PLEASE NOTE: First of several posts getting ready for the Clayville-Prairieland Pioneer Academy of Music's annual Advent soup supper performance in December. Technically, I guess it's the second because I posted some YouTube clips of the "Cherry Tree Carol" to the blog last year. But who wants to get technical? (Mountain dulcimer tab in DAA and DAD tunings with guitar chords and lyrics by Ralph Lee Smith and Maddy McNeil available at http://archive.dulcimersessions.com/dec07/smith.html.)
Ho ho ho ...
Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat ... please put a penny in the old man's hat.
When I was in the choir at Springfield College in Illinois, we'd start practicing Christmas anthems as soon as school began in September. So it feels like it's time for the Clayville-Prairieland Strings folks to start pulling together a holiday program. Atonement Lutheran Church, where we've been meeting, has voted to merge with two other parishes and a lot of details are up in the air, but as far as I know, the new blended parish will still have Advent soup suppers and we'll be invited to play.
If not, we can always find a nursing home. Or just go wassailing. "If you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do /
If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you!" And there's always the annual Christmas party at Clayville Historic Stagecoach Stop, which has been one of the highlights of the year for us.
We've had a couple of good suggestions already for the Advent program. One is the "Cherry Tree Carol." We sang it last year at Clayville, and there's a lovely southern Appalachian version available online. I'll post more about it soon.
Another Christmas song that we can arrange a little (kind of like we did last year with "Carol of the Bells") is a traditional English carol called "I Saw Three Ships." There's a nice "D-for-dulcimer" lead sheet available here that we can start with:
Let's learn it now, and when we've got it under our belts we can work out entrances, solos, etc.
There's detailed background on the Hymns and Carols of Christmas website, and some of it is fascinating. Check it out sometime. The song has been a cherished part of the English folk music scene for 150 years and more. As usual,
Wikipedia has the basics:
"I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In)" is a traditional and popular Christmas carol from England. A variant of its parent tune "Greensleeves", the earliest printed version of "I Saw Three Ships" is from the 17th century, possibly Derbyshire, and was also published by William Sandys in 1833.
The lyrics mention the ships sailing into Bethlehem, but the nearest body of water is the Dead Sea about 20 miles (32 km) away. The reference to three ships is thought to originate in the three ships that bore the purported relics of the Biblical magi to Cologne Cathedral in the 12th century. Another possible reference is to Wenceslaus II, King of Bohemia, who bore a coat of arms "Azure three galleys argent". Another thought was the three kings that came to baby Jesus.
Plenty of video clips on YouTube. Here's one I especially like:
Trace Adkins and Alyth McCormack - "I Saw Three Ships" -- at the CMA Country Christmas concert in 2013. She's singing Scots Gaelic in the first verse.
Other YouTube clips, ranging from Paddy Maloney and the Chieftans, the King's College Cambridge boys' choir, the folk rock duo Blackmore's Night, pianist Jon Schmidt, Nat King Cole and a mind-blowing session guitarist from the U.K. named Robbie McIntosh, that might give us ideas we might want to adapt, steal or ignore altogether:
Here is a picture of the actual landscape today around Bethlehem, which is located in the hills of Judea and surrounded by upland desert. Buildings in the background are a gated Israeli "settlement" in the occupied territories.
The bottom line, the main thing I would remember to play the traditional old music, ... it’s kind of like Zen. It’s not what you can add – it’s how much you can let go of and let drop away till you can get to the core of what the old people had. -- Don Pedi http://donpedi.com/about.htm
.
LITTLE SWITZERLAND, N.C. -- Today's Appalachian dulcimer players strum modified guitar chords in a I-V-IV progression, but the dulcimer wasn't originally designed to produce chords. And traditional mountain music was always more about melody than chords. In fact Don Pedi, who has collected old-time fiddle tunes and played them on the dulcimer for 30 years, says the first guitar wasn't played by a western North Carolina string band musician until 1911.
"He was Luke Smathers," Don said at his fall retreat here over the weekend, "and he ordered it from Montgomery Ward."
Don's annual "Way of the Dulcimer" Fall Retreat was held Aug. 27-29 at Little Switzerland's Wildacres Retreat Center. Don had lots to say about traditional ways of playing mountain music, and the struggle to maintain them as more and more players use a "chord-melody" dulcimer style based on playing guitar chords in a "bum-ditty" pattern derived from folk musicians in the flatlands.
Following are some of my notes and random thoughts. I've done this before, beginning after Don's 2013 retreat. As before, I made no attempt to cover the main points of the retreat. Instead, I jotted down notes when subjects came up that especially interested me. As in 2013, my thoughts are more random than thoughtful.
Retreat group in Wildacres dining hall. Bobby McMillon is third from right, behind the table.
Bobby McMillon
A highlight of the retreat was a Saturday night concert featuring Don and traditional ballad singer and storyteller Bobby McMillon. A recipient of the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award, McMillon went to school with descendants of Tom Dula -- the "Tom Dooley" who killed poor Laurie Foster in the ballad made famous by the Kingston Trio -- and is himself descended from Laura Foster.
"Eventually, I began to realize," he says in a blurb copied to copied to Don Pedi's website, "that if I didn't perform the songs I was learning, most of the repertories of the people I learned from would be lost because they didn't have family members of their own to hand them down to."
I didn't record the concert, but I did locate a YouTube clip of Bobby McMillon and his singing partner Marina Trivette singing the old songs and recollecting the experiences that led them to become ballad singers.
A couple of North Carolina expressions need translation for flatlanders -- a "booger" is a local word for the boogieman, also an evil spirit in Cherokee folklore; and "painter" is the local pronunciation of "panther." The YouTube clip is from a film by Tom Davenport, independent documentary filmmaker and folklorist of North Carolina, at http://www.folkstreams.net/film,96.
"Brushy Fork of John's Creek"
One of the tunes Don taught us was "Brushy Fork of John's Creek." His version is after Kentucky fiddler Fernando "Dandy" Lusk's, and he said it commemorates the last battle fought in Kentucky during the Civil War.
Nashvilleoldtime.org has a lead sheet with guitar (and mandolin) chords in A Mixolydian (two sharps in the key signature, at F# and C#), and traditionalmusic.co.uk has lead sheet and chords in G Mixolydian (no sharps or flats). It's traditionally played in A Mixolydian, which gives it a dark sound appropriate to the waning days of the Civil War in a state where brother truly fought against brother.
It was recorded Jan. 6, 1977, by tune collector Bruce Greene, who often performs with Don and has cut CDs with him. Hiram Stamper played it, on a fiddle in the "cross key" AEAE tuning. And Don usually tunes his dulcimer EAA, which blends nicely with the fiddle in A modal tunings like AEAE.
But Don's tab gives fret numbers only, and he played it for us both in his preferred tuning and in DAD, which was a Mixolydian tuning before the dulcimer clubs took it over. Hey, everybody plays in DAD, and if dulcimer tab ever comes available for "Brushy Fork of John's Creek," I'll bet any amount of money they'll tab it in DAD or capo the dulcimer on the fourth fret and play it in A on the high end of the fretboard. That's what dulcimer clubs do, bless their hearts.
But if they do, they'll lose that dark sound of the old A modal fiddle tunes.
All of which got me to thinking: Traditional southern Appalachian fiddlers had all kinds of cross-key tunings for songs like "Brushy Fork ..." and "Bonaparte's Retreat," and there's a reason for that. Traditional dulcimer players retuned a lot, too, and I'll bet it was for the same reason -- in the open modal tunings, you get that darker, lower sound that comes from playing a drone on the open strings.
