>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
[ Silence ]
>> Hello, everyone.
>> Hi.
>> Betsy Peterson: Grab a seat if you don't have one yet,
and I'm up here amidst the hull
of Stephen's paraphernalia and everything.
But my name is Betsy Peterson, and I'm the director
of the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress,
and I want to welcome you today to our latest presentation
in the Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series.
The Botkin Series, as I know some of you here know,
is a chance for the Folklife Center to highlight some
of the best scholarship, and musings,
and writings about ethnomusicology, oral history, folklife,
and cultural heritage, while also allowing us
to enhance our collections here at the Folklife Center.
It's an opportunity to share knowledge and also to bring
in new material to our collections.
Each lecture is videotaped, and becomes part
of the permanent collection, as you've probably seen
from some of the rearranging here.
And so in addition, the lectures will later be posted on the website,
so you will be able to, if you want to, come and revisit the talk.
In a month or so, it will be up and ready for you to listen to it.
But in the meantime, since it is being recorded, a couple of things:
one, we will have lights on so my apologies for that,
but it's a necessary evil.
I also would love to ask you to refrain
from taking photographs during the lecture, and yes, and not recording.
And if your cell phone is on right now,
the obligatory plea for you to turn it off.
But enough of the formalities.
Today I have the honor
of introducing the distinguished researcher, performer,
recording artist, and author, Stephen Wade,
who I know many here know.
Originally from Chicago, Stephen has dedicated his life
to studying American folklife, and he is the embodiment
of that rare combination of scholar, artist and gentleman.
[Laughs] He's been a musician since childhood,
and has compiled an impressive career as a stage performer.
His award-winning original theatrical events include
"Banjo Dancing," which ran for more than 10 years
at Washington's Arena Stage,
making it one of the longest off-Broadway --
longest running off-Broadway shows in American theater history.
His acclaimed theater show, "On The Way Home," honored the Jeff --
was honored with the Joseph Jefferson Award,
which recognizes outstanding theater artists in the Chicago area.
And in 2003, Wade received the Helen Hayes / Charles MacArthur Award
for excellence in Washington, DC area professional theater
for his work as a composer, adapter, and musical director
for the world premiere of Zora Neale Hurston's, "Polk County."
I could go on, but I know you are here to listen to Stephen.
And so I have the pleasure of introducing him today as the author
of a wonderful new book, which I hope if you haven't bought it,
you will, "The Beautiful All Around Us: Field Recording
and the American Experience."
It's a fabulous book.
He's a fabulous writer.
And it's very special to all of us here
at the American Folklife Center.
And Stephen has been a long-time friend of the Folklife Center,
has worked deeply with our collections,
is extremely knowledgeable, has worked with Alan Jabbour here,
one of the previous directors, Peggy Bulger, and now I have the pleasure
of jumping into that line.
So Stephen is going to talk to us a little bit about that today,
and about the writing of it, what he's been finding,
and how he tracked down communities, families, and performers connected
with early Library of Congress Field Recordings,
all across the American South.
It's a lovely, intimate piece of writing.
So without further ado, please welcome Stephen,
and please stick around at the end.
If you haven't bought the book, Stephen will be out front
to autograph, and sign, and talk to folks.
So thanks, welcome Stephen.
[ Applause ]
>> Stephen Wade: Thank you.
Thank you, thank you.
"The Beautiful Music All Around Us," $25, [laughter] 504 pages,
CD in the back, oversized, paper jacket; all right.
[Laughter] How can you afford not to get it?
Okay. "The Beautiful Music All Around Us" began its 18-year journey
at the Library of Congress.
I find it stirring to mark its completion here with all of you,
but especially with those among us today who work and have worked
at the Library's Archive of Folk Culture
and the American Folklife Center.
This is a homecoming.
And I thank you for this occasion.
So please stand so that I might salute you
for your support over these many years.
[Applause] Get up Jim.
All you guys who work here, okay.
Thank you so much; really.
[ Applause ]
I mean it.
I'm glad too.
The disappearance arises within a series named for Benjamin A. Botkin,
folklorist, poet, writer, and anthologist.
The last time I spoke at the Library was also in relation to Ben Botkin.
In November 2001, I participated in the Living Lore Conference,
a gathering sponsored by the Center,
which celebrated Botkin's extraordinary legacy.
More than simply words drawn from our common vocabulary,
"Living Lore" identifies an endeavor Botkin launched
as National Folklore editor
of the Federal Writers' Project in the late 1930's.
His Living Lore units documented current folk expression
and vernacular creativity.
Years later I drew heavily upon their contents.
They played a shaping role in my stage pieces,
and inspired so much of my research.
Not surprisingly, he appears too in the opening and closing pages
of "The Beautiful Music All Around Us."
Botkin's great heart, his capacious body of work,
and his inherently democratic vision provide us all a bountiful indelible
and ongoing inheritance.
Indeed, Botkin viewed folk tradition as something both constant
and supremely supple, with custom and wisdom adapting
to changing circumstances, not through formal means, such as laws
and regulations, but through observing, and doing,
and responding, and venturing, ready for anything and everything
that may come along, or as he described living lore,
"responsive to the mood of the moment,
though it had behind it the accumulated mother wit and wisdom
of generations," unquote.
With those words he recalled setting fieldworkers off to gather tales
in decidedly modern circumstances.
From bar room stools to skyscraper hoists,
WPA writers followed cabbies, and garment workers,
tunnel diggers, and construction stiffs.
Botkin himself prides the example
of New York City fish peddler, Clyde "Kingfish" Smith.
Depending on the neighborhood he entered, Kingfish varied his rhymes
and the tunes he set them to.
He found strategy good for business.
I got, "Shad, ain't you glad."
[Laughter] Could be sung the "Jumping Jive" at Harlem,
or "Bei Mir Bistu Shein" in Williamsburg.
Wherever he went, he said, "a lotta people waited
for my individual cry".
"The main thing required," he said, "is you've got to be in the mood."
[Laughter] Here in this most ancient trade
of street hawker comes something sweetly current,
and the most ordinary transition imaginable has become a pretext
to fill the streets with sung poetry.
