Let’s go back in time to December 12, 1940 and turn our radio dial to 830 AM WNYC. It’s 6 p.m. in New York and blues singer Lead Belly has his weekly half-hour show (Folk Songs of America) where he sings songs and invites on a guest each week. On this episode he welcomes folk singer “The Dustiest Dustbowler of them all”——as the announcer calls him——Woody Guthrie, who, like the host, delivers three songs with some in between song patter.
This recording sat in the WNYC archives until being dusted off for a rebroadcast in 2007 as part of the Down Home Radio Show. The first year of the Down Home Radio Show coincided with the last year in the life of Professor Henrietta Yurchenco (1916–2007), who was a well known folk and world music radio personality, as well as an ethnomusicologist. One of her earliest radio jobs was producing this very episode for Lead Belly’s Folk Songs of America, when she was only 24. She later went on to work with other stars in the business such as Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan.
The 1940 episode was unearthed for a show on outlaw songs, both blues and folk songs that glamorize people that the law saw as common criminals, but the people loved regardless. Lead Belly sings “Frankie and Albert” and Guthrie sings “John Hardy” and “Jesse James.”
Also on the show, Guthrie introduces his own “Ballad of Tom Joad” with a story about watching The Grapes of Wrath movie (1940) three times and then writing his own version. Lead Belly ends the show with “Boll Weevil,” which, being about a much hated insect, is kind of an outlaw ballad of sorts.
The only shame is not hearing the two together, and it’s not known whether they were in the same studio at the time.
Finally the announcer adds that if you like the show, drop a line to Lead Belly courtesy of WNYC and they’ll send you all the lyrics. I wonder if anybody still has a copy of that?
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
When did chivalry come to an end? Some would say it’s a matter of historical debate. But not for Jake Mahaffy. His short, funny film lets you see the embarrassing circumstances under which chivalry died, somewhere in a marsh in 1363. Enjoy.
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As scholars of ancient texts well know, the reconstruction of lost sources can be a matter of some controversy. In the ancient Hebrew and less ancient Christian Biblical texts, for example, critics find the remnants of many previous texts, seemingly stitched together by occasionally careless editors. Those source texts exist nowhere in any physical form, complete or otherwise. They must be inferred from the traces they have left behind—signatures of diction and syntax, stylistic and thematic preoccupations….
So it is with the study of ancient languages, but since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.
The observation that Sanskrit and ancient European languages like Greek and Latin have significant similarities was first recorded by a Jesuit missionary to Goa, Thomas Stephens, in the sixteenth century, but little was made of it until around 100 years later. A great leap forward came in the mid-nineteenth century when German linguist August Schleicher, under the influence of Hegel, published his Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages. There, Schleicher made an extensive attempt at reconstructing the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, “Proto-Indo-European,” or PIE, for short, thought to have originated somewhere in Eastern Europe, though this supposition is speculative.
To provide an example of what the language might have been like Schleicher made up a fable called “The Sheep and the Horses” as a “sonic experiment.” The story has been used ever since, “periodically updated,” writes Eric Powell at Archaeology, “to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago.” Having no access to any texts written in Proto-Indo-European (which may or may not have existed) nor, of course, to any speakers of the language, linguists disagree a good deal on what it should sound like; “no single version can be considered definitive.”
And yet, since Schleicher’s time, the theory has been considerably refined. At the top of the post, you can hear one such refinement based on work by UCLA professor H. Craig Melchert and read by linguist Andrew Byrd. See a translation of Schleicher’s story, “The Sheep and the Horses” below:
A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.
Byrd also reads another story in hypothetical Proto-Indo-European, “The King and the God,” using “pronunciation informed by the latest insights into PIE.”
Note: To watch this film with subtitles, please click “cc” at the bottom of the video player.
When we talk about traditionally animated feature films, we most often talk about Disney in the West and Japanese anime in the East. But both Disney animation and Japanese animation (from the studio of the acclaimed Hayao Miyazaki or others) have their inspirations as well as their followers, and in between Disney and Japan we find the ambitious 1941 Chinese production Princess Iron Fan. Made under Japanese occupation in the thick of the Second World War, the film took three years, 237 artists, and 350,000 yuan to make, premiering as the very first animated feature made in China. Now you can watch it free (with English subtitles available at the click of the “CC” icon) on Youtube.
Princess Iron Fan adapts one of the many stories in Journey to the West, the Ming-dynasty novel recognized as one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. In it, the titular princess — or rather, a demon with the title of a princess whose “iron” fan, though magical nevertheless, is actually made of banana leaves — duels the legendary Monkey King.
Artistically fired up by a screening of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1939, the film’s creators Wan Guchan and Wan Laiming, known as the Wan Brothers, used a suite of techniques then seldom or never seen in their homeland to bring the old tale to animated life, such as rotoscoping (tracing over live-action footage), bouncing-ball lyric sequences during musical numbers, and even color effects hand-drawn on top of the black-and-white animation.