How the dulcimer got to Mountain View, Ark.
One of the most important instrument makers in the Midwest is McSpadden Dulcimers at Mountain View, in the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas. Don filled in an important piece of the instrument's history when he mentioned McKinley Craft, a Kentuckian who learned how to make dulcimers from Jethro Amburgey at Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky. Don said Craft swapped a dulcimer for a bottle of whiskey in Batesville, Ark. It turned out to be the model for Lynn McSpadden's first dulcimers.
I got interested at one period [in the 1960s] in trying to document the use of the dulcimer in the Ozarks, and it never was great as it was in the Appalachian region or somewhere like that, but what I found was people - folklorists - who came through here researching folklore were basically interested in the lyrics and the music. They were not interested in the instruments that were being used. Through several contacts, I found out that there was an old fellow over at Leslie who had a dulcimer, so I took off to see him. He was a bootlegger, had made his living for years . . . It was way back in the sticks out of Leslie, and he had moved there from Kentucky in about 1920 - along in there somewhere - and his cousin, McKinley Craft back in Kentucky, had sent him a dulcimer or brought him a dulcimer, and he said that . . . Joe Craft told me that when he was young back in Kentucky that, if there was a band was going to play for a dance, there would be three instruments. There would be a fiddle, of course. There would be a banjo, and there would be a dulcimer. What’s missing is what everybody thinks of as the folk instrument now: the guitar.
But what got me thinking was when the interviewer asked McSpadden, "Were any of your ancestors involved in handicrafts or any kind of --"
McSpadden: No, I taught my dad how to make dulcimers.
[Interviewer]: Oh, is that right?
McSpadden: It would be nice if it were handed down through the generations, but I can’t come up with that story at all. ...
Instead, McSpadden said discovered the dulcimer as a divinity student at Duke -- another North Carolina connection! -- after he'd "gotten interested in folk music via the Peter, Paul, and Mary route." He said:
McSpadden: Oh, well. When I was a student at Duke University, Elliott Hancock was my roommate, and we both worked in the cafeteria, and he’d come in at night after finishing his work and eating, and sit down and play his guitar, and I thought, “Well. I’m going to defend myself. I’ve always liked the sound of a banjo.” So I went and bought a twenty dollar banjo at the pawn shop at Five Points in Durham, and I couldn’t tune the thing, and I certainly couldn’t play it. My fingers wouldn’t move in that direction. And I heard a friend from West Virginia, I guess - maybe Kentucky - was playing a record one night, and it had a dulcimer being played, and Billy Ed Wheeler, who was a semi-popular singer at the time, was singing and playing “Ash Grove,” and I thought, “Boy, that’s a nice sound,” you know. ...
Wheeler, of Swannanoa, is yet another North Carolina connection. Long associated with Warren Wilson College, he's best known perhaps for the novelty song "Ode to the Little Brown Shack Out Back" and a collection of Appalachian humor he co-edited with Loyal Jones of Berea College.
But I was struck by the way McSpadden stumbled onto traditional Appalachian music by listening to Peter, Paul and Mary as a divinity student at Duke. For a guy who stumbled onto the music as a grad student at the University of Tennessee, it's nice to know that one of the key players in the revival of traditional music in the Ozarks also got interested in it "via the Peter, Paul and Mary route" about the same time.
__________
From Ken Watson video on Don's website: http://donpedi.com/about.htm.: [2:10] The bottom line, the main thing I would remember to play the traditional old music, and being born in the time and the places we’re born, it’s kind of like Zen. It’s not what you can add – it’s how much you can let go of and let drop away till you can get to the core of what the old people had. Because they came from an agrarian culture where everything was felt; now we’re in technology world. Everything is thinking. And so it’s interesting. That’s it.
[2:46] And then I learned a lot directly from the old guys I’d meet around this part of the world and got those older sensibilities. I don’t learn from records or nothing. Mostly it’s from people. But, you know, it’s funny. ‘cause nowadays all these dulcimer people are saying ‘oh boy, you’ve got a good gimmick. But I’ve had a good gimmick for 30 years and when this ain’t popular any more, I’ll have the same gimmick. It’s just what I love, and it’s just what I do.
And the EverythingDulcimer.com website at http://www.everythingdulcimer.com/tab/#M -- scroll down the directory to "Michael ..." by Peter Widenmeyer. ("Einfaches Arrangement" is how they say "simple arrangement" in German). Or you can open the PDF file at
Most of us of a certain age know "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" as a summer camp song, one we sang in between "Kumbaya" and roasting marshmallows on a stick, but it is much older than that. First set to standard musical notation in 1863 in Port Royal, S.C., it was originally a work song, sung by African American slaves as they rowed across the waters surrounding the Sea Islands of the Carolina and Georgia low country. It was also a spiritual, in a day and a culture that didn't make distinctions between sacred and secular music. In fact it is one of the oldest black spirituals.
All of which gives it an energy and a surging call-and-response rhythm I don't think we quite captured in the Episcopal church camps of my youth.
Of the many versions available on YouTube, the one that I think comes the closest to the original is this performance by the Glory Gospel Singers, of New York City, in concert in Barmstedt, Germany, earlier this year:
The Glory Gospel Singers' sound strikes me as contemporary African American gospel, but "Michael" is one of the first spirituals written down by abolitionists from New England during the Civil War. It originated well before that, as a work song that kept boat crews rowing together. William Russell, a war correspondent for the Times of London who toured behind the Confederate lines in 1861, was reminded of the voyage that ferried lost souls over the River Styx to Hades in Greek mythology:
The oarsmen, as they bent to their task, beguiled the way by singing in unison a real [N]egro melody. ... It was a barbaric sort of madrigal, in which one singer beginning was followed by the others in unison, repeating the refrain in chorus, and full of quaint expression and melancholy:-- ... To me it was a strange scene. The stream, dark as Lethe, flowing between the silent, houseless, rugged banks, lighted up near the landing by the fire in the woods, which reddened the sky--the wild strain, and the unearthly adjurations to the singers' souls, as though they were palpable, put me in mind of the fancied voyage across the Styx.
"Michael" was collected in an 1867 book titled Slave Songs of the United States (available online from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill at http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/allen/allen.html), compiled by abolitionist teachers who worked with the freed slaves who fled to the federal lines after the Union Army landed in South Carolina and set up a supply depot around Port Royal. One of the teachers named William Francis Allen, who had heard similar work songs in seaports up north, explained how the call-and-response of African American singing helped dock workers pace themselves:
Some of the best pure [N]egro songs I have ever heard were those that used to be sung by the black stevedores, or perhaps the crews themselves, of the West India vessels, loading and unloading at the wharves in Philadelphia and Baltimore. I have stood for more than an hour, often, listening to them, as they hoisted and lowered the hogsheads and boxes of their cargoes; one man taking the burden [verse] of the song (and the slack of the rope) and the others striking in with the chorus. They would sing in this way more than a dozen different songs in an hour; most of which might indeed be warranted to contain 'nothing religious'--a few of them, 'on the contrary, quite the reverse'--but generally rather innocent and proper in their language, and strangely attractive in their music; and with a volume of voice that reached a square or two away.
