>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.
>> Elizabeth Peterson:
I'm Betsy Peterson,
the director of the
American Folklife Center,
and on behalf of the staff and
everyone in the Library really,
I'd like to welcome you
to the latest presentation
of our Benjamin Botkin
lecture series.
The Botkin series allows
us to highlight the work
of leading scholars in the
disciplines of folklore,
ethnomusicology, oral history, and
other cultural heritage studies.
And it also allows us to
enhance our own collections here.
All of the lectures that are done
here are videotaped and become part
of our archival collections and
are later posted as webcasts
on the Library's website.
So they're available
for future generations
and patrons throughout the world.
So now, if you have a
cellphone turned on,
please turn it off if you would.
The American Folklife Center also,
we're delighted when researchers,
of course, make use of our archives.
And many do, and many have published
wonderful books and recordings
out of the work that they've
done here at the archive.
But we especially like it
when it brings new insights
into our materials and when
folks design innovative projects
and programs based on our holdings.
And the archive, it
really is the heart
of the American Folklife Center.
It's the largest ethnographic
archive in the world.
And although the word
American is in the title
of the American Folklife Center,
that is sometimes a
bit of a misnomer.
We have collections from over 140
countries throughout the world.
And in particularly in relation to
our lecture today about Alan Lomax,
it's also we tend to think
sometimes of Alan Lomax
as primarily doing work
in the United States,
and certainly his field recording
trips throughout the south are
legendary and well-known to many
folks and have been published.
People have written about, and
many recordings are available.
But Alan Lomax also did extensive
field work elsewhere in Spain,
in Italy, in Ireland,
Scotland, and the Caribbean.
And his 1936 to 37
collecting trip to Haiti
and his recent reexamination,
reinterpretation and repatriation
by today's speaker is the
subject of today's talk.
And we're really thrilled
to have our speaker today.
And it's my honor to introduce the
distinguished ethnomusicologist,
Gage Averill.
Gage is currently dean
of the faulty of arts
at the University of
British Columbia.
Formerly, he was vice-principal and
dean of the University of Toronto
at Mississauga, I hope I said
that right, the dean of music
at the University of Toronto,
and the chair of NYU's
department of music.
An ethnomusicologist who specializes
in popular music of the Caribbean
and North American vernacular
music, Gage has served as president
of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
His 2003 book Barbershop Singing won
best book prizes from the Society
for Ethnomusicology and the
Society for American Music.
His 1997 book on Haitian
popular music and power,
A Day for the Hunter,
A Day for the Prey,
was awarded the best book prize
in ethnic and folk research
by the Association of
Recorded Sound Collections.
And his impressive, right
here, ten CD box set of music,
film and accompanying books,
is based on material
in the AFC archive.
And it's entitled Alan
Lomax and Haiti, 1936 to 37.
And it was named as an
outstanding project in 2010
by the Clinton Global Initiative
and received two Grammy nominations.
In addition to his Haitian research,
Professor Averill has also written
on cultural industries, applied
musicology, Trinidadian steel bands,
music of the African Diaspora,
world music ensembles,
Alan Lomax's Choreometrics
Projects and music and militarism.
We are delighted to have him
with us today, coming all the way
from British Columbia, to talk
about repatriating the Alan
Lomax Haitian recordings
in post-quake Haiti.
So please give a warm
welcome to Dr. Gage Averill.
[ Applause ]
>> Gage Averill: Thank you, Betsy.
I really appreciate that.
Thank you everyone for coming
out on a pretty cold
day here in Washington.
With your forbearance, I
might just start with a song.
[ Singing ]
Now that's a song to a fairly lesser
known Haitian deity called Wangol,
sometimes understood
to be King of Angola.
The song just says Wangol,
when are you coming back to us.
When will you see us again?
When will you see us again?
The country is changing.
When are you coming back to us?
And as of, with that theme
I just thought about singing
that on the way over on
the mall this morning.
In part, because the theme of return
of coming home is woven throughout
this talk for a very good reason.
For me, it feels a little bit like
coming home because this odyssey
with the Alan Lomax recordings
began for me here ten years ago
when we visited the Library of
Congress and this extraordinary AFC,
the resource that we have
here for the US and the globe.
So I wanted to thank not just Betsy
but Nancy Gross who invited me,
Todd Harvey and the staff
and the folks who are helping
with this presentation today
with my own coming home here.
Haiti has long been
a precarious country.
Its sovereignty was twice
compromised in the last century
by the United States
occupations, episodes.
And I don't want to focus
on the negative here,
but episodes of political violence
and upheaval, grinding poverty,
environmental degradation and mass
immigration and natural disasters,
have taken their toll, not
just on the welfare of Haitians
and the lives of Haitians but
also on the ability of Haiti
to maintain something like cultural
memory and its cultural heritage.
During the 29 years of
the Duvalier dictatorship,
which many of you will be
aware, generations of Haitians
in the artistic class, in the
intellectual classes, scholars
and others, left Haiti
to escape oppression.
And with them went a great
deal of the country's memory,
great deal of its talent,
its experience.
Following the exiles of the Duvalier
clan, public vengeance took the form
in many cases [foreign language]
or pulling up of the influence
of the former dictatorship.
And that involves some mass
violence and destruction
of institutions and homes.
Included in that were the [foreign
language] or the Bureau of Ethnology
in Haiti, which was
the main repository
of Haitian folklore collections.
And also the [foreign language],
make sure I'm not speaking
Spanish, the National Library.
And so, and of course, many of
the most important collections
in Haiti are private collections.
They're in people's homes where
they're exposed to the elements.
They're exposed to, of course,
the death of the owners, theft,
natural disasters, etcetera.
And so it's against this background
of precarious cultural reserves
and repositories that I want to
think today, to think through
and reflect on the role
of the Haitian archives
that Alan Lomax recorded in the
1930s about the hurdles we faced
in moving these into publication.
But also then in trying to make sure
they reside in Haiti, for Haitians,
for generations to come,
just as Betsy so nicely put,
the purpose of our
talk today, my talk.
And this, when I say my talk, I
don't want to suggest in any way
that this is an individual effort.
These archives reside here, and
there's so much that you have heard
of the Library of Congress
has gone into preserving them.
We have Haitian partners, Haitians
I've worked with who I'll talk
about throughout this talk.
Partners and universities
and funders.
This has been a team
effort all along.
So I'm giving the talk today,
and you'll see pictures
that look self-aggrandizing,
but in no way am I thinking
that this is an individual effort.
