>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
[ Silence ]   >> Betsy Peterson: Hello everyone.
I'm Betsy Peterson, the Director of the American Folklife Center here
at the Library of Congress, and I want to welcome you today
to another one of our Benjamin A. Botkin lectures --
an on-going series that we have here at the library.
The lecture series, the Botkin lecture series,
allows us to highlight some of the best scholarship and work going
on in folklore at the musicology, oral history,
and cultural heritage studies.
And it also allows us the opportunity
to build our collections.
We see this as one strategy for increasing the material
in our collections, and as a consequence, I want to ask you
to turn off your cell phone right now if you haven't done so.
Each lecture's videotaped and will be placed on our website,
and so you can revisit it as a webcast.
Today I have a very special honor for me, and I have a feeling
for several people here,
but the honor of introducing the distinguished historian Bill
C. Malone.
Professor Malone is Professor Emeritus of History
at Tulane University and now resides in Madison, Wisconsin,
where he's an active member
of the city's academic culture and cultural life.
Throughout his history, Dr. Malone has specialized
in documenting country music and other forms
of traditional American music.
In particular, he is the author of the legendary 1968 book,
"Country Music USA," which, I'm sure,
many of you have on your bookshelves.
I certainly do.
And it has the distinction of being the first and still one
of the most definitive academic histories of country music.
[Microphone Issues]   Sorry about that.
Professor Malone was born on a cotton-growing,
tenant farm near Tyler, Texas, and grew up with surrounded by country,
and what we call hillbilly music today.
As a graduate student at the University of Texas in the 1950s,
he became a well-known singer in the Austin area,
performing his repertoire of hillbilly songs
at such distinguished Austin locations as Threadgill's,
which I have been to several times.
His 1968 Ph.D. dissertation was eventually published
as "Country Music USA."
In the years since, Professor Malone has published numerous books
and received enumerable awards,
including a 1984 Guggenheim fellowship
and a 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award
from the Society for American Music.
In Madison, Malone hosts a popular weekly radio show,
"Back to the Country," on WORT fm, and frequently performs
with the local country and old time ensembles in the area,
often performing with his wife, Bobbie Malone,
who is also with us here today.
And who, she, herself, plays a very respectable mandolin and guitar,
and we are delighted to have both of them here with us today.
Today, Dr. Malone is going to discuss his most recent book,
"Music from the True Vine: Mike Seeger's Life and Musical Journey,"
which was recently published by the University of North Carolina press.
This is all the more meaningful for us here
at the American Folklife Center
because Mike Seeger has been a long-time friend
of the Folklife Center here.
And we're honored to have some of his valuable field work
and research in our archive.
So before I turn the microphone over to Dr. Malone, I want to mention
that copies of his book will be available for sale
after the lecture, so please, after the lecture, go out and buy a book.
Talk to Dr. Malone.
And without further ado, I will have the man himself come up:
Professor Malone.   [ Applause ]
[ Silence ]
>> Bill Malone: Thank you Betsy.   See if I can get this audio started.
[Music - Seeger playing the autoharp and singing]
"When first unto this Country, a stranger I came.
I courted a fair maid and Nancy was her name.
I courted her for love, and love I didn't obtain.
Do you think I've any reason or right to complain?
I wrote to see my Nancy I wrote both day and night.
I courted pretty Nancy, my own heart's true delight."
[autoharp music]
>>"I wrote see my Nancy, I wrote both day and night.
Till I spied a fine gray horse, both fine plump looking and white.
The sheriff's men they followed, and overtaken me.
They carted me away to the penitentiary.
They opened up the door, and then they..."
[music fades]
>>Bill Malone: Well that's the other Seeger.
Mike Seeger, playing an instrument for which he became famous,
the many instruments that he played.   That was the autoharp.
And he was singing an old song that he first heard when he was
about five or six years old.
Sitting on the floor in his father's front room
in Silver Springs, Maryland.
A song that he heard on the Library of Congress record
that his parents permitted him to play
on their variable speed recording unit.
That was Mike's, that and songs like it, were Mike's introduction
to the great realm of American country music.
Well, I start out in my book by asking question who is Mike Seeger?
So I could start out talking about talk out the same way today.
Because that's a question that I received over and over again
as I was preparing my manuscript.
And that question was invariably followed
up by another: is he related to Pete?
Well I'm sure I showed my frustration to such questions,
but I submit that I'm not the only person
who felt the sting of those questions.
Mike himself felt it.
I think from a very early age, Mike as very conscious
of living a very special and distinguished family.
I remember the first time I ever saw him was in Austin,
Texas at about 1962, when the New Lost City Ramblers came
through for a concert.
At a party after the concert, while Mike was receiving the guests,
whoever saw one coming up to him and saying, "how's old Pete?"
You could tell - you could see and feel Mike's discomfort.
I'm not suggesting that there was a love/hate relationship there.
There wasn't.   Mike loved his older half-brother.
And, in fact, he took up the five-string banjo
because of Pete's influence.
It helped eventually to direct his career.
On the other hand, though, I think that Mike was always conscious
of being in the shadow of an iconic half-brother.
Certainly by the time Mike went out into music on his own,
Mike had become this great legendary, excuse me,
Pete had become this great legendary presence, who swept millions
of people to their feet following great noble causes.