Allen noted that the work songs combined sacred and secular lyrics -- "I know only one pure boat-song, the fine lyric, "Michael row the boat ashore" (No. 31 [in the book]); and this I have no doubt is a real spiritual -- it being the archangel Michael that is addressed." He quoted Charles Pickard Ware, who actually collected the song, at some length:
"As I have written these tunes," says Mr. Ware, "two measures are to be sung to each stroke, the first measure being accented by the beginning of the stroke, the second by the rattle of the oars in the row-locks. On the passenger boat at the [Beaufort] ferry, they rowed from sixteen to thirty strokes a minute; twenty-four was the average. Of the tunes I have heard, I should say that ... 'Lay this body down' (No. 26), 'Religion so sweet' (No.17), and 'Michael row' (No. 31), were used when the load was heavy or the tide was against us."
That's how Allen heard it, as he described it in a diary quoted by Dena Epstein in her Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: U of I Press, 2003), which is probably the best book available on the origins of African American music:
Sunday, March 20, 1864…. we had wind and tide against us, and a heavy load, so we were not home till near seven … there was a full moon and the men sang most of the way as they rowed. It was curious to see how their rowing flagged — for they were quite tired — the moment the singing stopped. It wasn’t a very good set of singers, still I was very glad to hear them, for I have heard very little boat music. They sang “Michael row,” “Hold your Light,” and several others …
Although the Wisconsin Synod’s constitution stated that “everything should be in keeping with the true word of the Bible and the confessions of our Evangelical-Lutheran church”, and although all pastors pledged themselves to the Unaltered Augsburg Confession (UAC), practices did not always follow beliefs. The practices which were flawed were those concerning fellowship. Pastors often served congregations comprised of both Lutherans and Reformed Christians. This most likely stemmed from a “loyalty to the Langenberg tradition of peaceful coexistence among conflicting creeds which could not easily be shaken.” Ever since the Prussian Union, these Lutherans were used to worshiping side by side with those who did not have the same beliefs as they.
Fortunately, God did not allow this practice to continue in the Wisconsin Synod. By His guiding hand, our early church fathers began to turn from these unscriptural ways. God used a number of means to accomplish this turnaround. First of all, the synod’s constitution was still founded on the beliefs of a confessional Lutheran church. However, these beliefs obviously clashed with the current practices of fellowship. This caused disorderliness in the congregations, and because of this, pastors began to take a more consistent confessional stance on the applications of the doctrine of church fellowship.
By Steve Smith of the Western North Carolina Dulcimer Collective, on the EverythingDulcimer.com website at http://www.everythingdulcimer.com/files/tab/shenadoah.pdf(or go to Dulcimer Tablature menu and scroll down to Smith's version of "Shenandoah." There are a couple of others -- his is the one you want.) A couple of videos available on YouTube:
Shenandoah in live concert by Norwegian singer Sissel Kyrkjebø, with Paddy Moloney of the Chieftans and Swedish artist "Kalle" Moraeus on violin. It was recorded during her concerts held in 2001 Drammen Theater, Norway, released on the album In Symphony and picked up on her American album Sissel. (Kyrkjebø, by the way, is pronounced sort of like "SHIR-ke-buh" in Norwegian. I have no idea how it would be pronounced in English.)
Suzy Bogguss, Shenandoah. At the Loveless Cafe Barn for Music City Roots in Nashville, April 20, 2011. Pat Bergeson on harmonica, Fred Carpenter on fiddle, Will Barrow on accordion, Brian Owings on drums and Charlie Chadwick on bass. Suzy Boguss, by the way, was a homecoming queen at Aledo High School up in the Quad-Cities area.
A Shenandoah Lullaby by Jerry Garcia, vocal and guitar, and Jerry Grisman on mandolin.
Mudcat Cafe has several lengthy threads speculating on the song's origins and early history, which are obscure and varied. Two of the most informative are here
and here. I like what Kim C said May 11, 2001, at 10:15 a.m. in the thread "Subject: RE: Shenandoah Origin":
Here's what I tell people when I perform this, and it's as near as I can figure ... originating as a boatman's song in the 1830s or thereabouts, went out to sea as a shanty, came back to land as a ballad and has been sung as one for many years. It was popular with soldiers during the Civil War, and went out west with them afterwards and has enjoyed an incarnation as a cowboy ballad.
But by far the best https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Shenandoah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Shenandoah
"Oh Shenandoah" (also called simply "Shenandoah" or "Across the Wide Missouri") is a traditional American folk song of uncertain origin, dating at least to the early 19th century.
The song appears to have originated with Canadian and American voyageurs or fur traders traveling down the Missouri River in canoes, and has developed several different sets of lyrics. Some lyrics refer to the Native American chief "Shenandoah" (Oskanondonha) and a canoe-going trader who wants to marry his daughter. By the mid 1800s versions of the song had become a sea shanty heard or sung by sailors in various parts of the world.
Sea Songs and Shanties, Collected by W.B. Whall, Master Mariner (1910, Glasgow).
["Shenandoah"] probably came from the American or Canadian voyageurs, who were great singers .... In the early days of America, rivers and canals were the chief trade and passenger routes, and boatmen were an important class. Shenandoah was a celebrated Indian chief in American history, and several towns in the States are named after him. Besides being sung at sea, this song figured in old public school collections.
Radio show on the kantor who put together Martin Luther's first hymnals. Family tradition is that he was an ancestor of the Walthers in my paternal grandmother's (farmor's) family in Norway.
Hat tip to my cousin John, who writes, "I think I mentioned finding www.lutheranpublicradio.org several weeks ago - a website with lots of good church music that plays continuously, 24 hours per day. A high school classmate told me that her son, a LC-MS [pastor?], spoke on the talk side of the website. While scrolling through to find him, I found a talk on page 5, titled Issues, Etc. Encore: 16th Century Lutheran Kantor Johann Walter – Dr. Paul Grime, 4/24/15."
Toward the end of the podcast, Grime, of Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne, Ind., makes the point that by the standards of his day, Luther was writing "Christian contemporary" music.
I knew my father's middle name was Walther -- Birger Walther Ellertsen -- and both of his sisters had it as their middle name. But I didn't know till a family gathering in 2014 of the connection with Luther's arranger. From a blog post to Hogfiddle on our 2014 cousins' reunion in upstate New York Music seems to run in the family -- Bestefar's father and perhaps his grandfather were cantors in Bergen, and at Koinonia I learned that Bestemor's family, from an industrial town called Sarpsborg in southeastern Norway, claims descent from the Johann Walther who edited Martin Luther's early congregational music.
In fact, later on that weekend we celebrated the family tradition by singing some of Walther's arrangements, including Christ lag in Todesbanden ("Christ Jesus lay in death's strong bands"). ... <.blockquote>
A couple of times lately we've played "Midnight on the Water," and it's a waltz tune I need to learn to play better (true confessions time here). It's got a nice Western Swing feel to it, and it's often played in "cross-key" fiddle tunings with a D string left open that should blend well with the drones on an Appalachian dulcimer. We made a pretty good start toward making it our own a couple of sessions ago, so let's take another run at it when we meet Thursday, Aug. 20, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Atonement Lutheran Church, 2800 West Jefferson. It's one of those tunes that keep growing on you as you get to know them better. Well worth mastering.
Here are a couple of YouTube videos:
Midnight on the Water - John Hartford. Lots of nice ornamentation by a master of old-time string band music.
Midnight on the Water/Bonaparte's Retreat - Jay Ungar and Molly Mason\. Two standards in the open D fiddle tuning often known as the "dead man's tuning." Our tune begins at 2:00, after some very interesting (to me) talk about fiddle tunings, etc., but "Bonaparte's Retreat" is worth a listen, too. We ought to add it to our list of tunes to learn.
