>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. >> Nancy Groce: Hello it's -- my name is Nancy Groce and its June 6, 2017. And I'm here with Burt Feintuch to talk about his career and his experiences as a folklorist and a scholar and a musician. And first of all thanks so much for joining us. >> Burt Feintuch: My pleasure. I was flattered that you invited me. >> Nancy Groce: Yeah, and you're here for a Batten lecture, which will be given tomorrow. >> Burt Feintuch: Right, mm-hmm. >> Nancy Groce: Talking about New Orleans and - >> Burt Feintuch: And this idea of cultural integrity that I've been talking about lately. >> Nancy Groce: So I understand that your very generously going to have some of your collections come here to the library, so we wanted to just talk to you about how these collections came to be and how you came to be a folklorist and very - kind of just an overview. So, do you want to start with, did you start off to be a folklorist or a musician or where did you grow up? >> Burt Feintuch: I grew up mostly in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I grew up in Flutatown. >> Nancy Groce: Flutatown. >> Burt Feintuch: That's in Pennsylvania. Yeah I was born in Jersey City which my mother concealed from me for years. >> Nancy Groce: And what year was that? >> Burt Feintuch: That was 1949. I lived for the first several years of my life in Rutherford, New Jersey and then my father's business from work, took him to the Philadelphia area, and we moved. And how I became a folklorist? >> Nancy Groce: Yeah. >> Burt Feintuch: Well I have a number of ways of answering that question. One is that I would say that when I was 13 the mother of a friend of mine took the two of us to hear the Kingston Trio at Princeton University. And then retrospect and that just fired me up. In retrospect I think it may have been more that it was maybe the first life music I'd ever encountered or live music on stage that I'd ever encountered, but something really excited me. And then I think inexplicably my mother took me to see Pete Seeger after that at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, which really fired me up and you know Bob Campbell has written something about being taken to hear Pete Seeger young and how things were never quite the same after that. And I think that was true for me, and so this was of course during the great folk song revival of the 60's. And it meant that I got active in the folk song club in high school and all this sort of stuff. >> Nancy Groce: Were you a singer or - >> Burt Feintuch: I was mostly trying to play guitar and banjo in those days, in those days. And then I went on to college at Penn State where Sam Bayard was still teaching. >> Nancy Groce: Oh really? >> Burt Feintuch: Samuel Preston Bayard, yeah. >> Nancy Groce: So did you study with him? >> Burt Feintuch: I did, yeah. Three or four courses and he had studied with George Lyman Kittredge. He had published one of the first significant collections of instrumental folk music of fiddle and fife tunes from southeastern Pennsylvania. And it was a great old character. I also had a course from Bruce Rosenberg who was there very briefly. >> Nancy Groce: He must have been quite young - >> Burt Feintuch: I think he was quite young. I never really got to know him. He was going through some personal difficulties and was barely around. >> Nancy Groce: Was this in Harrisburg? >> Burt Feintuch: No, this was in State College. >> Nancy Groce: Oh in State College, oh okay. >> Burt Feintuch: And I was an American Studies major but taking all the folklore courses I could and became dimly aware that there was such a thing as a graduate degree in folklore. >> Nancy Groce: What was Bayard like as a professor? >> Burt Feintuch: He was a great character. He seemed like an old guy then. In retrospect I'm not really sure how old he was, but he had that kind antiquarian feel about him. He - what I think everyone remembers about Sam Bayard is that he used snuff. That as he snorted, he sniffed snuff. And he had a collection of antique snuff boxes. And so he would come to class and in the middle of class he'd be dipping snuff, or whatever the expression is; I don't know what it is when you inhale it as opposed to tuck it in. But - and everybody would be watching to see what sort of horn or silver or whatever snuff box he would pull out of his coat pocket. And when he finished teaching there was a fine powder on the floor around him. And you also knew that you'd made it in his estimation if he offered you a pinch of snuff, which eventually he did for me. It burned like crazy, that's what I remember. But he was very much of an era, you know? I think I had some sort of general folklore class from him where he used the croppy book, the Science of Folklore, from the 1930's. I had an I think Folk Song and Ballad or maybe just ballad class with him where we basically worked our way through the Albert Freedman book with him talking about each of the texts. He was also one of those people of that generation who had just this deep knowledge of the material itself. You know years later I sent him some recordings of some instrumental music from the northeast of England, I sent him some tune book copies too, and he was able to talk about the tune histories of all that sort of stuff, you know? He had that remarkable kind of knowledge that I think most of us no longer have. And he was you know, encouraging about the idea of studying folklore as well. I also got to know Saul Brody in those days, who was either in or had finished I guess the graduate program at Penn. I guess he hadn't finished his dissertation, which - >> Nancy Groce: I think that took a little bit longer. >> Burt Feintuch: That took a while, yeah. But I lived in a house that had been off campus, that had been claimed by people who were involved with what was called the Penn State Folklore Society, but was really a folk song society sponsoring concerts and things. And Saul used to come and stay there when he was around town, so learn some things about the field from him as well. Really I had no idea what I was getting into honestly between Sam's terrific but quite old fashioned way and that sort of generalities from Saul. And in fact, sometimes these days I tell people that I think it's likely that I would have become a musicologist if I'd known there was such a field back then, but I really didn't. Because I went into the field, you know because of a passion for traditional music, for vernacular music. And it seemed like that was the way to go in those days, I'm not sure it is anymore. >> Nancy Groce: So you did an undergraduate at - >> Burt Feintuch: At Penn State - >> Nancy Groce: And then where did you go next? >> Burt Feintuch: University of Pennsylvania for my Master's and PhD in folklore and folk life. >> Nancy Groce: And so - and who were your professors there? >> Burt Feintuch: Those days it was Kenny Goldstein, Don Yoder, Dan Benimos, Kenny and Dan, Tris Koffin were the sort of core of that program. There was a guy named Tom Burns, I don't know if that name means anything to you. Tom eventually sort of left the field. I went through that program really quickly; you know I went through