Phonographic Revivalism

Note: I'm trying to get something right in the chapter I'm working on, and sometimes it helps to lay it out in a few paragraphs here, so, here:


As a musical form, the blues is often defined and discussed in terms of authenticity.  There is the blues, the real blues, the deep blues, and  the real deep blues.  There is the race-haunted question of whether white folks can really play the blues, which could also be a way of asking of only black folks can play the blues, a questions which may have started out as the assertion that black folks could only play the blues, since early record producers considered blues the only viable commercial form for African American musicians, and usually refused to record the full repertoire of early "blues" artists.  And of course there's pianist Henry Thomas's assertion that "Although they call it the blues today, the original name given to this kind of music was 'reals.'  And it was real because it made the truth available to the people in the songs."  Thomas is voicing here both a feeling felt among black musicians and audiences, and part of the ethic that has made the blues an attractive form to write about for progressively minded academics.  He's also performing some signifyin' on the fact that many musical pieces widely considered "blues" were actually called "reels" by their original audiences.

For all of this concern with realness though, the history and historiography of the blues is largely and loudly defined in relation to recordings, aural mediations of "real" performances.  As noted above, commercial recording practice shaped the basic parameters of the genre.  When John Hammond Sr. went looking for the recently deceased Robert Johnson in 1938, and couldn't find him, Hammond played Johnson's records at Carnegie Hall instead, an act of near-literal phonographic revivalism that I'd argue qualifies Hammond's From Spirituals To Swing concerts as the beginning o of the blues revival.  Two decades later, decades in which documentarian recordists like Alan Lomax compiled field recordings of blues players as part of his folklore studies the Robert Johnson LP King of the Delta Blues Singers became an integral artifact of the early 60s blues revival, and played no small part in the establishment of the name "Delta Blues" as a generic term, whose history fused documentary and commercial recording practices.  And, three decades after that, the release of Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings as a CD boxed set inaugurated another blues revival, one marked by the emergence of festivals, tourist destinations, and of course, the "Million Dollar Juke Joint" House of Blues Franchise.  If we want to, we could even continue to pin blues revivals to advances in consumer recording and replay technology by noting that 2003, the congressionally mandated "Year of the Blues" was marked by the release of several blues films, including of course Martin Scorsese presents The Blues, a 7 film series whose title should remind us of the canon-making power that these advances in duplicable media hold, particularly when presented by a prestigious interlocutor like Scorsese, or Lomax, or Hammond.

Martin Scorsese present The Blues premiered on PBS and was, later in the year, released in a handsome DVD boxed set.  Several other blues films released in 2003, like Robert Mugge's Last of the Mississippi Jukes, and the re-released Deep Blues also by Mugge, The American Folk Blues Festival Series, You See Me Laughin', The Howlin' Wolf Story, and more, went straight to DVD.  This allowed consumers to mark the 100th anniversary of W.C. Handy's encounter with "the wierdest music I ever heard" in a Tutwiler train station, from the comfort of their own homes.  it also marked an early high point in the distribution of such films via physical discs, as that format soon began to receive intense competition from streaming video.  Perhaps there will be another blues revival soon, to mark this new form, thopugh it really hasn't been very long since the last one.

All of this-the notions of documentary authenticity, of a blues and a past that is always vanishing, ineffable and barely and imperfectly preserved, the fascination with the obsolete, the vernacularization of commercial media, and especially the need to mediate old and ever-disappering forms of mediation in new formats, comes to bear on a video like this:

Union Man

Well, Labor Day, or as Barrett calls it, "fake May Day" is almost over, but I still want to say something about a certain song.  "Union Man" by the Cate Brothers, from their 1975 album, Cate Bros. (pronounced "Cate Brothers"), produced by Steve Cropper, who also plays guitar on several tracks, including this one.  Here's the the songs, before we get much farther in:

 Its easy, in the first couple of verse, to hear just the narrator's skepticism about what the Union Man has to offer, his doubts about paying dues and going on strike. Since at least the 1980s that's the kind of sentiment that we expect from a narrator who declares "It's six A. M. and I'm out on the job/working like a fool for my pay" when he introduces himself.  Certainly that's all that blogger/DJ JB hears, as he encounters the song on an archaeological dig through the May 22, 1976 broadcast of Casey Kasem's American Top 40. But there's more to it than that, and the third verse and chorus are critical to what I'm convinced is a conversion narrative. first, lets pick up the last verse before the break, where, at the end, Ernie declares: "All the money, that I'm getting paid/Looks like I'm bound to lose!" which is as concise a summary of the the wage worker's place in capitalism as you'll find on record.  That's followed by a middle section that's all about point and counterpoint, including a guitar duel between Earl and Steve Cropper.  Then, his doubts resolved, at least temporarily, the narrator declares "hey hey Mr. union man, thank you for the helping hand/hey hey Mr. union man, so glad you understand."