Let's listen to a recording
made by Alan Lomax in 1936.
You'll see the words on the slide.
[ Singing ]
The gentleman singing,
[inaudible], is here,
pictured standing against his house.
[ Singing ]
His name is Gustaf Tanese
[phonetic] standing in his doorway.
On his recording, as I pointed
out, he's singing the call line,
the response from the congregation,
he's playing a sacred rattle.
And this was recorded
by Alan Lomax in 1937.
And secretively, well let me
take a look at the lyrics,
because this will explain this.
The lyrics are [foreign language],
the god of iron and warrior god
in Haiti who helps to protect Haiti.
[Foreign language] a version
of [foreign language] who works
with poisons and other things.
We've been at sea so long.
It's not just now that we're at sea.
I'm so near, but I can't get there.
And this seems to capture
the sense, figurative sense
of this collection being at sea
so long, seven years out of Haiti.
During a period of which
so much has been lost.
It was the recordings about 1,500
of them stored on aluminum discs.
Six films, accompanying ephemera,
so-called gathering dust.
Of course, there's no
dust down in the Library.
So all from Alan Lomax's
five-month expedition.
The recordings had been held here,
and Todd, I always credit you.
I'm assuming I'm correct in this
that you helped to locate these
to determine their importance
and then helped everything
that happened after that.
Am I giving you enough
credit or too much?
>> [Inaudible] has always been no.
>> Gage Averill: Okay.
They were, but I have to
say, as a scholar of Haiti,
I did not know about
them at the time.
I think I could say that was true of
almost everyone that I worked with.
It really took the efforts of
the Library staff to make sure
that these then went
to the next stage.
I was fortunate of being
asked then by Anna Lomax Wood,
who is the president of the
Association for Cultural Equity
in New York, which guards her
father's legacy or guards,
helps to propagate her father's
legacy, Alan Lomax's legacy.
I was asked to curate
annotate these,
and was incredibly
fortunate that I was.
I knew this was an extraordinary
project for scholars of Haiti,
but I just didn't really know
what this was going to mean
for average, for musicians in Haiti.
For music in Haiti.
To have these sounds
back circulating
after such a long period of time.
In 2003, not long after I was asked
by Anna to do this, I was asked also
by the University of Chicago
to introduce Katherine Dunham
at a speaking event at
the University of Chicago.
Ms. Dunham was a world-famous
dancer-choreographer.
She did ethnography in
Haiti and elsewhere.
A very, very important
cultural figure.
I'm assuming most of you know her.
She had spent a year
in Haiti in 1935
and 1936 preceding Alan
by about six months.
And although she had participated
in a Vodou peristyle at a temple,
the same one that Alan recorded,
I didn't make, strangely enough,
I didn't make that connection.
Wasn't preparing to talk about it.
And got up on, you know, in front
of a, a little bit like this,
and was looking through my laptop.
And I realized, I've got probably
200 recordings here recorded
in [inaudible], at the peristyle
that she writes about,
with all of her friends.
Madam, you know, the mambo,
[inaudible], mambo is a priestess,
[foreign language], excuse me.
Her friend, Cecile Esperonce
[phonetic], her husband,
who was an American expat
who had become a sort
of well-known Vodou priest.
So I really thought I had the
soundtrack to her book on Haiti.
So I walked, she was
sitting backstage,
and she was in a wheelchair
at the time.
I said, excuse me, Miss Dunham,
I have recordings from Haiti
at Baudette [phonetic] with
Cecile and Tailene [phonetic],
and she looked at me
like, you know, scary,
a ghost, there were recordings.
And I said, yeah I've got, would
you mind if I played one or two.
She said, of course not, go ahead.
And I played this one that
I'll play for you now.
It's called [foreign language]
which means, Theolene [phonetic],
we're going to guard
the temple for you.
It's a song for her by her
constituents, by her congregation.
[ Music ]
Near the end of a ceremony, very,
very excited part of the ceremony.
So she got up after that to speak.
She was able to get out of her
wheelchair, and she was going
to deliver her address standing up.
She turned to me, and
she started crying.
And she said, young man, you've
got a govee [phonetic] in there.
You've got a digital govee.
And I was a little bit stunned.
A govee for those who don't know,
is a pot, clay pot, usually,
that you find around a
temple, around a peristyle.
Sometimes you find them at
home just around a little area
in the home that's used
for religious purposes.
And they store a part of the
soul that ancestors that leave.
The rest of the soul goes [foreign
language] or under the water
to join [foreign language]
and the ancestors.
But it is possible to
preserve this part.
And so when you have
Katherine Dunham,
a person of that what Haitians would
call [foreign language] a person
of great spiritual and experiential
depth saying that to you, you know,
it causes you to, at
least me, to perk up.
It reminded me that these
recordings are not just recordings.
These are the voices of people
who may have left no other traces
of their passions and their
work, their experiences,
other than tales told
by family members.
I think it's safe to
say that that experience
with Katherine Dunham produced
a greater level of concern,
obligation, to make sure that
this work that we all did lived up
and honored the spirit
of those ancestors.
Not just for cultural memory,
not just help the society,
but also in those places where there
are direct personal idiosyncratic
familial linkages.
Those kinds of things
became more important to me,
the individual connections
over time.
We are, of course, talking about the
work by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax,
and I'll talk a little bit later
about their Haitian interlocutor,
who is also very, very important
in this gathering process.
I don't think I need to tell
you too much about Alan Lomax,
a towering figure in American
music for over six decades.
Began work with his
father, John Avery Lomax.
And I understand we
have some relatives
in the crowd today, so welcome.
A special welcome to you.
I hope to meet you afterwards.
And there were at work in '34
on what would be a collection
of American folk songs, the
American ballads and folk songs.
And producing another volume working
alongside musicologist Charles
Seeger and his composer
partner, Ruth Crawford Seeger,
on a book called Our
Singing Country.
He was also, Alan Lomax was
also at the time deeply involved
in the election campaign,
well in the election campaign
for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who
was seen as a bit of a patron saint
of folklore at that time.
And in the midst of all this, he
was just getting his degree from,
undergraduate degree from the
University of Texas in philosophy.
He takes off for Haiti, which
is an odd choice at the time.
Difficult place to get to.
Difficult place to move around.
I pondered on that for a little
bit, but you have to think
about Alan's own developmental arc.
He had been, as Betsy
had talked about,
recording through the south
sometimes with his friend,
Zora Neale Hurston, and
later on had also worked
with Professor Barnicle from NYU.
