>> Elizabeth Peterson, Director of the American Folklife Center: Well, hello everybody. My name is Betsy Peterson, and I'm the Director of the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress. And I'd like to welcome you to the latest presentation in our ongoing Benjamin A. Botkin Lecture Series. The Botkin Series, for those of you who don't know, allows the American Folklife Center to highlight the latest scholarship of leading scholars working into the, in the disciplines of folklore, ethnomusicology, oral history, and cultural heritage while also enhancing our collections here at the American Folklife Center. For the Center and the Library, the lecture series also forms an important facet of our acquisitions. Each lecture is videotaped and becomes part of the permanent collections of the Center. And in addition, the lectures are eventually posted as webcasts on the Library's website where they are available for viewing to Internet patrons throughout the world and for generations to come. So with that said, if you have some sort of electronic device, cell phone, et cetera, turned on at this point, perhaps turn it off. We'd appreciate it. Now today is something of a special edition of the Botkin Lecture Series, and today I have the pleasure of introducing the noted discographer, researcher, author, broadcaster, and scholar of folk and ethnic music, Dick Spottswood. More than just noted, Spottswood, as I think everyone in this room knows is legendary for his contributions to American music. Among his many accomplishments, Dick Spottswood is celebrated as the author of the essential reference work, Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893-1942, a seven-volume work. And it lists early non-English language sound recordings by ethnic groups throughout the U.S. and was published in 1990, and it still remains a go-to staple of reference archivists everywhere, including our own here at the AFC. Dick worked with the Library of Congress to produce the influential 15-volume LP Series: Folk Music in America, to mark the 1976 Bicentennial, and he did seminal research on Caribbean, South American, Bluegrass, Blues, and Country recordings. His scholarship has enriched literally hundreds of significant re-issue recordings by labels such as Arhoolie, Rounder, Yazoo, and The Bear Family. Not to mention reissues on his own Melodeon and Piedmont labels. If this were not enough, in addition to these contributions as a scholar and discographer, Dick is also renowned as the longtime host of the acclaimed weekly radio program The Dick Spottswood Show on Bluegrass Country Radio WAMU. He also co-founded Bluegrass Unlimited magazine in 1966, was a founding member of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. And among other projects, is currently working on a new edition of Country Music Sources, a biblio discography of commercially recorded traditional music. And last but not least, over the years in his spare time, Dick has contributed some 40 fieldwork collections to the AFC Archive, recordings of Bluegrass, Cajun, [inaudible], Swedish, Irish, Old-time Western and Blues musicians, including an interview with the legendary Mississippi John Hurt who Dick and Joe Hickerson interviewed next door in the Coolidge Auditorium in 1963. One would think that Dick would be a little bit, little less busy and productive, but since retiring to Florida, but that doesn't seem to be the case. This special edition of the Botkin Series is a two-part event. First, we're going to start with AFC staff members Nancy Gross and Steve Winick speaking with Dick about his career, and then we're going to take a short break to reset the stage for an appreciation panel. Short overviews highlighting various aspects of Dick's illustrious contributions to American music. Our panelists are to be Matthew Barton, Curator of Recorded Sound in the Library's Motion Picture and Recorded Sound division; AFC Consultant Carl Fleischhauer; AFC Archivist Maya Lerman; Kip Lornell, Professor of Ethnomusicology and History at George Washington University; and Jeff Place, Curator and Senior Archivist at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Oop, and one more, and Calypso Researcher Steve Shapiro. So finally I also want to thank our cosponsor of this event which is the Library's Division of Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound for cosponsoring this. So thanks to them and thanks to all of you for coming, and thanks to Dick Spottswood for making this all possible [laughter]. [ Applause ] >> Dick Spottswood: Thank you for that [inaudible]. Well, you, you sit there, people read, someone else has put your entire life before you, and you're thinking, "If I were hearing that about somebody else, I wouldn't believe it." But I guess the answer, if you just do one thing at a time and you live long enough, then you too could star on This is Your Life. >> Nancy Gross: But she still didn't cover everything so we can-- . >> Dick Spottswood: Just one thing I wanted to add. The, the record production thing and my proudest achievement was that huge well-funded Bicentennial record project that was called the-- . [ Applause ] I, I guess it poisoned a few minds, didn't it? [Laughter] >> Steve Winick: Yeah, there's a couple of volumes over on the table there that people can look at afterward too. >> Nancy Gross: We, we brought some show and tell for, for the break. >> Dick Spottswood: I'll, I'll autograph the part where the music is so you won't have to listen to it. >> Steve Winick: Sounds good. >> Nancy Gross: We could, we could go any number of directions, but we thought we'd sort of start chronologically so-- . >> Dick Spottswood: You guys need to introduce yourselves. >> Nancy Gross: Oh, I'm Nancy Gross. I'm one of the folklorists here at the American Folklife Center. >> Steve Winick: And I'm Steve Winick, also one of the folklorists at AFC, and the writer and editor for the Center. >> Dick Spottswood: And since these guys put this thing together, I'm going to applaud. [ Applause ] Thank you. >> Steve Winick: Yeah, so being, being fairly chronological, I mean, let's start with a really basic question which is what got you interested in music in the first place? >> Dick Spottswood: Well, I heard it, and it sounded good. [Laughter] No, I will tell you exactly what happened. I had some distant relatives that somehow we wound up spending a Thanksgiving holiday with them in 1948. And my father's first cousin, Margaret Jane, who was actually closer to my age than my father's age, she had just brought home a, a set of records from New York, and I didn't know about it, but I was several rooms away, and I heard this music playing. And I'm thinking, "That really sounds good!" and the closer I went, the better it sounded, and it said, it was a four-pocket 78-RPM record, and it said, "Bix Beiderbecke," and I'm not sure I could pronounce it at the time, but that's what it said. But then on the top it said, "Jazz as it should be played." I'm thinking, "Well you know what? I think they're right! That sounds really good," so I made her play the rest of the records for me. And I discovered well, these records are made in the 1920s. I wonder what that's about, and I found out that a lot of other music from the 1920s, and that was a very good starting point for all kinds of things, including all of the music that Betsy enumerated-- the Irish, and even Chinese music out of [inaudible] and, and the, the Japanese. Of course, the record companies were all over the globe by then, and they were recording local music to be sold to local people so that they would buy phonographs that they could hear the music on. So you were hearing these, these folk-styled, weren't even folk style. They were folk period performances all the way from New Orleans to, to rural Japan that were done in a way before the records had been around long enough to influence the music that was going onto the records in the first place. And so I, I kind of intuitively decided that was the music I wanted to spend some time with, and I've done that. >> Nancy Gross: And how old were you when you-- ? >> Dick Spottswood: In 1940-- you're making me tell, aren't you? >> Nancy Gross: Well sure. >> Dick Spottswood: I want to ask how old-- no, I won't. That was, it was 1948. I was, I was 11 years old. >> Nancy Gross: And that was here in Washington? You grew up in Washington? >> Dick Spottswood: No, it was in an isolated farm in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. The record album, I think, had just come back from either New York or H. Royer Smith in Philadelphia, one of those little cosmopolitan record shops where they, they sold records like that as well as square dance instructions, and obscure chamber music sets that were produced in people's basements and Bix Beiderbecke kind of fell into that category, too. I, you know, at the time, I didn't, I had never heard of the Carter Family or Big Joe Williams or all the, the Skillet Lickers. All, all the other music that's come to count for so much since then, and you know there's, there's a ton more of it that I still haven't heard that some of you all know about and could probably tell me about and warp my mind. >> Nancy Gross: And when did you become a record collector? Was it about, about that time? >> Dick Spottswood: At that instant I wanted, I wanted that record. I, I said, [laughter] Dad said, "Dick, what would you like for Christmas?" I want that record! >> Nancy Gross: And did you get it? >> Dick Spottswood: Why, I got it for Christmas. It was, it was a Columbia Records. It was, you know, you had to special-order it, but it was available through the, through the catalogue, so even though the music was inaccessible, at least for a lot of years, the records were. You could buy the records right over the counter. >> Steve Winick: Now in your early days of record collecting, where would you find records? >> Dick Spottswood: Well, you could go to little specialty shops. I mentioned H. Royer Smith. We had a little jazz shop in, right here in D.C. called oh, I can't remember the name of the store. But those people ran this little shop. It was just a little bit north of Tenley Circle and Wisconsin Avenue, and they specialized in bootlegged records that were coming out in those days of, of Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, and people out of the jazz catalogue, Jabbo Smith and, and so on that the records had gone out of print and they, they weren't lucrative enough to bring back into print, but people that operated out of basements and other humble facilities were willing to bootleg these records and put them back on the market again. So I, I got a paper route, and I started serving newspapers, The Evening Star. Anybody remember The Evening Star? All, all over West Moreland Hills, just outside of Northwest Washington and the money I got from my newspaper route, I would buy records with every month. But I'd buy these little plastic, they weren't vinyl, they were some other kind of plastic, but I'd bring back, you know, Jelly Roll Morton, Steamboat Stomp and, and or what their, the Billy Goat Stomp, I remember because he had hired a comedian to, to go, "Maa Maa," at the start of the record, and then Jelly Roll Morton said, "Man, take that goat outta here!" [Laughter] I lived for moments like that. [ Laughter ] Next question? [Laughter] >> Nancy Gross: And then you started going-- did you go door to door at one point? Is that right? >> Dick Spottswood: Sure did, oh yeah. >> Nancy Gross: So tell us about that. >> Dick Spottswood: Someone told me that the best place to do was to go into, to neighborhoods where people would have bought those records in the first place, and mostly that meant leaving Washington, D.C. but we lived close enough to places that were basically maybe south of Quantico on into Virginia, maybe West Virginia. And just go knock on people's doors say, you know, "I'm buying old records." A little innocent-looking little kid, you know, nobody took me very seriously. But they would dig records out of bushel baskets and things. And other record collectors said that's how you do it, and as long as you weren't too partial about what condition your records were in, you could find a lot of great music. I mean, the, the, the tale everybody [inaudible] is finding Jimmy Bertrand's Washboard Wizards in a bushel basket in a chicken coop in Leesburg, and about, about two records under that were four Charley Patton Paramounts in quite good condition, too. I had never heard of Charley Patton, but I'd heard of Paramounts, so I said, "put them in," and I bought a little stack of records. And when I got home, the people who knew better said, "Charley Patton!" So by then I was a serious collector because Charley Patton had real status among the record collectors, still does. >> Steve Winick: So you know nowadays we talk about certain music genres. People use the term roots music now, and there's, you know, folk music, country, blues. What, how did you conceptualize it back then, and what were you looking for when you were looking for records? >> Dick Spottswood: Good, good you said contextualized because you could either call it contextualization and it, which is what happens every time something gets named, there's a whole lot of Martin Hyder about value, change properties of things once it's named. Or just simply branding something so you've got a place to put it in the bins in the record store. And so a, a lot of, you know, a lot of that usage comes about that way basically back in those days, the record companies did that a little more subtly. They would have different numerical series. Unlike books, records were assigned a number, catalogue numbers. So that the dealers, if they wanted to order a new record, they didn't have to write, you know, "I want ten copies of Steamboat Stomp, Jelly Roll." They would just write 20261 or whatever the record number was, put that in a telegram, and the records would be there in a couple days from the, from the jobber, you know, two or three cities away. So but you know when they, when they put music in catalogues, they had to call it something. Jazz meant the, the popular music of the 1920s across the board. You know, everything that wasn't romantic, sentimental music, everything that was danceable music was called jazz then. It didn't take on a more specific meaning until later on. Hillbilly music went through a thousand name changes, mainly because people were uncomfortable with the word "hillbilly" right up front. And so it, it eventually evolved into country and western, and then when people decided well western wasn't really country, then country music became the generic name, as it still is. Jazz today covers everything from-- . I'm trying to-- I'll say Ornette Coleman, I wanted a more recent name than that, all the way back to Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver, music that has little in common except for the presumed race of its, of its creators. And that of course produced another problem for cataloging purposes since words you used to, to describe African American customers had to be chosen very delicately. So the, at first those were called race records, and then that became an uncomfortable name that people had. So that evolved