Feb. 22, 2012 - Issue #853: Folkways

These old sounds

Folkways keeps the past alive with the Winter Roots and Blues Roundup

Thu, Feb 23 – Sun, Feb 26
Winter Roots and Blues Roundup
Full schedule available at
ualberta.ca/folkwaysalive
 

Moses Asch formed and lost two  companies before he found his place in the recording world.
They were Asch Records and the Disc Company of America, respectively; neither lasted particularly long, but the latter, while initially more promising than the first, collapsed rather spectacularly when a Nat King Cole Christmas album it was distributing failed to materialize on store shelves before the holiday season. Conflicting stories blame an early winter snowstorm or a truck driver's strike but regardless of the reason, the loss of his second record company had a lasting effect on Asch's intentions in recording.

"He lost his shirt," explains Lorna Arndt, "and decided, according to his son, that he was no longer going to chase the big seller, that he was going to produce niche recordings for niche markets, and decided to record people who would not necessarily be given a voice anywhere else."

The name he gave his new project, formed in 1948, was Folkways. Some of its earliest recordings were the likes of Leadbelly, Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie. Folkways still wasn't much of a financial hit, but it's become the Asch project that's lasted, shaping the man's own place in history and, more importantly, becoming a vital life preserver for early regional musical culture.

"A lot of who we think about now as traditional folk musicians, who were telling a story or revealing an injustice of some kind, those people had a voice on Folkways," Arndt explains. She works at the University of Alberta's Folkways Alive! Project. Partnered with the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, they together  vanguard the Folkways' legacy and are cataloging and digitizing the entire oeuvre—some 2000 LPs, none of which have ever gone out of print (Arndt notes that, to Asch, "If it was worth recording it was worth keeping forever," and that that stipulation was one of the reasons why the Smithsonian is now the primary source for the collection's maintenance: an insitute of its ilk can uphold the demand.)

Arndt originally took a one-year leave of her job in the Registrar's office to help set up the project. That was back in 2003, and she's still here. Her time working with the small Folkways Alive! team has been as much about about ensuring that the traditions and sounds the label represents remain vital as it has been about archiving these old sounds. The U of A had a massive collection of Folkways recordings—all of them, actually; every one of the initial Folkways pressings—sitting mixed in with the rest of the university's music collection. The Smithsonian owns the rights to the recordings, and thus a partnership was struck and, in addition to helping digitize the archive, Folkways Alive! has expanded awareness of it, bringing  connected artists into town to perform, record and talk about their past, influences and connections to Folkways. For the past few years, though, its biggest outreach event has been the Winter Roots And Blues Roundup, about to embark in its third year of dedication to celebrating artists that have a direct connection to Folkways, and those that carry a kindred banner or pull inspiration from its roster.

Mark DeFresne (of Roomful of Blues) and Roy Forbes will perform, among others, this year; Holger Petersen will run a Blues of Folkways workshop alongside other thematic musical events; Peter North has curated a film component of five full films (see sidebar). At the Yardbird Suite will be The Woman of Folkways concert—all of these events, Arndt notes, sharing a connection with Asch's label.

"Bringing in a performer for a concert, we like them to have some kind of connection to Folkways, either in actual fact that they're on the label, or that they have some sort of philisophical connection," she notes. "There's lots of traditional musicians who really feel an affinity for what Folkways was all about, so it makes sense to bring them."
 

Over the phone from his home in California, Peter Case—this year's festival headliner, plus a participant in the Folkways workshop—starts reading aloud an essay entitled "Concerning a Black Guy's $45 Lottery and a Large Business Corporation Swindling The Public."

"I wrote this when I was about 15 or 16," he offers, before launching into its opening lines: "People talk about crime as if it's the problem. I think crime is caused by 'fear on the streets' as much as the fear is caused by the crime: both are just part of the way that everything is messed up.'"
The essay goes on to compare street thievery to corporate thievery, discuss how the system of punishment lets the latter off easier, and consider the extent to which people are responsible for their actions—it could, as Case noted on his personal blog, have been written by someone in the Occupy Movement, not a decades-younger version of himself.

It's indicative of Case's early engagement with the bigger questions of the world around him. If anyone shared a kindred spirit with the outsider existence that Folkways sought to capture, it'd be him. He certainly seems to adhere to the same ideals: his songwriting seems to capture the world he sees around him in immaculate detail, in whatever forms it takes. His own music has spanned from New Wave to Folk, from work with his power-pop band the Pilmsouls to solo, singer-songwriter guitarcraft.