They had done some
work in the Bahamas.
And Alan had an implicit
kind of model
of the sounds he was recording.
Understanding them is linked
deeply to African prototypes,
not just some growing
on this new turf.
And I think it's fair to say
that his interest in Haiti was
in part an interest in tracing
African-American musics to a place
where the history of slavery and
oppression of African peoples
in the new world was less, was more
attenuated, was more distant, right.
Haiti was the black republic.
It had cast off colonial chains in
1804 and lived as a country governed
by decedents of Africans.
And I really think he felt he
could find something more historic,
more authentic, less corrupted
by the process of slavery.
He was not alone in interest
in Haiti at the time.
During the American occupation from
1915 to 34, a series of journalists,
travel writers and military
personnel had written books
or other works on Haiti.
Melville Herskovits,
an anthropologist I'm
about to talk about, said Haiti
has fared badly at the hands
of its literary interpreters.
And he meant this group here.
The initial and most important
work was probably the one
by William Seabrook who was an
occultist and travel writer.
And he wrote The Magic
Island in 1929.
Former captain, John
Craig, wrote Black Bagdad.
Marine Sergeant Faustin Wirkus
wrote The White King of La Gonave.
And most notoriously, let's say,
Richard Loederer's Vodou Fire
in Haiti in that it really sprung
free of just about any relationship
to reality, fueled this
appetite in the North America
for stories about Vodou and zombies.
So you'll see the film
that was made in 1937 based
on Magic Island featuring
Bela Lugosi
as a Haitian plantation owner,
it was the original zombie movie.
This stuff grew out of this
encounter with the American marines
in Haiti through this period.
And influences the
ethnographers who come later.
They're seriously wanting to
undermine this literature,
undermine the sensationalism
and the racism of it.
But on the other hand,
this is what they had read,
what many of them had
read about Haiti.
Lomax had a number of
ethnographic contemporaries,
so he wasn't alone in that.
Most important, I think, for
generating an understanding
of Haiti was Jean Price-Mars, and
Price is the English pronunciation.
He had an English-speaking
family, whom you see on the left.
And Jean was writing during the
occupation and began a series
of articles eventually
collected into a book that began
to castigate the elite in
Haiti for losing sovereignty.
Like if this elite
knew what it was doing,
we wouldn't have Americans
running the country.
Essentially, the argument
there, along with an argument
about turning Haiti's attention
to Africa and to peasant culture,
which was more African,
away from a sense
that everything European was good
and everything African wasn't.
And he was essentially a kind
of an intellectual generator
of the folklore movement in Haiti.
And corresponded with
Melville Herskovits.
This correspondent helped Melville
Herskovits fashion his theory
of African retentions in the new
World, African-American culture.
And Melville Herskovits
and his wife, Francis,
came to Haiti in 1934, just
after the marines left.
He spent a year, not less
than a year in Haiti.
And wrote a book called
Life in a Haitian Valley
about his time in Mirebalais.
He shared those chapters,
a couple of those chapters
in Progress, with a
young Alan Lomax.
And he also shared them and his
contacts, his contacts, of course,
with Alan, shared some of his
contacts and his work with a number
of other people who had
growing interest in Haiti,
including Zora Neale Hurston,
Catherine Dunham, both of whom went
to Haiti very soon thereafter, a
novelist by the name of Courlander,
Harold Courlander, and his own
graduate student George Simpson.
Within a couple years, all of
these people were in Haiti,
many of them at the same time, doing
their own work on Haitian culture.
Alan speaks really only of, when
he writes about his contacts
with Herskovits, he speaks only
about Zora Neale Hurston,
who is his friend.
And probably the person most
important for his arrival in Haiti.
Zora is a leading black
author, I think,
is arguably the leading
black author of a generation.
Her interest in Haiti stretched
back at least 1932 when she wrote
that sergeant I talked about
earlier, Faustin Wirkus.
She was fascinated by his
book and proposed the two
of them do a comparative
study of conjure
or magic practices in the Caribbean.
She wanted, she told her advisor
that she wanted to get a grant
from the Guggenheim Foundation to
study throughout the Caribbean,
spend a couple of weeks in Haiti.
She eventually left her graduate
program to work with Alan
and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle in the
south, on folksong collecting trips
but did go to Haiti in '35 and '36.
Haiti and Jamaica.
And she wrote a letter
to Harold Spivacke,
the chief of the music division
here at the Library of Congress,
promoting a visit by Alan Lomax,
saying there's more material here
than you could ever imagine.
She talked about the kinds of
songs he might record and noted
that after saying that the Haitians
say that Seabrook is an awful liar,
remember the story Magic
Island by William Seabrook.
She admonished low backs, not to
mention the general term folklore,
or magic practices, in his letters
of introduction because Seabrook
and those who have followed him have
disgusted the Haitian government
with Vodou hunters.
So Alan did spend a good part of
his first few weeks in Haiti working
and staying in the
same hotel as Zora.
He recorded her there as one
of his first recordings
to try out is materials.
I just thought it would be
lovely to have her voice.
[ Singing ]
The expedition that resulted in
getting their start on December 10th
in 1936 when he got on the SS
Pistorius, it's a Columbian line,
sailed to part of Spain,
part of Port-au-Prince,
what country am I in?
Not Trinidad.
Haiti. You'll see Alan's map
here as part of the ephemera.
This is it, had a two-sided map.
The other side is a much
more detailed map of Haiti
with his writing all over it.
And that's a picture of the
port in Port-au-Prince, Haiti,
and just about three or four
years before Alan got there.
He brought his contacts from
Herskovits and Zora Neale Hurston.
During this period, it wasn't
always an easy time for Alan Lomax.
He expressed frustration
with getting the discs.
He ran out of discs in his
first month at one ceremony.
He also, I'm sorry to say this of
the Library, but he complained often
about the late payments from
the Library of Congress.
And the need to, speaking with
my Library colleagues here,
the need to fill out
detailed expense reports
for payments as little as two cents.
But soon after he arrived,
he engaged Revolie Polinice.
This is the gentleman
who I talked about early
who was foundational to this effort.
And Polinice translated.
He helped carry equipment
and baggage
and negotiated with the singers.
Alan had some French,
but it was not much.
And his Creole was largely
nonexistent at the start.
Revolie had many family members who
were involved in musical ensembles,
so he connected Alan up
very easily at the start.
And he sometimes cooked
and cleaned and assisted
in the recording process.
