Sound research over the years

    In early November, right after a horrific snowstorm that knocked out the electricity for five days, and snapped off or toppled over many white spruce trees in the nearby forest, I flew from Maine to Santa Fe for the annual conference of the American Folklore Society. I hadn't planned to give a paper this year, but I was asked to be on a panel called "Leaders in the Field," where a number of us older hands would be interviewed for posterity. The session was going to be videotaped and go into the Society’s archives. The irony struck that, having spent so much of my professional life documenting others, now I was to be a subject. Well, fair’s fair. Besides, professors are willing to talk about and share their research. To think and talk about its trajectory over the past forty years was an invitation I couldn't pass up, and didn't. So when it was my turn I told some stories about my interests in music and sound over the years and where that’s led. Here are a few of them.
    I was asked how I first got interested in music, and replied with a story my mother told me. She said that my first words were sung, not spoken. Evidently my family were avid radio listeners, and what caught my ear came out in song (phonetically) as “Pepi coda hitta pot.” The melody, not the mispronounced words, made it clear to my mother that what I was singing was a Pepsi jingle (“Pepsi-Cola hits the spot”). I sang before I spoke.
    I’ve told the story many times about the conversation my American studies program adviser had with me after I told her that I was going to write my dissertation on blues. “Has any scholar written on ‘that music’ before?,” she asked. “Not to my knowledge,” I replied. I didn’t know of any doctoral dissertations on blues, or any that analyzed the music. Books on blues were mainly artist biographies, written by fans, although some  researchers like Paul Oliver had written well about themes in the lyrics and other subjects. (I was unaware at that time that Bill Ferris was then writing a dissertation on blues at Penn; I got to know him later when he taught at Yale.) I thought my program adviser was asking whether I’d be making an original contribution to knowledge by writing on this subject. “Have you thought seriously about the consequences of your decision?” Consequences? I thought that the consequences of making an original contribution, if it were any good, would be satisfaction for the author and the reward of the doctoral degree. “Yes, sure,” I said, somewhat mystified by this question. And that was the end of the discussion.
    A few years later, when people began to ask me what I was doing teaching in an English department with a degree in American studies and a dissertation on blues, I would reply that in addition to writing about the music I was making a case for blues as African American cultural expression that resulted in worthy literature in and of itself. One didn’t have to go to the writings of Langston Hughes or Sterling Brown to find good blues poems; they were right there in the blues songs themselves, recorded from the 1920s onward.
    But gradually it dawned on me that the reason they were asking, and the reason why my program adviser had questioned me about my choice of dissertation topic, was that my path already was quite unusual. My adviser was worried for the future of my academic career and was asking if I’d realized that the likely consequence of choosing to write about ‘that music’ was academic suicide—i.e., whoever was going to hire this misfit? Luckily, I was too naive to think that research wouldn’t be rewarded on merit rather than choice of subject and, luckily, I was hired in a tenure-track job at a good university when such jobs were a lot more plentiful than they are today. As a graduate student I didn't think very much about careers; I just assumed it would take care of itself if I did well enough as a teacher and scholar.
    Fifteen years later, merit didn’t triumph over subject choice. Three of us were trying to raise money to make the Powerhouse for God documentary film about a powerful preacher-singer and his family in Appalachia’s northern Blue Ridge. Although we were successful with the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities turned us down three times. After our third grant proposal was unsuccessful, we found ourselves in DC—we’d started shooting the film, and we needed to get some equipment repaired—and while cooling our heels we got an appointment to meet with the NEH program officer. She told us she was very sorry we’d been denied funding so often, because it was obvious that we were fine film makers and that the scholarship behind the film was thorough. The problem, she said, was our subject. Appalachia was too obscure, and religious subjects could be controversial. “Couldn’t you make a film about the life of Lincoln? I’m sure you could get funding for that,” she wound up. We walked out without saying another word.