Case seems to be a careful archivist of his own past. Not only did he just find his decades-old essay "in a pile of papers," at home he's spent the past few years skimming his own past: The Case Files, released in 2011, is his dig through the closet, unearthing sounds that span the length of his three-decade career. Everything from major hits to deeper cuts—spoken word pieces he never commercially released, songs with the Pilmsouls, his own solo releases—are represented across its 12 songs.

"I have quite an archive here, of stuff I hadn't really been willing to take the time to approach. And then I started looking at it," he says, pausing for a moment to gather his thoughts. "It was interesting, 'cause you forget certain periods of time, and you go back, and listen to it. It can be surprising. ... I tried to make a record that mirrored the interests I have now, y'know. It felt like a good record for now, so that's what it is."

Digging through his past, Case notes,  helps reveal which ones have staying power for himself.
"It is fun, though, to have a big catalogue of songs and go on the road and be able to sing 'em all, y'know," he continues. "There's something about the songs ... when I go out and play 'em for people, the ones that I've kept and really keep working at, you really keep finding new things in them, too. They keep revealing themselves. And that's why they're fun to sing. And that's what you're looking for."
 

That seems to be another parallel to the Folkways spirit, there in Case's words: archiving the past, not just holding it in memory but in a physical recording, means it can be revisited to reveal new, unexpected dimensions of itself. Or maybe it changes because we do—but if it goes unarchived, the chance for us to understand it in new ways all but vanishes, and we're left with disintegrating memories. Asch's success with creating Folkways was one of legacy: none of these sounds he pressed to wax have vanished. And the university's reward for keeping the archive alive and engaging with an audience is the same: the preservation of a living, active history, to revisit and draw inspiration from, music or otherwise.

"The other thing that Moses said that gets bounced around a lot in relation to Folkways is that 'anything that is sound is worth recording,'" Arndt recalls. "So not only is there folk music and blues and jazz and a lot of what we now think of as world music [in the collection], but there's sound effects, or the sounds of the junkyard, or the office, or a lot of instructional things: how to play five-string banjo, for example, or mandolin. There are speeches—the "I have a dream speech," for example—the Watergate hearings are on Folkways. It's all about sound, not only music."


Thu, Feb 23 – Sun, Feb 26
Various locations; full schedule at ualberta.ca/folkwaysalive

'I think it's going to become the foundation of this thing," Peter North says. He's referring to the Winter Roots and Blues Roundup's film component, and in saying so he doesn't sound overconfident—to North, it's simply the fact of the matter. "There's so much good stuff out there to get—I could've had 16 films this year. And I just didn't have time to properly put that together. Five is good."
Five is also up one from last year; this is the second time that the Roundup has sported a film selection curated by North (if you don't count a lone short that played during the inagural festival), and within that he's gathered a varied mix of films: Benda Bilili documents four parapalegic musicians' struggle from the streets to acclaim;  A Walk In My Dream follows harmonica player Mike Stevens' attempts to improve the rock-bottom quality of life for a group of Labradorian youth. Those two screenings are free of charge; The Godmother of Rock & Roll: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, tracing  the life and career of the gospel singer and guitarist who influenced the likes of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, costs only $5, and has a Q&A with the director Mick Csaky, coming up from London.
"I emailed him one afternoon; he emails me right back and says, 'This is great. ... My son has just moved to Edmonton.' He'd said he was going to come and visit him from England this winter, and he said, 'I guess this is when I'll show up.'"
Troubador Blues dwells on the reality of life on the road for a modern folk musician, will be followed by talk with director Tom Weber and musician Peter Case (who afterwards will play a concert), while David Bromberg – Unsung Treasure, looking at the enigmatic artist's rollercoaster career, has never before had a public screening

 

And the films ...

The films draw on the idea of banding together in some way. "I wanted those aspects, because that's part of the Folkways thing, too," North says. "It's about community. That's what Folkways was always about; it wasn't just about music, it was about the coming together of community."
Still, even with that full spread, North doesn't seem fully satisfied. He's already planning ahead to next time.

"The one thing I'm missing is about a younger artist," North says. "Just about had the film about Andrew Bird, but it fell through. Maybe next year." vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus