>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. [ Pause ] >> Hello and welcome. I'm Nicole Saylor. I'm head of the archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. And I'd like to welcome you to the latest presentation of the ongoing Benjamin A. Botkin lecture series. The Botkin series allows us to highlight the work of leading scholars in the disciplines of folklore, ethnomusicology, oral history and cultural heritage while enhancing the collections here at the American Folklife Center. For the Center and the Library the Botkin lecture forms a facet of our acquisitions activities. Each lecture is videotaped, and it becomes part of the permanent collection of the Center. In addition, lectures are later posted as webcasts on the Library's website where they're available for viewing worldwide. And so this would be a good time to remind you that you'll want to silence your cell phones and whatever other electronic devices that you have with you. So today I have the honor of introducing the distinguished folklorist and longtime friend of the American Folklife Center James P. Leary of the University of Wisconsin. Professor Leary was born and raised in Rice Lake, a farming and logging town in northern Wisconsin. He earned his BA in literature from the University of Notre Dame before going on for an MA in folklore at the University of North Carolina and a Ph.D. in folklore and American studies from Indiana University. Currently he is the Birgit Baldwin Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has done research and production for numerous festivals, museum exhibits, radio programs, documentary sound recordings and films, documenting folklife in the Upper Midwest. His publications which have the best titles ever include Minnesota Polka; Yodeling in Dairyland: A History of Swiss Music in Wisconsin; Down Home Dairyland; So Ole Says to Lena: Folk Humor of the Upper Midwest; and my personal favorite Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music. And when he's not doing that in his spare time he's the co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore, and he's the cofounder and current director of the UW's Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures. Among his other projects he's currently working with the Center on a series of productions related to the 75th anniversary of Alan Lomax's trip through Michigan. His presentation today is titled Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings From the Upper Midwest, 1937- 46. And he draws on materials here at the archives, and he looks into research into the roots of this music and its branches in and around the Great Lakes Region. Jim is a tireless evangelist to win recognition for music in the Upper Midwest. And as someone who has been a small part of that journey I'm especially thrilled to have him here. So please make him feel welcome. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Thanks very much for that kind introduction, Nicki. Nicki was at University of Wisconsin and did some great stuff there, and it's thrilling to have her out there. I'm delighted to be here. Delighted to see so many friends. And as Nicki mentioned this project that I'm working on I have been working on it pretty intensively for about seven or eight years and intermittently going back almost 30 years. It has to do with collections here at the Library of Congress. Between 1937 and 1946 there were almost 2,000 songs and tunes recorded in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota for the Library of Congress by three different field researchers. And some of those materials have been reissued, or issued rather, on LPs and so forth. But most of them have not. And one of the -- well, the main reason why most of them have not is that most of them are in languages other than English. Back in the 70s when the American Folklife Center convened a conference on ethnic recordings in American, Joe Hickerson who was then the archivist wrote that in the 1930s the United States Government and the Library were disinclined to make much of the so-called foreign language recordings because of an ideological stance toward monolingualism in the United States, kind of a melting pot philosophy. And so that's one reason why most of these recordings have been hidden or forgotten. But another reason is just the challenge of dealing with those language because they include 25 languages not counting dialects thereof. And many of the songs are also in kind of mixed language mixing English with the various languages. Or, sometimes they use esoteric occupational terminology for logging or mining or farming or little idioms from various locales. My own involvement in this goes back many years. But first I kind of want to just situate things. And this is actually a map not so much for this project, I've still got to get one made, but this comes from my book Polkabilly. And the places shown there by name are places where I've either fieldwork or archival work. But I'll just come up. I hope you can hear me. The recordings actually were done by Alan Lomax in Michigan in the Detroit area in