Come All You Good Time People

EXTRA-CREDIT READING MONDAYS!

So I’m pretty sure that nothing else in this blog will be about the Anthology of American Folk Music, but because it’s the first post and all, I thought we may as well start with some roots:

You’re probably wondering what the Anthology of American Folk Music is, and if you’re not wondering that, you’re probably wondering why you should give a shit about it. Well, it’s a collection of—SURPRISE!—American folk music recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. Harry Smith, ethnomusicologist, experimental filmmaker, and infamous bohemian compiled the 79-song Anthology. The three (or four—the rare disc of labor songs is sometimes seen, but not always) disc set was released in 1952 on the Smithsonian Folkaways label.

Not surprisingly, Bob Dylan and his folk revival compatriots got their hands on the Anthology, as they were want to do. Dylan apparently couldn’t get enough of it, and was heavily influenced by Dock Boggs and other twangers on the Anthology, as you can read all about in The Old Weird America, by Greil Marcus.

Anyway, my favorite track on the collection is “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” recorded here by Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Lunsford has a few recordings of this song, but my favorite version is the one that appears on the Anthology, probably because I have such a huge soft spot for shitty recording technology (some of the other versions have been re-mastered) and Lunsford’s ineffably buoyant vocals.

In his analysis of the American folk revival, When We Were Good, Robert Cantwell embarks on a four page discussion of the song that concludes with the sentence, “Listen to ‘I Wish I Was A Mole in the Ground’ again and again, learn to play the banjo and sing it yourself over and over, study every printed version, squander your time in the bargain, and you still won’t fathom it.”

In the copy I checked out from the library, a previous reader drew brackets around that paragraph and wrote, “blah, blah.” Her reaction to Cantwell’s flowery prose is pretty understandable--“I Wish I Was A Mole in the Ground” is “just a folk song”; even Cantwell makes a point of saying that the song isn’t at all intellectual (Although he does make a point in saying that Lunsford was. He was a college-educated musician, 46 years old when he recorded this song, and had devoted a good part of his life before that to collecting and preserving American folk music).

What Cantwell is talking about, though, is the strange dyads that the song sets up: a mole versus a lizard, a woman that wants his money and the woman’s long hair, facing jail or the “railroad man.” Marcus calls the song “otherworldly” in The Old Weird America, and also talks about its “paranormal” qualities. Marcus, hydroelectric brainiac that he is, also points out that Lunsford performed at the White House in 1939, and also for King George VI. This was not marginal music.

But what makes this song and the rest of the Anthology so, well, sublime, is the way that it’s not an artifact of some past, mythical America, as Cantwell maybe wants us to believe. He discusses the way that the Anthology was sort of framed as this weird, avant-garde art when it was released in 1952 (This is because in 1952—and now, come to think of it—the sort of people who made the Anthology aren’t the people who were listening to it. Listeners were and are—heh—mostly college students and people interested in music history). But as much as these songs paint a picture of turn-of-the century America as a mythical place where talking animals and devils reign free, Lunsford just wants to be a mole in the ground. The Anthology isn’t avant-garde art, and it’s only History in the way that the Shins’ first album is History. It’s actually just pop music.

Some more Anthology traxxx:

Sugar Baby by Dock Boggs
Spike Driver Blues by Mississippi John Hurt