“The best songs are written by people who write specifically

and broad enough to allow artists and fans to find

their own places in the music. That’s what allows
the Great American Songbook to remain relevant.”
Carolyn Malachi, p. 68
Contents

5 28
HELLO STRANGER REFRAMING ‘THE FATHER
by Hilary Saunders OF AMERICAN MUSIC’
Reckoning with blackface minstrelsy and

6
the legacy of Stephen Foster
by Kim Ruehl

CANON FODDER
Loudon Wainwright III
by Caitlin Wolper 38
CANON FODDER
8
Caleb Caudle
by Caitlin Wolper

THE MEN WITH GOLDEN EARS

Max Dreyfus, George Gershwin, and the rise
and fall of Tin Pan Alley
40
by Charley Ruddell CARRYING A TORCH
Carly Simon’s most heartfelt standards
album turns 40

18 by Charles Donovan

AN AMERICAN ICON:
LOUIS ARMSTRONG 44
by Hilary Saunders
VIOLENT VERSES
Modern musicians grapple with

24
the legacy of murder ballads
by Stacy Chandler

VERSATILE VOICE
Rachael Price goes back to the (Song)book
by Noah Berlatsky
54
WON’T YOU SPARE ME OVER
‘Oh Death’ haunts the American
musical landscape
by Stephen Deusner
 3

60 92
CANON FODDER HOLDING THE LINE
Bettye LaVette The history and legacy of the Peekskill Riots
by Caitlin Wolper by Melanie Rock

62 98
SINGING IT TRUE A MIXED BAG
How Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, How Carl Sandburg’s ‘The American Songbag’
and other Black musicians canonized the Great shaped nearly a century of folk music
American Songbook by Avery Gregurich
by Marcus K. Dowling

70 104
CHECKING ALL THE BOXES THE FLIP SIDE OF HISTORY
Julian Lage finds inspiration in old classics and New box set presents a fuller picture of the
new collaborations ‘Anthology of American Folk Music’
by Greg Cahill by Allison Hussey

76 111
RUM AND COCA-COLA CONTRIBUTORS
The Great American Songbook’s Cuban

112
crossover
by Judy Cantor-Navas

SCREEN DOOR
90 Love Is a Long Road
by Kamara Thomas
CANON FODDER
M. Ward
by Caitlin Wolper
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ON THE COVER
Raleigh-based visual artist and musician
George Hage designed the cover for our
“Great American Songbook” issue. He drew
inspiration from art deco architecture and
colors and infused it all with a bit of
contemporary whimsy.

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No Depression is part of the FreshGrass Foundation.

freshgrass.org
ISBN-13: 978173402235390000
©2021, FreshGrass, LLC

Hello Stranger
I
t’s the day before Christmas and
I’m thinking about Justin Townes
Earle again. His 2014 album
Single Mothers is playing from
my shallow iPhone speakers and I
suddenly remember that he wrote the
gorgeous, languid ballad “White
Gardenias” in honor of Billie Holiday.
“I think my favorite song that I’ve
ever written is ‘White Gardenias,’” he
told NPR during a Tiny Desk Concert the
week before the LP came out on Vagrant
Records. “It’s for Billie Holiday. You’ll
notice that it almost feels like I’m gonna
miss the spot that I’m supposed to start
singing in. That comes from Billie
Holiday — falling way behind the beat,”
he explains before quipping: “It’ll scare
the shit out of a rhythm section, that’s for
sure!”
Holiday, of course, was a legend of
soul, jazz, and pop singing. In the 1930s,
she toured briefly with the Count Basie
Band and clarinetist/composer Artie
Shaw before recording her defining,
defiant work, “Strange Fruit.”
Earle’s death has haunted me since
late summer, throughout the fall and
into the winter. But it is spring now and
new people have filled old offices and
scientists have made and shared
miraculous molecules that protect us
from invisible pain. Though grief is not
linear, something like hope feels like it
might just flicker again.
I read Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the
Dark during this period too — those days
of dull repetition, fear, isolation, and
mourning 300,000 killed by a virus, one
from an accidental overdose, and others.
At times, the small book infuriated me
with its cautions of patience and
reminders that we may never see the
results of our actions. But one of the best
lessons Solnit offers is that “grief and
KRISTINA MORAVEC
hope can coexist.” In fact, I believe our
most hopeful actions stem from grief, for
we cannot be moved toward change
without seeing sorrow first.
In my own waves of grief that
crashed and steadied throughout the
end of a hellacious year and the end of
BY HILARY SAUNDERS
this issue’s production cycle, I imagine
talking to Earle about Holiday and the
Great American Songbook. It would
have been delightful — I can hear Earle’s
deadpan humor and earnestness
alternating in one-liner punches hitting
like the pick and slap of his guitar
strings — a perfect encapsulation of how
this strange and malleable genre
resonates with roots musicians today.
Even without either of their voices, a
sense of timelessness courses through
the pages of the Spring 2021 issue of No
Depression. It’s quite the historical
issue, with multiple features that
explain and contextualize this
amalgamation of standards, pop songs,
jazz hits, and showtunes from the first
half of the 20th century — from the rise
of Tin Pan Alley to the near-forgotten
riots in the Hudson Valley to crossover
hits in Cuba. But this issue is also firmly
rooted in the present, almost
surprisingly so. Nearly a century after
the heyday of this type of music, Rachael
Price of Lake Street Dive, Julian Lage,
M. Ward, Caleb Caudle, and so many
5
others continue to cite these songs and
singers as influences.
In our reading, however, the Great
American Songbook also refers to a
broader range of great American songs.
We felt like it was important to assess
tomes of traditional American music
like Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag
and Harry Smith’s Anthology of
American Folk Music, as well as Dust-to-
Digital’s new follow-up box set, The
Harry Smith B-Sides. And while
sociologists, politicians, and ordinary
residents and citizens continue to
grapple with this country’s complicated
history, No Depression writers found
merit in mining our musical legacies
like murder ballads and minstrel songs
for what remains great and what in our
songbook ought to evolve or simply not
survive.
Ultimately, we found more questions
than answers — a frustrating yield,
despite such an important and
fascinating romp throughout music and
time. I’m finding hope in the fact that
we’re asking these questions, though.
One issue of No Depression won’t fix
systemic racism in the country music
industry or erase the sexism and
violence perpetuated through old-time
songs. But identifying those patterns
and asking questions about them might
broaden our perspective, spark our
curiosity and grow our empathy.
“What other stories can be told? How
do people recognize that they have the
power to be storytellers, not just
listeners?” Solnit asks in her book. In
music especially, we are all storytellers
and listeners; we are as much a part of
the songs as the melodies and
percussion. And therefore I have to hope
that we also have the power to challenge
and change our musical narrative in
time. For as Solnit continues, “Hope is
the story of uncertainty, of coming to
terms with the risk involved in not
knowing what comes next, which is
more demanding than despair and, in a
way, more frightening. And
immeasurably more rewarding.”
6

CANON FODDER
The Endless American Songbook
The Great American Songbook, most commonly defined as a collection of standards produced in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s in New York
City’s Tin Pan Alley, can still feel like a nebulous concept. Many of the songs have been re-recorded and covered thousands of times,
constantly evolving with the times. No Depression spoke with four contemporary musicians, whose stories you’ll find interspersed in
this issue, about the impact these standards have had on their work, how they approach performing such a hallowed canon,
and why they believe these songs persist. — Caitlin Wolper

Loudon Wainwright III

Loudon Wainwright III remembers one night when his parents
were dressed to go out. He and his siblings waited in pajamas for
the babysitter. There was music playing; his mother and father
danced through the room.
“In those days, men and women — I’m sure [also] men and
men and women and women — would hold onto each other and
dance close to each other,” Wainwright says. “It’s such a
beautiful, sexy, and romantic thing for a kid to see. I’m sure it
was Ella Fitzgerald singing Rodgers and Hart, or Sinatra, or Fred
Astaire, or Irving Berlin.”
The folk musician encountered the Great American
Songbook in the 1950s, when he was a kid, courtesy of his
father’s record collection. That collection encompassed Ella
Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, Tony Bennett, and of
course many more.
“Obviously in the ’50s and ’60s, I had rock and roll and Bob
Dylan and The Beatles came along — but before that, my dad’s
record collection was the well to which I went,” Wainwright says.
“This is the first music I listened to and really heard.”
His album I’d Rather Lead a Band, released last October,
revives a number of these tracks. Working alongside music
supervisor Randall Poster, producer Stewart Lerman, and
bandleader Vince Giordano, Wainwright didn’t want to
reimagine the songs entirely, but he made sure they didn’t sound
archaic either.
“Stewart and Randy and I spent a lot of time trying to find
the right songs: There are obviously hundreds of songs we
could’ve chosen. We whittled it down to 14 somehow, and that
took several weeks, and we cut the record in three days,”
Wainwright says. “When Vince Giordano and his band plays live,
they want people to get up and dance. That’s what we were
thinking about when we made our record.”
All the same, he says he focused more on lyrics than
instrumentation — “I play the guitar and I play about five chords,
the same five guitar chords I learned when I was 15,” he says
— citing Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner
and Loewe, and Frank Loesser as talented lyricists.
“In fact, my very first publishing deal, the first money I really
made in the music business, I signed to Frank Music [Loesser’s
publishing company],” Wainwright says. “The guy that ran that
company saw me playing in a little folk club in New York City. I
was an in-house writer at Frank Music, so that was a thrill.”
Wainwright attributes some of the tracks on I’d Rather Lead
a Band to the Songbook, but he doesn’t see the Songbook as a
strict document. To him, this album is more a reflection, in a
broader sense, of what music has lasted.
“They’re love songs, and also the up-tempo ones and even
the slow ones are dance music,” Wainwright says. “I think that’s
why people are attracted to it: It’s well-crafted and it’s deeply
romantic.”
ROSS HALFIN
7
 8

George Gershwin

COURTESY OF THE GEORGE GRANTHAM BAIN COLLECTION AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

 9

Max Dreyfus

COURTESY OF THE MAX AND VICTORIA DREYFUS FOUNDATION

THE MEN WITH

GOLDEN EARS
Max Dreyfus, George Gershwin, and the rise and fall of
Tin Pan Alley
By Charley Ruddell
10
“I think you could say every major Broadway composer, or at least
the ones we think of as essential composers — anything that was
on Broadway was with Max Dreyfus.”
Will Friedwald
Author and music critic
O
n any given day in 1904, the
offices of T.B. Harms & Co. Inc.
were seldom noiseless.
Songwriters from around New
York City circulated inside the
publishing firm in guileless hopes of
signing a contract. Upright pianos lined
the halls and tired fingers clunked the
keys, auditioning scores of tunes that
would never see the light of day. It was
no different the day 19-year-old Jerome
Kern walked into the building on 45th
Street in Midtown Manhattan, a
fledgling songwriter, pianist, and native
New Yorker chasing the dream of
writing hits.
As told in a 1932 New Yorker profile
written by S.N. Behrman, Kern sat in one
of the offices and eyed a Prince Albert
coat hanging in the periphery. It
sparked within him a sense of nobility, a
sign of aristocracy, a marked departure
from the informal precinct of Tin Pan
Alley, just a mile downtown from the
esteemed T.B. Harms offices in
Midtown. He gleaned from his
inspection that whoever owned that coat
could make his career. It was an
observation so true it could be bound by
natural law, for the coat that hung in the
office belonged to none other than Max
Dreyfus — a businessman with golden
ears.
Dreyfus, ceaselessly coolheaded, sat
and listened to Kern’s unpublished
compositions. He recognized
immediately that the young man
playing for him could write a song, but
reckoned his talents would be useful
elsewhere. He hired Kern as a song
plugger, a now long-lost occupation in
which he would traverse the Hudson
Valley to play songs and sell sheet music
of popular British tunes recently
contracted by his firm. Dreyfus’
business strategy centered around

selling, not composing; Kern’s
compositions would have to wait.
Kern readily obliged and took off to
his post along the Hudson, while
Dreyfus, concluding that the doe-eyed
songwriter had believed the Prince
Albert coat was his, subtly withheld the
truth: Dreyfus had only rented the coat;
he would wear it later that evening to a
party for which he was hired as a
pianist. As Kern would come to realize,
Dreyfus was always one step ahead. He
projected success for his subjects and
possessed an uncanny ability to inspire
loyalty, even when the truths behind his
initiatives were malleable.
This story isn’t intended to suggest
malfeasance (Dreyfus was notoriously
protective of his employees), but rather
to specify an instance within his greater
scheme. Kern met Dreyfus at the
precipice of his enterprise, perhaps at
his sharpest and most ambitious. Their
relationship formed in the same year in
which Dreyfus made his first move as a
major player in Tin Pan Alley, buying
the majority of shares in T.B. Harms, one
of the most formidable music
publishers in the world, from savings
that he had stored over a decade of
working his way up the company’s
ranks.
The Rise
It wasn’t uncommon to find teenagers
roaming Tin Pan Alley in search of work
at the turn of the century, much like
Dreyfus did as a teenager in the mid-
1890s, a German immigrant with a bit of
music training and a keen sales pitch.
In those days, nothing defined that
stretch of the Flower District more than
the sound of a hundred clanging upright
pianos being played at once. Tin Pan
Alley, a block of modest apartment
buildings on West 28th Street between
5th and 6th avenues, got its name from
the jangling “tin pan” description of an
old, decrepit upright piano. There,
inside the cluster of street-facing
apartments, groups of immigrant
songwriters and enterprising publishers
began assembling what would become
the Great American Songbook note by
note, penny by penny.
In the late 1800s, New York City’s
entertainment district was centered in
Union Square, where Thomas Harms
had established T.B. Harms in 1860, but
gradually, at the verge of the 20th
century, publishing houses began
migrating uptown. “Up until [1904],
every 10 years or so, the nexus of
entertainment was gradually moving
from downtown to midtown,” says Will
Friedwald, an author and music critic
who specializes in early popular song
whose work has appeared in The Wall
Street Journal and The New York Times.
“It gradually went from Chinatown to
Union Square to Madison Square, and
then Herald Square, and finally
stopping at Times Square.”
As publishers were moving north,
American theater and popular music
were ballooning as cultural
benchmarks. Tin Pan Alley had
inadvertently been established at the
brink of the public’s voracity for just the
sort of songs it was producing; the area
became synonymous with the music
produced there. At its peak in the early
1900s, Tin Pan Alley’s clanking pianos
could be heard at all hours of the night,
ambitious songwriters and publishers
11
scrambling between apartment
buildings to write the next “Hello Ma
Baby (Hello Ma Ragtime Gal),” or “The
Sidewalks of New York.” The demand for
a big hit was of primary importance,
and writers, particularly Broadway
composers like Gus Edwards and John
Walter Bratton, had been elevated to the
highest and most honorable class.
Dreyfus himself was working as a
song plugger and arranger during this
time for T.B. Harms, before the firm
moved up to 45th Street in Midtown.
Every couple of years or so, he would
graduate to a new position, each more
profitable. In 1901, Dreyfus penned his
own hit contracted by the firm, an
instrumental ballad dubbed “Cupid’s
Garden.” It was his dream to earn rank
as a published songwriter, but Dreyfus,
ever earnest and observant of the fickle
industry, realized his specialty might
not have been in composition, but rather
in enterprising and talent scouting.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that his
big deal with T.B. Harms in 1904 was
sealed amid a profound shift within the
city. “When we talk about Broadway, we
can use 1904 as a starting point because
of the subway station,” Friedwald says.
“That’s the point when the Times Square
subway station opened. Times Square
was right in between the two big train
stations, Penn Station and Grand
Central, so all of the bridge and tunnel
people [commuters] could more easily
get to Times Square.”
Whether Dreyfus had intentionally
bought out T.B. Harms, the major holder
in Broadway publishing, at the juncture
of the city’s public transportation
expansion is unknown. But whether the
move was calculated or not, the savvy
12
entrepreneur, whose finger lay on the
pulse of New York City’s working-class
consumerism, came to monopolize
music publishing just as the world’s
musical theater capital became
accessible to more and more Americans.
A New Talent
Dreyfus loved songwriters. As the
T.B. Harms empire grew through
World War I, he affectionately referred
to his composers as “the boys,” and
offered lucrative contracts beneficial to
the songwriters. “I think you could say
every major Broadway composer, or at
least the ones we think of as essential
composers — anything that was on
Broadway was with Max Dreyfus,”
Friedwald notes. By 1920, Dreyfus
owned virtually all publishing rights
coming out of Broadway.
Jerome Kern had worked his way
through the ranks and demonstrated
his worth to Dreyfus, manifesting great
success as the composer of “They Didn’t
Believe Me” from the 1914 musical The
Girl from Utah. Dreyfus would also
scout and sign a young Cole Porter, the
immensely successful duo of Rodgers
and Hammerstein, the great Czech
orchestrator Rudolf Friml, and lyricist
Irving Caesar, who penned “Tea for
Two,” one of the most frequently
recorded songs in history.
But long before the fraternity of “the
boys” was erected, an extraordinary
young talent was scouring the streets of
Tin Pan Alley as a song plugger, making
50 cents a pop on the side as a
songwriter. Kern was the first in
Dreyfus’ circle to hear the young man
play, his large, spindly fingers
hammering a piano during rehearsals
for an upcoming Broadway musical
revue titled “Miss 1917,” for which Kern
was hired as a contributing songwriter.
The second to notice the virtuosic
pianist was music producer Harry
Askins, who upon witnessing his
rehearsal performances called for
Dreyfus immediately.
Dreyfus walked into the rehearsal
room hours later; Askins summoned the
young man, who promptly soared
through a number of pieces and humbly
introduced himself as George Gershwin.
He was hired on the spot and offered a
generous salary of $35 a week. “Unlike
most songwriters, he was a piano
virtuoso,” explains Friedwald. “You had
Cole Porter; Richard Rodgers could play
confidently, but not excitingly. Gershwin
was the one who was a piano virtuoso,
more than anybody.”
Gershwin flourished under Dreyfus’

watchful eye almost immediately. “It’s a
fascinating thing, in that his biggest hit,
by which we use the metrics to measure
or qualify a hit, was his first major song,
‘Swanee,’” Friedwald observes of
Gershwin’s 1919 composition. It is
particularly fascinating when
skimming Gershwin’s trove of popular
titles, considering the legacy of his opus
“Rhapsody in Blue,” or the
groundbreaking Porgy and Bess. In all
of his profound prolificity, Gershwin
struck gold early on, and Dreyfus had
once again surged to the top.
A First-Rate Gershwin
It was Paris in the mid-’20s. Gershwin
looked at the letter in his hands. It was
from Maurice Ravel, the esteemed
French classical composer, whom
Gershwin had contacted about a
mentorship. He opened the letter; it
read: “Why become a second-rate Ravel
when you’re already first-rate
Gershwin?”
Like most of his peers, Ravel had
recognized Gershwin as a revolutionary,
a once-in-a-lifetime talent endlessly lit
by a flame of genius. “Rhapsody in Blue”
made him a household name, its
boundless score distilling the very
essence of New York City: elegant,
bombastic, imaginative. It embodied the
spirit of Gershwin’s roots, his auspicious
beginnings on West 28th Street between
5th and 6th avenues, the advantageous
hustle in Tin Pan Alley.
Back in Manhattan, Max Dreyfus’
wealth grew larger as the Roaring ’20s
were underway, as Broadway excelled
and popular song reigned. And for every
Gershwin piece written, the Dreyfus
name was branded in its paperwork. He
13
would publish everything Gershwin
wrote through the ’20s and beyond,
regardless of its commercial success.
Dreyfus even formed a subsidiary of
T.B. Harms called New World Music
Corporation to allow Gershwin and his
brother Ira to hold their own copyrights.
(Dreyfus also owned a large share of this
deal; he wouldn’t be so foolish as to
allow total independence.) And far
beyond the last days of T.B. Harms
under Dreyfus’ management, he would
continually champion Gershwin as a
creative genius, a lucrative partner, and
a friend.
Gershwin would need this support
as he entered his most pioneering
period in the mid-’30s, taking on the
musical adaptation of DuBose
Heyward’s novel Porgy, a heroic story of
Black life in Charleston, South Carolina.
The English-language opera, dubbed
14

COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Max Dreyfus’ compositions, published by T. B. Harms & Co., New York, 1898
15
16
Porgy and Bess and featuring an all-
Black cast, was an immense
undertaking for Gershwin; it took two
years for him to compose, including the
song “Summertime,” now a staple tune
in the Songbook. But the opera was
simply too trailblazing, and was largely
unpopular.
“They should have let the
Metropolitan Opera do [Porgy and
Bess],” Friedwald explains. “They should
have produced it as an opera instead of
putting it on Broadway. People just
didn’t know what to make of it.”
The commercial failure left
Gershwin “devastated,” Friedwald notes,
and ushered in a new chapter of his
career. “Essentially, Gershwin wasted
two years of his life, coming from a
commercial point of view,” he says.
Gershwin took off for Hollywood, a place
he had previously stayed and worked
over the years, to compose music for
moving pictures in relative solitude.
The Fall
When Max Dreyfus helped form the
American Society of Composers,
Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in
1914, the aim was to protect songwriters
by ensuring their copyrights were
protected, and to provide proper
compensation. And that’s exactly what it
did, and still does today, but little did
Dreyfus know that it would topple the
keystone of Tin Pan Alley.
Fifteen years after the formation of
ASCAP, Dreyfus would sell his shares in
T.B. Harms to Warner Bros. as the
Hollywood system began gobbling up
publishing companies around the
country to reinforce the booming moving
picture business. He served as a
consultant thereafter for many years
before establishing the American branch
of Chappell, a British publishing firm run
by his brother Louis in London. All the
while, ASCAP continued to run smoothly.
But ASCAP’s exclusivity became its
biggest weakness. The organization
favored the highbrow aristocracy of
Broadway, failing to anticipate that
eventually the zeitgeist would shift, and
what was once popular would fade. The
days of “Give My Regards to Broadway”
and “For Sentimental Reasons” were
numbered as a new cultural wave began
permeating New York from the South.
In the 1940s, a dispute between
ASCAP and US radio stations yielded
Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), a direct
rival for ASCAP in the realm of copyright
holdings, where previously it was largely
uncontested. A music publisher named
Ralph Peer contributed greatly to the
BMI catalog, championing folkloric
Black music of the South, including the
blues and gospel, and ushering in Latin
and Cuban music from outside the US.
“Ralph Peer was the number-one guy
for everything that really wasn’t what we
think of as Tin Pan Alley,” says
Friedwald. “He became one of the
founders of BMI, and one of BMI’s
strengths was that they were the first to
pay attention to that, whereas ASCAP
looked down its nose at it.”
The Brill Building, constructed in 1931
on Broadway and 49th Street, offered
music publishers additional office space
at a time when the industry was
sprawling, and many Tin Pan Alley firms
migrated north once more. But one
notable publisher opted out. “Almost as
soon as [the Brill Building] opened —
perhaps mainly because it was close to
Times Square and all of these publishers
needed office space — music publishers
started moving in almost immediately.
But it was everybody except Dreyfus and
the kind of high-profile Broadway
writers,” Friedwald says. “It seemed to be
the place where everybody except Max
Dreyfus and the top Broadway people
went.”
One of the building’s first tenants
was Peer, whose presence as a BMI
representative spurred a renaissance of
music publishing that would take the
country by storm as the advent of World
War II shifted the tastes of American
consumers. R&B soon overcame the
once steadfast repository of musical
theater, and the Brill Building became
the music publishing hub of New York
City. Through the 1950s and ’60s, the
Brill Building dominated American
popular music, housing such prolific
songwriters as Carole King, Neil
Diamond, Phil Spector, Burt Bacharach,
and countless more.
Subsequently, Tin Pan Alley would
fall at the hands of rock and roll.