    One more story. I’ve often been asked how I got interested in doing research on the musical sermons of Rev. C. L. Franklin. Most people think I came to it through listening to his daughter Aretha, and learning about her background. Franklin was the most highly regarded black Baptist preacher of his generation; as the head of the National Baptist Association observed, he had a “whoop that comes along once in a hundred years.” (Whooping is what black preachers—and others—call the traditional musical delivery, where the preacher comes to a climax, improvising the words and singing them to a melody that carries them.)  But that wasn’t how I learned about Rev. Franklin.
    Instead, it happened when I was a graduate student, and when in addition to my studies and teaching duties I was playing guitar in Lazy Bill Lucas’s blues band. One Saturday night we got back early in the morning around 2 a.m. from a gig and I crashed on Bill’s couch. The next day he shook me awake at 7 a.m. and said, “Come on, boy. we’re going to church!” I hadn’t known Bill played piano at a nearby church—St. Mark's Baptist Church—but he was there most Sunday mornings accompanying the gospel songs, and he thought it’d do me some good to hear another kind of music. I stumbled off the couch and we got to the church, and I did enjoy the songs. Of course, I’d heard black gospel music for years, but what I hadn’t heard was whooped preaching. Rev. George Trawick was the preacher, and I was transfixed by this sound that was new to me. Later, I asked Bill about it, and he said I ought to listen to Rev. Franklin’s sermons. He just happened to have some albums that were recorded in New Bethel, in Detroit, Rev. Franklin’s church. They were very popular, he said. Indeed, Rev. Franklin was a rock star among African Americans of his generation, though completely unknown outside of the black communities. As soon as I heard Bill's records of Rev. Franklin's sermons, I knew I had heard a rare and gifted orator and poet-preacher with a remarkable musical delivery in his sermons that were improvised at the moment of performance, without a printed manuscript.
    And that was the start of my research on Rev. Franklin and the sound of the whoop. It was around 1969 that I heard Rev. Trawick. I already was working on my dissertation on blues, and I realized that I should complete that project before going on in earnest with this new one. So I did, and then in 1976 I met Rev. Franklin for the first time. I phoned him up, told him I wanted to visit, and asked him to suggest a weekend. He hemmed and hawed—I thought it was because this was an unusual request (coming from a professor of literature, at that)—and finally he offered a date, saying that on that weekend his daughter Aretha would be there. I said that would be fine, “but it’s you I want to see.” “Oh well then,” he told me, “come anytime!” I wonder what my American studies program adviser would have said about that research topic.
    Researching blues turned out not to be the lonely pursuit my adviser thought it would be. In addition to Bill Ferris at Penn, David Evans was researching blues at UCLA, and later several other scholars took up the subject, notably Houston Baker and Henry Louis (“Skip”) Gates, Jr. Angela Davis, known to me as a radical feminist and advocate of black power in the 1960s, later wrote a superb book about the vaudeville blues singers of the 1920s, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith and others. But black preaching remained an obscure research area—and to some extent it still is, although that may be changing. In the 1970s I did visit with Rev. Franklin, and over the course of several months interviewed him more than a dozen times about his life and preaching, and videotaped seven of his sermons. In the 1980s I wrote an essay on him in a book published by the Library of Congress, and wrote a book about his life and sermons that was published by the University of Illinois Press. The book did not interest my fellow folklorists and ethnomusicologists very much, nor were my colleagues in American studies much more than curious. It did sell, slowly but steadily, to scholars in African American religious studies.
    I’ve mentioned Rev. Franklin in this blog a few times before. For years I’ve been wanting to figure out a good way to publish the videotapes that I recorded of his preaching, so that they would reach what I came to realize was their target audience: the scholars of black preaching, the African American theologians, and the preachers themselves who wanted to see as well as hear this man whose whoop came along once in a hundred years. It wasn’t until the summer before last that, after I'd been looking for the target audience for many years, the target audience found me instead, and asked me to give a keynote at the first conference to celebrate the legacy of Rev. Franklin. Held in Detroit last April, “The Voice of a Prophet” (2014) attracted about 500 scholars and preachers and theologians and lay people. I showed the last two-thirds of one of my videos shot of Rev. Franklin in Detroit in the 1970s, and soon half the room was standing, cell phones in hand, copying the grainy, black-and-white video that was projected on the screen. (Some of that is on YouTube now.) There’s to be another conference this coming April, and I will show another video. I’m sure it won’t be too long before arrangements are made to publish these videotapes in a form that will enable them to take their place in this community after all these years of sequestration, or curation, or whatever one calls it.
