I just assigned my American Roots Music First Year Seminar students a meme as their first blogging assignment for the course, and it only seemed fair that I answer the questions as well.
Why did you sign up for a roots music FYS section? (It’s totally OK if the answer is something like “I didn’t really want to, but everything else was full.”.)
I signed up (years ago) to teach the course because I think it’s a great (and important) experience for first year students. I love the small class, discussion format, and I really like being able to teach something outside my official “area of expertise”. I chose roots music because I love the music and I think these early folk recordings provide a wonderful window into powerful piece of American history and culture. I could say a lot more, but I need to save something for class.
If you could take 5 pieces of music with you to a desert isle, what would they be? (The definition of “piece of music” here is always tricky. Think “song”, but I’ll let you get away with a more extended piece like a symphony. A 4 CD compilation of 70′s punk just isn’t going to count as a single piece of music, though, no matter how cool it might be.)
I love asking this sort of question, but hate answering it – it’s just so hard to choose. In no particular order…
- One of the Bartok string quartets. I really like Bartok, and the quartets completely mystify me. If I’m on a desert island with nothing much to do, it would be a nice chance to try to figure a few things out.
- Bach’s Mass in B Minor (or some excerpts if I can’t have the whole thing). I could imagine being pretty stressed on a desert island, and this (along with his Motets, and a variety of Gregorian chants) is what I tend to listen to if I’m trying to decompress.
- Chris Cutler’s Twice around the earth. This is definitely one I could see changing my mind about later, but that strange collage of sounds could be a powerful and compact reminder of that huge world that I’m presumably cut off from on the island. On the other hand it might just annoy me to no end.
- “Awungilobolele” by Udokotela Shange Namajaha. This is a Zulu wedding song from South Africa, and I continue to be entirely transported by it after well over a decade of listening to it. The shuffle beat, the wonderful vocals, the subtle instrumentation, and those crazy animal noises. Wow.
- Either “Lord, I just can’t keep from crying” by Blind Willie Johnson or “Death letter blues” by Son House, and I just can’t make up my mind right now. These are the two songs that probably define the blues for me, and I continue to wrestle with their sonic and emotional power even after some 20 years of listening to them.
There are no promises that my answers here wouldn’t be completely different next week. There are so many runners up…
It’s probably worth pointing out that I’ve deliberately leaned to pieces that I couldn’t just play myself. So while I love, for example, Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family, I “get” their songs, and could happily amuse myself by simply singing them as I walk around the island. I’ll never sing like Blind Willie Johnson or reproduce the amazing sound of Bach’s mass on my own, so they come with me in recorded form.
What’s a piece of music you associate with a parent, grandparent, or someone you know well that’s at least a generation older than you.
I don’t actually have any idea what kind of music any of my grandparents listened to for pleasure, but I do have two stories.
When I was four my mother was in the hospital having my sister and my grandmother (her mother) was staying with us, looking after me and helping out at the house. I don’t really associate my grandmother with music, but during that visit one of the things she did was teach me to sing some classic children’s songs (another important form of “folk” music). One I distinctly remember is learning “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly”, and I can still probably work through most of it to this day. Apparently (and I don’t remember this, but have heard the story many times), I rehearsed the songs facing one way, but when the time came for my big performance for my parents, my mother was quite comfortable in a different place than we’d planned for. Unwilling to adapt to this change, I sang my entire set with my back to my audience, stubbornly facing the same group of empty chairs that I’d practiced singing to.
The second story is about my great-great grandfather, who in fact died some ten years before I was born. When I was a kid I discovered his harmonica, which is still at the family farm where he lived. It’s an odd duck (pictured above) with a neat tremolo (echo) feature, two keys in the same harmonica, and a slightly broader range than a standard 10 hole chromatic. That discovery probably played a large role in my interest in the harmonica, and certainly led directly to my purchase of that same kind of harmonica, and my tendency to pull it out of my bag first.
