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.

Power of Drums

Many years ago, I was teaching high school English in a rural high school in Northern Kentucky, Oh, we were classified by our system as a "suburban" high school, but we knew the truth. We knew which kids wouldn't be there when the tobacco had to be stripped and which kids would definitely be in a tree stand the first day of deer season waiting on a buck. Not to mention that the principal knew exactly which fishing hole to raid on Senior Skip Day. Shoot, some freshman boys came to me one fall, John Deere hats-in-hand, because they wanted to start a "Huntin' and Fishin' Club," and they thought I looked like someone who knew my way around a gun and a rod. They were actually half right.

Now, it's true that some of these kids came from the city down the hill and had been kicked out of their own schools for some kind of bad behavior or another. Then we, the teachers and students of "that school up on the ridge" were supposed to somehow either scare these miscreants straight or give them so much country loving that they turned into decent human beings. Either way, it was a tall order. But it was in this climate that I had some of my best moments in teaching. For some reason, tall orders call for a lot of creative thinking and passion.

I don't know when it happened exactly, but one day in the mid 1990s, I was reading the Kentucky Post when I saw a headline that stopped me from skimming the rest of the news that day: "Banks to Lead Drum Workshop." To most readers that might have meant a couple of local banks were sponsoring an arts event, but to me it meant one thing: Dennis Banks, the Ojibwa Activist, was somehow coming to my neck of the woods. I drove to the Carnegie that day to hunt down Arlene Gibeau in her office. I had to get into that workshop! Never mind that I had never played drums in my life.

As it turned out, that was the least of my worries since I found out on the first night that we were going to make drums before we could even think about playing them. Then we were going to learn a bunch of songs from Dennis' culture and put on a concert--in one week. He said this to us like a bunch of mostly white people from Kentucky did this all the time and should have no problem cutting drum heads out of Elk hide and lacing them together to make a drum fit for a concert sung in vocables and Ojibwa. Oh, yeah, and Dennis was not fond of the word "play" as it referred to drum. We were going to learn to make drums and to drum and how to behave in the presence of a drum. He had his work cut out for him. Talk about tall orders.

Yet, by the end of that week, we had each crafted our drum with the help of a partner, knew how to behave around drums, sang in syllables and other languages, dressed in red and black for our concert, and felt so good we could hardly stand it. We were transformed! I knew that I wanted this feeling for my students.

In the five years that followed, I went to the workshop each year to assist in any way I could, bringing my Dad one year, my Mom the next and finally, my good friend and teaching buddy, Karen. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was slowly building the framework for my students to follow. Once Karen became involved, the two of us went into an absolute collaborative frenzy, deciding that the act of making a drum had propelled us toward a whole new idea for a humanities course, "Celebrating the Creative Spirit." So when our principal mentioned that he wanted someone to work on piloting a Humanities Course for high school, Karen and I were ready to jump.

We jumped right into a Humanities Institute that summer where teachers from Highlands, Southgate, and Simon Kenton began to formulate ideas for their courses. The end result? Karen and I invited Dennis Banks to our school(via a TIP grant from Kentucky Arts Council) to lead our students in a week-long drum workshop. Of course, because of Dennis' travel schedule, we could only get him during the notoriously snowy month of February. Imagine our surprise when school had to be called off for a snow day during our week-long workshop, and thirteen of our twenty drum makers still showed up to work on their drums with Dennis. In that moment, Karen and I believed in the transformational power of drums! One week before, some of these kids would have ditched school for a Jerry Springer re-run. But now, consumed with the passion of filling their own tall orders, they just couldn't let themselves down.

Let Freedom Sing--a review

This review aired on WVXU's Around Cincinnati on March 28, 2010. You can listen to the review by going to the audio link to the right of this blog.

Let Freedom Sing: of 19th Century Americans by Vivian B. Kline is a treasure chest of historical research wrapped up in the packaging of a novel. Published in 2009 by Outskirts Press, this imaginative work earned Kline the “Innovator, Educator, Writer Award” at the NAACP’s 54th Annual Dinner in Cincinnati. Besides illuminating the struggle for freed slaves during the difficult Reconstruction period, the author presents a fascinating look at Cincinnati’s role in the art, music, commerce, politics and social change agenda of the late 1800s.

Kline’s premise--and major structural device for the novel--is that a group of 21st Century students have gathered in their Cincinnati classroom to do research on the travels of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in order to eventually turn their collective work into a musical. In this frame story structure, the students are free to write about their findings in any form they find comfortable and are encouraged by their facilitator/teacher to work collaboratively. The historical narrative takes the form of diary entries from Ella Sheppard, letters between Maria Longworth Nichols and Susannah Gilbert, linked together with some actual narrative passages where characters interact in person. Kline frames the students’ project work with their meetings about what they intend to do, how it’s progressing, and what they finally think about the prospects of turning their historical research into a musical.

