>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Silence ] >> Betsy Peterson: Good afternoon or morning to everyone. My name is Betsy Peterson and I'm the Director of the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress. And I'm pleased to welcome you to the latest presentation in our Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series. The Botkin Series allows the center to accomplish a couple of things. First of all, we're able to present to you the latest and best work from leading scholars in folklore, ethnomusicology, oral history and cultural heritage studies. It also allows us to increase our acquisition activities. Each lecture is videotaped and becomes part of the permanent collection here at the Library and will eventually be webcast so that others around the world and future generations can hear this important work. So, as a reminder before we proceed, just turn off your cell phones if you have not already done so. And so today, this is a special pleasure, but I'm pleased to introduce Joshua Caffery, a musician and a folklorist, who is currently spending a year with us here in Washington after being awarded the prestigious Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies by the Library's John Kluge Center. Dr. Caffery is a writer and a musician and a native of Franklin, Louisiana. As a musician, he is a well-known; he is well-known as a founding member of the Red Stick Ramblers and a long-time member of the Louisiana French Band, Feufollet. As a scholar, Dr. Caffery completed his Ph.D. at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette under the direction of folklorist Barry Ancelet, and his first book, "Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana: The 1934 Lomax Recordings," was recently published by LSU Press. And I should add that we just happen to have a few copies out there in the lobby and I want to encourage you all to pick up one after the lecture. The American Folklife Center is particularly proud to be the repository for the important field recordings related to Louisiana. And in his talk today, Josh examines the songs recorded in the summer of 1934 for the Library by John Lomax with assistance from his son, Alan, who was a mere teenager at the time. While the music they recorded there has often been characterized as Cajun or Creole music, I think as you will hear from what Josh has to say and share with us today, that what actually was found is a little bit more complex. So without any further ado, I want to turn things over to Joshua Caffery. [ Applause ] >> Joshua Caffery: Thank you so much. I'd like to start off with a word of thanks. The story of this book actually starts here at the Library and with the Library staff, and I want to give credit where it's due. I first visited here, and the American Folklife Center, specifically, in 2007. I was a first-year graduate student at the time and I was making ends meet as a musician. My band, Feufollet, which is a Louisiana French Cajun music band, we had a job at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. We knew about the Lomax Collection in a vague way at the time, and I pressured or persuaded a few of my bandmates to go, come here, actually, to the Library and seek out the home of these recordings. We wandered around lost in the Thomas Jefferson Building for a while and then we ran into Todd Harvey outside of the Center. As you know, Todd presides over the Lomax Collection. When I explained to him that we were folk musicians from Louisiana interested in the early recordings, a puckish grin lit up his face and he sprang into action summoning an equally puckish Stephen Winick. And Todd began pulling files off the shelves, including correspondence between Alan Lomax and Joe Segura recording near Delcambre, Louisiana in 1934, and a distant relative of our fiddler, Feufollet's fiddler, Chris Segura. Todd and Stephen's exuberance and the novelty of seeing these artifacts in the flesh really fired our curiosity about the collection and we subsequently rearranged, recorded, and released a number of the songs drawn from the 1934 trip. This also marked the beginning of my own fascination with the material as a scholar. And Barry Ancelet, who I was working with at the time, encouraged me to look more deeply into it. For all the importance that's assigned to this collection, the Summer of '34 Collection in Southern Louisiana, which is really the first significant field recording expedition in our area, my area, of Louisiana which is south-central, southwestern Louisiana. For all the importance assigned to that collection, there was clearly so much work to be done on it-so much that remained unexplored and mysterious. I think by my count about only 25 percent of the songs had ever been transcribed, much less translated or studied in depth. To me it seemed of almost mystical significance, a font of arcane knowledge, sacred document of a forgotten past, an untranslated Upanishad of Louisiana song. I still feel that way, even after having done this work about it and I want to thank Steve and Todd for that afternoon years ago because it set in motion the work of this book. And it's the reason I'm speaking to you today. And really, though, Steve and Todd were just doing their job, which I get to see now. They do it every day. They have that same enthusiasm to everyone who comes in looking for this material. And we happened to run into them, and that's why I'm here today. I'd also like to thank everyone in the Kluge Center, where I'm in residence for the year, and the staff of the American Folklife Center, particularly Nancy Groce. I'm very honored to be here indeed. Let me begin with what might seem an unexpected analogy. As I started writing this talk, a quote from J. R. R. Tolkien, of all people, kept creeping into my mind. Tolkien's fame, of course, stems primarily from his fantasy novels, but he remains one of the great critics of Anglo-Saxon literature, as some of you probably know. His long essay on "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," remains central to scholarship about the poem to this day. In that study, he made a point that stayed with me. He said... this, "When new Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense, and it now produces a singular effect. If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory over the hills, an echo of an echo." Tolkien's point was that Beowulf, although in many ways Christianized, modernized for the time and theme and literary style, reverberated with the sound of a distant, somehow obscured cultural past. Like Beowulf, the early Lomax recordings in Louisiana are, in a sense, memories over the hills. As there are no hills in South Louisiana, we might say memories over the marshes or faint lights in the swamp. Like Beowulf, the Lomax recordings, even when they were new, were antiquarian. But, as Tolkien puts it, they were antiquarian in a good way, I think. Largely unconcerned with the Cajun and Creole accordion and fiddle-bass styles now understood as the region's signature folk music, John and Alan sought out the more venerable instrumental and vocal traditions. Antebellum spirituals, ancient Francophone narrative songs, round dance and play party songs, quadrille tunes, Blues ballads, and much, much more. I won't be able to talk about everything, but I'll hope to hit on a few of these. Traditions that were really more, or sometimes more of the 19th century than the 20th century, music that even people in the 1930s would have considered over the hill, in another sense of the term. But as a result of his good, good antiquarianism, the Lomax Collection -- again, like Beowulf -- produces what Tolkien calls "a singular effect." Because of its concern for the past, I believe it provides a unique atlas of a forgotten terrain which, in turn, helps build a more three-dimensional model for how our indigenous present came to be. And just as importantly, I believe it offers a unique tool for tradition-minded musicians interested in making a resonant and memorable musical future. As Alan himself wrote many years later, "Since we were short of money and time, I'm glad that we preserved the older styles since they provide a view of the complex roots of the Cajun and Creole music of today and with luck may fuel a French Louisiana music richer than the present-day Zydeco and Fais do-do." Kind of harsh, a little bit, there. For we lovers and practitioners of Cajun and Zydeco music, this is strong medicine, I think. But I have to appreciate this Lomaxian vision of culture in which a radical antiquarianism might rejuvenate American song. In fact, this is where the Lomaxs' vision intersects most directly with that of Ben Botkin, for whom this lecture series is named. Both Botkin and Lomax believe that, though folklorists might marvel in private of their precious reliquaries, their ultimate task is a public reciprocal one -- excuse me -- in which those relics would be returned to cultural usage as usable lore imbued with some newfound creative potential and imparting what Tolkien would call "a singular effect." For all the nobility of such a vision, though, a major obstacle exists in that most of the Lomax recordings, even the early recordings from the 1930s, have remained poorly understood and, I think, predictably true in French Louisiana, and relatively little studied. Perhaps partially because of the discipline of folklore moved away from an interest in text in the middle of the late 20th century or because the commercial recordings of the 1920s exert such a lasting sway over our sonic imagination, much of the early matter was never transcribed or translated, much less annotated or interpreted. For the 1934 recordings, with the exception of Ancelet's excellent, though necessarily brief liner notes written for a Rounder Records release, and a handful of annotated issues, there simply hasn't been very much ground to stand on. Luckily I think this is changing, not just with regard to the Louisiana recordings, but for the Lomax recordings and early 20th century field recordings writ large. As the post-romantic disdain, or what I would call the post-romantic disdain, for ballad expeditions and song collections of the sort popularized by scholars like Botkin and Lomax wanes, a growing appreciation for the sheer importance, scope, and depth of these resources is on the rise. Witness, for example, Gage Averill's incredible box set of Alan's Haitian recordings from the 1930s, or James Leary's forthcoming work on early field recordings in the Upper Midwest, or Stephen Wade's in-depth exploration of 13 particularly striking early field recordings, or Todd Harvey's book on Alan's 1938 Michigan excursion. Like musicians who continue to uncover overlooked gems in the massive collection, making new music from the old, scholars are busy again or still making new knowledge from temporarily discarded, but always carefully guarded, static lore. The goal of this book has been in this vein, to bring songs from the recording to the page, to fathom their nature, speculate about their origins, identify them with other related material, interpret their meaning, their relation to the rest of the collection, and, when possible, to the performers; in essence to make this somewhat inaccessible body of information available and accessible. This is, once again, an antiquarian task, but I hope it's what Tolkien would call the good kind. In this talk I want to do two things. I want to give a general overview of the 1934 trip and also delve in more detail into two of the songs in particular that produce the most interesting research discoveries. There are about 200 songs, and obviously I can't talk about all of them. But I'll try to go in depth into two and focus in on those two. First, a general overview of where and who they recorded and a little bit of why. Essentially they set out to canvass the area known variously as Acadiana, Bayou Country, Teche Country, French Louisiana. It goes by many different names. While they kept very little in the way of field notes at the time, it seems that their first base of operations was in Iberia Parish. More than half the songs from '34 were recorded in New Iberia, with many performers from outlying areas coming to New Iberia for recording sessions. While they didn't record their rationale exactly for beginning in New Iberia and