Kingfish Smith embodied Living Lore's realities.
On coming to the Library in 1942, Botkin extended
that vibrant perspective to a new series to albums,
then going into release -- hold on, it looked like this.
[Laughter] Okay.
They're bureaucratic gray covers, okay, imbued with the solemnity
and high purpose of the federal government.
[Laughter] Okay.
On coming to the Library in 1942, Botkin extended
that vibrant perspective to a new series
of albums, then going into release.
In one of the earliest reviews attending their publication,
he wrote, "They give us a new understanding
of the diversity of American life.
They bring us into contact with the people, workers, prison inmates,
housewives, and school children, white, Negro, and Indian,
who made these records," unquote.
In highlighting these transmitters, he affirmed their worth.
If largely unknown as creators and interpreters,
they stood outside of romantic caricature.
Botkin did not voice the popular ideology that defended the folk
as marginalized and overlooked,
nor did he call upon the perennial notion
that folklore harbors the spirit of the people,
in their essence their soul.
He also kept some distance from the folk music revival,
which so often saw the folk as exotic symbols of otherness,
pursuing a simple life that never was.
Quote "Although in most cases this is impossible
to establish the origin of a piece of folklore,"
he wrote nearly quarter of a century later, "We want to know as much
as possible about its source, history and use in relation
to the past and present experience of the people who keep it alive.
This information enables us to understand the function and meaning,
which folklore has for those who use it, and so enhances its interest
and significance for others," unquote.
The key to understanding the products of tradition,
Botkin reminds us, is to explore the roles they have played,
and to learn from the people whose experiences creativity reflects,
whether within a community, or extending beyond.
This approach to the American cultural mosaic guides
"The Beautiful Music all Around Us," and threads today's talk.
Now, let me play you a tune I learned
from 1938 Library of Congress recording.
Its recreation over the years -- it first went into print in 1838 --
speaks to the renewal that Ben Botkin expressed
in describing folklore, both as new wine in old bottles,
and old wine in new bottles.
This rendition comes in the playing of Eastern Kentucky banjoist,
Pete Steel, a former coalminer.
At the time of this recording Pete worked as a carpenter
at a paper factory in Southern Ohio.
He called it "the Spanish fandango."
And I'll follow this waltz with a variation called "Snowdrop,"
that I learned from Kirk McGee, a contemporary of Pete Steel's,
but from middle Tennessee.
Kirk enjoyed one of the earliest professional careers
in 20th Century country music, not recorded by the Library,
but by one of its commercial counterparts.
His variation demonstrates another approach to the same tune.
Set together, these pieces underline the promise Botkin found
characteristic of folklore, patterned by common experience,
varied by individual repetition.
It says, "Not only back where I come from,
but also where do we go from here?"
All right, I'll play it for you.
[ Background Sounds ]
Oh, I'm shaking.
[ Music Plays ]
[ Applause ]
Ben Botkin defined Living Lore by its relating of the foreground lore
to it's background in life.
These words could equally apply to the Library of Congress recordings.
Sometimes as musicians and singers perform, kitchen clocks tick,
a truck drives by, a neighbor talks, roosters crow, children giggle,
and an inmate urges his fellow prisoner to sing with all his might,
we find there a foreground in lore, the music,
with this audible background and life.
It was this presence, this 3-dimensionality that I found
so compelling about these recordings,
and which sparked my own commitment to them.
And thus begins my own story of how this book came to be written.
So now I'll go "off-book" here, as they say in the theater,
and let's hope -- this picture here, that's the cover of the book.
That's taken by a man -- he's still alive, he's 97 years old.
His name is Abbott Ferriss, and he's just a wonderful person.
He was from the Delta, and he was -- in 1939 when Herbert Halpert,
who recorded -- did a lot of recordings for the Library,
was going around in Mississippi, Abbott was his guide.
He was from there, and they spent their time
in this truck driving around.
And we'll get more to that if time permits.
Anyway, he took this picture.
He'd never taken any pictures before either.
This was his first time.
All right; this is okay.
[Laughter] Okay; this is how come I got going in this thing.
I have to tell you, when you see somebody like this
when you're a little kid -- oh, I didn't mean that.
How do I put that away?
Okay. [Laughter] All right.
That's Casey Jones.
His real name was -- Casey Jones, the chicken man,
and he was from Chicago -- well he wasn't from Chicago,
he was actually from Marshall, Texas.
And when I was in about 2nd grade or so, I started seeing him,
and generations of Chicagoans saw this guy.
Of course he was unforgettable.
He had a sign around his neck.
He said he had trained 216 chickens and they're all named "Mae West."
[Laughter] All right?
And they all died of natural causes.
That's what he said.
So he did this show, "Casey and Mae," and he was painted,
and he's been, oh, every -- I mean, people remembered him.
I mean, there's a play that he's a character in, in Chicago.
So he was this street performer, and, you know,
I looked up his arrest record.
He was constantly being hauled in for obstructing traffic.
Well, he was.
He was like people gathered around him, and he had this show
with the chicken and he'd make it look like, you know, Mae was,
you know, he gave her a little drink
from a little flask he had, and she'd wobble.
And he'd say, "Do the shimmy," she'd wobble, and all these dances
and stuff, and the trucking dance with the --
it was just that fantastic.
So when you see him as a little kid --
well that was it, that's when I knew art was wherever you find it.
You know, and it just -- it wasn't just at the arts --
so that was my introduction right there.
So and then a couple years later I started playing, and so, you know,
and my guitar teacher, you know, was a blues player,
and his band was always opening for all these great acts that had come
up from Chicago -- from Mississippi to Chicago,
and that's how come I met Muddy Waters as little kid.
And I saw "Howlin' Wolf," and then he started in bars
and of course I couldn't go in, but they'd have matinees,
and I stood outside, and, you know, and they'd throw the door open.
And I met Big Joe Williams.
He was the night watchman at Delmark Records, and his version of "Baby,
Please Don't Go" became a hit in 1935.