But Pete was only one part of the problem.
That Mike was conscious in being a member of a super achieving family.
You may not know or may not recall
that his parents had been very distinguished avante-guard classical
musicians and composers long before they discovered the people's music.
But they moved over to folk music in the 1930s after Charles went
to Washington, DC to work for the Resettlement Administration.
And set his team of researchers out to collecting old songs.
Those songs in turn, generally were deposited on a Library
of Congress records and sometimes, as I said,
Charles brought those records into the house,
where Mike could hear them.
Mike's mother had been the first woman
to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition.
So both parents were distinguished scholars.
Both had achieved a lot.
And by the time Mike was born, both were involved
in extremely important projects.   Quite often had no time for Mike.
I think we can frankly say that Mike not only suffered from the prestige
of his family, but also from the neglect
that their business sometimes caused.
Then there was his sister, Peggy.   One year younger.
Peggy was also distinguished in her own way.
At least became so.
Let me read what I have to say about Peggy when she was just a child.
While Mike was having trouble identifying
with the music his parents made, having trouble
in absorbing his principles, Peggy was embracing them.
[reading] Peggy embraced lessons and readily absorbed musical theory.
By the age of six, she was playing both piano and guitar.
At 11, she could transcribe musical notation and took great delight
in taking such a song as the "Irish Washerwoman"
through a circle of fifths in every key.
[Laughing] Peggy finally appreciates the way her mother
Well Mike, I guess one good way to describe Mike would be
to say he was a classic underachiever
in a family of super-achievers.   He probably was dyslectic, although
that was not explicitly confirmed during his childhood.
But he was unfocused.
He was resistant to formal education.
Resistant to all kinds of musical instruction.
His mother tried to get him to learn the piano and the musical theory
with it, but he resented that.   He also rejected clarinet lessons.
He went his own way with no knowledge in or no appreciation
of the classical music that his parents loved.
But, there was always music in the Seeger household,
and he embraced that music.
Made it a part of his consciousness, although at the time,
I'm sure he had no idea
that he would someday use this music to make a career.
I should say before going into the music that the only passion
that Mike Seeger had ever had before he was, say,
18 or 19 years old was cycling.
He was an expert bicyclist and a unicyclist.
There's a picture in my book about him on a unicycle.
But there's no reason why anybody
at the time could have foreseen the distinguished career
that Mike Seeger himself later achieved.
As I mention at the very beginning of my talk, he was permitted
to play the aluminum Library of Congress records
that his parents accumulated.
They permitted him to sit on the floor
to use the variable speed machine
that his mother used for song transcription.
He played these songs over and over and over again.
And when the cactus needles that were used for the recordings began
to wear out, then he would sit down and sharpen them,
and then go back to the machine.
He also listened to the few commercial hillbilly records
and blues records that his family possessed.
By the way, Charles Seeger would not permit a radio in the household.
He looked upon the radio as being a sinister agent of technology.
Maybe not realizing that these photograph records he had were also
agents of technology.
But Mike always pointed to one record above all
that played an important role in his emerging career,
and it played a role in his parent's career earlier.
This was Doc Boggs' recording, I think with a Brunswick label,
of the old murder ballot "Pretty Polly."
This has historic place in the Seeger family history.
Because way back at about 1931, when Charles Seeger was just beginning
to recognize folk music, and to understand that people
like Aunt Molly Jackson had some important things to say,
Charles began to go down to Greenwich Village and play
in the hillbilly band that the artist, Thomas Hart Benton had.
Benton played the harmonica and Jackson Pollock was even a member
of the band-- if you can believe that!
[Laughing] So Charles began sitting in with his guitar,
and one night Thomas Hart Benton brought out a hillbilly record.
It was Dock Boggs' version of "Pretty Polly."
And he was amazed that Charles Seeger had not only never heard
of this record, but knew nothing about hillbilly records.
He said in effect, how can you call yourself a folklorist,
how can you call yourself a student of American grassroots music
if you don't know about these commercial recordings?
Well years later, of course, Mike heard this recording
in his household and lived long enough to find Dock Boggs
and take him out on the concert trail.
As I'll point out again, a little bit later that was one
of the greatest thrills of Mike's life.
What he thought was one of his proudest accomplishments.
There are also the family sing-alongs.
On occasion Charles and Ruth would bring out the little brochures
that the Resettlement Administration prepared.
They would sing the songs they found on these brochures.
But above all, they would sing the songs
that Ruth Crawford Seeger was transcribing
for John and Alan Lomax.   She was visiting in 1939-40,
helping them prepare their one volume song collection called
"Our Singing Country."
And Ruth would listen to these songs over and over again
with great discipline, trying to notate them accurately.
So I think this was a major contribution
that Ruth made to Mike Seeger.
She said, in order to truly understand American folk music,
you have to understand the way people perform the song.
The song itself is not enough.
You have to know the way they've bent through notes,
and the way they move from one note to another.
And so she tried as hard as she could to recreate the actual sound
in the manuscript she was preparing for the Lomax's.
She also said that we should call this music "old-time music."
For after all, that is the term
that the so-called folk use to describe their music.
They don't call it folk music.   They call it "old-time music."