So he's written into this entire
work with Alan and Elizabeth.
Elizabeth arrived in February, a
couple months later, after Alan.
So what does this collection
look like?
You've seen his map, these cahiers,
these French schoolbooks were used
by Alan to write his recordings,
to keep track of the recordings.
I think, along with probably
the folks here at the Library,
I may be one of the world's experts
on reading Alan's handwriting.
Not easy. All the L's look like M's,
look like N's, look like vowels.
And then this is the
handwritten journal.
So he kept a journal.
At least it was a rich journal
for a few months of his voyage
and then got fairly thin later on.
Within that you'll see, and in
other pieces of paper attached
in this collection, you'll
see drawings of various kinds,
diagrams of rituals, in this
case, two versions from a Rada
and a Petro ceremony, two
different types of Vodou ceremonies
in Haiti of the drums used.
Here we see a drawing of how
he recorded a Vodou ceremony
at the bottom of this page.
He typed up some of
his notes later on.
Not all of them, but a few of them.
And the miscellany, we
had receipts on the right
for individual musicians,
and then a list
of various people he was paying.
And you can see, I can't see this
here, but maybe a little closer,
20 cents for [inaudible] priest.
Leila's mother.
Leila got 40 cents, and
Leila's mother got 20 cents,
50 cents for the cha-cha, the
person playing the rattle.
These were the musicians
he was engaging.
He was keep track of
the high finance
of fame in Haiti at the time.
We have his telegrams.
We had his maps.
Now I love this map
because I was confused
about the recordings made
in the first few weeks.
I didn't get a lot of the
names of those ensembles.
They didn't make sense to me.
Until this map appeared, and
I saw, [foreign languages].
These were place names that
became part of the ensemble names.
And it explained where these,
not only what they were,
but where these ensembles were from.
And of course, the core of this
were the recordings, which were 10
and 12-inch aluminum discs,
untreated aluminum discs,
generally in these
cardboard containers here
with notes on a few of them.
That was what we had down in the
boughs of the Library of Congress.
The difference, well
let's go back to that.
The difference really in
Alan Lomax's ethnography
and everyone else's is that
Alan was primarily concerned
with the sonic history or
the sonic life of Haiti.
Everyone else was, if
they made recordings,
and a few did, they were ancillary.
They were writing it,
writing a book.
Alan was trying to
preserve the sound
of Haitian music and Haitian life.
And it is a very different
collection
than anything else that's out there.
It's a larger collection
than anything else that's
ever been released on Haiti.
He had recorded these on a turntable
cutting unit that he picked
up in Stanford, Connecticut
from Lincoln Thompson
Sound Specialties Company.
Each side of these discs
could record maybe,
can be stretched a little
bit about eight minutes.
Some of the early tracks and
later tracks had different speeds.
I was talking with someone here a
little earlier about the difficulty
of working with these
variable speeds.
Lots of surface noise.
Very little bass on his recordings.
But on the other hand,
aluminum is just
as good now as it was back then.
They had hardly any wear and tear.
And we were able to recover much
of this, just to give you a sense
of the sound of these recordings.
I wanted to play a few examples,
because it's extraordinarily
diverse.
What Alan Lomax found
in Haiti, 1936,
has never been replicated
in its extent sense.
He spent his first couple weeks
making his way around the city,
being introduced to important,
so-called important elite Haitians.
And he recorded what he could.
He didn't always much
like that class in Haiti.
He complained about elites
and lighter-skinned
Haitians in his notes.
But he was taken to here, Haiti's
premier pianist, Ludovic Lamothe,
and as I understand, there were no
other recordings of Lamothe extent.
So this is it.
And Ludovic Lamothe
had been inspired,
although he was largely
a Chopinesque composer,
he was inspired by the indigenous
movement, and wanted to do art music
that had the feeling of Haitian
carnival, of Haitian Vodou.
And so we're going to hear a song
dedicated to a Haitian god, local,
god of agriculture and other things.
Which was on a rhythm
of, carnival rhythm.
>> [Inaudible] is entitled Nibo,
[inaudible], a carnival dance,
played by the author
himself, Mr. Ludovic Lamothe,
one of our foremost [inaudible]
Port-au-Prince, December 20, 1936.
[ Music ]
>> Gage Averill: Just some
delightful recordings, whether
or not Alan loved them,
I personally did.
He also went to an elite club
where both the president of Haiti
and the president of the
neighboring Dominican Republic were
being honored.
It was on the state visit to Haiti
of Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo,
the leader of Dominican Republic.
And he recorded a jazz band.
And this is stuff I had written
about, but never had recordings
of these groups in the 1930s or 40s.
A group called [foreign
language] jazz, surprise jazz.
And a jazz band in Haiti means, you
know, a dance band patterned on sort
of an African-American
prototype, but with,
largely with [foreign language],
the Haitian national
rhythm and creole lyrics.
So we're going to hear a song,
it's called a [foreign language],
is a tribute song to the
president of Haiti, Stenio Vincent,
who has won popular acclaim
among black Haitians by kicking
out the Middle Easterners.
And I didn't pick this for the
politics in Washington right now.
But he basically beat up
on the Lebanese and others
who were running the stalls
along the markets in Haiti.
Kicked them out so that
Haitians could have jobs.
And it's called Mesi Papa
Vensan, thank you Papa Vincent
for giving us, you know, say,
for giving us back the tree
and [foreign language]
little things.
When Vincent was no longer
popular, Haitians would walk
through the streets say thank you
Papa Vincent for giving us the holes
in our shoes and, you know.
But at this point he
was still popular.
[ Music ]
He also recorded, and Nancy,
because you were asking earlier
about these troubadour groups.
I'm going to give you an example.
This is the kind of music
that came to Haiti from Cuba,
and it's called troubadour
or troubadoop [phonetic]
music in Haiti.
This is a band playing another
political song [foreign language].
There was a politician,
local politician
in this area called Masoco
[phonetic] whose name
sounded Dominican.
And this song is trying
to assure people
that he is really a local guy.
He gives everybody
sandwiches and gasoline.
He's a good guy, so vote for him.
And [foreign language].
[ Music ]
Anyone who's heard song from
Eastern Cuba in the 1920s,
you'll notice this style.
It's terrifically Cuban.
[ Singing ]
Later on they bring
[inaudible] as well.
Little [inaudible].
[ Singing ]
So you're getting a sense of
how diverse this reparatory is.