central Michigan kind of up about Traverse City and up in Beaver Island and also in a Polish settlement Madsen [phonetic] and Posen, and then he went into the UP in 1938. He imagined in three months doing fieldwork through this entire area on a rapid recording survey, but when he got to the UP he really got hung up with all of the French Canadian and [inaudible] and other people there and had such a good time. He made it into Ordana [phonetic] Wisconsin to the Bad River Ojibwa reservation for one recording session but that was it. So we'll look at this area. The first recordings in 37 were done by Sidney Robertson actually in Klocade [phonetic], Minnesota and up on the Iron Range in Minnesota, but also in Rhinelander and Crandon areas of northern Wisconsin with lumberjacks here. Actually in Duluth with the Scotts Galig [phonetic] singer, with Serbs and [inaudible] and with Fins and [inaudible] and Virginia and over here in Ely. And then in the 40s [inaudible] did work, and we're going to start kind of here in Rice Lake which is my hometown. As Nicki said it was a farming and logging town, and I was born there in 1950. When I was a kid I used to love to go into Ringlesbocker's [phonetic] Tavern because Otto Ringlesbocker who was born in 1895 had behind the bar the world's largest collection of odd lumber camp musical instruments as he called it. And this was a great museum bar that also had a lot of taxidermy. Otto was a skilled taxidermist, and among the real animals he had such things as the fur herring, the owl eyed ripple skipper, the dingbat, the snow snake, and also Old Sachelass [phonetic], the world's largest musky which weighed 50 pounds more than the real world's largest musky ad Louis Spray's [phonetic] bar just down the street. But all these instruments where there including some that Otto made. A Hardanger fiddle, a Norwegian fiddle. He was the child of Swiss immigrants. He was a great performer on the [foreign language] a little button accordion. But he also worked in the woods in sawmills. He learned how to play a lot of different kinds of jigs and reals from French and French Indian and Irish background. There were a lot of Norwegians in the area, and he learned how to play a lot of Norwegian music as well. And in 1937 for the National Folk Festival which happened that year in Chicago he organized a troop called the Wisconsin Lumberjacks. And then in 1938 they came out here and performed in Washington, DC. And I got to know him some, and I also got to know the fellow on the lower right with the pipe, Ray Calkins [phonetic] who I interviewed when he was in his 90s. He was still going pretty strong there for a few years. In 1926 during the Henry Ford fiddle contest period Otto organized an old time fiddler's contest. It was prohibition so his tavern was in a billiard parlor and ice cream parlor. But these are a bunch of fiddlers including the bottom right, a guy named Ernest Pea Soup Giboard [phonetic] who was a French Ojibwa from Cuderway [phonetic] who later on I got to meet at the Honor of the Earth Powwow up there. I started doing field work myself with musicians in particular in the late 1970s. And I've done work in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, northern Lower Michigan, throughout Wisconsin and quite a bit in Minnesota as well. And these are a few images of some of my work. And a few years ago I did a book called Polkabilly where I tried to look at the fusion of Anglo American kind of hillbilly music with non Anglo European social dance music and dialect songs or polka music. And the key group for that was a group called the Goose Island Ramblers. But we want to turn to these historic recordings. And some of you, of course, may be familiar with Sidney Robertson on your right. Educated at Berkeley and eventually the wife of the avant-garde American Composer Henry Cowell, very interested in classical music, but also had that kind of populist avant-garde interest in folk music in the 1930s. Was teaching in New York City, the new school for social research in the 30s, and then was hired by Charles Seeger during the Roosevelt administration's resettlement agency. And part of Charles Seeger's notion was that for people who were displaced and suffering from the depression that performing traditional music would raise their spirits. Sidney was located in Minnesota for a while. And because of her interest in folk music began to do field recordings kind of around the region. And as a result discovered a number of contacts and began to make field recordings in 1937. She was so excited thereafter she went actually to California, and there's a superb website on the American Folklife Center's site, the Library of Congress called California Gold looking at her extraordinary recordings in Northern California. And recently there's been some great scholarship done on her work on the Erin [phonetic] Islands where she was one of the early people to make really good sound recordings there. But she was very excited by Wisconsin and Minnesota and wrote to Alan Lomax at the time who was the assistant in charge at the archive of American