into rhythm and blues, which is still used in a sector of the, of the record industry today. So you, you, you take records in and out of historical context by doing things like that, and as a result, if you're collecting, or if you're really thinking hard about the music, you have to take the music out of the contextualization sometimes because the music sometimes had very original things to say, instead of just group things to say. And that's where, that's where some of the most interesting music occurs is in the places where those genres we've artificially created actually connect. >> Steve Winick: Well, you mentioned race, so an interesting question is you must have been visiting the home of African American folks in the 1950s and asking to buy their records. What was that experience like? >> Dick Spottswood: Oh, well it depended on the, the individual. There were people that were very disconcerted about it, and not, not necessarily hostile, but that, that happened too. But other people were thinking, "Oh, good! If I get rid of those records, I get the space." You know, they were, they were very glad to unload them. Other people, and I think you know even though I was relatively young, the, you know the race factor comes into play. And people are thinking, "White boy, what do you know that I don't?" And so those transactions either didn't occur, or they occurred under circumstances that, that could be, that could be uncomfortable. I didn't know how to handle that situation in those days, and I don't know that I'm very good at it today. But I certainly was aware of it. >> Nancy Gross: And so you were initially looking more for the rhythm and blues artists? >> Dick Spottswood: Less so then because rhythm and blues was still occurring, music that you could buy. >> Nancy Gross: Oh, I see. >> Dick Spottswood: You didn't have to go for that retrospective because this was, this was in the great era of rhythm and blues was towards the, towards the end of the 78 era and moved into the 45. >> Nancy Gross: The older jazz artists from the 20s? >> Dick Spottswood: Older jazz artists and of course it morphed into eventually the hillbilly artists and the, the foreign language artists that, that, that turned out to have some very wonderful things to say. Didn't discover, well I didn't discover the foreign language catalogues until I started working on the, the anthology of folk music here at the library where I decided I want to get some of that foreign language music into this collection because these people that were not English speakers, were systematically left out of these collections, Americana collections before. And so I went looking for, for some of that music, too. And then that had to be taken apart and described, and genres assigned to it and all the rest of it that we'd already done for jazz and country and blues and gospel and all the rest of those genres. I get tired of that word [laughter]. >> Nancy Gross: Well going back a little bit chronologically, because you, the ethnic music, non-English languages later in your career. But between the time you were a teenage record collector and your next step was to become a librarian? >> Dick Spottswood: That was kind of connected, yeah, because as I, when I went to, to classes at University of Maryland, you know, I lived on, my parents gave me something, but I had to earn a lot of my, you know, expendable income and everything by myself. My record collecting really took a nosedive during those years. I didn't have the time to go look for records, and I didn't have the money to, to buy them with. Where, where was I, where, where was I going with that? Yeah, to be a librarian. I worked for a really, really sweet guy who had gone to the Catholic University Library School who was an amateur jazz musician himself. Does anybody here share my fond memories of Fred Hewitt, the music librarian at the University of Maryland? Fred died in a, in a fire accident about 25 years ago, but he was my boss. He was one of my dearest friends. He was a mentor, and, and I, I said yeah, I was majoring in philosophy at U of M, and I didn't know where I was going to go with that, but I, I didn't know where I'd go if I picked out something else as a career, too. And Fred said, "Just, just get the knowledge. You know, those, those things will fall into place later on." And so I thought to myself, "Hey, Fred. I want to be just like you." And he said, "Well, okay, I'll write you a letter, and you go take it down to the, the Reverend James J. Courtendick who was the head of the, the Library School at Catholic University which was the only Library school in those days, anywhere between in Philadelphia and, and Duke University. University of Maryland opened their own Library School not too long-- I guess I must have set a good example after that, because they had a good Library School going by the end of the, the 1960s. So that made me a librarian, and I really got into library stuff big time, too. When I, when I abandoned my professional library career, I was in charge of a fleet of Bookmobiles and the, and the library at the detention center out on Seven Locks Road in Montgomery County. I was just, I was the, you know I was the cowboy librarian, and it was, I, I got up every day, and I couldn't wait to go to work. I've never-- much as I love music and the collecting and the documenting and the writing and all of that, I had more fun on that Bookmobile than I've ever had, at least with my clothes on. [Laughter] >> Steve Winick: Well, something that came up during your training as a librarian was your master's thesis which connected you to the Library of Congress. >> Dick Spottswood: God, that right-- so I was looking around for something to do, and they, they were amazed to see this big, fat thing coming in, the size of a dissertation. But it was, back to the '30s, Alan Lomax was smart enough to go around to all of the, the record dealers, distributors, whatever in New York, and to pick up all of that old music he could on surviving record stocks. That he got very lucky when he had Paramount Records who gave him a ton of stuff to die for, and RCA was very generous. He didn't get there in time to get those, those pre-1930 Victor Records, but all of the Bluebird Records, including the foreign language series, especially the large Mexican series. All of that stuff came to the library. I didn't know about the Mexican records in those days. But I, I did, I devised a little documentary system to, to, to categorize all of the, all of the hillbilly and [inaudible] records, basically. And so that, that's what I did, and turned that into Catholic University and got my little degree. And I went down to be an Army private for a little while after that, and then I came out and did, operated a, a little record company in the mid-sixties. That's where the John [inaudible] thing comes in. And then by 1967, I was back in the library again. >> Nancy Gross: The, the little thing that you did, was that the seven-volume ethnic? >> Dick Spottswood: No, we talked, that's, that's a book, no that was-- . >> Nancy Gross: That came out later. >> Dick Spottswood: Yeah, that was later on. >> Nancy Gross: So your master's was on? >> Dick Spottswood: My master's was just a catalogue of blues and hillbilly records. [Inaudible] Whatever applied that were at the Library of Congress. They just basically let me handle the records. I used the discographic resources that were available at the time which are fairly limited. But I basically made up a catalogue card for each side of each record, you know. It sounds pretty elementary these days, but it looked like a big deal, and I made sure everybody thought it was. >> Steve Winick: You just made an allusion to that's where the John Hurt thing came in. So explain your connection to Mississippi John Hurt and how that whole connection came back. >> Dick Spottswood: Well that, that's such a funny story. There was a record collector in Australia whose name was John Edwards who died as a result of an unfortunate auto accident. He was still in his early or mid-twenties, I think. But it was New Year's Eve of 1960, you know going into 1961. And somewhere along the line, he had taped John Hurt's recording of Avalon Blues which was something I had never heard at the time, and that tape sort of made the rounds. Pete Kuykendall who worked at the Library here for a while as well, people will know Pete from a thousand wonderful-- Pete died two years ago. But he was, he was one of the great movers and shakers of the local music scene, primarily bluegrass but lots of other things too. But anyway, not to get off on another tangent. Pete had, Pete brought this, this tape over to the house, and he played this song. Here's John Hurt again on another song. We'd known Franky, we'd known the Spike Driver Blues, and we'd known the Candyman Blues, but here was a song called Avalon Blues. Well, I remember the Avalon. That was the little movie theater at the Chevy Chase Circle where I used to see Gene Autry double features on Saturday afternoons back, back during World War None. And, and but this Avalon was his, he said, "Avalon's my hometown, it's always on my mind." Well I heard of Avalon in Georgia, but this guy's name was Mississippi John Hurt. Well, maybe there's a place in Mississippi called Avalon! Bright kid! There was, and Tom Hoskins, I can just, he's, he's dead and gone, so I don't have to be afraid of a libel suit or anything. He was, he was involved with a young lady who I gather was about 17 at the time, and the two of them decided to go down to the Mardi Gras together, and I heard he was going. I am I had just, just learned this about the, about the Avalon, Mississippi connection, and I said, "There's a place on the map, and here," because I'd found it on the atlas, "See if anybody there has ever heard of somebody named John Hurt. The place can't be that big that people wouldn't know each other." He did that and, you know the first guy he asked, you know took him to the front door. Ten minutes later, John Hurt was coming in. It's like late at night, too. John Hurt was coming out at night wondering what this white guy was doing at his door. He was afraid that, you know that he'd crossed some kind of a social barrier unknowingly, and then was even more astounded when the guy said, "Well. I've been listening to your old records." And he took the guitar out-- this was Tom Hoskins, and he took the guitar out of the car. And John Hurt, who hadn't owned a guitar in years, sat there and, and played some music for him. He was obvious that he hadn't lost much, much of anything. So that's how that came about, and very shortly thereafter, John Hurt did come, come back up To Washington. Tom brought him back, and he was down here with Ray Corrison and Bob Carneal and Joe Hickerson and me, and we all made, made those recordings that there's a, all of those LC recordings have been put out on a little [inaudible] 2000 label, and it's, you know, it's there warts and all. It's not been edited, but John had only been playing guitar again for maybe three or four weeks by when those, when those records were made. But they, they still sounded pretty good. And everybody at the Library of Congress who knew about that kind of thing knew who John Hurt was, so that was kind of a big deal even then. He went up to the Newport Folk Festival that summer. >> Nancy Gross: Is this 1963? >> Dick Spottswood: Sixty-three, summer of '63, yeah. He was, I think we made those records here around April of '63, and the Newport Folk Festival was in, was in July. And John just turned out to be one of those people that was just a natural performer. He wasn't performing at all. He just, he got up there on the stage, and he was who he was, and 10,000 people went nuts. I'm not going to say, I mean, he was competing that year with, with you know Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Those people were making their, their first big bids for stardom at the same time. So John wasn't taking any of their territory away from them, but when he sang and played that guitar, and sat there and just chatted casually with 10,000 people, you know, after having coming off of a Mississippi farm three months earlier, it was a very natural transition for him. And he, you know he became a, a big star in a way that nobody had ever anticipated. And it was a kind of hard keeping up with all of the fallout from that, but it was really, it was really something. But to see how the, the folk crowd was willing to migrate from that New York-centric-produced art, artsy folk songs into some guy who was coming in who had never heard of anything called folk music before, even though people said he was a big star at it. >> Nancy Gross: Yeah, and you were also involved with Fred McDowell? >> Dick Spottswood: Well, I'd, I'd gone down to see Fred McDowell about the year I was in Library school, that was the spring of '62. We had a long Easter break, and so Louisa Spottswood, my wife at the time, we jumped into the Volkswagen, we went to Pete Kuykendall and borrowed a, a portable Ampex recorder. Not terribly portable, it took up most of the back seat in that Volkswagen, and a little mixer and everything, and went down and just looked for recordings to make. We go to Fred McDowell very easily because Alan Lomax had pointed the way. And we got there and you know made a series of really, really nice records of him, and those have, those have come-- . I don't know if those have come out in their entirety or not, but. >> Nancy Gross: They're here in our archive though. >> Dick Spottswood: Yeah, you, you got everything that's not on a commercial record. Later on it, it sort of-- I just owned those tapes, and I think I just, I turned those over to the Library when I was moving of something like that. >> Nancy Gross: We greatly appreciated-- . Robert Wilkins, there were a number but I, I think you don't get enough credit as being a field worker. You've done some really interesting recordings over the years. >> Dick Spottswood: Well, it's because we aren't, we weren't field workers because we generally came indoors. Whenever possible. >> Steve Winick: But yeah, there are, there are names that aren't as well-known like Frank Covington in our collections and Robert Wilkins. >> Dick Spottswood: Yeah, Robert Wilkins not, not, not so much either. Although Robert Wilkins turned out to be the guy who really cashed in out of all of those people. Well, no. I shouldn't say that. Skip James, both of, both of them did because Robert Wilkins who recorded some startling, startling great blues in the twenties and went right to the, to the heart of things. I mean, he sang about great tragic events and, and very personal feelings and was very, very eloquent about them. Made a handful of records for you know lesser labels that probably sold in the high dozens and was never heard from again. I, I thought I had heard a rumor that he was living in Memphis, and Louisa went to the, to the telephone-- she had to do something at the telephone company. I said, "While you're there, look in their directories and see if you can find a Robert Wilkins in the Memphis directory and see if, see if [inaudible] anything." Wrote there were two people named Robert Wilkins. I remember putting it, two