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This is part of an authorized online posting of Harvey Reid's important book, "The Troubadour Chronicles," published in May 2020. It is available in paperback from this web site or from Amazon.com.
“I speak for the trees.” [The Lorax (Dr. Seuss)] Chapter 5: A Lengthy DisclaimerSince antiquity, people have been singing words in rhythm to their melodies and accompanying themselves on musical instruments, but only the tiniest sliver of what was done is visible to history, properly described or understood. As we open up the curtain on the long and interesting story of troubadours past, it will be helpful to take some time to fully remind ourselves how hard this is to do, and how little we actually know about what happened musically in the past, no matter how much we want to. Every discussion of history should do this to some degree. Anything involving music in the past cannot be a scientific, fact-based expedition, and we’ll need to use our imaginations to fill the large gaps between things we know for certain. Theories are hard to prove right or wrong, and we should embrace the wondering as a form of entertainment rather than a search for ultimate truth. There is always reasonable doubt, and most evidence is anecdotal. Making a pile of facts, names and dates, and letting that collage of images and the accompanying sea of footnotes become the story is not enough, though that approach seems to be increasingly the norm for music history research in the age of the search engine. The lenses we use to peer into the musical past give us frustratingly blurry images, and any certainty we embrace might come merely from a situation of agreement among multiple people who are asking the same questions, rather than a set of proven facts. In the realm of orally-transmitted music, the past is even less visible, so a huge proportion of our knowledge of it is permanently shrouded in uncertainty. I will make copious use of quotation marks and words like “might,” “may have,” “seems,” “appears,” “likely,” “uncertain,” and “probably,” to avoid claims of certainty or triggering negative reactions from others with strong ideas contrary to my own. We have all inherited information and ideas from the past, we all now live on the banks of vast information rivers, but what we see or scoop up does not necessarily mean the same thing to all of us. Perhaps in the future someone will find a way to extract music from old clothing or teeth, from the walls of buildings or from outer space, but presently we have none of those advanced and magical technologies like DNA, electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, radiocarbon dating, Hubble telescopes, MRI machines, muography or ground-penetrating radar that are revolutionizing many other disciplines. For any music that predates audio and video recording, we can only try to interpret the maddeningly small clues we have to work with, since there is so little genuine evidence. We cannot know precisely where the 12-bar blues, the “Travis” guitar, the Bo Diddley beat or Scruggs banjo styles originated, where square dancing, cross-harp harmonica or the “Georgia Shuffle” fiddle bowing technique came from, or even how yodeling, Hawaiian slide guitar or the “slap bass” style became part of country, jazz or bluegrass music. A written document might tell us that there was a guitar or a piece of music at a particular place or moment in history, but we cannot be sure how often or skillfully something was played by whom, what it sounded like, or whether it was rare or common when it happened. We will need to compare our mental images with whatever hard data we do have, and I will invite you to join me as we try out some new theories and address some myths, truths and popular misconceptions. According to Walter J. Ong, of the roughly 3000 known languages on Earth, only 78 have a tradition of written literature. Scholarship in musicology, especially in literate cultures, has relied extremely heavily on written evidence; music notation, books, letters, essays, articles and diaries are all major sources. Many of them only tell us what one person experienced or tried to share, and we cannot be sure that an anecdote or viewpoint from one person’s writing applies more generally to an era in time or an entire culture. Paywalls and Freedom of Information Music From the Past Since antiquity, musicians, poets, jugglers, comedians, mimes, magicians, dancers and myriad other kinds of performers and entertainers have existed everywhere, and what we know about them comes from three basic sources. Some skills, melodies or words have been passed down invisibly as information embedded within the art itself; in the lyrics of songs, in the musical notes themselves, and even in the symbols and words in our languages. Music and language sometimes behave almost like elements of genetics, with words, expressions or symbols as flags resembling the “markers” that figure so prominently in DNA research. The second source is whatever we learn from written descriptions or drawings that were made by participants, witnesses or people who encountered those witnesses or participants. Written materials are the closest we have to scientific evidence, though they can easily be incorrect, or corrupted by time and translations, as anyone who has studied the Bible knows all too well. Translating is itself unscientific, and hard to question if you don’t know both languages fluently yourself. The third, and perhaps fuzziest of all, is oral history, which involves people remembering things and telling others. We forget and imagine things, and we embellish and distort our stories without even trying to. A folklorist collecting ballads found an instance where the line, “Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” was being sung as, “Parsons age and grow merry with time.” The 19th century parlor song published in 1860 (now known as “Wildwood Flower”) that went, “I’ll twine ‘mid the ringlets of my raven black hair” was sung by the Carter Family in 1928 as “I’ll twine with my mingles and waving black hair...” The line about the flower, the “pale aronatus with eyes of bright blue…” became “the pale and the leader and eyes look like blue.” Information has always evolved as it moves around, and music is no different. There were no