folksong. And he was interested, of course, in occupational songs, lumberjack and Great Lake songs for some of these compendia that he and his father had been doing on American folksong. But he also had a strong awareness of the kind of ethnic and cultural and linguistic diversity in the region. And so he came out in 1938, late summer and early fall and did fieldwork. And these people I think are relatively well known especially Alan Lomax. But less well known is a woman names Helene Stratman Thomas who was born in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, part German and part Cornish. And when Alan Lomax wasn't able to complete his three month survey of three states he wrote to the University of Wisconsin music department seeing if someone would take up the challenge of trying to record traditional music in the area. And Stratman Thomas was willing to do this. And in the summer of 1940, summer of 1941 and the summer of 1946 after the war she made different field trips that she recorded over 700 songs and tunes. And I want to focus mostly today on some of her field work, although we'll get to Alan Lomax's toward the end. And there's such a huge range of material here. But what I really want to look at are songs that have to do with what we might call cultural ferment, cultural creativity, creolization. I want to look at songs that have to do with people singing about the experience of being in American and languages other than English or also mixed language songs including mixed language songs involving indigenous people. And I'll be projecting the lyrics bilingual of those in just a moment. But this is Helene Stratman Thomas with Harry Dyer [phonetic] on the left who was a Mississippi river boat an in the center. And she's there with a couple of Holland Dutch singers, and on the right with a Swedish singer. Here she is in my hometown with Iva and Lois Ringlesbocker playing Swiss bells. And on the left here is John Schesock [phonetic] who was a [inaudible] or Polish highlander fiddler in Stevens Point. And on the right in her [inaudible] is Rick Lalota [phonetic] who was a Norwegian immigrant also very adept at handwork but knew a lot of old songs. We don't know who this fellow is. One of the lumberjacks. Actually at Alan Lomax's request Stratman Thomas was on the lookout for vulgar lumberjack songs. But since they wouldn't sing them in front of her she had some UW students working for her as audio engineer, and so a guy named Bob Draves [phonetic] while Helene waited out in the car, recorded songs singing about E is the end of a long [inaudible] and F is a [inaudible] and exciting lyrics like that. And then seated in the chair here is [inaudible] from Somerset, Wisconsin whose parents were French Canadians who moved down into that community. Here's some Czechs or Bohemians from Yuba, Wisconsin a little north of the Southern Wisconsin River. And the extreme right is Aunt Lily Richmond who was born in slavery in Missouri. Her family escaped early in the Civil War, and they came up to southwestern Wisconsin, part of a small African-American farming community in Grant County. Bessie Gordon [phonetic] sawed off the legs of a pump organ so it would fit behind her mom and pop tavern in Schofield, Wisconsin. They ran a dairy farm and she would sing songs and sometimes yodel. And we're not quite sure who this fellow is playing the hand drum, but there were a number of native people gathered in Wisconsin Dells. Wisconsin has 11 American Indian nations with their own tribal area. Among them are the Ho-Chunk. The Ho-Chunk were removed, formerly known as Winnebago. They were pushed out in the mid 19th century to reservations first in Minnesota. And then when the Sioux uprising came along Minnesota didn't want any native people there so they got shoved to South Dakota, and they grew up on rivers and woods. And there they were in kind of desert country and they were miserable and starving. And so they got some land from the Omaha and Missouri River. But a lot of them never left. The hid out, and then also they have a very strong [inaudible] tradition, so a lot of them became involved with the U.S. military. And by the post Civil War era they were able to get homestead lands as veterans. And some of them did around there in the traditional area in Black River Falls, and a lot of them started to come back. In the 1920 around the resort are of the Wisconsin Dells, of course that's an important area for the Ho-Chunk people and the local Lyons Club worked with the Ho-Chunk to begin to have what they call the stand rock ceremonial which is still going on there although now it's controlled by Ho-Chunk people doing traditional dances. And they did a program, and it began a place for native peoples to actually camp out during the summer and a lot of ways to maintain their language and culture and so forth. But it also attracted native people from other places to give kind of a variety to the performance which brought some new kinds of trends. In the 1920s coming out of the southwest were 49 songs which used vocables, used nowadays, of course, most prominently in