sheets of paper and a piece of carbon paper, and writing the same letter to both of the Robert Wilkins and say, "If you're the guy that made the records, could, you know, could, could we talk or whatever?" And I got the letter right back to, from, from Robert, from Robert Wilkins, and I guess I can say this. We're all-- when Reverend Wilkins addressed the letter back to us, it came to the address was Arlington, Arlington seven. We used the little, the little zone addresses in those days. He spelled Virginia, V-a-g-i-n-a. I, I saved that letter for the longest time. I think it got lost in the last move, but he, he was the purest man that you could ever ask to know, and believe me it was not a Freudian slip or anything, anything of the sort. [Laughter] And his retelling of Christ's parable, the Prodigal Son, was picked up by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, was put on the Rolling Stones, what was that? Beggar's Banquet record which was I guess their major seller, and the royalties from that song just kept rolling in and rolling in. And Wilkins lived into his mid-nineties, and I guess they're still collecting royalties on that song. Skip James had it happen with two of his songs. "I'm so Glad" was covered by Eric Clapton and a group called Cream who put it on a studio album, and then again on a live album. And that meant that Skip, who had testicular cancer, was operated on for it here with the Washington, D.C. Hospital Center when he came to Washington in 1964. He had, it, it metastasized and reappeared, and the next time it killed him, and that was '68-'69. It took a long time for him to [inaudible]. But the, the royalties from, from I'm so Glad, which he didn't compose in the first place, I have to add, paid, paid the bills, the medical bills for him the final year of his life. And I was really grateful to those English rockers and they were good to us. I didn't listen to the music, but I loved it just the same. [Laughter] >> Nancy Gross: Can you talk about-- well, let me just back up and say that I did a quick count, and we have over 40 collections that you have been kind enough to donate here at the American Folklife Center over the years. >> Dick Spottswood: I think you must have some forgeries-- . >> Nancy Gross: Very possibly. We're going to check as soon as you leave. But you know they're, they're not only the blues and the country and bluegrass, but you have, you recorded some Swedish material, Irish material, a number of things from the Southwest including Papago Indian music. >> Dick Spottswood: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of that stuff was done while I was out working on, on the grant. This again was the [inaudible] the Bicentennial Collection, and part of the grant that, that came over from the National Endowment for the Arts was that some of the money be used for, for field recordings. And so I, I did go out to the, to the Southwest because I had some interesting nibbles out there and got to-- . I, I still remember this, this, the, the techies will love this story. I had a little Nagra recorder. These were the, the recorders that were very small, but they were very, very fine machines and would record a signal just as good as studio consoles, and so they gave the thing to me. I took it on the little airplane, and I got out to, to San Diego, and there was a folk festival that it was going to have some, some great local Spanish American performances. Rose Maddox was coming to it. I, I won't sit here and try to think of the names, but it was something. Oh! And what's his-- ? Tommy Jarrell was there, and I recorded this magnificent performance of him doing the, the Drunkard's Hiccups with, with just his voice and the, and the fiddle. Much nicer than the studio recording. That wound up on the published collection, but the, the, the sad thing that happened was that the, the recorder stopped, stopped working, and I couldn't understand why. And so I sent the machine, I air-- we freighted the machine all the way from California back to Washington, and then it was sent back to me after somebody had flipped a little switch on the lower back that took it from the battery power to the electric power. [Laughter] I had the thing plugged in, but it was still feeding off the battery, and I didn't know it. So much for my technical resume here, folks. [ Laughter ] >> Steve Winick: So another sort of constellation of collections that we have from around that same time is, is a number of Cajun groups and individuals that you recorded. Did you get particularly interested in Cajun music around that time? >> Dick Spottswood: Well, I, everybody I guess heard Cajun was aware of something called Cajun music the first time as a result of that infamous-- Jeff could speak to this better than I could-- Harry Smith collection that came out in the early '50s, and for some reason, Harry Smith had access to some of that French language music, too, and tossed that in along with some of the other music styles. So we knew what it was and by, by the late '50s, early '60s, some folklorists, Harry Osters, the one who comes to mind, had been out there recording a lot of that music on location. So yeah, I was a big fan of Cajun music, and I'd made some friends through telephone and mails of some of the people that were living down in-- so I went down again with a little Nagra recorder which was working fine by that time. [Laughter] And I recorded a version of Dennis McGee singing [foreign language] that is as good as any version of that that I've ever heard. And that's on, that's on the-- I haven't heard that in years. I've got to get that out and play it again. He tore the roof off! And it was in the house, it was in Mark Savoire's parents' house, a little outhouse that they had. Because the people in Louisiana do not cook normally in their, in their houses. They have extra buildings in the rear that they will cook in most of the year. Because if they cook, if they turn the stove on in their houses, it would heat the house up so bad, you couldn't sleep at night. So we were out in the kitchen house in the back of and Bernie, I thinks, house, and, and they were just jamming, playing music, and I just quietly turned the recording on, and they played that performance for about five or six minutes. So yeah, I did some, some Cajun recording. Then and on some other occasions too, but that one just stands out in my mind because I couldn't-- oh! And the other part of that story was that we had started doing that right after a tornado had come through. I had almost driven through a tornado. I didn't know what a tornado was, coming across Texas to Louisiana, a tornado had struck down about 20 minutes or so before, before I actually got there. And this was right in the downtown Eunice, or no, just a little on the outskirts of Eunice because it was in the beginnings of farm country. And the, the tornado had gone in between the Savoire's living house and, and the, the cooking house. It was a space about maybe 50 or 75-feet wide. It had taken down one corner of one of the buildings and a tree. Otherwise the tornado went straight through and did tremendous damage to nothing [laughter]. So I remember that very vividly, too, because that plus, there was some good whiskey there, too. All those things really fueled that, that performance that day, too. Thank you for reminding me! That's something I hadn't thought about in a thousand years. >> Steve Winick: You know, Les Blank named the film after Dennis McGee's performance of that song because it's so powerful. >> Dick Spottswood: He did? I didn't know that! >> Steve Winick: Yeah, [foreign language], that's the name of the film, and, and Dennis'-- . >> Dick Spottswood: I've never met Les [inaudible]. Really? That was, that was nice. I just got lucky that day. >> Nancy Gross: Shifting the focus a little bit, let's talk about bluegrass and how you got-- . >> Dick Spottswood: I love talking about bluegrass. >> Nancy Gross: And how you got interested, and also a little bit about the bluegrass scene here in Washington in, I guess the late '50s is when you got interested? >> Dick Spottswood: Well, if you have a week or so, I guess we could, we could, we could cover all of that, but and there's some wonderful representatives of, of the bluegrass and the local music scene here. I won't name any names because you all know who you are, and if I, if I name, if I name names and I leave somebody out, then I'll pay for that the rest of my life, but bluegrass has long been synonymous with greatness in the Washington, D.C. area. There are, I think this was a little overblown, but in the 1960s when we started Bluegrass Unlimited, there were people in other places who were calling D.C. the bluegrass capital of the world. That was really because The Country Gentlemen had achieved such an enormous ascendancy because I won't say they were neither country nor gentlemen, but [laughter] they, they, they were urban guys who knew how to have a good time. Can I put it that way? But it was a wonderful name and it stuck, and it branded the music. And because John Duffey was always two steps ahead of everybody else, they were figuring out how to take, take the elements of the folk revival that would work in the bluegrass sensibility, so something the Stanley Brothers wouldn't have dreamed of doing in a thousand years. Duffey figured he could get away with it, so he did, and so The Country Gentlemen really had, had it both ways. They got booked at southern bluegrass festivals that, that started up in the wake of Newport in the mid-1960s, but The Country Gentlemen were getting all those college dates and, and New England coffee houses and all of those other places that were very receptive to Bluegrass because, and this is the, this is the third part of the little triad. Mo Asch of course had gotten those Folkways Records of The Gentlemen up there, but Don Pierce at Starday was not far behind him. And Pierce was starting to put bluegrass on 33-1/3 long play records instead of just 45 singles, and so he was getting that music not only up to New England, but out to Europe and other places, too. And so that music achieved a broad, broad popularity and so everybody who heard that music for the first time, not everybody, but people outside the South, were likely hearing this, The Country Gentlemen, and then later on The Seldom Scene. So we had, we had the spot-- Washington had the bluegrass spotlight on it. But that still doesn't mean that if you'd gone south to, to places like, like Mt. Airy or even out to Oklahoma and occasionally in Texas, but basically the, the North Carolina, West Virginia, and Kentucky, that area in there sort of from Bill Monroe country and West Central Kentucky down to Earl Scruggs country and in the, in the Carolina, North Carolina mountains. That was bluegrass country, and that's where the best bluegrass really was happening not in the sixties, but I, I'd say that, you could arguably say that even today because you, if you breathe that air down there, you play, you play the music even better. But D.C. knew how to package it, they knew how to export it, and they knew how to make it sound really, really good. So even if it wasn't capital-A authentic, it was still well worth your time to listen to. >> Nancy Gross: And, and at some point in there, you also took it to radio. Do you want to say a little bit about introducing bluegrass to educational radio at least? Public radio? >> Dick Spottswood: Well, we did. It was, it was back in those days they were just starting to, to, to do something. It wasn't even called public radio yet. Somebody came up with some grant money in the mid-sixties to fund something called National Educational Radio, and there was of course a TV component in all that too. And so the money was there to do some low-cost, low-budget programming, and I don't know what got into-- well, yes I do. It was a, it was a fellow named George Mercer on WAMU. Anybody remember George Mercer? Who was playing, who was playing jazz records, not always in the best-informed way, but you know, he put his heart and soul into it. And I'm thinking, "If Mercer can do that for archaic jazz, I wonder if they'd let bluegrass on [inaudible]?" You know, knocked on the door, and just said, "I'm [inaudible] nobody. But if you, if you want, I can do little, little, you know classroom-style lectures and you know play bluegrass and do something that's educational about bluegrass." And that, that's how it started out. Gary Henderson still has some of those old, old tapes and things. They don't, they don't sound that bad, but I sounded then like I look today. It was real coat and tie. [Laughter] And the, it was because I had designed it to sound respectable in a, in a classroom. We got away from that model fairly quickly, and, and they discovered that bluegrass was a, was a really good money maker, not just in the National Educational Radio days, but when it became NPR after I believe 1972 [baby crying]. >> Nancy Gross: One of your younger fans. >> Dick Spottswood: I'm glad somebody's awake. And, and so the thing just started. That was in 1967, and it's, it's still going, so praise me or blame me, but you know, I, I bear part of the responsibility for that. Gary Henderson very much you know bears the rest of the responsibility, but Gary brought all that commercial radio smarts and all the technical know-how and a deep and abiding love for, for the music. And I was hoping I was going to see him today, but he's in my thoughts. >> Nancy Gross: And you're still on the air, right? >> Dick Spottswood: Gary is still on the air down in Bell Buckle, Tennessee last I heard. >> Nancy Gross: Right, but you still do, you do broadcasts also on, online? >> Dick Spottswood: Well I've got a program today that's called, that I like to call The Obsolete Music Hour, if you believe in truth in packaging [applause]. And the station lets me do that, although they want the program to be known officially as The Dick Spottswood Show. I say except for my name, it's not really very original, so it, it's got a dual identity. [Laughter] And, and basically they, they let me play what I get away with, and I'm not in the same class as Ivy Shepperd, whom I do not see. >> Nancy Gross: She, she was just here. >> Dick Spottswood: And Ivy is the, Ivy is the real start of, of, of bluegrass country today. She inherited the mantle. She is, she is, she is now the new, the new Ray Davis and is ready to, you know, take that station to once back to star status again. But I, the, The Obsolete Music Hour did do well enough to where it's being programmed four times a week. I'm not doing new shows for every one of those, but they've got over 700 old ones that they can, that were recycled, you know, from earlier broadcasts, broadcasts I recorded. And so people can still hear a lot, a lot of that at odd times, too. But Ivy's, Ivy's taken over the, the, the drive, the morning drive timeslot, and it's on from seven until ten, the, Monday, Monday through Friday. I got to do the first hour this morning because Ivy was driving in from Mt. Airy and wasn't going to be able to get there in time, so she prerecorded part of the show. I did the rest of it, and that's what was on the, the air this morning. So she's a very proud