nearby St. Martinville, it may have something to do with the fact that they were partially on the hunt for survivals of Acadian culture. John Lomax had attended Harvard as an adult student. His chief academic benefactor was George Lyman Kittredge. Kittredge, in turn, was a student and associate of the great ballad scholar, Francis Child. All were influenced, of course, by another Harvard professor and poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose poem, "Evangeline," tells the tale of two newlyweds separated by the Acadian genocide and diaspora of the mid-1800s. "Evangeline" was the most famous poem of its day and, along with the 1929 feature film, it established this area as a land of the Acadians. In fact, it's called by state law Acadiana to this day. Of course, Acadians are the only people who live there, right? John Lomax was, without a doubt, on the hunt for songs that, to quote, songs of, to quote Longfellow, "Acadian farmers, men whose lives glided on like the rivers that watered the woodlands, darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven." This seems impossibly romantic, in a way, but their focus on this area was historically appropriate, as they must have known. The first Acadian refugees had indeed settled along the Bayou Teche near Loreauville, just outside of New Iberia and St. Martinville, and they recorded a number of Loreauville singers directly descended from the early Acadians in the area. In the brief audio notes to a number of the recordings, John Lomax describes the region, from time to time, as the central place in Evangeline country. He called it Evangeline country. In Iberia, St. Martin Parish they recorded a diversity of song in Louisiana Creole French and Cajun French. Here they also found the reserves of traditional French song they were seeking in the singing of Lunada Commeaux and Julian Hoffpauir and his young daughters. This is Lunada. Commeaux is a well-attested Acadian name, but Hoffpauir is actually an Alsatian name and the Hoffpauir ancestors had hailed from the border of Germany and Northeastern France. Though neither the Hoffpauirs nor their songs are really Acadian in any discernible way, their performances represent the most conservative French song repertoire known in Southwestern Louisiana. So they were looking for Acadian ballads and they may have found some, but they probably also found quite a few Alsatian songs. Julian, in particular, sang a number of songs in a very precise, syllabic meter, diverging little from the traditional French song texts as they appear in continental French folksong collections from the 18th and 19th centuries. He'd also trained his young daughters to sing a number of these older songs. A major goal of this book -- and you'll have to read the book to see how I go about it -- but is to deal in more nuanced way with this profusion of traditional French song that they found. The tendencies of the Lomaxes and other early folklorists working the area to designate all traditional Francophone singing as Acadian ballads persists to this day and it's misleading for a few reasons. First of all, there's no proof that any of the songs are Acadian in origin. Many were written in the mid- or late 19th century, in fact, hundreds of years after the Acadians left France and a century after they had arrived in Louisiana. For instance, one great irony of the collection is that the French songs that recorded from Loreauville singers, which is really ground zero Acadian country -- it's where the first Acadian bands stopped when they came through Louisiana -- but many of the songs they recorded from the Loreauville singers are the most modern French songs. And I'll play you a bit of one. >> [Man singing in French.] >> Joshua Caffery: This song is known as "L'Amore e Fanatisma," "Love and Fanaticism." I'm sorry. It tells a story of an Islamic warrior in love with a Christian belle. He hopes to abandon war and live in her embrace, but Allah commands him to die in the first wave of battle. This song was actually written by a Bordeaux aristocrat named Emonde de Carayon La Tour and it's a romance, a modern sentimental French lyric in the first person. And it was among the most popular songs in its day in latter 19th-century France. It appears in most major collections of popular songs and light opera from the time and it would originally have been sung in middle-class and upper-class drawing rooms. The singer may have been Acadian, in other words, but the song was written hundreds of years after the Acadians arrived in the New World, and long after they arrived in Louisiana. The second problem with this notion of the Acadian ballad is that a ballad isn't really a French song type. Scholars of folksong here know this, right, even though it comes from a French word. But the ballad is an English song type with a particular meter and particular thematic concerns that differ from traditional narrative songs in French. So Acadian ballad, then, it doesn't really work as an analytic category. It's more of a romantic category. It's what I'd call romantic metonymy, I suppose. In an area often identified with Acadian descendants when describing old French songs, "Acadian ballad" is a catch-all that glosses over a very complex song bag. All of that said, many of the songs are old enough that they could have made their way from continental France to Nova Scotia down to Louisiana. For instance, two singers perform a version of an ancient chason lit, "The Drunken Woman in the Tavern," which shows up in French song collections going back to the 13th century. The song relates the story of a somewhat dejected husband whose wife spends most evenings in the bar leaving him to scrub the pots and wash the dishes at home. And this song actually still exists in the modern Cajun repertoire thanks to the Balfa Brothers, whose mother sang the song and who performed sort of a really mournful version of the song with tremolo guitars in the background. It's interesting, though, because, you know, these songs are traditional, but in performance they take on different aspects. In all the female versions of the song, where the singers are female, they are sort of