from entering to finishing my PhD in four years. Barbara KG came in the year that I was basically not there, writing my dissertation, so I never really got to know her in that context. I think that's who was there then. I also did some course work with Ray Birdwhistle out of the department and someone in anthropology as well. >> Nancy Groce: And what did you write on? What were you studying? >> Burt Feintuch: I wrote a dissertation about a traditional fiddler from southeast Pennsylvania, his name was Earl Zeigler or Earl Haffler actually, it's complicated but Pop Haffler who was known as sort of old time fiddle circles and actually had a connection to Alan Jabber and to Henry Glassy, when Henry was state folklorist. I didn't know Henry in those days before my time, he had recorded Pop Haffler for whatever sort of work he was doing. Alan had visited him either through library or NEA or something at some point. >> Nancy Groce: Were you playing fiddle at this time? >> Burt Feintuch: I started playing the fiddle a year or two into graduate school; so yes. >> Nancy Groce: Because you're quite well known as a fiddler. >> Burt Feintuch: I'm flattered; thanks. >> Nancy Groce: Yeah, and when you were collecting from him, were you playing fiddle with him or were you - >> Burt Feintuch: To some extent and he was an elderly man. He was a taxidermist and I spent a year visiting him. He lived in a small town not too far - I never lived in Philadelphia. When I was in graduate school in Philly, I lived out in Bucks County, commuted an hour, hour and a half in because my then wife was teaching in that area and it just made sense. So I was living in a place called Lahaska, Pennsylvania between New Hope and Doylestown, if that means anything to you; if you know that part of the world. And Pop Haffer lived in a town about half an hour away called Quaker Town. And it was just a great Pennsylvania name, isn't it? And he had a son who was older than I was, who was a fiddle player as well and we had more in common in terms of repertoire than Pop, who had become kind of an attraction in old fiddlers picnics and things in that part of Pennsylvania. At that point there weren't many people known who could sort of fit that bill. The old traditional musician. >> Nancy Groce: And playing regional repertoire? >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah. You know it's been so long since I've listened to any of that or thought about it, I can't really talk much about it anymore. I think my interest has always been more in sort of understanding kind of why people make music and how people make music and how it fits in their lives then it is in repertoire itself. So, I spent pretty much a year visiting and interviewing and traveling around a little bit with him. His wife died in that time and he went into a deep depression and stopped playing and you know I happened to be with him when he picked it up again, which was an emotional moment for him. It was a terrific experience. It was also a dissertation that was very much influenced by all the performance theory stuff that was happening in those days for better or worse. >> Nancy Groce: We've recovered from the field but - >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah, but it's sort of not the dissertation I would write now. >> Nancy Groce: And you were also doing some collecting in Kentucky and Tennessee early in your career, right? >> Burt Feintuch: A little bit later. What happened was in the year that I was finishing - when I was at Penn which was kind of the burgeoning periods I think for that program. Although I think they kind of fooled us in that they made us think that it was a better established program and better established discipline than it really was, which I think is part of the job they had to do. >> Nancy Groce: This would be like in the mid to late 70's? >> Burt Feintuch: This was '71 to '75. And you know the new perspective stuff had just come out - >> Nancy Groce: So you were all sure you'd have careers and - >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah, in fact they used to say that everyone who finished the degree there and wanted an academic job got one. >> Nancy Groce: Penn was certainly the leading proponent at that point. >> Burt Feintuch: The year that I was finishing that didn't happen. The bottom kind of fell out and people weren't getting jobs and it was a difficult and frustrating time. At the very last moment really I learned about an opening at Western Kentucky University, which I think I learned about that in you know April or May, very late. And it was because Mary Clark, of Mary and Kenneth Clark, do you know those names? >> Nancy Groce: Yes. >> Burt Feintuch: Had announced her retirement I think late. And I applied for and got that job. So that took me to Bowling Green, Kentucky Western Kentucky University in the summer of 1975. Where there was a great archive of a lot of old film music among lots of other things. Lynwood Montell had been there for years; DK Willis had been there before he went to UCLA. >> Nancy Groce: I'd forgotten that. >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah, this was before - DK was before my time. But there were terrific recordings of very archaic local fiddle music that in many cases were done by DK with Archie Green visiting. Some Ed Conn and it was often, I think Lynwood who was sort of from that part of the country or not far from that part of Kentucky. I think it was Lynwood who led them to some of these people whom he'd known just by virtue of having grown up there. And I kind of got very interested in that. And I also early on met a fellow, a wonderful fiddle player who's become kind of legend in old time fiddle revival, a guy named Bruce Green. I don't know if that name means anything to you? Bruce was from New Jersey, very bright guy who had gotten very interested in archaic Kentucky fiddle music and had gone to Western Kentucky as an English major with the idea that he might be able to do some visiting and field research. And he had done a wonderful job of sort of turning up very old players who had played a repertoire that you just didn't hear any place else. >> Nancy Groce: Very regional repertoire? >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah very regional; yeah. And it found a home recordings and things of this sort. And was an incredibly talent, almost mimic of some of those players that he really kind of got that. You know many of us are more kind of interpreters. He was really kind of able to replicate things. And he used to - by that time he had graduated, was there part of the year and picking apples in Vermont to support himself the rest of the year. This really sounds like it's certainly - but I was lucky enough that he introduced me to some of the old time musicians that he knew. We got an early NEA folk arts grant together to produce a double album of both instrumental and vocal music from that south central Kentucky area and some of that was from the archive, and some of that was recordings that I did with the folk like center, borrowed - >> Nancy Groce: From the Library of Congress? >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah from the Library