I'm going to play a boy scout song
from [foreign language]
that he recorded.
This is a picture of boy scouts
here coming out of a church.
And this is a French, well
it's really a Belgian song
that Belgian kids will know.
And kids in Haiti have
grown up on French music
because who's running the schools
but the Catholic Church,
French priests.
So this [foreign language],
a very popular song.
[ Singing ]
Play all of these all day, but
we have other things to do.
Rara bands, Alan was very impressed
with the Rara bands which came
out of the temples
typically in Haiti.
And then took procession
on to the street
for a popular during the
period leading up to Easter.
They have a kind of sacred, but
also a celebratory role in Haiti.
And he recorded many of these.
This is one called
[foreign language].
You'll hear the tubes that
are played [inaudible].
[ Singing ]
Also recording individual singers.
Sometimes out, singing
songs out of context.
One of my favorites, and I
devoted an entire album to her
because I thought it would
be very nice to bore in
and just listen to someone.
Give them the kind of attention
that the media might give to a star.
This is an extraordinary singer
that he contracted, couldn't figure
out how to just have her
there all the time singing.
So hired her to clan house.
And she spent about two weeks
with Elizabeth and Alan,
and while she was there, they
recorded hundreds of songs of hers.
Her name is Francelia, I
don't have a last name.
And this is her singing a
song [foreign language],
they're using a Vodou
charm, magic charm,
to keep me from getting married.
[ Singing ]
And finally, well not finally,
I have two more to play for you.
This is an extraordinary group.
Gave me the most difficult time
of this, this box set really
because they're singing in an
archaic French with Creole mixed in.
Some contemporary mixed in, old men.
And they're singing
in a kind of old,
very old French style,
a romasse [phonetic].
And these are the songs about,
you know, knights and damsels
in distress that came
out of the late medieval
or early modern period, about
the 16th, 17th century in France.
So this is a preserved repertory,
and it was sung at nevin [phonetic]
which are nine-day wake ceremonies
for the people who've passed on.
These guys, old guys would go
around from town-to-town singing
these songs, these old French songs,
at wakes, with an extraordinarily
sound,
unlike anything else
I know in Haiti.
[ Singing ]
Very nasalized.
[ Singing ]
And I, seriously, I consulted
French Creole linguists
and couldn't get half
of those recordings.
And finally, you know, Alan loved
a lot of sounds he encountered
in Haiti, but for him, the
ultimate goal was Vodou ceremonies.
Despite what he told
the Haitian government.
And this is from the
first Vodou ceremony,
full Vodou ceremony ever recorded.
And Alan did it.
It wasn't recorded in its entirety,
but every song was
recorded, parts of every song.
And this is a, for the
deity that opens the gates
to the ceremony invites the
other gods in, [foreign language]
or papa [foreign language],
and it's a song talking
about his difficulty
walking [foreign language].
[ Singing ]
And they also shot, late in
the trip, Elizabeth shot films.
And we were talking
about the films earlier,
because better copies have
surfaced in the meantime.
And we have very good color film
for about half of those films.
I'll just show a couple minutes,
or less than a couple minutes,
of black and white films.
But this was shot in
1936 and '37 soundlessly.
The only thing we have are
some directions from Alan
about what types of music
might be played alongside.
But I thought you'd
like to see just a taste
of Elizabeth's filmography in Haiti.
This is Francelia whom you
saw, or you heard earlier.
And these are Vodou drummers
that he's brought outside
the peristyle to shoot them.
It's a setup.
But it was, they were having a
ceremony for him inside previously.
And the dancers come out to dance.
The initiates or [foreign
language] of the temple.
Later he, preceding my
Darrin by a couple decades,
uses this slow-mo technique.
Whoop, we missed it, on the drums
and the ceremony, to get maybe a bit
of a prurient look into the
motions of a Vodou ceremony.
And he also recorded contra dances.
This is the figures drawn on
the floor of a Vodou temple,
individuals [foreign language],
what do we call that in English?
>> Altar.
>> Gage Averill: Altar, thank you.
And the gentleman we saw
earlier at the beginning.
And Alan Lomax is off
sitting on a chair talking
with a [foreign language] priest.
You can see Alan to the right.
It's a little bit dark.
I hope you can see that.
So that was the materials.
The box set started here.
And it took, well from
conception, a couple decades.
But we were here about ten years ago
to make the transfer,
the digital transfer.
Working with the staff
to select styluses
and get the best sound we could.
With a full set of
digital files transferred,
I got to work on sorting through
the collection and trying to come
up with thematized albums, working
with my friend and colleague,
as well as the whole team here,
Louie Carl [inaudible] was
the person I just mentioned.
We, especially together,
worked on the translations.
And sometimes interpretations.
So, for example, we get
a song about a figure.
Sounded like maybe
somebody important
that I'd never heard about.
Louie Carl hadn't heard.
We get on a conference
call sometimes
to his family in [inaudible] Haiti.
If his auntie didn't
know what was going on,
she'd run down to a Vodou
priest down the street.
They'd bring people in,
sit around the phone.
We'd be playing music
through the phone.
It was kind of another team
to put together the
interpretation on this set.
Kind of a delightful process.
Alan's niece, Ellen
Harold, worked on his notes.
So I did one book about the
recordings and the process.
She did another capture,
bring his notes together.
By September, we had an edited
version ready for formatting.
Pressing and production.
And then in December we launched
the box set, starting with parties
in Brooklyn and plan for Miami.
You'll see here, let's see, in one
of these shots, me, Ellen Harold,
Alan, Alan's daughter, Anna Lomax
Wood, and Louie Cal [inaudible],
just a, you were there, weren't you?
No, you weren't, okay.
There were representatives
from the Library there as well.
We had a few of these.
And the patriation
plan looked like this.
I'm not actually going to go
into too many details about it,
but we wanted to get best
of recordings for radio.
We wanted to go to the locales which
Lomax had worked and find people,
relatives of those
who had been recorded.
We want to engage cultural activists
and think how can this
set be of use in Haiti.
We had a film crew
that we were working
with to demonstrate all
of this and capture it.
Wanted to get the box set to
libraries and cultural centers,
place listening devices
around Haiti.
Translate the box set into French
and Creole, make lesson plans
in French and Creole for school.
And now working with
Teach for Haiti.
And then eventually create a
digital version of the box set
and eventually the
whole, the collection.
So I was going to go to
Haiti on December 9th, 2010,
to do a broadcast
of the Port-au-Prince jazz
festival and start this process.