lighthearted and happy, but the male versions are extremely doleful. So also there are a handful of songs from 1934 that show up in French-Canadian repertories, but not in continental French collections. These tend to be occupational maritime adventure songs that may be rooted in a French-Canadian context. I think if we're looking for Acadian songs that might be the strongest place to look. Furthermore, although the ballad isn't a French song type, there are a number of Child ballads rendered in Cajun French -- well, two. A version of "The Butcher's Boy" and also "The House Carpenter," Child's "James Harris," or "The Demon Lover." My point is that there may be songs with Acadian connections there may be ballads, but there really aren't any Acadian ballads in Louisiana that I know of. In the annotations of the songs I've tried to make these divisions clear. And here at the Kluge Center I've been working on putting this information into an easily accessible format using interactive digital maps, and if you're curious about that after, I'd love to show you that work. But maps that correspond with the standard catalog of French folksongs, Conrad LaForte's great folksong catalog, which is really kind of like Child's "English and Scottish Popular Ballads," but for French song. On nearby Avery Island, a raised coastal salt dome-It's down here-they called on E. A. McIlhenny, the patriarch of the island, in himself a folklorist of sorts. No one's really made that case before that I know of, but I'm trying to make that case now. He was famed as a naturalist and conservationist, but he had grown up visiting the African-American church on Avery Island and he believed that antebellum spiritual singing of his youth was, like the surrounding marshes, endangered. He had published a book before the war of spirituals which included both musical and lyrical transcriptions of over a hundred songs by two women, Alberta Bradford and Becky Elsey, who knew the old repertoire. When the Lomaxes arrived, he put them in touch with these singers and they recorded a number of really beautiful songs, some of which show up only at Avery Island. In the Avery Island archive we dug up these photos of the ladies. They also dipped down to St. Mary Parish, which is where I'm from, and they recorded a chain gang foreman and logging team captain named John Bray, who performed a holler of the sort used in the Cypress logging operations in the area, as well as a version of "Stagger Lee" and an original fingerpicked blues about serving in World War II. This guy was really an amazing performer. I mean, he's comparable in talent to someone like Big Bill Broonzy or Blind Willie McTell, but we only have just this small handful of recordings with him, unfortunately. I actually tracked down this place. There I am. >> Stephen Winick: Josh, I think you meant World War I, right? >> Joshua Caffery: Yeah, I did. Sorry about that. Yeah. World War I; you're right. I don't have quite the musculature of John Bray, but not many people do. Okay? It's often treated as a given that Cajun and Creole music are heavily influenced by the Blues, but we don't know much about Country Blues in the region and the Lomax Collection gives us recordings of guys like this, who can sort of help us contextualize the growth of Cajun Zydeco music with respect to the Blues. To the west they moved along the Coastal Highway 14 through Vermilion Parish. Near Delcambre they recorded Joe Segura and his brothers, who had made commercial sides as the Segura Brothers. This is the Segura brothers. They recorded a bit of Acadian music, I mean Cajun accordion music here, but they called it 'accordion orchestras,' the Lomaxes did. But they focused on the older repertory of the brothers who sang Blues-inflected laments in Creole French, as well as older narrative songs that show up in French-Canadian collections. In Erath they recorded Finless Brasseau, Isaac Sonnier, Cleveland Sonnier, who performed French drinking songs, as well as "La Chanson d'Savoire," one of a cycle of Cajun French songs in which a drunken protagonist wanders along country roads with a jug on the pommel of his saddle. I'm not sure if this is Lennis Vincent, Sidney Richard, but it may be, it most probably is. In nearby Erath, they encountered Lennis Vincent and Sidney Richard in a neighborhood bar. Barry Ancelet actually tracked down Lennis Vincent years later and interviewed him and said that he asked him about these recordings, and Lennis Vincent said, "I've never made any recordings in my life." And Barry played the recordings for him and he said, "That's me!" And then he started coming back to him, apparently, and he started remembering the story and apparently what had happened is he and his friend, Sidney, were on a borrowed horse together on the way to church, and they decided to stop at a bar on the way. And they never really left the bar. They never made it to church. And there they ran into the Lomaxes. Along with a guy named Hippolyte Dupont, they recorded a number of songs. The Lomaxes apparently were there hanging out in the bar. And so that actually seems to be the case quite a bit, that some of these performers don't even remember they made these recordings. Sometimes it takes the audio to jog their memories. In Vermilion Parish they also recorded Wayne Perry, a virtuoso fiddler who played a number of song rooted in Anglo-American fiddling traditions, as well as a number of Blues, likely absorbed from the radio, as well as instrumental numbers tied to French quadrille traditions. Over here in Jeff Davis Parish, further to the west, they recorded an extensive batch of jourées, which are really Afro-Creole ring shouts. Around this time, apparently, John had left Alan on his own. He was only 18 at the time, and he apparently immediately started getting into trouble. According to him, he was under surveillance from the local sheriff and he had to be smuggled in the back of a car into Jennings, Louisiana to record these jourée singers. And then he had to flee because one of the sessions somehow devolved into a brawl. So that is the kind of thing that tended to happen when John left him alone, at least at the time. In