Western Swing, like bluegrass, was heavily influenced by jazz. And we can hear that influence in "Midnight on the Water."
The most significant of the new generation of Texas fiddlers [in the 1930s and 40s] was Benny Thomasson, (1909-1984) for whom the jazz music on early radio was a huge influence. His father Luke was also a well respected fiddler, and wrote the famous waltz Midnight on the Water. Luke was a friend of Eck Robertson, and would often visit the house, proving a major inspiration for Benny as a child. Benny’s repertoire ranged from traditional reels, hornpipes, polkas and waltzes to jazz numbers such as Sweet Georgia Brown.
Haigh also has an interesting aside on jam session styles, which are a bit different in the world of Western Swing, more like bluegrass and jazz sessions:
I asked Bryan [Jimmerson, president of the Texas Old Time Fiddlers Association] about the nature of the car park and campfire jam sessions which are an important feature of fiddle contests and conventions. In Britain we are used to the Irish trad session where a circle of players will do tune after tune in as near perfect unison as possible. In a tradition where improvisation and variation are valued, this surely could not be the same? I have rarely been around a jam session where folks play tunes at the same time. I have heard several young players do this from time to time but it's because they all take from the same teacher and have the exact same version of the tune so they are all playing the exact same notes. Generally at our jams the more seasoned fiddlers will play a tune and pass it to the next person to let them show what they can do with it. It's fun to watch them show off and try to out-do each other especially on swing tunes. Another jam scenario would be that one fiddler sits with the guitar players and plays until he is ready to let someone else play and then he gives up the "hot seat" to someone else and on it goes.
Old-time sessions fall somewhere in between. Most of us play slightly different versions of a tune, and some of us couldn't play it the same way twice if we tried. But our jams are more about blending with the other players in a group than individual performance, and we quickly learn we'd better not get too free with the melody!
MIDNIGHT ON THE WATER. Old‑Time, Waltz. USA, Texas. D Major. DDad tuning. AABB (Spandaro): AA'BB' (Brody, Matthiesen, Reiner & Anick). This popular composition is usually credited to Texas fiddler Luke Thomasson, although it has been published that Luke's son Benny (a famous Texas‑style fiddler who popularized the melody) long remembered the night he heard both his father and uncle composing the tune on the family porch (c. 1900?). Several sources have noted this tune’s resemblance to an Oklahoma-collected tune called “Old Paint,” and there is an ongoing debate about whether “Midnight” is derivative of “Paint” (or vice versa). The Library of Congress recording "Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls from Texas" (LOC lp L28), collected by John A. Lomax and edited by Duncan Emrich, has a version of the “Paint” song by Jess Morris which has quite similar melodic material with “Midnight on the Water.” The liner notes to the album point out that Morris was born in 1878 and would perhaps have been contemporary with the Thomassons, who, like Morris, lived in the Texas panhandle. ...
If you loved "To Kill a Mockingbird" and you're reading "Go Set a Watchman," there's a series on the AL.com newspaper website you ought to bookmark. Carla Jean Whitney, a feature writer for the Montgomery News, has written a lot about "Watchman," including a chapter-by-chapter synopsis (probably full of spoilers), a podcast featuring Whitney and editorial writer John Hammontree and other stories about Harper Lee and her books from a Deep South perspective today. I think it's essential reading.
Link here for a partial directory and surf around in the links:
As we prepared to record this week's Red Clay Readers podcast, my friend and colleague John Hammontree said something that shocked me:
He might prefer "Go Set A Watchman" to "To Kill A Mockingbird."
John is the first person I've heard make such a declaration, and I quickly turned on the tape recorder (er, iPhone app) and asked him to explain himself. "I think there's a lot more to unpack there, which I think makes it a more interesting book than the fairy tale that is 'To Kill A Mockingbird,'" he said.
Listen to that discussion, then chime in and let us know what you think.
This stuff isn't indexed, and there's a lot of it. It's part of a standing feature called the "Red Clay Readers," which is sort of like an online book club for readers of the Montgomery News, the Huntsville Times and the Mobile Press-Register. Whitney describes it like this and adds she'll host a livechat Friday of this week:
Red Clay Readers, AL.com's online book club, has spent the past month examining Harper Lee's "Go Set A Watchman." That analysis ends Friday, and we'll follow it with a live chat Friday afternoon at AL.com/books.
The book club kicked off with The Next Chapter events in Birmingham, Huntsville and Mobile, in which panelists and audience members discussed themes in and expectations for Lee's second book. Friday's live chat will include some of those folks, and we hope it will be an opportunity to revisit those discussions.
Friday's chat will include Mobile County Commissioner Merceria Ludgood, Auburn University-Montgomery's Nancy Grisham Anderson and Margaret Terwey, Books-A-Million's senior fiction buyer. Save the date and join us! The chat will take place from 2-3 p.m. at AL.com/books. I'll post that morning, and the conversation will take place in the comments.
There's been a lot more about the novels on the AL.com website, and the discussion I've read -- admittedly a small sampling so far -- brings to it a perspective that I think is important for the rest of us to know about.
As editorial writer John Hammontree suggests in the podcast, we gain a sense of Atticus Finch as a more well-rounded character from reading the novels together. I'd like to hope, speaking strictly for myself and from a perspective of having grown up in the South during the period Harper Lee wrote about in "Watchman," that we can come to an understanding of the complexity of race relations similar to what Harper Lee's Jean Louise Finch struggled with in "Go Set a Watchman." I suspect the book is deeply flawed, but it's important because we don't like to think about race -- and even if the novel isn't successful, Lee at least tries.
Audio clips at http://drdosido.net/fiddleclub/tag/genevieve-harrison-koester/. "A selection of tunes from Dear Old Illinois (both a place and the life work of Genevieve’s father, Garry Harrison). Gena plays with her dad in the New Mules, a band featured at the Old Town School’s Trad Fest in January 2008. The first of these tunes is from the David McIntosh collection of folksongs from Southern Illinois from the middle of the last century. The next two are tunes Garry collected from downstate fiddlers 30 years ago."
Pride of America -- CD
by The New Mules at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/newmules. "... Fiddler Garry Harrison learned the local music of his native downstate Illinois the old-time way, from his father and in person at the homes of elderly players from the area. Just as those folks learned and as Garry learned from them, Garry's daughter Genevieve in turn learned to play the fiddle in the old style, her first guidance being from her father.
"Garry and Gena joined with some of the area's finest players to form the New Mules. Abby Ladin plays the bass, Smith Koester the banjo, and Andy Gribble the guitar. Their music is from authentic traditional sources and includes both rare and obscure old gems and previously unheard versions of better-known numbers. The group brings renewed life to this music with their own unique arrangements and performances, and no one has more fun in doing it.
"The New Mules were honored with the award of First Prize in the Traditional Band competition at the Appalachian String Band Festival, Clifftop, West Virginia, August 2, 2008."
UPDATE: So when I order Pride of America from CDBaby.com, the online record store that caters to independent artists, I get this shipping notice in my email:
Thanks for your order with CD Baby!
* * *
[tracking details omitted]
(1) The New Mules: Pride of America
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our world-renowned packing specialist lit a local artisan candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, August 11, 2015.
We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Sigh...
We miss you already. We'll be right here at http://cdbaby.com/, patiently awaiting your return.
--
CD Baby
The little store with the best new independent music.
Members of the Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet, the group that is reviving the instrument today in Sweden, will play for a Psalmodikonhögmässa [high communion, or mass] Aug. 23, the 12th Sunday after Trinity [the season of the church year we call Pentecost, or ordinary time, in the US], at Slaka-Nykils pastorat in Linköping. The flier on the Church of Sweden's website has some information I didn't know before -- and confirms something I did know!
