read is my HUM 223 assignment sheet on how to write a listener response paper on music. Here's the part you need to know now:

In doing reflective response papers, I want you to start with your own reaction to the music. But I want you to go beyond that and focus on the music. Here's how. As you listen to it, ask yourself these questions:

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 work trigger that reaction?

We'll do this in class, too. Get in the habit of asking yourself these questions. They're basic. You'll even find they get you into the analysis part of your term project.

Here's something else that's helpful when you write about music or any of the arts, and it'll be part of the term project assignment, too. It's a "cookbook" formula for writing an essay about your response to any of the arts. It has three parts, too:

Circumstances. Give a one- to three-paragraph introduction to your essay (and it can go longer for a term paper). Start by describing the concert, or if you're reacting to a recording by saying what's on your mind, where and why you're listening to the work - or listening to it again - what your first reaction was, how you feel about it now, what you had for dinner, what the weather's like, anything that sets the stage.
Background. Here's where you give the necessary information about the piece. Title, artist, style of music. Example: "Uncle Dave Macon was one of the most popular performers in the early days of the Grand Ole Opry. He started out in traveling medicine shows and made the jump to the record industry and radio during the 1920s. His 'Gray Cat on a Tennessee Farm' is still a favorite tune among Appalachian dulcimer players."
Analysis. As always, argue a thesis. Support your thesis by quoting passages from the lyrics and analyzing the music. Check those suggestions from Dartmouth again. They'll tell you what to look for. Find some reviews on the internet and quote them. Agree with them, or disagree with them. And say why. Remember, in college-level writing, an unsupported thesis is sudden death!

It's in the same assignment sheet as the three questions.

Sacred Harp singing'

Here's the press release on the singing convention in Taylorville. I plan to be there Saturday (I'm on the arrangments committee).

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

23rd Illinois Sacred Harp Convention in September

The public is invited to the 23rd annual Sacred Harp Singing Convention from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 15, and Sunday, Sept. 16, at the Christian County Historical Museum in Taylorville. Beginners are welcome to join in as well as to listen, and loaner books will be provided.

Sacred Harp singing has been defined as “a non-denominational community musical event emphasizing participation, not performance.” It gets its name from the songbook used, “The Sacred Harp.” First published in 1844, the book includes 18th-century New England hymns, upland spirituals and camp meeting songs of the 19th century, as well as newer compositions in the old style. Singers at the Illinois Convention will also use the 2005 edition of “The Missouri Harmony,” published in St. Louis.

“Singers sit facing inward in a hollow square” at a Sacred Harp singing, according to musicologist Warren Steel of the University of Mississippi. “Each individual is invited to take a turn ‘leading,’ i.e. standing in the center, selecting a song, and beating time with the hand. The singing is not accompanied by harps or any other instrument.”

A potluck, or dinner on the ground, will be held at noon both days, and guests are invited to bring a dish to share.

Taylorville is 30 miles southeast of Springfield on Ill. 29, and between Litchfield and Decatur on Ill. 48. The Historical Museum is near the junction of Ill. 29 and 48.

For information, contact Berkley Moore in Springfield, telephone (217) 793-2400, email berkleymoore7195@sbcglobal; or Janet Fraembs in Charleston; telephone (217) 345- 6873, email jfraembs@mchsi.com.

# # #

HUM 223: African roots (Nigeria)

While it is impossible to generalize meaningfully about music in a continent as diverse as Africa, some observations that Bristish anthropological consultant Roger Blench makes in his Grove Encyclopedia survey of Nigerian music illustrate traits that were carried over to America.

Of Nigerian music in general, Blench says:

Music in Nigeria cannot easily be divorced from the society that produces it; all music has a function, and it is not usually conceptualised as an art in the Western manner. Well-played music does not garner applause, especially in the case of instrumental performance. The appropriate use of text is a cause for admiration, rewarded by ‘spraying’ the musician (i.e. placing a monetary gift against his or her forehead). Music almost invariably accompanies life-cycle rituals, weddings, funerals, religious ceremonies, political rallies and all types of work. As a result of this, solo performance is relatively unusual, although older people and children play instruments for their own amusement. The importance of music in agricultural societies is such that performance is strongly linked to seasons or activities such as planting or harvest; in the semi-arid regions it is common to find prohibitions on particular instruments during part of the year, for example when the crops are growing. Utterances in musical form frequently have a privileged status; something said in plain speech that would be considered offensive, can be sung without the hearer being socially permitted to take offence.

A few specific comments that carry over strongly to African-American music:

• Work is frequently accompanied by music, both in terms of keeping the rhythm of a particular activity and more generally to encourage physical labour, especially in the fields or in housebuilding. In the riverine areas, paddling songs were used to keep the pace of canoes. Groups of women frequently pound yams in large mortars that require extremely accurate co-ordination, and elaborate rhythmic patterns with ornamental flourishes accompany the pounding songs. Apart from this, in most of the regions north of the forest, the seasonality of rainfall requires farmers to work collectively on each others’ farms. The host farmer is usually expected to bring musicians to entertain the labourers, although not to duplicate the rhythms of farming directly.
  
  
• The idiom of dance pervades most musical performance in Nigeria; only praise-music and some types of ceremonial are not conceptualised in these terms. In many languages, the word for ‘song’ and ‘dance’ are either exactly the same or closely related. The repertoire of solo instruments played for amusement, such as the sansa or the raft-zither, generally consists of dance songs. The most energetic dances are found in the forest area, while those in the north tend to be more restrained, a possible result of Islamic influence. Dancers frequently wear rankle on their arms or legs which are sounded rhythmically in time with the dance, and women frequently play gourd-rattles in more southern areas. Masquerades frequently perform quite elaborate dances, a notable feat in the sometimes cumbersome costumes.
  
  
• European [i.e. Christian] musical traditions were imported in the 19th century but seem to be melded with musical styles brought by ex-Sierra Leoneans (descendants of freed slaves who became entrepreneurs along the coast). Some instruments associated with Christianity in Nigeria, such as the frame-drum, seem to reflect New World influence. On the coast, older Anglican churches still reproduce faithfully an English style of service, but in general even established churches use African instruments in services. A typical ensemble consists of the frame-drum, the gourd net-rattle, the large struck pot, and the smaller hand-held struck pot. Typically these instruments have spread from the coast, and remain alien to the cultures of people who play them. There is a lively tradition of writing church music among academic composers, while oral hymn composition flourishes in some communities in the south.
  
  The other aspect of mission culture relevant to music was the destructive prohibition of any type of performance associated with ‘paganism’. During the early colonial period, converts were discouraged from taking part in any ceremonies that seemed to have non-Christian overtones. In some areas, masquerades and instruments were physically burnt, and even today it is not uncommon to come across Christians who eschew even secular dancing and music. These stern prohibitions must in part be responsible for the large number of independent churches, most of which actively encourage the use of traditional musical instruments.
  