And that's something that Mike took with him into his career
and into the new Lost City Ramblers later.
[Pause]
>> Then finally, as an example of early influence,
there was the occasional visit made by his half-brother, Pete,
particularly after Pete began his military career.
Pete would sometimes come home to Silver Spring
to get a home-cooked meal.
He'd bring his long- necked banjo with him and play for the kids.
That was an experience that neither Mike nor Peggy were ever able
to forget.   For a long time, though, this music
to Mike was nothing more than Seeger music.
All these songs that he remembered from his early childhood,
these were just songs that the family knew and sang:
Seeger music; family music.
In other words, the sounds and voices heard
on these old records were disembodied voices.
It seemed to have no real meaning as far as a people
or a culture were concerned.
That all was to change by the time Mike entered his early 20s.
He graduated, it would have been about 1951, I suppose,
with no earthly idea about what he wanted to do.
He just knew he didn't like school.
At his mother's insistence, he enrolled in a couple of colleges
in the Washington, DC area and dropped out of both.
But by the time he dropped out of Georgetown,
he was playing the banjo full time.
He had discovered his life's love, although he still had no inclining
that he could make a living from it, nor pursue a career.
He first learned the guitar by taking lessons
from the famous Charley Bird, the blues musician.
His mother found out about it,
so he came down into Washington, took a few lessons.
But he refused to learn from the notes; refused to learn
from the instruction books that were provided.
He would do it his own way.   Then he took up the banjo.
And he began playing the banjo so often, so incessantly ,
that he said that even at the morning breakfast table,
he would sit reading the "Washington Post" and playing one banjo phrase,
one banjo cord, over and over until he learned it.
And the banjo became his life-long love.
But in short order, he learned the guitar, the banjo, the fiddle,
the mandolin, the autoharp, the French harp, the Jew's harp,
the panpipes, which are also called the quills,
and I guess you'd have to throw in the bass.
I'm sure anything with strings on it might learn how to play.
But it came with great effort.
I'm going to read you something that Bob Dylan had
to say about Mike Seeger.   Some point in his career.
Dylan saw Mike perform at a couple of music parties in New York City,
including one at Alan Lomax's apartment, and Dylan claimed
to discern very early that Mike already possessed the qualities
that he himself was struggling to attain.
"Mike was extraordinary," he wrote.   "The supreme archetype.
He could push a stake through Dracula's black heart.
What I had to work at, Mike already had
in his genes; in his genetic makeup.
Before he was even born, this music had to be in his blood.
Nobody could just learn this stuff."
Well I suppose there is some truth to that,
but that's mainly hyperbole.
Mike, as I said, worked hard and diligently,
incessantly to learn what he achieved.
It was not something that came in his genetic makeup.
In the early to mid-'50s, the music that heretofore had been sort
of a fleshless entity which he had absorbed began to take
on a flesh and blood form.
He began to see the music in its cultural context,
and he began to meet the people who were still making this music.
That came with this - first of all with his discovery of bluegrass
Luckily, somebody in the family gave Mike a radio,
despite what Charles had felt about the instrument.
Mike began to hear a local disc jockey shows --
in particular, one person for over a station
in Arlington, Virginia, Don Owens.
Again and again, people who became important in the bluegrass movement,
point to Don Owens as being the first influence in their lives.
Nobody was calling the music "bluegrass" yet.
Bluegrass songs were merely played on hillbilly radio shows,
along with all the other fare.
But nevertheless, people began to see that it was something different.
Something a bit more exciting, perhaps, then the music made
by Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt, and the Stanley Brothers.
One day a young fellow who had gone to school with Peggy,
a fellow named Richard Spottswood, came to the Seeger household
and he brought some Stanley Brothers recordings --
the first time that Mike had ever heard these records.
And his response to him was the same as mine.
And the same that many people have made.
It was almost like a religious experience.
Had never heard anything like this before.
Above all, Mike became convinced that the music he had loved
as a child was still alive, although it had taken on new forms.
He felt that bluegrass was the modern,
updating of the old string band music of the 1920s.
But he also began to hear this music in context.
He began to hear an occasional concert and by the mid- '50s,
he was going down to the country music parks, down in Maryland
and Pennsylvania, upper Virginia, and begin to see in person groups
like Flatt and Scruggs and the Stanley's.
And following almost in the steps of Richard Spottswood,
was another young man named Pete Kuykendall,
who also brought his records along and his insight into the music.
This was a heady period in American music.
This is when young people everywhere began
to discover bluegrass and forms like it.
And this is also the period when the Washington,
DC area began to be the bluegrass capital of the United States -
with so many bands that made that music and so many people
who were ready to listen to it.
Then in 1954, Mike had to make a major decision.
He made the most explicit political act of his life.
And to put this in proper context,
I need to say that Mike had already become conscious
that the Seegers were not only prestigious,
they were also controversial.   And during his life, he suffered
from what he calls "Seeger politics."
I think a lot of what Mike did in these years was unconscious,
but I think he consciously made the decision to avoid, if possible,
Seeger radicalism, or Seeger politics.
Because he knew what that sometimes did to Pete and to his father.
Mike himself suffered on occasion when he was asked by the authorities
if he was a Seeger, and if the Seeger were communists,
and that sort of thing.