of Congress. And it was one of the early NEA grants to do a sound recording. Yeah and then he ended up moving out of the area, moving to North Carolina. I haven't seen him for years, but he's sort of remained kind of shadow legendary figure for that kind of old repertoire, to some extent; yeah. So that's really what got me interested in both playing and learning something of the music from that part of the world. In those days western was a master's program in folklore and just getting interested in developing strengths in the public sector, so it was a pretty exciting time to get there, to be part of that. >> Nancy Groce: Can you talk a little bit about public sector because that's really when public sector folklore started to take off, right? >> Burt Feintuch: Well I guess one of the times; yeah. >> Yeah, when I got there in '75, I'm trying to remember this, cloudy history. There was a student - a recent graduate of the program named Linda White I think who had gotten a job as I think it was State Folklorist in Tennessee. It was very early, before Roby Cogswell who you would know I think. And there was a lot of sort of excitement in the program about the possibility of helping students think about careers in that direction. One of the first experiences I had with student, was I think it was in the summer when I had arrived, before I started teaching, I sat in on a master's thesis defense by a young student named Peggy Bulcher, for instance. And of course we know that history as well. I guess she was coming up from Florida at that point and working; so there were - and I also was on the thesis committee again I think before I even started teaching of a guy named George Reynolds who was working for Fox Fire. So there was a little bit of, sort of direction developing where students were getting their masters degrees and moving off into more public or applied kinds of work. And we began talking about what can we do to help that and to encourage it and work to develop some internships and work to develop some courses and actually work to develop what was called historic preservation option. I think which was a non-thesis option for the master's degree. We had people writing pretty serious masters theses, but we came up with this more courses - and some of those students actually went into historic preservation. But it was also a way to begin to move into more public or applied kinds of work through internships, through their own ingenuity. And also in '85 I organized the conference that became the book, the Conservation of Culture, which was published in '88. So that was one of the first big public folklore conferences. There'd been Bob Byington did something in Pittsburgh years earlier that people talked about quite a lot. And we did a smaller one either the late 70's or early 80's at Western. And then '85 did one that was quite a big one. And that led, the library's cultural conservation report that Ormond Loomis I guess had kind of led - had been published. So that there was a lot of this conversation going on in lots of places by then, but we had this conference that had stellar line up of people who are committed to the idea of what in those days was called cultural conservation. >> Nancy Groce: Are you in touch with Max Hall NEA quite a bit? >> Burt Feintuch: Mm-hmm, and we had Archie there to give a keynote, Archie Green came to give a keynote and Alan Jabbour was there and that led to that book which for a while was probably you know one of the main texts for people interested in you know reading about public folklore anyway. >> Nancy Groce: Did you write it or did you - >> Burt Feintuch: No it was edited. It was based on that conference, on the papers from that conference. I had an editor from the University Press of Kentucky, which is one of those consortium presses who had been sort of curious about the possibility of publishing this, come down to the conference and he left very excited about the possibility. >> Nancy Groce: That was really classic book; it's still in print, isn't it? >> No. No, I think that there's an online version available through the Kentucky Press although I don't actually know for sure. There was a brief moment where it looked like another press wanted to reissue it and I had the copyright reverted to me, or whatever the term is for that and then that fell through. It suddenly was one of those times when all the university presses were saying "Oh God, we're in trouble now; what can we do"? We only need to publish bestselling fiction and cook books you know? So, it never happened. >> Nancy Groce: So how long were you at Western Kentucky? >> Burt Feintuch: I was there for 13 years. I was there from '75 to '88. >> Nancy Groce: And then you got lured away by - >> Burt Feintuch: No then I worked hard to find another job. I - there was a lot I really loved about being at Western. I wasn't wild about - my then wife and I weren't wild about the idea of having children grow up there at that point. And a funny way the longer I was there the less it felt like home I think too, sort of culturally you know? It was a very religiously conservative place. It was an hour or so from Nashville; this is before Nashville kind of had the renaissance that it's gone through. It felt kind of remote and again, we weren't so comfortable with the idea of having kids grow up in a place where they were fighting about the Ten Commandments on the wall of classrooms and things of that sort. So I actually started looking for a job and I had - I had gotten involved with the Kentucky Humanities Council, the state council there and in fact had ended up chairing it in what turned out to be a sort of challenging year. And our executive director resigned to take another job. And also a really rewarding year. We had an early award from excellence from the NEH, which was then recognized in certain councils for excellence. And as I was looking for other kinds of jobs I started applying for humanities and directorships and ended up in New Hampshire in '88. >> Nancy Groce: So you went to New Hampshire as - >> Burt Feintuch: As Director of the Center of Humanities. Not really as a folklorist, in fact they weren't quite sure I think what to do with me as a folklorist. There had been someone in the English Department who had taught a little bit of folklore and literature but was a literary scholar and no training in folklore or any allied field at all. And there was also a name that you probably know, Linda Morley living in Manchester, New Hampshire who had done some work as a state folklorist before my time, was doing a little bit of teaching for the University for the English Department. And although I've never really asked I think what happened is some higher administrator said "Okay we're going to hire this guy, where are we going to put a folklorist"? And they said, "Let's put him in English" because at least the word shows up occasionally in the catalog or something there. In some ways in retrospect I think I would have done just as well or maybe better in Anthropology. I mean I'm very happy in English and my colleagues are great and they're very supportive and interested in what I do, but really that was in a certain sense a