Dulcimers/"Squirrel Heads and Gravy"

Copied from the email message I sent out tonight to people on my Prairieland Dulcimer Strings and New Salem dulcimer email lists, so I don't lose the information on what has become my favorite fiddle tune that I garnered from the Irish website cited below. Along with the information I summarized in the message, it has the tune in standard notation (in Gmaj) and an online forum with comments on songs, barbecued or stewed squirrel, "tree rats" and a cover of the song by the Piney Creek Weasels. Much too good to lose.

Hi everybody --

Two events coming up:

1. Our regular monthly meeting of the Prairieland Dulcimer Strings at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 8, at Atonment Lutheran Church. (Some exciting news, well, I think it's exciting, below.)

2. The Traditional Music Festival, which everybody calls the "Bluegrass Festival," at New Salem Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 8-9. Several of us from the Prairieland Dulcimers group will be there Satuday from 10 or 10:30 a.m.

Up at the Dickson Mounds gathering today, which was a small but very nice dulcimer festival, Mike Anderson gave me permission to copy the tab to "Squirrel Heads and Gravy" in his book for the Prairieland group. It's a wonderful fiddle tune, in spite of the title (or maybe because of it. Mike says his dulcimer kids think it's really gross and therefore love it)! Composed in the 1970s by an old-time fiddle player named Chris Germain, who made it up as sort of a goof on old-time fiddle tunes. More about it on an Irish traditional music website called The Session. Link at

http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/6913/comments

It's usually played in G, and I learned it in DGD tuning, but Mike has tabbed it out in D for DAD tuning. A very lively, toe-tapping tune that is in the public domain (apparently Germain didn't copyright it) and is rapidly going into the oral tradition. I have a version of it played on a Galax-style dulcimer on a CD featuring bands at the Old Fiddlers Convention in Galax, Va., three or four years ago. [It's also on The Family Album CD by the Wright Family, which I forgot to mention.]

-- Pete

Career advice for journalism students

Cross-posted to all my blogs.

Found while surfing The San Francisco Chronicle's website SFGate, a "30 piece" by outdoors writer Paul McHugh with a bit of advice for any young people considering making journalism a career." He sums it up in three words:

Go for it!

The column, which ran in the print edition Thursday, was McHugh's last. He's retiring after 22 years on the outdoors beat.

"I'm about to fold my tent and take a hike," said McHugh. "And yes, I do mean that literally."

Like many journalists, McHugh said he's proudest of the stories that exposed abuses and helped correct them:

One great part of a newspaper job is that it awards permission to ask questions and seek answers. I've focused on trying to wield that power well, particularly while facing folks who didn't seem inclined to answer. This job hasn't been only about fun; I've striven to address real resource and public-access issues.

On a few occasions, I've been able to perform investigative work that's at the heart of our journalistic mission. I broke up a cabal of the heedless and malfeasant, helping Asilomar become a well-managed funding source for our state parks department. I ushered an abusive administrator out the door of the California State Parks Foundation, and helped that organization to revive. Fighting for the public felt fabulous. If any of you young folks out there should feel tempted to join the right honorable crusade of journalism, here's my best advice: Go for it! You are needed. Especially if you have the insight and multimedia skills to help journalism re-invent itself for this new century.

McHugh says, "Humanity's age of exploration, of adventure and of existential challenge is far from over," even though the present isn't very inspiring. Again, his advice sums up in three words: Go for it! He adds:

History's overarching lesson, as far as I can tell, is that a time of ease ought to be used in steady preparation for times of hardship or calamity ahead - which will come to us in their turn, as surely as sunrise. If periods of ease are used only to grow soft and indolent, then after calamity returns, you'll have to shoulder more blame than you might want.

Something worth thinking about.

But what's a "30 piece?"
Back in the days when newspapers received their news over the telegraph, the custom grew up of keying in "30" at the end of a transmission. So "30" came to stand for the end of the story, and a "30 piece" came to stand for a writer's last bylined column. Nobody ever types "30" at the end of a story anymore (except occasionally an overeager public relations intern ending their first press release), but it's a bit of nostalgia that still lingers. Like this:

-- 30 --

HUM 223: Music and structure of a fiddle tune

If you read music, you can follow this simplified version of "Soldier's Joy" while I play a sound file in class. If you have the 2nd (old) edition of our textbook, you'll find similar music with the analysis on pages 14 and 15. Look at the music, and you'll be able to see the structure of the tune. It won't be exactly note-for-note the same as what you hear, but it'll be close enough. That's the way oral tradition works. It isn't exact, but it's close enough:

Notice how the low part (or "strain") is repeated. Old-time fiddlers also call this the "A Part." Notice also how there's a lot of repetition within the low part. That first phrase (the first two and a half measures) is played three time, and the low part is completed with a phrase that leads into the second part.

After the low part is played twice, it's time for the high part or "B Part," also played two times. Notice the way the first phrase in the high part (the first two measures) is also repeated, with some variations, and the whole thing resolves into something that sounds like the end of the low part, or Part A. An old-time string band could keep sawing away on a fiddle tune by repeating Part A twice, Part B twice, Part A twice, Part B twice ... and so on, all night long if they had to. It's repetitious, but repetitious is something you want if you're playing for a square dance or something.

Now, if you don't read music and skipped over what I just wrote above, go back and read it anyway. You'll be able to hear the structure of the tune, the repeated phrases, too. In fact, old-time fiddle players didn't read music. They played by ear.

If you don't get it on first hearing, you can follow the link that says "Click here to hear 'Soldier's Joy,'" and you'll open a MIDI file (one of those annoying sound files that beep out the bare bones of a tune) that you can listen to while you look at the music.

This is an important point. The AABB structure (so called because each part, or strain, repeats twice) of "Soldier's Joy" is basic to fiddle tunes, ballads, band music, church hymns and popular songs until well into the 20th century.

HUM 223: New Orleans scene after Katrina / READ!

Will the New Orleans music scene ever get back to what it was before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005? Probably not, says an article in this morning's Washington Post. Read it (and read it now because The Post doesn't archive stories on its website forever). The spirit of the music will live on, but an awful lot has been lost. This story suggests how much.

Here's the the main point of the story, by staff writer Teresa Wiltz:

Nearly 4,000 New Orleans musicians were sent scattering after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Many of them have been trying to return ever since. Today the soul of the city -- its rich musical legacy-- is at risk.

"Everything is shrinking," says David Freedman, general manager of WWOZ-FM, a public radio station in the city. "In the clubs, you get the impression that all's back to normal. When you start scratching the surface, it's smoke and mirrors.

"So many musicians have not come back. How many can we lose before we lose that dynamic? To what degree do we just become a tourist theme park?"

By industry insiders' estimates, a third of the city's musicians [...] have found a way back home for good. Another third, like Lumar LeBlanc of the brass band Soul Rebels, are doing what he calls "the double Zip code thing," parachuting into town for gigs and then heading back to temporary homes in Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles. The final third, like blind bluesman Henry Butler, stuck in Denver, have yet to make it back.

Among the double Zip-coders is Ivan Neville, singer, songwriter, keyboardist, son of Aaron. His mom's house was washed away. She passed in January. His dad settled near Nashville. Neville relocated to Austin, jetting in and out of New Orleans a couple times a month. As for making a permanent move back home?