companion, collaborator, and friend and colleague and everything. I can't say enough good about her. >> Steve Winick: Well, we did call this A Discographer on the Record, and I wonder if we could talk a little bit about one of your discography projects? >> Dick Spottswood: I meant, I meant to do that, but I was just waiting for the question. So here it is. >> Steve Winick: The Ethnic Music on Records project because it was interesting in a number of ways, but one of which was that it was one of the first projects that was conceptualized as being a book but a computer database as well. So talk about the use of computers in that project, and first of all, just tell us a little bit about it, what it was. >> Dick Spottswood: Well L.C. godfathered that project too, if you don't know it. >> Steve Winick: Yes. >> Dick Spottswood: I was-- . >> Steve Winick: I am [inaudible] for the Library. [Laughter] >> Dick Spottswood: That's alright, so, so, so am I in my saner moments. That when I was searching out material for the, for the Bicentennial Collection, I was able to worm my way into the confidence of the people that were doing archival work at the major record labels, mostly Edison and West Orange, New Jersey, and in New York, Columbia and Victor Records, all jointly owned by Sony now. And then Decca and Brunswick out on the West Coast. And I was, I took little letters of introduction from, I forget, it was either the head of the music [inaudible] or the Librarian of Congress at the time, and I was able to audition and in some cases get trial pressings, test pressings of material that I was uncovering that had, had either been overlooked or was unavailable because of its inherent rarity. Or music that, it wasn't even represented in the, in the files. And I remember a number of wonderful tracks by two great guitar players, Sylvester Weaver and Lonnie Johnson that they, they were nothing but just little numbers in the file. And it just, it took this, this, this matrix is in the inventory. So I would call up a lot of those matrices and, and listen to them, and you know this one's Lonnie, this one's Sylvester, and this one is like an organ solo or something. You know something out of bounds for me. And so I was able to put a lot of previously unissued material on that collection for the first time. Well, that kind of woke me up to the possibilities of discography in the larger sense of, of trying to, to capture a heretofore neglected genre that I had to name because it, nobody had called it a genre before then, and I just called it Ethnic Music on Records. And I went back to each of those, those great resources plus any number of collectors, plus down here at the Library, and into other major library collections, and I got my hands on information or sometimes the actual pressing of, of all of the foreign language records I could, I could find. And when I defined the project, I said, "The one thing I wanted to be is nonjudgmental. So I don't want to say, 'Oh, this guy's like a tenor singing with a little, you know, a little supper club orchestra or something.' I only wanted the real-deal ethnic music and so on." I, I decided not to do that. I was just going to account for everything that the record companies had produced, regardless of content or, or how interesting it would be to hear today. And I'm glad I did that because tastes, tastes change over generations and a lot of the music that I would have passed up in those days turns out to be pretty relevant to people for many different reasons today. But it hadn't been for the Library sending me up there in the first place, I would never have gone back to it. I would have never made the grant application to, you know, to, to both endowments, to NEH and to NEA as well to fund that. Their interest in it was because it was a, a computer-aided research project that, that had to do with library materials, and in this case, fortunately, it was not being limited to print materials. And I think the fact that it was going beyond, you know print, which is normally what libraries account for, that it was, it, it, it seemed more appealing at the time to do that. For, for, for reasons best known to themselves, I got those grants. That was my, my main occupation for the next several years of my life, on well into, well into the 1980s. And when the book thing came out in, in 1990, it was also co-produced by the Library who allowed me to enter all of the information. I had to come down to the Library every day to do that and work in the Automation Systems office because there were no, no ways of doing that from remote locations at the time. >> Steve Winick: Well there were no PCs, right? You were doing it on a mainframe. >> Dick Spottswood: There were no PCs, I mean Apple, Apple, I think, was still selling for five cents a share, I think, [Laughter] >> Nancy Gross: And it came out as seven large volumes? >> Dick Spottswood: And it came out as, in seven, in seven, in seven volumes which was reduceable finally to a, a fairly compact computer file. Because I'd been, we, we published it in 1990. University of Illinois brought it out in seven volumes, and then I, I was able to, through David Giovannoni intervened. Am I right, David? This was you, right? With the Library at the time they were getting ready to throw those old tapes away that the Library had, had used to, you know to generate the, the printed pages which were just photographed and copied for publication. And so David was able to copy those pages and to put it into an editable format which the Library had not been able to do. And as a result of David's contribution, I am able to still edit and update and improve and correct that document today. So I mean, I tend, I, you know, I get a lot of the glory for this, but if it wasn't for someone like, like David, and David's not the only one. But he's, he's the star this time. He, he got that book back into action in a way that wouldn't have happened if, if that, if, if those tapes had been thrown away, so thank you once again. >> Nancy Gross: How many recordings are listed in there? Do you have any idea? >> Dick Spottswood: Same, didn't you do a-- ? Sam Berlosky is here, also a [inaudible]. Didn't you, when you were getting ready to do that, that project out on the coast, didn't you estimate the number of master recordings that were in [inaudible]? >> Sam Berlosky: I could look it up. I'll give you a number. [Laughter] >> Dick Spottswood: Well, just a ballpark? I mean, just to, to answer Nancy's questions, how many, how many recordings did I document? >> Sam Berlosky: At least 50,000. >> Dick Spottswood: No, really? [Laughter] >> Nancy Gross: Okay, so more than a very-- a lot. We'll say a lot. It's a-- . >> Dick Spottswood: Yeah, a lot. That's a good answer. How about enough? >> Nancy Gross: And you've gone on, we can go, we can go, well we'll go for another couple of minutes, but you've also more recently been involved in cataloging music from the Caribbean and South America? Is that right? >> Dick Spottswood: No, that was all part of that-- . >> Nancy Gross: It was all part of that? >> Dick Spottswood: Yeah, yeah. I, Decca Records wasn't the first to do this, but Decca Records entered into the recording the new calypsos that were generated for the springtime festival called Carnival, every spring. And from 1934 through '37, artists would get on the boat and come up to New York and make records with the resident Caribbean-style string band up there. And then from 1938 through '40, three years in a row, the company sent engineers down with portable recording equipment, and they would record-- I understand it was in the back of a furniture or of a general store on St. James Street. I, I shouldn't be that specific. My memory's not good, but right there in Port of Spain and using local musicians, and those are the records that the Bear Family was able to capture all but one performance survived. Even a lot of stuff that was unissued or was censored at the time by the British censors because it was, you know, politically incorrect. Every single one of those [inaudible] parts survived, and they were shipped back up to, to where, they were shipped from Hollywood to, to suburban Maryland where Jack Towers, the man who did all that glorious work with those Duke Ellington recordings over the years. Jack Towers unpacked all of those cartons. I was there, and he just mastered those, those recordings. It was a very-- doing that was a very, very tricky thing. We can address that later on if you want, but we got a beautiful transfers of all of those Trinidad recordings from Decca Records including a lot of stuff that had never been available to the public in the first place. So long answer to a short question, but yeah, calypso was part of the deal. So was Irish, too, and I mean those are basically English language music forms but in Irish, the case of Irish, there's Irish, Gaelic, and some of those records are in that language. In the case of, of calypso, there were a number of recordings, especially the ones that I just mentioned that were recorded in Port of Spain that were sung in the, in the ancient Creole Patois that was even at the time was dying out and is probably all but extinct in Trinidad today. Steve Shapiro's here. He can correct me on that if I'm wrong. It's a, it's a language that you rarely encountered anymore because I think it was originally the language of the slaves as opposed to the, to the British rulers at a time when all of that was undergoing changes in the mid-nineteenth century which is another story. >> Steve Winick: So you mentioned when you were talking about your own work in, in putting these things into the discography that this also led in many cases to reissue projects. You mentioned Bear Family, but there's other, the Irish one [inaudible]. >> Dick Spottswood: Sure, [inaudible] put out a lot of that stuff. So did Bruce Bastin's Flyright and other labels in, in England. I've, I've got, there's, there's an article about me in Wikipedia and Jay Bruder, bless his heart, intervened on my behalf. And said, "Can we add-- ?" Because I was going to like use it as a resume or something. "Can we add like a list of, I don't call it discography, just a record list of the stuff that I produced and the stuff that I've written? So that I can have that down, and I can let the thing act as a kind of a resume?" So all of that, if you want to see all of those record titles, they're in that Wikipedia article. >> Nancy Gross: And there are a lot of them. >> Steve Winick: Yeah, so I mean, I, I think we're getting called that we, we're about ready to wrap up. So we want to know-- . >> Dick Spottswood: Who's in charge of wrapping up? [Laughter] >> Steve Winick: Well we, we are, but we're getting calls from our colleagues who actually have watches that they can look at. >> Nancy Gross: We're going to wrap up the first half. Then we're going to bring up your fan club and take five minutes to change the stage, and do the fan club. But a closing question-- . >> Steve Winick: I want to ask what you're, what you're working on now, and I mean one thing that I know was in the cards at one point was putting ethnic music on record online. I don't know if that's still a possibility. >> Dick Spottswood: I got one going that's weirder than that. >> Steve Winick: Okay, let us know. >> Dick Spottswood: Called Proto Billy. >> Steve Winick: Okay. >> Dick Spottswood: Now, for this project, we had to call on Mr. Giovannoni once again who is the, who is the man with the most from the least likely places. Isn't that a fair description, David? [Laughter] And Henry Sapoznik and I, Henry of the, the old klezmer revival days, have, have collaborated on this project which is to take some of the wonderful new sound restorations that David and a few other people have worked on vis a vis especially early cylinders. They've responded to this very well, and David is able to take cylinders from 1893 and I won't say make them sound like they were recorded last week, but they, they make them sound them as good as if they were coming over a high-quality telephone line. Is that accurate? Yeah, anyway, much more than you would ever expect from an 1893 recording. And it turns out that there's some performances worth capturing and, and redistributing from that long-ago era. And of course it was a source of repertoire for country music when it first began to, to be recorded widely in the 1920s because all of these country musicians had been playing for friends and relatives, you know in domestic hometown situations. They were not songwriters particularly. There were a few exceptions to the rule: Alton Delmore and a few others, and, and The Carters to some extent. But basically they were, they were just looking around everywhere they could to, to get old songs to be able to record. And kind of a parallel to what the Lomax's were doing with, with field recordings, but these people weren't looking for other people to sing the songs. They were looking for songs they could sing themselves because every six months the record companies would come back, and they'd want a fresh new batch of records. Well, there was no music industry, there was no country music, so-called, in those days. And so you had to get those songs from wherever you could. Lot of times it turned out that people had sheet music in their piano benches or organ benches, or they had, they had old cylinder players that would reproduce these early records. And so the Carters and Charlie Poole and Vernon Dalhart of course. A lot of people rescued these songs from these early sources, and where the recordings exist of them, and where they come across sounding pretty good, David has remastered a whole bunch of them. And we are combining those with early country music performances, and then in some cases reaching out even further to well we've got I'm Alabama Bound by Prince's Orchestra, a little military-style band were recorded the year that the music was first published in 1909-1910. And we end the sequence with Louis Jordan [laughter] thirty years later as an illustration of how the, how, how and where the, the music evolved. Another great one was a song we just, Henry just uncovered this newspaper clipping where a lady who had sung, "I Loved You Better Than You Knew," which is-- and Ivy will verify this. This is the world's rarest Carter Family record. She, she'll because she's got a copy and I don't. [ Laughter ] But it is also one of, one of their, I think the profoundest songs that they, that they recorded. This woman was so taken by the song and its suicidal implications that she went home that evening after singing it and swallowed a bottle of carbolic acid. Now the newspaper clipping comes from the next day when they were still trying to see if they were going to rescue her. Who knows how the story turned out. We couldn't, we never found a follow-up or anything. But in order to, to get that sequence, we started with a cylinder recording by a, I think maybe it was two, two tenors, Stanley and [inaudible], people like that from the, from the late 1890s. You know, just singing it with a little piano, and singing it very grand, you know operatic style. And then we jumped to the Carter Family performance, and then Johnny and Jack re-recorded it for the Opry audience