airlines, phones or internet in the past, and people did not travel as much as they do today, but this doesn’t mean that everything stayed put, or was only learned from family members or neighbors. Ideas and people have always circulated in various ways, though the “information highways” of the past were of course vastly smaller than they are now. We only need to look at better-known disciplines to get some perspective on the pursuit of some kind of “provable” ideas about the musical past. Oral tradition accounts and folktales claim that Vikings, Basque fishermen and Welsh sailors discovered North America long before Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci, but they all neglected to build stone buildings or leave behind other durable and verifiable physical proof of their visits. Does the lack of documentation and evidence mean they didn’t go there? Because we have no physical proof, are we still allowed to imagine that they did, or to pass on the old stories that say so? Even if we did find an old European coin or datable artifact buried in the remains of a possible Viking settlement in North America, how can we be sure that it wasn’t planted there by one of the people who claimed to dig it up? That sort of thing has happened, and so have personal attacks and character assassinations aimed at people who really did dig up genuine old artifacts, especially ones that disproved theories created or endorsed by established and influential people. The evolution of archeology has been as much about the history of arguments between competing archaeologists as it has about the pursuit of facts and evidence, and the history of anything always exhibits these same types of conflicts. Too often the truth we want is obscured by what has become a popularity contest between competing theories. Offering you my critique of D.K. Wilgus’ analysis of Francis Gummere’s expansions of Francis Child’s ballad research becomes absurd, and one must really factor in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which reminds us that all measurements and observations are affected by the location and abilities of the observers. (Unless of course, as Andrew Calhoun suggested, different observers are allowed to perceive Einstein’s theory differently.) Many of us look at our inherited folk music heritage differently, and we may easily reach different conclusions and attach different significance to existing evidence and anecdotes. Perhaps a concrete truth you could learn from academia is to be wary when you encounter something by a professor who is refuting what another professor has said. I recently read an article in the Atlantic Monthly by anthropologist-turned-apologist Stephen Nash (titled “The Underestimated Reliability of Oral Histories”) where he publicly confessed that although he was specifically trained to ignore oral histories and folklore and to stick to “real evidence,” he has now come to realize that in many cases oral histories have preserved things better than written ones. It was nice to see an eloquent admission of this idea from an “insider,” but it underscores that we have a “fence” and a “credibility gap” in history, with groups of believers on either side of it who often disagree. Historians have long struggled to accept that cultural myths, as imprecise and improbable as they often become, are usually rooted in real events, though it is especially satisfying when both the scientific evidence and folklore agree on what happened. Many now-accepted theories about ice ages, pyramids, asteroids killing off dinosaurs and of continental drift, for example, were ridiculed and dismissed when they were first proposed. Scholars have weighed in and written allegedly “definitive” works on things like the origins of poetry, but they are often motivated by trends in scholarship, research funding issues, and personal agendas. In “The Women Troubadours,” Meg Bogin claimed that Robert Briffault knew Arabic and was an impeccable source of information about the possible Arabic roots of early European troubadour poetry. But J. A. Abu-Haidar claims to be an expert, and said that Briffault didn’t know what he was talking about concerning the possible udhri poetic roots of Provençal lyrics. You’d need to learn old Occitan and Arabic languages to even begin to determine who was right, and there is no assurance you’d feel certain you found the truth even if you did that. Admittedly, this is an esoteric issue, but it involves the bedrock and the “missing link” ancestry of the troubadour arts, and humanity’s understanding of that deserves to be as clear as possible. About Paper and Parchment Poignantly, those pieces of paper remain the best and often the only tangible evidence of what happened, and those who have studied them have not had an easy time factoring in the things that were never written or could not be written on paper, or how music notation distorts and simplifies many kinds of music. I will repeatedly make the claim that the vital rhythmic and tonal elements of troubadour music from any era in history have never been able to survive on paper alone. A crucial part of the troubadour skill set involves creating and managing shifting polyrhythms, especially between the music and lyrics. Those elements are such a part of modern guitar playing it is natural to assume that they have existed before, but were only able to be passed on orally. Flamenco guitar is a good example of some of those skills that have survived, and if that style of music is a model for what happened, we may have lost a great deal of the rhythmic and stylistic elements of other oral European folk music during the centuries when the printing press was dominant. The astonishing complexity of traditional African drumming is another testament to the sophistication of some music that was long perceived as primitive, and not written down. William Henderson, in “A History of Germany in the Middle Ages” also took pains as early as 1894 to explain that we must be careful not to take old documents and accounts at face value, and that they are often found to be exaggerated or incorrect. “This analyzing of the language and peculiarities of style of mediaeval authors, taken in connection with other criterions, has led, often, to the discovery that writings were spurious.” He strove to separate “fact” from