But, as you, you know, it's typical,
we were talking about this, Nancy,
things always break down in Haiti.
The local radio station
had problem technique,
and I put off my trip
for a little bit.
Three days later, we
all know what happened.
I was supposed to be
in Haiti at this time,
but the [foreign language], the
massive earthquake hit Haiti,
about a 7.1 in Central Haiti.
This is the place I used to stay,
right next to the cathedral.
That's the cathedral you see there.
Cathedral Centrinity [phonetic].
And I would stay at
the Trinity School.
The van I used to drive in
is the van on the right.
This was the largest
concentration of fatalities.
It happened in Port-au-Prince,
but of course,
it extended up to San Mark
and to the north and out
in the Plateau Central down along
the South Talaogon [phonetic]
that I've talked about,
which was the center.
And into Jacmel and
into the south of Haiti.
Destroyed where the Presidential
Palace, which you'll see
in a second, the National
Cathedral, National Assembly,
the Hotel that served as
the base for the MINUSTAH,
which is the UN stabilization
mission and army barracks.
And with MINUSTAH and the army
out, effectively out of commission.
It was up to Haitians to respond
to the first weeks
after the earthquake.
I don't want to make this just
an earthquake talk, but you know,
iconic architecture, cultural
institutions were in rubble.
Art centers, galleries destroyed.
Artworks, if they weren't destroyed,
were exposed to the
elements and theft.
There were aftershocks.
Concert venues were destroyed.
Not an exaggeration to say much
of the material culture of Haiti
in ruins or threatened at the time.
But there's also the human capital.
There were artists
living in tent cities.
The tent cities sprang
up over Haiti.
You can see on the right a
little improvised tent city.
On the left, those shacks were
the main highway in Haiti.
Those doors of those shacks are
over the curb entering
on to the main highway.
You can't find a worse place to
try to live or sleep with children.
But this is what was, what Haiti
looked like in the aftermath.
Stirrings of reconstruction
here with the university,
Quisqueya University,
which is being built
on the ruins up on the hillsides.
So we went to Haiti, well before we
got to Haiti, there was an effort
to get our team out
talking about this project.
I had thought, quite seriously,
that, you know, nothing was going
to go on with this
project for years.
We just assume there are other
fish to fry right now in Haiti.
And there was grief
and shock and need
to mobilize the global community.
But the Green Foundation, which had
signed on to support the effort,
came back and said, you know,
they were working with
Clinton Foundation.
Actually, you know,
not quite so much.
Right now we need this project.
We need this project as
part of what's going on.
And so we were put to work.
They felt that kind of a
antidote to Haiti as a basket case
and as a recipient
nation was needed.
They wanted something that
talked about Haiti's strengths
and its cultural resources and
its history in positive terms.
So we started to reconceive what
this repatriation plan was going
to look like.
We had stories that
we were all involved
in this kind of coverage of it.
We were asked to choose, I was asked
to choose music for the box set
so they could do these PSAs
with stars, Naomi Watts
and Ben Stiller and
people reading them.
Money was being devoted from this.
Box sets were being given
away at fundraisers.
So we started, we flew to Haiti
to carry this on in March.
It was unlike any flight
to Haiti I've ever been on.
Usually, it's Haitians
coming back, you know.
Grannies in Sunday best bringing
boxes of tires for a family.
This was all North Americans going
down in tee shirts that say Haiti,
you know, reconstruction,
2010, Baptist church.
It was quite different experiencing.
You get there, what's usually
a [foreign language], you know,
you can't get through the traffic,
was just ridiculous, you know.
The army wasn't out.
There were cars from all these
relief efforts filling the streets.
We began the process the next
night after getting in Haiti
at the Café [foreign language]
which is a cultural center
which had remained standing, and
its popular performance venue.
The audience, which included
government administers, ambassadors,
shop owners, musicians,
intellectuals, activists,
was introduced to the project.
We had a Vodou jazz band playing.
We had a panel seen here.
We've got [foreign name]
cultural activist on the left.
Joel Widmaier, well-known musician,
radio personality, me, Anna Lomax
and then our sound engineer for
the project there up on the stage,
engaging with the audience.
And I took questions.
Someone who was there, a
radio DJ out in Leogane,
decided to organize a Vodou
ceremony with both the Rada,
you'll see women dressed in
white here, a Rada Vodou society,
and the Kongo society dressed
in red, coming together
to welcome these ancestors and
ancestral voices back to Haiti.
This took place recently,
just after that, in Leogane,
which had been the
epicenter of the quake.
Under, you'll see the Mapou
tree, Mapou is the most sacred
of all trees in Haiti,
conduit of spiritual energy.
The drums are up against it, but
the ceremony is taking place.
I just saw that the poster had the
shot, one of these shots on it.
I played, using a power source
from a, you know, battery,
built Delco as they
call them in Haiti.
I played songs from the box set
that had been recorded in this area,
starting with what I expected to
be very well known Vodou pieces.
And then just started throwing in
these idiosyncratic older songs
from smaller Vodou
societies in the region.
And it was really quite amazing,
some of the old [inaudible],
the [foreign language] in
the audience are nodding.
And you can see the
words starting to form.
And many of these songs
people hadn't heard in,
you know, 50, 60 years.
And the ceremony captured that.
I went out to speak with a very
well-known oongar [phonetic]
or priest the next day, Max
Beauvoir, and his daughter, Rachel,
who was, Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique,
who is an ethnographer.
And the two of them told
me how they had sat,
a friend gave them this
collection over the summer.
They sat for three
days listening to it,
in some cases, critiquing my notes.
Let me tell you, there
are mistakes in my notes.
And this is exactly what
we want to happen, right.
But in other words, talking
about how to get this back,
some of these songs back into
daily practice in temples in Haiti.
I also began to work
with an ensemble
of Vodou popular band called
Lakou Mizik, musical courtyard,
musical place of familial gathering.
Which has now recorded
songs by Francelia,
the artist we listened to earlier.
And we're working on getting them
other song techs to begin recording.
We were away from Haiti
in May on this effort
but then came back in June.
The Green Foundation worked
with a group called Fast
Forward Haiti Cinema
to record what was happening.
And then to insert
the Lomax materials
into this project they had
called [foreign language]
or Cinema Under the Stars.
And they took the stage to tent
cities, to [foreign language],
the most difficult
places to live in Haiti.
And then we took it
altogether again out to Leogane
to show cultural materials.
There was music.
But then the Lomax
materials were included.