Anyway, the political act that Mike made in early 1954 was
to declare himself
to be a conscientious objector to the Korean War.
So he became an orderly in a tuberculosis hospital in Baltimore.
He worked there for two years until 1956.
It was the turning point in his life.
It was in the tuberculosis hospital.
He first met a patient named Robert Dickens.
And Robert Dickens then informed Mike, he said, "Well,
you ought to come home with me because I'm the whole family picks
and sings, including my sister, Hazel."
So Mike became virtually a member of the Dickens Family.
I think they became the surrogate family, in fact,
that he did not have from his own family.
But above all, to me this is most important, the music he loved now,
not only had a human face, it was made by people to whom he was close.
He began to play music with the Dickens people
at apartments and homes.
He went out into the honky-tonks of Baltimore.
With them, he went down to the country music parks;
played with them there, and also listened to the music.
In sometime in 1956, Moe Ash, the owner and proprietor
of the Folkways label in New York City, wrote to Pete Seeger,
and he said "Pete, I've been hearing a whole lot
about this bluegrass banjo style;
a particular style played by Earl Scruggs."
He said now, "I know you have a banjo instruction book,
and maybe you can not only put some in your instruction book,
but maybe you can make a record for us?
Make an LP so we can educate our audience
about what the Scruggs style is."
And Pete said, "Well, I don't really have enough time, and I don't know
as much about it as I should.
But my brother, Mike, he knows a lot about the Scruggs style."
So it's at this point that I think Mike began to be aware
that it's good to be a Seeger.
He might be embarrassed of the family, but there is a lot
of positive that goes along with it.
So Mike set to work recording mostly Baltimore musicians whom he'd got
to know or hear about.
And in 1956, he produced for the Folkways label
"American Banjo: Scruggs Style."
Some people say this is the very first bluegrass album.
I wouldn't go quite that far, but it certainly explication
of the bluegrass banjo style.
Then Mike, on his own, decided to do another LP for Folkways.
This he conceived; he prepared.   He wrote the liner notes for it.
It was called "Mountain Music: Bluegrass Style."
To my way of thinking, this was the first true bluegrass album.
The first album to have in its title the word "bluegrass."
The first one to try to make any kind of link
between the bluegrass style and mountain culture.
The first to have liner notes.
That was almost unheard of in country music at the time.
But Folkways was already doing it.
And so the little history that Mike wrote for this album, even today,
stands up as a pretty good summary
of what bluegrass music was all about.
These two albums introduced, or did a lot to introduce bluegrass music
to the folk music revival.   And to the northern public.
The young musicians who were already congregating in Washington Square
in New York City now have something they can listen to.
And little by little, the Scruggs style began to make its way
into the music that they made.
Mike got in touch with Alan Lomax, who was a friend of the family,
and after Alan came back to the United States from Europe,
after his self-imposed exile in the early '50s, Mike told him--
Alan was looking for moderate examples of folk music.
Some evidence that the folk style was enduring
and that it was taking new forms.
And Mike encouraged him to go listen to bluegrass.
And so the result was that among other things,
Alan Lomax prepared an article for "Esquire Magazine" called,
I forget the specific title, but "folk music with overdrive."
That's the kind of respectability that the music needed.
Mike later said, in trying
to explain what he was doing during these years, he said,
"well, I had this mission."
And it was a mission, I think, that he had absorbed,
to a certain respect, from his parents.
Along with that zeal to collect and the zeal
to make his material known to the public.
He loved bluegrass.   He could play it.
But he wasn't totally satisfied with it.
He felt that bluegrass was too limited.
I've heard him say this,
he felt that too often the bluegrass musician just plays the same
sequence over and over again, and it became too automatic in their style.
He loved the spontaneity of old-time music.
So while documenting bluegrass music, and make its existence known,
he was still proud of, still determined to play,
the music that he had been first introduced to when he was a child.
As that opportunity became realizable, in 1958, when he joined
with two of his friends, two alumni of the Washington Squire scene,
John Cohen and Tom Paley.
Together they organize a trio called the New Lost City Ramblers.
They made their first of many LPs for the Folkways company,
and then set out on tours of the Northern United States,
playing almost exclusively in the North.
That was the greatest frustration for Mike Seeger.
The fact that, while this music was popular,
he could easily find a group to listen to it,
almost always the people who listen were in the North.
This is Southern music, but Southerners will not listen to it.
But let's remember that this was during the civil rights period,
when it was pretty difficult for northern missionaries to go
into the south, even if it was with the South's own music.
Anyway, there was nobody like the New Lost City Ramblers
in the American Folk Music Revival.
I'll bet I can get a hand from most of you...
How many remember the New Lost City Ramblers?
I believe it's unanimous isn't it, just about?
So I'm preaching to the choir here I suppose,
but you may have not have thought exactly what made this group
so distinct, so unique.
Before the New Lost City Ramblers came along,
the emphasis in American folk music performance
and scholarship tended to be on the song.
The song, other than the style or the person who made the song.
There were some exceptions to this: Woody Guthrie, Aunt Molly [Jackson],
and Lead Belly had come into New York in the 1940s --
made people aware of their music.