other information, though who knows if his work was ultimate truth any more than the things he sought to disprove. He reminded us that “A great mark of progress in the present century, and a further proof of the constructive tendency of the work of modern historians, is the systematic employment of charters, deeds, and legal documents as historical sources. Every gift, every privilege granted in earlier times, almost every transaction of any kind was duly certified by a deed signed and sealed in the presence of witnesses. Probably a hundred thousand such pieces of parchment have come down to us from the Middle Ages alone.” He lists numerous anecdotes from history, including the story of William Tell the archer, that have come to be “outed” as fictional. In our zeal to know more about the past we can easily read too much into an old sentence or accept any document or story as fact. Maybe William Tell was a real person and maybe he did shoot an apple off his son’s head with an arrow. We can never be completely sure. All information from the distant past is potentially incomplete, incorrect or out of context, and the passage of centuries has done little to correct or clarify the little we do have about music. It is also just as easy to assume something didn’t happen because we don’t have written proof from a “verified source” that it did. We are forever working only with whatever small percentage of evidence has managed to survive. All inquiries that rely on fossils or other kinds of tangible evidence should perhaps come with an asterisk next to the conclusions, since we have no idea what other artifacts were lost or damaged or have yet to be found. Documents preserved in monasteries or other isolated religious enclaves were generally better protected from war and other upheavals that destroyed evidence, and the authors of those documents were literate and respected, often referred to as “credible sources.” We don’t know, however, how much they actually knew of what was going on outside their enclaves, and being connected with the church, they weren’t necessarily sympathetic towards the troubadours and peasant musicians. They had their own agendas and viewpoints as they carefully wrote on their durable parchments in their secluded worlds. D.K. Wilgus said it nicely: “Oral, popular poetry would not have been likely to find a record in the monkish chronicles.” Documents were hand-copied until recently, which can easily mask the age or origin of their contents, and it is just as easy to preserve or copy an incorrect or misleading document as a correct one. Old instruments in museums often have elaborate inlay and decorations, but that doesn’t mean that all instruments made in the past looked like that. It probably only means that people took far better care of the pretty ones. Almost everything we know about the German medieval troubadours known as “minnesingers” comes from the Codex Manesse, an extraordinarily beautiful 14th century illuminated manuscript that was preserved in a monastery in Switzerland. Who knows what was written on the ugly manuscripts? The famous fire in the library of Alexandria long ago did incalculable damage to our knowledge of history, and the penchant for warring parties in the Middle Ages to completely destroy and sometimes immolate entire cities has not been helpful to our understanding of cultural life from the past. Class Issues It was easy to dismiss music of strange-looking and far-away cultures as “barbaric” and “primitive.” The white men, especially those from the dominant and ultra-colonialist British Isles, who tried to explain music during that era when such men felt the urge to explain everything in writing, were quite baffled by the breadth and beauty of the folk musics of their own country that they personally knew about and liked. Even as they were thrilled by the new “organized” and “civilized” music coming from Italy and Germany, some tried very hard to show that music from ancients, Orientals and savages, as they called them, shared properties with ignorant folk musics of their own countries. A common view was to sweep them all under the rug as being “proto-music” or developmental phases that could be quickly explained and dismissed as though they were musical versions of stone tools. Observers likened folk processes to evolution, and folklorists like Francis Grummere spread fanciful ideas that folk songs were created communally and might, “spring up among men-at-arms and in the dances” and then be “jostled into unity by the chances of time” and “forced into poetic unity by the pressure of tradition.” Frank Sidgwick weighed evidence and arguments and voted that “a man and not a people” created the folk songs in his efforts to refute the so-called “communal theory” of folklore. Other scholars felt the need to create a distinction between “illiterate” people who were part of a society that was based on literacy, as opposed to “non-literate” people, the aborigines and savages who were part of a different kind of culture altogether. A surprising number of publications focused on trying to explain the importance of Scottish airs and songs, though many admitted that the Irish and Welsh and to some extent the other mostly-white countries in Europe had some good ones too. Old accounts and descriptions of Norwegian hardanger fiddle playing (hardingfele) are amusing, where observers admitted liking the sound but disapproved of the unorganized and uncivilized ways the music was played and created. James McPherson fired a major volley in 1760 when he published “Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language,” which he followed in 1761 with “Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, together with Several Other Poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal.” They were met with huge international acclaim, and brought forth the idea that common people or perhaps a mysterious Homer-like minstrel named Ossian had written something large and good that educated, upper-class people could actually enjoy, and that competed in value with the literary work of educated writers. Thomas Jefferson was so taken by it that he vowed to learn Gaelic so he could read the poems in their original language. Theories were proposed, and arguments abounded about how anonymous genius creators somehow could have left