nearby Acadia Parish they found an interesting mix of songs. That's over here around Crowley and down here around Morse, Louisiana. I-10 today, by the way, runs right through here, as does Highway 90. So basically they were following a highway called 90 which runs to some degree along the coast. And then they were dipping down into some of these smaller state highways. In Acadia Parish there had been a strong influx of Anglo and Anglo-Irish immigration due to the growth of rice cultivation and the oil boom at the turn of the century. And the recordings there really reflect that. Jessie and Sam Stafford, whose ancestry I traced up through Mississippi and into the Appalachians, had a French mother named Assulee [phonetic], and their repertoire included what you might expect: Protestant hymns sung to Carter-style accompaniment, Cajun French songs of rambling drunkenness, all alongside a French chanson lit sung in close unison. Also in Acadia they recorded this fellow, the mysterious Mr. Borneau [phonetic], pictured here. He performed a Bluesy version of a bawdy Irish come-ye-all, as well as a long narrative song in Cajun French. I'll play you just a little bit of his singing. It's pretty interesting stuff. >> Field recording of male singer [words inaudible] I'm going to stop it there because it gets pretty racy. It's interesting because the name Borneau doesn't show up in any of the census records anywhere in Louisiana in the '30s and Todd and I have been kind of puzzling about who this guy was. In the card catalog it seems that Alan personally scratched out an older name that was there which seems to maybe have been Barnes, so it may be that this man didn't want his bawdy song to be on record for eternity at the Library of Congress. We don't really know. So this may be a Barnes or a Borne, perhaps, which are names that show up in the area. They also found this fellow, Horace Forman, who played three Anglo-American fiddle tunes with his son on fiddlesticks. It's a version of "The Boatman Dance." They also recorded a guy named Eddie Murphy, who sang a song called the "Waco Girl," which is a descendant of the 17th century broadside "The Witton Miller," which you may also know as "The Berkshire Tragedy," I think, or the "Cruel Miller," the "Bloody Miller." It's also the antecedent of "The Knoxville Gal," the Louvin Brothers' song. In Lafayette Parish, going back to Lafayette, circling around, John appears to have drawn on his background as a University of Texas administrator in that he made contact with Edwin L. Stephens, who is the president of the Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute, which is now the University of Louisiana. He recorded Edwin L. Stephens singing songs they learned from a deacon in his employ, and also from a Creole worker at the nearby Ensen la Bute [phonetic] oil field. And he also made recordings of a guy named Willis Ducray, who was an early leader of the university's music program. And in the audio notes, Ducray says that he -- he sings a really funny song about some Cajuns who've gone to the Ensen la Bute oil field and who've for some reason torn their drawers in the briar patch. I don't really know why that was, but he also says that he overheard the song from the singing of prisoners at the St. Martin Parish jail. And I always wonder why Willis Ducray, this middle-class guy and academic, had been in the St. Martin Parish jail. And I actually recently found out, my grandmother has a copy of this book. She's been reading it, and she grew up in Iberia Parish. And she ran into a really old friend of hers from St. Martinville, Louisiana, and he was, I believe 92, or 93 now, and asked him, "Did you know Willis Ducray? And, you know, why was he singing this song overheard from prisoners at the St. Martin Parish jail?" And this guy said, "Oh, Willis lived right across the street from the jail." So it makes sense that he would've -- I should've asked her before I wrote the book, but... in Lafayette, they also recorded an African-American songster named Wilson Jones, who went by the moniker Stavin' Chain. If you want to know more about Stavin' Chain and what it means, I'll have to refer you to the book, because it's sort of in dispute. While South Louisiana hasn't really been considered a hotbed of African-American string band music, Stavin' Chain and his group had a varied repertoire of reworked minstrel songs, Blues, original compositions, topical Blues, ballads; indicating that there really was, perhaps, an Anglo-African string band tradition area alongside the better-known Afro-Creole styles. So up to this point, I've tried to sketch a general outline of this trip, where they went. I couldn't include everything. But that's basically, in a nutshell, what they did. But really, the book is more about delving into the songs in more minute detail and trying to contextualize them, unearth new research about them and into the lives of the performers as well. So I want to do that with two of the songs now. And I want to start with one of Stavin' Chain's songs. The Lomaxes noted that when this photo was taken, he was in the midst of singing the song, "Batson," a Blues ballad about a mass murderer and a wrongfully-accused scapegoat. So here he is singing "Batson" in these photos. [ Music ] >> Field recording of Stavin' Chain singing "Batson." >> Joshua Caffery: I'd love to play you the whole song, but its 39 verses long. They had to stop Jones mid-song and start over on another disc. They actually transcribed this in one of their early collections. I believe it was "Our Singing Country." And in the note to Our Singing Country, just a short paragraph note, they say that, John says that Stavin' Chain claimed that the story was based on real events near Lake Charles, but that they weren't able to ascertain if this was true. I did some more digging, and as it turns out, the case of Albert Ed Batson and his alleged murder of six members of the Earle family hear Welsh, Louisiana in 1902 had been a truly infamous case, not just in Louisiana, but even nationwide. Jones' ballad developed sort of a vernacular retelling of the events of the case, in which the facts of the matter get shuffled