But generally the people who paid attention
to what they call folk music emphasized the song.
Mike and the New Lost City Ramblers were determined
to make the American people aware, if they could,
of the people who had made this music in the first place.
And they set out as carefully as they could execute it
to perform the music the way it had been originally performed.
Their emphasis was upon authenticity.
The recreation of the string band styles of the 1920s and 1930s.
In doing this, I think they made people increasingly aware
of the importance of the old 78 RPM commercial recordings.
They were saying, if not explicitly, they were saying
that the 78 RPM commercial record is just as important as a document
as any other form of folk music artifact.
Commercial, yes, but it's an item that moved among the American people
and represented the musical choices they made.
And when they recorded their songs,
when they compile their famous songbook,
the "New Lost City Ramblers Songbook," and when they went
out on stage, the Ramblers were always sure to tell people
where they got their material.
To them it was dishonest to say that this music was anonymous,
or it had risen magically from some mass source.
They would say: "Here's a song which we learned from Tom Ashley.
Or here's a song we learned from The Carter Family.
Here's one we learned from Uncle Dave Macon."
I think this was a profoundly democratic statement.
They were saying that these people mattered.
If they matter, then not only absorbed their song,
but absorbed the way they perform their songs.
There's something important in that culture.
What the New Lost City Ramblers did inevitably spilled
over into scholarship.
Although it worked both ways: there were already a group of scholars
who were beginning to study hillbilly music,
and beginning to emphasis the old records, but now they could point
to the New Lost City Ramblers as being preservers of this tradition.
There were a group of scholars in the United States who became known
as the Hillbilly Folklorists.
People like the D.K. Wilgus, Archie Green, John Greenway,
Ed Kahn -- who have I left out?   That's the nucleus of the group.
And thank God for them because they were coming along just
as I was beginning my own scholarship and trying
to make people aware of the validity of the kind of research I was doing
and the kind of sources that I was using.
Like the inevitable next step, then,
once you have resurrected the old songs, performed them
in the original styles, and made people aware
of where they were first performed, the next step is,
see if you can find those people.   Are they still living?
And, to their great delight, they found out that many of them were.
They found Ralph Rinzler found Tom Ashley down in North Carolina.
I think if may have been Dick Spottswood
who found Mississippi John Hurt.   Sleepy John Estes.
Well, Maybelle Carter wasn't hard to find --
she was already on the Grand Old Opry.
But, yes, quite a few of the people who had made records back
in the 1920s and '30s were still alive and, most important of all,
they were still capable of performing.
So the Ramblers hoped that once people found
out that these people were alive, they could still make music.
Let's put them back on records.
Let's bring them out into the concert trail.
And let's see if we can persuade the commercial record companies
to bring that music out again.
And little by little, Columbia and Victor, Decca, began to bring
out the recordings of Uncle Dave Macon and people like that.
Before I leave the New Lost City Ramblers behind, though,
let me play one more recording.
I think we need to hear a little bit of how they sounded.
Although I'm sure most of you can remember.
[ Instrumental music: "Colored Aristocracy"]
>> I chose that because that's another example of a song
that Mike learned when he was just a little boy
in his parents' home in Silver Spring.
Another song collected by one of the Charles Seeger's teams and deposited
in the Library of Congress recording,
it was called "Colored Aristocracy."
And as far as I can determine, nobody had ever recorded that song
until the New Lost City Ramblers did.
It sounds like it was probably a cake walk from the 1890s
that somehow made its way out into the hinterlands
and into the repertoires of hillbilly musicians.
And that had been recorded in West Virginia,
if I remember correctly, by a local string band.
And that was Mike playing the fiddle.
That's also different: nobody else
in the folk music revival played the fiddle.
And he brought this quintessential hillbilly instrument
into this music.
Well let's conclude by just talking about Mike himself.
Of course, he gave hundreds of concerts
with the New Lost City Ramblers and with others.
But from the very beginning, Mike had embarked on his own solo career.
And, in fact, that sometimes became a problem with the Ramblers.
They felt that he shouldn't be out doing his own thing;
had a particular problem with John Cohn.
I started out describing him as an underachiever,
but by the time the early '60s arrived,
he was the super over-achiever.
So much so that it took a toll on his health; on his marriages.
I think he was probably tough to be the wife of Mike Seeger.
It was tough to be one of his children because he was
so single-focused on what he loved and what he wanted to make known.
But seamlessly, the entertainment which he projected
as a musician became also an example of education.
Mike's concerts became learning devices.
When you heard Mike Seeger, you learned about the song.
You learned about the way the banjo was played on that particular cut.
You learned where it came from.
Because he could play just about every style
that the instrument was capable of doing.
But he continued to be a collector; a documenter; producer of LPs.
He was so involved, simultaneously, with so many things
that it was difficult for a biographer
to do his story adequately.   At least I had the problem.
How do you really describe Mike Seeger?
While he's making all these concerts,
he's also out in the field collecting the music
of all these old-timers and he's producing their LP's.
And he's getting lecture concerts.   He's doing residences in colleges.
Right towards the end of his life,
just a very few years before he died, Bobby and I visited with Mike
and Alexia, his wife, in Lexington, Virginia.
And we're out walking with him,
and I think it was Bobby who asked the question.