Calling the picture “an enormous achievement in wartime filmmaking,” Anime: A History author Jonathan Clements writes of its release the following year in Japanese cinemas: “This is particularly ironic, since the Wan brothers originally intended it as a protest against the Japanese, seeding the film with images of ‘the brutal reality of the daily violence in a country crippled by war.’ ” And just as Snow White motivated the Wan Brothers to take animation to a higher level, so Princess Iron Fan motivated a generation of Japanese animators to do the same. Clements quotes Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and much else besides, on his own first viewing of the film as a teenager, when he clearly understood it as “a work of resistance.” But like all the most dedicated creators, Tezuka could look beyond the Wan Brothers’ political challenge to take on their much more important artistic one.
These days everyone’s hung up on identity. But I don’t mean to talk politics, though my point is maybe inescapably political: the identities our jobs and incomes give us—the status or lack thereof—become so central to who we are in the world that they eclipse other essential aspects, eclipse the things we do strictly because it gives us pleasure to do them.
Music, dance, art, poetry.… These fall under what Alan Lomax called an experience of “the very core” of existence, “the adaptive style” of culture, “which enables its members to cohere and survive.” Culture, for Lomax, was neither an economic activity nor a racial category, neither an exclusive ranking of hierarchies nor a redoubt for nationalist insecurities. Cultures, plural, were peculiarly regional expressions of shared humanity across one interrelated world.
Lomax did have some paternalistic attitudes toward what he called “weaker peoples,” noting that “the role of the folklorist is that of the advocate of the folk.” But his advocacy was not based in theories of supremacy but of history. We could mend the ruptures of the past by adding “cultural equity… to the humane condition of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice,” wrote the idealistic Lomax. “The stuff of folklore,” he wrote elsewhere, “the orally transmitted wisdom, art and music of the people, can provide ten thousand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, ‘You are my brother.’”
Lomax’s idealism may seem to us quaint at best, but I dare you to condemn its results, which include connecting Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie to their global audiences and preserving a good deal of the folk music heritage of the world through tireless field and studio recording, documentation and memoir, and institutions like the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), founded by Lomax in 1986 to centralize and make available the vast amount of material he had collected over the decades.
In another archival project, Lomax’s Global Jukebox, we get to see rigorous scholarly methods applied to examples from his vast library of human expressions. The online project catalogues the work in musicology of Lomax and his father John, who both took on a “life long mission to document not only America’s cultural roots, but the world’s as well,” notes an online brochure for the Global Jukebox. Lomax believed that “music, dance and folklore of all traditions have equal value” and are equally worthy of study. The Global Jukebox carries that belief into the 21st century.
Since 1990, the Global Jukebox has functioned as a digital repository of music from Lomax’s global archive, as you can see in the very dated 1998 video above, featuring ACE director Gideon D’Arcangelo. Now, updated and put online, the newly-launched Global Jukeboxweb site provides an interactive interface, giving you access to detailed analyses of folk music from all over the world, and highly technical “descriptive data” for each song. You can learn the systems of “Choreometrics and Cantometrics”—specialized analytical tools for scientists—or you can casually browse the incredible diversity of music as a layperson, through a beautifully rendered map view or the colorfully attractive graphic “tree view,” below.
Stop by the Global Jukebox’s “About” page to learn much more about its technical specificities and history, which dates to 1960 when Lomax began working with anthropologist Conrad Arensberg at Columbia and Hunter Universities to study “the expressive arts” with scientific tools and emerging technologies. The Global Jukebox represents a highly schematic way of looking at Lomax’s body of work, and its ease of use and level of detail make it easy to leap around the world, sampling the thrilling variety of folk music he collected.
It is not, and is not meant as, a substitute for the living traditions Lomax helped safeguard, and the incredible music they have inspired professional and amateur musicians to make over the years. But the Global Jukebox gives us several unique ways of organizing and discovering those traditions—ways that are still evolving, such as a coming function for building your own cultural family tree with a playlist of songs from your musical ancestry.
Link Wray’s 1958 song “Rumble” remains the most dangerous-sounding instrumental blues vamp ever recorded, unmatched in its raw, slinky cool until, perhaps, John Lee Hooker’s Endless Boogie or the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. But unlike Lou Reed, Wray didn’t need lyrics about heroin addiction and sadomasochism to freak out the parents and turn on the kids. All he needed was his fuzzed-out guitar, soaking in reverb and tremolo, and a rhythm section with the minimalist instincts of Bo Diddley’s band, who were making a similar kind of sound at the same time “Rumble” hit the airwaves. But where Diddley’s songs invited listeners to dance, Wray’s “ragged, ominous chords, overdriven and dragged to a crawl,” wrote Rolling Stone, “sounded like an invitation to a knife fight.”