around quite a bit. In Jones' song, Batson is a hapless, oppressed laborer, accused of a crime he didn't commit. Apprehended while window-shopping, he's convicted and gruesomely executed, much to the horror of his adoring family. His last request is that his daughters be well-cared for. With little exception, though, newspaper reports of the time paint a very, very different portrait of Batson. Here's a 1902 New Orleans Daily Picayune paper. "Fiendish deeds of a tramp," reads the front page of the paper, published two days after the mutilated bodies of the Earle family were discovered. According to the article, Batson had worked for some time as the hired man of Ward Earle, a prosperous farmer and immigrant from Kansas. Someone claiming to be Earle had apparently tried to sell his team of livestock in Lake Charles, arousing suspicions that led to the discovery of the murdered family. Batson, meanwhile, also an immigrant, had fled to his hometown in Missouri, leaving incriminating evidence in Ward Earle's buggy, a vest containing a cryptic suicide note, and other personal possessions. As all evidence suggested Batson's guilt, here's Batson, by the way, the sheriff and deputy of Welsh pursued him to Missouri, extraditing him to Cleish Parish, where he stood trial for murder. Then I found this photo. And this is where it started to become particularly interesting for me. At first I thought I had hit folkloristic gold, because I thought, "I recognize that guy. Henry Glassie must be the murderer." [ Laughter ] But not even Henry Glassie is that old. I was very excited. This is a picture of the sheriff and the deputy. And when I found this in an online newspaper archive, I excitedly called my wife into the room, and I said, "I found a picture of the sheriff and deputy. Isn't this cool?" And my wife's mouth sort of dropped, and she said, "I know that man." I said, "How could you know this man? This is 1902." And she ran out of the room. I said, "What is going on?" And she ran out of the room, and she brought her family photo album in and showed me this picture, which is her great, great grandfather, Isaac Fontineau [phonetic]. And if you look closely at the ears of the deputy to the right and the ears of Isaac Fontineau, this is the same guy. Her great, great grandfather had -- was the deputy in the case, and he actually appears in the song. He slaps Batson across the face when he's window shopping and drags him to jail. Anyway, already notorious, this case began to assume legendary proportions when the first verdict of guilty was reversed and a second trial was announced. Things became more complicated when an acquaintance of the defense attorney, the Associated Press reporter Charles Dobson, who's this mysterious fellow, also known as Miles Dobson, published a book called "Guilty" Or "Guilty?" I should say, "Guilty? Sidelines on the Batson Case: A Recrudescence of the Murder of the Earle Family in Louisiana." I didn't know the word "recrudescence." A great word. And it postulated that two unknown villains had perpetrated the crime, possibly as a retribution for an ancient grievance dating back to Kansas. Although hearsay evidence of this kind was never admitted in court, the book caused a stir, and it contributed to an ongoing controversy surrounding the execution. Many people maintained, or believed, for whatever reason, that Batson was innocent. And as you could see from the photo, he was also very handsome. So he had a following, apparently, of women who would send him novels in prison to read. And in fact there's someone -- I just recently found out there's someone working on a book-length study of the story of Batson, who's arguing that Batson did not commit the crime. While Jones' ballad diverges sharply from the facts as presented at trial, many of the divergences relate to details of the case, no doubt transformed by oral transmission. For instance, Batson hitches up Earle's two bay horses in a wagon, and the case revolved largely around the suspect's attempts to sell Earle's mules, horses and buggy. In the song, Batson walks uptown where he looks in a showcase. That's where he's slapped by Claire's great, great grandfather. During the trial, it emerged that the suspect had left Earle's horses and mules and visited a gunsmith and a watch repair store on Ryan Street, which is still a commercial corridor in Lake Charles. Similarly, the closing lines of the song, "Bye-bye Batson, bye-bye," may relate to the text of Batson's purported suicide note, which was called the "Ha-ha" letter by the prosecution, which concluded that, with these words. This is what the suicide note said: "A. E. Batson, friend to all. Ha-ha. Bye-bye. I'm gone." Those lines are repeated in the song. All of these connections notwithstanding, Jones' narrative differs from the events in major respects. Albert Batson was an itinerant laborer, for instance, and he didn't have a wife or child. Authorities apprehended him after he left the state, not when he was window-shopping in Lake Charles. This shuffling and metamorphosis of the facts of the case, of course, is in keeping with their assimilation into the narrative Blues tradition, which tends to invert societal norms, making heroes of reputed scoundrels and vice versa. The tune and the structure of the song are taken directly -- you may have recognized this-but it's the same melody of "Frankie and Johnny," which also presents a generous defense of someone who was convicted or believed to have been a murderer. The second song, and probably for me, one of the more interesting, I think, discoveries or finds that I made doing this work, was at the St. John Lavert sugar plantation and involved the singing of a guy named Joe Massey. This is the St. John Lavert plantation to this day in St. Martin Parish. And I'll play you a little bit of one of his songs. >> Field recording of Joe Massey singing [inaudible words] >> Joshua Caffery: We know from the recordings that Massey was not really very impressed with John Lomax. In fact, he was keenly annoyed at being forced to sing, and he both ridicules Lomax and proclaims himself ready to fight the importunate folklorist if necessary. In one part of the