Said, "Mike, of all the things you've done,
how do you assess your role in the American folk music history?
What are you most proud of?"
And this is what he singled out: He said he was most proud
of having taken Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten
out onto the concert trail and Dock Boggs.
I think it's significant because both
of these people had very central, important roles
in his family and his growing up.
I guess everybody's heard the story of Libba Cotton?
Libba worked for the family as a housekeeper.
One day I believe it was Peggy, went into the kitchen
and found Libba playing the family guitar, the Seeger guitar.
Playing it upside down.
They said they didn't even know she could play a guitar
until they just accidently came upon her.
So little by little, Mike began to record her songs
and eventually produced an LP on the Folkways label.
Peggy took one of these songs, among others, to England.
It was a song called "Freight Train."
"Freight Train" became a hit in England, and it was brought back
to the United States, and it took a devil of a long time and a lot
of money, a lot of effort, to ever get Libba any money from this song.
But Mike said over and over again he was proud
that this brown-skinned woman who had helped to raise him,
who had cooked him cookies, finally lived long enough to go out
and perform in public for American people.
The other person, Dock Boggs, I've already referred to.
Dock had played a central role in his family's discovery
of folk music, he was central to Mike's growing up in the late '30s,
and Mike was delighted to find out during one of his concert trips
that Dock Boggs was still alive, living in Norton, Virginia.
So he visited Dock Boggs and found
out that shortly before Mike arrived, Dock had brought his banjo
out of hock, and was ready to play it again.
So Mike almost immediately found Dock a festival to play on,
then often traveled with him over the years.
And Dock Boggs said again and again he was proud of the role
that Mike Seeger had played in saving his life
and giving him a new audience.
I think Hazel Dickens may have made the best statement about Mike,
though, that sums up his relationship
with other old time musicians.
She said, "Mike validated my culture.
He was the first outsider to recognize
and understand the music that I did.
And he made it possible for me to make a life from my music."
And I think that was true of a lot of the old-timers
who found new leases on life and new audiences
How do you compare Mike Seeger, then to his brother, Pete?
There's no way that I could ever denigrate Pete Seeger,
and I wouldn't attempt to.
But I will say that I think that Mike Seeger could do things
on the string instruments that Pete could never do.
Mike Seeger was a better musician than Pete, but beyond that,
I think [Mike] took the music, and instead of using it
for his own purposes, either for propaganda
or for political objectives, he took the music for its own self.
He put himself in the shadows and put the music up front,
and reminded us of the humanity of the people
who had made the music in the first place.
To me what Mike Seeger did, was as important
as what Pete Seeger did in his own way.
[pause]
>> Mike brought humanity to folk music scholarship.
And he made us aware of the wealth of material that lay in our past.
And he made it possible, among others, for people like Alan Jabbour
to discover that it's not just the old timers,
the commercial old-timers, that are important.
There's a lot of people out there still making music
that we've never heard of, like Tommy Jarrell and Henry Reed.
And I think one thing that Mike was proud of by the time he died is
that there was a resurrection of interest in the South.
Southerners were little by little beginning
to recognize their own cultural contributions.
Of course, we haven't mentioned Doc Watson.
Mike didn't discover Doc, but he came around the same period.
And I guess, finally, I would say
that I personally owe Mike a great debt of tribute.
I say in the book that when Mike Seeger came along, I was impressed
by what he did, but I wasn't quite sure of his objectives.
I wasn't sure who this guy Mike Seeger was.
I felt this is some kind of Yankee interloper who's interfering
with my music; the music I grew up with.
He will probably play it awhile and go on to something else.
Of course, that idea came totally from ignorance.
Not really knowing who Mike Seeger was or where he came from.
So it was pretty common for me and my friends at the University
of Texas, who sang old time music, to sort of make fun of Mike Seeger
and the New Lost City Ramblers - these Yankee boys who were trying
to sound like hillbillies
and not quite achieving what they tried to do.
I must confess that while making sport of them,
I was buying every record they made.   I bought their songbook.
I went to their concerts.   I memorized their songs.
And when it came time for me to do research on the manuscript
that became "Country Music USA," I found their research invaluable.
I found the names of people who I had never known.
And I grew up with people like Uncle Dave Macon and the Carter Family.
But because of Mike and the New Lost City Ramblers, I became well aware
of people like Charlie Poole, and people like him.
So Mike, if you're listening anywhere, thanks.
You made my career possible.   All right.
Do we have any questions?   [ Applause ]
>> Male audience member: I just want to make a brief comment
on the New Lost City Ramblers in the south.
I was in Atlanta in the 1960s, and I played a lot of music there.
And was interested in this kind of music.
And I remember seeing the New Lost City Ramblers playing,
I think the place was called the Bottom of the Barrel, and not quite,
it really was the bottom of the barrel.
>> Bill Malone: Well.   I'm sure they felt that way a lot
when they played in some of these clubs.
>> Male audience member: Yes.   I think so.
So there was something of an audience for them.
The main reason I remember that old-time music was not popular
in the south during that period was that at least in the urban areas,
white southerners were embarrassed by it-- natives of the region.
They were on to rock and roll.   Popular music and -
>> Bill Malone: I think that's true.