The song’s title capitalized on fifties panic over juvenile delinquency and gang violence, anxieties responsible for the popularity of entertainments like The Wild One, West Side Story, and Blackboard Jungle. Wray’s menacing, seductive song made the kids “go ape,” he said, the very first time he played it, improvising on the spot at a 1957 dance in Fredericksburg, Virginia, after the band received a request for a hit song they didn’t know how to play. Instead “Rumble” was born. In order to recreate the raucous, distorted sound of that first night in the studio, Wray famously punched holes in the speaker of his guitar amp and turned it into a fuzzbox, the first of its kind.
The gritty tune is said to be, writes critic and curator at the Library of Congress Cary O’Dell, “the connecting force between early blues guitarists and the later guitar gods of the 1960s (Hendrix, Clapton, Page.)” Wray was “the father of distortion and fuzz, the originator of the power chord and the godfather of metal. He seems to be as well the reason the world ‘thrash’ was invented, or at least applied to music.” These are large claims indeed, but Wray’s raunchy, shimmering guitar sounds like nothing that had come before it, and a harbinger of so much to come. Jimmy Page has described hearing “Rumble” as a pivotal moment. Iggy Pop credits it as the reason he became a musician.
Like all the best rock and roll, Wray’s brief masterpiece had the power to shock and upset the squares. The song was banned from radio stations in New York and Boston for fear it might actually incite gang violence—the first and only instrumental song to be banned from the air. “Rumble” acquired its name from the stepdaughter of Archie Bleyer, who released it on his Cadence Records. It reminded her, she said, of West Side Story’s gang fights, portrayed in the memorable Act I dance scene called “Rumble.” No other piece of music lived up better to radio network Mutual Broadcasting System’s 1958 description of the “distorted, monotonous, noisy music” they wanted to get rid of. The network meant these as derogatory terms, but they are high virtues in so much great rock and roll, and few songs have embodied them better than Wray’s biggest hit.
We denizens of the craft-roasting, wi-fi-connected 21st century know well how to drink voluminous quantities of coffee and argue our opinions. In 17th-century London, however, such pursuits could look shocking and dangerous, especially since they happened in coffee houses, the new urban spaces where, according to Res Obscura’s Benjamin Breen, you could “bet on bear fights, warm your legs by the fire, witness public dissections (human and animal), solicit prostitutes (male and female), buy and sell stocks, purchase tulips or pornographic pamphlets, observe the activities of spies, dissidents, merchants, and swindlers, and then read your mail, delivered directly to your table.”
The patrons, while engaging in all that, partook of “a new drug from the Muslim world—black, odiferous, frightening, bewitching — called ‘coffee.’ ” Quickly finding itself subject to a great deal of scientific research and everyday argument as to its merits and demerits, the drink set off the satirical “Coffee Revolt of 1674,” which began that year with a pamphlet called “The Womens Petition Against Coffee,” purporting to offer “The Humble Petitions and Address of Several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women, Languishing in Extremity of Want.”
It seems that England, once “a Paradise for Women” thanks to “the brisk Activity of our men, who in former Ages were justly esteemed the Ablest Performers in Christendome,” had, for the non-coffee-drinking sex, become a deeply unsatisfying place:
The dull Lubbers want a Spur now, rather than a Bridle: being so far from dowing any works of Supererregation that we find them not capable of performing those Devoirs which their Duty, and our Expectations Exact. The Occasion of which Insufferable Disaster, after a furious Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the Learned of the Faculty, we can Attribute to nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Cripple our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.
Coffee, so insist the Buxome Good-Women, renders the men of England “as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel’d as Envy, or an old meager Hagg over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears.” These charges drew a response in the form of the “Mens Answer to the Womens Petition Against Coffee, Vindicating Their own Performances, and the Vertues of that Liquor, from the Undeserved Aspersions lately cast upon them by their SCANDALOUS PAMPHLET.” In it, the “men” ask the “women,” among other questions,
Why must innocent COFFEE be the object of your Spleen? That harmless and healing Liquor, which Indulgent Providence first sent amongst us, at a time when Brimmers of Rebellion, and Fanatick Zeal had intoxicated the Nation, and we wanted a Drink at once to make us Sober and Merry: ‘Tis not this incomparable settle Brain that shortens Natures Standard, or makes us less Active in the Sports of Venus, and we wonder you should take these Exceptions, since so many of the little Houses, with the Turkish Woman stradling on their Signs, are but Emblems of what is to be done within for your Conveniencies, meer Nurseries to promote the petulant Trade, and breed up a stock of hopeful Plants for the future service of the Republique, in the most thriving Mysteries of Debauchery; There being scarce a Coffee-Hut but affords a Tawdry Woman, a wonton Daughter, or a Buxome Maide, to accommodate Customers; and can you think that any which frequent such Discipline, can be wanting in their Pastures, or defective in their Arms?