powwow songs. But they also used English lyrics. And so we're going to hear one of these examples. This was a recording of a 49 song made in the Wisconsin Dells in 1946. [ Music and Singing ] Okay, Germans settled in Wisconsin in the late 1830s, and Wisconsin is the most German state in the Union. More than half the population has some German background. And, of course, we're known for beer and bratwurst and pretzels and that sort of thing. As many of you may know just like Pennsylvania Dutch are Germans, the term Dutchman from Deutch has been has been used often for people of German background rather than people from the Netherlands or Holland who sometimes get called Hollanders or Holland Dutch. And there are a lot of interesting dialect songs that have come out of that that used mixed language. And this is one example. It's from a singer named Noble Brown [phonetic], and I'll tell you about him in a minute. But I do want to say that one of the most important strains of polka music in the Upper Midwest is the so called Dutchman style that is associated with a couple of Seminole bands. One Hunts Wilfard [phonetic] from New Ulm, Minnesota who became known as Whoopy John [phonetic] for his distinctive yodeling. He started playing at weddings but then made sound recordings in the 1920s and also recorded over radio playing out of Minneapolis. And then toured incessantly. And then a guy named Harold Lefenmocher [phonetic] also from New Ulm, Minnesota. Started out with this band they called them the Continentals but they weren't doing so well. But then they changed the name to the Six Fat Dutchmen, and none of them were especially fat, and they had about nine in the band. But this was a really good title. And so this has been a very strong still going part of the polka scene in the Upper Midwest. But this fella Noble Brown his mother was actually a Hollander, Holland Dutch. His father was English. He grew up in Grant County, Wisconsin, but there were a lot of Germans who had come there in the 1840s. And as a young guy, a young boy, he left home, went up and worked in the woods in northern Wisconsin. And it was not unusual for lumber camps to have a lot of people who had sailed either in the salt seas or on the Great Lakes. And, of course, lumber camp work was winter work. And one of the things you could do them when you couldn't work in the woods in the winter was to work on Great Lakes vessel or else to go out and harvest in the Dakotas later in the season. So Brown did that. He got a taste for that. He ended up being a salt sea sailor. We don't know for sure where he picked up this My Father Was a Dutchman. But if any of you are into shanties, the great songs of sailors, Stan Hugo [phonetic] includes some really great notes on My Father Was a Dutchman on one of these kind of mixed language songs that used to be on big sailing ships. And I have friends in Australia who are very familiar with this mostly as an instrumental dance tune. But it's called My Father Was a Dutchman. It's the same tune that Noble Brown uses. And so we'll listen to that. [ Singing ] Yah, okay. And part of my point here is that when we think about what constitutes American there are many splendors to that definition. There's always a lot of stuff that's going on culturally. And when we think about folk music it's not static. People are changing. They're taking on new influences. They're adapting, they're listening to other people, and so you have all kinds of interesting things happening. Very close to where I grew up, 15 miles away, is a little community called Cumberland. I grew in Rice Lake with people of a lot of different ethnic backgrounds. There were Ojibwes, there were [inaudible] or Ojibwe French. My family was Irish. There were a lot of people who were Czech or Bohemian, there were Polish people there. There were Italians, there were lots of Norwegians, lots of Germans, there were Finns. There were a few Danes and Swedes, French Canadians. I'm old enough, born in 1950, that I was aware of a lot of that growing up. I could hear people speaking English and languages, that wasn't their first language. And there was live radio in my hometown when I was growing up. I could hear Swiss music, I could hear Bohemian music periodically. There was the Skipper Berg [phonetic] Band played Scandinavian old time music. There was the Polish barn dance out of Weyerhaeuser. So I could still hear a lot of that growing up. But these Italian folks were originally in St. Paul, Minneapolis St. Paul. And in the late 19th century there was a strike against a railroad working in northern Wisconsin. The Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Paul and Pacific, or the CMSTP&P. A guy I knew who once worked for them told me, he said, you know what those letters stand for? The cheapest, the meanest, the slowest to pay and the last P stands for [inaudible]. But they hired these Italians as scabs to replace the other people who were on strike. And, of course, they were desperate new immigrants, and they came over and worked. But many of them bought land. They wanted to farm. And a lot of them started