turning point in my career as an academic. You know I continued to write and do the research that I do in the field, but that's not really why I'm there. I teach one course a year. I've been teaching, early on I taught some folklore you know, Introduction to Folklore courses and I was teaching some graduate students. I eventually decided I didn't want to teach graduate students anymore, although I taught mostly grad students at the masters level at Western. Because I just didn't really enjoy teaching English Lit grad students who wanted things from me that I was interested in giving them. And you know with my much more kind of ethnographic orientation in that era anyhow. And now in recent years I've been, for a while I was teaching a course that I called The Ethnography of Music, which was a fieldwork class basically. And the last couple of years I've taught an American Roots music class. My classes are all cross listed by anthropology as well. But I'm really there directing this research center, research and programming center in the humanities. >> Nancy Groce: But in your spare time you continue to do research and fieldwork? >> Burt Feintuch: Sure, yeah. I love to do that and I certainly have continued to do that. >> Nancy Groce: So will your next big research project after leaving Western Kentucky, I always think of you about that time starting to work in North Umberland, but maybe that was a little bit later. >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah actually I should tell you this, how are we doing on time? >> Nancy Groce: We're doing fine. >> Burt Feintuch: I should tell you this little bit too I guess, back to why I chose to be a folklorist. In 1969 in my junior year as an undergraduate I studied abroad at the University of Durham in the Northeast of England. And it was a brand new program then and I was vaguely aware that there was something akin to the US folk song revival happening in the UK, but didn't know much about it. In fact, I remember Michael Cooney, if you remember - he told me about that. And so I got there and I asked one of the faculty where I might go hear some music. And he said "Go to New Castle", which was about 20 minutes away on the train on a Thursday night and go to this pub called the Bridge, which turned out to be one of the legendary clubs in the folk revival in England, sort of powerful commitment to regional music there, to local music in New Castle as then the sort of main city of the North Umberland region, although technically now it's not part of the county of North Umberland. It had a huge history, industrial history and a lot of music call and a lot of local song and also a lot of - and also the whole north Umbrian piping tradition, the small pipe, a distinctive instrument from that part of the world, to manuscripts and libraries dating back to the 1660's and so forth. And I just stumbled on this and although had sort of split my time listening half to the New Lost City Ramblers and half to James Brown as an undergraduate, I didn't really get the idea fully I think until I was there that music is as local as it was there. You know as people purveyed it as and you know you could hear people play a tune named for a street that you'd walk down as you went to the train station to go back to where you were living. And that really made a powerful impact on me as well, I think intellectually and in my interest and also because the musicians are essentially doing tune scholarship. You know helped me think about - >> Nancy Groce: It's Allister Anderson was probably there at the time - >> Burt Feintuch: The group the High Level - >> Nancy Groce: Oh yeah - >> Burt Feintuch: Colin Ross who was one of the first fiddle players in the revival there after Dave Swarbuck, yeah so at some point in Kentucky some years later I got the idea that maybe I could write an article about the revival of the North Umbrian small pipes, and managed to raise some money to go do a summer of field work. This would have been around '85 I think. And that just sort of spun out of control in a good way in that I kept raising money and kept going back sort of interviewing and recording everything I could. I was there for years, did some - a few articles about the revival there, eventually produced Folkways CD, a Smithsonian Folkways of Music - >> Nancy Groce: The North Umberland Grant - >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah. >> Nancy Groce: Which is a great CD. >> Burt Feintuch: Thanks, thanks. It was a lot of fun to do. And that is one of the largest sort of piles of recordings I have that will be part of the contribution. >> Nancy Groce: And who were you recording at that point? Were you recording at the Bridge or were you going out and doing - >> Burt Feintuch: No the Bridge was sort of - it hadn't stopped then but it had stopped being what it had been. It had become more of a generic club. The people who had gotten it going weren't really going there anymore, so I was very interested first in the history of the small pipes and of the revival. And talking to -- here was older generation sort of gentlemen had been involved in that, a lot of talk with Colin Ross who was the first sort of - one of the first people to - of a later generation to make the instrument and make it available and David Burley who was probably the first who made - David sort of made the Chevy of the North Umberland small pipes made a lot of them on the assembly line. >> Nancy Groce: People had stopped making that instrument. >> Burt Feintuch: You could barely get your hands on a set if you wanted them and then suddenly they were available again. And some people said the answer to why there's a revival is you can buy the pipes again. I think more complicated, but I was going back quite a lot - doing a lot of recording, several hundred hours I think of recordings - >> Nancy Groce: Were you doing just with Umberland, were you across the border at all? >> Burt Feintuch: Some, well not in Scotland, I never got to Scotland. When you say cross the border I think Durham, to the south. Yeah. And that's probably a lot of academics of the great book that they didn't write, that's mine. There's a lot of material there and you know and an assortment of publications but the book never got written. And part never got written because I got the job offer at UNH, at the University of New Hampshire. That same year I had an NEH fellowship offered to me and had to not take the fellowship so as to take the job at UNH. UNH, the search had failed the year before and they're very anxious to get someone to get it started so they wouldn't let me wait a year. In those days NEH wouldn't let you defer either. So, I think I went back to North Umberland once or twice in the early years at UNH, but it kind of lost momentum and you know eventually I went to Cape Brenton too and that was kind of bad news for North Umberland. >> Nancy Groce: Let's talk about that because in the last 20 years it's really been a lot in Cape Brenton. So when did you make that switch and being in New Hampshire must have helped - >> Burt Feintuch: It certainly helps logistically. You know this goes back to me as a musician actually. I had started paying the fiddle as