    And so those are just some of the stories I told at the folklore conference. Elders are expected to have them, and I do. But I wouldn’t want them to upstage the research itself on blues or the sound of black preaching. When asked what theme I thought had unified my research over the years, I didn’t hesitate: it was sound, I said, whether the timbre of blues, or the elaborate songs of Old Regular Baptists, or the whoop of the black preacher, or its white preaching sound counterpart (that can be heard in John Sherfey’s chanted sermons, from my Powerhouse for God project, or the even more musical chant of Old Regular Baptist preachers). I concluded by saying that my appeal for a sound commons for all creatures, and current studies of animal sound communication, are a continuation of this lifelong pursuit of sound. 

Team Fieldwork

I've neglected this blog while completing work on the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology and preparing and delivering a keynote address for the Ecomusicologies 2014 conference that took place in Asheville, North Carolina a few weeks ago. That was an extremely stimulating conference and I plan to say why in due course. Much of my reading lately has been in the area of sound communication among animals, following up on the ideas about sound signaling presence and co-presence. That field is dominated today by a cluster of assumptions coming from game theory, natural selection, and bio-economics. I will be posting some things about that in the near future.

Last week there was a lively discussion on the public folklore list concerning team fieldwork and the use of still photography. Betsy Peterson, head of the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress, asked for information on those topics from those folklorists who undertook fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s. Shortly after the AFC was founded, in 1976, it sent teams of folklife specialists into particular geographical areas to survey the folklore in the region and, usually, turn the documentation into an exhibit which toured in that region and then was deposited in archives there or in the Library of Congress or both. Usually the teams were led by employees of the AFC, but they also utilized local-based folklorists who already knew something about the region's folklife. Although teams of two or three researchers were not new in folklore, these AFC teams were larger and in some ways resembled the teams of anthropologists and sociologists who assessed the social lives of people in a given geographical area. My response to Betsy was this:
    
     "Speaking from my North American perspective—I don’t know how this all went down in Europe or elsewhere back in the day, but when I studied folklore in the 1960s, what I encountered was “collecting” or survey work, rather than “fieldwork” in the longitudinal, Malinowskian ethnographic sense, or in the sense of some of the collaborative long-term team fieldwork projects that anthropologists were doing. Folklorists went into the field to survey and find and “collect” folklore, either individually or collectively (no pun intended). If memory serves, the language of the American Folklife Center’s early team projects was also expressed in terms of field surveys, which is what I understood them to have been. Documentation was part of the process of collecting. Earlier examples of collaboration in folklore field collecting include Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the late 1930s collecting epic songs together in Yugoslavia, and the collaborative field trips undertaken by Alan Lomax with Zora Neale Hurston and also with John Work, not to mention those that Alan went on with his father John. At some point in the 1960s/1970s the ethnographic turn in folklore seems to have replaced the idea of collecting (surveying). Now fieldwork was no longer regarded primarily as collecting folklore, but as doing ethnographies of expressive culture, in an anthropological sense, longer term and in one place. My work on the Powerhouse projects, Henry Glassie’s work in Ballymenone—there are several examples from the 1970s. My work on the Powerhouse project was collaborative, by the way. In anthropology, examples of larger teams doing anthropological fieldwork include the long-term projects undertaken by professors at Harvard and the U. of Chicago and their graduate students, after World War II. This isn’t to say there were no folklorists in the 1960s doing longitudinal work with individuals or in particular places, nor that they didn’t conceive of it as fieldwork; but it wasn’t the norm.