"I don't see it," Neville, 48, says between sets at the Maple Leaf in the city's Uptown section. "Not in the near future. The spirit of New Orleans is alive. But it will never be the same again."

Wiltz notes that high schools lost their musical instruments, and 40 percent of their students. "With the loss of schools comes the loss of teaching jobs, work that musicians counted on to pay the rent between gigs," she adds. "With the loss of students comes the loss of a future generation of musicians."

I'm cross-posting this story to my advanced journalism blog, too, because it's so well written. See how Wiltz conveys the spirit of a little club in the 9th Ward, the part of the city hit hardest by the 2005 flooding:

But the hardest thing to preserve is something that can't be purchased. It is that which New Orleanians so desperately want to preserve: the feel of the city, that NOLA mojo, the likes of which can be found in Bullets, a crowded little Mid-City joint. Inside, trumpeter Kermit Ruffins and his band, the Barbecue Swingers, are jammed against the window. A steady stream of sports is playing on the TV, but no one pays much attention.

In spirit, Bullets is as far from the tourist-laden French Quarter as you can get. Here, it's buckets of Miller Lite and chicken wings served alongside Ruffins's gritty, greasy swinging "trad jazz" -- traditional jazz. The crowd is more boomer than youthful, with seasoned souls sporting tees that read "We Survived Hurricane Katrina" and "New Orleans: Proud to Call It Home." A grizzled gent leans over a newcomer, slyly uttering the post-Katrina pickup line du jour: "I really want to show you the Ninth Ward."

As the sun sets, a man comes in peddling homemade tamales; another hawks cellphone covers and disposable cameras. Tattooed white kids arrive, while a contingent of Creole matrons stands in the center of the room, arms folded, looking just a little bit aloof. Until they start to dance as one, getting down and dirty with the beat.

A man scratches away on a washboard as band members sing in Creole and English, catcalling and ululating. Everybody, it seems, knows the words, and they sing along, loud and strong, filling the tiny club with a sense of goose-bump-raising communion.

I cry Hey mama

In the morning time

Yi-Yi-Yi

"Only in New Orleans," Ruffins chants, laughing and laughing. "Only in New Orleans."

Wiltz doesn't explain how she happened to hear the "pickup line du jour." Maybe she doesn't have to.

When it comes to American music, New Orleans is the cradle. It's the Garden of Eden. It's where it all began. Wiltz' story conveys that, and in a few words -- a well chosen quote -- she conveys how much was lost in Hurrican Katrina.

This is the city that spawned Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson and Sidney Bechet, Randy Newman and Master P -- not to mention a long line of famous musical families: the Marsalises, the Nevilles, the Batistes, the Toussaints.

Folks like to brag that New Orleans is the northernmost tip of the Caribbean, a sentiment that has little to do with geography. It's a sensibility, evident in the food, the culture, in the French and Spanish surnames, in the old folks who cling to Creole, an Africanized French patois.

New Orleanians have always celebrated the mixing of genes, the blending of races and cultures into a potent ancestral gumbo. All this informs the music here, marinating it in nostalgia and a sense of defiant joy. New Orleanians are peculiarly tied to place, ever cognizant of history.

Drive by Congo Square, and without fail, a local will remind you that it was here that the slaves played their music on Sundays, drumming away their worries, and where a slave could earn enough extra money to buy freedom. Where the Creole orchestras played in brass band concerts -- many of whose members were the black sons of rich white fathers who sent them to Europe to be educated.

"In New York, you learn jazz, you learn the blues," Paul Sanchez says. "In New Orleans, you're born into it. Baby comes out the womb chasing the rhythm."

He's waxing lyrical as he tools around the Lower Ninth Ward, cruising in his green minivan.

"I tell you, this place is magic," Sanchez says. "I say this with sadness in my voice."

In another interview, with more well chosen quotes from a 21-year-old "jazz-funk-rock-pop" musician named Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, she conveys what remains, how fragile it is and how important it is for the future. As you almost have to do in New Orleans these days, she approaches the future through the past:

When Katrina hit, Andrews was a 19-year-old wunderkind on break from touring with Lenny Kravitz. He fled with his family to Dallas, 10 crammed in his Volvo, wondering and worrying if other family members made it out, too.

He didn't stay away for long. New Orleans grounds him. Specifically, it is Faubourg Treme that feeds him -- reputed to be America's oldest black neighborhood, which nurtured the musical talents of the Rebirth Brass Band, 19th-century Creole classical composer Edmund Dede, Kermit Ruffins and Louis Prima. The neighborhood that nurtured Andrews.

Here, high-water marks along the wooden shotgun houses and shuttered nightclubs give mute testimony to the flood. Few residents returned, but today, under a highway overpass, against a backdrop of murals of long-gone jazz greats, a group of men gathers as it does every day, sitting on metal folding chairs, trying to reclaim a little bit of community. Most of them don't live here any longer.

"These," Andrews says, pointing at the men as he pulls up alongside them in his oversize SUV, "are the last that's left. This is the soul of the neighborhood."

He rolls down the window. "Hey, Dad. Do you need anything? You hungry?" His father, James, smiles at him, shakes his head.

This is where Trombone Shorty comes to touch base, to get his "laugh on," to run errands for his elders. To remind himself not to get a big head. To remind himself of the importance of reaching back, to pull along other musicians who aren't as fortunate as he.

"New Orleans made me who I am," Andrews says. "I can't leave it.

"I need New Orleans. And New Orleans needs me."

We have been talking and reading in class about tradition, and how cultural values including music can be handed down from generation to generation. Is that what's happening here?

HUM 223: Folk, popular, art music

Here's some more on the terms we were throwing around in class Wednesday, from the 2nd edition instead of the 3rd (“Author’s Guide to the Panorama” xv-xvi) in our textbook American Music: A Panorama. [With a few of my own observations and opinions thrown in.] The definitions are a little more complete, and we'll want to refer to them as we go along.

Folk music. "... evolves within fairly close-knit homogeneous communities possessing a strong sense of group solidarity. It is music known to and enjoyed by a large proportion of the community, who identify it as 'their music,' made by and for themselves. Many of the members of the community … perform the music themselves, with varying degrees of skill." Used to be rural and geographically isolated, but this is no longer always true. Conventional in style. Catchy melodies. Often easy to sing. Emphasis is on the song and not the singer. Other the music has a purpose in daily life beyond making pretty sounds -- e.g. work songs, dance tunes, reglious music. In the past learned by oral tradition instead of written music, "but this must now include by extension radio, recordings, television, and film." Often the community is defined by ethnic identity. But not always -– e.g. protest songs, labor songs, other types of music sung by close-knit groups with a common purpose. A lot of sacred music started out as folk music.

Popular music. “… created for and enjoyed by the vast majority of the people, undefined by region. No specific ethnic background is requisite to fully appreciate or identify with it. It is primarily (though not exclusively) music for entertainment, and as such it makes only modest demands on its listeners’ musical knowledge and experience. It tends to adopt sounds from both folk and classical music that have become sufficiently familiar to the wider public.” Played by skilled professionals. [p. xvi] It's commercial, sold as sheet music in the old days, now radio, sound and video recordings. Is gospel popular music or folk music? Or both?