A Relic and Reminder
As Howard Pollock detailed in his 2006
book George Gershwin: His Life and Work,
1937 was the beginning of the end for the
celebrated composer. Pollack describes
Gershwin’s head pounding as he sat
facing the piano one evening, the San
Francisco Symphony Orchestra stationed
idly under the stage lights at the
symphony hall, a full audience nestled in
the velvet darkness. He smelled burnt
rubber in the air during the special
performance of his expansive Concerto in
F. Then his fingers stumbled and he
missed a note, and another, and his vision
went black. In a wink, the keys reappeared
as the static in his vision began to clear,
and he concluded the vigorous Allegro
agitato as if nothing had happened.
Back at his rented house in Beverly
Hills, Gershwin’s mood was as
turbulent. Others around him noticed a
marked shift in his behavior as the year
progressed. He was plagued by
headaches and the persistent smell of
burnt rubber. When he moved into an
open quarter of lyricist Yip Harburg’s
estate, his closest circle pondered the
onset of mental illness.
It took only five months for the brain
tumor to impart its irrevocable damage.
Gershwin collapsed one morning in
early July and fell into a coma. Two days
later, in a final attempt to save his life,
doctors removed the mass, a
glioblastoma, from his brain, causing it
to herniate. He was 38 years old.
News of Gershwin’s death stunned
the world, one of the bright lights of the
20th century having dimmed far too
early. But Gershwin’s compositions lived
on in the annals of the Great American
Songbook, particularly pieces written in
his last days, like “They Can’t Take That
Away from Me,” an iconic tune
re-popularized by Frank Sinatra in
1954.
“That final phase of Gershwin in
Hollywood is almost his most magical,”
Friedwald says. “A disproportionate
number of his great songs come from
that final Hollywood phase from 1935-
37.” The Gershwin estate still controls
the copyrights to many of his iconic
works, due largely in part to the
benevolent Max Dreyfus.
At the time of Gershwin’s death,
Dreyfus was spending his summers on a
300-acre farm in Brewster, New York. He
turned the stable barn into a clubhouse
of sorts; it’s where he hosted “the boys”
— Jerome Kern, Oscar Levant, Rodgers
and Hammerstein, and others — the
clubhouse outfitted with games and
pianos for entertainment.
After dinner on these nights, Dreyfus
would sit and play piano with Levant,
and they’d revel in each other’s
company; Dreyfus, the soft spoken and
poised industry magnate, living
vicariously through the youth of his
institution. Though Dreyfus would
never make a name for himself in the
colosseum of great songwriters, his
name would carry enormous weight
17
among those who did make it there, a
looming presence in the ranks of the
Great American Songbook.
Dreyfus died at the farm in 1964 at
90 years old. He was survived by his
wife, Victoria, and left a small herd of
Percheron horses and some cattle. The
clubhouse remained a shrine of sorts,
the pianos slowly gathering dust as
years passed and company became
sparser.
One of the pianos was the first
Dreyfus had ever owned in America, a
Steinway from the late 1800s that he
acquired in the purchase of T.B. Harms
back in 1904. It remained a relic of his
success through his lifetime, a symbol
of American virtue, emblematic of his
meteoric rise as a great entrepreneur
and a poignant reminder of a path he
longed for but never fully traversed —
that of a professional musician.
Like Gershwin’s Concerto in F,
Dreyfus’ Steinway represented the
beauty in tragedy. Gershwin’s final
performance of Concerto in F would
signal the imminent demise of its
creator; Dreyfus’ Steinway, a beautiful
piece of work, would only see its true
potential around the company of people
more talented than himself.
These men, both great in their own
respects, represented the duality of Tin
Pan Alley’s legacy: the fragility of genius
and the torment of sacrifice. The Great
American Songbook, defined both by
genius and sacrifice, would be far short
of great without their golden ears. ■
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18

L A N
ouis Armstrong is one of the
great American musicians in any
genre, but his relationship with the
Great American Songbook is a
particularly special one. Born in New
Orleans just after the turn of the 20th
century, Armstrong’s musical influences
predated the beginning of the Songbook as
a genre, and his legacy stretches far past
the Songbook’s heyday.
Though he began his five-decade

A M E R
career as a trumpeter, Armstrong grew
into an esteemed vocalist as well. His
gravelly baritone is iconic in songs like
“What a Wonderful World,” “When the
Saints Go Marching In,” and his version of
Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” (which
became his best-selling release).
Armstrong also helped popularize
improvisational scat singing on songs like
“Heebie Jeebies” and “Hotter Than That,”
which helped usher in bebop jazz. Ella

I C A N
Fitzgerald also became a notable scat
singer and they collaborated for two full
albums together for Verve Records, Ella
and Louis and Ella and Louis Again, later
reuniting on the soundtrack for Porgy and
Bess.
Armstrong’s career of instrumentals,
vocal tunes, jazz, showtunes, and original
compositions (some of which became jazz
standards in their own right) represents
one of the greatest crossover successes —

I C O N
in terms of both genre and race — in
American history. These live photos and
portraits by William P. Gottlieb, housed in
the Library of Congress, help convey the
vivaciousness of this Songbook titan.
— Hilary Saunders
 Louis Armstrong at the Aquarium in New York City, circa July 1946.

ALL PHOTOS BY WILLIAM P. GOTTLIEB, COURTESY OF THE IRA AND LEONORE S. GERSHWIN
FUND COLLECTION IN THE MUSIC DIVISION OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
19
 20

Louis Armstrong at Carnegie Hall in New York

City, circa April 1947.

“My photo of Louis shows him just before the

concert. The horn you see belongs to Bobby
Hackett. Louis’ had just been stolen. Satchmo
had to borrow a mute, too. All he had of his
own for the concert was his mouthpiece,
which he had in his pocket when the thief
grabbed his case. Horn has since been
recovered at a pawn shop.” — William P.
Gottlieb for DownBeat magazine

These images were also published in

Gottlieb’s photography book, The Golden Age
of Jazz (Pomegranate), which was first
published in 1995.
 21

Louis Armstrong at Carnegie Hall in New York City, circa February 1947.
22

Louis Armstrong at Carnegie Hall in New

York City, circa February 1947.
 23

Louis Armstrong at the Aquarium

in New York City, circa July 1946.
These images were also originally
published in Gottlieb’s
photography book, The Golden
Age of Jazz (Pomegranate), which
was first published in 1995.
116
24
VERSATILE
VOICE
Rachael Price goes back to the (Song)book
by Noah Berlatsky
R
achael Price started
singing when she was four years
old. Now best known as the lead
singer of genre-fluid band Lake
Street Dive, she first discovered her love
of performing in Tennessee’s The Voices
of Bahá choir, which her father, Tom
Price, conducted. Her love of the Great
American Songbook came later, when
she heard “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” a nursery
rhyme-turned-jazz standard by Ella
Fitzgerald and the Chick Webb orchestra.
“It’s such an incredible recording,” Price
says with a laugh and hint of wonder. “I
still listen to it and I can’t believe it, in so
many ways.”
Growing up, Price watched musicals
voraciously — “a lot of the movie
musicals like with Doris Day and Judy
Garland and the big band movies,” she
says, “so I was very enamored very early
on with singing from the ’30s, ’40s, and
’50s. I feel like when I heard Ella
Fitzgerald, it was just an extension of
that. … She has so many recordings of
when she’s super young, so I think it was
easier for me to connect with a young Ella
Fitzgerald voice because she sounds like
a child, but she’s super swingin’ and
[has] an incredible command over her
voice. I could hear my child voice in that.
And I felt like I could copy it.”
Price was a soloist with the world-
touring Bahá choir by the time she was
12; she recorded her first solo CD,
Dedicated to You, in 2003, when she was
17. The title track is a swinging, small-
band arrangement of a Sammy Cahn/
Saul Chaplin/Hy Zaret song from the
1930s, sung with a flirtatious, knowing
control that sounds older than her years.
Price went on to study at the New
England Conservatory of Music, where
she continued to pursue her love of vocal
 25

Rachael & Vilray

JONNO RATTMAN
26
“It’s like being in a band. There are these give-and-go moments
where you get to step forward and do something, and then
you have to know when to step back and let somebody else do
something and keep this thing moving forward.”
Chris Funk
The Decemberists
jazz. Her second album, The Good Hours,
from 2008, is a stunning demonstration
of her command of the classic Songbook.
Her version of Duke Ellington’s “Mood
Indigo” is an almost impossibly languid
interpretation, the words spaced apart
with exquisitely deliberate randomness,
so it sounds like she’s swooning through
virtually the entire song. And on the
Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer chestnut
“That Old Black Magic,” she starts off
with a stunning a cappella verse, turning
the goofy novelty into something darkly
sorcerous.
Price says that as a singer what she
most loves about the Songbook is the
melodies. “They’re so perfect,” she
gushes. “There was such a focus then on
the construction of the melody. And it’s
honestly like a feeling, like a physical
feeling in my voice, that those melodies
still feel so good to sing.”
At the same time, though, she
recognizes that pop music today has
moved to a very different place. “I don’t
really think that there’s a strong focus on
melody, or on surprising, harmonic
changes. And I’m not saying that in a bad
way. What I find very interesting in music
right now is more based on exploration
in rhythm.”
Lake Street Dive, which easily morphs
between indie rock, alt-jazz, folk, and
other genres, can be heard as a kind of
ongoing negotiation between the melodic
pop gems of the Great American
Songbook and the more rhythm-based
music of The Beatles and classic soul.
Founded in 2004 by a group of New
England Conservatory graduates, the
band includes trumpeter and guitarist
Mike Olson, drummer Mike Calabrese,
and double bassist Bridget Kearney. New England Conservatory, but Vilray
On tracks like “Neighbor Song” from
2010’s self-titled album, Price channels a
jazzier Dusty Springfield, her voice
sliding around Kearney’s fluid bass line
while the rhythm section rocks and
sways like those “neighbors making love
upstairs.” Their cover of “Faith” on 2014’s
Fun Machine imagines George Michael
as Frank Sinatra, turning his passionate
direct insinuation into playful vocal lines
that scamper and shimmy, ushering the
’80s pop canon into the Great American
Songbook.
In the following years, the group even
moved toward funk. Keyboardist Akie
Bermiss joined the quartet on their 2018
LP Free Yourself Up, his work lending a
strong influence to songs like “Red Light
Kisses,” in which Price wails with a force
more akin to Nancy Wilson than Ella
Fitzgerald. Lake Street Dive’s most recent
song, “Making Do,” released in
September, features a big chorus, jagged
guitar solo, prominent rhythm section,
and slick production. Price sounds tough
as hell, but it’s less jazzy than just about
anything in her catalog.
Spirit of the Songbook
But Lake Street Dive’s evolution doesn’t
mean Price has abandoned her first love.
In 2019, she and composer and guitarist
Vilray released their eponymous Rachael
& Vilray, an album of intimate jazz songs.
The two originally met as students at the
(who goes by the single name) dropped
out and drifted away from music to work
at a manufacturing plant in Queens.
When Price moved to Brooklyn around
2004, she tried to get him interested in a
duo. But, he says, “I really was very
reluctant because I wasn’t playing much
at all. We did get together … after she
twisted my arm, but I had no real
confidence in it at all, so it didn’t really go
anywhere.”
The two kept in touch, though, and
when Vilray started to play and perform
again a couple of years ago, Price went to
see him and was blown away. “I didn’t
know the extent to which he was
immersed in the Great American
Songbook until I heard him play a show
solo,” she says. “He’s really well
acquainted with a lot of obscure songs
from that time, the ones that didn’t make
it into the pantheon.”
Songs like “Blue Moon” and “Autumn
Leaves” have been performed so often, by
so many people, and are so well known
that it can be hard to connect with them,
Price notes. “Whereas there’s all these
obscure songs to mine from that era that
have the same excellent construction,
subtle wordplay, and humor, and love
songs with these beautifully crafted
 27

“The Great American Songbook stays relevant, because it’s

so relevant in the culture. You hear it in every generation of
moviemaker, every generation of TV maker. They keep it alive by
putting it in people’s houses.
And I think that it’s still very relatable.”
Vilray

melodies that a lot of us have never heard
before. And when I experienced that — I
hadn’t really been singing jazz for a while
— I realized that my connection to the
music was just as strong and just as
energetic as it had ever been.”
Rachael & Vilray includes a couple of
classic covers, most notably the Peggy Lee
standard “I Love the Way You’re Breaking
My Heart.” For the most part, though, it
sounds like a collection of Great
American Songbook obscurities. But it
isn’t. Instead, most of the 12-track album
actually comprises new songs composed
in the tradition of the great songwriters
of the ’30s , ’40s, and ’50s. Vilray
demonstrates an almost preternatural
ability to capture the spirit, lyrical twists,
and melodic invention of Porters,
Gershwins, and Ellingtons past.
Those writers would often compose
with a performer in mind, Vilray says,
and he tries to do that as well. Price is so
versatile that he enjoys instead giving
her material tailored for “specific people
from yesteryear.” “Without a Thought for
My Heart,” he says, “expresses this
weirdly melancholic and enthused idea
in a very soft way,” which Price infused
with a theatricality similar to that of
Peggy Lee. “Go on Shining,” with Jon
Batiste on piano, recalls the dreamily
good-humored music of Fats Waller.
The deftly virtuosic “Laundromat
Song,” with Price and Vilray harmonizing
together, is inspired by the vocal group
The Mills Brothers. “The Mills Brothers
were choosing lyrics to accentuate the
rhythm,” Vilray says. “They would have a
lot of consonants, so the words are
almost more like a snare drum pattern
than like a lyric. So I started off that song
with the first lyrics, which are, ‘Drop your
lucky nickel down the money slot.’ That’s
just got a lot of pops in it.”
Part of the fun for both Vilray and
Price was to see how she would take
these songs composed for great singers
from the past and turn them into
something of her own. Vilray says that
his favorite of Price’s interpretations in
that respect is “At Your Mother’s House,”
a song arranged by Jacob Zimmerman,
which he wrote with the John Kirby
Orchestra in mind. Kirby’s band was
known for its suave, careful
arrangements; it left so little room for
improvisation that it was looked at
askance by some jazz critics. But, Vilray
says, “when Rachael laid her vocals over
it, it became this Louis Jordan kind of
thing, on the brink between jazz and rock
and roll, even though there was nothing
really in the arrangement that made it so.
And that was an amazing, blow-my-
mind kind of moment to hear that in the
studio.”
For her part, Rachael was hard-
pressed to pick a favorite song or
performance. “Honestly, I love them all
so much that every time I hear a new
song, I can’t believe that I get to sing it.
But I think that ‘Alone at Last’ is just an
exceptional, special song. It completely
fits within the style, but it also has
melodic turns of phrases that I’ve never
sung myself. That one’s really impressive.
And very fun. And hard to sing,” she says,
pausing to laugh. “That’s the same
thing!”
Looking ahead, Lake Street Dive has
new album, Obviously, due out in the
spring, though it’s been difficult with
COVID-19 still spreading and band
members located in Brooklyn, South
Carolina, and Boston. “Recording
remotely doesn’t really work for us,” she
says, though they’ve been writing new
material and releasing some videos, and
they feel like they’re in a good place to
start on the next record when the
pandemic lifts.
Vilray and Price also hope to make
another duo record. Vilray says they have
songs and arrangements ready for
whenever they can get back in the studio.
There’s still a demand for music that
sounds like it was written 90 years ago, as
it turns out.
“The Great American Songbook stays
relevant, because it’s so relevant in the
culture,” Vilray says. “You hear it in every
generation of moviemaker, every
generation of TV maker. They keep it
alive by putting it in people’s houses. And
I think that it’s still very relatable. You
know, maybe it’s fewer people than it was
in 1960. And certainly, it’s fewer people
than it was in 1940. But I think that the
culture keeps it as a real American
tradition.” ■
 NEW AND COMING SOON FROM
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113
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28
 29

REFRAMING
‘THE FATHER
OF AMERICAN
MUSIC’
Reckoning with blackface
minstrelsy and the legacy
of Stephen Foster
by Kim Ruehl
COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
30
“With minstrelsy — the history and the image of what it is — we
are quick to shy away. You can be embarrassed, ashamed, hurt,
disgusted, whatever, we want to just shut the door on these things.
But I think it has a story.”
Dr. Dwandalyn Reece
Executive committee chair at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC
W
hen Stephen Foster,
often referred to as “the
father of American
music,” was 9 years old, he
and his friends joined a theater group.
For that brief moment, the young white
boy — who would become known
worldwide not for his stage
performances, but for the wealth of
songwriting he would release into the
world — became a well-paid child star of
the stage. Mimicking the prevailing form
of entertainment that he and his friends
saw adults enjoy in their corner of
western Pennsylvania, Foster joined
others who rubbed black grease on their
skin and sang songs with titles like “Zip
Coon” and “Jim Crow.”
As Ken Emerson explained in his
1998 book, Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and
the Rise of American Popular Culture,
“Stephen Foster was among the first
white boys to do what white boys (and the
occasional girl) have been doing ever
since — mimicking black music, or what
they think is black music and black
style.”
From Foster to Elvis Presley to the
present, white American performers
have drawn from Black culture and
tradition to build their own popularity
and profit. Yet, even when the nation
spiraled into civil war and later fought
over civil rights for Black citizens,
musicians of all backgrounds have
always found common ground and
collaboration despite, across, and even
occasionally because of the
discriminatory practices of their day.
Still, it’s hard to look back at the kind
of blackface minstrelsy that influenced
one of American history’s most prolific
songwriters as anything other than
deeply bizarre at best, and disturbingly
racist at least. But the songs that Foster
and others composed for the minstrel
shows of the mid-19th century retain
value because they can be vehicles for

learning about just how commonplace
and casual were the roots of racism in
America.
Consider this now-often-omitted
verse from “Oh! Susanna”:
I jumped aboard the telegraph and was seen through the people who were
traveled down the river,
Electric fluid magnified, and killed five
hundred nigger.
The bullgine bust, the horse ran off,
really thought I’d die;
I shut my eyes to hold my breath — somebody. So the minstrel shows built
Susanna, don’t you cry.
The verse is followed by a rousing
banjo and vocal chorus as we all know it:
“Oh! Susanna, oh don’t you cry for me /
for I come from Alabama with a banjo on
my knee.”
Because so much of the history of
slavery is often tied up with images of the
South, many assume that was the
primary backdrop for the minstrel
tradition. Like many other minstrel
songwriters, Foster created music that
was purely from his imagination of what
enslaved Black people looked like and
how they felt, having never actually
experienced Southern Black people or
culture firsthand.
Folk singer-songwriter and song
collector Dom Flemons explains this is
something that neither began nor ended
with blackface minstrelsy in America. Its
roots stretch back to the European
countries from which so many American
immigrants came.
“There’s a history of German folk
orchestras,” he notes, “traveling and
showing [off] folk dance music and folk
instruments and whatnot. By the 1840s,
this tradition turned into a presentation
of African American plantation life as it
putting this show on. … In those days,
before mass media, this is the first time
you have any exposure to any of this
foreign music at all. The best thing you’ve
got is someone doing an impression of
off of this idea.”
In his book, Emerson drives the point
home: “A shared feeling of superiority to
blacks was one of the few things that
united a nation of immigrants, many of
them more recent arrivals than the
African Americans they mocked.”
Now, as the United States moves
forward through amplified racial tension
that has played out on the streets and in
government, it’s important to consider
the way American musical traditions
have impacted the journey to where we
are now, both for better and for worse.
‘The First Movement of Minstrelsy’
Many people first encounter minstrel
music, specifically Foster’s songs, in
childhood. Schoolchildren across the
United States grow up knowing a verse or
two of various Foster tunes like “Oh!
Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks
at Home (Swanee River),” and others.
These songs are so pervasive, they’re
31
often called folk songs, although they
have a known composer and were
originally written for success in
mainstream entertainment.
And it makes sense that childhood is
the entrée for many to Foster’s catalog,
since his own attraction to minstrelsy
began early in life. In the 1820s and ’30s,
when a young Foster was moving around
frequently as his family struggled
financially, the opportunity to engage
with minstrel shows was one constant in
an otherwise somewhat chaotic
childhood.
“Stephen Foster would compose so
many songs about home in part because
he seldom knew one for long,” Emerson
wrote. And it would be this fact that
would draw him to imagining stories of
the dark-skinned people whom he had
rarely if ever encountered in his daily life,
those who had been torn from their
homes and forced to serve someone
else’s.
These days, folks are likely to make it
to adulthood without encountering these
songs’ original verses that are riddled
with dialect and language we now
recognize as racist.
But some, like Flemons, ask listeners
to step outside of contemporary
assumptions in order to understand the
art for the role it played when it was
created. After all, when most songwriters
sit down to write a song, they are usually
not thinking of how it will play a century
later.
“The first movement of minstrelsy,”
32

Dom Flemons

TIMOTHY DUFFY
 33

“To acknowledge that African Americans have emotions, feelings

like longing, love, heartbreak, loss, anger, any emotions besides
working for the Man — that is the innovation of Stephen Foster. This
does not mean that the songs are not without fault.”
Dom Flemons

Flemons explains, “came from a
collection of singular players coming
together and bringing these [stringband]
instruments together. … Stephen Foster is
a songwriter that is brought up near the
Ohio River, Upper Appalachian area,
connected with the greater Mississippi
Valley traveling line for entertainers. So,
he is part of this world of songwriters
that are a part of what would become Tin
Pan Alley in New York City. He is writing
for an audience that is going to a minstrel
show that is going up and down the
Mississippi River. He is writing, to his
imagination, the romantic images that
would pull on the heartstrings of the
American public.
“One of the things that makes
Stephen Foster so innovative, in terms of
the American Songbook, [is] hard to
imagine now. But in a world where
African Americans have no voice
whatsoever, his songs are humanizing
statements about the African American
experience, even though they are very
racist for our modern sensibilities. To
acknowledge that African Americans
have emotions, feelings like longing, love,
heartbreak, loss, anger, any emotions
besides working for the Man — that is the
innovation of Stephen Foster.”
Flemons pauses before adding: “This
does not mean that the songs are not
without fault.”
Revising and Reconsidering
Indeed, when Flemons performed a
concert of Foster’s music in Cincinnati in
2015, he bumped up against some of the
most problematic songs from Foster’s
canon and had to wrestle with how to
present them. Numerous other
performers have struggled with this as
well. Emmylou Harris and James Taylor,
for example, who have recorded Foster’s
music since the civil rights achievements
of the 1960s, chose to omit the offensive
verses altogether. Like them and many
others, Flemons determined the best way
to bring these songs into a modern
context is to eliminate troublesome
language.
For “My Old Kentucky Home,” he only
had to strike the word “darkie.” For
another song, “Ring, Ring the Banjo,”
however, he struck all the lyrics and
simply delivered it as an instrumental.
“‘Ring, Ring the Banjo’ has
completely, outrageously offensive
lyrics,” he says. “It’s not even worth
telling you what the lyrics are, they’re so
bad. You would just have to look up the
sheet music and say, ‘Wow, okay, back in
the vault,’ in terms of the lyrics. So we
handled that as a bones instrumental. I
did it instrumentally and it wound up
working out very nicely. It had some good
breaks, and we arranged a wonderful
version without using the words.”
Flemons also notes that he approved
this interpretation only in the context of
the Stephen Foster program. “But that’s
not something I would take into my
regular concerts,” he continues. “I would
only do that specifically to show off the
bones and show off the banjo in one
particular way.”
Others, like Jake Blount, whose 2020
album Spider Tales tackles the legacy of
racism in the American songbook,
deliberately choose not to perform songs
that began in minstrel shows. Early last
year, Blount told Banjo News that
minstrel songs only belong “in the
archive. These tunes are the soundtrack
to domestic terrorism. … My basic
inclination is, if it’s a minstrel tune, don’t
play it.”
This debate between retaining bits of
history in a new context and just
throwing it all into an archival vault, of
course, is familiar beyond the realm of
American music. It is the same type of
debate that has swirled for years around
the Confederate flag and monuments
34
across the South.
But there is a vast difference between a
statue and a song. The former is often
created to honor power, while the latter
might be created for a number of reasons
— from momentary emotions to topical
statements within a brief bubble of time.
When a statue is erected, it remains until
removed, but a song once released from its
writer may go through infinite evolutions,
may be broken up like an old car and used
for its parts.
Emerson’s book spotlights one shining
example of this. “Foster was skeptical, at
times even derisive about the anti-slavery
movement,” he wrote. “But that did not
prevent abolitionists from turning ‘Oh!
Susanna’ into ‘The North Star’: ‘Oh! Star of
Freedom / Tis the star for me / Twill lead
me off to Canada / There I will be free.’”
This outcropping of the folk process
should be taken in concert with the fact
that white musicians have been imitating
Black music — and other expressions of
Black culture — for centuries, chiefly
because of how entertaining and
influential the minstrel shows were for the
entire American entertainment industry.
Its factuality doesn’t equate to
acceptability, though; it only shows that
American music was — and often
continues to be — so tangled up with racial
appropriation and cultural evolution. (“It’s
almost as though blackface were
inseparable from our national identity,”
wrote Emerson.)
Dr. Dwandalyn Reece, executive
committee chair at the National Museum
of African American History and Culture
in Washington, DC, notes that, “With
minstrelsy — the history and the image of
what it is — we are quick to shy away. You
can be embarrassed, ashamed, hurt,
disgusted, whatever, we want to just shut
the door on these things. But I think it has
a story.”
She continues, “ As a museum … we
want to be able to engage with difficult
things and understand what they are
about. I see a lot of musicians wrestling
with that, wrestling in a way that we could
be honest: African Americans have been
part of string traditions, folk music,
Appalachian music for centuries. Since its
origins.”
This is a fact that has become well-
known in the roots music world, where
performers like Blount and Flemons, and
Flemons’ former Carolina Chocolate
Drops bandmate Rhiannon Giddens, have
built their careers playing from the
Appalachian stringband tradition.
Giddens, in fact, counts among her
instruments a replica of a minstrel banjo,
which she wields as an opportunity to
educate her audience during her live
performances.
In 2018, she told NPR Music, “Before
whites took up the banjo in the ’40s and the
’50s — that is, the 1840s and ’50s — they
were gourd instruments, they were
homemade instruments and they
sounded like this. They were deep and they
were dark and that’s what the banjo sound
was.”
That music fans the world over have
come to know the banjo as a bright, jangly
instrument is a result of appropriation
that can be traced back to the minstrel
stage. Whether one sees its usage there as
an expression of racism or as a moment in
the evolution of American culture is
another matter. More likely, it is both these
things at once.
Drawing Lines and Crossing Over
So is there any cultural benefit to
unpacking the influence of minstrelsy on
American culture? What about its legacy,
specifically in the realm of American folk
and roots music? Is it enough for “woke”
people with good intentions to give credit
where it’s due, or is there a better way to
balance the centuries of influence Black
culture has had on white artists’
creations?
After all, there was a time when all the
elements of what’s now considered roots
music — country, folk, bluegrass, blues, and
soul — were viewed by performers and
audiences alike as one cohesive style, a
musical Pangaea that was ripped apart by a
sort of tectonic shift in American culture.
When the recording industry reordered the
MICHELLE LOTKER