And the night of the
concert in the cow field
in Leogane was quite extraordinary.
You're seeing it down here
in the bottom with some
of the musicians playing.
As part of the show, the films
shot by Alan and Elizabeth
that we saw earlier were aired for
lots of people living in Leogane.
This was the first time they
had ever seen the locality
in film, right.
Films were always from
abroad or, you know,
occasionally a Haitian film,
but never about Leogane.
And we started to show Alan's
color film of a rara brigade,
and a woman in the second
row put her hands up
and started, that's my grandpa.
[Foreign language].
And people started applauded.
And I'm emphasizing these
moments because they meant a lot
to me during this process.
You see how people connect
with what's otherwise,
it's an archive, right.
We woke up in December
to the announcement,
sorry for the self-aggrandizing
picture there,
that the box set had been nominated
for some Grammys, including
the notes.
This is a family story.
Sorry to tell you this.
I went in at 5:00 in
the morning when I heard
and I shook my daughter,
who is seven.
I said Peony, you know, guess
what, your dad has been nominated
for a Grammy for, guess
who we're up against.
She said who?
Sleepy head.
I said, the Beetles.
And she said, my Beetles?
And I said, yeah, your Beetles.
And I said their box set is our
principal competitor for, you know.
She said, my box set?
And I said, yeah, the block box
set that we listen to all the time.
She rolled over and
said, that's okay, Daddy,
at least you were nominated.
Out of the mouths of babes.
But this was actually one of the,
other than, you know, hoopla,
it was a moment of good news.
Now it was not a good
news period for Haiti.
That reconstruction you might
have heard about, not so much.
A lot of the governments backed
off from their commitments.
When they did commit, the money gets
frittered away on drivers and things
or spent on national
products abroad.
Clearing debris was still being done
largely by two Haitian companies,
a water company and
a telecom company,
who were getting their employees
out on the street, right,
yellow shirts and red shirts.
Where was everybody else.
People were still living
in improvised housing.
So this was nice to have
a moment to celebrate.
We also had a show at the New
Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
to test out Haitian products.
We're trying to move them into,
you know, Macy's, places like that.
And we had Haitian performers, a
couple of talks, which I talked.
And a big tent devoted to Haiti
to try to make the connection
between post-Katrina New Orleans
and post-earthquake Haiti.
Many people have made
that connection,
lots of similar problems
dealing with the aftermath
of the difficulties there.
And the, you know, someone close
to the repatriation effort.
He's somebody who owned
a mango plantation.
Got into this story, and he started
going around with us and trying
to find, his job was
to find descendants
of the people Alan Lomax recorded.
And He located the woman with the
blue hat here, who is the daughter
of the gentleman we
saw in the first slide.
Do you remember the guy
up against his door?
This is the same building,
by the way.
The door is still there.
And this is Madame
Tanise [phonetic].
So she, we presented
her with a box set.
I have to say, some
of this was set up.
We had a film crew at
the time and they wanted,
you know, the big meeting.
But we presented her with a box set.
Showed her films of her father,
recordings of her father
and his friends.
She was weeping in part, Anna Lomax
was there because the daughter
of this man she had heard about
who came many, many years ago
to record her dad, was here
meeting the daughter of her father.
And said it felt like sisters.
And there was a lot
of crying going on,
not just the two of
them in that group.
She had a stall on the street.
Fed the entire crew for free.
Would not take payment for, you
know, anyone like Haitian food.
But it was griot, fried pork,
some pikliz, the vegetable relish,
and [foreign language],
fried [inaudible].
Pretty tasty.
So the publication and, you know,
I talked earlier about
the partnership.
But just to dramatize, just to
a few of these, with the Library
of Congress, Association
for Cultural Equity.
Alan Lomax's archives in New York.
The Green Family Foundation, which
is supporting the repatriation.
The Digital Library
of the Caribbean,
especially all the
Haitian collections there
at the Florida International
University.
Teach for Haiti, a project in Haiti.
Many other Haitian partners.
The Audio School down in Jacmel.
This is the group that's
working together.
The publication and repatriation
project has been a team effort,
as I emphasized at the start.
You know, we're all working to try
to bring these cultural
archives back into circulation,
hoping to see, whatever might come,
countless future possibilities
for epiphanies, for
growth, for discoveries,
for teaching and learning.
There's no way of predicting
what will come of this, right,
when these resources are available.
But we, I think all of us are
taking comfort in the sense
that new opportunities are emerging
from people who are touched by
or inspired on a personal level
by this set of recordings.
The repatriation of Lomax's
recordings brought me face-to-face
with these.
And again, I've emphasized
a few of them.
But Katherine Dunham,
remembering lost friends.
Older Vodou initiates remembering
these songs from their childhood.
We heard the daughter of
Tanese, Gustaf Tanese,
encountering the daughter of his,
the person who recorded
them those years later.
Priests adding layers of
interpretation to our notes.
All these experiences become
part of this odyssey, right,
this odyssey of something
starts here in the stacks.
And then ripples out
in ways in the world.
It may be imagined by
me, and maybe now by you,
as this spiritual digital
govee returning to the sources,
those rich, really
powerful recordings
that Alan Lomax walked away
with so many years ago in Haiti.
So thank you for your
time and attention.
If we have time for a couple
of questions, I'm available.
[ Applause ]
Is it okay to take
a question or two?
>> Yes.
>> Gage Averill: Oh great.
Thanks.
>> When you're trying to
get feedback, you know,
[inaudible], are you doing that?
>> Gage Averill: Yes.
>> So how are you doing that?
[Inaudible].
>> Gage Averill: Right
after I leave Washington,
I'm going to the Lomax
archives in New York.
I was confessing to a
couple of people earlier
about the difficulties
of this process.
We had lots of cooks in the kitchen.
So I'm, you know, [inaudible].
I'm trying to steer this forward.
>> Stay on mike please.
>> Gage Averill: Oh sure.
I'm trying to steer this
forward as an ethnographer.
We have a grantor, Green
Foundation, working on this.
The Lomax Archives in New York.
But we are trying to, they
supposedly at the Lomax Archives,
have a new program, which
I'm going to see on Monday.
That program will allow us
to enter the entire metadata,
all the information, about the
recordings, background information.
And then load all of
that into a web presence.
So I'm going to be introduced
to the technology on Monday.
My colleague, Louie Carl [inaudible]
and I who have been contracted
to help this next stage, which is
to get it up with a Wiki capacity
so that Haitians, non-Haitians,
ethnographers,
people who are interested
in knowing anything
about this material can
come and add layers to this.