high-quality art amongst the peasants, mixed with what they called “artless graces,” “pleasing simplicity” and “romantic wildness.” One of the established theories of folk music became the idea described by ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl in 1926: “the members of the folk community are unable to create something new; they only take over what is created by the elite… and while using it, simplify and debase it.” Louise Pound wrote that “the typical process…is a process of decay.” Most prominently Joseph Ritson and James Beattie, but also many others at the time, hotly debated whether “shepherds and milkmaids,” “bards and minstrels” or perhaps hidden, unnamed educated “great men” wrote all this music and poetry. The learned white men were also baffled by the modality and pentatonic scales of much of the peasant music. Those yielded music that didn’t conform to the newly-accepted rules of harmony and arrangement that were strutting about in the works of the great composers. They created operas, symphonies and other examples of proper composition that almost never happened to be in the Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian or Mixolydian modes often used in folk music. According to Matthew Gelbart’s exhaustively-researched “The Invention Of Folk Music and Art Music,” all manner of convoluted theories emerged among the explainers, peaking in the late 18th and early 19th century. It literally took several centuries for academia to evolve our more tolerant and understanding modern concepts of folklore. Most of us now seem to accept that unknown and often illiterate or “uneducated” individuals can originate interesting music that sometimes spreads and mutates, and that this knowledge is learned and often modified, often invisibly, among the populations. We’ll look more closely at how the peak of the ignorance among the “educated” about the processes of folk music seemed to coincide exactly with the peak of Western music’s embracing of reading music from the printed page. Oral History and Folklore Oral history can be very valuable when you need to look back just a few generations, and perhaps ask old people what their childhoods were like or what their parents or grandparents used to say or do. Jennifer Post, in her engaging “Music In Rural New England Family and Community Life 1870-1940,” did a beautiful job of interviewing older people and studying transcripts of interviews done in the recent past to assemble information about music from not that long ago, since there were almost no recordings and few documents to be found. After longer intervals, though, and outside of very stable and insular societies, there often isn’t any way to tell fact from folktale or myth. Scientifically-minded people tend to completely discount folk knowledge because of its variability and uncertainty, yet there often are valuable things encoded in it. Almost every really old culture has a flood myth quite similar to the story of Noah’s ark and the Biblical flood. When they are all assembled and compared, a kind of truth emerges, that leads some researchers to think that collectively this kind of “knowledge” is acceptable evidence that there really was a world-wide flood ten to twelve thousand years ago. Such theories are especially tenable when you consider other kinds of more tangible evidence like seashells in the Alps and Andes mountains at very high altitudes. Journalist/author Graham Hancock has written quite a number of very interesting and tantalizing books that often involve taking myths, oral histories and folktales more seriously. When many of them from different places all tell the same story, and are corroborated by existing physical evidence it’s academically harsh to merely dismiss them all as “untrue” or “unproven.” We don’t know why people all over the world universally say “OK.” We don’t know where playing cards came from, or why the red kings on those cards usually have special art on them. A good example of how quickly things get unclear when we try to look into the past is that we don’t even know where the $ symbol came from for the American dollar, though the most popular theories connect it to the symbol for the Mexican peso. The United States is not even 250 years old, and we have already lost track of why we use an S with one or two lines through it to represent the currency that was established by our fledgling government in 1785, barely a hundred years before my grandparents were born. Possibly the most popular melody at the time of the Revolutionary War was “Yankee Doodle,” but what in the world is a “Yankee” or a “Doodle?” “Yankee” is probably a variant of the Dutch word janke, since New York was originally a Dutch colony. In Dutch it means ‘little Jan’ or ‘little John,’ which isn’t particularly helpful. We also don’t know where the musical term “boogie-woogie” came from, where the character Santa Claus originated, or why we accept and celebrate the idea of the Easter Bunny. Even the word Easter is an odd one to apply to an important Christian holiday, since it comes from Eostre (Ostara), a rather minor English pagan goddess. Alfred E. Newman, the freckle-faced grinning character that MAD Magazine adopted in the 1950s as their “mascot” is also an untraceable element of folklore that seems to date only to the 1890s, but is already shrouded in mystery as to its origins. I doubt you will be able to find satisfactory, certified-as-true explanations of innumerable cultural practices and beliefs, and you’ll need to get used to feeling puzzled as we spin out our long ball of musical yarn. Again I recommend looking at all of this as entertainment, and that we all try to enjoy the processes of wondering and imagining, rather than taking sides or drawing lines in any sand. Ideas, memes, language and culture travel around in populations very much the same ways that diseases and pathogens do. The mathematical models are nearly identical. A good example of how frustrating it is to try to go backwards in time musically is the realm of nursery rhymes. Those little rhyming songs, chants and taunts that many of us learned as children, like “Ring around the rosy” or “London Bridge is falling down” and even “Liar liar, pants on fire” have very ancient histories, but are impossible to trace, because they are learned orally, quickly and invisibly. They are essentially memes, and since we often absorb them when we are very young we usually don’t remember how we learned them. Millions are familiar with them, but we don’t know for certain where they came from, how they got all around the world or into our individual heads, nor can we track their endless variations. A parent, sibling or housekeeper or nursemaid might have sung them to a child anywhere, and there are similarities and differences among the versions we know of them that are perfect examples of the elusive nature of any kind of oral tradition or folklore. We don’t even know where the now-widespread children’s song “The Wheels on the Bus” came from, though it first seems to have appeared in the 1950s. Jokes work the same way, especially dirty ones that are not printed often. There are very old oral-tradition jokes circulating, that like peasant music don’t always follow traceable or observable pathways of information. We only have limited understanding of what music was doing in stable societies long ago, but we know vastly less about what gypsies or wandering entertainers were doing at the time, or how vital their contribution was to troubadour history. Their presence adds a “wild-card” element to any model that tries to explain how music moved around Europe, and it is completely possible that undocumented traveling musicians carried important musical ideas around for a very long time, and to some extent they still do. They obviously brought with them all sorts of rhyming, rhythmic songs played on portable instruments. When a new musician passed through, doing things people hadn’t seen or heard before, it was the historical (and probably prehistoric) equivalent of listening to the radio. If the listener liked the music and wanted lessons, or perhaps was a noble or otherwise influential person, or even knew how to write, then the knowledge could pass from oral to literate. Young people joining the military or going away to school often brought songs to other places or brought things home, all in untraceable ways. One sailor on one ship could have brought a song, a musical instrument, a joke or a disease across an ocean and caused it to spread all over a continent. Plenty of sailors also went plenty of places with ideas and diseases that did not spread widely or “go viral.” Just like today, some things spread and other things don’t. It’s entirely possible that even a single charismatic and skilled fingerpicking guitarist on a boat traveling on the Ohio or Mississippi River around the year 1870 could have had a major impact on the entire history of American guitar and troubadour music. Unfortunately, we may never know more than we do now about whether that happened. Eyewitnesses Eyewitness sources are necessarily limited in what they can say about music, which would likely sound very different in distant cultures, with nothing resembling recording technology to preserve anything specific. The Swarganga Music Foundation website said it nicely, though they were discussing Indian folk music: “Carrying the tradition forward by oral tradition, not in a documented or codified form is the important aspect of folk music. Documentation of literature of folk songs, music notation and audio documentation is a recent phenomenon.” Ultimately, we have almost nothing in the way of measurable or “hard data” that would lead us to believe that we really knew what music people were playing in the various corners of Europe in the Middle Ages, which unfortunately is precisely what many modern people want to know more about. “Fake news” might have spread more easily in earlier times than today. Now and then a new source turns up and joins the collective knowledge of the libraries and collections preserving them, but for the most part there haven’t been many new eyewitness accounts or pictures of medieval musicians, and the passing centuries have mostly meant that fading manuscripts have faded some more, or been lost, damaged or stolen. The Medieval Mind Understanding or projecting our modern mindset into the practices and sociology of slavery of the Antebellum South is a more familiar but nonetheless difficult problem. Less dramatically, the disgust, derision and even punishment that upper-class Europeans heaped upon street musicians, ballad singers, guitarists and fiddlers in centuries past might also be incomprehensible to the modern mind that has for the most part learned to enjoy and respect art from “primitive cultures.” We should keep these sorts of perspectives in mind as we project our imaginations and world views into the past. Who Curates the People’s Music? Scholars or Non-Scholars? The folklore and culture we all inherit includes a huge variety of songs, melodies, rhythms, slang, jokes, riddles and puzzles, fiddle tunes, folk tales, costumes, recipes and whatever else you can’t stop people from passing on to their companions and descendants. Educated, powerful and literate people have participated intermittently in this stream of information transmittal, and have both helped, hindered and ignored the “peoples’ arts” all through history. In trying to understand our musical and cultural heritage, we have to pick apart what are often two different rivers of information: the “scholarly” or “institutional” body of knowledge, and the “people’s knowledge.” Old documents with songs written on them might have come only from the academic or literate world and not necessarily been a reflection of what people in general were doing. I don’t get the impression that any of the authors of the scholarly books on folk music were skilled folk musicians themselves, at least until the 20th century when Mike Seeger, John Jacob Niles, Ry Cooder and some others got involved who understood the processes and were effective performers. Carl Sandburg was a pleasant singer. Bill Malone is a capable troubadour, as are Stephen Wade and Elijah Wald, and they have contributed some of the best writing and thinking about American roots music. Ballad collectors who followed Francis Child preserved his template of laboriously organizing, labeling and comparing written transcripts of ballad lyrics collected in different times and places, and by drawing inferences and conclusions from those comparisons. They also modified them as they saw fit, for the most part removing the bawdy parts. The