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. 

Sound Sacralizes Space

Let us once again enlarge the discussion from music to sound, a move toward the soundscape that I have been led to make over and over again. As Theodore Roethke wrote, "I learn by going where I have to go." By now I hope the lesson is learned. At any rate, shifting attention from music to sound has been very helpful to me in thinking about the role of music--and sound--in sustaining life on planet Earth.

Sound sacralizes space through co-presence. That is, one senses the presence of something greater than oneself through sound. It is not only sound that does this; touch will do it as well. But sound is present from a distance and can be present virtually whereas touch cannot be.

Space, or place, may become sacralized visually as well as aurally. One experiences the sublime in the presence of Nature, the natural world, visually and aurally. When you close your eyes, the visual world disappears while the aural world remains. Open your eyes and the visual world reappears as it was. Sound, on the other hand, comes and goes. It is ephemeral. Its sudden appearance and disappearance does not depend on opening and closing one's ears; it is there and then not there. Sound's sacralization of space is sudden, dramatic.

Secular sounds sacralize place, memorialize people. The names of fiddle tunes--"The Brushy Fork of John's Creek" (memorializing the last battle in Pike Co., Kentucky, during the Civil War); "Bill Brown" (memorializing a peddler who was murdered); "They Swung John Brown from a Sour Apple Tree"--these are among tunes I play, and they invoke co-presence. Often an old-time string band fiddler will say the name of the person from whom he or she learned the tune, just before or after playing it, invoking the co-presence of the source musician.

Co-presence, a concept developed by the sociologist Shanyang Zhao, refers to "a sense of being with others," both physically (face-to-face) and virtually. The concept has been useful in exploring ways in which people feel connected on the Internet even though they are not physically present to one another. Here I want to extend co-presence to the sense that when sound sacralizes space one feels in the presence of something greater than oneself. There is a kind of virtuality in that the "greater than oneself" is felt but the presence does not take on a particular physical embodiment.

Back in 1971 the blues singer Leonard "Baby Doo" Caston reminisced to me about working as a sharecropper when he was a teenager. Out chopping (weeding) corn, he used to sing out a field holler, "the old cornfield blues without an instrument," and he remarked that the sound would carry far out there in the country soundscape. "Lazy" Bill Lucas, blues singer and pianist, was there too, and he responded that the woods were like an echo chamber, that those field hollers would carry for miles and that others would hear them and answer them with their own field hollers. Co-presence. The holler organizes the fields and woods aurally much as Wallace Stevens's jar organized the Tennessee wilderness visually ("Anecdote of the Jar" is the Stevens poem I'm referring to here.) In those days I was thinking about field hollers as a musical genre and precursor of the blues, but Baby Doo and Lazy Bill were trying to tell me about something else: the field holler as soundscape, sound sacralizing space. You can hear what they say and then hear Baby Doo sing a field holler on the CD set accompanying the book Worlds of Music.

Soundscape, a concept developed by R. Murray Schafer (his book, The Tuning of the World [1977] is definitive), refers to the acoustic environment. It is a back-formation from the word landscape. His work on soundscape included exercises for paying attention to sound (what he termed "ear-cleaning"). His work arose in the context of noise pollution; he was a historian of sound, and a social engineer interested in acoustic design in the service of more healthful soundscapes. In Schafer's view, soundscapes contained keynotes (background sounds, such as wind, insects, birds), signals (foreground sounds that are present to consciousness), and soundmarks (sounds unique to particular communities, which need protection). Endangered musical cultures possess soundmarks.

Schafer also coined the term schizophonia, referring to a feeling of unease with the doubleness of sound when the sound is separated from the source of its original production, as when one listens to a recording of a live performance. Schizophonia (a back-formation from schizophrenia) is also an instance of co-presence, and is experienced today without unease or confusion by many; but for Schafer it was a modern disease. It need not be; it also characterizes community on the Internet; that is, the kind of co-presence one feels when socially networked with others on listservs and other kinds of Internet communities, such as Facebook.

A realist, Schafer was not so much interested in sound as socially constructed, or the soundscapes of memory, as I am. Much of my ethnographic research in music has been research in sound. My Powerhouse for God project (documentary LP, 1983; book, 1988; documentary film, 1989 which is stream-able free on folkstreams.net) started with music but quickly moved to sound: the book's subtitle is "speech, chant, and song in an Appalachian Baptist church." Music was one thing, knowable; but the holy whine of the preacher's voice and the sung prayer was mysterious, as well it should have been, the peculiar sound marking (in the churchmembers' worldview) the presence of the divine and thereby sacralizing the sanctuary space of the church. That presence is a co-presence, not corporeal. The project I did with Rev. C.L. Franklin focused on his sung sermons ("whooping," as it is called in the Black churches), not on the magnificent gospel music, spirituals, or lined-out hymnody in the church--which, after all, was where his daughter Aretha made her bones, so it must have been wonderful--and it was. But I was drawn even more to the sound of the preaching, the moments when speech turned to chant and sound sacralized space and place.

It was in the 1990s when I visited the Old Regular Baptists in southeastern Kentucky that I encountered people who spoke explicitly of sound transforming and sacralizing space, whether singing in the coal mine or the sound of the singing coming down from the mountains or echoing outside the churches on a Sunday morning, heard by the children playing up and down the creek beds. Their words about sound may be heard on the first of the two CDs that Smithsonian Folkways released from my field tape recordings: Songs of the Old Regular Baptists. To close out the CD we chose to present excerpts from some of their statements about the singing, and many mentioned the sound and its "drawing power." Elwood Cornett, the moderator (head) of the Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists, said: "When I came into this life there was that sound. I hope that when I leave here, that I leave the same sound that I found when I came here." The Old Regular Baptists weren't thinking about their music as music; they were talking about the power of its sound to open a communication channel in the co-presence of the divine.

An acoustic ecology devoted to music and its role in sustaining life on planet Earth would do well to understand, before engaging in social engineering and managing soundscapes, how sound sacralizes space and place.