an old time fiddle player in part because a guy who you also knew name Jerry Milnes who was at Augusta and West Virginia, who was - when I was in graduate school was around Philadelphia working as an industrial model maker and playing old time music with a bunch of friends. And I ran into him once and mentioned the fact that I loved to fiddle and he said "I'll give you some lessons". So, I went to him maybe half a dozen times and that really got me started, but that was my only almost sort of official education in playing. The rest was by ear and by trial and error, a lot of error. And I got to New Hampshire in '88 and couldn't find anyone who played the music I played. >> Nancy Groce: Which was mostly southern - >> Burt Feintuch: Southern old time music because that's what I'd been doing in Kentucky. And so I had to kind of retool to play for contra dances, which was playing a lot of some New England repertoire and you know the kind of mish mash of stuff that's played there, a lot of Irish music and these days if you're going to go to a session where I live you're probably going to play Irish music, which led me to listen a little bit to Cape Breton music, which I think I would have dismissed as not very interesting when I was in Kentucky because my aesthetic was so different. But I thought wow, this is kind of an interesting thing and for reasons that I don't' fully you know, remember decided to go spend a week at a fiddle event in Cape Breton. I think this was 1997. One of these things where you sit at the feet of masters. And it was also great that you could drive there of course as opposed to fly to the Northeast of England. But it was a marvelous experience in part because I got to know these wonderful players, Buddy McMaster, Ken Inbeton and others. And I think my sort of folklore self, clicked in as well as soon as I realized that the music was so locked into community there too. It wasn't just going to something where people taught you and went home. They left to play for a dance or something. And so you know the folklore made me sort of the outlier that first year there because all the students at this thing would say "Where are we going to get together to play tunes with each other" and I'd say "I'm going to a dance", you know? And it just kind of blew me away how vital the tradition was there compared to anything I'd known. And so I started setting up interviews and started going back and kept going back. And you know was lucky enough to do a couple of the Smithsonian folkways projects and to do some writing. And eventually got the idea to do a book with my friend and collaborator Gary Sampson a photographer, who had been the official photographer at the University of New Hampshire. But had moved on to teach photography at the New Hampshire Institute of Arts in Manchester. When he was still at UNH, UNH sent him to Cape Breton to do some photographs of me at work for the university's magazine. >> Nancy Groce: Just to make sure you were actually working? >> Burt Feintuch: And he had been there years ago on some other assignment and it turned out you know we discovered we both loved the place. >> Nancy Groce: And this is mostly the Gaelic tradition of Cape Breton or also in French? >> Burt Feintuch: No, it's - my work has been pretty largely in what people would say is the Gaelic community, although they don't by and large speak Gaelic anymore. I know people in the French community as well and the Scottish music or what used to be called the Cape Breton Scottish violin music before they started just saying Cape Breton. So dominant there that you hear a lot of Francophones playing the music and people playing the music to the Francophone community, has been working hard to sort of revitalize things. And there is a history of you know, publishing song books and things of that sort too, that I don't' know all that much about. But the kind of cultural boundaries are really porous there. >> Nancy Groce: You were there just when Cape Breton music sort of exploded on the world stage. >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah or maybe just slightly afterwards when I was there Natalie McMaster and Ashley McIsaac the two people who kind of caused that explosion were riding very high. Natalie continues to ride pretty high and Ashley kind of burned out a little bit. But these were two young people with strong family traditions of fiddle playing, lessons from some of the same people, who became immensely popular first in Canada and beyond. Ashely had done a CD that mixed traditional fiddle music with the - a lot of very in your face rock and roll that was - that went whatever it was platinum or something. >> Nancy Groce: And in Britain also, it did well in Brittan. >> Burt Feintuch: I don't know that, but I'm not surprised. He'd be playing at a dance in a little community, there'd be a line down the street of teenage girls wanting to see it; it was a great scene to hear this fiddle player who is a very traditional style fiddle player or can be. And Natalie had worked to create a kind of act that made the music work for all kinds of audiences but not so much the hard rock stuff that Ashley was doing, and she's really endured. So, yeah so it was very big then across Canada and beyond. >> Nancy Groce: And Celtic colors started - >> Burt Feintuch: A few years later. The book that I started talking about which was called In The Blood, Cape Breton Conversations on Culture. The idea was to talk to people who one way or another sort of engaged with culture in their lives. A lot of musicians would also one of the founders of Celtic Colors Festival Joella Folds, who stepped away from it now, but until recently was really the force behind it. >> Nancy Groce: I know her from Scotland - >> Burt Feintuch: Celtic Connections - yeah I know she was - she talks about being inspired by that to start this festival that would extend the short season in Cape Breton, the short tour season so they do it in October and it's been a huge success I think and it's run very, very well. >> Nancy Groce: So you're recording - you say you're as interested in the stories and how people use music as with the music. But the In the Blood Book, which we have here, it has a lot of interesting interviews with people; how did you decide who to interview for that field work? >> Burt Feintuch: I think you - I think what I did was sort of follow my passion more than map anything out that had any kind of logic. I knew that I wanted to go beyond musicians. I knew there were musicians that I really wanted to talk to who I think needed to be on the record in terms of talking about life and their stories as much as their music, which was already on the record. But I also wanted to talk to people who were involved with language revival, with the development of festivals and some other sorts of things too. I talked to someone who is a publisher of tune books, whose tune books have had a very powerful impact on the - >> Nancy Groce: Whose - >> Burt Feintuch: Paul Cranford. >> Nancy Groce: Is he the lighthouse keeper? >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah. Retired from that now. Yeah I mean - one thing I realized in North Umberland was that