And he recorded 3 times, and that becomes -- .
Vera Hall in this book here and in the Library's recordings sung
"Another Man Done Gone," I mean, those are related --
part of the same world of song.
And so I was fortunate enough
to see these people here -- Mahalia Jackson.
And so it was really great to have that going on.
And then of course I got a little older,
and [laughter] my banjo teacher [inaudible], but she said,
"That's not hair, that's nerve endings."
Okay. [Laughter] And he may have that right.
So anyway, and then so that was Fleming [Brown] right there.
And I took that picture.
That was -- and that's during the time I played Reno.
That was in December '82 or '83.
And he had started with the Library of Congress Records too.
His first banjo piece he ever really worked up was
"Reek and Rambling Blade."
Well, that's what the title was in the book "Our Singing Country."
But on the Library of Congress that one's called "Rambling Boy"
from Justus Begley, and he had started out playing in 1948.
And the reason why he started playing was --
well here's Fleming teaching at the Old Town School of Folk Music,
and I'll get to this -- and that's him with Frank Proffitt.
The reason he started playing was he heard Hobart Smith on a record,
we'll get to in a second, but --
and Hobart Smith was recorded by the Library,
and that just would turn Fleming's life around.
Now, that man there, that's Frank Proffitt, and he was the source
of the song "Tom Dooley,"
and there's he playing the Fleming's D45 guitar.
And that's -- and he said to me, "You know, it's not really important
about the instruments you have.
You have to go learn this music from the people who know how to play it."
And that's the thing.
And so he had this -- He said it just --
he said seeing the music just -- or hearing it only on a record --
he likened it to a polar bear in the Arctic,
versus one at the Brookfield Zoo.
And he said, "There's a real difference here.
And you've just got to get into those environments,
and then maybe you'll learn something
and understand something about this."
And so when -- so he first sent me to listening to all these records,
and they were that you couldn't -- I couldn't --
no, I didn't know where to buy them, and they were hard to --
weren't really -- the records weren't in stock.
They were at the Chicago Public Library.
So I'd listen to these records and the, you know,
rush hour buses lumbering past, and I'm looking at names like
"Luther Strong" from Dalesburg, Kentucky, and, you know,
Shipp Sisters from Byhalia, Mississippi,
and all these great names, W. Claunch from Guntown, Mississippi,
you know, and I realized as I was listening to these records,
and the chickens and all of that crowing, and the clocks ticking
like in the back of Joseph Begley's recording that this was what --
this was like Casey Jones.
It was like this -- there was music that he did --
because Casey played a diatonic accordion,
a button accordion while he did his thing with Mae West.
And so there was this -- and there was music,
but there was this context, this environment around it.
And that was what was just absolutely --
so it's the same thing I realized.
And it was just like what I saw when I was peeking into those bars
where Muddy was playing, and how it looked.
I had no idea what "I got my mojo working" means.
I was 10 years old.
But I [laughter] saw the people reacting
to him, and they understood.
There was shared experience there.
And that was what -- I at least sensed
that there was something else going on and he was communicating just
in a little -- every quiver in his voice,
that people were getting and following.
So listening to these records was just reiterating that sense of --
that context thing that then confronted with,
with those experiences.
So I started visiting people -- and oops, I missed there.
There, that's Virgil Anderson.
That's what I was playing here at Arena [Stage].
Like I always gave me a break first week of July,
and that's July I think '82 or '83 or something.
And he lived in Rocky Ranch, Kentucky.
Oh, it was so great to visit him.
He had a rope ridge that he'd made.
It was the only way to get into his house unless he forwarded the creek
with a high-sprung truck.
And so there was this bridge you'd walk over, and he had --
I noticed one time -- I went there several times to visit.
He had the letters "USA" carved in the cement.
I said, "Virgil, why did you do that?"
He said, "Well, I just wanted people to know that that there was --
even though they were so far back they were still
in the United States," you know.
[Laughter] So he was great.
And that's Tommy Jarrell there.
And as Alan has said in his presentation,
this is a master teacher, this guy.
He was amazing.
In fact, the day after I took
that picture I think I was here visiting the archive.
That's back in 1980.
I remember driving up for -- anyway Tommy, he didn't have a telephone.
And I said, "Well, why don't you?"
He said, "Well, I just -- it's already okay if people come over."
I mean, thousands of people have come to this guy's house
and just he was a pilgrimage people made to visit this man,
and he was just a capacious heart, and open like --
he'd been a motor grater operator for the state of North Carolina.
In fact, he would park his motor grater in front
of his house there after work.
He didn't drive another car home.
And [laughter] I used to play my banjo right there and --
oh that's Kirk McGee, the source of "Snowdrop" that I played for you,
and he played with Uncle Dave Macon.
And he played just everything.
He played fiddle, and banjo, and guitar.
And he'd had a stroke, and his hands would shake while he played.
But he'd go for the notes and he played all kinds of music.
It was just unlimited from his "Stars and Stripes Forever,"
to old-time fiddle tunes, and piano rolls that he had learned,
and shape note singing that he'd grown up with,
and just this enormous variety of American music,
every style you can imagine.
And he said, "Well, you -- " and he said --
looking at the banjo and his hands are shaking and he looks up at me
and says, "Well, you just find more and more on it all the time."
So it was just this creative force that he had.
And they were -- okay, Fleming learned from Doc Hopkins,
and Doc Hopkins was from Possum Hollow, Kentucky.
He came up to Chicago in 1930 to sing on the National Barn Dance,
a live radio show he had for 22 years.
And then when I started as a teenager,
I played as Doc's accompanist, and we played here at Wolf Trap.
And Doc outlived Fleming.
He was born in 1900, he died in 1988.
And so that's us.
And then that's the 3 of us there.
That was the night "Banjo Dancing" closed in Chicago in 1980.
And let's see, and that's Doc.
He was a researcher too.
I mean, he was on the radio in Kansas City, and he got a letter
from the son of Frank James, okay, Frank and Jesse James.
He said, "Look, he was singing Jesse James on the air."