At first, I was skeptical that couching this history in multiple viewpoints would work for me as a reader. Fond as I am of unifying, distinctive voices like that of narrator, Jack Crabb, in Little Big Man, I feared I was in for a bumpy read. But Kline is so careful to get her frame story students writing in the language of the era and the stories themselves are so appealing to anyone who cares about local history, that I soon found myself discussing many of these historical figures and events with my friends and family. I was hooked in by the beginnings of baseball and totally captivated by the high-powered literary salons hosted in New York City by the Cary sisters of North College Hill.

And there are plenty of colorful characters to discuss. Here’s a partial list for your consideration: Jenny Lind, the Nightingale Singer, P.T. Barnum, promoter extraordinaire,Horace Greeley who ran unsuccessfully against Grant for the Presidency, Nicholas Longworth the Cincinnati arts patron and wine maker, Mary Todd Lincoln portrayed here as a grieving wife, Frederick Douglass the orator, Robert Duncanson the artist, and the first woman to ever run for President, Vicky Woodhull, among many others. The exciting part about the story for me was finding out the role Cincinnati and Cincinnatians had in shaping the future of Fisk University, a school located all the way down in Nashville.

Vivian B. Kline was led to write this novel when she made a puzzling addition to her collection of historic picture postcards. When no one in our area was able to identify the group of black performers photographed in
antebellum clothing, Mrs. Kline set out to find the story behind the postcard.
A library in Harlem ultimately identified the group as the first Jubilee Singers who traveled the country--and eventually parts of Europe-- to raise funds for their struggling Fisk University. This post card sent Kline on her remarkable research mission that resulted in Let Freedom Sing: of 19th Century Americans which has the interesting subtitle: An Historical Novel, or Could it Be a Musical? With the author already transforming these historical events into dramatic vignettes, letters, and diary entries and the Fisk Jubilee Singers leaving behind a published repertoire of spirituals, can a musical be far behind? Imagine the costumes!

Eli the Good--a review

(This review aired on WVXU's Around Cincinnati on March 14, 2010. Check links to the right of this blog to listen to the review.)

Eli the Good, the fourth novel by Kentucky’s favorite son, Silas House, is shelved as a work of young adult literature. But the story and scope of the novel transcend this label, as House frames the events of America’s Bicentennial through the 10-year-old eyes of Eli Book. Themes like the power of friendship, the lingering effects of war, self-acceptance, and love of family--even in the face of stark disagreement--lift this account of the summer of 1976 to the level of the 1930s as decribed by Scout Finch( in To Kill a Mockingbird) or Buddy (in “A Christmas Memory.”)

In the spring of 2009, I attended one of House’s writing workshops where he shared his notion of the essential ingredients of story. A good story, according to him, must have both a mystery and a love story. By his own yard stick, House creates a memorable character in Eli, who eavesdrops his way around the shadowy adult mysteries of the Book household discovering the hidden love stories that might keep his family from flying apart.

Mysteries abound from the onset. Why has Eli’s free-spirited Aunt Nell returned to the family? What ancient disagreement with his sister still nags at Stanton Book’s heart? Why does Stanton wake the family with his screaming? And why does Eli’s sister, Josie, goad her parents at every turn? Eli hides under tables, risks the spidery space beneath the porch, and hangs in the hallways, hoping to piece together clues from the adult conversations. When the clues tantalize, but don’t quite add up, he enlists his best friend and neighbor, Edie, to help him plunder his father’s letters home from Viet Nam. The answers aren’t quite what Eli expects.

The love stories in this novel are complex and beautiful. Part of Eli’s yearning stems from the overt devotion he witnesses in his parents’ love for each other. He sometimes feels invisible to them as they exchange meaningful gazes and brush each other’s hands. Another love story exists between Loretta Book and her sister-in-law, Nell, as they revel in each other’s sisterly company and dance in the rain together. And yet another love story finds best friends Edie and Eli, confiding secrets and sharing their love of nature, in the easy pre-dawn of adolescence while Eli’s sister, Josie, suffers the pouty, full-blown drama of teenage love and rebellion.

House underscores the mounting tensions for the characters with frequent allusions to the music of the time. Eli and his mother dance to Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” Nell sings Dylan snippets sadly from the porch swing and advises the ever-skeptical Josie about which Dylan tunes will “rip your guts out,” and later Nell gives Eli the title, “Mother Nature’s Son,” a song she urges Stanton to play on the Gibson while she sings. Following this song, an explosive argument foreshadows that some mysteries will soon be laid bare for the Book family.

As usual, the characters in a House novel are presented in precise, intimate detail--from Eli’s adoration of his mother’s easy, natural beauty at the Fourth of July celebration to his horror at seeing nothing behind his father’s war-traumatized eyes when Eli casually horseplays in a thunderstorm. Important, lyrical scenes develop in nature, backed by bird call, witnessed by foxes and silent beech trees. When darkness falls, House treats us to characters’ favorite words, like “gloaming.”

“Eli the Good” is the title Nell confers upon her struggling young nephew to start him on his path to identity. Kings titled “the Good” rather than “the Great” were much more likely to be kind to their people, she explains. As she dubs him king of his backyard, the reader knows she is hoping he will grow up to be a kind man, able to face the cruelties of the world without becoming part of them. I was sorry to conclude my visit with the Books. Their mysteries and love stories--in the hands of Silas House’s poetic and musical craft--add up to one good story.