song, he addresses an initially unnamed third party, saying essentially, "Let's talk in French. He won't understand; he's an American." "American" in Louisiana Creole French basically means an Anglo interloper, or a Yankee. Later in the performance, Massey sings about a character named Joe Féraille; then addressees Joe Féraille in the second person. Féraille subsequently becomes the speaker of the song, saying: "Listen to what Féraille is saying. Listen to what I'm singing." Who was this mysterious Joe Féraille, I wondered, and why was he taking control of Massey's song?" As Joe Féraille also shows up in two other songs recorded in 1934, I started looking at the songs as a group. The only clue I could find was from the great scholar of Haitian folklore, Harold Courlander, who had once speculated in passing in an appendix that Féraille could have been related to the Haitian tutelary spirit or loa, Ogun Ferraille. But no one had ever really provided any evidence for such a speculation. But as I started to look at the songs, a few things stood out: First, all of the songs included something about a dog named Fido, who's always killed by a train. Not really for any particular reason that's explained in the song. Second, they were usually sung to the melody of the famous and ubiquitous American folksong "Casey Jones." I think I have a photo of Casey here. Here's the yard at St. John Lavert. Here's Casey Jones. So the songs are always sung to the melody of "Casey Jones," which is based on the historical story of a heroic young railroader who died trying to stop his train and save lives. Third, Creole and Cajun versions of the "Casey Jones" song have nothing at all to do with this historical engineer. They don't have anything to do with Casey Jones, even though they include the name Casey Jones. But they always have something about a dog named Fido, who is killed by a train, which is mysterious. This was all confusing until I started to read more about Ogun Ferraillerai, the Haitian loa that Courlander had tipped me off to. And Ogun Ferraille African antecedent, the Yoruba Ogun. As it turns out, Ogun's sacrificial food is always dog meat, whether in Haitian voodoo, Brazilian Candomblé or Cuban Santeria. Even a recent book for first-responders in Southern Florida in a chapter on animal cruelty investigations, a table lists the various divinities of Santeria and voodoo and their corresponding sacrificial animal. For Ogun and Ogoo, the animal is always dog. Furthermore, the deity Ogun and his Caribbean descendants are primarily spirits of iron and iron technology. "Féraille" means "iron" or "ironworker." In modern Nigeria, where the worship of Ogun persists, he came to be associated with modern long-distance transportation and its dangers, particularly trains. In 1963, a Jesuit priest observed this of Goo [phonetic], the Dahomeyan in cognate of Ogun. Goo, fetish of the blacksmiths, god of weapons and war, the deity of those who produce iron and who use it. Scrap iron is reserved for him as well as animals accidentally killed by iron. All of this may explain why Joe Féraille is often crossed with Casey Jones in Louisiana French folksong. Joe Féraille, I would submit to you, may represent a fusion of the folksong "Hero of the American Railroad" and the West African deity of perilous iron. This all becomes more meaningful, it all became more meaningful when I thought a little bit more and did some more research into the life of Joe Massey. In an audio notation after Massey's recording, Lomax states the following; John Lomax states the following: "These songs have been sung by Joe while running the dummy engine on the St. John's plantation for the last 19 years. These are the songs he sings for his own amusement while he works on the dummy engine." The dummy engine, as it turns out, is really just a small locomotive engine of the sort once used on Louisiana sugarcane plantations. It's a small locomotive train. And St. John Lavert today, there's a dummy engine sitting not far off the highway, which is -- I'd like to think this is Joe's dummy engine. It most probably is. These dummies were apparently efficient, but they were notoriously dangerous. They show up in periodical literature in the late 18th and 19th century, mostly in the context of very gruesome accidents or equally gruesome lawsuits. Joe Massey, in other words, had every reason to be concerned about the dangers of iron technologies. He had every reason to sing a song about Joe Féraille. Here are some other shots of the dummy. Here's where he maybe would've worked. Now, we know very little about whether Louisiana Afro-Creole song featured spirit possession and trance in the manner of Haitian voodoo or Candomblé. But it may be the case that Massey invoked Féraille as a way of managing his encounter with the Lomaxes. He was also, we should not forget, being asked to perform before an imposing contraption of iron technology: a 300-pound recording device that was noisily cutting his songs into a disc of metal; a disc, of course, that resides in the Library's collections to this day. I can't be sure, but I like to think that Joe Massey's conjuring of Joe Féraille wasn't just happenstance, but that it might offer a commentary of sorts on the Lomaxian endeavor itself. As Sandra Barns [phonetic] writes of the philosophical underpinnings of Ogun: "He is the metaphoric representation of a transformation brought about by human effort. He kills as he creates. In the old world, one of the emblems of Ogun is a snake biting its tail, feeding on itself; thereby engaging in an unending repetition of destruction and rebirth in order to regenerate." The same could be said about the Lomaxes' folkloristic mission, and perhaps the enterprise of folklore studies writ large. Just as radio, other mass media spread across the country, the beginning of the erasure of many vernacular oral media that had survived since the middle ages, the Lomaxes carried the other sharp edge of technological progress: the needle-engraving ephemeral sound into enduring aluminum. At the beginning of this talk, I relied on Tolkien's metaphor of Beowulf as a memory over the hills. Alexander Pope reminds