    When I studied ethnomusicology beginning in 1966 I encountered the term fieldwork, and I also encountered it the same year in an introductory anthropology course. Of course, the idea we were taught way back then was that a fieldworker was, ideally, a scientific observer, fly on the wall, investigative reporter, even when fieldwork was done by a group of fieldworkers; the notion that fieldwork involved collaboration among fieldworkers and “informants” (or what we’d call nowadays field partners, consultants, teachers, co-subjects, etc. as discussed recently on this listserv) was being advanced back then only by a few of the more radical action anthropologists.
     My own fieldwork in the 1960s I think of more as visiting than fieldwork, something I’ve actually written about here and there, the idea of visiting and friendship, collaborating with blues musicians, learning music from them, helping them in their careers by getting them gigs, recording contracts, etc. and mostly hanging out with them, not just learning about music but about a way of being in the world. There was a group of blues musicians in Minneapolis, Lazy Bill Lucas, JoJo Williams, Mojo Buford, Sonny Boy Rogers, kind of a floating group that congregated at Bill’s apartment on Lake Street, where we ate Bill’s fried chicken, drank Fox Deluxe beer, played music, and “shot the shit” (talked, as it was called back then) about life and love and music, made plans, and so forth. In the 1970s most of my fieldwork on the Powerhouse project was collaborative, with Ken George, who was a grad student in folklore at Chapel Hill at the time. (He’s since gone on to become a well-known anthropologist; taught at Harvard, Oregon, and Wisconsin, and is now teaching in Australia.) But even before then I wasn’t alone in that kind of fieldwork; when I taught at IU for a summer, Sandy Rikoon and I went together to a few Pentecostal and Baptist churches, where we documented the services, interviewed the evangelists, and so on. Sandy would remember that.
     Re visual documentation, again, this was something that was part of the ethnographer’s toolkit as I learned in studying ethnomusicology and anthropology back in the 1960s. I don’t recall it being a part of folklore studies, but certainly there were folklorists back then who were doing it intensively and well—Bruce Jackson and John Cohen spring immediately to mind. My own introduction to photography came from my father, who had me taking pictures and working in a darkroom as a young teenager; and after devouring _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_ in high school, I decided I wanted to do what Agee and Evans did, which meant among other things making documentary photos. My dad had brought back a couple of 35mm cameras from World War II, a Leica and a Balda; he gave me the Balda to use. Interestingly, until he died I never saw the WWII photos he made in France as part of the American liberating army; he was one of those who never talked about the war, but he did save the photos and I have them now. In the 1960s I shot some 8mm movies of my blues musician friends and tried to synch them up with reel tape recordings I made at the same time, but I could never keep them in good synch and gave up. How I wish I’d had enough money or a grant to rent Super-8 synch sound equipment to do that back then. When I went with Bill and his friends to perform at the Ann Arbor Blues Festivals in 1969 and 1970, I made 5” reel tape recordings with a Sony TC-800B (called, at the time, the poor person’s Uher) portable recorder and shot still photos, this time using my dad’s Leica which by then he’d given to me. In the mid-1970s I got a $1500 grant from the NEA Folk Arts division (back then it had the words jazz and ethnic in its name also) for fieldwork with Rev. C. L. Franklin and with the grant money I promptly bought a videotape recorder, a combination of a reel video tape machine that could fit on a large backpack frame, along with an outboard video camera. It was called a video “portapak” and shot grainy black-and-white video on 1/2” reels, and I used it to make videos in the Powerhouse project as well as the Franklin project. I also took it along when Sandy Rikoon and I visited those churches in Indiana nearly 40 years ago."

     Last April I showed one of those old videos from 1977 at the conference celebrating Rev. C. L. Franklin's legacy, more than 35 years after I shot it, and nearly 30 years after Rev. Franklin's death. It turns out that the seven videos I shot of his preaching--all complete sermons, in 1977 and 1978--with that technically challenged portapak, are the only visual documentation made of his preaching; yet he was widely acknowledged as the finest African American preacher of his generation: as a preacher, of course. Martin Luther King, Jr. was his contemporary, and of course King's sermons were magnificent political orations. But Franklin was regarded as the finer preacher.