again in 1956 with Kitty Wells' daughter Ruby singing the high part on a three-part trio. We've got all three of those performances in a row, so that's, that's what I'm working on right now. >> Steve Winick: Wow, sounds great! >> Dick Spottswood: Long answer to a short question. >> Nancy Gross: But that's been what's really interesting about your scholarship and, and your research is looking at how music moves across different genres in different ways that music is fluid. >> Dick Spottswood: Some of the most interesting things about music scholarship is where unlikely things connect in unlikely ways and unlikely places. I just, I just told Ivy this morning, I was, I was looking for an Uncle Dave Macon song. I don't know whether I talked to Steve Wade about this or not. Maybe Steve already knows it because Steve knows everything there is to know about Uncle Dave. His song called, "Gray Cat on a Tennessee Farm" is one of the most celebrated of those rousing string, but a lot of people in this room are going to know that song. Well, I, I followed the little mouse or wherever it led me, and I found this online. The, there's a song called "Black Cat, White Cat," in a little booklet of Dan Emmett Minstrel Songs from 1853, and if you look at the text, yeah, it's, it's the same song. But "Black Cat, White Cat," pre-Civil War era, the song had some implications then that Uncle Dave Macon was just able to, able to overlook. Turns out the song shows up in, in England that, that's got instead of the black cat-- well, in Uncle Dave's, "Yet the big cat spit in the little cat's eye. Little cat, little cat, don't you cry." Well in England, it's the, it's still the black and the white cat, but it's, "The black cat piddled in the little cat's eye." I don't think that ever, crossed the water again. But, but there was, the, the song was still in Dave Macon's repertoire two, what? Three generations later, not through any kind of official circulation. The song just survived the way those old songs survived, and you can point to where they show up, but you can never quite figure out where the connecting tissue is between all of them. But that's, that's what keeps me coming back for more. >> Nancy Gross: Well this has been great! We could go on for hours more, but let's break now. >> Dick Spottswood: Well, how patient are you? [Laughter] >> Nancy Gross: We'll find out. But thank you so much. This has just been a treat. Thank you so much, Dick Spottswood. [ Applause ] We're just going to redo the stage, and then have, part of your fan club come up and talk a little bit about different aspects of your career. >> Dick Spottswood: Just make sure you screen my enemies, okay? >> Steve Winick: We won't say they love you better than you know, but you know what we mean. >> Dick Spottswood: Thank you! >> Nancy Gross: That was terrific! Thank you so much! [Inaudible] of Dick Spottswood and his contributions. And hearing from the man himself of course was great, but now we're going to hear from his fan club. And this is very hard to narrow this down just to the six distinguished scholars onstage now. We're going to go roughly in alphabetical order, starting with Matt Barton who's the Curator of Recorded Sounds at MBRS here at the Library. Then Carl Fleischhauer who's, was with AFC then branched out to do other things for the Library and is back with AFC as, as retired. We like to think of him as Emeritus. Maya Lerman who's an archivist at AFC. Kip Lornell who's a Professor of Ethnomusicology and History at George Washington University. Jeff Place, who's a Curator and Senior Archivist at the Smithsonian Folkways, and Steve Shapiro who is Washington-based calypso researcher. So all of them are going to take, present about, about eight minutes or so of information on Dick and his contributions, and then we'll take some questions afterwards. So again, thank you all for coming, and let's start with Matt Barton. [ Applause ] >> Matthew Barton, Library of Congress: Thank you, thank you. I'm usually down in Culpepper at the Library's National Audio Visual Conservation Center, but I start at the Library up here in the Folklife Center. So it's nice to be back, get back to my roots, as we talk about roots all the time. I'll, I'll start with my first encounter, my first conversation with, with Dick Spottswood which was I believe in the spring of 1988. I was working for Alan Lomax at the time. Alan's friend, the great choreographer Pearl Primus had called him, and she badly needed a copy of Josh White's "Hard Times Blues," the original, keynote of 516A from the album Southern Exposure, keynote 107. I'm also supposed to talk about discography, and [laughter]. But she badly needed this, the original, not, not the later version on Mercury and perhaps others. So Alan, everything else took a back seat to this, and I started with a name, something you may recognize, Mort Savada as Records Revisited in Manhattan, and he didn't have it. The moment you need a specific record, it becomes the rarest thing ever. And however, he did give me Dick Spottswood's number, and Dick Spottswood's name, of course, I knew from many reissues and published works, so it was really a bit of a thrill to give him a call. And he was very warm and helpful. He didn't have the record, of course. But [laughter] he did have Joe Bussard's phone number. Didn't need, didn't need the disk itself, a tape was good enough. So you know problem solved. And it was a very nice, very warm conversation with Dick, and I had to wrap it up and get back to things. And I said, "Well, it really has been a pleasure and an honor to speak to you. You know, your, your name is on a lot of the records in my collection." And Dick said, "Well send them back to me, would you?" [Laughter] And from, [laughter] and, and from there followed further phone conversations, working on various reissue projects and such over the years. But I did not meet Dick in the flesh until the year 2000 at the ARSC Conference, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And we found ourselves, you may remember, Dick, at one point the UNC was clearing out their record library, so one of the events was a, a record sale. Which was really just an enormous feeding frenzy, and Dick and I retreated and sat down, and Dick shook his head and just said, "This is a bad bunch." But it was, it was such a pleasure to, to meet him there, and I don't think we met in person again until the next ARSC Conference that I went to which was in Philadelphia in 2003. And Dick, Dick was not waiting there at the dock or anything, but he happened to be the first person that I met as we were trying to locate where we were going to stay, find our rooms. And at the time, I was looking for work, but I was rather embarrassed about it, so I wasn't doing much of a good job of getting the word out. Somehow Dick knew it, and the first thing he inquired about was just that, which was you know you always get the glad hand when you see people. But when someone expresses a genuine concern, that, that really makes a difference. And happy to say that my job hunt ended here a couple of months later, and one of the first jobs that I was given was working with Dick on a proposed expansion and reissue of the famous Folk Music in America Series that you've been hearing about. And we, we almost did it. We got close, really close a couple of times, but in the end there were so many permissions issues to overcome and it, it just didn't happen. But it was a wonderful experience and wonderfully educational. And most of you may know this, but I, I want to emphasize that that title, Folk Music in America, which is almost comically generic, in this case it delivered, the 15-volumes deliver on that mightily because they are, as has been noted, it's, it's you know the most expansive collection of American Folk music that had ever been. Not just English language traditions, but so many others. It, it's here that you'll find the great Ukrainian fiddler Pawlo Humeniuk alongside Gid Tanner and The Skillet Lickers. Why? Because they both played dance music. And on the album of Songs of Death and Tragedy, a wonderful Spanish song from Texas, "Homenaje a J. F. Kennedy," which recounts in Spanish John F. Kennedy's fateful trip to Texas. It is there alongside Ernest B. Stoneman's "Wreck of the Old 97." And at the time of that first conversation, I, I had recently discovered those albums and also some of Dick's work with calypso music. But I want to get back to the subject of discography, and I was looking for things, ways to talk about discography that well, that are not boring. Because it's vital, but you know a dramatic reading from a discography you know is not-- [laughter]-- is not a very hot ticket. And thankfully Dick took care of that problem for me as I found online an article for the VJM Jazz Mart, a, a piece that he wrote about the two classical discographers, Bill Moran and Ted Fagan, titled "Bill and Ted's Excellent Discography." [Laughter] So I'm going to quote extensively from that just because it, it's you know Dick's own descriptions of what goes into making a good discography, and some of the, covers some of his own work. Including the famous Ethnic Music on Records, which you can see over there. Sam, I think you estimated at least 50,000 entries. I can tell you that the whole thing tops out at over 4300 pages, so average 11 or 12 a page, it's 50,000 easy. So this is what Dick wrote. Back in the early 1960s a pair of classical vocal collectors got fed up with not being able to learn the salient facts about the records on their shelves. Charles Delaunay's original Hot Discographie from 1936 was the first attempt at comprehensive genre discography, and the first to document at least most of the then-known universe of jazz recordings. It provided dates and places of recording, matrix numbers, the serial numbers assigned to metal masters, catalog numbers, and names and instruments of participating musicians. The latter albeit sketchily and mostly inaccurately- odd, considering the majority of the participants were still alive and musically active. And recordings as they, recordings were grouped by performer and displayed chronologically by matrix number, as they were created in separate sessions. Delaunay was the first to document recorded sound with specific and systematic information. Soon thereafter jazz-minded producers began to identify sidemen on record labels and occasionally include recording dates, again, of often dubious provenance, on re-issues, to the delight of serious fans. Delaunay's book went through subsequent editions, and was not superseded until Brian Rust's Jazz Records, 1897-1931, and its later incarnations which extended the timeline to the American Federation of Musicians' recording ban in 1942. The scope of Brian's magnum opus was enlarged to include obscure material, issued and unissued, by both well-known and forgotten artists. Brian largely succeeded in capturing the universe of pre-World War II American and English jazz on 78 rpm records. But his coverage of European jazz was sketchy and concentrated on those bands which included American musicians or musicians who were internationally-known. Five subsequent editions have been refined, amended and corrected earlier data; a companion work, Blues & Gospel Records, first appeared in 1963 and has since gone through four editions. Given those indispensable resources, it is little wonder that Ted Fagan and Bill Moran were frustrated at the lack of comparable references for classical records. In 1966, at Bill's suggestion, Ted obtained permission to conduct, conduct research in RCA's files, thinking that he would try to isolate and document classical performances that appeared on Victor's Red Seal series. He soon realized that this approach would yield less information than he wanted and, in his words, "with the naïve ignorance of the uninitiated, I blithely suggested that we copy out all available information." Soon I was following his example and creating my own index cards, having received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to prepare the discography Ethnic Music on Records. I met Ted for the first time in 1978, as I was beginning a fourteen-month stay in New York to collect information from Columbia and Victor, from the Edison site in nearby West Orange, New Jersey, and from the Gennett files housed at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. As I said, the first volume is over there, and yeah, you can check it out. But I'd like to read another dramatic reading of discographical data but from the introduction from the late Dr. James Billington who was Librarian of Congress for over 25 years. This is what he wrote for the introduction in 1990. "Experience teaches that research in a heretofore uncharted field requires more than desire and exhortation. It needs a chart. Ethnic Recordings have been a terra incognita. Collectors, scholars, libraries and archives not only lack collections for research, but lack even a knowledge of what they lacked. The universe of ethnic recordings was undefined and its stars and constellations unidentified. Ethnic Music on Records, a prodigious and monumental work, changed, changes all that. For the first time in the field of ethnic recordings has a basic research tool to guide scholars, collectors, and libraries in the labors to come. Searching out, gathering and preserving these recordings. And how do we know their historical existence? Sharing them with the artists and ethnic communities for which they are a lost heritage, reissuing them for wider availability as part, part of the contemporary cultural process. And studying and reflecting on them as compelling documents of the American experience." Those words are rather more grandiose than Dick is wont to write himself, but they express the, the scale of the tasks he set for himself, and the enormity of the achievement. So Dick, I'll just close by saying that I'll send back any record in my collection that has your name on it, but I'm going to hold onto your discographies and writings until they're pried from my cold, dead hands. [Laughter] [ Applause ] >> Carl Fleischhauer: Thanks. I'm Carl Fleischhauer and as you've heard, retired here from the Library, and if I can get this up. Dick, this is pretty much of a picture show. So if you want to shift over a chair or two, you might get a better look at some of the photos from an earlier day. My first encounters with Dick were in print, looking at Bluegrass Unlimited. This is Volume 1, Number 1, and some of those early issues in which, as you have heard, he was a prominent figure, and wrote record reviews of various sorts that were frank. And this inspired praise from a lot of readers, but a little grumbling from a few of them as well. He broadened his embrace partly through this period. And he was on WAMU long before this picture was made, and went on to get what we've been talking about a lot today which is using the ironic rubric obsolete recordings in the, in the broadest possible sense. I met Dick myself in 1975. I had been on a field trip in Louisiana with the British scholar John Cowley, well known for his calypso work. And we found Dick at home in Silver Spring, and got a glimpse of one part of his personal record collection out