And he said, "Well, if you want to know something about this song
and about the James's, come on over
to the James' home place here in Kearney, Missouri."
So he did, and he went over there.
And that's Jesse James's grave right there that he's touching.
That's since been chipped away.
They've had to build a new one [laughter] for Jesse.
That's Doc doing his own [phonetic] --
and he did a radio series called "Song Stories."
I mean, he was doing -- and Carl Sandburg called him up, you know,
and he would call Carl Sandburg up, and they'd --
the 2 of them were talking.
And so information's going back and forth between that.
So that's the record that made Fleming.
So Hobart appears on Library of Congress Record looking like this,
but then in 1948 this record comes
out with this great cover by Ben Shine.
And this was really the record that made Fleming want to play the banjo,
and Ben, he gets -- he learns from Doc Hopkins the technique.
So and now this Texas Gladden sings Blue Ridge ballads.
That's Texas and Hobart right there.
And that's the picture of him.
So Texas, you know, she advocates on behalf her brother.
"I think I'm good," she says, "but you ought to hear my brother."
And he could play -- he said --
Hobart said he could play anything except a car bumper
or a barbed wire fence.
[Laughter] And damn it, he could too.
He played the fiddle, and banjo, and guitar, and piano, and mandolin,
and harmonica, and he just -- pump organ; he just didn't stop.
And so he has enormous --
and so what's so great is this thing keeps coming together,
because Hobart then later on he comes to Chicago and he
and Fleming become friends, and he stays at Fleming's house,
and Fleming makes the most extensive recordings
of Hobart ever in Hobart's life.
And so there areas in Fleming's rec room and that's
where they made the tapes.
And then in 2005 I put together --
Fleming gave me those tapes before he died,
and I put together this album called "In Sacred Trust," because really
when Fleming handed me these tapes he knew -- he was very old by then,
and he knew this was one of the most important documents he'd ever put
together in his whole life.
And so there was, you know, his entrusting it to me.
But there was also -- if you listen
to that record you could hear those 2 guys just talking to each other
with this great trust and mutual musicians understanding each other,
and even though coming from very different, you know,
grew up very differently.
And then what's really important about that is that Hobart,
born in 1897, and he's learning from folks
who were alive during the Civil War.
And he doesn't read or write very much.
He certainly didn't have a tape recorder or a disc machine.
He had to remember this music by memory and desire.
I mean, that was what it was for him.
So he's holding their music in sacred trust because he would swear
to Fleming he'd play just like his mentors.
And so there's Hobart in Chicago in that same week, and there he is --
that was -- I used that for the cover of the record.
And here he is with some of his instruments.
And that's his wife, Brookie [assumed spelling].
And that's during the concert they did.
And Hobart -- so there's Fleming,
and Hobart's listening to him right there.
I was going to play you a tune from that.
I'll get to it -- maybe we'll get to it later.
I just want to keep talking here for a second.
I was going to play a tune that Hobart played there.
But it was another version of the -- well heck, I'd better do it,
[laughter] because I'll never get to it.
It's just -- I want -- all right.
This is another version of the Fandango that Hobart did.
I'll see if could do this.
And this is -- let me say, this is the hit of that concert that night.
That night it was --
[ Guitar music ]
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
All right; well so that's "Casey whistle" [phonetic].
All right; so here's Hobart and his family.
And well okay that's Hobart holding a guitar right there.
And that's his wife, Pearl Melinda.
And then I knew that little girl there.
That was Charlotte.
That was their daughter, Charlotte.
I just loved her.
And then that's Texas Gladden.
Texas is right there.
And that's her husband, James.
And that's her sister, Kansas.
Okay. [Laughter] She had a sister named "Virginia."
And she had a cousin named "Tennessee."
Okay; what's going on here with all this?
He said, "Well, these are names on the American map."
And so "Texas" is not a nickname.
And Hobart, Hobart Smith is -- okay Hobart McKinley Smith, born 1897.
Okay; who gets inaugurated that year, William McKinley
and Garret A. Hobart as vice president.
[Laughter] So they're celebrating, you know,
these aspects of American life.
And okay, and that's their father over on the side there.
Here; this is King Smith, and he played the banjo.
And Lavinia [assumed spelling], that's who taught Texas how to --
that was their main mentor for singing.
And there that's -- there is his grandmother there.
And it was this little boy here, Jim, who --
I mean, it was so important when you get to chapter 9
in the book, that's who's talking.
[Laughter] And he could name every single person in this picture.
And he was the last person alive
to know every single person in this picture.
We were standing at a Super K-mart in Salem,
Virginia getting this thing copied, and it was just amazing.
You just -- he had these pictures on the wall of his bedroom,
and when he took them off and when he put them back on, you know,
he just -- you know, I had disappeared.
He just looked at these pictures, and it just mattered --
you could just see what mattered so much to him.
And I was just in Salem doing a presentation of this book,
and 35 members of the family came.
And yes, Texas, his daughter was there.
I interviewed her -- I interviewed about 200 people in the course
of this book, and Ella -- her name is Wilma Jean,
but her real full name is Eleanor Wilma Jean.
Well, Texas plays at the Whitetop Festival the year Eleanor Roosevelt
came and she's pregnant with Wilma Jean, so Eleanor.
So this thing goes on.
And so okay so there's Hobart and some of his kids in the family van.
And okay I was in that room.
That's where they recorded.
That house you see, that's where they recorded "One Morning In May,"
and all those other songs.
And that's Texas and Hobart right there.
And that's one of the last pictures ever taken of Hobart.
And look, that was in Fleming's banjo case when he died.
And look, the song that made him want to play the banjo was Hobart
and Texas singing "Poor Ellen Smith" together, and Texas was singing,
and Hobart was playing the hell out of the banjo.
Look what's the first song he wrote
on that note there, "Poor Ellen Smith."
Okay, now we'll get in the stuff that's very specific to Library
of Congress and you guys -- Well, you all know about this story.
It's pretty much the most famous story now --
well one of the most famous stories going
down about Library of Congress recordings.
But, you know, it has a local thing on Kirk Street
in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
And that's where this transcription was done by Ruth Crawford Seeger.