Art music (which the 2nd edition calls “classical”). Has been around longer than pop music, and includes music from earlier periods. Says Kingman (main author of the 2nd edition), “As cultivated music it rewards a certain degree of musical experience in the listener, though its devotees are not defined by any intellectual, social, economic, regional, or racial classification.” I like calling it “art music” instead of classical, as the 3rd edition does, because it includes both classical music and jazz. However, art music often uses techniques and conventions borrowed from classical music -- symphonies, concertos, operas, requiem Masses, etc. The online Wikipedia encyclopedia says art music “primarily refers to classical traditions (including contemporary as well as historical classical music forms), focuses on formal styles, invites technical and detailed deconstruction and criticism, and demands focused attention from the listener.” It also tends to demand a very highly skilled, totally focused performer (most of us can't sing opera). So are the members of a very good techno band classical musicans? Are they art musicians?

Jazz. Here’s what Kingman says about it: "Jazz is a special case. Emerging from African American roots (in both sacred and secular music) at the turn of the last century, it has become in my view arguably a form of classical music, despite the undoubted influence on popular music of jazz-related rhythms, styles, and orchestration. But it is a classical music set apart by virtue of its having retained certain identifying and obligatory stylistic traits (mainly rhythmic), and on being uniquely dependent upon, and shaped by, its traditional ingredient of improvisation."

See how they all kind of blur together? A good example is Charlie Patton’s “Spoonful Blues” that we heard Wednesday, which shows elements of all four categories. Probably most of what we hear in class will show a fusion of genres.

Ukranian choral folk music CDs, audio files

Recordings of choral folk music by a group in Ukraine called Drevo. A folkloric revival group, it has the sound Larry Gordon's and Patty Cuyler's Village Harmony and Northern Harmony youth choirs strive for. Since I'm posting links, I'll just link to Village Harmony too while I'm at it. I'm not sure I understand what all the websites are (although they're obviously selling CDs), so I'll just post links now and come back and sort it out later:

The first webpage I found with a description of Drevo while I was surfing around tonight. It has a link to a couple of CDs. I'll just quote:

Drevo brings back to light old traditions of Ukrainian village music , steeped in its own harmonies, scales and techniques.One thousand years ago with the ward of Christianity to Ukraine the culture on these grounds did not begin anew, but its new page was opened. Alongside with the partially kept prior archaic layers and on their basis, the Christianity has formed other original forms of culture, genres and styles.The influence of these processes on Ukrainian village music was especially expressive.

Drevo (founded in Kiev in 1979) has begun the movement for authentic reproduction of old traditional Ukrainian folk music. The art director of Drevo Eugeny Efremov is an ethnomusicologist, the candidate of an art criticism, senior lecturer of National musical aca-demy of Ukraine. The ensemble consists of the young scientists, who collect and investigate Ukrainian village music of different regions of the country for many years. Drevo recovers the material gathered in ethnographic expeditions without additional art processing, keeping its natural, original form.

Origen Music, an indie label from Ukraine. Again, I'll just quote:

Shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union electronic new age music composer, musician, producer and sound engineer Alexsey Zakharenko from Kiev-Ukraine (his new age music and group ORIGEN are featured on this site) started recording the Eastern Orthodox church choral music. Earlier it was impossibly to do in the communist and atheistic Soviet Union. In 1995 he released the CD "All Night Vigil"- traditional church choral music of Kiev Pechersk Monastery. It was the first authentic church music CD in Ukraine. Later Alexsey Zakharenko founded Origen Music - Ukrainian indie label focused on recording of Russian and Eastern Orthodox church choral music, classical, electronic new age music and Ukrainian music.

After listening to it, I'm convinced. For Eastern European folkloric music (and not just the one group Drevo), this looks like the real deal.

Also, this: The first hit in the directory when I search keyword "Drevo" in Google, put up by something called Magnatune: Music downloads & licensing. It has streaming audio of the CD Christian Themes in Ukrainian Folk Songs with an announcer identifying the songs between tracks. But it has more than that. Again, I'll quote. Here's the blurb on Magnatune's gate page:

Listen to over 500 hand-picked complete albums. If you like what you hear, download an album for as little as $5 (you pick the price), or buy a real CD, or license our music for commercial use. You'll get MP3s & WAVs, and no copy protection (DRM), ever.

A lot of classical, especially early music. Jazz and blues, new age, electronica and other genres I don't even recognize. World music including not only Eastern Europe, dub, Asian, Arab, "funk jazz salsa rock from Argentina." A lot of "long tail" music. They deal directly with the artists. They promise: "No major labels: we have absolutely nothing to do with major labels or the RIAA." Worth finding out more about!

Link to EverythingDulcimer.com forum

Posted to the blog, like so many other useful addresses, so I won't forget it. It's at http://everythingdulcimer.com/discuss/viewforum.php?f=9 ... I haven't had the time to read it all (hence this link) but there's a very interesting thread on zitters (as the scheitholz was called, apparently, by Pennsylvania German speakers) and hymns that would be appropriate for the zitter.

Remembering Zion in streaming audio ...

There's a little Canadian streaming audio station with a decidedly non-commercial playlist of Jamaican music from the 50s on. It's called SCRATCH ... mento, ska, rocksteady, reggae & dub. The name comes from Jamaican producer Lee "Scratch" Perry. Says website host Chris Azevedo:

The format ranges from late-1950s mento (Stanley Beckford), Jamaican-boogie (Laurel Aitken) into 60's ska (with the likes of The Skatalites, Laurel Aitken, Prince Buster and Theophilus Beckford), through the rocksteady years and on to reggae and dub.
There is no rap or hip-hop in the playlist - just some fine toasting from the likes of King Stitt, Prince Jazzbo, U-Roy and Big Youth (to name a few).

The playlist is updated weekly.

Also information on Rasta, dub, etc. And a quote from the Melodians' song "Rivers of Babylon ... where we wept / When we remembered Zion."

As far as I can tell, Azevedo is an amateur in the best sense of the word, someone who does something because he loves doing it. He has a personal website, with vacation and cat pictures but no commercial gimmickry. Just a deep appreciation for the music.

A couple of other streaming audio links I might not be able to find again --

Irish traditional music at liveireland.com on "Live Ireland." Has both traditional and contemporary streams, as well as features and a "shop Ireland" store.

Triple J or 2JJJ is "Australia's youth radio station," according to the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corp.) tease on Google.

Clapton interview: On blues, Chicago

Interesting interview with Eric Clapton on rock critic Greg Kot's blog on The Chicago Tribune's website. Among other things, there's this exchange:

Q: You've done so much to nurture the blues. Do you think it will carry on?

A: Oh, sure. There is no shelf life for that. It's classical music now. It's on another level with the music of the great masters. It's very important. It touches people in a way that classical music touches people. It's on the same level.

Q: But are there new people coming up to keep it going or will it survive only in the recordings?