some of the early tune books really kind of established a repertoire. And I don't think that's so true in Cape Breton but it's in part true and a lot of that is Paul's work. >> Nancy Groce: And it's during Holland too - >> Burt Feintuch: During Holland, yeah who I felt very lucky to get to know. >> Nancy Groce: Yeah he's a lovely guy. >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah and just a brilliant musician. >> Nancy Groce: And Brenda Stubbord is up there also. >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah I know Brenda well, I haven't seen her for a while, but know her well. Yeah. We went to - I interviewed Brenda and we went to - Gary was with me and we went to do a photograph of her and she was living in a place called Florence then in Cape Breton. And Gary had lights with him, which he didn't normally have but he plugged some lights in and set up the shot and tripped the shutter and the power went out all over town. It turns out she is a locally celebrated tune composer to which kept saying she was going to write a tune called "Burt's Power Surge". She did write a tune for me, different title. >> Nancy Groce: Oh she did, okay we'll have to get it. Have you play that at some point. >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah so Cape Breton just kind of kept going. This is about the 20th anniversary of my starting to go to Cape Breton and for a while I was going three or four times a year. You know any time I could, it's about a 700 mile or so drive from my house, but not a bad drive at all and I really can't remember the number of times that I've done that. >> Nancy Groce: So do you feel part of that community now? >> Burt Feintuch: I hadn't gone for a couple of years and went back last June. I was asked to be on the board of the Celtic Music Interpretive Center that's on the honorary board. And they were having a tenth year anniversary and I went back for that and felt very moved by how connected. I felt two people and how people were reciprocal and one of the biggest honors I think of my career was - so it was a dinner and sort of celebration for the tenth anniversary and then there was a concert in the hall next to the center. One of the musicians who I know fairly well got on stage and thanked someone who was a big donor who helped support the event and thanked me and said that what I had done was archive their culture, which is not exactly how I would say it but it was something I found really moving. And I'm hoping at some point that those recordings will also end up in a Cape Breton institution along with coming here and have talked to the interpretive center and to special collections at Cape Breton University about that. >> Nancy Groce: What are you working on now, are you doing Cape Breton stuff or are you - >> Burt Feintuch: I don't think I'll ever stop doing Cape Breton stuff, although I don't have anything particular going on. I have an article that will be a chapter in a book in progress. A book that's being edited by a couple of Jeff Titans friends and students not quite a fetch rift but something to recognize him about music and sustainability. >> Nancy Groce: Much like a fetch rift - >> Burt Feintuch: It's not going to be identified as such but where I talk about Cape Breton and New Orleans in the same breath as I am going to do here. After Gary and I did the Cape Breton book we said this is really a lot of fun and it was kind of - sort of targeted in a more focused way than a lot of my other things have been. Let's do these interviews, do these photographs and do a book. And we said let's try something else. We kind of know how to do this now, let's do another one and I said, "Let's go to New Orleans". >> Nancy Groce: And why New Orleans? >> Burt Feintuch: I had been in New Orleans for something, I think Juney, my partner and I Juney Thomas and I had gone maybe for my birthday. I haven't been there for years, since I was a teenager. And we went to hear one of the musicians that's always been a kind of musical hero, Walter Wolfman Washington. >> Nancy Groce: Oh really? >> Burt Feintuch: Great sort of soul and funk musician, just grabs me. And we left and I said I'm going to do something here, and I thought for a while I'd like - I wonder if I could write his life history. And then I thought I don't know, I don't know him, I don't know you know how feasible a project that is. But that led me to think "Well Gary and I do know how to do these interview and photograph books, let's do one in New Orleans. And Gary had never been to New Orleans, and I thought to myself - so I had this sort of deep ethnographic engagement with Cape Breton, can I do something almost more like a journalist would, that is sort of set some parameters with the goal of producing something and do it. And so for me it was an experiment really and we did it. >> Nancy Groce: And that resulted in - >> Burt Feintuch: The book Talking New Orleans Music, which came out in 2015. >> Nancy Groce: Was your research done before or after or during Katrina? >> Burt Feintuch: After. There's some conversation about Katrina of course, more or less depending who I talked to. It's interviews with 11 musicians, actually one of whom is not really in New Orleans as much a musician as a producer, a guy named Scott Billington; I don't know if you know Scott. Scott is now Vice President for ANR for Rounder, but he produced all the Rounder recordings from Louisiana, but from New Orleans and a lot the Cajun and Coast stuff they did too starting the 80's. So I knew Walter Wolfman Washington's music thanks to Scott's production. And Scott was in those days living in New Bridgeport, Massachusetts half an hour from me and had grown up in kind of Boston Blues Revival scene, a friend of Erica Brady's our colleague. And was actually a great interview and kind of opened the door to people like Erma Thomas for me. >> Nancy Groce: Opened the door, did he put you in touch with them or - >> Burt Feintuch: He gave me Erma's personal email address and let me take it from there, yeah. Yeah that to me, too is a thrill because I've always loved her music and it was hard to get to her, not because - just because of her schedule and mine. In fact Gary and I decided to make one last trip to shoot some more photos and do a little bit more work and I emailed her once again saying "I'm coming, this is the last time, would it be possible at all to do an interview? And remember I'm Scott's friend" and wherever we switched plans as we were flying to New Orleans, I checked my email and there was an email from her saying call my manager. Her manager is her husband you know, and so I called and I said "This is me" and "Erma said she'd do an interview" and you could tell they were sitting watching television together. And then her husband said, "Hey did you say you'd do an interview with some guy" and she said, "Yeah I guess". And he said, "When do you want to come" and I said "When's good" and he said, "When's good"? And we set it up and went and did it. And it was really last minute and as I said a thrill. >> Nancy Groce: So are you - >> Burt Feintuch: So what am I doing now? >> Nancy Groce: Or what's next? >> Burt Feintuch: I'm doing what I think is