“The extravagant claims for coffee made by men’s-health handbills exposed the commodity to satire,” writes Markman Ellis, author of The Coffee-House: A Cultural History, but “that coffee might have a deleterious effect on male virility was a theory accorded considerable scientific respect.” Still, pamphlets like the “Womens Petition” took as their target less the biological effects of coffee than “the new urban manners of masculine sociability that coffee represents. The satirist accuses coffee-house habitués of being ‘effeminate’ because they spend their time talking, reading, and pursuing their business rather than carousing, drinking, and whoring.” If any women of the 21st century would really prefer that men go back to those old ways — well, it would at least make for an interesting argument.
In the first decade or so of the Soviet Union’s existence, “avant-garde experimenters emerged from obscurity to benefit from actual state sponsorship,” writes Harvard professor of Russian Literature Ainsley Morse. Their “aesthetic radicalism jibed nicely with political turmoil.” Among these artists were Futurists and Formalists, poets, painters, actors, directors, and many who fit into all of these categories. Most famous among them—the rakish romantic poet, writer, artist, actor, playwright, and filmmaker Vladimir Mayakovsky—had already achieved a great deal of notoriety by 1917. After the Revolution, he threw himself, “wholeheartedly” into creating playful, optimistic agitprop for the Party and “became a foghorn for socialism.”
At least at first. “In hindsight,” Morse laments, it’s hard to see the careers of these early Soviet artists “without wincing: all of these artists and writers getting cozy with the state machine that would shortly bring about their mental and physical destruction: imprisonment, exile, starvation, and suicide.” Sadly, the last of these was to be Mayakovsky’s fate; he killed himself in 1930, as Stalin’s paranoid totalitarianism began to gain strength. Yet throughout the 1920s, Mayakovsky was “driven by ideological commitment,” as well as “financial exigency,” writes Robert Bird at the University of Chicago’s “Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary.” The wildly imaginative and idealistic poet “transformed the popular media landscape of Russia” under Lenin.
Though he was harshly criticized by other artists for his work as a propagandist, “under his pen Russian poetry began to speak with a more flexible and expressive (even anarchic) play of sound and rhythm.” Maykovsky applied his talents not only to posters and poetry for adults, but to works for children as well. “The early years of the Soviet Union were a golden age for children’s literature,” notes the New York Review of Books in their description of The Fire Horse, an early example of Soviet pedagogy from Mayakovsky and fellow poets Osip Mandelstam and Daniil Kharms. The pages you see here come from the first edition of another classic Mayakovsky children’s work—a long poem called Whom Shall I Be?, first published, with illustrations by Nisson Shifrin, in 1932, two years after the author’s death.
In these verses, Mayakovsky exhorts his readers to choose their own path, “create their own identities,” even as the book channels their desires “into specific existing roles” predetermined by a seemingly very limited number of professional choices (all for men). Nevertheless, in final lines of Whom Shall I Be? Mayakovsky writes, “All jobs are fine for you: / Choose / for your own taste!” The book illustrates what Ruxi Zhang calls the “ineffectiveness of Soviet pedagogy” in its earliest stages. Lenin and his even more iron-fisted successor desired a “generation of faithful workers.” Instead, children’s books like Mayakovsky’s “overplayed Soviet fantasy,” often advocating for “freedom that fundamentally countered Soviet expectations for children to follow directions from the regime without questioning or interpreting them.”
In Mayakovsky’s earlier children’s story, The Fire Horse, several craftsmen get together to make a beautiful toy horse—which cannot be bought at the store—for a young boy who dreams of being a cavalryman. The book, writes Morse, is “transparently didactic,” explaining “in detail how the horse is made, and at the cost of whose labor.” Nonetheless, its story sounds less like an exemplar from the state’s idea of a worker’s paradise and more like a vignette from anarchist, aristocrat, and naturalist Peter Kropotkin’s society of “mutual aid.” It’s only natural that Mayakovsky and his comrades’ children’s books would reflect their stylistic daring, individualism, and wit. “It wasn’t much of a leap” for Futurist artists whose “mainstay” had been artist’s books with “interdependent text and illustrations.” Eventually, however, avant-garde artists like Mayakovsky were purged or “tamed” by the new regime.
Bird demonstrates this with the pages below from a 1947 edition of Whom Should I Be? These correspond to the pages above from 1932, showing an engineer. In addition to the replacing of an enthusiastic adult worker with an obedient, dutiful child, “the abstract depictions of constructivist buildings are replaced by realistic renderings of neo-classical edifices.” In 1932, Socialist Realism had only just become the official style of the Soviet Union. By 1947, its absolute authority was mostly unquestionable. Browse (and read, if you read Russian) all of Mayakovsky’s Whom Should I Be? at the Internet Archive, or at the top of this post.
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