Jake Blount
35
36

Sheet music from 1864. Words by George Cooper; music by Stephen C. Foster.

way musicians made a living, executives
split musical styles up to market Black
artists to Black audiences via “race music,”
and white artists to white audiences via
“hillbilly music.”
According to Reece, the recording
industry’s decision from almost a
century ago to split complex American
music along the lines of race “really set a
dynamic that continues to play out
today.” She muses, “Who crosses [over]?
Who is authentic? Who’s a character?
Who’s a real version of this and that?
These dialogues are always coming back
in different forms and instances. Are you
doing caricature, or are you showing a
level of appreciation? There are no easy
answers, particularly because of the way
culture works. With cultural landscape,
you listen to something and you may be
influenced by it and it comes out in your
music.”
To that end, it’s worthwhile to
consider the influence minstrelsy had on
Black musicians after the Civil War. After
all, the mode of performance was so
pervasive and such a certain avenue
toward financial solvency for its
performers that it’s not especially
surprising that now-freed Black people
might see in it an opportunity for both
artistic and financial advancement
during the early days of Reconstruction.
Indeed, Black blackface performers
COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
became incredibly popular on the circuit,
finding audiences around the United
States as well as performing abroad.
“It was the first time you had African
American performers being presented
onstage,” says Flemons. “And they’re
using their talents to make money,
independent wages, which was kind of
an interesting new choice. … It was the
first time you had large amounts of
African American people that were
entertainers traveling internationally:
Australia, Tivoli, Belgium, France,
because they have big music halls
[where] they present these minstrel
shows. Then they start having competing
white and Black minstrel shows, and the
like, all the way up to the 1890s.”
Here, Flemons ties the minstrel
tradition to circus culture and,
specifically, clowning. “Because you can’t
tell who they are, [clowns] can say stuff
that would be completely inappropriate
in any other moment in society. ... Of
course, in blackface minstrelsy, they turn
that into a Negro clown. And so the Negro
clown can say all sorts of things that a
white guy can’t say, even if they want to
say more. Again, the minstrel show is
playing on an idea of the duality of
American society.”
Reece takes this idea even further.
“Minstrelsy is about seeing through the
lens of a people and a culture, through
someone else’s eyes,” she says. “Part of
reclaiming anything that’s been used to
oppress you is to take that same thing
and use it as — I don’t know, maybe
‘weapon’ is too strong — but owning it
and telling truth. So much of our history
in the United States is [us] not wrestling
with issues. … That history is wrapped up
in our music today.”
Indeed, it’s wrapped up in the way
Lesley Riddle’s unique approach to the
guitar has instead been passed down
through generations of country and folk
players as the Carter Scratch, named not
for the Black man who originated it but
for the white woman who made it
famous. It’s in the influence of lesser-
known blues icons like Robert Johnson
37
and Son House upon generations of far-
more-famous white artists as variant as
Bob Dylan and Robert Plant. It’s in the
fact that organizations such as the Music
Maker Relief Foundation have been
formed simply to try to discover and
promote the Black artists whose work
has indelibly marked traditional
American music. And it’s in so many
other ways to try to draw a line between
where appreciation ends and
appropriation begins. That would be like
trying to delineate at what shade, exactly,
blue becomes green.
What we may understand now better
than Foster could have in his lifetime is a
result of a couple centuries of growth in
American culture, although there are
still more questions than answers.
Nonetheless, blackface and minstrelsy
still hold entertainment value in certain
corners of society, as evidenced by white
musicians profiting from intrinsically
Black music styles or the occasional
public figure backpedaling from photos
of themselves in blackface at a party
when they were younger.
“It’s more than just blackening your
face and [indulging] the stereotypes,”
says Reece. “It also did a psychic damage
to African Americans. When those
presences reappear over and over again,
you’re reliving that trauma and
perception.”
All the issues that tie together in the
legacy of minstrelsy amount to “the
ultimate sin that we’re still trying to
struggle through with our public dialogue
and the history of our country,” she says.
“It all plays out in our music and it’s in
our culture. What happens in our
entertainment is a mirror of who we are
as a society.” ■
38
CANON FODDER
The Endless American Songbook
By Caitlin Wolper
Caleb Caudle
Caleb Caudle believes there are numerous entry points into
the Great American Songbook. Jazz fans might enter through
Duke Ellington; country fans, like him, through Willie Nelson.
Caudle’s journey began with a 25-cent Goodwill buy: Nelson’s
Stardust on cassette. With each song he discovered, he was
inspired to seek out the original writers from Tin Pan Alley and
earlier. One track in particular that has stuck with him is Billie
Holiday’s jazzy rendition of “Autumn in New York.” Originally
composed by Vernon Duke for the 1934 musical Thumbs Up!,
Caudle says that Holiday’s 1952 version is “one of my favorite
pieces of music ever.”
Caudle’s eighth studio album, Better Hurry Up, came out last
April and was recorded at the infamous Cash Cabin, built in
Nashville by Johnny Cash in 1979. Caudle compared it to
“[feeling] like you’re in the shadow of giants.” With contributors
Mickey Raphael, Dennis Crouch, Fred Eltringham, Russ Pahl,
and others, Caudle produced original tracks alongside a cover of
the Hank Williams classic “Howlin’ at the Moon.”
Caudle has a noted reverence for numerous genres of
musical lineage; ultimately, he’s inspired by their relatable
emotional bedrock.
“To me, what it ultimately all boils down to is that these songs
are timeless, and they were created in a space where I feel like
the writers kind of knew that,” Caudle says. “I always try to take
that kind of approach with my music, and I think that’s probably
from that same train of thought: ‘We can write this now and it’ll
still be relevant in 100 years.’”
Of course, it’s not just the lyrics that mark a standard; the
sound and singer cannot be forgotten. “The longevity comes not
just from the writing, but from the people who were performing
the songs, everyone from Frank Sinatra to the recent [Bob]
Dylan stuff he did where he covered all the standards,” Caudle
says.
Plus, the performer has to really feel what they sing. Caudle
maintains that a good cover comes down to conviction — a
sentiment certainly not limited to the ’40s and ’50s. Caudle sees
songs by more modern musicians like Randy Newman at home
among those older standards.
“I’m turned off by anyone where I immediately know they
don’t mean what they’re saying. A lot of singers, especially Billie
Holiday — where it’s dripping with conviction always — you
can’t really get away from it,” Caudle says. “That’s what it comes
down to for me. I gotta know you mean it.”
He names John Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things” as
an example: “It’s pretty far outside what you would typically
think of, but it’s pure artistry and you’re seeing someone take it
to a different place, and still, it sounds like somebody who
means it.”
MIKE DUNN
39
40

LIZ LINDER

Carly Simon’s book about her friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Touched by the Sun: My Friendship with Jackie (Picador), was released in
paperback in November.

CARRYING
A TORCH
Carly Simon’s most heartfelt standards album turns 40
I
n 1981, after nine collections
of her own songs, Carly Simon made
something without precedent
among her peers — a themed album
whose contents, 90 percent by other
writers, spanned from the 1930s to the
1980s. Harry Nilsson’s A Little Touch of
Schmilsson in the Night in 1973 was a
straightforward oldies album, but Torch
was different. Its 11 loved-and-lost-and-
losing-my-head songs mixed Rodgers &
Hart, Hoagy Carmichael, and Alec Wilder
with more recent, but lesser-known
compositions by Nicholas Holmes (from
the jazz–rock ensemble White Elephant),
Stephen Sondheim, and Simon herself.
The unexpected maneuver turned out to
be remarkably prescient: Today, it’s
almost obligatory for singer-songwriters
to turn in a standards or covers album.
Torch was far more enterprising and
imaginative than most.
“I’d always wanted to do an album of
torch songs, songs I’d known as a child
because my mother sang them and my
father played them on the piano,” says
Simon, calling from Martha’s Vineyard.
by Charles Donovan
“My father published the songbooks of
writers like Oscar Hammerstein,
Richard Rodgers, Arthur Schwartz, and
Howard Dietz, and we got to know those
people. They would come to our house
and play things like ‘I’ll Be Around’ and
‘Spring Is Here,’ so I knew those songs
indigenously.”
The torch song — touching on lost,
unrequited, or broken love — is an
unusual notion; there aren’t many
examples of song classifications for such
specific emotional straits. There’s no
genre, for example, for tunes about
infidelity or heartwarming
rapprochements. It wasn’t by chance that
Simon was drawn in this direction. In
1981, her marriage to James Taylor
splintering irreparably, she was living
the torch experience. “Every song I chose
had a resonance for me,” she adds. “It
was a time in my life of lost love. I was
carrying a torch for my marriage.”
Her label did not share her passion
for the project. After years with Elektra,
Simon was one album into a new deal
with Warner Bros. 1980’s Come Upstairs,
41
a mod-ish rock album, had revived her
fortunes after a slump in 1979. “Mo Ostin
[former Warner Bros CEO] was very
much against Torch,” she says. “That he
put it out at all was, I guess, a concession.
But they didn’t want to put any money
into it.”
Lynn Goldsmith, the multimedia
artist who shot the photo on the album’s
sleeve, confirms this. “Carly really had to
fight the label. She was expressing
herself as an artist, saying, ‘I don’t want
to do the same thing all the time. I want to
do what my heart is telling me to do.’”
Blending Old and New
Torch was quite unlike the perfunctory
standards albums that would later
become commonplace in the industry.
These have tended to treat pre-rock pop
as cozy, aural comfort food and often
seem born of market research. Torch was
the opposite — an act of unflinching
self-revelation. Simon made no overtly
self-conscious attempts to alter her
approach to singing, tackling each song
42
not as a period piece, but as if it were
being sung for the first time. Her rich,
ardent voice, using glissando for an
aching emotional effect, was a perfect
match for the music.
“It was so natural and easy. I’ve never
tried to sound like anyone else or to
sound a certain way,” says Simon. “It’s
just my voice coming out of me, Carly.”
Then there was the blending of old
and new, of known and unknown; the
jettisoning of obviousness. Song
selections arose from informal jams
with Mike Mainieri, producer of all three
of Simon’s Warner Bros. albums, during
the Come Upstairs sessions. The
standards included “I Get Along Without
You Very Well,” “I’ll Be Around,” “Spring
Is Here,” “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t
Good,” and “Body and Soul.”
Keen to achieve an unusual blend,
Simon included “Hurt,” an R&B cri de
coeur made famous by Roy Hamilton
and Timi Yuro, and “Pretty Strange,”
written by Jon Hendricks and Randy
Weston, which appeared on Hendricks’
1959 album A Good Git-Together.
But Simon also sought newer songs
that could sit comfortably with the old.
Mainieri had introduced her to his
friend, writer and musician Nicholas
Holmes. “I was looking for songs off the
beaten track,” she says. She selected two
by Holmes, adapting the lyrics “to make
them more mine and adjust them to
being sung by a woman.” In “Blue of
Blue,” the self-abasing protagonist has
lost her lover, realizing too late the depth
of her feeling. With a deliciously
heartsick pace, despondent melody lines,
and David Sanborn’s restless, swooning
sax, it establishes the tone of the album.
Although there are orchestrations,
they’re mixed subtly to achieve a
cinematic nightclub ambience. The
second Holmes entry is “What Shall We
Do with the Child,” in which a woman
reflects on an extinguished love affair,
bracing herself for questions from her
fatherless infant.
The next puzzle piece was Stephen
Sondheim’s “Not a Day Goes By,” from the
musical he’d also completed in 1981,
Merrily We Roll Along. Simon visited
Sondheim at home for a private
performance. “He said, ‘I’ll play you one
that’s the end of the show but it’s actually
the beginning because the show is front
to back and back to front.’” As the
composer played, Simon began to cry.
She retrieved a pin from her blouse,
pressing it to her earlobe in the hope that
physical pain might stem her tears. “I
was crying so hard and I didn’t want to
stop him from playing. It was so
beautiful.”
“Not a Day Goes By” is the apex of
torch sensibility, a song whose narrator
is reeling from excruciating loss,
foreseeing nothing but a lonely lifetime
of anguish and fixation. “I love the fact
that it doesn’t shirk from repetition —
‘Day after day after day after day ... ,’”
says Simon. “I used to think repetition
was a cop-out, but in ‘Not a Day Goes By’ it
is dazzling, the way it gets the thought
and the emotion across and across and
across, melodically and lyrically.”
Simon’s sole original composition on
Torch was “From the Heart,” a snapshot
of a moment in a drawn-out marital
hostility when a partner realizes, with a
painful midnight lurch, that love matters
more than being right. It’s tempting to
trace a backward line from this song to
“James” from 1980’s Come Upstairs and
“We’re So Close” from 1979’s Spy. “We’re
So Close,” an ironic torch song, depicts a
union in denial, drained of the lifeblood
of kind words, thoughtful gestures, and
tenderness. “James,” one year later,
frames love in more quixotic terms.
“From the Heart,” the concluding entry in
this marriage trilogy, describes a sliver of
hope in a moribund partnership with
such openness that listener becomes
eavesdropper:
One of us slipped last night
And said “Darling”
There in the middle of the night
Between dream and sleep
Did you say it or did I
I don’t know
But it interrupted the war.
“I wanted to have one song on Torch that
was my own, if I could,” Simon recalls. “It
was kind of an odd melody for me — I
don’t think I quite got it right — but I
think the words were pretty right on.”
Moved to Tears
Sessions for Torch involved multiple
orchestrators (Don Sebesky, Marty Paich,
Robert M. Freedman) with a core band of
Warren Bernhardt (piano), Hugh
McCracken (guitar), Anthony Jackson
(bass), and Rick Marotta (drums).
Featured guests were Sanborn, Lee
Ritenour, and the Brecker Brothers.
Simon sang from the vocal booth at the

“Carly was making the album she wanted to make. This was before
pop artists did ‘standards’ records. I give her props for that.
My most vivid memory is of Stephen Sondheim in the control room
weeping when he heard her singing.”
Scott Litt
Power Station, New York, with the
orchestra in the main room.
“The atmosphere was great,”
remembers Scott Litt, then a young staff
engineer. “It was pretty trippy with all the
different arrangers and musicians, but
super fun. Carly was making the album
she wanted to make. This was before pop
artists did ‘standards’ records. I give her
props for that. My most vivid memory is of
Stephen Sondheim in the control room
weeping when he heard her singing.”
Sondheim’s tears make perfect sense.
Without recourse to camp or excess,
Simon’s voice interrogates the substance
of each song, bringing its defining
emotion to the surface. She describes her
process: “I’m a highly emotional person.
I’ve learned over the years in recording
studios to stay on either side of an
emotion, either creeping up to it or, having
felt it, going down on the other side. If I try
to sing in the peak, I find I can’t.”
No conversation about Torch would
be complete without mentioning its
cover. Simon’s LP jackets are frequently
interpreted as titillation; in fact, they tell
stories. For Torch, she’s in luxury
eveningwear, in the grip of a strange,
pleading dance. Her expression is
ambiguous, as if it has passed through
rapture on its way to something darker
and sadder. The title is spelled out in
bloody slashes of scarlet paint.
As Goldsmith, the photographer,
recalls, “We were at Carly’s home in New
York. She was going through her divorce
and the first time we tried shooting, she
was crying so much that I said, ‘This isn’t
working.’ I mean, it fit Torch, but I didn’t
want to be shooting while she was feeling
Engineer on ‘Torch’
so low.” Goldsmith had recently met
young Dynasty star Al Corley. “He was
very tall and handsome. I thought, ‘She’s
gonna like Al.’ I called him and said,
‘Would you like to come with me because
I could use your help, and maybe you
could be a model or help me move the
lights around?’ And as soon as we
arrived, there was chemistry and I knew
Carly wouldn’t be crying.”
The winning shot was taken on the
roof at nighttime. “I wanted to throw
myself off because I was in such a lather
about the breakup,” says Simon, “but Al
was a wonderful shoulder to lean on.
Lynn played the music in the background
and I was moving to it and you can barely
see Al in the picture, but I saw a lot of him
after that — he was my boyfriend for
three years. Lynn picked the right guy.”
On the cover, Corley’s black apparel and
back-to-the-camera positioning render
him almost invisible — an inspired
touch, given that the songs on Torch are
sung to vanished suitors.
The Test of Time
Torch met with a rave review in Rolling
Stone and cracked the Billboard Top 50
upon its release. In 1983, when the first
part of Linda Ronstadt’s blockbuster
trilogy with bandleader and arranger
Nelson Riddle appeared, Mo Ostin
realized the opportunity he’d missed.
“He said to me, ‘I made the biggest
mistake in my career by not pushing
Torch,’” Simon recalls. The vindication,
albeit too late, clearly means something
to her.
“It was an almost uniquely vulnerable
43
point in her life,” says Sheila Weller,
Simon’s first serious biographer (Girls
Like Us, Simon & Schuster, 2008). “Her
son, Ben, had had an illness so
distressing to Carly that she lost 25
pounds. Her marriage was at its breaking
point. She had also had a kind of — very
human — breakdown onstage in
Pittsburgh. So Torch was born of that
fear, terror, sadness, and difficulty. I have
experienced what her friend Mia Farrow
calls her lack of buffers, her lack of
‘celebrity’ protection of her emotions.
What entered her performance of the
songs, and her photo on the cover, is an
example of that extreme — and quite
radiant — emotion and humanity.”
Later in her career, Simon returned
to conceptual standards albums with
1990’s My Romance and 1997’s Film
Noir — both impressive. Even though it
lacked the force of character and
emotional investment of its
predecessors, 2005’s soupy Moonlight
Serenade (made in two days with
arrangements supervised by Richard
Perry largely without Simon’s input)
restored her to the American Top 10.
Although Simon considers My
Romance more cohesive, it is Torch
where her recorded relationship with the
Great American Songbook begins, taking
listeners on a riveting journey to the
bruised recesses of the human heart.
Where more superficial standards
collections are forgotten, it remains as
compelling at 40 as it was when it came
out. “I got to do what I wanted to do as an
artist,” says Simon. “It was a real
departure and a very emotional,
important album for me.” ■
44