there at his house. At the time, Dick was working in the archive of folk songs in the Library of Congress. Here he is talking to John Cowley, and a snap of him in the recording laboratory next door. Although I confess he looks like he's reading the Washington Post. But Dick was well along in his exploration of ethnic genres, and we've been hearing quite a bit about of course this series of albums that, that he masterminded between, well they were published between '76 and '78. About eight years later, Dick wrote an essay in which he paid tribute to some of the people who had guided him, including Myron Surmach whose New York store had for years catered to Americans of Ukrainian and Polish descent. As well as his visits with two of the children of Vladislov Sajewski, a man who'd launched a Polish-American music store and publishing activity in Chicago in 1897. The children were Alvin Sajewski and Jania Sajewski Terli. We'll see more of Alvin in a moment. After these dates, in 1976, the American Folklife Center was established just as those first volumes of the Anthology were released. And within a few months, Dick was enlisted by Alan Jabbour, the new director of the Center, to organize a conference on recordings of ethnic music. And in a way, it became a tribute to the extent of Dick's network. At the event in this very room, Dick provided an overview of the topic in a talk that was later published in the book. But the conference brought together a marvelous assembly of like-minded people, including [inaudible], elderly but vigorous, which he attributed to raising bees and eating honey. I think his lapel pin is a bee. And Alvin Sajewski shown here, I think his wife's real name is Genevieve, but she may have had a nickname that I've forgotten, with Dick again in this room at the conference. The assembled group included many others. Some but not all pictured in this slideshow. Here's Pekke Gronow, the Finnish musicologist associated with the University of Helsinki and Finnish broadcasting. And this picture has Pekke conversing with the Swedish American and Pan Scandinavian accordionist, Walter Erikkson. Here is Mick Molony, a performer and student if Irish folk music at the time, later got a PhD in folklore as well as being a National Heritage Fellowship awardee. Susan Kalcik, a specialist in Slavic culture, active with the Smithsonian Festival, and later professor at Highlands College, and a winner of the America [inaudible] Award. Chris Strachwitz, the man behind Arhoolie Label, and a folk music impresario and much more. And present with us today Rich Nevins, the President CEO and Cofounder of Shanachie Records but with a prior trail of work in reissue albums and field recordings. Here are Rich and Chris in conversation with Alan Jabbour. As the discussion proceeded, there were popups by attendees like the folklorist Archie Green, who's always ready to pop up and ask a question [laughter]. And here is Archie talking to Bill Ivey. Bill Ivey was then the Director of the Country Music Foundation, later became chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and later yet chair of The National Endowment for the Arts. Also present was Jim Griffith, a folklorist from Arizona, who joined the great Mexican American singer Lydia Mendoza in a panel discussion. Here are Martin Keonig and Ethel Raim, co-directors of the Slavic and Balkan Cultures program at the Smithsonian, and New York City's then-called Balkan Arts Center. Ethel was another NEA National Heritage Fellow in 2018. And Kenny Goldstein, or Goldstein, does he say? Thank you, Goldstein was there talking to Alan, a Professor at Penn and a mentor to many. Joe Hickerson was on the stage of course as head of the Archive of Folk Song which is not yet part of the American Folklife Center. This snap shows Richard March who learned, who earned his PhD in Folklore from Indiana, and had a long career in public folklore in Wisconsin. Joe Wilson's on the scene, the director of the National Council for Traditional Arts, here with the Sajewski's and Alan Jabbour in the Coolidge Auditorium. We had Bob Pinson, a well-known country music scholar whose collection of early recordings was acquired by the Country Music Foundation, really the core of their collection where Bob went to work. And Ray Boley, the cofounder of Canyon Records, a publisher of an extensive catalogue of Native American music. Dick also guided the development of an exhibition to accompany the conference with recordings and other materials from the Library and borrowed from other sources. Dick also helped organize a concert that featured Lydia Mendoza, but Dick's particular contribution with the performers was with the Polish Highlanders from Chicago, performing the music and dance, I like to say, of that nation's southern mountains. Here's Dick backstage with the performers in the Coolidge, and for those of you who know him, that's Bob Carneal in the background, sort of leaning on a piece of furniture. He was head of the Recording Lab and one of my favorite photos, the audio engineer John Howell in the Coolidge recording booth at that time. John had provided extensive service in mastering Dick's 15-album set, and was a familiar figure to many who needed copies of Library recordings. Later in 1977, the Folklife Center carried out a field project in Chicago where I pitched in. Two or three of us retraced Dick's steps, revisiting Sajewski's Music Store where we interviewed Alvin and sister Jania and added to the center store of copy photos of historical documents, some of which illustrated the 1982 publication from the Ethnic Recordings Conference. It included an introductory article by Dick as well as a long piece on the Sajewski family. All marking a terrific set of contributions to getting the Library's American Folklife Center launched and rolling. Thank you very much, Dick. [ Applause ] >> Maya Lerman, American Folklife Center: Hi, everyone. So I work here at the American Folklife Center as an archivist. [ Inaudible ] So I just wanted to speak more personally about how Dick's work influenced me both as a musician and as someone who went into the field of preserving music and cultural material. And I know I'm one of many others, both musicians and music appreciators who were greatly influenced by the Dick Spottswood Show, so that's what I'm going to focus on. So as, at a pretty young age I went through that common route of learning about folk, more about folk music through listening to Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan. And then going back to their influences, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and also bluegrass artists like Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. But I wanted to learn more, and hear more musicians. And Dick's show opened the door to learning about artists that I wasn't hearing anywhere else. And this wasn't just in the folk world. It encompassed blues, old-time music, country, bluegrass, ethnic music, swing, and jazz. So his show covered all of these styles, but the music also as we spoke about earlier, kind of transcended categorization. And you could feel the blurring of boundaries between all the different styles of music and the influences on each other. And at the time, well so this was I guess the nineties, there wasn't really any other show on the radio that you could hear this breadth of music. And most radio was more categorized, I suppose, into different styles. So the show became a great resources for me for learning about new artists or new old artists. And every Sunday morning, before I would do my homework or chores, I would eagerly listen to his show, and the songs, and his talking in between definitely soothed my adolescent soul. And I'm pretty sure I learned about a lot of different through the show such as the Carter Family and Jimmy Rogers, the Louvin Brothers, Blind Willie McTell, just to name a few among many, many others. And I also learned, so I grew up in Washington, D.C., I forgot to mention. I learned a lot about Washington, D.C.-area musicians, people like Buzz Busby, Country Gentlemen that were mentioned before, and Seldom Scene which alerted me to the thriving bluegrass scene in the Washington area. The show became a source for me to learn about these artists and also to start teaching myself some of these songs on guitar, and learning the words and singing them myself. And the Dick Spottswood Show also became a resource for biographical information about the musicians, historical context, and learning about all the relationships and connections between the different artists from different parts of the country. Dick always does and did meticulous research, but the material always felt very accessible at the same time. So he's able to, he has a talent for telling the story of the music and the musicians, but also makes you feel like you're discovering it yourself. The show stoked my curiosity for learning more about the musicians and the music. Which ultimately led me to major in anthropology, study music, and seek an opportunity to do field research in preparation for the 2003 Smithsonian Folklife Festival where one of the themes was about the Appalachian region. So I, in this project, I helped to document and select some of the artists in the region in preparation for the festival. And I got to meet and work with Jeff Place at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Renslar Archives, and this, this experience was ignited by the curiosity that I developed from listening to Dick's show, and led me to study library science and go on to archiving but with a, always with a strong foundation in folk music and its historical context. So Dick is still at this, as we know, and doing a show every week. And I'm grateful that he's here, and that I get the chance, the chance to thank him for his work which helped lead me to where I am today. And led to my continued interest and thirst for learning about and listening to more of this great music. And it's also special to be here amongst so many others who appreciate Dick's work, and to be able to thank him together. Thank you, that's it. [ Applause ] >> Jeff Place, Smithsonian Institution: I'll move this up a little bit, and I want to apologize for my voice. There's not much here, but hopefully you can understand. Anyways, as they said I'm Jeff Place from the Smithsonian. And many, many years ago, 35 years ago or something like that, I start working here while I was in graduate school for University of Maryland Library School, and was hanging around, working here and illustrious people like Dick would pass through all the time, and the, the Gus Meade who was writing his amazing discography and was this guy who collected records. I collect records, too. I'm a maniac on records, so I was really impressed by these guys, the size of their record collections. But Gus was this flamboyant guy with a big handlebar mustache. He was a fiddler, and he spent something like, he started in the 1950s working on a Country Music Sources book, and he kept working, and unfortunately, right before he finished it, he passed away. So thankfully, we have to thank Dick and Gus's son Doug for finishing that. I understand yesterday you talked about a newer edition or you're updating it? That's good. Yeah, so-- . >> Dick Spottswood: It'll never be finished. >> Jeff Place: It'll never be finished. It's a monster tome and you talk about nerds. I used to go like to lunch, like and sit down with the book and actually read through a reference book. Oh, they did that in 1927? So it was kind of amazing. So I was, I've always been like, you know I like discographies as well. I've always been really impressed with Dick's work. And what's kind of important about it, what makes it kind of unique is that Dick takes all these amazing tomes and all this amazing discographical information and makes them lives by these records that are put out from a show. So they're not just like lines on a piece of paper. They're actually, you know out there for people to understand. Folk Music in America, as we said, we talked about it, we were talking about the reissues, [inaudible] is a great one. I love it. I'd also love to see that out there again, and what was interesting about it is that it was a combination of field work recordings as we just heard. You know, previously unreleased [inaudible] recording, [inaudible] recordings. It was a real mixture of getting the best possible song, songs to illustrate certain themes. So I remember I was asked to be on the [inaudible] show a few years ago on September 11, and he wanted songs of disasters and tragedy. Now where should I go? [Laughter] I would say LBC9, Songs of Death and Tragedy. So we listened to the corrido about Kennedy's assassination. That was the first place I went to. Sometimes I get a lot of reference questions, and people are just interested in songs like this. They ask me at the Smithsonian, and when I get that, some of these topics, I say, "Well, go to that record if you can find it, because that's a really good collection." But yeah, there's, there's the whole series of things. There's dance music, songs of childhood, songs of humor and hilarity, labor and livelihood, local history, migration and immigration, songs of war and history. It's, you know, probably as far as these sort of collections of a topic, they're probably as good as it gets out there. My comments probably will be like more brief than I intended because most other people have said like three-quarters of what I have written down on this piece of paper already. But the whole thing is, you know having worked for Smithsonian Folkways for 31 years, you know we, we reissue a lot of old stuff, and [inaudible] involved. And there's certain people out there you kind of go look for, you know? You know all these labels that do similar things? That's us, you know there's the scholars who really know the stuff who are out there like, people like Dick, and others. But having done all these things for Rounder and Arhoolie, Chris [inaudible] as we just saw on a picture, [inaudible] Yazoo, [inaudible] other ones, and of course we heard about Dick's own Piedmont label, and Melodeon label I guess as well. >> Dick Spottswood: May it rest in peace. [Laughter] >> Jeff Place: Yeah. So whatever happened to all the masters of that stuff? >> Dick Spottswood: Artie [inaudible] did that [inaudible]. >> Jeff Place: Okay, so yeah. And also though he did a lot of series, I counted on his Wikipedia page, 19 CDs, some working with John Calley on Calypso music. So you know I think correct me if I'm wrong, Dick, but it seemed like you, you, you get like totally into like a certain ethnic type of music for a while and really. I remember being at the ARSC Conference in New York one time years ago. Dick was heading off to the Ukrainian record store. He was all excited and came back with this, you know before that I talked to him a couple years earlier, he was into calypso music. So he kind of focused for a while on these certain things. And just completely immersed himself in this kind of music, you know? These things are so complete, these discographies. But yeah, there's Ukrainian music, Turkish music on Rounder. So various boxed sets, Bear Family. I, there's a Charlie Monroe four-CD set, and