small businesses. So if you go to Cumberland nowadays there's a very strong Italian presence. There's great food there and just really some wonderful people. One of them was a guy named Tom St. Angelo, and he ended up becoming the representative from my home district in the State Assembly which is kind of cool. My grandfather had that seat in the 30s. But Tom St. Angelo did in the 60s, and Cumberland has named their public library after him. He was a fine singer, and he got together with a number of his neighbors, Michael Rinolo [phonetic] and Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose Degidio [phonetic], and they sang a really great song. It exists in a lot of different variations. The first verse is someone who is over in America, he's thinking America is beautiful. Italy is small. My little blond is kind of an idiomatic term for my sweetheart. So he's not coming back. And then the daughter says to her mother make my dowry ready I want to go, go to America, the train and then the boat. And in the last one they're both over here and they're not coming back. And this is done in a very nice choral arrangement. [ Music and Singing ] Okay. They actually sang only the first two verses but he sent in [inaudible]. One of the challenges, I won't really get into it, but in 1947 Helene Stratman Thomas wanted to publish 200 songs from her field recordings for Wisconsin's 1948 centennial. And she wrote to the people who she had recorded saying can you send me the original lyrics in an English translation. Well, the problem was these recordings were made on big disk cutting machines, so you couldn't just dub off a cassette or a CD or send a sound file or something like that. So people didn't necessarily know what they had sung. So you got all sorts of things back or sometimes no response at all if people weren't fluent in writing in English let alone in their own language. But, at any rate, that's another story. This fellow, Albert Racuda [phonetic] born in this country to Czech immigrants, Czechs began to settle in southwestern Wisconsin in the 1850s. There was a railroad built along the Wisconsin River so they could come through the Great Lakes and kind of go off into that area after they were at the Port of Milwaukee and find nice farmland which they did. Albert Racuda farmed. He raised rabbits for their pelts and meat. Also Prairie Du Chien is where the Wisconsin River empties into the Mississippi, and he operated a little resort there. But he was a fine button accordion player, and his mother sang a lot of songs. She was from [inaudible], a small Village in what's now the Czech Republic not too far from Prague. And one of the songs that she sang was about a solider from [inaudible], the Village, who had gone off to fight in one of the many wars. And about the time of World War I Albert adapted this. You can see on the left Prairie Du [foreign language] so to Prairie Du Chien. He plays this on the button accordion for a while, plays a tune, and then he stops and sings without the accordion, so we'll listen to this first verse. [ Music and Singing ] So I'm going to pause it there. It goes on for quite a few verses. He's off to the war, and he has various battles and blood is flowing and horses are falling and men around him and he's swinging his sword and stuff like that. Alright, here we move to a little settlement, Belgium, Wisconsin, where somewhat paradoxically people from the Dutch of Luxemburg settled in the 1850s. Wisconsin has I think it's the -- well, it may compete with Iowa in being the largest per capita of Luxemburg in the United States. But there's some little communities, Fredonia and Port Washington and Belgium where Luxemburgers settled. A lot of them were farmers. This fellow, Nicholas Becker [phonetic] who we see the bottom center on the portrait and also on the stamp from Luxemburg was an immigrant, he was a farmer. But he also was a creative fellow. He wrote a long treatise on the history of Luxemburgers in Wisconsin including something about all of the different nicknames that they had because they have very few surnames. I remember one of them was Watry, W-A-T-R-Y, was one of the surnames. And one of the nicknames he wrote about was someone who was called Cripple Watry. And that always stuck with me because I went to the state wrestling tournament in Wisconsin in 1968, and I was defeated in the first round by a guy from Port Washington named Watry who definitely wasn't crippled. But at any rate one of the things this Nicholas Decker also did was to write poems and songs about the experience. One was about a hired man who was very confused because he couldn't get the oxen to obey him. They'd been brought up by English speaking trainers, and so they responded to commands in English. And so this fellow was amazed that even in American even the animals speak English. But this one is a song of greeting for a gathering of Luxemburgers, in this case people from Chicago had come up. And small countries like Luxemburg get really excited that some of their traditions have been sustained in American and venerated. And this is one of a