VIOLENT
VERSES
Modern musicians grapple with
the legacy of murder ballads
by Stacy Chandler
JANE BEAIRD
45
46
“The murder ballad is a tradition in music, yes, particularly in
country, blues, and bluegrass, but do we need to be upholding it
and singing those songs anymore?”
Allison Moorer
I
t’s a tale as old as time: Boy
meets girl, boy loses girl. Boy
laments that his soul is consigned to
hell because the reason he lost the
girl is because he killed her.
It’s heard in “Pretty Polly,” in which
Willie invites his fiancée along on a cozy
journey “over hills and valleys so deep”
until they arrive, to her surprise, at a
hole in the ground — the grave he tells
her he spent the previous night digging
just for her.
It’s heard in “Knoxville Girl,” where a
different Willie ends a Sunday evening
stroll with his lady friend by beating her
to death with a stick, then turning
himself in the next morning because he
feels kind of bad about it.
With some variations on the theme,
the girl gets it in “Tom Dooley,” “Omie
Wise,” “Little Sadie,” “Down in the Willow
Garden,” and many other songs, some
centuries old, that have become part of
the traditional music canon.
A playlist of these songs, all of which
have real-life stories behind them,
would feel like a macabre marathon of
true crime podcasts — except no one is
digging into motives or methods, and no
one is crusading for justice. It’s just
accepted that women were murdered in
these songs, for reasons as scant as
“dark and roving eyes,” the hint of an
out-of-wedlock pregnancy, a
troublesome past, or sometimes no
discernable reason at all.
But not all of these men were total
monsters: Some murder ballads take
pains to assure listeners that he loved
her, after all.
If that feels uncomfortably close to
real-life, modern-day violence against

women, that’s because it is.
‘Pretty Polly’ Problems
Murder ballads put musicians in a bit of a
bind. Can they sing lyrics like “He stabbed
her in the heart and her heart’s blood did
flow / And into the grave Pretty Polly did
go” or “I took her by her golden curls and I
drug her round and round / Throwing her
into the river that flows through Knoxville
town” without glorifying brutality? Is
“tradition” a good enough reason to keep
playing these songs in jams or onstage,
often in the presence of young people who
may well wonder why these stories
continue to be told?
Dirk Powell, for one, can’t anymore.
He grew up listening to his Papaw
play “Pretty Polly” on banjo during
family visits to Kentucky.
“He played an absolutely beautiful
version of it, musically, that was very
unique. And it was one of the songs of his
that I was the most proud of because it
was one that was most unique to him,”
Powell says from his home in Lafayette,
Louisiana. “You know, a lot of standard
traditional songs, a lot of people play the
same song and it sounds kind of the
same and it’s great, but they haven’t
really put their own spin on it. But he
played chords and had a way of doing it
that I’d never heard anybody else do. So it
was a precious song to me.”
Naturally, “Pretty Polly” became part
of Powell’s own repertoire as he found
his own genre-spanning spin on
traditional American music.
“Like so many other people, I sang the
words as if they didn’t mean anything,
you know, as if they weren’t relevant to
this moment, that they were from some
other era and therefore didn’t have
power,” he says.
But then a couple years ago, as he was
singing “Pretty Polly” during a
soundcheck, he found himself suddenly
unable to ignore the song’s violent lyrics.
How Polly expresses trepidation —
“Willie, oh Willie, I’m afraid of your
ways” — and begs for her life. How Willie
puts his hands on her body and ends her
life — “He stabbed her in the heart and
her heart’s blood did flow.” And how he
dispassionately covers the grave and
heads home, “leaving nothing behind
him but the wild birds to mourn.”
Hearing those lyrics coming out of
his mouth, Powell thought of his teenage
daughters.
“I remember my daughters watching
me sing words like that to those kinds of
songs. And watching them struggle to
47
accept them and then just ask
themselves, ‘Why is this okay? Well, I
guess if all the adults think it’s okay and
everybody’s just brushing it aside, I guess
it’s okay.’”
Powell decided he could no longer
brush the song’s violence aside, so he
decided to bury it. “I just thought, I’m not
thinking about him anymore, the man
who kills and abuses women. He’s not
getting any more attention from me. He’s
not getting any of that sort of romantic,
anti-hero, weird glorification that doesn’t
explore it in any real way. And sure, the
song is called ‘Pretty Polly,’ but at the end
of the song, it’s about him. He’s the one
that turns to go home, leaving the
turtledoves to mourn, and I just literally
said to myself in the middle of a verse,
I’m never singing those words again. I
just can’t give it any more.”
For his next album, 2020’s When I
Wait for You, Powell recorded a new
song to replace that old standard. In “I
Ain’t Playing Pretty Polly,” the verses
relate stories of strong women in his
family and the men who loved them
well. “I ain’t playing ‘Pretty Polly’ or
‘Rosalie McFall,’” he sings in the chorus.
“I ain’t playing ‘Knoxville Girl,’ no, none
of them at all / No more tales of women
killed by drunken violent men / They
48
don’t deserve their stories told / I won’t
raise my voice again.”
As Powell started playing “I Ain’t
Playing Pretty Polly” live over the past
couple years, a few people viewed it as
turning his back on tradition, a
misapplication of modern sensibilities to
a piece of historical music, he says. But
he’s also received thanks from women
who have themselves been victims of
domestic violence, and that carries far
more weight with him.
“If I have offered anything that shows
them some understanding and makes
them feel understood or seen, then that’s
what it’s all about,” Powell says.
One such note of thanks came from a
peer in the music industry, singer-
songwriter Allison Moorer, whose 2019
book and companion album, Blood,
grappled with her mother’s murder at
the hands of her father, who turned the
rifle on himself immediately afterward
in the family’s Alabama front yard when
Moorer was a teenager.
“I needed to hear this. Everyone
should,” Moorer wrote in a social media
post just after Powell released “I Ain’t
Playing Pretty Polly” last summer. “The
murder ballad is a tradition in music,
yes, particularly in country, blues, and
bluegrass, but do we need to be
upholding it and singing those songs
anymore? I hope other musicians will
take Dirk’s lead and stop retelling tales,
real or imagined, of women being
murdered because they were the object
of some possessive drunk’s affection, or
wait … let’s be honest … it isn’t and never
has been about affection, it’s always been
and always will be about control,
obsession, and rage.
“Violence against women is a
problem that we have failed to address in
a real way,” she continued. “In many
situations, it’s complicated. And the
psychological effects of abuse are
complicated too. But what isn’t
complicated about violence against
women is the very fact that it hasn’t ever
been and never will be something that
should be considered anything but
absolutely intolerable.”
If It Bleeds, It Leads
As modern society has started to reckon
with violence against women —
examining its root causes and effects and
adding laws and protections aimed at
preventing it — murder ballads have
stuck around. They haven’t died off like
their subjects did, because people can’t
get enough of them.
Across time, languages, and regions,
people love a story — and all the better if
it’s set to music. Which is why ballads,
songs that tell a story, have endured in
the American folk tradition, sometimes
for hundreds of years.
European settlers, particularly from
the British Isles, brought most of the
ballads familiar to American ears,
though some sprang up from events that
took place on this side of the pond.
However loosely, they’re usually based on
real events, whether persistent rumors
that hung on through generations of
seafaring communities or, in the case of
killings, covered by newspapers and
drawing breathless crowds outside
courthouses.
Sometimes the songs were printed
and sold on single sheets of paper called
broadsides, but often they were shared
simply by playing and singing the songs
person to person or at small gatherings.
As the songs transmitted, the details and
sometimes even the titles changed over
time, but the core stories tended to stay
intact.
While some ballads celebrate heroes
like John Henry or Casey Jones, many
commemorate darker characters and
JOAN BAEZ
events — the same impulse that drives
our “true crime” obsession today.
 49

Dirk Powell
 50

Wild Ponies

LAURA SCHNEIDER

“If it bleeds, it leads,” quips Doug
Williams of Nashville duo Wild Ponies.
“It’s just like modern news.” Murder
ballads dish up sensationalism —
historians liken them to modern-day
tabloid journalism — but also, Williams
theorizes, a feeling of relief in listeners.
“You go back to Roman gladiators,”
he says. “People could sit there in the
stands, they could watch the lions eat a
Christian and they say, ‘Well, shit, at
least that’s not me.’”
There’s also a morbid curiosity in
what would drive someone to kill, though
few murder ballads provide anything
close to a satisfactory answer.
“Not that it’s ever justified, but what
would drive someone to that point?”
Williams muses. “You know, ‘her dark
and roving eye’ doesn’t seem quite
enough. So it’s just kind of looking at the
human condition and what would push
them into that position.”
Between the lines of murder ballads,
listeners may well find a warning, a
moral to the story. On the surface, they
might be a sort of public service
announcement against lingering alone
with shady men or the potentially ruinous
consequences of premarital sex. But you
don’t have to dig too much deeper to find
another kind of warning as well.
“They’re for entertainment, but also,
just like our movies are, there’s a hidden
message. There’s a hidden moral within
it,” says singer-songwriter and banjo
player Abigail Washburn. “In a lot of
them, especially the ones where the
women die, that hidden message has
been ‘Woman, stay in your place. Or you
will be killed.’”
Paying for Willie’s Sin
Four waves into the feminist movement,
as the #MeToo movement lifts women’s
voices and makes casual misogyny
harder to ignore, that message hasn’t
aged well, and some artists are taking a
closer look at murder ballads and how
and whether they can fit into the modern
world. For some, like Powell, shelving
such songs and finding a new story to
sing is the solution. But others are finding
power in flipping the script, giving voice
to the victims of these songs and forcing
listeners to stop and understand what
happened to them, and why.
51
Wild Ponies’ Telisha Williams was on
a treadmill when she first listened —
really listened — to “Knoxville Girl,” a
song she’d grown up playing and hearing
in Southwest Virginia.
“I met a little girl in Knoxville, a town
we all know well,” the song, most
famously recorded by The Louvin
Brothers in 1956, started in Williams’
headphones as she ran.
And every Sunday evening,
out in her home, I’d dwell.
We went to take an evening walk
about a mile from town,
I picked a stick up off the ground
and knocked that fair girl down.
She fell down on her bended knees,
for mercy she did cry,
“Oh Willie dear, don’t kill me here,
I’m unprepared to die.”
She never spoke another word,
I only beat her more,
Until the ground around me
with her blood did flow.
“I don’t know if it was just something
about my body being occupied, and so I
52
was hearing it in a different way,” she
recalls from her and husband Doug’s
home in Nashville. She broke her stride,
hopped her feet to the sides, and let the
belt go and go as she stood in shock. “It
was like, hands on my hips, listening,
and I was like … what??”
The only clue the song gives as to
Willie’s motive is the Knoxville Girl’s
“dark and roving eyes,” an imbalance of
justice that haunted Telisha. A few years
later, she and Doug came up with a way to
put that haunting to good use in their
song “Ghost of the Knoxville Girl,” the
title track of their 2012 album.
“I am the ghost of the Knoxville Girl,”
the song begins, “Doomed to wander
around this world / I haunt the paths of
jealous men / They all must pay for
Willie’s sin.”
Go down, go down to the pits of hell
Willie, dear, I loved you well.
With the devil now you
make your home,
For my brown eyes
they never roamed.
“I feel like [‘Knoxville Girl’] was one
of those songs that was just kind of a
part of our songbook,” Telisha says,
“and it seemed like easy access, for lack
of a better term, because the ‘dark and
roving eye’ seems such a ridiculous
reason to be murdered, that it seemed
really easy to be able to flip that, and for
the ghost of the Knoxville Girl to be
fully validated in her haunting. She was
murdered for no reason, so full pass on
haunting the shit out of every bad man
forever.”
Washburn, too, felt moved to give a
slain woman in a murder ballad a voice, a
story of her own. On their first album
together, she and husband Béla Fleck
included a recording of “Pretty Polly” that
adds to the song’s usual rendition by
weaving Polly’s name between verses like
an otherworldly cry on the wind, like her
memory is making itself known to the
listener. And then, on the album’s next
song, the woman singing (unnamed, but
Washburn says the sequencing was
intentional) speaks directly.
“If I had a shotgun / and you were in
the woods,” the first lines of “Shotgun
Blues” unfold, “I’d hunt you down / and
tell you you’re no good.”
There’s a scene with the man — not
the woman — on his knees begging for
his life, and there’s compassion from the
woman, tempered by realism: “If I
thought you felt bad / ’bout what you done
to me / I’d let you go / But boy you’re just
too mean.” But what doesn’t happen on
this murder ballad rebuttal is a murder.
And that’s because revenge wasn’t on
Washburn’s and Fleck’s minds when they
were writing the song as much as
rewriting the power structure that
murder ballads reinforce.
“I just thought to myself, ‘Oh, wouldn’t
it be great if I could just intervene in the
middle of a ballad and say, ‘Man, what are
you doing? This is ridiculous!’” she says.
“And if reason won’t work then I’m going
to put you at the end of my shotgun. You’re
going to feel what it’s like when the tables
are turned and someone other than you is
more powerful.
“So that song is really not about killing
a man. It’s about turning the power

Abigail Washburn
structure upside down and changing the
trajectory. You know, it’s so much more
powerful to redirect the trajectory of a life
than it is to end it and put it in the
ground.”
Even as murder ballads like “Pretty
Polly” and “Knoxville Girl” and so many
others have persisted for so many
years, new ones are springing up, but
it’s no longer a given that the woman is
the victim.
“Frankie and Johnny” is a relative
youngster in the canon, having
emerged in 1899 as a ripped-from-the-
headlines commemoration of a woman
shooting her lover after he was spotted
with another woman. Under various
names and with varying details, Elvis
Presley, Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Louis
Armstrong, and many others
performed the song well into the 20th
century.
Even more recently, songs like
Martina McBride’s “Independence
SHERVIN LAINEZ
Day,” The Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” and
Gillian Welch’s “Caleb Meyer” have
emphasized women in control of their
own destinies.
It all reflects a shift in thinking
about women and how we choose to
cement our norms into song. But that
doesn’t mean the work is done.
A Modern Discussion
A relic of the past can become so
entrenched in tradition that we don’t
even think to examine it. Think about
the children’s song and game “Ring
around the Rosie” — at some point as
adults we learn it’s about the Great
Plague (though it’s worth noting that
some folklorists have cast doubt on that
theory). But we’re far enough removed
from that 1665 illness to shrug it off.
But it’s not so easy to dismiss songs
about violence against women, which is
still very much a problem. The World
Health Organization estimates that 1 in
3 women globally have experienced
physical or sexual violence in their
lifetime. Thirty-eight percent of
murders of women are committed by a
male partner.
53
Music alone won’t solve any of that
— and doesn’t cause it, either. A song
can memorialize a historic event,
perhaps offering a reminder of past
horror that has present ramifications.
But a song can also help normalize
something horrific, giving cover for
those who don’t wish to confront it.
Sooner or later, it seems, every
musician has to take a hard look at the
lingering presence of murder ballads
in the traditional songbook and decide
how to navigate it from stage, in jam
circles, and in their own hearts.
“I think people handle it very
differently,” says Powell, “and I guess
that was one of my points with [“I Ain’t
Playing Pretty Polly”], is to have people
look at it and ask the question and then
answer it for themselves. … I had
somebody, very early when I released
the song, that was pretty offended say,
“Well, I’m still going to play [“Pretty
Polly”]. … And it’s like, well, okay, but we
had the discussion, and that’s what I
wanted to have happen. I think it’s
worth having the discussion.” ■
54
 55

WON’T
YOU
SPARE ME
OVER
‘Oh Death’ haunts the American
musical landscape
by Stephen Deusner
56
I
n the late 1920s, Moran Lee
“Dock” Boggs traveled from his
home in Virginia to New York City to
cut a dozen sides for Brunswick
Records. But for reasons either never
known or lost to time, “Oh Death” was not
one of those songs, despite it being part
of the coal miner and bandleader’s live
repertory. He played the song often
around Appalachia with his Cumberland
Mountain Entertainers. As famed music
writer Greil Marcus explained in his
liner notes to the 1997 compilation
Country Blues, whenever Boggs would
start playing that number, his guitarist
Scott Boatwright would josh him, “Get
out of the graveyard, Dock!” It is not an
upbeat tune, certainly not a dance
number (and probably better described
as a buzzkill), but most of Boggs’ listeners
would have recognized it. Originally
called “Conversations with Death,” the
song has been traced back to the 1910s
and an itinerant preacher named Lloyd
Chandler, and its pleading refrain — “Oh
Death, won’t you spare me over for
another year” — had already been
excerpted in other songs, most notably
Camper Van
Beethoven
the Pace Jubilee Singers’ 1927 recording
of a very different song with the same
title.
We can only imagine how Boggs’ “Oh
Death” sounded at the tail end of the
1920s, right when America was on the
cusp of economic collapse. Eventually he
disbanded his group, quit playing live,
and committed to working in the mines,
where he sweated out the Great
Depression, World War II, the advent of
rock and roll, and the Cold War. Shortly
after he retired, Boggs made a return to
the stage thanks to folklorist and
musician Mike Seeger, who coaxed the
old man into a studio. In 1963 — around
the time President Kennedy was
assassinated in Dallas — Boggs released
his debut album, Legendary Singer &
Banjo Player, on Smithsonian Folkways.
That album marks his first recording of
“Oh Death.”
Boggs plays the song by himself —
just his froggy voice and his jumpy banjo,
both utterly distinctive. The music
sounds unfathomably and fittingly
lonely, which is how we all face death,
and that impression is reinforced by his
bizarre and rigid phrasing. Boggs sings
like rigor mortis is setting in: his limbs
stiffening, his throat closing. Death is
there in the room with him as he sings,
there in the room with you as you listen.
“I’ll fix your feet so you can’t walk,” he
testifies solemnly. “I’ll lock your jaw so
you can’t talk. I’ll close your eyes so you
can’t see.” Later, Death commands,
“Leave the body and leave it cold.” Few
songs have depicted the act of dying in
such ghastly terms.
Boggs likely knew more about death
in 1963 than he did in 1929. Certainly,
America did. From his throat, the song
issues a warning: Everyone, whether king
or peasant, president or voter, succumbs
eventually. “No wealth, no land, no silver
or gold — nothing satisfies me but your
soul.” Despite its gospel origins, “Oh
COURTESY OF PITCH-A-TENT RECORDS
Death” is not a Christian song. There is
no moral, no reassurance that heaven
awaits the righteous; there is no
intimation that hell awaits your enemies,
either. Death is beyond religion, beyond
morality. It simply is. There is no
stopping it. You can only hasten it.
“Oh Death” is terrifying, but by

turning the song outward — by
addressing listeners directly — Boggs
makes it impossible to shake, which may
account for why he has been so long and
so closely associated with it. His version
summons images of the Great
Depression and World War II, global
pandemics and civil unrest, crowded
hospitals and unmarked graves, but the
song itself has grown beyond him. It has
become a grim American folk standard
with a long and oddly public life, taken
up and reinterpreted across generations
and genres, across regions and scenes.
The specifics change from one version to
the next, but the general horror remains
the same. Everyone who sings “Oh Death”
seems to inform the listener, “You too will
face Death. You too will have this
conversation.”
Timely Tie-in
Four years after Boggs recorded “Oh
Death” for Seeger and four years before
Boggs’ death in 1971, a band from San
Francisco transformed the song into an
anti-war anthem for the hippie set,
injecting it with outrage and vitriol.
While not a wildly popular band,
Kaleidoscope was certainly wild. They’d
started out playing old-time songs,
eventually mixing in local psychedelic
rock and their own approximations of
Eastern musical traditions. They rocked
out on oud and sitar and bağlama. Dave
Lindley, who became a popular session
player in the ’70s and ’80s, played his
guitar with a violin bow. Like many
California bands of that time,
Kaleidoscope staged happenings more
than they played concerts, often
accompanied by belly dancers, flamenco
performers, and a light show. But the
mysticism of international styles only
enamored them up to a point, and the
band drew deep from the well of
American popular music. They even
covered Cab Calloway’s scat classic
“Minnie the Moocher” on their 1967
debut Side Trips.
Their cover of “Oh Death” also
appears on that record. And they
transformed it into a gangly beast with a
curious two-step rhythm, a bassline
shaped like a question mark, pots-and-
57
pans percussion like Jacob Marley’s
chains, and a droning fiddle like a razor
across tender skin. Singer Solomon
Feldthouse did an oddball take on Boggs’
stiff cadence, but become more animated
when he cried out for his mother: “My
eyes are aching and I cannot see. I feel
the sheet pulling over me.”
There’s a grim hysteria to their
version of the song, which dovetails with
so much protest music being made
during the early years of the Vietnam
War. In fact, when the band played the
Newport Folk Festival in 1969, Feldthouse
launched into an impromptu sermon
midway through the song, nearly
throwing his bandmates off course. The
more he ranted, the more he connected
the horrors in the lyrics to the horrors of
warfare. He made the song a monument
to the violence inflicted on US soldiers as
well as the violence they were
commanded to inflict upon their enemy.
Twenty years later — at a time when
the serial killer known as BTK Killer was
taunting police by quoting “Oh Death” in
letters to newspapers — another
California band covered Kaleidoscope’s
58
take of Boggs’ tune. Camper Van
Beethoven’s version, which appears on
their 1988 album Our Beloved
Revolutionary Sweetheart, replicates
the loping pace right down to its
inquisitive bassline. The band, which
had injected enough humor in their
lyrics to invite and eventually dispel the
novelty label, didn’t necessarily intend
to import the song’s political
implications into the late 1980s.
Frontman David Lowery recalls first
hearing the song at a bluegrass festival
in the Mojave Desert back in the 1970s,
but he had only recently discovered
Kaleidoscope after a friend pointed out
the similarities between the two bands.
Covering the tune was a means of
further distinguishing Camper Van
Beethoven as hippies on the punk scene.
Their version begins almost matter-
of-factly, with the stoicism of an
instruction manual, as Lowery explains
the way of all life, but it ends someplace
very different than where it starts. The
groove grows tenser, Lowery sounds
testier, his voice choked with audacity
and outrage. The band stomps on the
song. Listeners can almost hear the
spittle at the sides of his mouth when he
sings, “Cast aside the flesh of thee, cast
aside and set you free.”
“There’s some macabre stuff to it,”
says Lowery. “I was a young man and I
think you relate to that stuff more in a
comic, ghoulish way than you do when
you get older. Kaleidoscope had the
Vietnam War and the ’60s to put the
song into context. In the ’80s, for
Camper, it was more like a B-movie. But
it was important that it said what it said
because that made it a piece of
counterculture. We tried to find things
that were odd and out of fashion, but
were still unusual and shocking.”
As a piece of counterculture, Camper
Van Beethoven’s “Oh Death” points a
bony finger at anyone who might ignore
Death’s horrors or — so much worse
— might deploy Death as a political
instrument. This was, of course, the tail
end of the Reagan administration,
which had boasted of American military
might, portrayed poverty as a personal
failing rather than a systemic
imbalance, allowed AIDS to run
unchecked through the gay community,
and stoked fears of nuclear war in its
Cold War chest thumping. Released just
months before Reagan vacated the
White House, Camper Van Beethoven’s
“Oh Death” tries to take in all of America
in that moment; death is all the same,
whether from social neglect or a
sexually transmitted disease or a nuclear
explosion.
An Unlikely Hit
In February 2002, Ralph Stanley took the
stage alone at the Grammy Awards
ceremony in Los Angeles to perform “O
Death.” Without instrumentation, he
sang it to a quieted room, turning that
title into a high lonesome holler and
shaking the ceremony out of its self-
congratulatory pomp. That speaks to the
popularity of the O Brother, Where Art
Thou? soundtrack on which it appeared,
which by then had become an unlikely
commercial juggernaut, but it also
speaks to Stanley’s command of that
song. The 74-year-old had been
performing since 1947 and had been
singing that song longer than
Kaleidoscope had been a band and
longer than Lowery had been alive.
In 1999, producer T Bone Burnett
asked him to make a new recording of
the song, which would have turned out
much like Boggs’ 1963 version if Burnett
had had his way. But Stanley associated
the song with church, specifically the
Primitive Baptist Church, which
tolerated no music other than the
human voice. So Stanley recorded it

Sam Amidon
a cappella, and it became something like
a hit for him — the kind of song that fans
new and old scream for at shows.
Stanley’s version is arguably the most
popular of all, recorded and released at
the tail end of the 20th century. It speaks
to fin de siècle jitters: not just worries
over Y2K complications, but to the sense
that humanity was stepping into an
unknown future. That may have spurred
the success of O Brother, which took
forms rooted in the early 20th century
and brought them forward, but “O
Death” is still an outlier on that album: a
song that offers no comfort, that only
reminds the listener that like those who
came generations before them, death is
the only destination. It grinds against the
glibness of the Coen Brothers’ film,
which is set in a self-consciously
cinematic version of Dock Boggs’ world,
but it also runs counter to the coffee-
table tastefulness of the soundtrack, with
its polite depictions of the past. Even at
the Grammys, the song was almost too
real.
Just as O Brother forever altered the
landscape of roots music, Stanley’s “O
Death” inspired new interest in the song
STEVE GULLICK
itself, which has been covered repeatedly
in the 20 years since the soundtrack
renewed interest in it. Sam Amidon, The
Tarbox Ramblers, Shakey Graves,
Diamanda Galas, Kate Mann,
Gangstagrass, Onkel Tuka, Rising
Appalachia, Noah Gunderson, and many
others have all put their stamp on the old
standard. It’s a song, however, that can
easily get away from its singer. Many of
these versions sound overly solemn, even
placid, which only points to the fact that
“Oh Death” rarely tolerates beauty.
Hushed, reverent performances miss the
point completely. Death in the song is
not a calm eternity of peace, but messy,
ugly horror.
One of the most affecting versions
from this young century is therefore also
one of the weirdest. For their 2002 album
The Executioner’s Last Songs, Pine Valley
Cosmonauts — an acoustic offshoot of
the infamous Chicago-via-Wales
country-punk outfit The Mekons —
enlisted Diane Izzo to sing it. A local cult
artist who only released one album in
her lifetime, she slurs her words, chews
on her syllables, and spits them out like
tobacco juice. She sounds haunted,
weary, as though she has clawed her way
out of hell, but she also projects insolence
and daring. It’s an audacious
performance, as though she’s flipping
Death the bird. The same year the
Cosmonauts released that album, the US
59
was reeling from 9/11 and ramping up
into a full military press in the Middle
East.
“Oh Death” still haunts the American
landscape, right alongside Death itself.
Perhaps that has less to do with the
power of this indelible song and more to
do with something intrinsic to American
life, or to life in general. There is always
national tragedy, always bloodshed to
foretell, always calamity to endure.
In 2007, Amidon offered a thoughtful
and resigned version of “O Death” on his
album All Is Well. It’s different than
Boggs’ version — more nostalgic for the
life that is leaving him and less desperate
in its pleading. “The thing about ‘O
Death’ that is so complicated is that it’s so
direct and so blunt, so it’s not a song you
would always want to sing,” says Amidon,
who released a self-titled collection of
reworked folk songs in October.
“You might not want to sing it if you’re
experiencing grief, although I’ve heard
from friends who did listen to it with
family members who were facing death
and they found comfort in it,” he
continues. “Facing death is not just
sadness, but anger and fear and rage.
Those feelings have their place. This song
links to those feelings more than most
songs would dare to.” ■
60
CANON FODDER
The Endless American Songbook
By Caitlin Wolper
Bettye LaVette
By her own estimation, it took Bettye LaVette 59 years to
grow into the standards she’s sung. That’s how long she’s been
performing — since she was 16 years old. Even though (like any
teen) she wanted to sing modern songs, her manager, Jim
Lewis, insisted she learn the standards.
“He wanted me to know a lot of songs, a lot of difficult songs.
He wanted musicians to respect me and he wanted me to have
my own arrangements — those were the marks of class during
the ’40s and ’50s,” LaVette says. “He was continuously telling me,
‘This music that you’re in love with, only about one out of 10 of
them are going to last.’ ”
LaVette quickly realized, too, that standards didn’t just come
from the ’40s and ’50s — songs included in the term also were
created in the ’30s and even ’20s. She recalls singing Johnny
Nash’s version of “Always” at home and her mother joining in.
“I said, ‘Mom, how do you know that?’ and she said, ‘I’ve
known it since I was a little girl,’” LaVette says, noting that her
mother grew up with Irving Berlin’s original from 1925. “Many
of [these songs] came from the ’20s and we just didn’t know it.”
She has noticed that the Great American Songbook is
different for everyone: Their interpretation is often based on
when they were born or when they got involved with music,
almost like a rolling admission. While she said her husband
might cite Bob Dylan as a member of the Songbook, she
disagrees: “That’s not the Great American Songbook to me. It
will be, but it’s not right now.”
The Great American Songbook means something different
for everyone, and it’s different at every age. “If you ask, ‘What
does this music mean to you?’ it means something different
than it did 25 years ago, and 25 years before that it meant
something different yet again,” LaVette continues. “When you’ve
sung for 59 years, your answer to this kind of question has so
many more complexities.”
It’s one thing to sing a song like Etta James’ “At Last” when
you’re 16, she says, and another altogether when you’re 74. That
learned maturity is essential, something that’s clear on her
most recent album, Blackbirds — her 2020 collection of cover
songs, most of which were originally popularized by Black
singers.
“I’ve grown into the songs now. It’s like some shoes or
something that your big sister had, and then you finally got big
enough to wear them,” LaVette says. “I’ve grown into the songs.
They are nostalgic, they are something that happened to me
long ago. It took me over 30 years to learn to sing these songs
proficiently.”
Now she feels the words “standard,” “classic,” and “legend”
are used very freely: “I had to grow into those words.” That’s not
to say current music can’t earn such distinction — she’s
confident certain songs, whether profound or silly (like
Pharrell Williams’ “Happy,” she quips), will persist.
For a time, learning standards was a matter of career
preservation — no matter what happened, those were the songs
everyone would want to hear. All this time later, she’s carved out
her career, growing into the songs and herself.
Thinking back on her teenage years, LaVette recalls a
particularly memorable bit of wisdom from her manager, Lewis.
He said to her, “You don’t know if you’re going to be a star or not …
but in the event you don’t, you’ll know a lot of songs — if you
learn how to sing them, you can work for the rest of your life.”
She adds slyly: “And I almost have.” ■
JOSEPH A. ROSEN
61
62