A: Both. There will be a certain element preserved and enshrined, but as a language it will continue to flourish, because the people who understand the language know how to put it into any kind of music you can play. It's possible to use that root to embellish rock, pop, jazz. It doesn't have to be strictly uniform. It can be applied in different ways.

But Clapton also takes on subjects ranging from punk (he thinks it almost killed roots music for a while) to woodshedding (he has small children and doesn't have enough time for it), B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Chicago. On Chicago:

Q: When you were listening to those classic Chicago blues records as a teenager, did you have a mental picture of what Chicago was like?

A: A certain amount of image was created by the guys themselves. It was well known there were these clubs called Smitty's and Pepper's Lounge and the South Side of Chicago was the hot place to be. Needless to say, where I came from, we didn't get the full picture, the harsher aspects of it. It seemed incredibly romantic, gangsterish and exciting. The first band I identified with from Chicago was the Muddy

He's in town for Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival, to be held today in in south suburban Chicago.

Early jazz website

Wonderful source ... the Red Hot Jazz Archive with text and sound files ... including Jelly Roll Morton's version of Buddy Bolton's Blues and other musicians referenced -- and linked -- in its overview of jazz before 1930:

The first Jazz was played by African-American and Creole musicians in New Orleans. The cornet player, Buddy Bolden is generally considered to be the first real Jazz musician. Other early players included Freddie Keppard, Bunk Johnson and Clarence Williams. Although these musicians names are unknown to most people, then and now, their ideas are still being elaborated on to this day. Most of these men could not make a living with their music and were forced to work menial jobs to get by. The second wave of New Orleans Jazz musicians like Joe "King" Oliver, Kid Ory and Jelly Roll Morton formed small bands that took the music of these older men and increased the complexity and dynamic of their music, as well as gaining greater commercial success. This music became known as "Hot Jazz", because of the often breakneck speeds and amazing improvised polyphony that these bands produced. A young virtuoso cornet player named Louis Armstrong was discovered in New Orleans by King Oliver. Armstrong soon grew to become the greatest Jazz musician of his era and eventually one of the biggest stars in the world. The impact of Armstrong and other Jazz musicians altered the course of both popular and Classical music. African-American musical styles became the dominant force in 20th century music.

But not, of course, Bolden, whose career played out before the advent of sound recording.

I.D. Stamper interview

Better save this --

Googling around with different keywords on the Digital Library of Appalachia website I came up with this directory of I.D. Stamper's interview with a group of high school kids from Atlanta. Playing and talking about Uncle Ed Thomas, tunings, etc. Several hammered dulcimer tracks but mostly his unique style of playing the dulcimers he adapted from Thomas'. I want to save it because I don't know if I can duplicate the search.

One sound bite that didn't get into the search above has an all-too-brief sound bite about how Stamper got his sound and styled his dulcimers.

HUM 223 -- syllabus add on spirituals

African-American spirtuals. In the years after the Civil War, black spirituals were discovered by white musicians and became an important artistic form that combined the sound of African-American religious singing with the discipline of European classical music. Since we don't have a textbook for this part of the course, we'll read about it on the World Wide Web. Treat these readings as you would assigned readings in a textbook. The University of Denver's Sweet Chariot website is one of the best. Read the essay "Survival and Resistance" by Arthur C. Jones on the Sweet Chariot website. Note especially what he says about the song "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and how 20th-century composer George Gershwin used its melodic structure -- and its emotional feeling -- in the classic song "Summertime." ... Read also "Music for Specific Times and Places: Evolving Cultural and Musical Contexts" by John J. Sheinbaum. It's long, and you'll have to click on four different links to get it all. If your computer lets you, listen to the sound bites, too. It's important stuff, and it will help you understand what what happens with jazz, blues, rock and hip hop later.

Link -- Thrivent website on Lutheran music

Just a quick link to documentation of the Thrivent series of CDs on 500 Years of Lutheran Music, mailed to Lutheran churches and now out of print. I'm posting it to the blog so I can find the link later.

Links -- St. Gregory of Nyssa ** UPDATED ** w/ NEW LINK AND FRESH TRANSLATION

St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – after 394), along with his brother Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus, was one of Cappadocian Fathers. of the early Christian Church. A bishop in Asia Minor, he was theologian and (mostly neo-Platonic) philosopher who helped set the doctrine of the Trinity in its enduring form. He is also known for an acute observation on the theological debates of the day in the Eastern Roman Empire:

Everywhere, in the public squares, at crossroads, on the streets and lanes, people used to stop you and discourse at random about the Trinity. If you asked something of a moneychanger, he would begin discussing the question of the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you questioned a baker about the price of bread, he would answer that the Father is greater and the Son is subordinate of Him. If you went to take a bath, the Anomoean (semi-Arian) bath attendant would tell you that in his opinion the Son simply comes from nothing. Must we say these people were out of their heads? At any rate heresy had upset their minds.

The heresies he referred to were offshoots of the Arian heresy, which in its various forms denied the divinity of Christ. St. Gregory's Anomoean bath attendant would have believed a doctrine that was in general agreement with the Arians and semi-Arians on Christology but differed on obscure points of theology.

Good bio of Gregory of Nyssa online in the 1910 edition of Catholic Encyclopedia at NewAdvent.org.

LATER (March 2, 2014): Googled into it, tried the links, found a dead one and went searching for a new one. Found some good ones at Roger Pearse, an epinonymous blog about " Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more." In this post on June 19, 2009, he asked "A famous passage from Gregory of Nyssa … but where from?" Pearse's blog specializes in early Christian texts, and he has some informed responses in the comments section.

Including this one posted by Dioscorus Boles:

I found this in The Orthodox Church – Church History by Kallistos Ware:

Gregory of Nyssa describes the unending theological arguments in Constantinople at the time of the second General Council:

The whole city is full of it, the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; old-clothes men, money changers, food sellers: they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask “Is my bath ready?” the attendant answers that the Son was made out of nothing (On the Deity of the Son [P.G. xlvi, 557b]).

He includes a citation to Ware at http://www.synaxis.org/catechist/Orthodox_Church, and adds, "I don’t have the reference which Ware gives (On the Deity of the Son [P.G. xlvi, 557b]), but somebody may have it."

[I've changed the indents to make clear that St. Gregory is a quote within a quote.]

Word for the day: Adiaphora

Every so often when I'm reading about Lutheran hymnody, I come across a word that means "matters indifferent" in the sense of things you don't have to believe to be an orthodox Christian (with a lower-case "o"). It's called adiaphora, and it's a useful concept, fuzzy enough around the edges for me to want to be cautious using it but incisive enough to help me sift out the things that really do matter. So I make a note of how it's spelled, and vow to learn it. Then the word slips away from me, and I'm reduced to saying things like, "oh, you know, that word that starts with 'a' that Luther used, and it means stuff that doesn't matter." At that point, I start to notice people are looking at me strangely and waiting for an opportunity to change the subject.