number of examples of stamps issued from people from Wisconsin who were documented by Helene Stratman Thomas and the Library Congress in the 1940s. Actually this is the singing of Nicholas's son Jacob who is right above him in the photograph. And I'll just play the first verse here. [ Music and Singing ] Okay, for these last couple I'm going to shift to Alan Lomax's fieldwork in 1938. And Nicki mentioned my book Polkabilly. I was very lucky a number of years ago to meet, since I've done a lot of work with Finnish Americans, to meet a filmmaker, Erkie Matanen [phonetic] who has been making wonderful films for Finnish Public Television on Finnish Americans. And we had invited him over to University of Wisconsin. And he said can I bring along my friend [inaudible]? And he's a musician. And I said sure. And I had no idea that this guy is a big star in Finland. He's sometimes known as the Finnish Bruce Springsteen. He's had many number one records and so forth. He made up this song cycle actually of Finnish American songs. He sort of invented this character. He said when he was 16 he was really bored at the summer cabin and into like learning to play American blues and rock and roll. His mother had driven him out of the house because he was so sulky. And he stumbled on this ancient neighborhood then in America in the 20s and had hoboed around and learned to play a banjo from Doc Boggs [phonetic] and guitar from Charley Padden [phonetic]. And that he had this cycle of songs he'd made up about life in America. And so that's what this [inaudible] was presenting. Well, really he had been listening to the Harry Smith collection reissuing a whole bunch of 78 rpm recordings from the 20s. But [inaudible] wanted to know what Finnish Americans really sounded like. And so when he was over here I had a set that I had had a student digitize of Library of Congress recordings made by Alan Lomax of Finnish Americans in the Upper Peninsula. So I gave him a copy of that. And his next two CDs he included songs from that. Both of those CDs went to number one on the Finnish charts which is kind of cool. So I'm going to play a little bit of the original from a fellow named Emil Mackey [phonetic] from Newberry, Michigan. And this is a song in Finnish, but it's to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. That's no an uncommon thing among Finns. And there were a lot of Finns who were also members of the Industrial Workers of the World. And just like Joe Hill, the Swedish immigrant, used common popular songs and hymns. So did Finnish [inaudible]. They used the tune of It's a Long Way to Tipperary and other kinds of things. And Emil Mackey is taking his stance distinctively against the rather pietistic Finnish Lutheran Church, because here in heaven people are dancing and being rowdy and stuff like that and playing profane instruments like the accordion. So we'll listen to a little bit of Emil Mackey. [ Music and Singing ] Okay, we'll hear a little bit of how [inaudible] does it, and if you want to hear more it's pretty easy to find him on YouTube. There's a whole lot of stuff up there. [ Music and Singing ] Okay. We're going to switch over now to a film that helps also to illustrate what I've been trying to stress about the continuing creative and kind of fusion nature of a lot of this music in the region. And in 1938 Alan Lomax in addition to taking a huge disk cutting machine, recording machine, and a big bulky mic and a whole bunch of blank disks and so forth he also took a silent film camera and a bunch of film. Unfortunately some of it was stolen, but some of it existed. I found out about it years ago. Bill Ferris [phonetic] had done kind of a little inventory of folklore films in the 1970s. And I went over I think in this building actually and watched a version of it, but it was in black and white. And a few years later I was able to get a video dub of it. But many years after that [inaudible] here discovered that, in fact, it was colored film and restored it to high digital format or whatever. But, of course, it was silent film. And Lomax did not do an especially good job of keeping track of who was in the film. And so we had to figure out who was in the film, and then we had to try to find if there were recordings of those people. And if there were recordings could we, in fact, match them up with some of the footage. And we've actually completed the film. And I should say that what I'm talking about here will result in about a year from the fall in a book, a five CD set, a DVD film that's tucked in called Folksongs of Another America that University of Wisconsin Press is going to publish especially if I can finish the manuscript for it. But the film is finished pretty much thanks to [inaudible] effort. We've shown it a little bit in its entirety, and we'll be kind of putting out more. This is just a short clip from some Croatians with also an Italian surname because the patriarch of the family lived in -- sojourned in Italy, and there's some intermarriage, so they're Italian Croatians from that part of the Adriatic Sea. They were miners in the copper country of