SINGING
IT
How Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles,
and other Black musicians
canonized the Great American
Songbook
by Marcus K. Dowling

TRUE ROLF AMBOR

 63

Ella Fitzgerald in 1961

64
G
enerations of iconic Black
vocalists have looked into the
Great American Songbook —
the canon of the most important
and influential American popular songs
and jazz standards from the early 20th
century — and created untouchable
versions of its songs. Their sanctified,
cosmopolitan, and uniquely Black
interpretations result in timeless
affiliations, often more lasting than those
of the original white composers.
The rich tradition of Black musicians
covering, and often elevating, the
Songbook’s original recordings includes
such standouts as Lena Horne’s work
with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
“Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and Paul
Robeson’s version of the duo’s “Some
Enchanted Evening.” Ethel Waters’ take
on Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather” and
Nat King Cole’s version of Hoagy
Carmichael’s “Stardust” and numerous
others have become their own entries in
the Songbook.
Black artists like Ella Fitzgerald and
Ray Charles in particular enjoyed pop
crossover careers that leaned heavily on
the Songbook and have kept them
relevant beyond their lifetimes. Charles’
1960 album Modern Sounds in Country
and Western — a cover album of country
classics — stands as one of the all-time
great recordings. And most of
Fitzgerald’s later career involved singing
entire collections of songwriters and
composers with multiple contributions
to the Songbook.
Charles’ bluesy croak and Fitzgerald’s
scatting jazz vocals teem with what
traditionalists might consider surface-
level imperfections, but that only added
to the timelessness of the songs they
sang.
In his 2013 book The Color of Sound:
Race, Religion, and Music in Brazil, John
Burdick described the sanctified African
American gospel voice — as a creative
device used in and out of sanctified
music — as “hypnotic” and “vibrating at
unexpected moments.” Moreover, it’s
considered “breathy” and filled with
“cracks, creaks, and squeaks.” recording for Verve Records, founded by
Imperfectly-perfect vocalists like
Charles and Fitzgerald infuse their lyrics
— especially those from the Songbook —
with some level of African American
cultural aesthetic, thereby reinterpreting
their meanings.
“Great artists sing through the lens of
a certain perspective,” says Grammy-
nominated singer and producer Carolyn
Malachi. “Great Black artists frequently
sing the Great American Songbook from
a place that remembers [Black people’s]
painful and challenging American
experience.”
Saved by the Songbook
Fitzgerald in particular was one of the
most important interpreters of the
Songbook, regardless of race or gender.
“The work of Ella Fitzgerald is the
American equivalent of classical music,”
jazz writer Will Friedwald said in the
2019 documentary Ella Fitzgerald: Just
One of Those Things. “What she did with
the works of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter,
and Duke Ellington are comparable to
Bach and Beethoven.”
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter
Songbook, released in 1956, was her first
Norman Granz, who was also Fitzgerald’s
manager. At the time, Fitzgerald was two
decades into her career and considered
stagnant as an artist. Granz’s gambit was
that recording her sophisticated style
over classics would revive her career. The
proof is in the results: The Cole Porter
Songbook, the result of a three-day
session with the label, is widely regarded
65
 66

Carolyn Malachi

AYON OSHON

as one of the greatest jazz albums ever
released. It was added to the Library of
Congress’ National Registry in 2003.
“In the same vein that you cannot give
informative opinion to movies if you have
not seen Casablanca or Citizen Kane, or
cannot discuss philosophy or religion if
you haven’t read the Bible, it is
impossible to give an opinion of female
vocals unless you have imbibed from the
waters of Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbook
series,” Norman W. Harris wrote in his
2016 Jazz Weekly review of a remastering
of the album.
Fitzgerald’s improvisational style
defined her relationship with the Great
American Songbook’s classics. And in
particular, her ability to weave her voice
around Buddy Bregman’s orchestra
allowed for the lyrics of songs like
“Anything Goes” — the title track of the
1934 musical about mistaken identities,
budding romances, and a runaway
heiress — to feel more caressed than
coerced, as when belted by the likes of
Ethel Merman. Fitzgerald’s style allowed
for a coy take on one of Porter’s more
ribald creations. These lyrics with this
arrangement aren’t a tense and brash
sexual overture. Instead, they’re
flowingly seductive and more honestly
real.
Singing the Great American
Songbook saved and then elevated
Fitzgerald’s career. As Mel Tormé, a
contemporary of Fitzgerald’s wrote in his
1988 memoir Mel Torme: It Wasn’t All
Velvet, “[Fitzgerald] was in danger of
falling into the ‘cult singer’ trap, an abyss
wherein only jazz fans and musicians
appreciated her.”
Fitzgerald’s 1956 success with Cole
Porter’s songbook allowed her to — as
Tormé said — grow past singing in
“smoky joints and out-of-the-way
venues.” From there, she went on to
record albums of works by Rodgers and
Hart, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and
George and Ira Gershwin, all to great
success. As Tormé summarized, “Her
fame spread to the four corners of the
earth, and in this country, she played
where she wanted to.”
In fact, two years later, she and Louis
Armstrong changed the course of the
Songbook with their interpretation of
Porgy and Bess — George Gershwin and
DuBose Heyward’s 1935 folk-opera set in
a Black tenement in Charleston, South
Carolina. The song “Summertime” is the
most covered song globally, with more
than 25,000 recorded versions, according
to the English National Opera, and
Fitzgerald’s trumpet-like vocals convey a
level of shared cultural awareness with
the characters. Their album went on to
win a Grammy Hall of Fame Award “to
honor recordings of lasting qualitative or
historical significance.”
Fitzgerald continued to incorporate
“Summertime” into her sets throughout
the rest of her career, which is still
celebrated today. Last October, Verve
released a never-before-heard live
recording from her 1962 European tour,
The Lost Berlin Tapes. Toward the end of
67
the performance at the Berlin
Sportpalast indoor arena, Fitzgerald
introduces the song by saying, “We’d like
to throw just one pretty tune in before we
do the next song, sort of put you to sleep
for a moment.” The crowd laughs audibly,
then cheers wildly.
Sweet and Clear
Last year also marked the 90th
anniversary of Hoagy Carmichael’s
writing of “Georgia On My Mind” and the
60th anniversary of Charles’ cover of the
song. Carmichael’s original has a clear-
spoken folksy appeal that pairs well with
the bed of mellow jazz upon which it’s
laid. He sings, “Georgia on my mind /
Each day, Georgia, a song of you / Comes
as sweet and clear as moonlight through
the pines / Other arms reach out to me /
Other eyes smile tenderly / Still, in
peaceful dreams, I see / The road leads
back to you, to you, my beautiful Georgia,”
which sounds like the blissful, carefree
recantations of a white antebellum
landowner.
However, Charles’ version delivers an
entirely different interpretation. “It was
just a beautiful, romantic melody,”
Charles told author Joe Smith in 1987 for
his book Off the Record: An Oral History
of Popular Music, regarding what drew
him to “Georgia On My Mind.” “I sing
‘Georgia On My Mind’ true. I always sing
what I sing true. I sang it the way I felt it.”
Born in Albany, Georgia in 1930,
Charles grew up poor (the son of a
68
laborer and a laundress) and was raised
by a single mother. By the time he was
seven, he was fully blind. All of these
experiences give heart to his
performance, which became an
honorific reference to the sweetness and
pride he found in the Peach State, despite
its harsh and racist history.
“His voice is a craggy croak, tired and
broken,” wrote Tom Breihan in
Stereogum’s 2018 series “The Number
Ones.” “But it’s beautiful, too. There’s
sweetness and devotion in it.”
That devotion, often found in church
music and gospel singing, was incredibly
important to Black performers in the
early 1960s, especially Charles. Born out
of the backwoods, tent revivals, and small
auditorium stages of the “Gospel
Highway” and “Chitlin’ Circuit” tours, the
rhythms, percussion, and energy
evocative of these calls to prayer often
found their way into Black
interpretations of the Great American
Songbook. In “Georgia” in particular,
Charles’ female backing trio, The
Raelettes, play a vital role with their call-
and-response. Charles plays the role of a
Baptist minister preaching a reverential
gospel: The verses are sentences and the
hook is a period. As he pauses, Charles
allows The Raelettes to emerge for a “can
the choir say amen” moment.
Eventually Charles’ iconic, Grammy-
winning version of “Georgia on My Mind”
— captured in just four takes — eclipsed
Carmichael’s original. The state of
Georgia even designated Charles’ version
the state song in 1979. Ultimately, the
song succeeds because Charles sings
with a style that blended pop sensibilities
with an awareness of the cultural time
and spiritual space into which the song
was released. The result is a classic that is
forever tied with his name, even more so
than that of its composer.
Carrying the Message
Fitzgerald and Charles are among a
century of Black artists who have
mastered the ability to coax timeless
performances out of the Great American
Songbook. While their vocal techniques
and timbres add nuanced perspectives to
these essential American creations,
Malachi argues that the sentimentality of
the songs themselves contributes to their
longevity. “It’s easy to curry favor with an
audience when you can tug at their
heartstrings,” she says. “Even as humanity
evolves, the thread that ties us together
and allows us to experience art — and
draw certain distinctive meanings from it
— remains the same.”
In fact, the Songbook still influences
Malachi in all of her efforts, personal and
professional. As the great-granddaughter
of jazz pianist and educator John Malachi
and a lecturer at Howard University’s
Cathy Hughes School of Communications,
she offers a multigenerational perspective
on how to interpret the Songbook.
Studying Fitzgerald’s scatting and
flexible, multioctave timbre helps Malachi
parse out vocal takes in her work as a
recording engineer and producer. “When
I’m mixing a session, and I’m listening to
a raw vocal track, I always listen for the
honesty of the vocal performance. Black
singers singing the Songbook have
informed music with a style and flavor
that many try to, but shouldn’t be,
replicated. Instead, their bold honesty
should inspire your creative freedom.”
And even as a performer, Malachi
leans on the power of interpretation and
reinvention, continuing the tradition set
by previous generations of Black singers
who recorded songs from past eras. In her
latest single, a jazzy cover of Phoebe
Snow’s 1973 song “Poetry Man” that came
out last June, she turns Snow’s plaintive
folk-rock original into a soul ballad.
Malachi extends notes with jazzy
flourishes that add a hint of playful color,
and her chops as an improvisational
pianist add a joyousness to the original’s
calm, reflective tone.
Ultimately, Malachi’s nuanced
understanding of the Songbook helps
her appreciate how a new era of Black
vocalists can unlock their creativity and
connect to their heritage — like Charles
and Fitzgerald did before them.
“The best songs are written by people
who write specifically and broad enough
to allow artists and fans to find their own
places in the music. That’s what allows
the Great American Songbook to remain
relevant,” says Malachi. “The writing and
composition are clear enough where the
power of the messages shines through
most of all.” ■
CARL VAN VECHTEN / COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Ella Fitzgerald in 1940

69
70

CHECKING
ALL THE
BOXES
Julian Lage finds
inspiration in old classics
and new collaborations
by Greg Cahill
ALYSSE GAFKJEN
71
72

Chris Eldridge and Julian Lage

DEVIN PEDDE

W
hen he was just a teen-
aged jazz guitarist back in
2000, Julian Lage told his
California hometown
newsweekly The North Bay Bohemian:
“As I play, I discover a spiritual element in
the music. I meditate and I find that this
centers me and allows things to happen.
You can’t force the music — you can’t
force yourself into a groove.”
Twenty years later, Lage stands by
that statement. “Music represents what
it needs to represent at the time for
each practitioner,” he says on the phone
from his current home in Nashville.
“Maybe when I was growing up, I
thought that I had to overcome certain
challenges. But I find great delight in
the things that each person uniquely
struggles with and also in all the things
we share in common. You kind of have
your own karma with the guitar. As long
as you go along with the ride, I think it’s
very kind and friendly. That’s my
experience with it.”
His karma has been good. Lage grew
up in Santa Rosa, California, 40 miles
north of San Francisco, and started
playing guitar at age 5 after hearing his
father strumming the instrument. At 12,
he had already contributed to David
Grisman’s Dawg Duos album, played on
the 2000 Grammy Awards telecast, and
been the subject of the Academy Award-
nominated documentary Jules at Eight.
By 16, he had studied sitar and tabla at
the prestigious Ali Akbar College of
Music (where he met a future
collaborator, the tabla master Zakir
Hussain) and was composing for and
performing with veteran jazz
vibraphonist Gary Burton.
Now 32, Lage has a slight build and is
soft-spoken, with a quick laugh, joyful
nature, and gentle disposition. In 2009,
he released his debut album, Sounding
Point, with a band culled from his days at
Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Known for his improvisational skills, he
has recorded nine solo, duo, and trio
albums, including sessions with fellow
guitarists Nels Cline of Wilco and Chris
“Critter” Eldridge of Punch Brothers. His
most recent album, 2020’s Love Hurts,
features Dave King on drums and Jorge
Roeder on bass (a follow-up record with
that same trio is due out this spring).
Lage’s music often echoes the sound
of such legendary jazz guitarists as Jim
Hall and Pat Metheny, whose
atmospheric styles are reflected in his
playing. But his guitar heroes also
include the late Clarence White, who
played in The Kentucky Colonels before
73
joining The Byrds and becoming a
country-rock pioneer. Another is Jerry
Garcia, who had a lifelong connection to
bluegrass, recording several bluegrass
albums with Grisman. “I think once you
start looking, a lot of guitarists have a
deep connection with American
traditional acoustic music,” Lage says.
“As a guitarist, you don’t have to care
about it, but once you do you realize it’s
all laid out for you — then it’s easy to
bridge the gap between American
traditional acoustic music and modern
jazz.”
In Standard Time
For Lage, standards are an important
foundational tool that helps make him a
better composer and player — his latest
trio album includes “I’m Getting
Sentimental Over You,” first recorded in
1935 by Tommy Dorsey; “Love Hurts,”
introduced by The Everly Brothers and
popularized by Gram Parsons and
Emmylou Harris; and “Crying” by Roy
Orbison.
“Standards are the ultimate emblem
of melody and harmony and form — it
defines the tradition I come from,” Lage
says. “If you’re going to talk about
atmosphere and lyricism, you’re gonna
74
talk about ‘Stardust’ and ‘Embraceable
You’ and ‘Body and Soul.’ Those are the
texts that I return to, and anything that
works there is going to work elsewhere.
That’s the foundation for everything I’ve
written, and even free improvisation
leans on what you can learn from
standards about what a satisfying
contour feels like. If you play
‘(Somewhere) Over the Rainbow,’ by the
end of that first chorus, you’ve been
changed. No matter what else you play,
you end up asking, ‘How can I achieve
that when I don’t have the benefit of this
great song?’ Because it forces you to think
about the contour — the rise and fall, the
tension and release. So standards are
something I’ve been close to all my life
and I feel that I am getting closer to them.
They bring something to jazz that I want
to celebrate.”
Yesterday’s standards wax and wane
in popularity, and tomorrow’s standards
may not even exist yet. But Lage believes
that the current canon, with all its
fluidity, contains a number of
contradictions. “You might say a
standard is something that’s classic and
it’s 32 measures and singable. Well, not
necessarily,” he says. “You might say it’s
something with a vamp and a groove.
Well, it’s not necessarily that either. So I
think popular culture is what determines
whether something sticks as well as how
people interpret it. ‘My Favorite Things’
would have been a standard no matter
what, but John Coltrane playing it sent
that song to another level, so it’s now here
to stay.”
Lage’s partner, the singer-songwriter
Margaret Glaspy, has introduced him to
new music while in quarantine together,
including some potential new standards.
Recently, they performed an at-home,
acoustic rendition of Kacey Musgraves’
“Rainbow.”
“It’s a great song because it makes you
feel something and it’s very clear,” Lage
says. “It’s masterfully done. It’s one of
those songs, like ‘God Only Knows,’ a
song that is harmonically and
melodically and rhythmically and
lyrically on point — everything is firing. …
So if you’re searching for the next
standards, look for those songs that
check the most boxes for you.”
Always Hearing
“I realize this might sound like
hyperbole, but I feel like he is already
one of the all-time greats of the
instrument,” says guitarist Chris
Eldridge, who shared a 2017 Grammy
nomination with Lage for Best
Contemporary Instrumental Album for
Mount Royal. “It’s a privilege to have a
guitar duo together. I always want to just
be better when I’m playing with Julian. I
mean that in a very healthy way because
Julian leads with warmth and love and
is great at making everyone he plays
with feel comfortable. I once told
Jefferson Hamer, another guitar player
friend of mine who was going to hang
 75

“I think once you start looking, a lot of guitarists have a deep

connection with American traditional acoustic music. As a guitarist,
you don’t have to care about it, but once you do you realize it’s
all laid out for you — then it’s easy to bridge the gap between
American traditional acoustic music and modern jazz.”
Julian Lage

out and play with Julian, ‘It’s bizarre, but
somehow you will never feel better
about yourself as a guitar player than
when you are playing with Julian.’”
Nels Cline, lauded for his technical
and melodic guitarwork with Wilco, has
had a similar experience playing with
Lage. “I can get pretty neurotic about
playing, but not when I play with Julian.
He is always hearing what I play. This
quality alone is liberating for me,” he
says. “It relaxes me and hence feels
nurturing to the point where I feel that I
just play better when I play with Julian.
If that’s not a strong connection I don’t
know what is. … We play music. Together.
We appreciate not only each other’s
voices and sensibilities but, crucially,
the music that happens from our
combined efforts. As Julian has said, it’s
more ‘one big guitar’ rather than two
sovereign individuals sparring or
whatever.”
Lage typically doesn’t use traditional
comping, the ubiquitous jazz
accompaniment technique in which a
musician fills in around a partner’s lead
lines with complementary harmony
chords before stepping up to take their
own moment in the spotlight. Rather, he
overlays his partner’s guitar parts by
playing empathetic lead lines and
building textured melodies, perhaps a
shadow of his classical Indian training.
This technique is audible throughout
Mount Royal. On “Old Grimes” and
“Greener Grass,” Lage and Eldridge
simultaneously weave cross-picked
guitar lines to create lacy melodies. On
“Goldacre,” they blend their divergent
styles deftly, with Lage adding moody
minor-chord accents to Eldridge’s
traditional bluegrass runs.
“Playing with Critter was a gateway
that showed me I have access to these
tools and they apply to a different
genre,” says Lage. “It wasn’t necessarily
me taking on that different genre. I’m
not a great bluegrass guitar player, by
any stretch of the imagination — I know
about four songs in the tradition. But I
do love Critter and I love playing music
with him. The music that’s dear to him
is in that realm and I’m going to find
every way that I can to apply my
understanding of his music and be a
good and empathetic musical partner
with him. … It just so happens that his
realm is very guitar friendly.
“It makes as much sense as you want
it to,” Lage adds, considering how to
blend jazz and bluegrass, blues and
country. “When I’m coming from a jazz
perspective, I can see how you may not
be inclined to see the way into basically
American traditional acoustic music.
You don’t have to, but if you choose to do
it, you find that a lot of the behavior
around guitar technique — how you do
it, how you frame it, how you
conceptualize approaching soloing and
accompaniment, all those principles —
they’re very well laid out through the
lens of traditional American acoustic
music.” ■
76

RUM
AND
COCA-
COLA
The Great American Songbook’s
Cuban crossover
by Judy Cantor-Navas
 77

A young Omara Portuondo at

the start of her career in Cuba.