SVENSK KULTURHISTORIA: INSTRUMENTET ÄR
KANSKE VÄRLDENS ÄLDSTA.
Psalmodikon är ett svenskt kulturarv som kan vara på väg att försvinna. Ändå var detta det mest vanliga instrumentet i Sverige under 1800-talet. Att det nära på försvunnit beror inte på bristen på instrument utan avsaknaden av folk som vet hur man använder detta enkla robusta instrument.
Själva lådan består av gran (bästa ljudet).
Strängen är gjord av fårtarmar.
Den skriker ibland! Stråken gjordes förr av en gren och hästtagel.
Idag använder vi fiolstråkar.
Vi spelar fyrstämmigt d.v.s. Sopran, Alt, Tenor och Bas.
Repertoar: Välkända psalmer, visor (Taube, Ferlin, Dan Andersson).
Which I translate (very freely, and with a big assist from Doktor Google} as follows:
SWEDISH CULTURAL HISTORY: INSTRUMENT IS PERHAPS THE WORLD'S OLDEST
Psalmodikon is a Swedish cultural heritage that may be about to disappear. Yet this was the most common instrument in Sweden during the 1800s. Its disappeared is not due to lack of instruments but the lack of people who know how to use this simple, robust instruments.
The box itself is made up of spruce (best sound).
The string is made of sheep intestines.
It screams sometimes! The bow was formerly made of a branch and horsehair.
Today we use violin bows.
We play in four-part harmony -- i.e. soprano, alto, tenor and bass
Repertoire: Well-known psalms, or hymns, and ballads. Taube, Ferlin and Dan Anderson were Swedish traditional musicians.
I can attest to the part about how the psalmodikon shrieks at times [skriker ibland]. So can practically anyone who has heard me play!
This morning I taught "Again Thy Glorious Sun Doth Rise" (Din Klara Sol Går Åter Upp) from the Augustana Synod's 1901 hymnal and Dillner's Melodier (1830) at Colona United Methodist Church in the Quad-Cities. Hat tip to my sister-in-law Marian's husband Phil Paulson of LeClaire, Iowa, for recording it and sharing it on Facebook. Link here to the video on my FB page:
I like the way my re-enactment of a 19th-century Swedish pastor's singing school is jelling, although I definitely need to work on bowing and the whole presentation could use a little more polish! I think my audiences -- congregations -- do learn the song by the repetition that comes when I (a) play the melody on the psalmodikon, (b) lead the congregation in singing the sifferskrift numbers, and (c) lead them in singing all four verses from the English hymnal. Most of them seem to enjoy it.
For convenient reference, here's the hymn in sifferskrift, Dillner's numerical psalmodikon tablature:
The numbers reflect degrees of the scale: 1 = do, 2 = re, 3 = mi and so on up through 8 = do' at the octave.
OK, OK, this is a music blog (mostly), and this post has nothing to do with music.
But this morning I was on Facebook, and the subject of Girdwood, Alaska, came up. Girdwood is about an hour's drive east of Anchorage, and I used to go out there when Debi was busy with Alaska Domestic Violence Network meetings in town. I'd eat lunch at a little restaurant called the Bake Shop and head a few miles farther down the Seward Highway to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, where I'd spend an hour or two before heading back to Anchorage.
Other times, Debi and I would head out in the morning. The Seward Highway follows the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet out of Anchorage, and the scenery looks like fjord country in Norway. It's magnificent. Then we'd stop at the Bake Shop for a bowl of soup, which was also magnificent, before visiting the wildlife center.
Anyway, when I Googled up the Bake Shop today, I noticed it is now posting some of its recipes.
Among them:
Great Northern Bean with Andouille Sausage, Tomato Basil, Beef Barley Vegetable Soup, Szegedin Goulash (named after a district in Hungary where they grow paprika) and a vegan African Ground Nut Stew. Also Potato Salad, Chicken Salad and a variety of baked goods.
Composer John Victor Bergquist was head of the Augustana College music department and leader of the Handel Oratorio Society and Wennerberg chorus from 1912 to 1918. One of Bergquist’s original compositions, Golgatha, was performed by the Handel Oratorio Society with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1915. Also in 1915, Bergquist, along with Dr. E.W. Olson, was commissioned by the Augustana Synod to compose a piece, the Reformation Cantata, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. This piece was performed in 1917 in Rock Island, Illinois, by a 400-member chorus and the Tri-City Orchestra.
Sources: Bergendoff, Conrad. Augustana… A Profession of Faith: A History of Augustana College, 1860-1935. Rock Island, IL: Augustana College Library, 1969.
Laudon, Robert Tallant. “J. Victor Bergquist: Finding Joy in Music.” Minnesota Musicians of the Cultured Generation. Minneapolis: University of Michigan, 2002.
Bergquist wrote a series of articles for The Lutheran Companion, Nov. 1916-Jan. 1917, on the synod's Reformation heritage:
11 Nov. 1916. Intro by editorial staff, pp. 1-2; Part I [not numbered] by Bergquist, p. 7.
18 Nov. 1916. Part II, p. 8.
25 Nov. 1916. Part III, p. 6.
9 Dec. 1916. Part IV, p. 8.
16 Dec. Part V, p. 8.
6 Jan. 1917, p. 8. Part VI.
13 Jan. 1917, p. 19. Part VII.
27 Jan. 1917, p. 44. Part VII (sic).
[Beginning in January 1917, pages were numbered consecutively; prior to that, each issue was paginated separately.]
Gerberding, George Henry
(August 21, 1847–March 27, 1927). B. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; educ. Thiel Coll. and Muhlenberg Coll. (see Ministry, Education of, VIII A 7, 11); ordained 1876; pastor and miss. in Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Dakota; founder and 1st pres. Syn. of the Northwest, pres. Chicago Syn. (see United Lutheran Church, Synods of, 20, 8); prof. Chicago Luth. Sem. and Northwestern Luth. Sem. (see Ministry, Education of, XI B 6, 10). Works include The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church; Life and Letters of W. A. Passavant, DD ...
Text: Paul Gerhardt 1653 (46 år) "Nun ruhen alle Wälder", sv. övers. Haqvin Spegel 1686 (41 år) "Nu vilar hela jorden", bearb. och nyövers. Britt G Hallqvist 1978 (64 år)
Musik: Heinrich Isaac o 1500 (50 år) "Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen", jfr 1697 års koralbok nr 375 och 1820 års koralbok nr 433
[Av upphovsrättsliga skäl kan resten av texten inte publiceras här än]
Oscar Lövgren skriver (i Psalm- och sånglexikon, Gummessons 1964, sp. 231) att Gerhardts psalm är "vår bildrikaste och kanske mest berömda aftonpsalm." Det senare äger nog inte längre sin riktighet, men det förra stämmer nog, dels p.g.a. psalmens längd (hela nio verser) och dels p.g.a. att nästan varje vers innehåller en natur- eller kroppsbeskrivning följd av en andlig, bildlig tillämpning.
Psalmens längd har dock gjort att den i vår "bråttomtid" sällan sjungs (även om tiden det tar att sjunga den bara är en bråkdel av den tid det tar att följa en dokusåpa eller "Morden i Midsomer"). Mest berömd är den väl för att anslaget påståtts strida mot jordens klotformighet, varför också Britt G Hallvist i sin slutliga version av psalmen undvek påståendet att "alla skogar" eller "hela jorden" vilar. I hennes tidigare, mer originaltrogna, översättning började psalmen dock så här:
Nu vilar alla skogar,
djur, mänskor, fält och plogar,
all världen slumrar in.