probably the last of these books that I think of somewhere between scholarship and art books, thanks to the photographic part of it. We had such a good time in New Orleans, we said let's try another one and let's try it sort of on this model. You know can we do it without spending the rest of my life making these trips. And so we're doing a book that we're calling Creole Soul, which is about [Inaudible]. Working both in Texas and in Louisiana. An actually started in Texas and I'm really convinced that the Texas part is more interesting and more vital than Louisiana part, a lot of people don't know that. Although there's a fine book about Zytigo in Texas by a guy named Roger Wood. But what happened is a lot of Creole people from South Louisiana moved to East Texas for work, starting in the early twentieth century and in more urban environments, some of the urban stuff you hear in Zytigo now developed more in Texas than it did in Louisiana, came back to Louisiana, yeah. So that's been a lot of fun and we were there - we were in Louisiana for a week or so in March. And getting close I think we have enough interviews. We may go back to do some more photographs. >> Nancy Groce: You've done so much field work and we've spent most of this discussion so far talking about that. But could you talk a little bit about what you -- you were the editor of the American - >> Burt Feintuch: The Journal of American Folklore - >> Nancy Groce: For a while right? >> Burt Feintuch: From 1990 to 1995, yeah. What do you want me to talk about? >> Nancy Groce: That can be an overview of the field in a different way. >> Burt Feintuch: Sure of course it did. That was - so that started in my second year at the University of New Hampshire. >> Nancy Groce: And how did - did you volunteer? Did you volunteer or did someone volunteer you for this? >> Burt Feintuch: I think it was that I was sort of foolish enough to say yes. Roger Abrahams asked me if I would be interested in - and Kenny Goldstein did - >> Nancy Groce: So they were both your professors - >> Burt Feintuch: Roger had not been my professor. I knew Roger - I knew Roger a little bit. Roger came to Penn years later. Of course Roger had gotten his degree from Penn too, but that was long gone by the time I got there. So it's funny, I don't remember entirely how this happened but I was sort of taken aback to be asked if I'd be interested in doing it and I think it was that I had invited Roger to give a talk at UNH in the early years. I tried to bring some folklorists in and that just went by the wayside as my budget changed and so forth. But we had Barbaga KG I remember as well and I think maybe he asked. And my sense is in those days there was less interest in being democratic than there is now. I mean it was in some ways, in some ways it doesn't seem that long ago and in some ways it was quite a long time ago in terms of how we think about how to do things openly and fairly it seems to me. So I was asked if I would be interested. Probably there were other people asked too, I don't know. And I went to my dean who in those days was a very sort of powerful figure at the university and things were going fairly well financial. And he offered the support that I would need and I said, "Okay" and it happened. Toward the end of my time I got asked if I would be interested in re-enlisting for five years and I said no, and I realized that my ego had said yes and for the 1990-1995 term, but my common sense caught up with me during that time - it was a lot of work. But you know I think we did some things that made a difference. We did that key words issue, the body [Inaudible] issue. >> Nancy Groce: Was that the one you worked on with Michael Taft? >> Burt Feintuch: No this was the one called Common Ground that led to the Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture book. That was first a special issue and in fact, the Illinois, the press had to be convinced that there was a reason to do a book version because why don't people just read the journal? Yeah, and so that turned out to be a pretty influential publication and you know it was a really interesting time. For me I said early on that had I know differently I might have become an ethnomusicologist. Started graduate school I was astonished at the range of interests other students had. I thought we'd all be there just talking about ballads or something I guess, as having been the student of Sam Bayard. But here were these people interested in myth and other forms of narrative and all sorts of stuff. I had very little idea of the breadth of the field, and of course this was years later but working in the journal too it certainly exposed me to that and you know interesting and exciting ways. And then it became hard work. I was thinking about the other day, this was the beginning of email for instance. We were doing things by fax and mail and so forth and I was worried it was kind of transitional moment. >> Nancy Groce: Amazingly survived without emails or computers when you started? >> Burt Feintuch: Yes. >> Nancy Groce: Did you - you probably did your dissertation on a typewriter? >> Burt Feintuch: Well you paid someone or convinced someone to type it for you in those days but it was done on a typewriter, sure. >> Nancy Groce: And you are also I should mention just as part of the interview that you were - was it in 2012 you became a fellow of the American Folklore Society? >> Burt Feintuch: I don't remember what year it was, but it was fairly recently, yeah. >> Nancy Groce: That gives you more status in the meetings immediately. >> Burt Feintuch: I haven't noticed. Nope, the fellows do a breakfast for graduate students and they - I think they find new fellows who are the suckers who will get up early in the morning and go sit at a table with graduate students. It's a nice event and the fellows also do a reception for graduate students. >> Nancy Groce: That's true. >> Burt Feintuch: The ones I've been to have been very nice events. >> Nancy Groce: And the membership has expanded and broadened too. >> Burt Feintuch: Well there's some of us pushing for that, it still needs to go quite a ways I think, but at least I think more people understand why it should as does the society itself with its own membership. >> Nancy Groce: Now what part of your career have I not talked about and not asked you about? >> Burt Feintuch: Well one thing, I don't know if I've mentioned this as I've talked to Todd in the library about field work material that I'll be compiling and giving. The first field work I actually did was in British Columbia in my first summer after my first year in graduate school. I got a grant that I think channeled what was in the Canadian folk music society that this was a time when Canada was thinking a lot about multi-culturism and developing that notion of a mosaic of cultures rather than the melting pot metaphor we're using here. And they're interested in having someone do some fieldwork having to do with bilingual community in British Columbia, how that happened I don't really know. It's where those funds came from, why that decision was made. But I was encourage by Kenny I think and helped in my proposal writing by Dan. Wrote a