The doubts in those first two verses always made me hear that last line as sarcasm, but I'm sure that's not the case now.  There's very little sarcasm or cynicism in any of the songs that make up the 4 Cate Brothers albums from 1975-1979.  In fact, until 1979's Tom Dowd produced Fire on the Tracks, every song is sung as a first person, narrative, and usually a heartfelt one.  That doesn't mean that that the narrator of every song is Ernie or Earl, but it makes it easier to get to know the narrators they speak through. And the narrator of this song is, by the end of the song, sincerely happy to take a "helping hand" from someone who "understands" even if getting to that point is a challenge to what he believes he's supposed to be doing to feed his "hungry family."  Not simply a pro-union song, its a dramatization of the conflict between unionism and the ideological disposition of much the southern working class.  Its instructive.

In many ways, "Union Man" much less ambivalent about the unionism than the song "King Harvest" by the Cates' friends, The Band.  If you're not familiar with the relationship between these two groups, here's some background.  Interestingly, Robbie Robertson, a voracious reader, has said that he wrote "King Harvest" after hearing about and reading about The Southern Tenant Farmer's Union.  In an interview last year, Earl said that they wrote the song after reading a book about the STFU, and I've been wondering since if it was, this one?  Earl and Ernie both also said that the song was originally slower, that Cropper wrote the opening like and sped it up, which explains his co-writing credit on the tune.

Since I've started this, its past labor day, but hardly time to put aside the value of work.  The Cates kept working long after those 4 albums, and even after "retiring" in 2006, they still work a lot.  Here's a more recent performance of "Union Man" from the slightly surreal locale of the Cherokee Casino in Siloam Springs.  Thanks for listening.

"a social history of remembering in the South."

Sorry for the long absence from this site. There's plenty on my mind, but no particular thing floating to the top that I want to blog about. so, instead, I want to share something that I read (again) today that's driving what I'm hoping to do:

“We should not take for granted, then, the inevitability of the contemporary southern landscape, dense with invocations of the past. The historical South that exists today is the consequence not of some innate regional properties but of decades of investment, labor, and conscious design by individuals and groups of individuals who have imagined themselves as “southerners.” If characterizations of southern memory are to be meaningful, attention should be given to what kind of history southerners have valued, what in their past they have chosen to remember and forget, how they have disseminated the past they recalled, and to what uses those memories have been put. We need, in short, a social history of remembering in the South.”

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, from No Deed But Memory” in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory and Southern Identity, 2000.

To this I'd add the commonsense note that different southerners have valued different memories, and used different mechanisms for archiving and disseminating those memories too. some of that memory work corresponds to dominant hegemonic notions of southerness, and some of that memory work defies those notions, sometimes activating and enlisting contrary and alternative imaginations of southerness in that effort. And while even this could stand a little unpacking, I want to press forward and suggest a couple of unusual sites for archiving and activating memory, sites available to groups who who lack (for a variety of reasons) the political clout to write their past into the literal landscape in the form of either shopping malls or graveyards. One of them is Facebook, where my own hometown has been holding a kind of extended and far flung countercultural reunion. The other one, broader and more directly applicable to my project is live music in general.

My own experience in playing at and putting on shows suggests to me that live musical performance is all or mostly or often about the construction of memorable moments, and that popular musical performance specifically is about the ongoing practice of enacting (constructing, whatever performative verb you want to use here) a (roughly) duplicable series of memorable moments. Looking at live musical performance in this way ties those performances to recordings, ties together the interests of musicians and audiences, and helps, I hope to get at the role that social musicking plays in the (re)construction of the past in the present. In the context of Brundage's remarks on southern memory it also allows us to see southern musicking as an ongoing identificatory project.

Now, there's a cluster of thoughts around "southern music" and especially "southern rock" that I think cries out for some expansion, but I need a cup of coffee to think about that. Specifically, I'm thinking about southern music, genre, and memory as the overall theme of the next post.