success of Child’s work, boosted by Englishman Cecil Sharp’s efforts a few years later, spawned new generations of song collectors and folklorists who tried to penetrate into the farthest reaches of rural America, primarily to find remnants of those British Isles ballads. The results of their work have had noticeable consequences on the lives of modern American folk musicians, and what we all collectively know of our musical heritage. Those early folklorists greatly helped to shape the image that modern American musicians and audiences have of their shared musical history, though the fact that most of them were conservative white men meant that they overlooked and misinterpreted quite a bit. Because they were so focused on British Isles ballads, they also tended to ignore other music they encountered. The music of those ballads was not part of Child’s or Percy’s studies, or most of their followers in folklore, nor were the lives of the musicians who sang them. The lyrics to the songs were written on paper, while the sources were credited with just a footnote or annotation giving the name and date where the version was collected, and perhaps the occupation, state or town of residence of the musician. In 1915 Pliny Earle Goddard (1869-1968), the retiring president of the American Society of Folk-Lore published an essay in the Journal of American Folk-Lore (Vol. 28) titled “The Relation of Folk-Lore to Anthropology,” that was a speech he had given in 1914. Here was a man at the center of the academic world of American folklore, at a time just before the world would discover the huge richness of blues, jazz, gospel, hillbilly and early country music, who with his fellow scholars in linguistics, archeology, ethnology and anthropology were focused almost entirely on the idea of folklore and folk music as they applied to indigenous people. The idea that there might be other folklore or folk music around them, made by the people who grew their food and cleaned or built their houses, seemed to be invisible to them. Among what Goddard called “the cultures of unlettered peoples,” he did manage to say that “The greatest lack in our comparative studies is that of music,” but he spent two pages trying to connect the Hopi sun-dance to Homer’s Odyssey and American Indian artifacts to the Greek vases from Mycenae. The other articles in the journal were about folk dances from Mexico, animal fables of the Chuh Indians, Athapapascan myths, the Syrian Lamb, Eskimo songs, Batanga and Penobscot folk tales, and poetry of Northern Brazil. Edwin Piper got closer to home by sharing some children’s play-party songs from the Midwest, but the section “Songs and Rhymes From the South” by E. C. Perrow jumped out. It was 120 sets of lyrics and eight melodies of songs, said to be about drinking and gambling, though without much discussion of purpose or meaning. They were collected from sources said to be “country whites,” “mountain whites” or “negroes.” Dr. Perrow was born in Virginia, trained at Trinity College (NC) and received his doctorate at Harvard, and became a professor of English at the University of Missouri and Mississippi, then at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. He was one of the earliest collectors of Southern American folk songs, and published 270 of them in three issues of the Journal between 1912 and 1916. He did not seem to have rallied the Society or the nation to join him in his appreciation of rural American music, and his work remains independent and obscure, though he did publish the earliest version of “On Top of Old Smoky.” Like fellow early collectors Howard Odum, Dorothy Scarborough, Natalie Curtis and Mellinger Henry, Perrow had a recording machine, but tragically, they all seem to have tossed out the precious cylinders after transcribing the lyrics and melodies, not realizing how incredibly valuable they would be today. The slow pace and difficulty with which early folksong collectors came to a realistic understanding of the music of rural American people is quite remarkable, now that we have some better perspective on the situation. The academic pursuit of Elizabethan ballads in the rural South or the obsessive stalking of Delta blues musicians by educated white guys with tape recorders are now seen as the somewhat geeky behavior they really were, and the native music of “folk people” in America no longer needs anyone’s doctoral theses to give the art validity or credence. In 1950 it was really hard for even smart people to understand that Robert Johnson could be so skilled or that his guitar or singing style could be so far from what educated white people did with their voices or guitars. It was hard to understand how Jerry Lee Lewis could do what he did on the piano, how French Canadian Jean Carignan could play his fiddle style, or even that Elvis could sing or gyrate like that. The explosion, where various folk musics invaded and conquered popular music, was both disorienting and extremely exciting. When people who grew up on church hymns and Stephen Foster songs heard boogie-woogie piano, they understandably were astounded. When Scotsman Lonnie Donegan heard Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie recordings it galvanized him, and when those Liverpool Lads and the young Mick Jagger first heard recordings of Howling Wolf, Slim Harpo, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, they went nuts too. Now we know not to characterize learning by audio as being somehow impure or not valid, since that is what stirred the musical pot the most for about 90 years beginning around 1925. I wouldn’t have learned much by seeing Doc Watson or Leo Kottke come through town once and play out on the street by the railroad depot, but with my record player and my guitar in 1972 I was able to really penetrate their complex styles of playing. In and Out of Oral Tradition