And that's Bonaparte's retreat, and that was the fiddler right there.
That's Bill Stepp.
And when I first went to visit his family, the first thing they pointed
out to me is, "His name is not "W.
M. Stepp," it's "W.
H. Stepp," so get that one right.
Okay. And so that was good to know.
It's just -- I think it was just sort of a misreading
of the handwriting, or I don't know what happened, why it was wrong.
But anyway, so that was William Hamilton Stepp.
And there he is -- course he sort of looks
like a lawyer there, but he wasn't.
He was a logger, and he was mostly a musician.
One of his grandsons told me, "My grandpa was not workified."
[Laughter] And there he is as an older man.
And that's his fiddle.
Look, I tried to get it for the Library of Congress.
I asked the grandson, he said, "Forget it."
Okay, so I tried.
Okay; you could have had -- I tried to get it for you, and other members
of the family were not into it [phonetic].
Okay. Here is where Bill Stepp was born.
And he lived -- I guess in Tennessee and in Kentucky and places
like that, they used to -- some of these are called "rock houses."
And what it is, is they -- this is -- here's one in 1875.
And they lived -- and he spent the first 5 years
of his life in this cave here.
They had like wood planking pretty much in front of it there.
And people all up and down River there did live
in these kind of accommodations.
And okay I know this is going to seem a little --
perhaps a little peculiar, but a bit like relics.
But I -- okay [laughter] that's from there.
All right; that really is.
I thought, "Well, 3-dimensional realities here."
Okay, 3-dimensional entireties; so that's from the cave there.
That's -- all right so okay.
And then that -- okay that was his mother --
Bill Stepp's mother was right there, and that was her sister,
and that's a man who lived with her sister.
His mother was half-Indian, and she was a prostitute.
And this was her mother there.
And you could see these pictures go back.
And that's -- oh I got this picture
from another one of his grandchildren.
It was just -- I just love this picture so much.
And it just seemed such a prize, because --
and then that woman there, I was just talking to her daughter.
She played guitar on some of the recordings.
That's Mae Porter Puckett.
And here is where they played.
It was at Hoskins' Grocery.
And that's where they would jam on Saturdays, and built it just
up a notch back there on Stinson Creek at the time.
And that's -- and then this picture you may have seen before.
That's Walter Williams.
And he was one hell of a banjo player.
And that's Bill Stepp there.
He was just terrific.
You may have heard his version "East Virginia" that Pete Seeger learned.
This is Bill.
He had 65 grandchildren.
I just -- I want you to see the furniture here.
Okay. I just love this.
It's the only color picture I think there is of him.
And then that was his last daughter.
That was Nanny.
And she said, "My daddy was a rounder."
You know, and he had been married 7 times when --
[laughter] but she still -- she danced and oh, I just --
oh she was just terrific.
And she's so happy about all this.
And I'll tell you, this family --
I went to a couple different family reunions,
and the first one I just felt useful in a way
that I never have in my life.
It was -- everybody there had heard, you know, the beef commercial,
"Beef, it's what's for dinner," and the theme
to the Bonaparte Retreat thing, but nobody connected it to grandpa.
Everybody had heard grandpa play it, but nobody had made the connection.
So I played this tape going from his fiddling right
into the Copeland thing, and just pride just filled the hall.
It was just wonderful.
I just was so happy to have that role in their lives.
And I didn't bring the banjo with me on these trips mostly.
I had listened to other people.
And people -- I'm sure other people I talked --
I never hid the fact that I played and stuff,
but it wasn't really the issue.
I had to listen to them.
And this man here, he had been raised by Ora Dell Graham.
And he'd never heard of Library of Congress.
He said, "What's that?"
And when I told him that she was on this record here, it made no sense
at all, because of the life that he had grown up in.
I mean, he lived in Mississippi at the time
of [the murder of] Emmett Till -- and he -- it was like Faulkner.
He said, "Emmett Till, that hurt."
I mean, it was just like [inaudible] they endured.
I mean, it was just incredible when he said that.
And so we're driving around, and this -- like I said, this is just --
it makes -- and it's just defined expectation that there are --
these recordings are made of his aunt when she was 12 years old,
and that they're in some huge library in Washington, DC.
So I actually had this with me,
John Cole's "For Congress in the Nation" with me.
I don't know why I brought it with me, but I'm glad I did,
because I showed them the cannons of selection.
They were written just 3 weeks after Ora Dell made her recordings.
And it said here, "The Library of Congress should possess all books
and other materials which express and record the life and achievements
of the people of the United States."
And I said, "So that means that the papers of a president and the poetry
of a schoolyard child are both welcomed here,
and that's what's going on."
And then he said, "Now I understand."
And so that's when we went to -- we were --
that's the only picture there is of Ora Dell Graham, and we were going
to -- we were driving around trying to find a copy place for it.
And then he just finally said, "Take it home."
And he -- and that was the thing,
all these people trusted him with their pictures.
So I would make copies and then send them a copy too.
So she died really young.
I had hoped to meet her actually.
I did meet several of the performers on these records.
But she was 12 years old --
there were no death records that I could find.
And I found her school records at the Sunflower County Board
of Education and all this stuff,
and at the Department of Archives History.
So she could have been just in her 60s when I went there, so I thought,
"Well -- " but it wasn't the case.
And she had died, as I was told, either in a holdup
that she had perpetrated with her -- shot with her own gun,
or else in an auto wreck.
But the person told me that --
the person was pretty sure that it was the first one.
And that's what I reported in the notes when I wrote --
when I put together this album, my "Treasury of Library
of Congress Field Recordings," that came out in '97.
But that actually -- as Sonny Milton said to me, the man you just saw,
he said, "Well, it could have happened to her, but it didn't,
it happen to her sister, Babe."
And that's who died that way.
And she died in this auto wreck on her way to sing at a gig
in Clarksville, Mississippi when she was 24 years old.
And this is where she went to school.
This is the Drew Colored School.
And it was a Rosenwald School built with funds from Julius Rosenwald,
the Chicago philanthropist.