Men du, min själ, skall börja
din andakt, du skall spörja
vad som behagar Skaparn din.
Man måste väl dock säga att versionen i 1986 års psalmbok känns mer lättflytande. Det har dock inte hjälpt upp psalmens popularitet nämnvärt. Man måste väl erkänna att den, som så många psalmer från den tid då psalmboken inte användes bara i kyrkan, verkar mer skriven för den enskilda kvällsandakten än för offentliga sammankomster ("Till sömn jag mig bereder, / tar av mig skor och kläder"), men jag har en känsla av att den inte heller i det privata sammanhanget längre har någon stark ställning. De fyra sista stroferna passar dock utmärkt väl att sjunga som avslutning på t.ex. kvällsmässor, och så trött är man nog sällan att man inte skulle orka be dem hemma inför sänggåendet ("när mina tankar domnar / och alla sinnen somnar").
Nu vilar hela jorden · Mats Bergström. Guitar. Julsånger utan ord.
℗ 2012 Naxos Sweden
Nu vilar hela jorden · Peter Mattei
℗ 2011 Ladybird Production
Released on: 2011-04-01
Artist: Peter Mattei
Conductor: Gustaf Sjokvist
Orchestra: Stockholm Sinfonietta
Composer: Heinrich Isaac
Composer: Jan Sandstrom
Auto-generated by YouTube.
Music
"Nu Vilar Hela Jorden (Arr. J. Sandstrom)" by Heinrich Isaac
186 Nu vilar folk och länder -- 1986 års psalmbok som melodipsalmbok på nätet
Our next slow jam and song learning session of the Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music is from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, Aug. 1, in the barn at Clayville Historic Site, Ill. 125, Pleasant Plains. One tune I want to feature is "Over the Waterfall." We used to play it, but we haven't been lately. It's too good a tune to lose, though, so I want to start Saturday's session by refreshing our memory -- and introducing it for the folks who have joined us recently.
"Over the Waterfall" is in Stephen Siefert's Join the Jam, with a lead sheet in standard musical notation, backup chords and tab for a dulcimer tuned in DAD ... all the more reason to go ahead and get Steve's book. You can order it on his website at http://www.stephenseifert.com/ (click on "Physical Store" in the ribbon at the left of his start page, and follow the links).
If you don't have Steve's book and want to play the melody on a mountain dulcimer, there's tab available on the Three Rivers Dulcimer Society website in Washington state at:
I think the tune Mixolydian, but I've been accused of going overboard on the modes. Most people say D major.
There's a C natural toward the end of the A part that gives the tune a slightly darker Mixolydian feel, just for a moment there, but the folks on the Session website, whom I consider authoritative on questions like this, classify the tune as D major.
A couple of YouTube clips:
Uploaded by YouTube user Jim Pankey, who writes: "Christie Burns, Jim Pankey and Roy Curry playing tunes on the porch! :)" I don't know who these people are, but I like the way they swing this tune!
A more traditional old-time string band arrangement by Redwing, of Eugene, Oregon. "Redwing is a five-piece string band, based in Eugene, Oregon. They play old time and Celtic tunes. This was filmed at Belknap Hot Springs Resort, on the McKenzie River in Oregon."
OVER THE WATERFALL. AKA and see "The Fellow/Feller That Looks Like Me," "Punkin Head." Old‑Time, Breakdown. USA, Virginia. D Major. Standard tuning. AB (Silberberg): AABB (most versions). Originally from fiddler Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, it was learned from directly from Reed and popularized in modern times by folklorist and fiddler Alan Jabbour. Reed himself may have learned it from hearing it emanating from a steam-driven calliope. "Over the Waterfall" is a melody that is fairly wide-spread throughout the British Isles and North America, explains Jabbour, and was used both for a well-known British-American song sometimes called "Eggs and Marrowbones" (AKA “Old Woman from Wexford,” “Old Woman in Dover,” “Wily Auld Carle” etc.) and as an instrumental tune. Comparison with “The Dark Girl Dressed in Blue [2]” in O’Neill’s Music of Ireland (1903) reveals a striking similarity between the two, and it is possible “Over the Waterfall” was adapted from an Irish source. Others have suggested that it may originally have been a composed piece from the turn of the century that was spread by travelling‑circus and riverboat musicians.
***
The earliest recorded version was by Al Hopkins and the Bucklebusters in the very last years of the 1920’s, who recorded it on a 78 RPM as “The Fellow that Looks Like Me” (Brunswick 184). “The Fellow that Looks Like Me” that was in the repertoire of Virginia fiddler Stuart Lundy (son of Galax fiddler Emmett Lundy) under that title, as well as the aforementioned Bucklebusters. Lundy died in the late 1970’s. The Hopkins family (Al is referenced above) was also originally from Galax. The Reed version of “Over the Waterfall” has become very common among old‑time fiddlers (indeed, it has become hackneyed), though is now usually regarded as a beginner's tune. Kentucky fiddler J.P. Fraley plays the tune, learned from the fiddling of his father, a somewhat more melodically complicated version. ...
Korsbaneret: Kristlig Kalendar för 1880. [Banner of the Cross: Christian Calendar for 1880] Chicago: Enander & Bohmans Förlag, 1879.
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011254985
Pix on page 44 and poem on page 45.
xxx
There is also a history of the church in Andover --
"Svenska Evangeliska Församlingen i Andover," Korsbaneret: Kristlig Kalendar för 1880 (Chicago: Enander & Bohmans Förlag), pp.
60-119.
Hat tip to Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet (NPsF) and my sister-in-law Marian Edmund-Paulson for telling me about this guy. He plays the psalmodikon with some the drive and rhythm of Swedish folk music, and it reminds me of the Hardanger fiddles I first heard as a student in Oslo. --
A new member of Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet, the Swedish psalmodikon players' association has posted a YouTube clip, a photo and a SoundCloud audio clip of a kvällsvisa (night song) and a stev (*a simple four-line melody -- see note below) on the psalmodikon to NpSF's Facebook page at:
His name is Gunnar F, and he also plays the nyckelharpa or Swedish keyed fiddle (in fact it appears that it's his primary instrument). And his attack -- the way he hits the downbeat -- gives his playing a lilt, or rhythmic quality, that I'm not used to hearing on the psalmodikon.
It's fascinating, I love hearing it and I want to study it.
So, Gunnar F, if you ever happen to read this: I hope you post more psalmodikon videos to YouTube!
In the meantime, here's his Stev for Psalmodikon on YouTube:
Psalmodikon med Gunnar F. He writes: "Psalmodikon var ett instrument vi växte upp med. Men det var länge sedan …" (trans.: the psalmodikon was an instrument we grew up with. It was a long time ago).
Equally as interesting is a picture that Gunnar F sent the Psalmodikonförbundet. It shows a turn-of-the-century band with a psalmodikon from Jämtland, a district in north central Sweden next to the Norwegian border and not too far east of Trondheim.
It's quite a band! I see a cornet, an accordion, a fiddle, cymbals, what appears to be a small zither (a Finnish kantele, maybe?) and a psalmodikon that's unlike any I've seen before.
Folk psalmodikon with sympathetic strings?