In the 1950′s, a year after his wife died, he wrote a wonderful, short account of their wedding, which was a triple wedding where three couples were married at the same time. This was a really big deal in the community (there were some locally important families involved), and they had a huge party, including a vast sequence of local bands playing polkas and other dance music popular with American-Swiss dairy farmers. 100 years ago Stevens County wouldn’t have had too many people, but you probably could have pulled up dozens of polka bands on short notice. Now you’d be hard pressed to get one or two live bands. Hmmm…
If we all decided to replace the national anthem with a new song, and everyone agreed that you got to choose, what would you recommend?
This seems to have stumped many of the students whose pieces I’ve seen, and it is an odd question. Most of the answers include the word “patriotic”, but I’m not quite sure what different people are meaning by that, so I think we’ll have to discuss that some.
I guess I’ll throw in a proposal for “This land is your land” by Woody Guthrie, but that’s not terribly original since it has been quite seriously proposed as a replacement by others before me. It’s much more singable, it comes much more clearly out of the American folk traditions, and the lyrics are much more inclusive and less militaristic than the current anthem. The emphasis on the physical size and scope of the country smacks a little of “Manifest Destiny”, which is perhaps unfortunate. Of course there are questions of which set of lyrics we’re going to sing (there’s a much more overtly political verse or two that are very rarely sung).
Guthrie, while a great song writer, doesn’t really capture a very broad spectrum of American music. Something crazy like Beausoleil’s “Hey Baby, Quoi Ca Dit?” pulls together a much wider range of musical and linguistic influences, but no one would be able to sing it. And I have no idea what sort of song would reasonably acknowledge the Native Americans.
Humph. Life is complicated.
What kinds of music related performance stuff (if any) do you do? I interpret this pretty broadly so it can be playing one or more instruments, singing, dance, DJing (dance or radio), etc. (It’s totally OK if the answer is “None”.)
I took piano lessons for years as a kid, but didn’t start thinking of myself as a singer until our son was born. I’ve dinked around on the harmonica for quite a while, and my wonderful wife feeds my habit, having bought me a used accordion several years ago and a djembe drum last Christmas.
I’ve been performing pretty regularly (if wildly informally) at UMM’s Open Mic Nights for about 1.5 years, either by myself, with Sub-Evil Boy, with Joe Alia (excellent sax player and chemist here at UMM), or with any of a number of great student musicians that tolerate my presence on the stage with them.
Given the readings and what (little) you know about Governor Blanco, if you had a chance to ask her one question, what would it be?
At the recommendation of another faculty, I just read “The lost year: The failure to rebuild” from the New Yorker, and it was a real eye opener (in a depressing sort of way). Based on that, I guess I’d want to ask something like “What do you hope to actually save in New Orleans, and why?” There are a lot of different facets to New Orleans (or any city), and it’s unclear what’s being saved/rebuilt. Is it the football stadium and Mardi Gras parades and the “frozen in amber” old-timey jazz of the French Quarter? Or is it the incredible cultural depth and breadth in smaller things like the neighborhoods, secondlines, and small clubs? (Boy, that’s not a biased question, is it?)
‘Nuff (if not too much)…
That was very fascinating, as were the class Blogs that I had a quick skim through. It was interesting to see the reasons for various choices, particularly the parent/grandparent music – although that made me feel rather old :-)
I must admit to being quite amused at your introducing Desert Island Discs to the student populace!
Thanks. I haven’t had time to read too many of the student blogs yet (still mostly trying to make sure I know where they all are :->), but what I have seen has been interesting and I definitely look forward to reading more over the weekend.
Every year one has to step back and think about what it means for our new students to be 18. I may feel like I’m still 22 (except when my shoulder acts up or I need help getting up when I’ve been sitting cross-legged on the floor :->), but these students’ entire lives have happened after I graduated from college.
I keep having to remind myself that these students are now farther away (in time) from the Sex Pistols than the Pistols were from Elvis, and Public Enemy sounds “old” to them. Perhaps more importantly, these are increasingly an “iPod generation” whose experience of music isn’t so much that of (somewhat expensive) pre-packaged collections of songs on physical objects, but instead as vast collections of cheap/free songs, often acquired in isolation and with no liner notes.
The Desert Island Discs idea has worked quite well for me for several years. It gives me a sense of where they are and what they’re listening to, which is cool. Thanks to the Beeb!