Younger southerners had gone on to some
of the commercial offshoots of old-time music.
They had gone in to blues or rock and roll, and...
>> Male audience member: Like Elvis.   [Laughing]
>> Bill Malone: Elvis.
>> Male audience member: Yeah.   Yeah, that's true.
>> Bill Malone: I think you're right
that it took a while for people to overcome.
It took a while for the country music industry, so called,
to overcome its sense of inferiority.
Before they set up their own Hall of Fame and began collecting data
from the old timers, both in and outside of Nashville.
>> Female audience member:
I know Harry Smith Anthology was a big influence on people
like Bob Dylan and so forth....
And I was wondering, was there any kind of personal relationship
between him [Smith] - and he was an odd character--
between him and Mike Seeger?
>> Bill Malone: No, but there was this relationship
between John Cohen and Harry Smith.
John took some photographs of him and he did a lengthy essay,
at least one or more on Harry Smith.
But you're certainly right about him.
One of the reasons why it was possible for a group
like the New Lost City Ramblers to exist is because, first of all,
the Lomaxes in the 1940s had put out a few of the old commercial songs.
They did a couple of albums, I think for Victor and for Decca.
And then in 1952, this very eccentric collector, Harry Smith,
took his collection to Moe Ash at Folkways and persuaded him
to put out a boxed collection.
So people began to become aware of this music
that had been recorded commercially between, say, 1923 and 1938 or so.
And I remember the impact that the collection had on me.
I was browsing through the public library in Austin, Texas,
and there I found a big, black boxed collection called
"American Folk Music."
And I open it up, and I found some familiar names,
like the Carter Family and Uncle Dave Macon, and I was thrilled.
The music I grew up with, the music I love, is being brought back again.
And now it's being called folk music!
I always thought it was hillbilly.
[Laughing] And here it has been produced by this,
what I thought was this prestigious company
in New York City, of all places.
But I later found out that other people are having similar reactions
-- everybody from Bob Dylan to Joan Baez, and, of course, John Cohen,
and Mike Seeger, and Tom Paley.
And so, in other words, people in the folk music community,
they knew about the old records, but they didn't really know
that it could still be produced
until the New Lost City Ramblers began touring
and performing the songs in their own way.
And, of course, from that time on, then people began looking
for the originals, and hoping
that the record companies would bring them out again.
>> Alan Jabbour: I thought "Colored Aristocracy" was a really good
example to play because I have to add to your list
of Mike's contributions --
helping to bring in a whole instrumental phase
of the folk music revival movement
because the old revival was really song-focused.
And Pete, in effect, perfectly illustrates that; whereas,
Mike was a -- he loves to sing, but he was an instrumental guy.
He played - his shows were like a choreograph presentation
that 'the instruments you can play.'   He had them all lined up on stage
and he'd go grab one, and turn it around....
>> Bill Malone: Yeah.
I wrote on his album covers, he would stand in front
of an array of instruments, too....
>> Alan Jabbour: Yeah, I think you're right
that having a fiddle tune, "Colored Aristocracy,"
on that early record sort of typified, sort of opening
up a whole new realm of possibilities there.
And once the instrumental revival got going,
which he certainly had a hand in getting going, it also opened
up the connections with dance, and...
>> Bill Malone: They began to do
that toward the end of his career, too.
>> Alan Jabbour: He got very interested in dance himself...
It was a very important, sort of shift over to instrumental music --
not that people abandoned singing--
but they added instrumental music as a purpose.
>> Bill Malone: That's great point.
>> Male audience member: This is a question I wished I had asked Mike:
To what degree and in what form was there crossover in the mountains
between the black community musicians
and the white community musicians?
Was there a black equivalent of the old-time players?
>> Bill Malone: Well, I should of, since...I called it "Music
from the True Vine," and yet I made no comment at all
about why that was called that.
That's something that Mike, toward the end of his career,
began emphasizing over and over again.
I guess it had been implicit in his career earlier,
but he hadn't made any formal statement.
And that's the idea that you're referring to.
He felt that southern music as a whole was a product
of the inter-relationship, the interaction
between black and white southerners.
And that they borrowed from each other.
Not just in the flatlands, but in the mountains as well.
People like CeCee Conway in her book, "African Banjo Echoes
in the Appalachians," is a good example:
she claims that banjo style wasn't learned exclusively
from minstrel performers who toured the area.
It was learned from African-American musicians who moved
into the mountains and worked in various projects,
or played on street corners.
But that's what he meant by "music from the true vine."
The true vine of American music came from this inter-relationship
between the music of the black and white southerners.
>> Todd Harvey: I just wanted to follow-up on what Betsy said earlier
that - thank you for a wonderful lecture
in the Folklife Center's Reading Room.
We really benefit from your work on,
all the [inaudible] books on the shelf.
And I would also say that the archive has about 700 hours
of Mike Seeger's recordings.
If you want to do research all those interviews with Dock Boggs,
all those concerts, all those Ramblers recordings are
in the archive; and we also have the John Cohen collections.
So if you want to explore the relationship between John Cohen
and Ramblers, and Harry Smith, you can do it.
It's one stop shopping....
>> Bill Malone: Okay.   Great.