Michigan in the Amik and Lake Linden area. And they were tamboritsa [phonetic] musicians. But they also liked what's now called, what the hell is it called, some call it Gypsy swing, thinking of Jangle Rinehart [phonetic] and Stepehen Grapelli [phonetic] and that kind of stuff. And so they did a little song called 21st Century Blues that's a complaint about the terrible conditions in the mines and how they wanted to beat up the boss. And then from that then they swing into a traditional Croatian tamboritsa song [foreign language]. And so we'll see this little film clip from this larger film. [ Music and Singing ] Okay, that's it. So what I've tried to do is just give you a very small glimpse of some of these field recordings along with some film footage from 1937 to 1946. As I said this is material that was gathered during a very critical historical period and has come here to the Library of Congress. A lot of it has been hidden for many years because of the challenges of the many languages plus the technical challenges of restoring it that I really haven't gone into. As well as some of the ideological challenges that have defined what constitutes being American in a very narrow way. And so what I've tried to do here with this selection, and I think it comes through in the larger body of work, is to show that these people are, in fact, Americans. They're working here, they're singing about the place, they're mixing the language. There's all kinds of interesting ferment. And I think by looking at this kind of area which is similar in many ways to urban centers, industrialized backwoods areas are very similar to so-called border towns whether we look at New Orleans or New York City or Los Angeles or whatever. There's all this ferment that's going on. It went on then, it's going on right now. And I think documenting it has an awful lot to tell us about the American experience. And, of course, it also highlights the tremendous value of their collections at the American Folklife Center. So thank you very much for your attention. It's been a lot of fun to show this to you. [ Applause ] >> If anyone has any questions for Jim I invite you to ask. >> Or comments or whatever. >> Yeah. >> Complaints. Yes? >> Hi. How much of this is available online. Are any of the collections and songs available online? >> No. Well, actually yes some of it is. I'm sorry. Yes. The Wisconsin material of Helene Stratman Thomas is available if you Googled Wisconsin folksong collection. What happened was the Wisconsin materials back in the 60s or early 70s the music library there acquired preservation master tapes from the Library of Congress. And then those were digitized subsequently in the 1990s, late 90s or early in the 2000s. And then they've been put up, they stream there. And also some of the Sidney Robertson collections, the ones from Wisconsin, not the Minnesota ones, they're online as well. And so you can search by instrument or place or genre or ethnic group for those. The Lomax ones, the non-English language ones and a lot of the other material no. But that's being worked on, right? >> Yes, in association with what's going on to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Lomax in Michigan we're working to get those materials [inaudible] materials [inaudible] go online through the Library's website. It's a [inaudible]. >> And there is a hard index for some of this stuff that's online. But it's also challenging because as we've discovered there are lots of errors because of the language differences and so forth. But little by little, yeah. Other? Yes? >> You mentioned that [inaudible] that people send in translations? >> Oh, yeah. >> Good, that's the language thing that you're working on right now? >> Yeah. Actually with the project that I'm working on selects 175 songs and tunes out of the 2,000, and I try to be somewhat representative. So over the years I've worked with people who have expertise in all of the languages. So the project I'm working on will have -- the book part will have photographs, it will have like you saw here a sample from that where you've got the original language and then an English translation, and then live annotations or comparative information about the songs and tunes and that sort of thing. But it's been really hard. And sometimes it's taken whole teams of people, and sometimes still we can't figure out because not only are the recordings 70 some or 80 years old, but people are sometimes singing rapidly or maybe they've had a few drinks or maybe they're the children of immigrants and they don't quite know what they're singing or maybe they come -- we had one song that was actually a song about a Viennese military regiment, the Deutschmeisters, and there were esoteric references to a certain kind of hairstyle we figured out, what's called a fiesco [phonetic]. And it was after a character named Pump Fiesco [phonetic] who was like in a Schiller [phonetic] stage drama or something like that. I mean it just took a hell of a long time to figure out that that's what was being sung, some kind of pomade you needed to get this fiesco haircut just