us, though, that mere hills are not our only concern for "Those attained we tremble to survey. The growing labors of the lengthened way. The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes, Hills peep over hills and Alps on Alps arise." So my book is an effort to deal with one hill, but there are of course Alps upon Alps over the horizon. My study deals with one little groove, one simple ring in the great aluminum disc of lore that is the Lomax collection. And not "one ring to rule them all." [ Laughter ] Eighty years later, we're beginning to do more than scratch the surface of this disc. We're re-listening, re-hearing, re-searching; and just as the Lomaxes used the new technology of their day, we have the technological abilities to move faster, to make these treasures more universally available and universally appreciated, to help create a more meaningful cultural future from a better-understood cultural past, to once again, in Tolkien's words, "be antiquarians, but hopefully the good kind." So thank you. That's my talk. [ Applause ] I really think that the best thing to do with these songs is to play them, figure out ways to play them. So I'm going to invite a special guest, my wife, Claire Caffery. We're going to sing one of these songs. And if you were paying attention, her great- great-grandfather is the star of one of these songs, and so we're going to sing part of "Batson." Claire's going to sing it. I'm not going to sing it. Don't worry. And we're not going to sing the whole thing, because it's 39 verses long, but we'll sing a bit of it. So... Claire Caffery, everyone. >> Claire Caffery: Thank you. >> Claire Caffery singing and Joshua Caffery on guitar [ Music ] [ Singing ] Batson been working for Mr. Earle six long years today. And ever since he worked for Mr. Earle, he never got a pay. Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." Batson asked Mr. Earle, can he take a walk? Mr. Earle answered Batson,"You can go, but come right back."Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." He was walking down Ryan Street looking down in the showcase. He thought he had something, something what he really need. Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." 'Bout the time he was looking in that showcase. Here come Mr. Henry Reese. Mr. Sheriff, police come a-walking, Throwed two 45s in his face. Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." Mr. Henry Reese's deputy come a-runnin'. Slapped him across the face. He says, "Stick 'em up, Batson, for we consider you under arrest." Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." When Batson got to the jailhouse locked up in that place. He took a pencil right in his hand. He marked every day he laid. Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." You may bring me coffee. You may bring me tea. Look like you bring me everything I need except the jailhouse key. Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." Now, you may dress in red. And you may dress in black. You may dress any color you want, but you ain't getting Batson back. Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." [ Music ] They brought poor Batson on the gallows. They brought him back to the hall. Batson asked the judge if they going to take his life. Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." Batson asked the Sheriff. He asked him that two or three times. Saying "All I want you to do for me is take care of my two little girls." Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." A rubber-tied buggy; decorated horse. You know they brought Batson to the graveyard. Says they brought his family back. Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." I think I heard somebody say a while before she left. Says you going to leave me, But I'll meet you some lonesome day. Crying, "Oh, Mama, He didn't done the crime." I think I heard somebody say, "Bye-bye Batson, bye-bye." "Bye-bye Batson, bye-bye." And I believe he's dead and gone. Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." Crying, "Oh, Mama, I didn't done the crime." [ Applause ] >> Claire Caffery: But my grandfather's really the good guy. Just remember that. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Joshua Caffery: I think we have time for a couple of questions, if anybody has some. Yes, sir. >> Male audience member: I hope it's not off your subject, but I wonder if you have anything to say about Lead Belly in this context. Bowtie, that singer, Bowtie's Iberiaville or New Iberia, I don't know the difference, if they both exist. And he sings, "Frankie and Albert." And he's from Louisiana, and he played some accordion and all that. >> Joshua Caffery: Yeah, I don't know if there was any contact with Lead Belly particularly, but one interesting thing about Stavin' Chain is that he sings a song called "When I First Got Ready for the War," which is -- he said was an original ballad about World War I, sort of like John Bray's original song of World War I. And in the song he talks about Camp Pike, which was a cantonment for African-American soldiers in World War I. And Big Bill Broonzy was also at Camp Pike. So I don't know if he had any contact with Lead Belly, but he probably had contact with perhaps someone like Big Bill Broonzy, who also played "Frankie and Johnny" and "Frankie and Albert" and a lot of those other songs. And that's an interesting thing, I think, to speculate about those, how much some of the people in Southern Louisiana, even Cajun and Creole musicians, might've had contact with songsters of Lead Belly's ilk. I'm not sure. I did talk about one song in the book that was recorded at Angola[Prison]. All the Lead Belly stuff has been discussed quite a bit already, but they did record a guy named Oakdale Carrier at Angola, who is from Evangeline Parish, I believe, and he sang in Creole French. And we know that Lead Belly played accordion, so I have to think that at some point they jammed on some Cajun and Creole songs, you know? I wish that we had recordings of that. Anybody else? No? Alright. Well, thank you guys for coming out. If you want to buy a book, I have some out there. So thanks a lot. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.