And that's where the recording occurred, right there.
That was the auditorium.
And it's from the street, or the road -- highway.
And those are kids at that school.
And that's in the classroom there.
That's really what most kids went to school.
In south Clark County in the 1940s they mostly went to schools either
in churches or in kitchens.
And that's really what most of these settings
for Black school children were really like at the time.
That was -- there were only 2 school buses in that county by the end
of that decade; and that was one of them.
And that's the other one.
That's the -- but they called it "Little Red," that schoolhouse.
It still stands.
And there is another picture from Drew School.
Okay. So the day I get there and I'm trying to find Ora Dell, I --
the thing is people in small towns pretty much know what's going
on in places whether the stranger can be trusted with the information,
so it was determined that maybe I could be.
And there was a woman who was related to Ora Dell
who had also gone at Drew School with Ora Dell
who was willing to talk to me.
So I drove over to Nancy Hunter's house,
and this is during a subsequent visit.
And I'm standing in front of her doing what I'm doing now,
I just talking, and she had that dog, Jo-Jo in her lap.
And that whole time I was talking to her, she had actually her --
that hand there was in her pocket.
And she was in that chair.
And I'm just moving around, you know, like that.
And it's a good thing I didn't --
and there she's looking at those pictures I was just showing.
It's a good thing I didn't make any sudden moves,
because right at the end of that -- of our conversation,
she pulls her hand out of her pocket when Jo-Jo's still in her lap,
and she had a 38 special in her hand; [laughter] and no holster.
I'm not -- you know, let's not get fancy here.
She had been moving with me like a ball turret gunner,
the whole time I'm in her kitchen ranting
and raving about this great music.
And she pulled out the gun to show me she trusted me at the end.
[Laughter] Everybody in town knew
that Nancy Hunter packed heat; everybody but me.
And I had no idea.
And I'll tell you, that was a moment.
[Laughter] And subsequent times I'd been with her I never asked,
you know, but anyway that was it.
So yes, there was a lot of --
there was a part of the work that I did in these 18 years.
You know, there was a lot of violence in one way
or another that I was around.
This was -- that's Huntsville Waltz.
And I was in that -- if you just go down this way a little bit,
you'd be in the cellblock now abandoned
where Lead Belly was kept during the time he was there.
It was built like during the time of the Civil War.
They don't use that.
So it was amazing to me that the guard told me
that he had the creeps being in there, that I was with.
He didn't like being in there.
About a minute after I took that picture,
someone came down really mad at me and said, "Turn that camera off.
We don't want you taking pictures of the locking mechanisms."
That hadn't been the first thing on my mind,
to tell you the truth, but I believed him.
This here, this is another -- that's her -- this one a couple of times.
This is State Farm, Virginia.
This is along James River.
And that's where some recordings are made
by Harold Spivacke and John Lomax.
I thought it was amazing.
That tower there, that's inside the prison.
I had pointed out to the warden, I said, "You know, that --
there's no hands on that clock."
[Laughter] And he said he hadn't noticed that before.
[Laughter] I thought, "Well, for God's sake,
there that that's what people do there.
It's not -- " all right so [laughter]
that was the warden there.
He told me he was the best man-hunting dog tracker
in the state of Virginia.
[Laughter] He was a good man.
I mean, he was scary, but he was nice to me.
I liked him.
And I went to visit him a couple of -- several times.
He's really actually interested in history,
and in the history of music.
He gave me this picture.
I mean, look at that, I mean, he saved his stuff.
And you see that building back there,
that was his office, same building, yes.
And then another time we went to visit him -- I went to visit him --
that was Captain Dick Taylor there, the man in the blue pants.
He was in his 90s.
And I did not prompt this, I didn't say a word.
And boy, the curtain opened.
All of a sudden he started talking about this blind banjoist
that he guarded in the mid-'30s.
He was talking about Jimmie Strothers
of the Bloodstained Banders.
I mean, that's who he's talking about.
And it was just like the waters parted.
He talked about him.
I have it on tape.
It's just -- it was there and then it stopped.
But like I said, I didn't say, "Did you record him?
Do you remember?"
I didn't say anything about a blind banjoist.
He just started talking about him.
And it was great.
You know, that's a song my generation knew as, you know, oh,
"Good Shepherd" from the Jefferson Airplane.
And so I met Jorma Kaukonen, and he taught it
to his fellow band members.
And he'd actually never heard the original.
He got it from a folk revivalist, learned it from an LC record,
from that record there, and then so when I hand him the treasury he got
to heard Jimmie Strothers for the first time,
so the way these things move around.
So that's a really famous person.
That's Parchman Farm, and that's Parchman Prison in Mississippi.
And if you go to University of Illinois website,
we do this little video about the book.
And that picture is in it right at the beginning.
That's the graveyard, so those are little --
if you look, those are gravestones there.
And I just couldn't believe it when I saw those crosses, boy, just,
you know, it just said it all.
And in Texas I went to a couple of these prisons too,
the one they call "Peckerwood Hill."
And then here, that's the last of what's called "the cages."
You know, when Parchman was around from the late 19th Century,
from the time it was created, for many,
many years it was an agricultural profit-making business really
for the state of Mississippi.
And they kept inmates in these what are called "cages."
And it would hold a couple hundred men.
And there was a wall in the middle of it because you had trustees
on one side -- well actually there's a very strange nomenclature there --
it seems strange at first.
You have trustee shooters, and you have gunmen.
So the men who are "under the gun" are the gunmen.
And the guys that are carrying the weapons --
because you have prisoners guarding prisoners here.
So there's actually very few employees.
I interviewed a number of employees who had grown up there,
and whose parents had been guards, whose fathers had been guards there.
And all of them later talked about the "free world,"
which is a convict's term for the outside too.
So you have the trustee shooters and the gunmen.
And one who had been a gunman
who then became a trustee shooter was this man right there.
And that's Charlie Butler, "Diamond Joe," chapter 11 in the book.
He was a great singer.
And then I went through all these files.
They took -- there was a camera where they did these mug shots.