The psalmodikon is held by the woman wearing a headscarf, third from the left in the back row of the picture at the right of the page below, which is a screen grab from NPsF's Facebook page. To enlarge it, go to NPsF's Facebook post and click on the picture. (While you're there, BTW, why don't you click on "Like?" They're doing a lot to revive interest in the psalmodikon.) It's the boxy instrument held by the woman in the back row, third from the left, and it's identified in the cutlines as a jämtländskt psalmodikon. It looks like she played it with a standard violin bow.
I'll leave it to the experts whether this Jämtland psalmodikon is technically a zither or a lute. (A zither is the word the experts use for any stringed instrument without a neck, and a lute is any instrument with a neck, including but not limited to lutes.). If I had to guess, I'd say it's some kind of hybrid. But I think it's clearly a folk instrument.
And it looks like it has sympathetic strings. The Swedes call them resonanssträngar, and I did a fair amount of research on them when I had my copy made of the Rev. Lars Paul Esbjörn's psalmodikon at the Jenny Lind Chapel museum in Andover. (Pictures are available on the Jenny Lind Chapel website -- click on "Flickr" link and open directory of Psalmodikon pictures.)
As near as I can tell, the psalmodikon in Gunnar F's picture has a melody string stretched from a tuning peg at the top of the neck to a bridge toward the bottom of the soundbox. The fretboard is marked with the same white- and dark-colored pattern of whole steps and half steps as other psalmodikons. I count 12 sympathetic strings or resonanssträngar, stretched over the soundbox. I don't think it would be possible to bow any of them, but if they were tuned to the 12 tones of a chromatic scale, they would vibrate sympathetically in unison with whatever note was being bowed on the melody string.
To sum it up in a word or two, the Jämtland psalmodikon in the picture is musically a sophisticated instrument. And look at the detail in the soundhole carved in the shape of a lyre! This is an instrument that clearly has developed considerably from the simple wooden monochord that Johann Dillner described. I think it became more elaborate, both musically and esthetically, by a folk process.
When I was a kid, the psalmodikon was still a natural, common, instrument in some parts of the country, amongst elderly people. Since then it has almost disappeared and most swedes don´t even know what it is. I found out there is an association, Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet www.npsalmodikonforbundet.se
and through them I could buy me an instrument.
The picture is of me and my mother.
The first one is not exactly as my mother wrote it. The other is a so called nystev from southern Norway.
As the directory at https://soundcloud.com/gunnar-fredelius makes clear, Gunnar F is an accomplished nyckelharpa player with a deep interest in the older strains of Scandinavian traditional music. What I've heard of his music is modal and rhythmic, and it reminds me of the traditional Norwegian music I enjoyed so much when I heard it played on the Hardanger fiddle in summer school at the University of Oslo. I suspect that some of the pietist Swedish-American pastors I'm writing about now might not appreciate his music, but I plan to keep coming back to it -- there's a lot I can learn by listening to him.
So, Gunnar F, if you're reading this, please keep posting your music to the internet.
__________
* Footnote. A stev, according to Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stev, is a simple "folk song consisting of four line lyric stanzas." It's similar to English ballad measure, or the Common Meter of traditional Anglo-American hymnody. I'm most familiar with them in Norwegian folk music, where they're associated with simple melodies called kvedar. Link here for an arrangement of Kirsten Bråten Berg's Min Kvedarlund (my grove, or garden, of kvedar), the title song from her 1993 album of that name), along with some more background on Norwegian stev melodies and kvedar.
According to Setesdalswiki at http://www.setesdalswiki.no/wiki/Min_kvedarlund, "Min Kvedarlund" is a compilation of "bånsullar [lullabies] og småviser [little songs] etter T. Liestøl, Ingebjørg Liestøl, Jorunn Nomeland, Svein Hovden og Gro Faremo." Setesdalwiki is a local crowd-sourced website for the Setesdal region on the southern coast of Norway.
Text of a letter I just submitted to the Hon. Bruce Rauner, governor of Illinois:
Recently I wrote urging you not to close the Illinois State Museum, and I got this message back: “I appreciate you taking the time to reach out to my office about bobcat hunting in Illinois. … Please know I value your opinion and thank you for sharing it with me. Hearing from people in Illinois gives me a better idea of what is impacting local communities across the state. Knowing those opinions helps me make decisions for you in Springfield.”
I guess it’s nice to hear you say you value my opinion and it helps you make decisions about my local community, but I wasn’t talking about bobcat hunting. I wrote to tell you that closing the State Museum will damage our reputation in the international scientific community.
So, since apparently no one on your staff bothered to read my first letter, I will try again: DO NOT, repeat NOT, CLOSE the ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM, repeat ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM. If you do, it will make further research on artifacts in the museum collection, including a juvenile bobcat skeleton found in a Hopewell culture burial site, inaccessible to scientists worldwide, including the anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany whom I referenced in my first letter. If you close the museum, it will look like a CHEAP POLITICAL STUNT, repeat CHEAP POLITICAL STUNT, retaliating against a community that voted against you in last year’s Republican gubernatorial primary. And I know you wouldn’t want to give anybody that impression.
For background, including my original letter and a screen grab of Governor Rauner's full response, see post immediately below dated July 15 --
I suspect that the original, in which I discussed the bobcat skeleton at some length (for such a short letter), was run through word recognition software in the governor's office and the form letter for the bobcat bill was assigned to me on the basis of a word frequency count. Hence my repetitions in the second message.
Just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside to know how much your opinion is valued!
Last week I wrote Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner in opposition to his plans to close the Illinois State Museum. Today I got back this message:
That puzzled me at first, but then I looked up the letter -- a form that I sent to the governor's office and members of the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, who review plans to close state facilities. It said:
According to a July 2 article on the Daily News website of Science magazine, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Angela Perri, zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, hypothesizes that animal bones from a Hopewell burial site now housed at the State Museum in Springfield belonged to young bobcat which was buried with a shell bead necklace around its neck. “This is the closest you can get to finding taming in the archaeological record,” she told David Grimm, online editor of the AAAS magazine. Perri suggests that the necklace may have been a collar, and the animal may have been “a cherished pet” that was orphaned, adopted by human beings and nurtured as a small kitten. If this hypothesis can be proven, it would be important evidence of how wild animals were domesticated. However, Governor Rauner’s budget threatens that possibility.
“Unfortunately, further work on the bobcat may not be possible,” said Grimm of the AAAS. “The museum where the bones are housed is facing a shutdown due to state budget cuts, and Perri says she can no longer access the samples.”
Dr. Perry is not the only scientist who has made use of the State Musuem. Rainer Schreg, professor of pre- and early history (Ur- und Frühgeschichte) at Heidelberg University in Germany, visited an archaeological dig in Pike County in 2010 and presented a paper on his work in Germany while he was here. Dr. Schreg said recently, the museum “makes an important and multi-faceted public contribution, which is closely linked to research that is fundamental to the understanding of history and landscape in the Midwest. It is nonsense [Blödsinn] to cancel something like this." (My translation.) Science depends on the free exchange of information among scholars worldwide, and closing this museum at this time would cut off an avenue for our archaeologists and historians to exchange ideas with their peers. It would also, as Dr. Schreg suggests, damage our reputation worldwide.
We have heard plenty about the State Museum’s economic impact and its educational value, both for family groups who visit during school vacations and for students who tour Springfield during the spring. And it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of these things. But the museum’s value for scholarly and scientific research is also considerable, and it is placed in jeopardy by any effort to close the facility, even temporarily.
So, in all fairness, I guess they did read the letter. They just didn't read it with comprehension. They must have skimmed through it till they saw the word "bobcat," and sent out the bobcat letter without any further ado.