Come and Go, Molly Snow

Come and Go, Molly Snow is a book about grief, redemption, and music. Published in paperback this past October by The University Press of Kentucky, the novel was Mary Ann Taylor-Hall’s first, garnering praise as a hardback from The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, and People Magazine--just to name a few sources of acclaim. There was even talk of a movie version that ultimately collapsed under the weight of a bad script. That’s unfortunate, because the story is intrinsically cinematic in its flashback format, capturing everything from atmospheric breakdown scenes to spirited bluegrass music “breakdowns” through the plucky voice of Carrie Mae Mullins, an extraordinary woman fiddler who enters the mostly male world of bluegrass music.

The story begins with Carrie reflecting on how she ended up on a farm near Lexington, KY recovering from a breakdown, barely trusted by her two elder hosts to wield a knife for pitting peaches. The author uses the frame story of Carrie’s recovery to reveal gradually one of the major questions of the novel: how does one get beyond the death of a child?

The challenge of writing about grief hinges on the writer’s ability to make the inner landscape of a character accessible to the reader. For Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People, that challenge was met by alternating the inner suffering of two major characters, the grieving father and son. Both tell the story in first person, letting the reader piece together the tragedy beneath the surface from two viewpoints. While most first person narrators are by definition “unreliable,” as the reader only gets one subjective point of view, Taylor-Hall builds trust in Carrie Mae the same way J.D. Salinger had readers believing Holden Caulfield, by creating a character with a distinct, authentic voice. We believe and feel her descent into the monotone of grief because we have already heard her passionate voice describe the myriad emotions, sounds and sensations of playing in an ensemble.

In fact, music permeates the entire novel. Carrie describes her attraction to the handsome band leader, Cap, through their harmony singing, when she says,“harmony’s all there is or needs to be, when it’s right” and characterizes her often absent father’s depth of blues as “oh, my daddy was not easy listening.” The music even extends into Carrie’s thoughts on language when she considers the onomatopoeia of one word:

“Cease--what a word, like the breath going out of everything.”

And the music of Taylor-Hall’s language as it filters through Carrie set me jotting down quotes I wanted for later, just because they were surprising and succulent. As Carrie struggles with whether or not there is something after this life, the task in front of her of slicing peaches produces this insight:

“The gold, moist slices, red at the inner edge, gather the light to them. They look like light itself, as if to say, ‘You want to believe in something, believe in peaches.’”

The other characters in this novel serve to guide Carrie toward her eventual path through their examples--good and bad--and through their ample humanity. The sumptuous Cap, heart-throb to the masses, yet clueless about his own desires, the hardworking, nurturing granny, Ona, with her own tragic loss, and the ravenous-for-adventure retired banker, Ruth, who seeks the Holy Land and just maybe another fling, Pearls Girls, the all-women band formed by friends, Louis, the hard-driving banjo picker who resents Carrie’s “invasion” of his all-male band, the lively Molly Snow herself, who steps in and out of the narrative bringing Carrie both joy and pain, and spectres of all kinds who haunt Carrie in their longings, including her parents and a ghost called Little Lady Kidwell.

This novel poses many questions about the nature of existence, but thankfully leaves the answering to each of us on our own paths with our own casts of colorful characters. Come and Go, Molly Snow is a book for those who ask the important questions, but don't expect the answers to be easy.

HealthRHYTHMS and Fine Arts Fund Sampler Weekend

"Have drums, will travel" was our mantra for Creative Aging, The Coalition for Music and Wellness, and me for Fine Arts Fund Sampler Weekend. On Saturday February 20, Jim Waddle--board member for Creative Aging and volunteer coordinator of their drumming offerings--and I met up at Media Bridges in downtown Cincinnati for an hour of intergenerational drumming. We had a circle of about 27 drummers for our first session representing all age groups from toddlers to seniors.

As we finished up a successful session, volunteers from FAF and Media Bridges helped us pack the drums back in my Jeep for a drive over to Music Hall where an all-day art expo for kids was taking place called "Get Smart with Art." We formed a very large drumming circle with kids, parents, Music and Wellness Coalition, and Creative Aging drummers. The kids used drums and percussion that they made earlier at the expo, or joined us on some of the wide-array of Remo drums we brought in. My fondest memory of this session is seeing a young man from our Media Bridges session rejoin us so that he could play the gathering drum in this huge circle. The expression on his face as he wielded the big mallet was one of absolute joy.

On Sunday, February 21, I toted the drums over to Campbell County Public Library in Cold Spring for another lively intergenerational circle featuring some drummers from the Campbell County Senior Center, lots of parents and kids, and even Pam Temple from WNKU and wild carrot. She was performing at the library later and just thought it might be fun to join in.

I usually present some kind of program for Fine Arts Fund Sampler, either with Raison D'Etre, or solo. But this one was so exciting because of the full participation of the attendees who found their "walking talking rhythm" in their names and shared drumming. (photo courtesy of Janet Arno, Campbell County Library.)