So tonight when I came across the word again, I vowed this time to post a definition to the blog ... so I won't lose it again (that's on the theory so far my computers always stand out above the clutter on my desks). Here is Wikipedia's definition:

Adiaphoron, pl. -a (Greek language αδιάφορα "indifferent things"; German "Mitteldinge" "middle matters") was a concept used in Stoic philosophy. It latter came to refer to matters not regarded as essential to faith, but nevertheless as permissible for Christians or allowed in church.

See how useful it is?

Nelson's and Fevold's history of the Norwegian Evangelical Synod, speaks of "the adiaphora, such as the theater, dancing, and card-playing," and again of "condemnation of such things as dancing, novels, and plays" (1:29, 1:31). A very useful concept for Norwegian pietists who could rail against whatever temptations were available in small-town Minnesota while continuing to split theological hairs about sotierology.

Works Cited
"Adiaphora." Wikipedia. 29 May 2007. 11 June 2007. .

Nelson, E. Clifford, and Eugene L. Fevold. The Lutheran Church Among Norwegian-Americans: A History of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. 2 vols. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1960.

HUM 221: Russian Orthodox Natives in Alaska

Today we'll complete a circle. One of the first Native cultures we looked at, back in the winter, was that of the Unangan Aleuts who live on islands in the Bering Sea. Today we will read -- and post journals to the blog -- about the related Yup'ik Eskimos of western Alaska and the Alutiiq people of Kodiak Island and other points along the coast of Southcentral Alaska.

The Alutiiq are also known in their native language as Sugpiaq and in English as "Aleuts" (which is what the Russians called them), and many Alutiiq, especially older people, still prefer the term. Alutiiq or Sugpiaq culture was strongly influenced by the Russians, and they are still Russian Orthodox even though Alaska hasn't been Russian for 150 years. The Smithsonian Institution has an online exhibit on Alutiiq culture that gives the basics. The first section, called "About the People," is an especially good overview. Also click through the pictures in the section on "Our Beliefs," for a survey of traditional beliefs before the Russians came.

In Alaska, Russian missionaries behaved differently than Americans did in the "Lower 48." The Russians left after Alaska was sold to the United States in 1867, but many Native Alaskans are still Russian Orthodox. "At the sale of Alaska, everyone thought that orthodoxy would disappear because all the Russians left," Bishop Nikolai, the Russian Orthodox bishop of Alaska, told BBC News. "Actually quite the contrary has happened - we are now the largest church in Alaska." An online Library of Congress exhibit on The Russian Church and Native Alaskan Cultures explains how Russian schools embraced Native languages instead of trying to eradicate them like American schools did. After the Americans came, Alaska Native children were punished any language other than English in school -- just like children in the Lower 48 -- and the other languages are dying out now. But for many years they flourished because the Russians encouraged literacy in more than one language:

Local parish schools offered reading, writing, and arithmetic, Biblical history, penmanship, music, and, at times, as many as four languages simultaneously: Russian, Old Church Slavonic, English, and a Native language. Indeed, the stories of the many remarkable graduates of the Church system, mostly Creoles [people whose mothers were Native Alaskan and whose fathers were Russian] like the priest Iakov Netsvetov ... are among the most moving in the history of Russian America.

Netsvetov is also known as St. Iakov or, more commonly, St. Jacob. He is, to my knowledge, the only Native American who has been canonized in a Christian church.

Russian Orthodox churches put a lot of emphasis on art and music, and Native Alaskans were soon composing hymns for the Russian Orthodox liturgy. We will hear a couple of selections. First, go to the page of links to Alaska Orthodox Texts compiled by All Saints of North America Orthodox Church in Hamilton, Ont., and scroll down to Aleut Orthodox Liturgical Music collection recorded in Anchorage in 1980-1981 and on St. George & St. Paul Islands in 1980. Click on the hymn "Christ is Risen." (It's near the bottom of the page, in the first set of links under "Audio Resources." To listen in class, you'll have to use earphones.) The language is Unangan Aleut, but the hymn sounds very Russian, especially in its complex harmonies.

Our other musical selection is a "troparion" (a type of Orthodox hymn) to St. Jacob Netsvetov (click on the mp3 file included in the CD "Yup'ik Orthodox Liturgical Music from the Kuskokwim, Vol. 2). In another window, you can see an icon (holy picture) of St. Jacob and read the troparian in English translation.

Do the melodies of the Easter hymn "Christ is Risen" and the hymn to St. Jacob remind you of anything? Congregational hymns in the West, the portions of Catholic (and some Protestant) services that are sung? Gregorian chant? What is the purpose of music among groups of people? How does Western music function like the singing and drumming we heard on the pow wow video? How is it different?

Another Russian Orthodox saint, St. Herman of Alaska, came to this country from Russia in 1794. But he is revered by Alaska Natives, and he is considered the father of Orthodoxy in America since the Russians were in Alaska before Russian immigration began to the Lower 48 in the late 1800s. The Rev. Andrew Tregubov, an Orthodox priest in New Hampshire, tells of a pilgrimage to St. Herman's shrine, when he sailed

... on a fishing rig made up primarily of Alaskans. Over the roar of the giant engines and the ocean wind came a spontaneous singing of the tropar [hymn] “Blessed Herman of Alaska, North Star of Christ’s Holy Church,” that went on during much of the trip across the open sea. The deck was covered with over a hundred people singing with joy to their beloved Herman. They sang and talked about him in the present tense, as if, no – not as if, but because he was with them and for them right then and there.

On the website with his sermon, Fr. Andrew shows an icon of St. Herman, and cites two people who believe St. Herman appeared to them. One was a fishing boat skipper who says St. Herman guided him out of the water when he got drunk and fell overboard, and the other was a hiker who believes St. Herman appeared to him on Mount Denali (McKinley), warned him of bad weather coming and thus saved his life.

Do the stories that are still told about St. Herman today suggest anything about the role he and other Russian missionaries played in the transmission of Native cultures? Why do we tell stories about saints, anyway? How are they like the stories that Native Americans tell? How are they different? What role do stories, in general, play in the transmission of culture?

Painter Helen Jane Simeonoff, who is of Sugpiaq or Alutiiq heritage, has her artwork on sale in the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository in Kodiak. She consciously tries to restore traditional forms of expression, including the Sugpiaq langauge which was repressed in the schools after tbe American education system came to Alaska. So her work features seals, puffins, masks, hats, Russian Orthodox churches and other traditions. Study her work, and answer the last question.

How does an artist like Simeonoff blend Native, Russian and 21st-century American artistic traditions in their work. What does this tell you about the transmission of cultural expressions?

HUM 221: Art of the Northwest Coast

Unlike any other Native American cultural area is that of the Northwest Coast, which would include Oregon, Washington, the Canadian province of British Colombia and the Southeast coast of Alaska. They consisted of several tribes, of whom the Tlingit (pron. KLINK-et) of Alaska are perhaps the best known in the United States. But they all had certain cultural traits in common. They had plenty of food available, and a technology well suited to deep sea fishing. Their canoes, were for example, were seaworthy and beautifully ornamented. And the artistry they put into the marine technology whereby they earned their living extended into other parts of their lives. Their culture was complex, and their totem poles in particular are known worldwide as examples of the highest artistic achievement.