PHOTO COURTESY THE GLADYS PALMERA COLLECTION / WWW.GLADYSPALMERA.COM

78
“Nat King Cole was crucial for Cuban musicians. Frank Sinatra was
also important, but Nat was a musician who the Cuban artists
really connected with. His period as a pianist in the ’40s was
something that Cuban musicians knew well. And he was Black.”
Rosa Marquetti
Cuban music historian
I
n her youth, Omara Portuondo
had a voice that could evoke both a
smoky lounge and a santería
ceremony. By age 25, the future
Buena Vista Social Club singer had
already finished a tour of the United
States with Las D’Aida, the celebrated
all-female vocal quartet that had shared
Havana cabaret stages with Nat King
Cole and Edith Piaf.
Although Portuondo had no sights
on a solo career, she agreed to go over to
the recording studio at Radio Progreso
in Havana for a session led by pianist
Julio Gutiérrez, one of the most
innovative arrangers in a country of
boundless musical explorers. There she
tracked an Afro-Cuban version of “That
Old Black Magic” called “Magia Negra”
that became the title song of her 1959
debut album.
Portuondo is bathed in red neon,
cleavage spilling from her satin cocktail
dress as she embraces a conga on the
cover of Magia Negra. Throughout the
record, she echoes Ella Fitzgerald in her
phrasing, but she sings to the beat of
percussion rooted in the sacred
ceremonies of Cuba’s African slaves.
The album also features “El Hombre
Que Se Fue,” Gutiérrez’s adaptation of
“The Man That Got Away” (like “That
Old Black Magic,” composed by Harold
Arlen), and Portuondo’s Spanish-
language cover of Duke Ellington’s
“Caravan,” together with romantic
boleros, an Afro-Cuban praise song, and
a flamenco-tinged ode to southern
Spain. Gutiérrez knowingly
encapsulated the international sound of
pre-revolutionary Cuba’s exuberant
nightlife scene, while appropriating the

idea of “black magic” in a distinctly
Cuban way. He also played up the
exoticism that gave, and still gives,
Cuban culture currency in the global
market.
“Magia Negra was one of the most
complex records ever released in Cuba,”
says Cuban music historian Rosa
Marquetti. “It’s an album whose
production values and quality are equal
to that of American recordings of the
time.”
That assessment would have
particularly pleased Gutiérrez, whose
later numbers included a cha-cha-chá
version of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the
Clock” and “Close Encounters of the
Latin Kind,” a postmodern dance-floor
novelty that set John Williams’ movie
theme to a Cuban rumba beat.
Gutiérrez was a consummate
musical shape-shifter who throughout
his life took particular delight in
reimagining the music of the American
Top 40. (He died in New York City in
unjust obscurity in 1990). But in the
1940s and ’50s, he was certainly not
alone among Havana’s top musical
talents in giving a Cuban twist to
popular US tunes. Songs that were part
of Cuba’s own hit parade included
“Stormy Weather,” recorded as “Lluvia
Gris,” by Portuondo and also by the
young Olga Guillot, who turned up for
what was her first-ever recording
session at Havana’s Panart Records
studio in 1944 wearing bobby socks and
saddle shoes. Guillot, who would
become immortally known as the
Queen of Bolero, also released Spanish
versions of “Stardust” (“Polvo de
Estrellas”), “Night and Day” (“Noche y
Día) and “At Last (“Al Fin”). A stark and
poignant rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Be
Careful, It’s My Heart,” in English, by the
iconoclastic pianist and singer Bola de
Nieve stands out among other notable
Cuban reimaginings of American songs.
Magia Negra capped an era of a fluid
and constant musical exchange between
79
Cuba and the United States that would
soon come to an abrupt end, and which
to date has never been repeated. The
title song, whose Spanish lyrics
compare a lover’s voice to “the echo of a
drum,” exemplifies the brilliant
midcentury amalgamation of popular
American melodies and Cuban rhythms
that has since reverberated in the music
of both countries, and beyond.
Shared Frequencies
After World War II, the volume was
turned up on the musical frequency
where Cuban and American music
converged. Listeners in Havana could
bop to the sound of Cuban big bands on
radio programs like El Club del Swing.
They could also tune in to broadcasts
coming from radio stations in South
Florida (just 90 miles north), which
exposed the island audience to the latest
American sounds. Havana concerts by
Cole, Josephine Baker, Sarah Vaughan,
80

Bola de Nieve, whose repertoire included Irving Berlin’s

“Be Careful, It’s My Heart”

and other American stars made
headlines. Thanks to these shared
frequencies and performances, Cuban
musicians began making records with
their own transformative versions of the
same songs.
The influence of Cuban music in the
United States can be said to have really
begun on a Saturday in April 1930, at
New York’s Palace Theater, when Don
Azpiazú’s Havana Casino Orchestra
performed “El Manisero,” the song that
would become known internationally as
“The Peanut Vendor.” Azpiazú recorded
PHOTO COURTESY THE GLADYS PALMERA COLLECTION / WWW.GLADYSPALMERA.COM
the song that year for RCA Victor. As
John Storm Roberts recounted in his
1979 book The Latin Tinge, his essential
history of Latin music in the United
States, “Victor was afraid it would be too
strange for American ears” and was
reluctant to release the single. But by
early 1931, it had reached the top of the
charts, setting off a rage for all things
Cuban.
“Azpiazú’s authenticity, coming at a
time when El Barrio was beginning to
develop as an alternate Latin center [in
New York City], ensured that Cuban
styles … would become part of American
music,” wrote Roberts. In the ’40s, What
Jelly Roll Morton had dubbed “the
Spanish Tinge” had spread to indelibly
color the sound of American song with
Latin rhythms; popular songs by Cuban
composers become standards in
American big band versions. While
George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”
was frequently performed onstage by
Ernesto Lecuona, the iconic Cuban
composer’s own “Siboney” became a
ballroom standard and was recorded by
Connie Francis and Bing Crosby. Pianist
Nilo Menéndez, a member of Lecuona’s
orchestra, wrote “Aquellos Ojos Verdes,”
which as “Green Eyes” was Anglicized in
a hit version by Jimmy Dorsey, whose
band took the song to number one on
the Billboard charts in 1941. Glenn
Miller also recorded “Green Eyes,” and
bandleaders Xavier Cugat and Desi
Arnaz, who were largely responsible for
bringing Latin music to mainstream
America, each laid claim to their own
instrumental takes on the song. In the
late ’50s, Cole would record the original,
singing in his endearingly clumsy
Spanish on his second of three
crossover albums, A Mis Amigos. (In
2006, actor Ben Affleck reprised
“Aquellos Ojos Verdes” when he sang it
in the movie Hollywoodland.)
The demand for Cuban musicians
increased in the US as the cha-cha-chá
and mambo took over American
81
ballrooms in the 1950s. Enthusiasm for
the Latin sound was further fueled by
Hollywood movies featuring Arnaz or
mambo king Pérez Prado, among other
artists.
While Cuban rhythms fired up
dance floors in the US, popular
American songs, particularly jazz
vocals, inspired Havana musicians to
create a whole new style of music. They
called it filin, a Cuban phonetic spelling
of “feeling,” evoking the emotional swell
of the music they so adored.
“We started writing songs that,
harmonically, had a certain American
touch about them,” pianist Frank Emilio
Flynn told me in 1998, the day before his
long-awaited US concert debut at New
York’s Lincoln Center, at the age of 77.
“The thing was to take a song and give it
the kinds of harmonies and melodies
that we heard Sinatra or Nat King Cole
sing.” In the ’40s, Flynn was a founder of
a group called Loquibambia, whose
other members included Portuondo as
well as singer-songwriter José Antonio
Méndez and guitarists and composers
César Portillo de la Luz and Alberto
Menéndez. During the band’s live radio
debut, Portuondo was introduced as
“Miss Omara Brown, the girlfriend of
filin,” as an homage to Billie Holiday.
82

“Filin was born out of the influences

of the American Songbook and jazz on
these young Cuban guys,” notes actor
Matt Dillon, the director of a new
documentary about the pioneering scat
singer Francisco Fellove. The late singer
was another key member of that Havana
bohemian scene, though he would soon
move to Mexico, where he gained fame
as “El Gran Fellove.”
“They were hanging out and creating
songs together in someone’s
apartment,” Dillon adds during a recent
phone interview. “They didn’t have
money, they were poor, they were Black,
they were mulatto, and they weren’t The marquee at New York’s Strand Theater announcing
necessarily professional or in the ‘in’ a concert by Xavier Cugat in the 1940s.
crowd, but they were creating, doing
these jam sessions.
“These guys are listening to the

PHOTO COURTESY THE GLADYS PALMERA COLLECTION / WWW.GLADYSPALMERA.COM

[American] records. And that’s
inspiring the way that they’re creating
songs.”

Imitation and Innovation

Decades later, at a backyard party in
Miami’s Little Havana in the 1990s,
guitarist Alberto Menendez
enthusiastically acknowledged to me
that he and his friends “imitated” what
they heard on albums by Cab Calloway,
Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and
other American idols. But out of those
derivations emerged a distinctly Cuban
ballad style that would result in some of
the greatest boleros of all time. They
include Portillo de la Luz’s “Contigo en la
83
 84

Francisco Fellove

PHOTO COURTESY OF EL GRAN FELLOVE — A FILM BY MATT DILLON


Mambo king Pérez Prado
and orchestra.
Distancia” and Méndez’s “La Gloria Eres
PHOTO COURTESY THE GLADYS PALMERA COLLECTION / WWW.GLADYSPALMERA.COM
Tú.” The filin composers embodied the
fusion of Cuban and American music, as
liquid a mix as rum and Coca-Cola. And
like the drink known as the Cuba Libre,
it has proved to be a combination as
enduring as it is irresistible.
“It’s been something that’s totally
organic in which the geographical
proximity between the two countries,
and the influence of radio and cinema,
played decisive roles,” Marquetti
explains. “It was not something staged
or contrived.”
While filin became the soundtrack
for gatherings in small smoky clubs,
bohemian enclaves that were something
like the Cuban equivalent of New York’s
coffeehouses, the highball scene in
Havana was happening in the city’s
exclusive nightclubs, where the
diamond-draped and fur-wrapped
figures of the American society women
contrasted with the nearly naked bodies
of the Cuban chorus-line dancers in
extravagant Afro-Cuban-themed stage
shows. At the center of the action was
the famous Tropicana, where Armando
Romeu presided over the orchestra for
the better part of 25 years, starting in
1945. As Cuban writer Leonardo Acosta
put it, Romeu was “rarely seen off the
premises.”
The Romeu Orchestra was known to
feature Cuba’s finest musicians, who
were fluent in both American and
Cuban idioms, including pianists
Peruchín and Bebo Valdés and
85
trumpeter Generoso Jiménez, a veteran
of Cuban icon Benny Moré’s band.
Trumpeter Chico O’Farrill worked for a
time as the orchestra’s arranger, a role
he would also fulfill for Duke Ellington,
Benny Goodman, and Stan Kenton.
In addition to the mambos, cha-cha-
chás, and big band takes on rumba and
Cuban son, the Armando Romeu
Orchestra’s setlists included songs that
the posh Americans who flocked to the
Tropicana during their weekends in
Havana would instantly recognize. Just
a few months after the Hollywood
premiere of the movie Casablanca,
Romeu put out a single of “As Time Goes
By,” with the pioneering Cuban jazz
singer Delia Bravo (who was also
Romeu’s wife) singing in heavily
86
accented English. He also recorded
versions of songs including “Take the A
Train,” “Lady Be Good,” and
“Honeysuckle Rose.”
But Romeu’s repertoire was not
merely designed to please tourists.
Romeu, who called himself an
“unconditional admirer of Duke
Ellington,” was a diehard jazz fan who
was known to spend his spare time
listening to the latest records that he
received from New York, transcribing
the arrangements of the tracks by ear. As
Acosta recounts in his 2003 book
Cubano Be, Cubano Bop, Romeu deemed
this meticulous task his “favorite hobby
in life.”
“Every young musician at the time
was seeking something new,” says
Walfredo de los Reyes Sr., the innovative
Cuban-born drummer and timbale
player in Julio Gutiérrez’s band, who
had spent his teenage years in New York
before returning to Havana at age 20.
Now 87, he’s settled in Northern
California after years spent performing
in Las Vegas casino shows.
“It was an incredible era because the
war had just ended in the ’40s.
Everything was changing.”
‘The Perfect Combination’
As Cuban musicians began getting
together for after-hours jam sessions,
Cuban music’s presence on American
stages was cemented for time
immemorial when Dizzy Gillespie met a
young conga player named Chano Pozo,
who arrived in New York for the first
time in 1946. Percussionist and
bandleader Machito (Frank Grillo), a
former member of Cab Calloway’s band,
with trumpeter Mario Bauzá, his
brother-in-law, had already made a
significant contribution to the
incorporation of Afro-Cuban rhythms
into the music of jazz big bands.
Gillespie hired Pozo for a now legendary
1947 concert at Carnegie Hall. Their
collaboration was short (Pozo was
murdered in a Harlem bar in 1948), but
historic, resulting in “Manteca,” the
song that has been served as the
ultimate representation of what is often
called “the perfect combination:” Latin
rhythms and jazz.
The jazz cats whose albums were so
prized by Cuban musicians began to
arrive in Havana. An engagement by
Woody Herman and his octet at the
Tropicana in 1950 was a milestone
event. Benny Goodman came to check
out the scene. Sarah Vaughan and her
trio jammed with Cuban musicians
after their show at the Sans Souci club;
among the songs they played together
was the Hoagy Carmichael standard
“The Nearness of You.”
Then Nat King Cole came to town.
Cole, accompanied by his trio; his
wife, Maria; and six-year-old daughter
Natalie, arrived in Havana in March
1956 for his first of three engagements
at the Tropicana.
“It was a significant encounter for
both sides, as the famous singer and
pianist who had always shown an
inclination for Cuban music also had an
influence on Cuban jazz and filin
musicians,” Acosta remembers. Cole’s
trio fell in with Armando Romeu’s
orchestra during the shows, together
performing a song list that included
“Love Come Back to Me and “It’s Only a
Paper Moon,” as well as Cole’s signatures
“Mona Lisa” and “Unforgettable.”
“Nat King Cole was crucial for Cuban
musicians,” says Marquetti, the author of
the Cuban music blog Desmemoriados
and a biography of Chano Pozo. “Frank
Sinatra was also important, but Nat was
a musician who the Cuban artists really
connected with. His period as a pianist
in the ’40s was something that Cuban
musicians knew well. And he was
Black.”
Marquetti can count three Afro-
Cuban singers who were referred to as
“the Nat King Cole cubano.” The best
known of them was Leonel Bravet, who
was another founding member of the
filin group Loquibambia.
Cole cemented his position as the
most celebrated link in the chain of
American-Cuban collaborations with
the recording of his first Spanish-
language album, Cole Español, with
PHOTO BY WILLIAM P. GOTTLIEB, COURTESY OF THE IRA AND LEONORE S. GERSHWIN
FUND COLLECTION, MUSIC DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

Nat King Cole in New York City, June 1947

87
 88

(1949)
Desi Arnaz and his
conga in the movie
“Holiday in Havana”

PHOTO COURTESY THE GLADYS PALMERA COLLECTION / WWW.GLADYSPALMERA.COM


arrangements by Armando Romeu,
performed by his orchestra, which at the
time featured Bebo Valdés on piano.
Valdés coached Cole on the
pronunciation of the Spanish lyrics of
songs, including “Quizás, Quizás,
Quizás,” later recorded as “Perhaps,
Perhaps, Perhaps” by Doris Day. Romeu’s
orchestra recorded the tracks at Havana’s
Panart studio, with Cole sitting at the
piano on one track to perform an
instrumental version of filin composer
Portillo de la Luz’s “Tu Mi Dilirio.” At least
some of Cole’s vocals were laid down
later at the Capitol Records studios in Los
Angeles. Released in 1958, the album was
an instant classic in Latin America and a
best-selling cocktail-hour album in the
States.
Radio Silence and Renewal
Less than a year later, the fizz would start
to go out of the effervescent mixing of
American and Cuban music. On New
Year’s 1959, Cuban President Fulgencio
Batista fled the island as Fidel Castro and
his Revolutionary rebels stormed
Havana. The withdrawal of American
corporations and shuttering of the
mafia-backed casinos that had been the
center of the city’s nightlife soon
followed.
After the release that year of Magia
Negra, the first of more than 30 solo
albums to date, Omara Portuondo
continued to make appearances with the
vocal group Las D’Aida in the United
States until 1962, when a series of shows
at a Miami hotel was cut short due to the
Cuban Missile Crisis and the group
returned to Cuba. Diplomatic relations
between the United States and Cuba were
subsequently severed, and the vibrant
back-and-forth of Cuban and American
musicians soon turned to near radio
silence.
In Cuba, as the ’60s began, filin and
other styles of music that had close ties to
American sounds were no longer in the
spotlight. The Cuban ballad form evolved
to a more folk-rooted style, la nueva
trova, whose socially minded songs were
more in sync with the ideology of the
revolution. Cuban artists ceased to tour
in the United States. And while
numerous talented Cuban musicians
went into exile in the United States, the
careers of many of them became
casualties of the triumph of rock bands
over dance orchestras, and, subsequently,
the arrival of disco and club DJs.
Portuondo’s career continued in
Cuba and beyond, though her tours
skirted the United States for decades. In
1997, Ry Cooder’s Buena Vista Social
Club suddenly returned the sound of
Cuba’s yesteryear to the world, selling 12
million copies internationally. The
release coincided with a loosening of US
regulations and Cuba’s willingness to
send musicians to the United States as
cultural envoys in the wake of the fall of
the Soviet Union and the loss of its main
economic support.
The romance of Portuondo’s return
engagement with the American public
continues. Last November, at age 90, she
89
was nominated for a Latin Grammy for
her latest solo album, Mariposas; in
2019 she also won the Latin Grammy
Lifetime Achievement Award.
Over the decades, intrepid American
musicians have made their way to Cuba,
most often to perform at the Havana
International Jazz Festival, keeping the
collaborative spirit alive. But in 2015, a
new era of Cuban-American musical
exchange opened when American
President Barack Obama and Cuban
President Raul Castro restored
diplomatic relations between the two
countries. In the euphoric aftermath of
that agreement, The Rolling Stones gave
a free concert in Havana for half a
million people.
But by 2018, Donald Trump had put
in place regulations severely curtailing
travel to Cuba. Stirred by the repressive
political climate, Cuban exiles began to
oppose Cuban musicians’ appearances
in South Florida, objecting to their
alleged ties to the Communist
government.
With the recent election of Joe Biden
at US president, many expect diplomatic
relations between the United States and
Cuba to be normalized again (at least to
the extent that Congress will allow), and
new musical collaborations to follow. In
the meantime, the music recorded in
the 1940s and ’50s, from “Magia Negra”
to “Stormy Weather” and “El Manisero,”
serves as a testament to the two
countries’ shared musical legacy, and a
joyous reminder that artistic freedom
should never be taken for granted. ■
90
CANON FODDER
The Endless American Songbook
By Caitlin Wolper
M. Ward
Known for his solo work and previous bands — he was a
member of Monsters of Folk and the “him” in She & Him —
Matthew Ward is generally regarded as an indie-folk
performer. But he’s hardly new to the Great American
Songbook. As a young teenager, he listened to a pop tribute
album for Cole Porter, and he took to Billie Holiday in his 20s.
“I had always put Billie Holiday in the category of music
that I respect and admire but never really imagined it would be
something that would take hold and live with me for decades,”
he says. Clearly Ward (who performs as M. Ward) couldn’t
shake the influence: his Billie Holiday tribute album, Think of
Spring, came out in December. Reflecting on this music, he
says, “something about it felt eternal.”
But that brought up a specific challenge: tackling “eternal”
material without regurgitating or tarnishing it. He lauds the
covers on the 1990 Red Hot + Blue Cole Porter tribute album,
citing the contributions by Sinead O’Connor (“You Do
Something to Me”), The Neville Brothers (“In the Still of the
Night”), and U2 (“Night and Day”); listening to that on repeat
was “an eyeopener” when it came to the endless possibilities
for reimagining existing classics.
When it came time to do it himself, he approached the
covers on Think of Spring via his main mediums — acoustic
guitar and voice, sometimes piano. In a way, his reimagining of
Holiday’s songs isn’t so much a deconstruction; it’s a creation
process starting with one of these initial instruments.
But sometimes the song rejects reinterpretation. For
example, Ward initially recorded Holiday’s “The End of a Love
Affair” for Think of Spring, but it didn’t make the final cut
because he didn’t feel like it was interesting or different enough.
Instead, he included a rendition of “All the Way” — a warm-
toned acoustic counter to Holiday’s sultry, slow jazz original.
All these predecessors have had an effect on his own music
throughout his career — he’s borrowed chord progressions,
and he says his songwriting aims for that same lyrical
timelessness. Of course, plenty has changed in the music
industry since those standards were first sung: “We went
through this great stage in music where there was a song and
that was it. Most of the time you couldn’t even put a face to it
because, before TV, it was just the song and the lyrics. I’m not
saying it’s better or worse than what we have now. It’s almost
like a different world.”
Now, optics play an enormous role in music consumption.
The best song needs to be packaged with an engaging video,
branded images, maybe a dose of viral dancing. Perhaps that
makes it even harder for a new song to grow into a standard: It
requires so many more facets.
“If we could tap into [what makes a song a standard] and
somehow make it a logical inclusion, I think it would, in a way,
kill it,” Ward says. “I guess if I have to boil it down, it’s that [the
song] makes you feel something — it changes your mood or
emotion in some way.” ■
HOLLY ANDRE
91
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Gordon Parks in Washington, DC, in June 1942

Safety film negatives of Paul Robeson taken by photographer

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS — PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION,

FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION/OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION BLACK-AND-WHITE NEGATIVES
 93

HOLDING THE
LINEThe history and legacy of the
Peekskill Riots
by Melanie Rock
94
I
n the summer of 1949, Pete
Seeger debuted his anti-fascist
anthem “If I Had a Hammer (The
Hammer Song)” at an open-air
concert in the Hudson Valley, near
Peekskill, New York. The show was a
fundraiser benefiting the Civil Rights
Congress of Harlem, a legal defense
organization with Communist Party ties.
Hosted by The People’s Artists, an offshoot
of the folk musicians’ collective (and
eponymous magazine) People’s Songs, it
was the fourth in a series of annual
concerts showcasing the music that
fueled the nation’s broiling labor and civil
rights movements. As in previous years,
audiences were primed for an
inspirational program of protest music,
featuring the politically controversial
headlining star, Paul Robeson.
A pair of riots, sparked by racism and
Cold War paranoia, erupted in Peekskill
in response to that concert. Their
reverberations shook a nation already
rattled by the polarizing effects of World
War II and the burgeoning Red Scare. It
was a moment marked by intense
political division, unchecked government
corruption, uninformed fear of a Radical
Left, and immense socioeconomic
inequality, not unlike the current state of
America. But in that moment, folk artists
cracked open the Great American
Songbook and let protest music in.
Hostile Hometown
During the volatile years of the Great
Depression, World War II, and the Cold
War, the small city of Peekskill
represented a microcosm of national
tensions. An established Protestant
citizenry cautiously absorbed the tidal
influx of unfamiliar newcomers. Catholic
arrivals in the 1920s spurred aggressions
by the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan
chapter, which veterans’ groups quashed
as World War II erupted. In the summer
months, the rural surrounds of post-
industrial Peekskill felt the squeeze of city
folks setting up camps and communes
that evolved into permanent homesteads.
In 1923, a collective community called
Mohegan Colony was established a few
miles outside of Peekskill’s city limits and
earned the reputation of “Commie
hotbed” due to resident members’ left-
leaning politics and presumed Jewish
heritage. Notably, Mohegan Colony was
the site of the People’s Artists’ first
Robeson concert, in 1946.
By the late 1930s, Robeson had
become one of the most famous
entertainers in the world. The son of a
formerly enslaved man, Robeson was a
championship footballer at Rutgers;
graduated from Columbia Law School and
passed the New York bar; spoke more than
a dozen languages; and maintained a
top-tier theatrical career on the world’s
great stages. Often billed as “America’s
Negro,” Robeson constantly broadened
his knowledge of international folk music,
language, and culture while on tour. He
became a popular lecturer on
international affairs, professing unity,
equity, and peace while exuding authentic
empathy for all oppressed people. And he
consistently decried the systemic
dehumanization of his Black countrymen.
Robeson was one of the most
renowned interpreters of the Great
American Songbook throughout his
career. As an actor and a singer, he knew

