Important New Book on Folk Music

(This review aired on the June 20th edition of Around Cincinnati on WVXU 91.7. Please go to the audio link provided by the show's producer, Lee Hay, to enjoy the music excerpts.)

New this month from Ohio University Press comes a treasure trove for all folk music lovers, Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music by Anne Grimes, compiled and edited by Sara Grimes, Jennifer Grimes Kay, Mary Grimes, and Mindy Grimes who are the author's daughters.

During the 1950s when many song collectors headed to the mountains, armed with reel-to-reel tape recorders and knowledge of the Child Ballads, Anne Grimes collected in the major cities of Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati as well is in most of Ohio's 88 counties. "Everybody thinks you find folk music in the hills, " Grimes told a reporter for The Columbus Citizen-Journal in 1971. "You don't," she continued, "It's in their heads."

Along her collecting journey, Grimes sang several times at the National Folk Festival and recorded on Folkways, crossing paths with folk music legends like Pete Seeger,Harry Belafonte and Bob Gibson. She also became an expert in the lore and techniques of the plucked or lap dulcimer. Many of her life's endeavors come together in this book plus companion CD collection, which is filled with interesting songs, stories, photos, and notations that illuminate Ohio history, folk lore and folk song.

Throughout the book are photos taken by Anne's husband, James W. Grimes, that reveal how much the collector's passion must have involved her entire family. The photos document Grimes' cherished song contributors as well as many of their unique instruments and styles of playing. The Grimes family sorted through thousands of tapes--housed in total at the American Folk Life Center--in order to select the 33 tracks that are featured on the CD. I'd just like to share with you some representative highlights.

Grimes explains Child Ballads, for those new to folk song collecting, as "classic British ballads that go way, way back--some from as early as the thirteenth century." She then goes on to explain about the scholar Francis James Child who classified and numbered the 305 ballads he researched and published in the late 1800s. Grimes was always running into new versions of these ballads in her collecting. In fact, a woman named Bertha Bacon of Belmont County brought Grimes one of the 27 versions of the Child ballad, "Lord Lovel" still sung in Ohio in the 1950s. The book includes the text of Bertha's version. But, I'd like you to hear a snippet of a rare tune Bertha Bacon sang for Grimes that is probably Irish in origin. It's entitled "The Death of the Devil":

Track 2--"The Death of the Devil"

Anne Grimes met up with Bob Gibson when he attended an Ohio Folklore Society meeting in search of good songs. He ended up sleeping in the basement of the Grimes home after a party. At another session in her home, he contributed this version of "Our Goodman," a Child ballad for which Anne had collected several Ohio versions.

Track 12--"Our Goodman"

In Gallipolis, Grimes recorded dulcimer player, Brodie F.Halley, as he shared his style of dulcimer playing.

Track 13 "Watermelon/Beautiful home."

The author herself demonstrates her own spirited style of dulcimer-playing in this distinctly Ohio murder ballad entitled "John Funston."

Track 15

At the National Folk Festival in St. Louis, Grimes was able to record May Kennedy McCord and Pete Seeger doing their versions of ballads at an after-concert hootenanny. Here are clips from "Hangman" and "Jefferson and Liberty."

Tracks 22 & 24

And for a final clip, I'd like to share this gem of a song about the practice of "lining out hymns." I think the performance by Bessie Weinrich of Vigo, Ohio speaks for itself. Here's "My Eyes Are Dim."

Track 29

Anne Grimes died in 2004 while working on this book about her contributors. Her family decided that it was work too important not to be finished. If Ohio's place in folk song is near to your heart, Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music will bring you hours of pleasure. If you are a scholar of rare songs or a seeker of ballads, this well-documented resource can steer you toward more gems in your own backyard.

Wendell Berry and Religion

Wendell Berry and Religion , edited by Joel James Shuman and L. Rogers Owens, is subtitled Heaven's Earthly Life. Published by The University Press of Kentucky in 2009, this collection of theology-based essays is part of a larger series of books entitled Culture of the Land, a Series in the New Agrarianism.

The series preface explains agrarianism as "a comprehensive worldview that appreciates the intimate and practical connections that exist between humans and the earth." The editor goes on to describe agrarianism as "our most promising alternative to the unsustainable and destructive ways of current global, industrial, and consumer culture."

The introduction to the essays, written by co-editor Joel James Shuman, lays the foundation for how Wendell Berry's body of work is important to Christian thought by dividing the essays into the following sections: Good Work, Holy Living, Imagination, and Moving Forward.

By way of introducing the "good work" essays, Shuman reminds the reader of a persistent theme in Berry's writing: women and men are created to work and to do so well. The essays in this section examine what good work means to a university professor who ponders whether a Christian university can avoid overspecialization, to a medical school professor who requires his fourth year students to read Berry in order to better treat the whole human being, to a lawyer who milks goats in the morning while contemplating Berry's idea of "legal friendships", and to a pastor who sees his proper work as nourishing the common life of his congregation.

The other sections of the book follow suit as the essayists apply their experiences to Berry's agrarian viewpoint of the delicate, dependent relationship between humanity and the earth. In a well-constructed argument Elizabeth Bahnson cites her own dilemma with birth control pills in "The Pill is like...DDT?" Citing recent studies about declining amphibian populations, Bahnson wonders about the far-reaching effects of current hormonal methods on both women and the environment. As an organic farmer, she worries about adding chemicals to the earth to control fertility of the land That sensitivity to organic farming led her to question the methods we use to control fertility in humans. The very word "control" in relation to nature suggests to agrarians that human beings have lost their sense of place in the hierarchy of creation.

Other interesting discussions in the "Holy Living" section include the importance of community gardens to the ministry of a North Carolina church and an Old Testament scholar's discussion of the value of land in the Bible, exemplified by the words for "human" and "land" in Hebrew, the closely related "Adam/adamah."

Perhaps my favorite essay in this section is an agrarian explanation of theological concepts in "The Dark Night of the Soil"--love that title-- by Norman Wirzba. The author explains the complete surrender of the soul to a higher understanding by equating it to the body's ultimate return to serve the dark stillness of the earth. Supporting this theological discussion of the “dark night of the soul” are beautiful passages from Wendell Berry's poetry:

"Taking us where we would not go--Into the boundless dark.
When what was made has been unmade
The Maker comes to his work."

The final two sections of the book encourage readers to imagine better ways toward stewardship of the earth. While Philip Muntzel posits an embedded hopefulness in the "God-world cycle," Scott Williams explores the "alien landscapes" created by the violent practice of mountain-top removal--for which we are all culpable whenever we perform the simple act of switching on the lights in our homes. A final essay by Charles R. Pinches uses Berry's characters to suggest how Christians can join contemporary political debate without becoming divided into tribal sectarians versus cosmopolitans.

Wendell Berry and Religion will probably find its way into various university classrooms where discussions on theology, philosophy, nature, and ecology flourish. It would no doubt make a wonderful text for an honors seminar including the good work of establishing a community garden. Or, if you work your hands in the dark soil and don't mind turning over a few words for some fertile truth, it just might be the collection for you to cultivate.

This review originally aired May 30, 2010 on WVXU's Around Cincinnati, Lee Hay, producer. To listen to an audio version of the review from WVXU's archives, click on the link to the right of the blog.