For background, pay a virtual visit to the Grand Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. There you will see replica housefronts and totem poles of four Canadian people in this cultural area. Click on the housefronts for more information about the houses and people, and on the links below for a variety of other information. Notice the painted decorations, the carvings, the design that goes into the Haida "button blanket." (It is related to the Chilkat blankets of Alaska.) For more background on the Northwest Coast cultures, you can read this University of Washington overview of the Tlingit and related peoples of Alaska and British Columbia. It will tell you how climate and geography affected the culture Be sure to click through to the pictures of totem poles (one is mislabeled, it shows you a man and a dog, but the others show a remarkable art form). Pay special attention to sections on housing and the matriarchal clan system.

Then visit the the website for Totem Poles: An Appreciation by Canadian author Pat Kramer. She's plugging a book, but she has a good explanation of what totem poles are, and what they mean. Some good thumbnails, too. Totem poles are still being carved. For links to several Alaskan and Canadian artists doing totem poles todaygo to the Native Languages website. The website (one of the best on Native American subjects) advises, "If you're looking for something less expensive, why not visit our Native American sculptures page instead, where there are some nice collections of beautiful Indian woodcarving ..." Good advice. Let's go there and see what we find.

But first a tangent, an important one: Are you getting a good feel for how important a traditional art form woodworking is for the First Nations of the Northwest Coast? Good. In that case you're ready to read this from the report of the superintendent of the Siletz Indian Agency in Oregon on Aug. 28, 1882. He was especially proud of a new sawmill:

... The labor in the mills is all performed by Indians with a single exception. I am pleased to say that a number of Indians, so far as I know for the first time, cut their timber, drew their logs, and sawed their own lumber without the aid of government, thus proving themselves on the road to self-support and independence, a thing of which they feel a pride.

He added:

The Indians here I find are not very unlike white people; some are willing to labor for what they have and others think they ought to be supported in their idleness. ... The Indians here as a rule learn the trades easily, perhaps more readily even than farming. There are goodly numbers who can perform service in the shops or mills, and show evidence of rapid advancement in mechanism.

No wonder! They'd been building cedar plank houses and working with wood for centuries.

In the 21st century, the art of the Northwest Coast peoples is still alive. Visit the Coghlan Studio and Gallery near Vancouver, B.C., for a highly commercial but culturally aware approach to the art. Be sure to read the history of carving and other arts, the essay on raising a new totem pole at the Royal Museum Of British Columbia in Victoria. But most Northwest Coast art now is smaller, and it branches out into other media. Surf around the Coughlan Gallery's website, visit the gift shop and the gallery to see more. Click on the thumbnails to see larger pictures of the art, or to read artist's biographies. How much are the artists charging? (Prices that say "$ ... cdn" are Canadian, and "$ ... usd" are U.S. dollars. But you would have figured that out anyway.) Think about it, review what you've read and answer this question: How have Native American artists of the Northwest Coast adapted their traditional art forms to a market economy? What strikes you most about their art? What in your background and/or taste makes you feel that way? What specific features in the design and execution of the art speak to you across cultures? What suprises you about it? Post your answers as comments to this blogpost.

HUM 221: People, architecture of the desert

We're not even going to try to cover the different styles of architecture evolved by Native American peoples in the week we've got left. Instead, I'm just going to link to a few generalizations ... and then to some examples of especially distinctive styles of architecture. Today we'll look at some adaptations made to a desert environment in Arizona.

And, of course, I'll ask you a couple of questions. Post your answers as comments to this blogpost.

Generalization. MSN's online Encarta encyclopedia says this about Native architecture: "In traditional Native American culture, the dwelling was far more than a physical shelter or what Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier called 'a machine for living.' For many Native Americans the house was a physical and spiritual representation of the universe." That's true, and it's important. But there's an endless variety of ways the universe can be represented.

Here are a few:

In Arizona, the Hohokam people developed irrigated communities with cities on platform mounds. One, along Salt River just off the Hohokam Expressway ("the 143") in what is now Phoenix, Ariz., is called "Pueblo Grande" (which means big town in Spanish: We don't know what the Hohokam called it). But here's an artist's conception of what it looked like. It's on the title page of a book that tells, in a lot of detail, how the Hohokam adapted their agriculture to the Sonoran desert. Notice how green the picture is. That's how green it was back in the day. Really.

In 1998 a Science, Technology and Culture class at the University of Denver constructed a virtual Hohokam village that explains their farming, irrigation, housing, religion, crafts and recreation. (It's ingenious. Click on the irrigation canals, for example, to read about how they watered their crops.) The Hohokam vanished during the 1400s or 1500s and left no written records. So we don't know how they saw the universe. Study the virtual village, and give it your best guess. Based on what you've learned about them, how do you think they saw the universe?

(The Hohokam, by the way, gave their name to the baseball park in Mesa where the Chicago Cubs play during spring training. The name we use for them comes from the Tohono O'odham people, who may be descended from them, and it means "the old ones" or "the ones who are used up." Cubs fans will have to decide for themselves what to make of that fact.)

Another remarkable style of architecture emerged in the same part of the country when Spanish priests founded missions where they taught Christianity and European methods of cattle ranching to the indigenous people. The mission of San Xavier del Bac (pronounced "sahn hahv-i-yer") on the Tohono O'odham reservation near Tuscon is both a functioning Catholic parish and a monument of Spanish mission architecture. The official mission website tells the history of the mission, and of the Tohono people. Read especially how Native culture and Catholicism coexist today. There's a striking set of photographs by Helga Teiwes, with text by Bernard Fontana, that shows the outpouring of artistic and religious expression at San Xavier. Read about the mission, look at the pictures and answer the question: What does the mission art tell you about the way people at San Xavier see the universe?

HUM 221 -- research project

Guidelines for paper:

1. Length is 3-5 pages, typed, double-spaced, 12pt.

2. Documented. Either MLA or APA style. Don't get obsessive-compulsive about it, but do indicate the sources of your information with a signal phrase. For example: According to the Cherokee Nations website, ..." or "Osage poet Duane BigEagle writes ..." List Works Cited at the end at least by by author, title, address.

3. Give your reaction, your response to whatever poem, story, legend, dance, type of jewelry, etc., you write about. There are several tip sheets on reader response linked to my blue faculty page.

4. Have a thesis. Make it say something. You'll never get away from English 111-112.

5. It is due Friday.

HUM 221: Cultural traditions, grandparents

Here's a website I just discovered that gives reaction to Navajo traditions by students at Huafan University in Taiwan. The traditions are in Luci Tapahonso's "Remember the Things They Told Us," which we have written about. English language students in instructor Chang Hong Bin's class were asked to journal:

Think about the stories youu have been told by your parents and grandparents, advice , stories and
rules you have been given to live by (especially if the rules were not
explained... see [stanza or paragraph] #5 in the poem). List as many stories, advice, rules as you can think of and write them down ...