Link (not lynx) here to Facebook. When I posted Rauner's letter to Facebook, I got back some classic comments. Follow this link to see them.
Last week Jim Harris, who facilitated the Prairieland Strings when we met on the Springfield College-Ursuline Academy campus, dropped by our session and taught us -- playing by ear, no less! -- a shape-note melody called BEACH SPRING. It's one of those haunting pentatonic Anglo-American melodies, and it's been around since 1844, when Benjamin Franklin White included it in the first edition of his Sacred Harp with a hymn text that begins "Come ye sinners, poor and needy." White is regarded as the composer of the tune, although he probably heard it in oral tradition.
(Tangent: I'm not shouting when I capitalize the name of the tune, by the way. It's a convention that people sometimes use when writing about hymns -- names of tunes go in caps, like BEACH SPRING, and names of hymn texts or first lines go in quotation marks, like "Come ye sinners ..." I'm going to follow the convention here because the tune shows up with so many different texts.)
The tune
According to http://www.hymnary.org/tune/beach_spring, BEACH SPRING has been published in 113 different hymnals. For a long time, we closed our sessions at Ursula Hall playing a copyrighted version of it called the "Servant Song."
So I went home and Googled it. Turns out I found a lead sheet with chords and dulcimer tablature on Tull Glazner's website. Glazner notes that BEACH SPRING appeared in several shape-note tunebooks of the early 1800s:
The most well known of these from "The Sacred Harp" is called "Come Ye Sinners Poor and Needy", whose lyrics were written by Joseph Hart in 1759. A related hymn is called "Jesus is Willing". Over the years, many other hymns have been set to this melody, including "Jesus At Your Holy Table", "Come All Christians Be Committed", "Lord Whose Love in Humble Service", and "Healing River of the Spirit". The tune was featured as the theme song for the Ken Burns 1997 PBS documentary about the Lewis and Clark expedition.
And he links to two YouTube videos: (1) of a montage of shape note singing photos set to a background track of "Come Ye Sinners" from the 1991 edition of the Sacred Harprecorded at a shape-note singing convention held in Flora, Ind.; and (2) another version of BEACH SPRING being played on mandola with perfect tempo and dynamics.
A couple of others:
Beech Spring (The Corps of Discovery), Soundtrack to Lewis & Clark TV series.
Mountain dulcimer duet by Doc Gardner and Carolyn Marlett
Beach Spring Hymn tune played on guitar by Brad Sondahl
The text
In its most common form (although not in the Sacred Harp), the hymn text is a composite of a religious text written in 1759 by a Calvinist minister in England named Joseph Hart and an unrelated "floating verse" from American folk tradition.
Hart's verse is:
Come ye sinners, poor and needy,
Weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus ready stands to save you,
Full of pity, love, and pow'r.
And the floating verse, which is treated like a chorus, is:
I will arise and go to Jesus,
He will embrace me in His arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior,
O there are ten thousand charms.
Somehow it all fits together. Lyrics a composite from Hymnary.org.
PLEASE NOTE: There is another American folk hymn melody to which Hart's text is often sung together with the camp meeting chorus. It is a minor-key (or Aeolian modal) tune called RESTORATION, and it was collected -- or composed -- by B.F. White's brother-in-law William Walker in Southern Harmony. Here it is, as sung by the Galkin Evangelistic Team:
Last week I was asked by the dulcimer club in Petersburg to tab out "Eating Goober Peas" in DAD tuning, and it's such a fun song I decided to introduce in at Tuesday's session of the Prairieland Strings, meeting at 7 p.m. at Atonement Lutheran Church, 2800 West Jefferson, Springfield. It needs no introduction, but I found a couple of YouTube videos.
But first, a plug: The Petersburg folks have been invited to take part in a Civil War re-enactment during the Illinois State Fair in August. It's an honor, and I'll bet they have a lot of fun. Watch for them.
Two clips below:
The first is an old video of longtime folk singer Burl Ives and an impossibly young-looking Johnny Cash singing it on a TV show (Johnny Cash's? during the 60s?). Their vocals more than make up for the irritating studio band backing them.
The second is an audio clip with still pictures, of a performance by the 2nd South Carolina String Band of Gettysburg, Pa. They're a feature at the big re-enactments on the East Coast, and they make a decent effort at recreating the spirit of Civil War-era music with a contemporary folk and old-time string band sound. For what it's worth, I think they square that circle admirably. Always worth a listen.
The fount of all human knowledge at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goober_Peas tells us that "Eating Goober Peas" was first published in 1866 by A. E. Blackmar in New Orleans, with words attributed to A. Pindar and music to P. Nutt. Before you take that too seriously, however, you should know that "Pindar" is another word for the peanut and "P. Nutt" is ... well, take another look at it!
JPEG files of the original are available online in the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection on the Johns Hopkins University website at https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/12885. Dulcimer players take note -- the original is in D! That means people who aren't high sopranos can sing it.
All Hail to Thee O Blessed Morn. Carols By The Fireside - Howard J Foster.
Var hälsad, sköna morgonstund (sung by Andreas Hoas). Swedish Hymnal 1819: no.55, "Var hälsad sköna morgonstund" (Wie schön leuchtet der morgenstern). Sung by Andreas Hoas, Gammalsvenskby (Старошведське, Starosjvedske; in German: Altschwedendorf). Hoas sings in Swedish, with a Estonian-Swedish accent. The melody is flourished with ornaments and melismatic "fill-ins".
Jens Fredborg -- YouTube user -- Vär hälsad, sköna morgonstund - Ett Jesus, än påminner jag -- melody from Den Svenska Koralbok played on keyboard
Lars Mörlid & Peter Sandwall, Christian contemporary duo -- in concert in 2011 Var hälsad sköna morgonstund ("All Hail to Thee" begins at 3:40)
Attending julotta in Sweden is to many Swedish Americans one of the most treasured of memories. Snow is connected with it and sleigh bells and a journey across the countryside in the dark morning hour, brightened by the flickering flames of torches.
Many have memories of a city church within walking distance, and they remember with no less feeling of nostalgia how the snow crunched under the feet and how the light streamed out of the windows as they approached the church.
Julotta in Sweden
Thus, each one of us gathers memories out of the milieu from which we come. But to all of us the message of Christmas and the singing of "Var hälsad, sköna morgonstund" (literally, be greeted beautiful morning hour) constitute common ground. This hymn is still numbered 55 in the revised hymnal of the Swedish State Church, and the manner in which it is sung each Christmas morning indicates clearly that the congregation knows it by heart.
A Minnesota professor of Swedish descent, now deceased, maintained that it was a mistake to sing this hymn in an English translation. It had only one version, according to him, and that was the Swedish. "That is the way I learned it as a child and that is the way I continue to sing it regardless of what the rest of the congregation sings," he would say with an emphatic nod.
“Jul” or Yule, was celebrated long before Christianity came to Scandinavia.
At that time it was an observation of the winter solistice, that from then on the days would become longer and darkness gradually recede.
It was a celebration of light returning.
The word “jul” or Yule means “the change” of “the feast of feasts”, with reference to midwinter reveries celebrated around new years.
There was plenty of mead and plenty of food, indulging in a sort of magic of plenty.
It was believed that it would ensure prosperity and plenty for the coming year.
The “yule night” was loaded with supernatural powers when even the animals could speak.
---
Christmas in Scandinavia is an antidote to darkness, a way to break winter's hold. Nowhere else in the world is it celebrated quite so warmly - or with so much candlelight and food - as in this northern corner of Europe.