I remember reading in an interview online that Dick said he probably must have put more research into that one than almost anything else. But having done a lot of these kinds of projects myself over the years, I know how fun it is to kind of immerse yourself in say Lead Belly for two years. You know, and just learn everything there is to know about Lead Belly, and then move onto the next, next project, you know? And I think I can only imagine that Dick must have had that same kind of experience over the years. He also, I know, did the liner notes for Screaming and Hollering Blues, Charley Patton reissue, which was I believe got a Grammy nomination, if it didn't win. And then ten-CD set for Bear Family West Indian Rhythms? Is that? Right, that's quite an undertaking as well. But I mean, you know, for people like me coming along, I came along, you know after Dick. And you know looking back at folks like Dick, you know who have done all of this amazing work. Like it's hard to imagine when I was like 30 years old trying to figure out how to, you know do even a sliver of the kind of work these guys did. So, you know, and I'm hoping he has a million projects left in him, because you know I can't, I can only imagine what's in that brain, you know with all those discographies he wrote. It's some amazing collections that have come out of that, so that's pretty much all I got. [Laughter] [ Applause ] >> Steve Shapiro: Great, thank you. Okay. That's good, that's good, good. Well, I'm Steve Shapiro, and it's an honor to be here, an honor to honor Dick. Through his love of music through records, Dick has made major contributions in the preservation and revival of numerous Folk genres as we've been hearing. One of these genres might be called, is what might be called Classic Trinidadian Calypso, and I'd like to tell you about Dick's contribution to Calypso, but I'll first start with some background on Trinidad and calypso. Here is the relationship of Trinidad off the coast of Venezuela to the United States. Here is Jamaica, which is often, which is also associated in the minds of many people with calypso. And there were two major calypso booms which brought Trinidadian calypso to a wide American audience. The second boom which is the most recent one was in 1956 when Harry Belafonte, with his million-selling LP Calypso hit and the country went wild. Belafonte was a New Yorker of Jamaican parentage. The first book was ushered in by the Andrews Sisters in 1944, and American audiences found calypso's accentuation and musical rhythm charming, but there's a greater body of calypso songs from Trinidad that contains biting political and social commentary which for many years had been unknown to most Americans. Hundreds of these songs, as has been said before, were recorded for Decca Records between 1935 and 1945 in what has been called the Golden Age of Calypso. Here are some singers recording. Here's Beginner Attila the Hun with the Growling Tiger. The Growler, 1937, Carerror, Attila, Lion, and Lord Executor, Lord Invader, and King Radio. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, this music was occasionally heard on American radio, and at the Village Vanguard night club. Oh, and here's Beginner, and some people became infected with the bug to hear more. For example, in the late 1930s, my father heard Wilmoth Houdini on the record, on the radio and this inspired him to scour record stores in Harlem looking for calypso records. There were other Americans who also caught this bug and collected the 78-RPM records. They originally sold on Decca for thirty-five cents each, including people such as Joanna Colcord, whose holding should still be here at the Library of Congress. And Moses Asch. A major problem for American listeners was understanding Trinidadian diction and Trinidadian references. In the United States and in Trinidad, as musical fashions changed and newer sound technologies emerged, the Trinidadian calypso music of old largely went out of style and faded from memory. Over the last 70 years, we've seen shellacked-78 RPM records give way to vinyl LPs and 45s, then cassette tapes, then compact disks, and now streaming audio. A few people who had these old calypso records and the equipment to play them, still enjoyed this music. But over time, a good many records went out in the trash as generally happened when 78s became obsolete, In the 1960s and 1980s, some record companies did LP reissues of these calypso 78s, but these LP records had limited dissemination and represented only a fraction of this body of great music. Moses Asch, here he is pictured with Sam Charters, did the first reissue of Golden Age Calypso, the real calypso in 1967, I think it was. Coming to Dick, among Dick's gifts are excellent taste in music and great skill in networking and hunting down old records. He started doing this as a youngster, as we've heard, but when he moved to Washington, he even searched at Giant supermarkets, Giant Food supermarkets as going, as well as going door to door to buy these records. Later, his radio and discographical work greatly expanded his purview. In 1977 when I made what was for me a dream trip to Trinidad for two weeks, I was living in southern West Virginia at the time. I tried to seek out the old calypso singers in Trinidad, and perhaps find some of their records. Many people in Trinidad told me I was years too late. The singers of yore were all gone. Daunted, but not defeated, I persisted and ultimately met Tiger and Lion. Tiger began singing calypso in 1934, and Lion started recording that year as well. Tiger had retired from calypso when I met him, from singing, and made his living at the time selling advertisements in the annual pre-Lenten Carnival program booklets. But Tiger's voice and singing were as fine as ever, and I told him it was a shame that he no longer sang or recorded. Tiger asked me to help any way I could. Before leaving Trinidad, I looked up Aubrey Christopher in his Radio Television Repair Shop in Port of Spain. Marginal revenue. Christopher had been an audio engineer who recorded calypso singers in the 1950s. Mr. Christopher proudly showed me a letter from Don Hill at the American Museum, he was with the American Museum in New York City from a few years back, thanking him for the help he had given to one of Don's research assistants. Months later when I was up north in New York City, I tracked Don down. It was not easy. Remember, this was 1977, years before the Internet, individual phone lines in institutional offices. Can anyone here remember that? [Laughter] Oh, I see some smiles. And cell phones. With our common love of classical calypso, meeting Don was like finding long-lost family. Well Don told me I also had to meet Dick Spottswood. At the time, Dick was in New York doing discographical work for Ethnic Music on Records. So on another trip up north, I got to meet Dick, and we began our friendship. In 1979, Rounder Records brought Tiger up to New York to make a record with a orchestra that recreated old-time calypso. I asked Dick if he would like to attend the recording session. Dick said yes. Mind you, Tiger had been 13 years away from the microphone. Dick sat in front of Tiger as an audio, audience of one, silently sitting in front of him, smiling the whole time. I don't know if he ever dropped his smile. Tiger told me afterward that by doing this, Dick's presence had given him tremendous confidence. When I moved back to Maryland in 1980, Dick generally shared access to his holding of calypso records. Don had a great term for the three of ours friendship although I now forget what it was. In the Washington, D.C. area, our Golden Age of Calypso family expanded and came to include the late Jim Lyons and Tony Haggard, and we shared our recordings with each other. In the 1980s, Folkways did another LP reissue. Several-- also with Sam Charters producing it. Several other companies followed suit. Dick was almost always central to these reissues. Dick worked with Bruce Bastin of Interstate Music in England, Chris Strachwitz of Folk lyric Arhoolie, Bill Nowlin of Rounder Records. Here he is with Ken Irwin on the left, and Marian Latent Levy on the center. And, and corroborating on the notes with people such as, such scholars as Don Hill and John Cowley. Difficult song lyrics were deciphered, and Trinidadian references in the songs were explained. When compact disks took off, Interstate, Arhoolie, and Rounder reissued their LPs in the new format, usually increasing the number songs, number of songs on each CD to about 25 tracks. Dick brought about even more CD reissues. There's some of them. Still a challenge of hunting down all of Decca's calypso 78s was somewhat akin to filling in the word, filling in the words of a giant crossword puzzle, and this is only on the Deccas. We're not even talking about the range of great calypso recorded in the first 40, 45 years of the twentieth century. Around 2000 to 2003, miracle of miracles, Dick and Bear Family Records obtained access to all the original masters of Decca recordings in the MCA Universal archive in California. And in 2006, they came out with the 10-CD set which you've heard of: West Indian Rhythm, all 267 performances Decca recorded in Trinidad from 1938 to 1940. With dissemination through the media of compact disks, the Internet, and streaming audio, a substantial portion of recordings from the Golden Age of Trinidadian calypso now survives as a body and can be heard in Trinidad, the United States, and around the world. And there's more coming. Thanks to no small part to Dick and his vision. [ Applause ] >> Kip Lornell. George Washington University: I'm Kip Lornell, and I was asked to speak about Dick's work with blues which I will mostly do, but it's hard to separate blues commentary about the blues and Dick Spottswood without tipping into the territory of recordings, both reissues and original 78s. Dick made an interesting observation just a few minutes ago when somebody asked him about the updating of the Country Music Source book that Gus Meade and he had worked on, and continues to work on, and that's reminded me of a couple of things that have to do with revival and the continual work that's related not only to blues but other aspects of vernacular American music that Dick has worked with. He mentioned John Hurt, and I was going to talk a little about John Hurt, and Reverend Robert [inaudible] which I would do to some small degree, but he, Dick mentioned some of the things I was going to talk about, so I've had to reshuffle a few things here. On the first Skip James recording that came out on Piedmont, it was trumpeted as, "First session since 1931!" and that reminds me that Dick's interest in sound recording through collecting 78s, as do I, informed later research. You cannot get away from looking at the revival, and I have a, not, not being the, my students at GW often want to do PowerPoints, and I say, "PowerPoint's okay. They have their place." I am not much of a PowerPoint person, but I have in front of me the photograph of Pioneers of the Blues Revival. Here goes that word again, revival, with a nice picture of John Hurt and Mr. Spottswood, a younger John Hurt, and a somewhat younger Dick Spottswood, probably from 1964 on the cover. It's an interview, book of interviews with people interested in various aspects of blues revival. And one of the chapters is with Mr. Spottswood. That's one of the ways that I'm thinking about these connections and how they work. You mentioned, Dick, that Arnie Kaplan, Biograph Records, acquired Piedmont and the fact that was probably 1970, and that was about two years before I did my first set of liner notes for Arnie Kaplan for Biograph which was a Johnny Shines album. One of the things I wanted to quote is just Spottswood on talking about Fred McDowell which I'll, I think I'll come back to here briefly in a minute. The previous [inaudible] in 1962 over a school break, we recorded Fred McDowell in his home in Como, Mississippi. And we were sitting on those tapes without a clue what we ought to be doing. I completed library school that year and started a new job. The sessions were wonderful, but eventually they came out on Rounder Records with the help of Folklorist and Flyright producer Bruce Bastin, who was mentioned earlier. The same collection was released simultaneously in England and America on Flyright and Rounder. That happened with Frank Covington, too, but not until the 1970s. Bruce and I recorded him in 1975 at home. He was as good as anyone else, but here the salient point. But no one really wanted to hear many unamplified blues guitar records by the, and to this day this record is virtually unknown. And it is a very good record as well. But that doesn't stop folks like Dick and others who have done this kind of research from doing important research just because it doesn't have commercial value. And I'm sure that when Arnie Kaplan purchased the Piedmont material from Dick Spottswood, he realized it would have some value, but not as much commercial value as one would hope. And that album that came out by Skip James that was referred to was called, "Skip James, "modestly, "Greatest of the Delta Blues Singers." And the titles included some recordings that he had done before, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues," but also they reflected what Skip James was up to then in terms of blues. Because he was quite ill, and as Dick pointed out, died not much later. You can't help but want to listen to a rousing version of "Sickbed Blues," or "Washington, D.C. Hospital Center Blues," as a personal note about the way Skip James' health was going at the time. But he also did reproduce some of the recordings he had done earlier for Paramount. "Devil got my Woman," but also some of the things that were in his repertoire like "Cherry Ball Blues" and "Illinois Blues." Those sessions were recorded in, the first session in December 1964 in Falls Church, Virginia, which happened to be Pete Cochendahl's studio. And the sessions were finally formally complete, and I quote, "At Spottswood's home on July 28, 1965," so in 1965 is when that album came out. But one of the other things I wanted to mention of some of the other things that Dick did in terms of recording of blues. And this is quoting from an interview, actually the same book about Pioneers of the Blues Revival. The question was did Piedmont do a Skip James record? Well, by that time, Piedmont through a long series, I'm sure, of interesting machinations with Tom Hoskins and some other folks, Dick's answer was, "No, by the time Skip James was in place, I'd started a new label name Melodeon that prominently featured Skip James. Peacock and Dahl and I recorded him in December of 1964 and into 1965. Earlier that year, Skip had come up to Mississippi for surgery that would turn out to be terminal cancer. But while I was at the hospital, he wrote, "Washington, DC Hospital Center Blues," and the cancer wasn't really caught in time and eventually that's what killed him a little bit later." As I said, Dick mentioned some of the things I was going to talk about, so I am skipping around a little bit here. On that very point of record companies. >> Dick Spottswood: Should I have cleared that with you? >> Kip Lornell: Well, there's no way I could have known. I figured they'd be asking some questions about Skip James and John Hurt, but I'm, I'm pretty good finessing some major changes at the last minute here. Here's, here's something that I think is-- another short quote from Dick. He's talking about 1963. "I had graduated three years earlier, this is from the University of Maryland, and then gone into the Army briefly. And 1963 was also the year I came down with Crohn's disease which is another reason I should have gotten out of the music biz, but I had no idea how sick I was going to be. Because I had been in very robust health up until that point, I was totally unprepared. It nearly killed me. And at a very critical time when I should have been out there waving the flag and beating the drum for Piedmont, going up to New York when John Hurt went to appear on the Johnny Carson Show." Which I had not realized he appeared on the Johnny Carson Show. "Neither Carson nor Hurt understood where each other was coming from, and the result was a disaster. I was furious at myself for not being there, but I was simply too sick to travel. There were other issues, too. If I had the chance to do Piedmont all over again, I wouldn't, absolutely would not." [Laughter] That says something about the record business in the 1960s. Think about the record business well into the 21st century. I'm sure Dick would feel similarly to that now. The record business is not a way to make any money in the 21st century, that's for sure. He'd also mentioned Frank Covington, and again, these are Dick's words. "I'd forgotten about Frank. That's a record I'm really proud of. The record almost didn't get made because Frank was avoiding us." A situation I've run into as well in my field work. Not necessarily avoiding, but sometimes people are simply hard to catch up with. They don't have phones, they don't have answering machines. And we're talking the 1970s and 1980s. As my students who have no idea what the digital, the non-digital world looks like, they assume you can find every [inaudible] of the computer, and everybody has email and will answer your Snapchats immediately. And if you don't, there's something wrong. "Ah, but we outfoxed him. There was Bruce Bastin-- that was more Bruce Bastin's idea than mine. He was visiting from England. He stayed with me over the Fourth of July in 1975. I had a Nagra recorder on loan from the Library of Congress, a small reel-to-reel machine that could make studio-quality recordings." When you actually plug it in and put it on the electrical mode, and don't plug it in and put it in battery mode. That was an aside from me. [ Laughter ] "Frank lived out in the country near Frederica, Delaware, had no phone." Okay, that makes it hard to do field work when you're trying to go somewhere from Washington, DC to the eastern shore of Delaware to try to find somebody with no phone. And I have certainly made enough trips like myself like that. "No phone, and previous attempts to record him had been unsuccessful. Bruce proposed that we ride over from DC to see if Frank was home. We threw the recorder in the back seat of my 1972 Volkswagen, and took off in the morning, July 5, with no expectations that our trip would be successful. But when we arrived, Frank was there with his wife Winnie, and their family, friendly, cheerful, and welcoming. With no preparation or reservations, Frank just sat down, tossed off one great performance after another. Geez, he was good! It was an event that ranks up there with the recordings of Robert Wilkins, John Hurt, and Fred McDowell in my memory. And they're among the best performances I ever had the privilege to record. Thank you for reminding me about that." And a lot of today we're thinking about some of the things that Dick has done over the years, of course not just with blues, but with other forms of music. And you're talking about bending genres, when I was going to graduate school and lived in Memphis for four years. I don't know if I ever told you, Dick, but Robert Wilkins literally lived the street behind me one block over, so I would go by to visit him every once in a while. And at that point, he was the Reverend Robert Wilkins, so you know you talk about blues singers, and you talk about songsters. And that line between what is folk music, what is blues becomes blurred all the time. And certainly Robert Wilkins with a song like The Prodigal Son, which you know you think about as a piece of narrative. Is it blues? Is it gospel? Does it really matter? Do we really in some ways need some of these genres? In terms of selling things and product we do. In terms of looking at those cracks that you were talking about earlier where the really interesting things happen? I think Robert Wilkins is a good example of that. When going back briefly to Frank Covington, you, you know, he was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and the observation your made is the last place you'd look for old-time, down-South blues was Reading, Pennsylvania. At the same time, just after Dick had sold his, the label to Arnie Kaplan Biograph, I was living in the Albany, New York area and actually doing field work and doing that very thing: recording down-home blues musicians in Albany, New York in 1970 through 1973. So that suggests that in fact you could do that, you could do that kind of field work, finding folks and doing this whether it had commercial value or not. And in fact, Flyright did put out two albums of my field recordings from Albany in the mid-1970s based on the kinds of things that I was looking for. The first time I met Marginal revenue. Spottswood was in fact at the event that Carl Fleischhauer showed pictures of earlier, which was the Ethnic Music Conference, and that was 1975, Carl? Was that right? I think that's right. >> Carl Fleischhauer: It was 1977. >> Kip Lornell: In '77, okay. Okay, so that's the first time I ever met Dick, and we have kept in touch in various ways over the last few years. And I will close out by saying in addition to thinking about the relationship between the continuities in the recording industry in forming us from the 1930s and earlier, and the work that folks do today, whether it's field recordings, discographical information, Dick has been helpful in a number of ways. I have a, a book coming out in October on Washington, DC bluegrass that Oxford University Press is publishing. And I was going back and forth about the title. And I'd done a long interview with Dick, a long interview with Gary Henderson, one of my other distinguished colleagues who's sitting here right now. Who played with the Johnson Mountain Boys is currently a member of The Seldom Scene, [inaudible]. Everyone was very helpful, but I had a fairly long title, and the title was, "Capital Bluegrass, as it should be, because you look at all the information about bluegrass in Washington, DC, and it's urban culture meets-- no. Hillbilly music meets urban culture in Washington, DC. And Dick looks and says, "No, that's too long. That's too long. It's got to be shorter." So you got to have a subtitle, and it's got to be shorter. Just call it "Capital Bluegrass: Hillbilly Music Meets Washington, D.C." and that is what the book is going to be entitled. So I thank you for that, Dick. [ Applause ] >> Nancy Gross: I want to thank all our, I want to thank all of our panelists, and I, I know it's been a long afternoon. But can we just take a few minutes? Is there anybody in the audience who'd like to make a testimonial or statement or ask a question? Okay. Do, do we have a, do we have a mic? >> Who had the question? >> Hi, I'm, I'm David Sager, and I work in the Recorded Sound Research Center here at the Library, and for most of my life, I've been a, a musician and a collector of early sound recordings. And I just want to say just a couple things briefly, unrehearsed and unplanned. When I was 12 years old, I answered an ad in the paper, somebody was selling old records. And my mother or my father took me over to Albany Avenue and Takoma Park, and there was Dick Spottswood, and stacks of 78s and thus began a friendship that's oh, 50 some years now. And he was too kind, really. I used to get phone calls on Saturdays and Sunday mornings and I'd, you know I was always a late sleeper. So I was awakened, and there would be Dick. And he'd say, "Hey, Buddy! There's a, there's a, an estate sale in such-and-such a place, and I'll be over to get you." And he'd come over in his Volkswagen, and we would go and look for records together. Anyway, congratulations, Dick, on all you've done and all the wonderful things you've given all of us. And, and to me personally. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Hi, I'm Dudley [inaudible]. I became familiar with Dick's music through his work, WAMU, and in particular [inaudible] was the first white bluegrass band I ever heard play black, a capella-style singing. And so I called Dick, and I said, "Dick, I really like that stuff, and I know you play a lot of it." And Dick says, "Well, why don't you just come on over to the house and bring a tape deck?" And for two days, Dick Spottswood carried 78 records up into his kitchen, and I sit there and just tape everything that he would bring me. And I thought that was very generous of you, Dick. I appreciate you! Thank you. [ Applause ] >> I have another testimonial, Frank Pershan. >> Dick Spottswood: Oh, Frank! I wouldn't have recognized you. >> It's been 40-some years probably. >> Dick Spottswood: You look good! >> Thank you. [Laughter] So do you! In '70, '71, in your Bookmobile days, also on Albany Avenue, I went, I had met Walter Vinson, the singer/songwriter for the Mississippi Sheiks, and decided. He, he wasn't as lucky as Skip James or Reverend Robert Wilkins in terms of getting his royalties without a struggle, but as a crucial intervention, I went to see you and got, again, through your generosity. A reel-to-reel tape before cassettes, of course, of 16 or 18 or 20 different versions of "Sitting on Top of the World," that I could then take to the lawyer across the street here, Fulton Perlowski, and with the documents and again, things that you had helped to, to provide information. And ultimately get recovery of that, the royalties that were, were due to him. We also collaborated on another project that wasn't as successful which was a proposal to NORMAL, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws to publish an LP of recordings of songs about pot. [Laughter] And once again-- . >> Dick Spottswood: I think there have been a few of those. >> Your generosity, I could, I could drop by the house and get 16 to 18 different, different songs. I think they never, they, they never answered the letters or responded. But other people did it commercially to great success. Again, thank you for your generosity helping other people to do work, maybe not up to the level of your own, but contributions in any case. >> Dick Spottswood: Two, two things, Fred. We-- didn't you also get a, a protection for [inaudible]? >> No, no, no. Just "Sitting on Top of the World." >> Dick Spottswood: Just "Sitting on Top of the World," because you were working on both of those, I think. Alright. The only other thing I wanted to say was if he says he's been to China and wants to sell you South Carolina, then you know you're talking to that reefer man. [ Laughter ] >> Hi, I'm Jennifer Cutting, Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center. One thing that we haven't thanked Dick for yet is his contributions to this discography, American Folk Music and Folklore Recordings: A Selected list. And this is, this publication named the 35 or so best folk recordings of any given year. And in its time, it was kind of like the Grammy for a folk recording that was well documented. And let's see, the first one was published in 1983. I came to the Center in '87, and Carl Fleischhauer guided me through that issue, and then I took it solo from then. But Dick was on the panel. We would have a panel of five or six specialists in ethnic recordings, and let me tell you, Dick. In 1991, '92, and 1983, so he was on the panel for the first one and the last one. There were more fantastically heated and passionate discussions around that table of specialists the years that Dick was on the panel than at any other time. So I want to thank you for your-- . >> Dick Spottswood: I had lousy taste. [Laughter] >> I want to thank Dick for his erudition and his wonderfully expressed opinions during those years on the Selected List. Thank you, Dick. [ Applause ] >> Nancy Gross: Thank you, Jennifer. I think we have-- . Yeah, I think we have time for one more, Jennifer? >> David has given me the courage to do something, ad lib. My name's Rob Bamberger. I first met Dick because of a record collector's group that met, I don't remember exactly when. But I do remember the first visit to your bungalow in Takoma Park. And being ushered into the basement where I saw 78s that I never thought I would ever see such as the Jelly Roll Morton Rialto Music Shop release. And you had a complete run of the Earl Hines QRS records. I was afraid to even hold these things, you know? I, I think I held one of the QRS's but made me too nervous. When Dick decided to sell that collection to Robert [inaudible], I asked him out of naive youth, how, how can you, how can you possibly let this go? And Dick said something to me that I always remembered and have quoted several. And before the presentation, Steve even recalled it. Dick said to me, because you know that was a, a basement and you have a dehumidifier down there. Dick said, "You wake up one morning and you realize instead of the collection, the collection is keeping you." I have never forgotten that, and there was a point some years later. One morning I woke up and realized I had crossed that, that rubicon. Once Dick moved to Florida, often during Hot Jazz Saturday Night, I would get these wonderful little emails in which Dick would be making these kinds of musical connections across the years. And frequently I would say on the air, "Just got an email from Dick Spottswood who shares," or-- I would pass along what he, what he said. There have been times when I have said, and I'm so astonished that with all of the advances and digital technology and such. I have said, "I wish Dick Spottswood's brain could be, could be downloaded." And you know I looked into it, and I found [laughter] I found that my head would need an annex so large that I wouldn't be able to stand up and walk. I would be, I would keel over. >> Dick Spottswood: They're having a sale on formaldehyde this week. >> I, I just want to say in conclusion what an absolute blessing your friendship has been to me. And because you have such a, a grace and humility about you, you probably can't appreciate how much prestige is accorded to all of us for the very fact that we know you. [ Applause ] >> Dick Spottswood: Everybody in this room, you all have been in many, many ways a part of my, a part of my life that I wouldn't, I wouldn't part with. I, I interrupted you. >> Nancy Gross: No, I think that might be a great place to stop right now. And I want to thank everybody for coming, and especially Dick for coming up from Florida for this very special occasion. Thank you! [ Applause ]