how to channel a deep sense of character
in all his performances. Live — in
musicals like Show Boat and as a
headlining act — as well as on albums for
Victor Records, Columbia, and others, his
rich baritone communicated the sounds
and standards of a changing America.
Shortly before the Peekskill concert,
however, Robeson was publicly
condemned for having made remarks
before the Paris Peace Conference that
were deemed anti-American back home.
He’d suggested that Black soldiers refuse
to fight a war on behalf of an unjust
homeland, and expressed his fond
appreciation for the high level of
hospitality he’d enjoyed while visiting the
Soviet Union, in contrast to the Jim Crow
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE PEEKSKILL MUSEUM
norms of the Southern states. In no time
“America’s Negro” was issued a new
moniker: “Commie N----r.”
The writer Arthur Miller proclaimed
1949 to be “the last Post-War year,”
referencing the end of shiny optimism
and the jolt of Cold War destabilization.
Racist attitudes toward Black and Jewish
people escalated as joblessness spiked
and labor organizers partnered with civil
rights leaders in the fight for equality and
justice. Fittingly, when People’s Artists
advertised their Aug. 27 concert in
Peekskill’s daily paper, The Evening Star,
a stream of heated editorials followed,
demonizing Robeson, the Civil Rights
Congress, and the anticipated hordes of
“pinko” fans who some feared would
overwhelm the town. Some articles touted
Nazi slogans and threatened violent
opposition, while others staunchly
disavowed the Klan and discouraged
attendance for the sake of personal safety.
But none foreshadowed the scope of
hostility and hatred encountered by the
first wave of music fans to arrive for the
event.
‘Parade of Patriots’
Expecting an audience of at least 1,000,
The People’s Artists had secured the
12-acre Lakelands Picnic Grounds and
asked the writer/activist Howard Fast to
serve as the concert’s chairman. In
addition to Robeson and Seeger, the
Aug. 27 bill included Hope Foye, Joan
Schlesinger, and George Walker. Events of
95
that day, and those following, are
documented in the pages of Fast’s now
out-of-print memoir, Peekskill: USA.
Published by the Civil Rights Congress in
1950, it offers his chilling, firsthand
account.
While the organizers set the stage, an
energized citizen’s brigade formed a self-
declared “parade of patriots” that
morphed into a fierce guerilla army. They
blocked the entrance to the picnic
grounds, hurling bottles, stones, sticks,
bricks, and flagrantly racist epithets at
arriving ticket-holders. Only 200 people
made it through the gate, as cars and
buses came under heavy attack. The
protesters hung Robeson’s form in effigy
and burned a cross. Terrified organizers
managed to turn Robeson’s car away
before it reached the picnic grounds, and
the show was abruptly aborted. But the
200 who’d gotten in were trapped. Police
and two identified FBI agents stood idly by
as frenzied protesters ignited a massive
bonfire of 1,000 wooden chairs, record
albums, and pamphlets, lighting up the
night.
In his book, Fast recalled: “All evening
Huge crowds gathered in
support of the veterans who
were opposed to the concert.
96
we had fought against the most
monstrous and inconceivable mass
lynching ever attempted in the northern
states of America, not simply a riot or a
mob demonstration, but a calculated
attack to kill two hundred people.”
An estimated 20 people were injured,
but many more were terrorized. Witnesses
questioned the lack of police protection
and the paltry number of officers that
were present.
The next morning, a group of 1,500
concerned citizens organized a response.
Calling themselves the Westchester
Committee for Law and Order, they
rescheduled the concert for the following
week, on the afternoon of Sept. 4, Labor
Day weekend, at a new site.
In the ensuing week, New York Gov.
Thomas E. Dewey assigned guilt for the
Aug. 27 attack to the concertgoers, not the
protesters, and predicted a repeat of
violence on the second try. Local media
coverage fueled the flames: Some
encouraged readers to stay away, while
others suggested boycotts and protests. As
a result, labor unions from across the
tri-state region assembled a security
detail in order to adequately protect the
artists and attendees.
On Sept. 4, an interracial, all-volunteer
security force of 3,000 unionists, veterans,
and do-gooders from as far as Brooklyn
surrounded the perimeter of the vastly
larger concert site, a field within the now-
defunct Hollow Brook Country Club. An
angry mob of thousands lined the roads
approaching the main gate, armed with
arsenals of stones. State and local police,
who’d been refused admission, joined the
protesters’ ranks, against a human chain
of unionists ably shielding the field. Their
linked arms formed an impenetrable
barricade, insuring 20,000 attendees the
peaceful enjoyment of an unforgettable
afternoon of music. Most were oblivious to
the apprehension of two armed snipers
with rifle sights locked on Robeson’s stage.
Sylvia Kahn opened the show with
“The Star-Spangled Banner.” Leonid
Hambro and Ray Lev played classical
piano works by Chopin, Bach, Prokofiev,
and Ravel, followed by the soprano Hope
Foye. Pete Seeger wound up the crowd
with “T Is for Texas” and “If I Had a
Hammer,” followed by Robeson’s eclectic
repertoire, which included “Go Down,
Moses,” a string of European folk ballads,
and a Russian aria from Modest
Mussorgsky’s 1874 opera, Boris Godunov.
After a brief appeal for funds, Robeson
closed the show with his rousing
re-interpretation of “Ol’ Man River,” the
hit from the beloved musical Show Boat,
the last lines of which he’d famously
revised to serve his personal commitment
to the cause of racial equality: “But I keeps
laughin’/ Instead of cryin’ / I must keep
fightin’ / Until I’m dyin’ / And Ol’ Man
River / He’ll just keep rollin’ along!”
Sound bites from the concert are
archived on a 78 rpm record by Los
Angeles-based folk music DJ Mario
Casetta and distributed by the Peoples’
Artists and Charter Records. The
recording features Robeson’s finale, the
roaring audience in thrall, and then the
unmistakable sounds of chaos building as
police directed departing crowds along a
nearly impassable exit route.
“There were 900 police, deputies, and
state troopers at Peekskill,” Pete Seeger
told Casetta for a series of additional
interviews soon after the events. “They
allowed the mob to form along a 4-mile
line of road, and directed all the traffic
down this only exit, and then stood by
watching while all the hoodlums threw
rocks through the windows of cars and
buses. Heads were bashed in. Eyes were
cut by flying glass. Cars were overturned
and people in them dragged out and
beaten. The police stood by and laughed.
Hoodlum gangs went on a night-long
reign of terror, all through Westchester
County and clear down to 210th Street
and Broadway. Then the police moved.
They moved into the picnic grounds and
they beat up the trade union guards.”
Said Fast, “That’s the sound of
fascism. Not in Germany, but here in
America. Remember it.”

Remembered in Song
While the Peekskill Riots remain
under-reported and under-recognized
in the context of American history,
musicians shared their frustration
through songs over time.
Just two weeks after the event, after
having escaped the riot, Lee Hays
wrote the lyrics to “Hold the Line” for
The Weavers:
We shed our blood at Peekskill
And suffered many a pain
But we beat back the fascists
and we’ll beat them back again!
Hold the line! Hold the line!
As we held the line at Peekskill
we will hold it ev’rywhere
Hold the line! Hold the line!
We will hold the line forever
Till there’s freedom ev’rywhere.
The first recording appeared on
Casetta’s 78 recapping the event, and
the song became an anthem of the
civil rights movement. Seeger’s
recording of it didn’t reach wider
audiences for another 50 years, until
its inclusion on the 1999 LP Headlines
& Footnotes: A Collection of Topical
Songs.
Woody Guthrie was at Peekskill too,
serving among the unionist security
force and later riding home in Seeger’s
battered car. The riot inspired his
collection of 21 Peekskill songs,
including “Talkin’ Peekskill” (with
lyrics like, “I’ma tellin you kukluck
hoodlum thugs / I’ma tellin you
bloodyhound Nazi dogs/ I’ma tellin you
twobit fascist rats / I’ma rollin back ta
Peekskill with bulletproof glass!”) and
“No More Peekskill” (“When that Nazi
dust goes blowing / When a world at
peace gets growing / I can walk and sing
and dance with all my friends!).
Although most of Guthrie’s
Peekskill lyrics were never put to
music, his lyrics titled “My Thirty
Thousand” became a song during the
1998 Mermaid Avenue collaboration
between Billy Bragg and Wilco. While
“My Thirty Thousand” was initially
recorded that year, it was shelved as
an outtake; Nonesuch didn’t release it
until 2012, as part of the Mermaid
Avenue: The Complete Sessions box set.
Bragg sings Guthrie’s righteous words
with his famed pointedness:
When Paul had sung and gone
And the kids and babies home
Cops came with guns and clubs
And clubbed and beat them!
I’d hate to be a cop
Caught with a bloody stick
97
’Cause you can’t bash the brains
out of thirty thousand!
Unfortunately for Robeson, though,
his performing career was derailed
after the Peekskill riots. The House
Un-American Activities Committee and
the FBI blacklisted him and the
mainstream press portrayed him as the
riot’s chief instigator. Though he went
on to perform on comeback tours
throughout the United Kingdom,
Western Europe, Russia, Australia, and
New Zealand in the late 1950s and early
’60s, he struggled with severe mental
health issues and ultimately retired in
seclusion in 1963.
Robeson’s legacy as a civil rights
activist and guardian of the Songbook
remains in his actions and in his
music.
At the end of his recording of the
Peekskill riots, Casetta included an
empowering address Robeson made
to a huge Harlem crowd the next day.
And in the wake of a tumultuous
summer of protest in America yet
again, Robeson’s words still ring true:
“These Klan-inspired and police-
condoned hoodlums cannot stop the
song of freedom in America. We are
going on singing and presenting our
concerts in every corner of America.
Let’s fight together.” ■
98
A MIXED BAG
How Carl Sandburg’s ‘The American Songbag’ shaped nearly
a century of folk music
O
n Day 218 of his “American
Songbag Stay-at-Home Series,”
Stephen Griffith sat down in
front of his computer to record
a rendition of the folk song “Si Hubbard.”
The tune, also known as “Hey Rube,” is a
dusty relic of a song that hasn’t held up
well over the years. Holding his 1920
Vernon parlor guitar and singing into a
headset microphone, Griffith started in.
“It’s 33 verses, no chorus, and it’s a very
complicated narrative about the circus.
And, as far as I can tell, it has no
redeeming social value,” Griffith says,
laughing. “It was a tough one.”
For nearly a year, from his home in
Asheville, North Carolina, Griffith has
been recording each and every song in
Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag, a
tome of American folk music consisting
of more than 280 songs and ballads first
published in 1927. (Griffith counts more
than 315 songs, including free-standing
by Avery Gregurich
verses and hidden songs tucked
throughout the text.) When Griffith holds
up his “working copy” of the Songbag to
the camera on a video call, it’s dog-eared,
stickered, and its binding is entirely split
down its spine. He hoped to have
completed this project of recording
performances of every song and posting
them on his website, FolkSongIndex.com,
by the end of January.
Within the Songbag, which stretches to
nearly 500 pages, there are plenty of
forgotten tunes, like “Si Hubbard,”
published right alongside many of the
foundational songs of American folk
music like “Frankie and Albert,” “The
Midnight Special,” “Those Gambler’s
Blues”(which is known now as “St. James
Infirmary”), “C.C. Rider,” and “Casey
Jones.”
With each recording Griffith posts, he
includes Sandburg’s introductory texts, a
prosaic mix of reference information and
advertisements for the songs themselves.
Here’s the one for “Si Hubbard”:
Circus barkers made up as “hayseeds”
sang and recited this piece in the 1880’s. It
was published in the early Seventies with
the title “Hey Rube.” Three boys in
Pittsfield, Illinois, asked a barker to teach
them the words. He refused. The boys took
turns listening, wrote down the words,
joined the three parts and thus had the
whole song. One of the boys grew up,
became a Peoria lawyer, then a Chicago
lawyer, and now on cold winter nights
when there is no circus to go to, he sings it
for his own boy.
Redeeming qualities for modern
society or not, Griffith has diligently
worked through every page of the
Songbag, even when he wasn’t sure what
the point was or whether or not he
understood the songs well enough to
PHOTO BY AL RAVENNA. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK WORLD-TELEGRAM & SUN, COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Carl Sandburg in 1955

99
100
Carl Sandburg is shown here as he was writing the commentary for Bomber, the national defense motion picture just completed by the Office of Emergency Management
film unit. Mr. Sandburg is famous as the Pulitzer prize winning author of The War Years, monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln, and as the author of numerous
poems and other works. Mr. Sandburg is also famous as a musician, newspaper columnist and authority on Americans. The commentary for Bomber was his first
excursion into film making. He volunteered his services to the defense program and served without pay. — Library of Congress
properly sing them. He’s studied them
and sung them even when the book’s
entries contain Black spirituals and
minstrel songs that might be best to leave
for other voices, or in the past entirely.
Griffith chose the Songbag in the first
place because he was looking for a
project to devote the rest of his life to,
something he could “dig into that
included my four main loves in life —
literature, music, history, and religion.”
Additionally, it’s a relatively untouched
tome: He counts more than 100 songs
that have never been recorded, even after
nearly a century in print.
“I call his songbook the ‘mothership’
of American songbooks. I would say that
Sandburg is the ‘big bang’ that separated
folk music, followed by singer-
songwriters, from Tin Pan Alley and
future pop,” Griffith says.
He had been working on the project
for over a year when the pandemic
started. In some ways, the months of
isolation helped him maintain his focus
on the project and develop a deeper
understanding of the songs and their
origins. “What I’m trying to do is get
inside the song like an actor gets inside
of a character in order to try to figure out
exactly what’s going on. That’s been very
helpful,” he says. “I mean, in that regard,
I’m glad the pandemic happened
because I’ve really been able to get into
these, and it’s been just a joyous
experiment.”
Finding Songs
Today, Sandburg’s legacy survives through
his poetry, his expansive and Pulitzer
prize-winning biography of Abraham
Lincoln, and a series of children’s books.
But Griffith believes his work in compiling
The American Songbag warrants that
same merit. He points out that Ken Burns’
recent documentary series on country
music puts The Carter Family at the start
of country music. One of their first
recorded 78s, recorded in 1927 at the
exalted Bristol Sessions, was “Bury Me
Under the Weeping Willow,” released the
same year that Sandburg included it in his
Songbag.
Sandburg first started collecting songs
as a drifting teenager. Born and raised in
Galesburg, Illinois, Sandburg dropped out
of school after the eighth grade. He began
traveling and working all across the Great
Plains, working a series of jobs — milk
wagon driver, hotel porter, bricklayer,
stereoscope salesman, and farm laborer.
He served eight months during the
Spanish-American War, wearing woolen
uniforms recycled from the Civil War. He
lost 25 pounds in what he called the “dirty
and lousy affair,” but gained a scholarship
to Lombard College back in Galesburg.
PHOTO CIRCA 1940 AND 1946, COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION/OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION BLACK-AND-WHITE NEGATIVES.
From there, he became a journalist in
Milwaukee, and later served as a secretary
to Emil Seidel, the first socialist mayor of
Milwaukee. He met his wife, Lilian
Steichen, in the office of the Milwaukee
Social Democratic Party. After marrying
and starting his family there, he moved to
Chicago, where he began writing in
earnest.
By the time he began working on the
Songbag, Sandburg was one of the most
well-known literary figures in the
American consciousness. He’d written
several well-received children’s books,
reported firsthand about the Chicago race
riots of 1919, and won his first Pulitzer for
his collection of poetry, Cornhuskers. He’d
also traveled extensively, lecturing and
reading poetry (first Walt Whitman’s, later
his own) at venues from college campuses
to county fairgrounds. He’d purchased his
first guitar in 1910 and found immediately
that crowd sizes grew after he’d started
closing his performances with a song or
two. After these performances, members
of the audience would present Sandburg
with additional verses to the songs he
knew and share with him songs that he
didn’t.
Additionally, many of his literary
friends, like Robert Frost, H.L. Mencken,
and Sherwood Anderson, sent Sandburg
songs. He also learned them firsthand
from his friend John Lomax, who had

published Cowboy Songs and Other
Frontier Ballads in 1910, many songs of
which would later reappear in the
Songbag.
In her 1964 book, Carl Sandburg: A
Biography, Penelope Niven wrote about a
night when Sandburg performed for his
fellow journalists at the Chicago Daily
News. Sinclair Lewis had just returned
from a tour of Europe and the journalist
Lloyd Lewis remembered Sandburg
singing “The Buffalo Skinners” for the
group. Lloyd Lewis said, “It was like a
funeral song to the pioneer America that
is gone, and when Carl was done Sinclair
Lewis spoke up, his face streaked with
tears, ‘That’s the America I came home to.
That’s it.’ ”
Handy in the Household
In its introduction, Sandburg envisioned
the work as follows: “The American
Songbag is a ragbag of strips, stripes, and
streaks of color from nearly all ends of the
earth. The melodies and verses presented
here are from diverse regions, from varied
human characters and communities, and
each is sung differently in different
places.”
The songs are seemingly organized by
Sandburg’s poetic whim, defying the
then-convention of ordering songs by
geographic region. “Dramas and
Portraits” and “Tarnished Love Tales or
Colonial and Revolutionary Antiques” are
gathered together, as are “Railroad and
Work Gangs,” “The Big Brutal City,” and
“Mexican Border Songs.”
Like the Songbag itself, musicologist
Judith Tick sees Sandburg and his
seemingly disparate works as reflection of
the composite man.
“We so often separate artists into
categories, as if somehow the Carl
Sandburg who went around playing songs
as a troubadour was different from Carl
Sandburg, the poet, but they’re the same.
He’s one and the same person,” says Tick,
a professor emerita at Northeastern
University in Boston. “There’s a kind of
poetic spirit in The American Songbag
that’s easy to miss if you just start
worrying about musical style, and how
romantic they are. ... There’s poetry in
roots music, so that poetry is symbolized
in this wonderful volume.”
She credits the Songbag as the way
that Americans in cities first understood
folk music. In some ways, the collection
was merely good economics, the product
of supply and demand: Families needed
arrangements they could play on the
piano.
“It was understood, especially because
access to recorded sound was so limited
in the late 1920s, that if you were going to
hear music, you made music. They went
101
together,” Tick says. “Being able to provide
music-making for yourself, your family,
and your friends was a very important
social skill, and getting arrangements that
were up to date and interesting was also
very important.”
Sandburg pictured his book as a sort
of tool for households, as essential as a
hammer, writing in the introduction that
it is “a songbook to be sung rather than
read. Music and the human voice
command this parade of melodies and
lyrics.”
Those melodies take many shapes in
the Songbag. In the prefatory notes,
Sandburg explains how some of the song
arrangements were worked out: “In the
arranging of a song I would usually sing it
for the composer — and bring out my
notebook sketch, a rough affair rapidly
penciled and as a document looking
rather like a ‘shivaree’ than a quiet
wedding.” Then, the composers were
tasked with producing an accompanying
arrangement.
Those arrangements varied widely
from complex harmonizations to simple
accompaniments. Various contemporary
composers worked with Sandburg on the
arrangements, including a young Ruth
Crawford, who had taught Sandburg’s
children to play piano and had become a
sort-of adopted daughter to Sandburg. For
the Songbag, Crawford contributed
102
arrangements of “Those Gambler’s Blues”
(“St. James Infirmary”), “Lonesome
Road,” and “Ten Thousand Miles Away
from Home.” Later, she would marry
Charles Seeger, raising their children,
including Mike and Peggy, and her
stepson, Pete Seeger. She also went on to
work closely with John and Alan Lomax at
the Archive of American Folk Song at the
Library of Congress.
In 1921, a 21-year-old Crawford wrote
in her journal of Sandburg: “One evening
after a siege of wood chopping on the
windblown, chilling lakefront and a
boisterous, laughter-swept dinner with
the two buoyant children, he sat there in
the lamplight, singing song after song,
simply, sometimes wildly, sometimes
mournfully, his understanding voice
winding in and out among the irregular
nuances and accompanied by the stray
chords on his guitar.”
Compliments and Critiques
When the Songbag first appeared in the
fall of 1927, it sold quickly, remained in
print for decades, and was republished
several times over the next several
decades. While its popularity was
immediate, it also garnered, and has
sustained, various criticisms.
Music and art critic Alfred
Frankenstein first met Sandburg in the
1920s, when Sandburg came to lecture at
the University of Chicago. He
subsequently traveled the lecture circuit
with Sandburg, notating tunes that
Sandburg was performing after his poetry
readings. He had helped Sandburg with
gathering and documenting the songs,
many of which ended up in the Songbag.
But when he found out about the
publisher’s plans to include
harmonizations with the songs, he
stepped away from the project. In Niven’s
Carl Sandburg: A Biography, she quotes a
letter Frankenstein wrote to Sandburg,
asking, “Who in the hell is the flat head
that got the brilliant idea to harmonize
these songs? There isn’t the slightest
reason for publishing them so, and there
are a million reasons against it.”
Today’s folk music scholars hold
similar frustrations with the Songbag.
Robert Waltz works as the editor of the
Traditional Ballad Index, a database that
includes reference information on
hundreds of folk songs. Waltz writes in an
email that the Songbag is “almost hair-
tearingly aggravating for ballad scholars”
because Sandburg “was just not very
reliable.”
“Sandburg’s book, as a piece of folk
scholarship, stands rather low. But it was
easy to use, it was comfortable, it sounded
folky even though it was the work of a poet
who was willing to fiddle with things,” he
says. “Despite that, it looked, to a non-
expert, fairly authoritative without being
intimidating: a powerful combination,
rarely found elsewhere.”
There were plenty of other
contemporary songbooks of the time,
many of which Sandburg lists in the
Songbag as “An American Bookshelf of
Song”: John Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and
Other Frontier Ballads, American Songs
and Ballads by Louise Pound, American-
English Folk-Songs Collected in the
Southern Appalachians by Cecil Sharp,
and Folk-Songs of the South by John
Harrington Cox. But none enjoyed the
immense and continuous popularity that
Sandburg’s Songbag did.
The fact that the Songbag remained in
print for more than 70 years after its
initial publication shows its lasting
influence among generations of
musicians and listeners alike. Jeff Place,
who has served as curator and senior
archivist at Smithsonian Folkways
Recordings for more than 30 years,
highlights that reach.
“Almost every single collection we’ve
got that has books in it of folk people, the
Songbag is in there. I mean, it was kind of
one of those things that everybody had on
their shelf in their house, sort of like an

almanac or dictionary or something,
sitting on piano benches,” Place says. “I
think a lot of those people who went on to
become collectors and folk musicians,
that was a pretty crucial book early on in
their life.”
Place, who has won three Grammys
for his production and his album notes,
equates the popularity and subsequent
impact of the Songbag on American folk
music of the time with the later release of
Harry Smith’s seminal Anthology of
American Folk Music in 1952. Place
worked on the 1997 reissue for the
Smithsonian, which reintroduced
Smith’s masterwork to yet another
generation of folk musicians and
listeners. Back in 1952, Place says, most
of the records categorized as folk were
uptown folk singers like Burl Ives,
Richard Dyer-Bennet, and Marais &
Miranda.
“That kind of real roots-to-the-earth
kind of music that was on the Anthology,
that edgy stuff that Smith really loved and
found, that wasn’t available,” Place says.
“That was kind of a revelation to people
who liked folk music, like this is really
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
cool stuff. It’s the same kind of thing with
the Songbag. I bet in 1926, if you are going
out to buy music, 90% of it was like Tin
Pan Alley kind of arrangements and all
that sort of stuff, and then people thought,
this is just really crazy wild music. I’m
sure people just thought they had found
something different.”
Preservation Is Paramount
The American Songbag has left a deep,
incalculable mark on American roots
music, in both its territorial foundations
and its current, expansive state. If you
trace a Dylan lyric down, cross reference
the O Brother, Where Art Thou?
soundtrack, or watch Dave Rawlings
Machine play “Money Is the Meat in the
Coconut,” the seeds can usually be found
somewhere deep in the pages of the
Songbag. There’s a comfort in knowing,
after nearly a century in print, that the
Songbag’s relevancy has only grown, not
diminished, and that somewhere in the
hills of North Carolina, someone is
trying to remind us of American folk
music’s everlasting ability to bridge the
gaps between generations of musicians.
Reinterpreting these songs,
therefore, is not a job that Stephen
Griffith has taken lightly. As he has
pursued recording the entirety of the
American Songbag, the biggest
questions he’s asked himself have been
whether some of these songs deserve to
be broadcast at all, and whether he is
the right person to do it. But ultimately,
103
Stephen Griffith
he decided preservation is paramount
in reevaluating our complicated
American musical heritage.
“I’m not going to force people to
accept the songs. What I want people to
do is look at where these songs came
from, and decide for themselves: Is it a
song that in my conscience I can sing, or
I can point to? Or is it a song that just
needs to be, as far as I’m concerned,
erased?” Griffith says. “Can we still
honor these songs that have been
affected by the institutional racism in
this country? I don’t want to throw out
those songs. I just want to give them
more context. If we care to look, we can
find out who we are and where we came
from.”
Through his research and his
performances, Griffith has become a
contemporary part of the folk process.
He’s the latest in a long line of collectors
of American song, picking through
verses gathered by others or added
themselves somewhere along the way.
“That’s what folk music is. I try to tell
my kids, this was before telephones and
recording and all of that stuff. … People
sang a song, they go back home, they
want to remember it, they can’t
remember it, so they make up their own
words to go with it,” he says. “That’s the
legacy of folk music.” ■
 104