Through a lack of information, two of these songs were able to masquerade as folk songs, and A.P. Carter and Ralph Peer were able to copyright and publish the other as their own property. Both errors happened presumably because both the “scholars” and business people underestimated the speed and breadth that songs were already traveling in almost invisible ways, and no one had access to enough good information to know what was really going on. As soon as recordings arrived, people began to learn from them, though the process was slightly different, because it was faster, more accurate, and involved rhythm, tone and dynamics and not just words and melody. The archive of early recordings of rural performers in the 1920s are full of both similar and different versions of songs by musicians from different places who never knew or heard each other. Record companies could easily record alternate versions of a song that was already embedded in folk knowledge, thus documenting the variations. People also could get their hands on a 78rpm record, hop a train and take the music across the country, so that within days it could invisibly spread anywhere, spawn imitations or even merge and interbreed with a local version from another area. The celebration of oral learning doesn’t make sense today in the light of our better understanding of music as information, and it didn’t make sense to the folk musicians who were the sources of the ballads being collected. They were puzzled and even offended that the folklorists were not interested in having them sing original or popular songs into the recording machines. The general rules for folklore collecting were that the songs had real value if they were learned orally, spanned generations, and if the sources were not professional musicians. This confusion about sources and learning pathways has also led to situations where folk artists feel the need to conceal the source of their songs in order to please the song collectors or listeners. Folk music legend Jean Ritchie (1922-2015) made an international career out of singing the ballads and songs she learned growing up in rural Kentucky, always being careful to stress how she learned to play the dulcimer from her father or neighbors, singing songs she heard in her youth. One of her best-known albums, released in 1957 was called “Songs of Her Kentucky Mountain Family.” But she let it slip on page 73 in her 1988 autobiography “Singing Family of the Cumberlands” that her father Balis and his brother Isaac together ordered a “talking machine” in 1905 from Sears & Roebuck and walked 80 miles to the nearest freight office in Jackson, Kentucky to bring it home to their small town of Viper, where the whole village came to listen and marvel. She perhaps learned from the record player as much as from relatives or neighbors, but it’s not as good a story to tell when you come from a tiny rural town and it is the height of the “folk boom.” North Carolina folk and bluegrass legend Arthel “Doc” Watson (1923-2012), just a year younger than Ritchie, also remembered the day his father brought home a Victrola with 50 records, and his repertoire was full of songs he learned from earlier recording artists like the Delmore Brothers, Carson Robison and even Elvis Presley. Doc didn’t hide where he learned his music, and press reviews for his first recordings and concerts often made strange claims that he was good, but wasn’t “pure” folk music. By the latter part of his career the sheer force of his artistry had made it clear to all that whatever way he learned was fine, and it is possible he might have greatly helped pave the way for modern musicians playing traditional American music to be respected by academia even if they learned from recordings and were not part of the actual oral cultures where the music had supposedly originated, according to established rules of folklore. Though Watson himself was from the mountains of North Carolina, he once told historian Bill Malone that he had to work hard to learn many of the ballads and traditional songs from his home region that the 1960s folk audiences assumed he already knew. You can hear it in his introduction on a live performance version of “Little Orphan Girl,” recorded at a folk festival, where he said that his mother and his grandmother both knew this song, “so it must be pretty old.” It’s actually extremely likely he learned the song from the Delmore Brothers’ 1933 recording “The Frozen Girl,” since his melody and many verses match their version, and he was known to have learned so many other songs from their records. Doc was playing a Les Paul electric guitar in a rockabilly band when he was “discovered” and turned into a touring “folk musician.” The hillbillies were no longer just learning from their neighbors and relatives, and many musicians we envision as having learned from the “folk process” often “cheated” by listening to records and radios. Should we join the folklore purists and be disappointed? Of course not. When those recordings came along, vastly more of the musical elements could be passed along to the listeners. American orally and aurally-transmitted music literally exploded, and we have all enjoyed the fruits of its growth, even as it jumped out of its traditional containers and spread wildly around. Nearly every song I ever learned came from either a recording or from other people who were not my family, neighbors or even an older generation. Folklore and Money The fact that ballad collectors were so focused on only the oral tradition can seem narrow-minded, especially by musicians who do not read music, though it is understandable that educated people could become fascinated with the idea of large numbers of antiquated songs surviving for centuries in the memories of illiterate, lower-class people. It is impressive how many songs were passed along without paper or recordings, but it is also unfortunate that if someone wrote a song centuries ago, it didn’t remain intact and we can’t know the author or provenance of the song because of imprecise information paths. The early collectors were convinced that the proper or academically valid way to learn a folk song was from another person, without the use of paper or recordings. Since they ignored the non-traditional songs that their sources knew, we don’t have field recordings of those. The most hallowed sources of ballads were the singers who had committed the most song lyrics to memory, which in the light of the 21st century information glut becomes an interesting distinction. A young person today might wonder why anyone would bother to learn hundreds of songs when they could just look them up on a smartphone whenever they needed to. Blind Arkansas singer Emma Dusenbury was found and recorded in 1936, and was responsible for 116 songs in the