right. So there have been lots of little trips down the rabbit hole about all of this stuff. Yes, back there and then up here? >> During these treks in the 30s and 40s was there documentation about how these were performed? I noticed in one of the photographs it said [inaudible]. I'm particularly interested if these were performed in theaters either at that time or [inaudible]. >> Well, most of the recordings were made in peoples' homes, but sometimes they were made in halls in different places. Sometimes some of the recorders were run on battery, but sometimes if there was a power source they went to where that would be and there weren't power sources everywhere. Alan Lomax in particular did not want to record people who were professionals or who were trained. But early on Helene Stratman Thomas didn't exactly know what kind of distinctions she ought to make from the point of view of the Library of Congress at that time. And so she recorded, for example, a Finnish guy names Yamar Neukala [phonetic] from Superior. And the Finns had workers halls, and they also had choral groups, and Yamar and his wife sang in the worker's chorus of Duluth and Superior. But he also performed on stage to the piano accompaniment of his wife, and he's doing a song called the [foreign language] which about a little baby with their cheeks stuffed with like a special sweet bread. It's a lullaby for kids but he sings it in this really booming way rolling his r's and trilling and so forth. And so I mean it's definitely a concert kind of performance. And then a number of the -- well, if you listen to that 21st Century Blues -- they've been listening to kind of ragtime bluesy sorts of things. These people were listening to sound recordings. Performers were coming over from the old country. People in the lumbar camps were singing Irish songs that were Herrigan [phonetic] and Hart [phonetic] kind of My Dad's Dinner Pail and stuff like that. And so what the whole corpus gives you really is a sense of all these different influences that are floating around including the one that you asked about. So it's definitely part of it all. Yes? >> In notice there's relatively little in your presentation that involves English language songs although you certainly dealt with it. But I'm wondering -- which is the only music from the area that I was [inaudible] with the English language with the lumberjacks and the old English ballads in the area. I wonder if your book will similarly have a relatively low percentage [inaudible]? >> No, actually there's a fair amount that's in there. What I didn't want to do like there's a Library of Congress LP that hasn't been reissued fully, Songs of the Michigan Lumberjacks, and then there's a folklorist Lori Summers [phonetic] who has done stuff with songs from Beaver Island, and some of those have been issues through Michigan State University Press. And then there was a folksongs of Wisconsin LP, Helene Stratman Thomas, that had a few fiddle tunes from Otto Ringlesbocker but the mostly English language songs. And so I haven't replicated any of that except for one song by Emory Denoyer [phonetic] where the full song was on two disks. And on the LP that was reissued by Rounder [phonetic] as a CD they don't have the part from the second disk that was recorded so I put the two of them together. But there's a lot of English language songs. Aunt Lily Richmond who I showed a picture of there are three songs from her, the African-American woman in southwestern Wisconsin. I especially included some bawdy, some raunchy lumberjack songs that weren't issued on some of these previous recordings as well because I think they need to be there along with all of the other material. So, yeah, there are a lot of English language songs. Some from England. There were Kentucks, Kentuckians who came up from eastern Kentucky to work in the woods in northern Wisconsin, there's some songs from them. There's a lot of songs from kind of an Irish tradition in the English language. So there's plenty of that, too, yeah. Yes, Linda? >> Hi. [Inaudible] so long and I have access to the Library of Congress materials. And so how can I look it up [inaudible]? >> On the Library's site there's this, what's it called, traditional songs -- >> It's called Traditional Music and Spoken Word Catalog. >> Great, than you Steven. And so if you entered -- I mean you could search by group. You could put in Italian and find a whole lot of Italian stuff which might be a good thing because Alan Lomax recorded some very interesting Italian songs in the UP including an antifascist song in the 30s. There's a lot of kind of current stuff. Or you could enter by the particular performer. >> I wouldn't know, I just know some [inaudible]. >> Yeah, you could just enter Italian. [Inaudible]. You could enter Italian there. >> You can search by location as well. You can search for a state or -- >> If you come to our [inaudible] or talk to anyone [inaudible]. >> We'd be happy to help you, yes. Can we take one last question? >> We're done. Thank you, Jim. >> Thanks a lot, thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.