Charley Patton, 1929

PHOTOS COURTESY OF DUST \-TO-DIGITAL


Charley Patton (on previous page), Andrew and Jim Baxter, left, and Cleoma Breaux and Joseph F. Falcon are featured on The Harry Smith B-Sides.
THE FLIP SIDE
OF HISTORY
New box set presents a fuller picture of the
‘Anthology of American Folk Music’
by Allison Hussey
T
he cover to the Anthology
of American Folk Music bears a
striking curio. The etched image
depicts a hand reaching out of a
sunbeam-spangled cloud to tune a single-
stringed instrument — the Celestial
Monochord — that sets the heavens and
earth in tune with one another. It’s
majestic and mysterious all at once,
speaking to a broad and universal
connection through music.
In 1952, Folkways Records issued the
six-LP set curated by Harry Smith, a
project assembled from the massive
collection of 78 rpm records that he’d
begun collecting as a teenager. It covered
pre-war gospel, blues, and other
traditional music, piquing deeper interest
in acts like The Carter Family, Charley
Patton, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and
Blind Willie Johnson. Smith was a seeker
and a scholar whose creative interests
extended into filmmaking, visual art,
music, and all the spaces in between.
Within the sharp red covers is a treasure
chest of American identities, organized by
Smith’s own logic and creativity.
The Anthology of American Folk Music
105
helped inspire the likes of Bob Dylan,
Joan Baez, and Dave Van Ronk to write,
establishing a subset of semi-standards
that would power the folk revival activity
of the 1960s. It influenced a vast swath of
artists who may or may not necessarily
identify as folk musicians. The Anthology
carried tunes like “The House Carpenter,”
“The Cuckoo,” “See That My Grave Is Kept
Clean,” and “Stagger Lee” into the wider
public sphere, where they’ve endured as
familiar numbers. It helped introduce
Americans to the centuries-old English
and Celtic Child Ballads, the seeds of
106
Burnett & Rutherford (shown at left circa the late 1920s) and Lionel Ziprin (right, circa 1952, shown with Harry Smith to his left and an unidentified friend behind) are
featured on The Harry Smith B-Sides.
countless Appalachian yarns. It spread
blues and banjo tunes from regional
enclaves across the country, and, more
broadly, it helped cohere a sustained
interest in the origins and meaning of
folk music.
Digging Deeper
Released last October, a four-CD archival
box set issued by the Atlanta-based label
Dust-to-Digital has plunged deeper into
exploring the context of the Anthology’s
old songs. Its 84 tracks appear on the
opposite sides of the 78 rpm record sides
that appeared in the original Anthology.
Eli Smith, a New York-based musician
who runs the Brooklyn Folk Festival and
label Jalopy Records in addition to
helping lead the Harry Smith B-Sides
project, notes that Folkways’ tactic of
marketing to libraries helped the
Anthology take hold across the country.
“It created a common repertoire for
the new generation of folk musicians in
New York City, but also nationally, and it
created a canon of songs for them, which
has been handed down through the
successive generations to a certain
extent until now,” Smith says.
Nearly 70 years after the Anthology,
the Harry Smith B-Sides project
developed in adjacent corners of
interest. On one side was John Cohen, a
folklorist, filmmaker, and lifelong
scholar who shares many of Harry
Smith’s countercultural interests. Rani
Singh, who worked closely with Smith as
his assistant in the last years of his life
and oversees the Harry Smith Archive,
credits Cohen with helping connect
Smith’s interdisciplinary pursuits in the
public eye, most notably in a 1968
interview with Sing Out! magazine.
In 2013, Cohen recruited Eli Smith
— his mentee and bandmate in the old-
time group The Down Hill Strugglers —
to research and find the flip-sides of
every song included in the original
Anthology. The goal, Smith says, was to
complete listeners’ understandings of
what the original 78s actually were.
“[The end result] would give you
some clearer idea of the meaning and
context of the music, as it was originally
issued in the ’20s and ’30s, as it was
originally heard by the people who
originally bought those discs,” he says.
Once they’d tracked down the
material, Cohen and Smith approached
Dust-to-Digital’s April and Lance
Ledbetter to see about releasing the
project. With a roster already stuffed
with other collections of 78 rpm rarities
from Thailand and Africa, as well as the
landmark gospel set Goodbye Babylon,
COURTESY OF THE LIONEL ZIPRIN ARCHIVES
the label seemed like a natural fit.
In fact, they’d already begun
enthusiastically brainstorming the
concept with record collector Robert
Nobley in 2004. At that point, they’d
discussed, but had not begun anything;
they sidelined the project, as often
happens with ambitious endeavors such
as these.
Like Smith and millions of others,
Lance qualifies his introduction to the
Anthology as life-changing. “It just blew
me away. There was the music, Harry’s
presentation, the graphic design, the
text, his cutout images, it was just a
transformative experience,” he says. “I
always wanted to start a record label and
I did not know what to do. That wasn’t
where I had the vision of what Dust-to-
Digital would be, but that’s what put me
on the path to get to that vision.”
With the recordings and research in
hand, the Ledbetters, Cohen, and Smith
set to work seeing the B-Sides project
through to completion. Smith and Cohen
recruited a number of collaborators —
scholars, musicians, and others — to
write liner notes for the set, paying
homage to the quippy, quirky headline
style that Smith deployed in his original
collection.
For “Nobody’s Dirty Business” by
Mississippi John Hurt, Hubby Jenkins

Furry Lewis (shown at left circa 1927) and Ernest Stoneman’s Blue Ridge Corn Shuckers (in Galax, Virginia, in 1928) are featured on The Harry Smith B-Sides.
writes, “Man Demands Others Stay Out
of the Affairs of His Tumultuous
Relationship; Contemplates
Reconciliation and Murder.” “Children
Lose Their Mother Under Mysterious
Circumstances; Fail to Complete
Homework,” reads music writer Amanda
Petrusich’s explanation of “Village
School” by Nelstone’s Hawaiians (who
were actually from Alabama). Other
contributors include Rosanne Cash,
Dom Flemons, Devendra Banhart, and
Pokey LaFarge.
“I wanted it to be a snapshot of some
people who I felt were strongly affected
by the Anthology, and were carrying on
the work of the Anthology in some way,”
Smith says. “Some people approached it
with some more of an academic bent,
and that includes some academics and
researchers. Other people that are more
just straight-up musicians, artists,
maybe came at it in a way that was
free-spirited.”
Petrusich, who examined the world
of rare-record collectors in her 2014
book Do Not Sell at Any Price, was drawn
to the Anthology’s otherworldly appeal
when she first encountered it through
the Smithsonian Folkways’ 1997 reissue.
The liner-note project became a new way
to inhabit the mind of someone whose
work had made a prominent impact on
her own.
As a young writer, she’d write out
passages that struck her from other
writers she admired as a way of
deepening her connection to the work.
“Just to sort of see like, ‘Can I learn
something about the rhythm of this,
what does this look like in my hand?’
Just to try to kind of get closer to it,” she
explains. “Trying to mimic Smith’s
writing was sort of my way of doing that.
It felt like both an opportunity to pay
homage to him and another way to learn
from him.”
For fiddler Rayna Gellert, the
influence of the Anthology is even more
personal. Like Smith, she was looped
into the B-Sides project by Cohen and
contributed to the liner notes. But when
asked about where her relationship to
the Anthology began, she laughs and
offers, “In the womb.”
Gellert’s fiddle lineage comes from
her father, who realized as a young
violinist in early 1960s New York that
there was room for him to hone his
chops as a fiddler in the city’s
burgeoning folk-revival and hootenanny
scene. Barely a full-fledged teenager, he
taught himself “Sail Away Lady” from
Uncle Bunt Stephens’ Anthology
recording and soon established himself
as a fiddler for life. Gellert, in turn,
107
picked up the family trade.
From the perspective of an old-time
musician, Gellert’s connection to the
Anthology extends beyond her blood
relatives. The music connects her to the
wider family of people who carried this
music through history until it arrived to
her.
“I think of Uncle Bunt Stephens as
this sort of spiritual grandfather in a
way, musically, beyond that very specific
starting point of the old-time fiddle
experience that I had growing up,” she
says.
Reckoning with the Roots
Before the B-Sides project could come to
fruition, Dust-to-Digital had to navigate
the labyrinthine process of tracking
down rights-holders to clear the usage of
all 80-something songs — which
sometimes meant butting up against
monolithic major labels to which old-
time music wasn’t much of a pressing
concern. But there was another snag as
well.
As the project neared its final stages,
the Ledbetters realized that they couldn’t
abide some of the tracks in the set that
contained racist language. Their
reckoning arrived amid the summer
protests against police brutality in the
108
From left, The Carter Family, Jim Jackson, and the Rev. J.M. Gates are featured on The Harry Smith B-Sides.
wake of the murders of George Floyd and
Breonna Taylor — at which point the
B-Sides box sets were already in
production. In June, they decided to
reconfigure the set to remove three
tracks, adding a slip of paper noting the
change in the set. It came down to
helping people enjoy the music and
recognizing its value in all contexts,
whether that’s a listener taking a studied
approach or someone hearing these
selections for the first time as a result of
streaming algorithms.
“The Anthology is what turned me on
to this music. We don’t want to be turning
people away because they hear hateful
lyrics,” says Lance Ledbetter. “That’s
what it boils down to. The sustainability
of this music is a part of that decision.”
Following the release of the set in
October and the publication of a New
York Times article about the project, the
Ledbetters received even more feedback
on their decision. Some supported it,
while others accused them of historical
erasure. But as the Ledbetters note, the
songs removed from the set are easy to
find online for those who feel compelled
to hear them; they’re not impeding
anybody’s access to the work.
“We’re creative people who have the
ability to make choices based on what we
want to do. That’s a big part of Dust-to-
Digital — it’s the way it is because of
choices that we make all the time,” April
Ledbetter says, adding that she
sometimes feels frustrated by what she
sees when people express interest in
hearing old songs that contain racial
slurs. “I think they kind of don’t
understand what they’re asking to hear.
There’s a lot of hate there. Well, I’m not
going to be a part of perpetuating that or
making that easier for people to access,”
she says.
The Ledbetters’ emphasis on
facilitating positive connections with the
records that Harry Smith collected
aligned with what Rani Singh, director of
the Harry Smith Archive, cites as Smith’s
desire to let the music speak for itself.
“Harry Smith made a very deliberate
choice in not naming the race or gender
of the artists on the Anthology. He said,
specifically, that he wanted people to just
judge the music for what it was,” Singh
says, noting, “That was something that
was very contradictory to the standard
anthropological traditions and
techniques of the time.”
The Anthology is an oddity, too, in
regard to its status as a singular project
for Smith. He got rid of most of his
records after completing the Anthology,
giving some to the Lincoln Center branch
of the New York Public Library and
others ending up with Folkways. He
spent the rest of his life engaged in
adventures in experimental film and
other media.
Generations of Growth
Though Harry Smith moved on from the
Anthology, the collection continues to
take hold among new generations of
listeners. In early 2021, the new Bob
Dylan Center is set to open in
complement to the existing Woody
Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The
Bob Dylan Center, also in Tulsa, will be

“Harry Smith made a very deliberate choice in not naming the race
or gender of the artists on the ‘Anthology.’ He said, specifically, that
he wanted people to just judge the music for what it was.”
Rani Singh
the new home for the books and records
that remained in Smith’s collection upon
his death in 1991 — materials that the
Getty Research Institute couldn’t keep
alongside his other papers in Los
Angeles. This new preservation endeavor,
Singh says, is part of a larger mission to
connect the dots between different
performance arts.
“Their mandate, as I understand it, is
to really broaden out the interests of not
just Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, but to
really be thinking about creativity and
how music gets fueled by so many
different types of artistry,” she says.
“Harry Smith — who had met Woody
Guthrie early on in 1951 in San Francisco
and certainly influenced Bob Dylan over
the decades — fits squarely into that into
that mandate.”
And as Eli Smith points out, the
technological advances of the last several
decades mean that the Anthology now
exists as part of a broader body of work
that’s available to the public, thanks in
part to labels like Dust-to-Digital as well
as contemporaries like Bear Family
Director of the Harry Smith Archive
Records and Document Records.
“The Anthology is no longer the sole
resource that it used to be for many
people, and I think that’s wonderful,”
Smith says, “[It’s] something that people
can really use and take advantage of to
get a very serious education about what
down-home, grassroots American folk
music really is — what it sounds like, who
made it, what their lives were like.”
Harry Smith’s record collection as
heard through the Anthology and the
B-Sides serves as a portal back to a period
of history that was, for lack of a better
term, “weird.” But “weird” is no
pejorative; it instead captures the wide
umbrella of listening to rare musical
moments unburdened by expectations.
“There is an aesthetic sense of the
pure magic of the idiosyncratic
weirdnesses of some of these records,
where the thing that’s the most thrilling
is just how freaky people’s approaches
are to songs and instruments, and how
individual these different expressions
are of these tunes,” Gellert says.
Petrusich, meanwhile, notes that the
109
Anthology encapsulates an era that
occupied a completely different mindset,
music made by mostly ordinary people
in the earliest days of the recording
industry.
“I think there was a way of
performing then, because the
performers were not entirely aware that
they were making a document that would
long outlive them,” she says, continuing,
“It was such a foreign and strange idea in
that moment that there’s a kind of
un-self-consciousness to the
performances that I find myself longing
for in a lot of contemporary music.”
It’s this singular, enrapturing quality
that’s helped the Anthology remain a
pillar in the understanding of American
folk music. With the original Anthology,
Harry Smith offered infinite seeds to
curious listeners that inspired cascades
of musicians, writers, and many more.
That those seeds continue to yield fruit
so many years later, through that
original tome and the B-Sides, speaks to
the unusual and lasting power of this
particular songbook. ■
110

Connie Converse

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Summer 2021: Voices Fall 2021: Ghosts

After themed issues on instruments, gear, songwriting, and No Depression will be ready for “spooky season” with the Fall
other tools, No Depression will dedicate an entire issue to the 2021 issue! Called “Ghosts”, stories will highlight roots music THE ESTATE OF ELIZABETH CONVERSE / SQUIRREL THING RECORDINGS

human voice. Summer 2021 will serve as quite the vocal issue,
literally and figuratively. Stories will take a deeper look at
singing range, technicalities, and timbre, but also highlight
individuals whose voices carry words of change, protest, and
dissent throughout roots music.
Included in this issue: Connie Converse, Jeff Tweedy, Sam
Amidon, Sarah Jarosz, Margaret Glaspy, Widespread Panic,
Maxayn Lewis, Branford Marsalis, and Elizabeth King and The
Gospel Souls.
folklore, legendary figures, forgotten histories, and
contemporary musicians keeping these ethereal traditions
alive. Of course, this genre of music has its share of ghosts —
from characters in old standards to the many injustices that
stymie equality in the music industry — and No Depression
won’t shy from them either.

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Contributors
ALLISON HUSSEY is a native North Carolinian
living in Brooklyn. She’s written about
music and culture for No Depression,
Pitchfork, NPR Music, Bandcamp Daily,
She Shreds, INDY Week, and others.
AVERY GREGURICH is a writer living and working
in Marengo, Iowa. He was raised next to the
Mississippi River and has never strayed too
far from it.
CAITLIN WOLPER is a writer whose work has
appeared in The New York Times, Rolling
Stone, Vulture, and more. Her first poetry
chapbook, Ordering Coffee in Tel Aviv, was
published in October 2019 by Finishing
Line Press. She tweets (with a bevy of
exclamation points) at @CaitlinWolper.
CHARLES DONOVAN is a London-born journalist
whose work has appeared in the Sunday
Times Magazine, Record Collector, Shindig,
The Evening Standard, and The
Independent. As a copy editor, he has
worked for Vogue and Boisdale
Life. He produces album reissues for the
Cherry Red and BGO labels.
CHARLEY RUDDELL is a freelance music
journalist and critic whose work has
appeared in Pitchfork, Aquarium
Drunkard, WBUR, Reverb, and others. He is
also a touring bandmate, co-songwriter,
and loving partner to Aubrey Haddard,
with whom he currently resides with in
Brooklyn, New York.
GEORGE HAGE is a graphic artist and
songwriter based in Raleigh, North
Carolina. He has done design work for
American Aquarium, Rayland Baxter,
Chris Shiflett, music festivals, and more.
When he’s not creating art, he’s creating
music with his band, Jack the Radio,
which recently released a full-length
album, Creatures, with special guests
Lydia Loveless, Tamisha Waden, and
Jeanne Jolly.
GREG CAHILL is a San Francisco Bay Area
writer. He is the former editor of Acoustic
Guitar magazine and once listened for 10
minutes while Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
described his favorite milkshake (it’s all
about the viscosity).
HILARY SAUNDERS is the managing editor at No
Depression and her previous work has
appeared in Paste, ESPN, Next City, The
Jewish Daily Forward, and more. She’s a
proud alumna of the University of Miami
and a firm believer that rock and roll can
save the world.
JANE BEAIRD is an illustrator and fine artist
living in Brooklyn. Her work uses organic
imagery, storytelling, and a whimsical color
palette to explore femininity and identity in
the modern world. When she’s not painting
or curled up at home with a book, you can
find her taking long walks in the city.
JUDY CANTOR-NAVAS is a writer devoted to
preserving the legacy of Latin music. She
was nominated for a 2020 Grammy award
for her liner notes for the box set The
Complete Cuban Jam Sessions, which she
also co-produced. Judy is the translator of
the new book Cha-Cha-Chá: A Dance and
an Era, published by the Gladys Palmera
Collection in Spanish and English editions,
and she has served as Latin music
consultant for a feature film to be released
in 2021. These days, Judy is at home with
her husband and son in Barcelona.
KAMARA THOMAS is a singer, songspeller,
mythology fanatic, and multidisciplinary
storyteller based in Durham, North
Carolina. Her solo album Tularosa: An
American Dreamtime will be released
later this year, and her band Aquarian
Devils will release its first single in
February. Kamara directs work for film,
stage, and public spaces, and she also
spearheads Country Soul Songbook, a
performance and documentary project
that spotlights underrepresented voices in
country and Americana.
KIM RUEHL was an editor of No
Depression from 2008 to 2017, bringing the
magazine back into print in 2015 and
ending her run as editor-in-chief. She has
also written for Billboard, NPR Music, Yes
Magazine, and others. Her book, A Singing
Army: Zilphia Horton and the Highlander
Folk School, is due in March from
University of Texas Press. She lives in
Asheville, North Carolina.
111
MARCUS AMAKER is Charleston, South
Carolina’s first poet laureate and an
award-winning graphic designer. His
poetry has been featured on PBS
Newshour, TEDxCharleston, Alaska
Airwaves magazine, and more. His eighth
book, The Birth of All Things, was
published by Free Verse Press in June. His
third album with Grammy-winning
musician/producer Quentin E. Baxter of
Ranky Tanky will be released this year.
MARCUS K. DOWLING is a journalist, broadcaster,
and entrepreneur based in Washington,
DC. In the past decade, he has written for
The Bitter Southerner, Complex, ESPN’s
The Undefeated, The FADER, Mixmag,
Pitchfork, Vibe, VICE, and more. As a
wordsmith, Dowling is obsessed with
history, appreciating the present, and
loving the future.
MELANIE ROCK is a freelance writer and
musician based in New York’s Hudson
Valley. She’s currently developing a full-
length memoir, titled Browngirl Cleans Up,
about growing up multi-ethnic in 1970s
New York. Visit melanierock.com for more.
NOAH BERLATSKY is a freelance writer based in
Chicago. He played the banjo briefly and
poorly, but he misses it.
STACY CHANDLER is the assistant editor for No
Depression. She also writes occasionally
for the (Raleigh, North Carolina) News &
Observer and various alumni magazines,
and has copy edited daily newspapers,
accounting magazines, shopping guides,
online college courses, and pretty much
anything else that has words in it. She lives
in Raleigh with her husband, their
daughter, a big dumb yellow dog, and an
underused fiddle.
STEPHEN DEUSNER is a Tennessee native now
living in Bloomington, Indiana. His work
appears regularly in Uncut, Pitchfork,
Stereogum, and the Bluegrass Situation,
among other publications. His first
book, Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling
the South with the Drive-By Truckers, will
be out in Fall 2021.
 Screen Door
112
T
ry this mental exercise. For
the following scenarios,
envision the first face that
pops into your mind.
Lone traveler, hitting the open road.
Rider on horseback, galloping
into the sunset.
Good-looking drifter,
crisscrossing the country.
Chances are, the character you saw
was a white man. If you saw a woman,
chances are it was a white woman. I’d be
surprised if the first character you saw
was black, brown, or queer. If you’re lucky,
you envisioned yourself. If you’re white,
I can assure you it was easier to do so.
Does this mean that a black or brown or
queer person never rode into the sunset
or hit the open road? Of course not. But we
have a collective struggle imagining that
possibility. The reasons why are all over
the news.
This struggle is the American
Mythology Problem. This problem vexes
me, because I’m a songwriter, and songs
— especially country and Americana
songs — are high-volume repositories of
monolithic American mythologies. These
genres — where we pride ourselves on
that mix of traditionalism, storytelling,
and authenticity — are swimming in
a mythological bullshit that stinks in
proportion to our willingness to call it out
from our polite creative circles.
Stories matter. The characters and
images we write into songs matter. The
American Songbook should represent our
entire community, because the stories we
tell frame our collective reality.
I founded the Country Soul Songbook
project to address this mythology
problem in country and Americana by
putting BIPOC and LGBTQ2IA artists into
the spotlight — reinterpreting, archiving,
and recreating the canon from our points
of view. A new story (which is really a very
old story) needs telling about where this
music comes from and who belongs to it.
LOVE IS A LONG ROAD
BY KAMARA THOMAS
I’m hoping it will change minds and
hearts to see a stage full of musicians that
are usually marginalized or tokenized
playing their own country and Americana
music. I’m betting that a song like “Delta
Dawn” or “Islands in the Stream” or “Close
Up the Honky Tonks,” sung from the
bodies of these folks, will flip an internal
mythological switch that allows us to see
more possibilities in the American story.
In October, we organized the first
annual Country Soul Songbook Summit.
Over four days and 35 hours of virtual
gathering, we featured 65 BIPOC and
LGBTQ2IA artists, entrepreneurs,
scholars, and journalists who create
and care about this music. We had
conversations about representation,
inclusivity, activism, and community.
We redefined for ourselves what it looks
like to be country, Southern, Western,
American. We made a commitment as
artists to lead the conversation. We left
the Summit brimming with ideas and
invigorated for the work ahead.
Songs die if they’re not sung. And
if songwriters don’t build songs to last,
the Songbook suffers and the culture
deteriorates. So it has always been that
the American Songbook is in the hands of
artists, and it needs all hands on deck if
it’s going to be part of the future. It’s time
for artists to decide what we’re keeping or
leaving behind, and what stories have yet
to be told.
The good news is that stories created
our mythology problems, and stories can
correct them. Are the stories we’re telling
ourselves true, or just what the genre has
come to expect? Are we making space
for a more expansive American story, or
just reinforcing the oppressive systems
we’re used to? As we barrel toward a
future beyond imagining, will our songs
become relics of an outdated and harmful
American mythology, or firebrands that
make the way a bit clearer for those who
come after us? We love the Songbook too
much to leave it languishing, don’t we?
Charles L. Hughes, whose book
Country Soul: Making Music and Making
Race in the American South helped
inspire Country Soul Songbook, stated
an idea at the summit that continues to
inspire me. He asserted that musicians
are historical actors, that we should see
ourselves as such, and that especially
collectively, the music we make has a
greater power over our times than we
might recognize.
Renovating America’s mythology
will take work and generations of time.
It will take songs, written and sung by
a multitude of artists who look and see
differently from one another, playing
together onstage, one stage at a time. This
DERRICK BEASLEY
will take courage, and I’m hoping a great
many songwriters answer the call, so
that one day we might have an American
Songbook that represents America.