Library of Congress Archive of Folksong, the most of any source. Dusenbury knew a lot of old songs and remembered them well, though in the bigger picture the value of her achievement is debatable. As a musician who knows between five hundred and a thousand songs that are committed to memory, I know plenty of other singers who also know large numbers of songs, though we were never informed that there were rules of learning and remembering, or some kind of juried competition of English-language song lyric preservation. The fact that Dusenbury may not have learned hers from books or records made her of a different ilk to the collectors. It takes some time and effort to put them into memory, though of course the more often we perform a song the better it seems to stick there. Our memories are not precise machines, and we troubadours and singers tend to keep notebooks of lyrics that we sometimes glance at to refresh our memories, or even read or consult if we haven’t sung a song for a long time. We seem to more easily remember the tunes, but we often write the lyrics and sometimes the chords down on paper for reference. Maybe that is just our way of compensating for our musical illiteracy, like a blind person managing the money in their wallet. It doesn’t seem reasonable to consider the use of paper or a recording as a disqualifier, as if I don’t really know a song or it is not worthy or valid if I used paper or a sound recording to learn it, or if I have to glance at the words or the first line of the third verse before singing it to an audience. The People as Researchers Internet and Search Engine Issues Songs vs. Poetry Storing Words With Music My Message and Myself as a Messenger I have made a living for almost 50 years outside of both the music industry and the academic world of folk music; I have written and arranged many songs, published dozens of books, including the first college textbook for folk guitar, published by Random House in 1984, and likely the first “desktop-published” book and the first “Indie” CD. I have recorded over 500 tracks on over 30 albums of music, forming as large and diverse a body of recorded solo troubadour music as anyone has produced. I have learned and performed considerable amounts of music, including Joplin and Bach pieces, made my own arrangements of traditional songs and instrumental pieces on a number of instruments, pioneered new tunings of my instruments and developed new playing techniques. I helped develop new instrument accessories and amplification technologies, gave more than 6000 live performances, and collaborated with quite a number of other creators and performers. Whatever I am or whatever I am not, I’m certainly not an outsider looking in, and I think it is long overdue in the annals of troubadour and roots music history for someone to tell this story who understands and practices the art form. There is no Nobel Prize in my profession, no relevant Grammy award; there are no elected officials, respected journalists or news commentators in our field. We modern troubadours are an unorganized, independent and unruly bunch; we have no trade organizations, membership societies or annual meetings, though we did about 700 years ago in some parts of Europe. There are no eminent Professors of Troubadourology at hallowed universities, and no directors of government agencies who might stand up like a Poet Laureate or Surgeon General and speak to the nation with authority about an important troubadour-related issue. Popular musicians rarely offer much in the way of advice or guidance to beginners, and the list of famous troubadours who have devoted significant time or energy to helping others learn or understand the craft is sadly a very short one. I can only laugh to imagine that Bob Dylan might find out about my work and make a speech or announce a press conference on the subject to perhaps help more people learn about troubadour music and history. One of the most talented, influential and prolific troubadours of our time, his support could help the cause immensely, but that is an unlikely fantasy and not a plan. Popular musicians who are the inspirations and role models for most new musicians, and who could do the most to help our cause, do not seem to feel obligated to a community of fellow musicians or driven by a visible altruistic desire to help the next generations learn the craft. That work thus falls to those of us in the lower ranks, or simply to chance, evolution and the entropic forces of information. In the next chapter I will try to explain to you why, if you intend to learn to become one of these innumerable, unnameable singing troubadour/musicians, there is no good reason why you need to learn about reading music, using staffs, clefs, rests and quarter notes, and those colorful Italian words like rubato or fortissimo. I feel certain that many readers will instantly stiffen and question the authority of my claims. You could apply George Occam’s famous “razor” principle, and conclude that it is much simpler and therefore more likely that I am mistaken or delusional than that a deeply-ingrained, centuries-old system of notating music could be significantly flawed or limited to the point that large numbers of people would be wise to ignore it. It is very likely that you will have never heard anyone express the viewpoint that reading music is useless, at least for some types of musicians. No one has given troubadours or guitarists a seat in the orchestra, so why should we limit ourselves by using their notation systems and protocols, that completely ignore huge parts of what makes our music special? When I tell you in Chapter 13 about the disrespect and outright persecution of musicians like me that happened in the past, you will probably rush to your favorite internet search engine to try to find out if I am lying to you, mistaken or exaggerating. First let’s grapple with this pesky and imperfect relationship between troubadour music and paper. I'm trying to raise issues, questions and awareness in the world of modern troubadours... I want people to find this in web searches and to read it. I don't have a way for you to comment here, but I welcome your emails with your reactions. Feel free to cheer me on, or to disagree... Chordally yours, HARVEY REID ©2021
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