The students' comments are posted below the poem. A student who gave his/her name in Chinese characters posted this:

When I was a child, elders ever told to me at the dinner table about that I should make away with rices in my bowl, or I will marry a cat-wife. I didn't ask them why they speaked so in that time, but now I realize that rice is what to them that the effort of hard working all years without rest, so we shouldn't squander it and we should treat it as precious.

I'm not sure what a "cat-wife" is (and Google wasn't any help). But it sounds like a folk tale about kids who didn't clean up their plates and married cats. Click on some of the other comments, and see what Chinese children are told by their grandparents.

How does the Chinese lore compare to the traditions in the poems by Tapahonso and Duane BigEagle we have read. How do all three compare to what you were taught from your grandparents? (My grandfather, for example, taught me the only kind of poker men ever played was five-card draw, and only girls and wimps ever called a hand with wild cards. I'm not sure what he would have thought about watching Texas hold'em games on television, but I think it's probably a good thing he didn't live to see it.) How do traditions, values, etc., handed down in families differ from those of popular culture?

HUM 221: Values, dance

Here are the questions:

1. How does "My Grandfather Was a Quantum Physicist" raise the same issues as a powwow?

2. How does the poem relate to Luci Tapahonso's poem about Navajo traditions?

3. What values do all three have in common?

Post as comments to the blog.

HUM 221: Reader response/assignment

Write a 3- to 5-page paper (750-1,200 words double-spaced in 12pt type) in which you give your response to the poem "Sháá Áko Dahjiníleh: Remember the Things They Told Us" by Dine (Navajo) poet Luci Tapahonso. We will read the poem in class today, and you can get started on your response. Linked to my faculty page are a tip sheet on how to write a reader response and a sample essay I wrote as a model of how I would do one.

As you read the poem, be asking yourself what stands out in your mind. That may be the main point of the poem, but it doesn't have to be. In "Remember the Things They Told Us," Tapahonso seems to be talking about a wide range of things she heard from her elders. Some of them are important, others I'm not sure about. That's OK. I'd focus on the ones that meant something to me. (I like the part about praying at dawn, but that doesn't mean you have to. You're not me, and the paper is about your response to the poem, not mine.) Then I'd ask myself what it is in my background that makes me feel that way. And I'd be sure to quote the passage in my analysis of the poem.

There's a three-part outline that I find helps my students engage with a poem, a painting, a song or any other work of art. (Think "engage" like gears meshing.) You'll see it in more detail as you read my tip sheets, but here are the basics:

1. Circumstances. Since you're writing about your response to a work of art, your mood and surroundings enter into the response. Do you feel the same about a song when you hear it by candle-light or when it's on the car radio in rush hour traffic? I like it, because it helps you focus on what you're feeling about the work instead of parroting what the book says about it.

2. Background. Especially when you're responding to a work of art from a different culture, you ought to say a little about the artist and his/her cultural traditions. Here it's probably enough to say Tapahonso is Navajo (with some detail about her career, etc.), and she's talking about Navajo traditions here. If you follow the link to her website, you'll find more information about her.

Analysis. This is the main part of the paper. Quote from the poem, explain what it means to you and analyze your response to it. Remember to back up your generalizations with quotations, examples and detailed analysis. Remember: An unsupported generalization is SUDDEN DEATH in college writing. You'll get more ideas for how to do the analysis part by reading my sample essay on Kinky Friedman's song.

The final paper is due the day after Easter break, April 9, at the beginning of class.

HUM 221: Proposals due Wednesday

On Wednesday, April 4, we will do two things:

1. I will collect your term paper proposals. Details below.

2. You will write the first draft of your reader response to a poem that I select for you.

But first, your proposals. Here is what I want you to do for them. In a page of double-spaced 12pt type, please tell me:

Who and/or what you plan to write about. In other words, what's your topic? If you know what you're going to say about it -- i.e. your working hypothesis -- be sure to let me know what it is. If not, a research question will do just fine.

Why did you choose that topic -- in other words, why does it interest you? Notice that this question is very similar to the first and second of the three questions I suggest that you ask yourself when writing a reader response.

You may get some ideas for what to say in your proposal by consulting an assignment sheet for the research proposal in Humanities 223, the roots music class I offer fall semesters, although it calls for a longer and more elaborate paper than I'm asking you for this semester in HUM 221.

HUM 221: Quiz on Duane BigEagle

Review Duane BigEagle's poem "Pull" on pages 59-60 in today's reading for class. Write a brief reader response and post it as a comment to this blog. Answer these questions:

1. What do you get out of the poem? What does it say to you? What stands out in your mind (which may or may not be the main theme of the poem)?

2. What in your cultural background, taste, values, etc., helps you respond to the poem? What stands as a barrier?

3. Analysis: What specific passages in the poem make you feel that response?

Take about 5 minutes to think it through, then post your answers

HUM 221: More research paper ideas

One thing I want to encourage you in your papers is to do a reader (or listener or viewer) response. Here's a tip sheet on writing one about literature and one on writing a listener response to music. Both are linked to my faculty page, and both are absolutely brilliant -- right? -- because I wrote them. Both tell you when you engage, or respond to, a work of art, you ask yourself three questions:

1. What stands out here? What's my main impression? What do I get out of this work? What speaks to me? It may be the main theme of the work, or it may be something else that's particularly relevant to your experience.

2. What in my background makes me feel that way? Especially if you're responding to something from another culture, what is there in my culture, my world view, etc., that enables me to reach across cultures and respond to it?

3. What, specificually, in the work do I respond to? This is where you get into your analysis. Especially when you're responding to it across cultures, you may want to get into its meaning in its original culture (a healing chant, for example) and its meaning in ours (perhaps an aesthetic statement).

Here are some more writers that would lend themselves to a reader response:

Joy Harjo. She's of Creek/Muscogee heritage, writes poetry and plays tenor sax in what has been described as a "tribal, jazz, reggae, and rock" style. Often she strikes a note of self-discovery and reconciliation.

Simon Ortiz. A Pueblo Indian from New Mexico, a lot of Ortiz' poetry on line. For what it's worth, he's my favorite poet. Also the only poet I know of who has published a poem that is also a chili recipe. Maybe the two facts are connected.

Sherman Alexie. A Spokane and Coeur d'Alene novelist, poet, filmmaker and satirist of . Very funny, with a sharp edge to his humor. If you can't laugh at yourself, you may not enjoy him. But if you keep reading (or watching), you'll learn to laugh at yourself. And that's a skill we all need to develop!

Tony Hillerman. He isn't an Indian, but he writes mystery novels about the Navajo Tribal Police in northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona. Some Native writers think he expropriates their culture and doesn't give back enough. (Alexie is one of his critics.) But his novels are critically acclaimed, and they're based on careful research into contemporary Navajo culture.

Navajo Blessingway. This is a traditional Navajo (Dine) song that brought blessings to those for whom it was sung. It has influenced many writers (including Joy Harjo and Tony Hillerman), and is often found in translation as a poem. It has also been expropriated as sort of a New Age baby shower, especially in northern California, but without the approval of traditional Navajo people. The traditional blessingway is deeply grounded in Navajo spirituality, as Sr. Pamela Clare CSF points out in Franciscan magazine.