>> Steve Winick: And people like Leslie Riddle, who,
talking about the inter-relation of black and white music;
who helped the Carter Family learn a lot of their songs was someone
that Mike sought out and documented and we have those recordings.
>> I was interested in the point that you made that Mike wanted
to promote the older musicians, and yet, as an example,
the recording that you played first, "When First Onto This Country,"
in 1978, when the English folk-rock band Fairport Convention recorded
that, it's the only song on which their fiddler puts
down the fiddle and plays the autoharp.
Which is an obvious borrowing [multiple speakers] to Mike;
not to the Gant Family, because they didn't have an autoharp
on the recording.
So what would happen is that the New Lost City Ramblers' version would
actually become the one that became the most popular.
Did that bother Mike if that happened, do you know?
Or what was his attitude toward his own fame?
I know he was kind of uncomfortable with it,
but what more do you know about that?
>> Bill Malone: I think he was uncomfortable
in being put forward in front of a group.
That happened to him from time to time
when the New Lost City Ramblers did concerts.
You know, the placard would say, "Mike Seeger
and the New Lost City Ramblers."   And that bothered him.
And they say that at parties, at jam sessions which he played,
he was always just part of the mix.
He never really put himself forward in a dramatic way.
He was very happy to listen to other people play.
He was always learning.
And I remember referring to him-- I would say, "Mike,
when you mastered such and such..."   That would make him uncomfortable.
He would say, "I never mastered anything."
>> Male audience member: I would just say,
adding on to the Reading Room, another great thing for those of us
who work in the field when some of these things stream at work,
so even though you're working, you can listen as well.
But my question is, and I appreciate the geographic specificity
where they would say, hey, we learned this here,
and this is from here, and he'll give pretty complete backgrounds
to some of the tunes, but I'm from Texas, and I'm very interested
in the western boundary, you might say, of the folk revival.
And there are a lot of, used to talk about southern music.
It's really southeastern music to a large degree.
And I'm really fascinated by the western boundary
of the folk revival, if you want to raise it that way.
>> Bill Malone: Well, one thing that always bothered me
about the New Lost City Ramblers presentations --
and you could find this a little bit in Mike's early work, too --
was this emphasis on the Southern mountains.
They always try to make it appear
that everything they got came directly from the mountains,
either from commercial companies that went there and recorded people,
or from Library of Congress expeditions, or whatever.
And then a lot of the examples they would give were for people
like Uncle Dave Macon, who came from central Tennessee.
We got Jim Rogers, who comes from Mississippi.
They came from everywhere.
And I think that was a lot -- Eck Robertson from Texas;
Prince Albert Hunt, it's on and on.
And I was troubled with the fact that they wouldn't venture
into early Western Swing at all.
That's a very viable product of the old- time string movement.
So there were a lot of areas that they stayed clear of.
But I think that was kind of a holdover
from earlier folklore scholarship.
An emphasis goes back to Cecil Sharp, if not even earlier.
The idea that American folk music comes from some,
deep in the recesses of the southern Appalachians.
Some of it did, but a lot of it didn't.
So I think you're correct in setting the parameters ought
to be broadened dramatically.
Did I get it sort of what you were saying?
>> Male audience member: Yeah yeah.
The ground in which the true vine, from which the true vine grew,
is so rich, I guess, there's a lot there to mine.
I'm interested in, I don't know --
in the Bob Dylan bio thing that they had some years ago,
he had initially portrayed himself as Rough Hewn [phonetic]
from Gallop, New Mexico, and I was amused to see that.
But, I guess the folk revival just had so much to plumb
that they just never got out to the western part at all.
>> Bill Malone: And the Gant Family, that somebody mentioned back here,
who contributed "When First onto this Country, a Stranger I Came,"
they were - that was a Mormon family from Texas, I think.
They may have migrated from someplace else maybe.
But they wound up in the Hill Country outside of Austin.
So American folk songs, American country music,
came from many, many sources.
>> Male audience member: I wanted to comment.
Alan's father, John [Lomax] did some fabulous fieldwork
in Texas and the west....   >> Nancy Groce: Okay.
One more question, then we're going to have to -
>> Female audience member: Thank you.
You mentioned that when you were younger,
you felt some suspicion towards the New Lost City Ramblers
and Mike Seeger for being northern interpreters, essentially.
I wonder, we talked a lot about what he did for folk music,
but I wonder - did his - do you think his relationship
with southerners changed so much?
As musicians, as general practitioners.
I mean, obviously, without [inaudible]
and people that he knew closely.   I just wonder if, I mean, I wonder -
>> Bill Malone: I don't think
that Mike ever had any problem with southerners at all.
He was apolitical in that sense.
He was partially liberal, but he wasn't bothered
by political questions and he would have gone into the South.
He would have performed more there than he did if it had been possible.
Tom Paley was against that.
He was very much opposed to going South.
>> Female audience member: But politically, I guess I meant more -
do you think that people more from grass roots background rely
on his records the way I was?   >> Bill Malone: I don't know.
I doubt it.   >> Female audience member: Yeah.
>> Bill Malone: I'm not sure who was buying his records really.
College students?
>> Nancy Groce: I want to thank Professor Malone for a great talk.
[ Applause ]   >> Bill Malone: Thank you.
Thank you very much.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.