So to me, that's the gold
standard, sorry, at the end of this,
to actually get feedback and
to make this a living document.
I'm excited about this,
by the way, yeah.
Thank you.
>> What material is it
exactly that you want
to repatriate and where [inaudible].
>> Gage Averill: Good.
Well, repatriation now, I thank you
for asking for this because just
in the process of writing
an article for a volume
on studies of repatriating music.
And of course, when you're
dealing with many indigenous people
who want physical objects back.
They want to repatriate it.
This started out with bones
and ancestral remains.
But also ceremonial regalia.
It's important then to take the
objects and bring them back.
In my pitch at the beginning, I
talked about precarious countries
where it's actually helpful to
have safe copies reside in places
like the Library of Congress where
we know there's like gigabytes,
tetra, backup storage,
you know, who knows where.
Buried under mountains somewhere.
This is a very, very safe
place for these to be.
And when it's sound, our sense,
the sense of the Haitian
partners we've worked
with so far is those sounds and
digital versions of the objects
and the notes, can be repatriated,
meaning sent back into circulation,
made accessible to anyone who
needs and wants to have them.
And become part of a cultural legacy
through education and other means.
That's our take on repatriation.
It's making sure that the
materials in some form or other,
by materials I mean recordings
and sounds, are accessible.
Rather than going down into
the Library of Congress
and lifting boxes and
moving them to Haiti.
Which I don't think
anyone sees as the goal.
But thanks for asking.
That's a very important
clarification.
Yes.
>> So you were mentioning that
you have [inaudible] additional
memories, notes and experiences to
the information that you gathered.
How then do you, I mean, it
potentially be an endless source
of recirculation of those materials
as more people know about them,
more ethnographers hear about them.
They have their own resources.
How do you see that happening?
Is it a dialogue that just is
open-ended and keeps going,
or do you plan to do
something else [inaudible]?
>> Gage Averill: That's
a brilliant question.
I have seen as far as
the dialogue stage.
I am in constant, constantly aware
of my limitations as a scholar
in a culture which I didn't grow up.
And the limitations of my informants
and colleagues and others.
So I think this dialogue will
enrich the project greatly.
What happens after
that, I haven't thought.
If you have some ideas I would love
to hear them because it is possible
that you might sort of capture that
at another stage in the process.
[ Inaudible ]
Okay, great.
Yes.
>> What bones, like
spiritual regalia,
that is repatriated or restored.
These artifacts have
a spiritual aspect.
Maybe I could ask you to go beyond
a little bit and just theorize
for a moment about
the healing capacity
or any other spiritual aspect that
might not be immediately visible.
But the practical matter as
impacts the Haitian on the street.
>> Gage Averill: You have asked
me to go beyond, haven't you?
I would, you know, because
everyone would approach this
certainly different.
Haitians of different religious
backgrounds would have very
different takes on the sounds that
have been recorded and their role.
There is, even 70, 80 years after
the anti-superstitious campaigns
in Haiti, there is a good
and various large swath
of elite middle-class Haitians
and some poor [inaudible]
around the country who want to
have nothing to do with sounds
that might have had
an origin in Vodou.
The powerful presence of
evangelical churches in Haiti
from the American occupation on,
which has grown considerably,
in part has been fueled by Haitians
wanting, in some ways to kind
of protect themselves from
a world of spiritual power
that they find potentially menacing.
So I have friends who might
be Catholic or something
who baptized your children [foreign
language], in order to protect them
from the [foreign language].
So I don't want to ever imagine
that Haiti has a unified
spiritual background or belief set.
The, I am certainly aware, and
you can read spirituality in this
if you want, but of
the power of sound.
And the power of voices in healing.
I think we learn more and more about
what, you know, various diseases,
various conditions,
various emotional states,
how they can be improved
through music, through sound.
I think it's important
for people spiritually,
as well as intellectually, to have
a sense of where they come from.
I think people seek this out.
Human seek this out.
I just did my, you
know, ancestory.com,
you know, thing the other day.
We want to know who we're
connected to and where we come from.
I think this is powerful
in that way.
Now, whether or not, and I think
it's open to interpretation, whether
or not a disc, an aluminum disc,
which was there in a moment
when people gathered around
and sang through an apparatus
and had their voices engraved
in a spiral on the disc.
Whether or not that disc is embodied
with spiritual power, I think,
is open to, I think some people
would argue that it is in Haiti.
Whether, now how do
we play without that.
How do we engage with that,
and how do we honor that.
Sometimes archives tour.
In my job as dean, I oversee
a museum called the MOA,
Museum of Anthropology at UBC.
One of the great collections of
first nations art and artifacts.
With a reciprocal research
relationship
with all the first nations
bands in the northwest.
[Inaudible] are our neighbors
on whose territory we
sit, unseated territory.
Have allowed burial
boxes to be used there.
Everything in that museum has
to have a sign off, right.
We have exhibits that are
whited out and left there
because [inaudible] would
prefer they not be viewed.
And we want that statement
to be there.
That museum, we bring
people to the museum.
We have ceremonies there, dances.
We repatriate remains.
We did this recently to
South Sea islanders who came,
Samoans who came, military
delegation of Samoans.
Wouldn't talk to the museum,
wouldn't talk to me,
which is important.
They would talk of the [inaudible]
who were their first nation's
hosts and repatriated remains.
You can bring people
in and out of museums,
and one way of bringing the museum
out or the collection out is
to tour things so that people
have that powerful sense of being
in the presence, even if
it's material objects.
So I've gone on.
I'm sort of spinning this.
But I think it's a really
interesting question.
And I would love to engage, you
know, with the archive culture
and museum on those
next stage questions
about how we go further
in the material side.
Which may also be the
spiritual side.
Thank you.
>> Great. Thank you
so much for coming.
Gage Averill.
>> Gage Averill: I can take
questions individually.
Thank you so much.
>> Elizabeth Peterson: Thank you.
I just want to point out that
there's a copy of the box seat
if people would like to take a look.
I want to thank you for coming.
Our next Botkin lecture
is on May 10th,
and we'll be featuring a discussion
with Mark Moss who is the singer
of Sing Out Magazine, who is the
editor rather of Sing Out Magazine.
Well certainly the editor
of Sing Out Magazine.
And we're going to be talking
about folk music and journalism
in the 20th and 21st century.
Thank you again for coming.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.