proposal, got the grants spent this summer. I could have been just kind of blindly looking for something to do in British Columbia but by luck ended up in a failed finished Utopian community on an island between the northern part of Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland, a place called Sointulla which in Finnish means harmony, which has been established around 1900, by Finnish immigrants from Western Canada and the upper Midwest to the US. Many of whom had been agricultural people in Finland, but ended up logging or mining and doing things they found unpleasant. And brought over a kind of fiery socialist leader from Finland who led them in creating a community on this island, which for a time the Canadian government gave to them and became kind of extra territorial, not part of Canada. It failed as a Utopian community in part because it wasn't suitable for agriculture. And people went back into mostly fishing and some logging. But at that point, this would have been summer of 72, 500 people living in this beautiful spot in a very kind of rugged part of Canada in those days, very hard to get to there. And in the summer men would go out fishing, come back in and somebody would have a music party. And I was there recording music and talking to people and did a little bit of writing about that, so I have that material as well and it was you know, an odd thing because I don't speak Finnish. And Alli Congess Miranda did a little bit of translation for me for something, I don't really remember what some time after maybe as I was writing my final report for my grant or something, but that was a marvelous experience in beginning to understand what field work was. Again that was after a year of graduate school. >> Nancy Groce: Interesting. Maybe Todd Harvey is sitting in on this. Is there any questions you have? >> Todd Harvey: You talked about using the Nagra recorder, talk about other gear that you favored [Inaudible]. >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah I used all kinds of - >> Nancy Groce: So we had a question from Todd Harvey who is on the side here, who is one of our archivists and he wants - he was curious about the gear you use both in North Umberland and in your other field work collections? You borrowed a nagra from the library at one point. >> Burt Feintuch: Yeah I was very lucky in that you know in those days this being around '75, '76 the library, the Folk Life Center had a program lending out nagras and I - Bruce Green and I had gotten the grant to do that piece that I had mentioned to you that involves some new field recording. And I asked if I could borrow a machine and it so happened that Carl Fleishauer was lucky enough to see [Inaudible] I think picking one up some place that maybe someone in Tennessee was using it. It was going to be coming - it was in the area and it worked out that he could both drop one off for me in Bowling Green, Kentucky and also teach me how to use it. And that was really my first experience you know thinking about recording well. A little bit from Kenny. When I'd gone to British Columbia he'd loaned me one of those little five inch Sony, I forget what they were a little five inch reel to reel recorders, battery operated recorders that Sony had out, that was his own machine and he had loaned me. I had the nagra for a while and a few other things with it, not just that recording. But of course it went back to the library to my dismay. And then of course what do you do on a more limited budget when you can't afford a nagra 4S and convince the program at Western to buy a couple of viewers - >> Nancy Groce: Yeah. >> Burt Feintuch: And use those and then hire quality cassette recording became possible, the - was it Sony TCD5M, does that sound right to you? It was a little metal cassette recorder that people we reusing for at least broadcast quality, so I had one of those. >> Nancy Groce: You were using it with two external mics? >> Burt Feintuch: External mics, yeah, I had some kind of [Inaudible] in those days. As I left there and went to New Hampshire I acquired a dat recorder. I did a little bit on mini disk too. The North Umbrian stuff because of issues of portability some of that was done on that - the Sony D5M or whatever it was and then later a Walkman Pro I think they were called, audio cassettes. We've all seen these things if we've been around long enough. More recently I've done some one bit recording on a Corg MR1000. I don't know if you're familiar with those here. They never really caught on very much, but they're very high quality recorders, one that I bought for myself. But traveling to - on airplanes the bigger stuff is a bother, and so I started using a Task M DR40, which I despite actually. And finally in recent years bought a Zoom H5N or whatever it is, which is to me a superior machine, just easier to work and less prone to screw ups. I've kind of used a lot of media over the years. I still have the dat recorder if I ever need to play anything, assuming it will play. Although I had no problems with dats. I know they're notoriously - >> Nancy Groce: Unstable. >> Burt Feintuch: Difficult. >> Nancy Groce: You've done most of your field recording has been audio? Or have you also done video? >> Burt Feintuch: Very little video. You know I recorded a - I did a little bit of video on Sony Portapack in my graduate school days, which was a bulky black and white thing that recorded on reels and I don't know what happened to that material. Speaking of not knowing whatever happened to that material. When I got back from - I'm jumping around, but when I got back from studying abroad in England, all charged up I got asked at Penn State by the person who ran the so called Artisan Lecture Series, which was a very big attraction for students to help produce a folk festival at Penn State and we brought in - and the resources seemed unlimited, you know in those days and I said, "Let's bring in all these people" and it ranged from bringing the Balfa Brothers and Mississippi Fred McDowell to bringing big revival acts like Joan Baez and the High level ranters were flew in from England and Al Anderson sort of credits me with getting his career started; it was his first trip to the US and in that time I interviewed Fred McDowell just because he was there and I had this vague sort of sense that's what you do, and I don't know whatever happened to that recording. Likewise when I was in Durham I - there was a local group of young guys playing regional music and I borrowed a recorder and recorded them, one of those people was Dave Richardson who went on to Boys of - yeah, who I've known for years. I haven't seen for years; so in a sense I was doing field work in the dark and I don't know what happened to those several recordings. >> Nancy Groce: Things turned out - >> Burt Feintuch: Those I don't think will. >> Nancy Groce: Well we can - this has been great. Thank you so much for coming in. >> Burt Feintuch: Thanks for doing this. >> Nancy Groce: We might do a follow up. We won't have a chance to look at your material - but for right now this has been really interesting; so thank you so much. >> Burt Feintuch: Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.