There was a room.
I was in there.
I sat in the chair there.
And there was like a handcuff clamp over here, you know.
And I said to a fellow who ran, I said, "Gee, that's an old camera."
He said, "Well, it only takes 2 pictures, you know, it's 2 poses.
It never goes anywhere else, front and side, that's it.
It can last long."
And they had -- and there was a picture of Vernon Presley
on the wall, right, Elvis's father,
who had been in there for counterfeiting.
[Laughter] And there's another picture.
That's Walsh Dennis, and he and Charlie Simms sang "Lead Me
To the Rock," which is just a fantastic performance.
And I -- that was his niece, and she was raised
in the same home with him.
And she was a wonderful person, Helen Marie Rowe, and I --
we got to be pretty good friends.
She would call me every New Year's Day and every July 4th up until --
yes, and then she'd always tell me when she called a new joke.
Okay, here's what it was.
I'm sitting with her interviewing her in her house.
I went with her for about a week, and I realized finally my questions
about music were going nowhere.
I mean, she remembered his singing, but that really wasn't the thing.
The thing is, she had had 18 children.
She didn't read or write.
And all of a sudden it's like the second best question I ever asked
in my life.
The first question was when I asked Michelle to marry me.
[laughter] But the second best one had to be --
and I don't know why it came to me, it just occurred to me while I was
with her, I said, "Well, did you ever tell your kids any stories?"
because she had so many she'd have to put them to bed and stuff.
And then it opened up.
And it was like every Ben Botkin book, every folklore book I have
at home, every book you have here, I mean, this is all these, you know,
tale types, I mean, all these hundreds of old stories,
she knew them all localized to Mississippi, and she's telling them.
She had her daughter, I mean, rolling on the floor.
She would not give up on these, you know, riddles that she was doing.
So every July 4th and New Year's Day she'd call me up and say, "Steve,
I've got a new joke for you."
[Laughter] And so she remembered, you know, these things.
And so that was just -- it was just great.
And here, when I went into the papers there at the courthouse,
they -- I opened this drawer and every single one
of these commitment papers were all tied
with the same ribbon in this drawer.
They had never been opened.
And it was just all these people who had been convicted.
And you could see here how Walsh Dennis was in for burglary.
And so he was a burglar.
And then here was the fellow that he sang with.
Now, if you take a look here, this all started making sense
by going a couple different places.
So he's 9011 at Parchment, okay?
And he's 9013.
What happened is, is that they were both tried in the same courthouse.
They were transported at the same time to the same cage at Parchman,
and then they wind up singing together.
So by just putting those 2 parts together all
of a sudden the whole thing started making sense as to what
that duet came about, you know.
And so and then there are some of the docket papers.
And you could see now he was in for murder.
And then there -- that was Charles Winters.
He was the fireman there at Parchman.
And he had grown up there and his father had been a guard there too.
And he was one of those -- Okay, "Rock Island Line":
some of you when you were at the American Folklore Meeting
in new Orleans saw me talk about this.
This -- I guess -- a library moment.
This had to be my big library moment.
I mean, it was a library moment
of my life I never expect to happen again.
And I was lucky that it even happened, is that so the Library
of Congress had these recordings, 2 recordings,
of the "Rock Island Line" from 1934.
It wasn't clear by the difference of them
to record 2 different prisons --
by different prisoners and without a week apart in 1934.
But the song had to have a prior existence to recording.
And I thought, "Well, maybe somebody commented on it earlier."
And then I found out there was a "Rock Island Railroad Magazine";
and there was one library that had it.
And they were all in boxes.
And so through interlibrary loan they all came to the University
of Maryland Library because I lived near there, all these boxes,
really tiny type, hundreds of issues.
They had -- this magazine had been going for years and years
at this library, and I'm turning page after page.
And I realized, "Man, there's a lot of songs these guys are doing here."
And they were called "booster songs."
And they were to promote the railroad.
And they urged employees to make up songs.
You know, it's a lot of this kind of --
it's sort of like the way construction companies now here
in [inaudible] have, you know,
soccer teams for Spanish workers here.
So they were urging singing, and old conductors, and, you know,
white and black were making up songs there.
And so there it is, and finally, I was just turning pages,
all that had to have people walk by, or somebody sneeze,
or something like that, and I would never have seen it.
But all of a sudden I saw it, and there it was:
"Buy your ticket at Rock Island Lines."
And I went out of my mind because I immediately knew what I was looking
at, because not only in the song, in the text did they name people
who were specific to the railroad there, those guys are
in the audience that night according to the report around the songs.
So this whole thing all of a sudden it was a date and who made it up.
And you never get origins in folklore, and maybe that's not
so important in its use and who possesses it
at the time that's important.
But we have 5 minutes now?
>> Betsy Peterson: Yes.
>> Stephen Wade: Oh, no.
[Laughter] Oh, oh, no.
Okay, well I just have so many stories to tell you.
Anyway, that's Kelly Pace [assumed spelling].
That's his [inaudible].
That was his brother, Lawrence, and that was his wife, Ruby.
And I'll tell you one story then I'll go back to just a second.
It was such a touching -- it was such an amazing moment when I --
when they signed the agreement to allow this to come out here,
he was too sick to hold the pen.
And so they just looked at me and he touched her finger
like that while she signed it.
And that's when the official met the informal.
And that was what this was about, like the archive.
And so this project began in June 1994 during a telephone call
between Gerry Parsons, for 21 years at the Reference Library
and the Folk Archive, and myself.
During that call we came up with the idea of a sampler CD consisting
of some wonderful pieces previously published in LC compilations.
In the course of that conversation I named nearly every song
in this book.
And within an hour's time I reached a label willing to publish that CD.
This resulted in an October 1997 collection I titled consciously
in honor of Ben Botkin, "A Treasury of Library
of Congress Field Recordings."
And during that phone call with Gerry,
I also knew then not only what would open the album, Bonaparte Retreats
and Bill Stepp, but also what would close it,
"The Kiowa Story of the Flute."
I'm going to switch here.
I'm going to find you a picture of this man here.
Oh man, I wish I -- if I could read you this book,
I'd read you this book.
[Laughter] Okay.
There's a -- oh I'd even get -- I brought Pete Steele's --
well this has got to go on another time.
Okay; I'm going to try to find this picture here of what I need.
I guess it was more than I had planned.
[Laughter] I have 600 pictures.
There are like 200 here.
All right; well, okay I'm sorry I'm doing this this waytoday,
but well that was Jess Morrison's dog, Boots.
He and Duncan Emrich recorded it to each other.
Okay, all right.
Oh, that's Bob Morris.
That was the nephew of Jess Morris.
I'm just letting -- Jess is buried right beside --
right where Bob was walking.
Okay; this is just one of an adventure to go on.
Okay; and I'm going to -- sorry, okay I want to be there, all right.
And take a look at her.
That's Ella Hoffpauir.
And that was her parents.
Honey Boy Edwards.
E. C. Ball.
Oh, yes, that's the daughter of Luther Strong.
And they didn't take this picture for me,
they took this picture for them.
That's when the book came.
And that's open to the page on their -- on Luther.
And her granddaughter just sent that to me recently.
I didn't know that had been taken.
Okay; I'm so sorry that I can't -- all right, so there's [inaudible].
Okay, okay.
During that phone call with Gerry Parsons, I would open the album with
"Bonaparte's Retreat" from Bill Stepp.
But also what would close it, "The Kiowa Story of the Flute," spoken
and played by Belo Cozad,
the Comanche flute maker from Stecker, Oklahoma.
In the summer of 1941, during a recording,
he made at the Riverside Indian School of Anadarko, Oklahoma,
Belo told how his tune came about.
Before he played it, he described an ancestor who went up on a mountain,
and after 4 days received this music as a gift.
Subsequently, it transferred to Belo, recounting the saga
to the ethnomusicologist recording him he says, "Keep it.
Keep it as long as you live."
Belo is giving this stranger operating this machine a place
in a precious musical heritage.
I thought, as did Gerry, who loved this recording too, that to open
and close the sampler with this heartwarming alternative
to the Balkanization identity politics and fragmentation
that occupied so much current thought and effort
in cultural matters, expressed the message as encompassing
as Bill Stepp's anthemic fanfare.
Belo's generosity echoes Ben Botkin's recasting
of a traditional proverb: "Culture, like love, laughs at locksmiths."
These words, like Belo's, speaks to an interconnectedness
of American lives as they do to an irrepressible creative process.
They also recall something that Ella Hoffpauir, who at age 10 in 1934,
made some of the earliest folk music field recordings,
the Library of Congress said in February 1999.
We sat in her home, a house trailer in Saint Martinsville, Louisiana.
Though her father's lineage was German,
the first language she spoke was French.
"That's what America's all about," she remarked.
"We're all immigrants, but we're born here.
Our ancestors had to come from overseas somewhere,
and mine came from Germany and France.
And that's why I just couldn't understand why Hitler --
how he wanted to kill those Jews so much.
Why? What was the reason?
We're all God's children.
It's just like these black people, a lot just hate them.
Why? There's no reason for that.
I can't see it.
We never thought that because of your color has
to make you a difference of your person."
What Ella said so powerfully speaks on a fundamental level
to what the archive of folk culture
and the American Folklife Center represent in our society.
By their very presence,
in this infinitely expansive federal institution, these offices attest
to an acceptance of human difference.
At heart their work reaches beyond the sheer necessity for repository
of the myriad informal creative achievements of the American people,
which the Archive and Center steward and safeguard.
They serve a further end, what Ben Botkin called "applied folklore,"
a folklore's capacity to create understanding.
More than a half century ago he spoke of varied cultural backgrounds
and communities, from social to religious, regional to national,
even to what he called "the exchange and comparison of different
yet common experiences,
and accepting others for their differences."
He cited the Quaker saying, "It's not the 'me' in thee
which makes thee valuable to me."
This wisdom he felt offered a survival tool
in an increasingly internationalist world, no less true today
in this era or globalization.
I know that the wonderful people who inhabit the beautiful music all
around us, people like Ella Hoffpauir and Nancy Hunter,
and Sonny Milton, and Helen Marie Rowe, and Ralph Dawson,
and I named a bunch of others I'd hoped to get to today,
and Jim Gladden, and Charlotte Smith Fields, and Lawrence and Ruby Pace,
and David "Honey Boy" Edwards, and Jim Strong,
and Faith [inaudible], who you just saw.
These people figuratively all paced these gilded halls.
Not only did they illuminate the pages of a book,
and in a few instances have even appeared
on some old recordings tied to this place.
They remind us of a purpose we share,
a joyfulness we treasure, and a community we seek.
[ Applause ]
Thank you very much.
Well, all right.
Well, I'll play one tune.
>> Can you play a tune?
Okay.
>> Stephen Wade: Yes.
>> Play a tune?
>> Stephen Wade: Yes; I'll play a tune.
I'll sit up and play a tune.
>> Yes.
>> Stephen Wade: This is [overlapping] --
okay, okay I'll play a tune, and then I'll -- and then you can go.
Listen, here I've got to find this darned picture.
Okay. [Laughter] Because -- okay I'm sorry to do it this way.
Really is -- this -- okay I'm going to find it.
I know I will.
I just don't know how to do this quicker than this.
Okay, I'll get there.
Oh, come on, come on, come on, come on.
Oh, yes. Okay.
Okay; we're in it now.
[Laughter] Okay.
Oh, okay.
[ Silence ]
Take a look at that banjo.
There you go.
That's Pete Steele's banjo.
When I get done with all this, I guess I'm going to give it to --
I told the staff I said, "You know, I don't need another banjo.
Let's give it to Smithsonian, because then it can be right there
with Tommy Gerald's fiddle, and Libba Cotten's guitar.
[ Banjo Plays ]
So "Cold Creek March" is also a variation
of that fandango we were doing.
[ Banjo Plays ]
[ Applause & Cheering ]
>> Betsy Peterson: Thank you.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.