Introduction to American Musical Traditions

This five-volume work presents an American musical mosaic. Folklorists and ethnomusicologists whose research centers on musical traditions in the United States wrote authoritative essays specifically for American Musical Traditions. We solicited additional materials from the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, particularly from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Keyed to musical examples and illustrations on both the Smithsonian Folkways website and the Brown University website (addresses below), American Musical Traditions presents a combination of words, sounds, and images so readers can hear, as well as read about, much of the music under discussion.

It goes without saying that at the start of the twenty-first century, every community in the United States has music. But this has been true for as long as the continent has been settled by humans; among the Native Americans, music (and dance) has always played an important role in ceremony and recreation.

My great-grandparents grew up in a world in which people who wanted to hear music had to learn to sing and play it themselves. Today televisions, videocassette recorders, radios, and compact disc players can be found in most American households, along with collections of recordings. All of these are products of the twentieth-century revolution in electromechanical musical reproduction, permitting anyone to hear music on demand without performing it.

In addition to the old methods of distributing music, a dizzying array of new digital formats and delivery methods, including mini-disc, CD-R, CD-RW, mp3, and DVD, along with the World Wide Web, are bringing music into the new century, while musical performance itself is being reconceived with the help of electronic equipment, sampling, and computers. Today, of course, music from all over the globe is available at the flip of a switch or movement of a computer mouse. But every community also has its live music makers. Music is taught and learned in the public schools, in music academies, and by private teachers. Community bands and orchestras, informal chamber music groups, singer-songwriters with guitars, basement or garage rock and country bands, singers of all stylistic persuasions—these music makers can be found in just about every community, large or small.

Outside the mainstream there is another kind of music, one that members of certain populations regard as their own. While contemporary popular music is set in the present and strives for novelty and sales, and while classical music looks to the future and strives for originality, this other music, which in this book we call "traditional," is almost always linked to the past and bounded in certain ways. The traditional music we have in mind usually arises in connection with ethnic or regional identity, and sometimes it is connected to an original homeland outside the United States. The groups that possess traditional music often attach it to particular (named) people and places, with ties to an older generation of source musicians from whom it has been learned.

Traditional music has sometimes been called folk music, but in university circles today the word "folk" carries troublesome baggage (such as nationalism, purity, and noblesse oblige) and so the younger generation of scholars tends to avoid it. Today the word "traditional" often substitutes for "folk," but "tradition" can be a troublesome word as well. Scholars have shown that it is naive to consider traditions a set of ancient, sacred rules, like the American Constitution, that we must interpret reverentially. Traditions turn out to be far more flexible than we ever imagined. After all, traditions must adapt to the present moment or they will fail; and more than a few traditions turn out, on inspection, to be the invention of things we want to believe about the past but that have little or no basis in fact. For example, the contemporary sound of "Irish traditional music"—represented by popular Irish bands featuring uillean pipes, fiddles, wooden flutes, guitars, tin whistles, citterns, bouzoukis, and bodhrans, a sound that is marketed as "Celtic music" and is sometimes pictured with ancient mists and druidic artifacts on album covers—turns out to be only a few decades old. The periodic revival of Celtic culture seems to be a tradition itself, one that the poet William Butler Yeats invoked more than a hundred years ago in The Celtic Twilight.

Today it is easy to debunk invented traditions wherever an ancient pedigree is foolishly sought, and music seems particularly susceptible to this kind of search. Yet when the dust settles we see that all living traditions bend the past to the present in order to continue into the future. Regarded in the present as manifestations of the past, they are thought to carry some authority (or not carry it) by virtue of that association.

In the upper Midwest, for example, where Germans, Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians settled more than a hundred years ago, many communities have retained, and revived, and in so reviving further developed, musical traditions that are recognizably their own. The same is true of other ethnic immigrant populations in different parts of the country. It is a mistake to think that traditions are rigid. Change, it seems, is built into most musical traditions. African Americans created music styles such as the blues, spirituals, jazz, and soul music, all featuring improvisation. Hip-hop, the most modern musical manifestation of this improvised cultural tradition, has its roots in the oral poetry of the African American "toast" (Jackson 1974) and in a lengthy tradition of vernacular dance. In African American musical traditions, innovation is the norm.

Geographical region, ethnic population, and musical style have guided most research into American vernacular musical traditions. This work reflects those boundaries. Volume 1 presents Native American music; Volume 2 offers African American music; Volume 3 concentrates on the music of the British Isles, including Ireland, in America. These are the three areas that have received the most attention from musical scholars. In the last thirty years or so, research has increasingly focused on the music of European and Asian immigrant ethnic groups. Volume 4 therefore presents music from European American immigrant communities, including those from France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, and Finland; and Volume 5 offers music from the Spanish-speaking communities as well as Asian American music. Readers who wish to learn more about how and where ethnic groups settled in the United States are referred to James Paul Allen and Eugene James Turner, We the People: An Atlas of America's Ethnic Diversity, and to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups.

Organizing these volumes according to ethnic groups must not leave the impression of a rigid, balkanized United States of tight-knit musical enclaves. Classical music is available to all. Few consider this Western art music to have ethnic boundaries. Popular music that comes from the media is also open to all. While many musical communities do take stewardship of music they identify as their own, their people also participate in the mainstream of America's popular music styles that do not reflect the perspective of any single group. In addition, they may adopt practitioners who learn their traditional music but who did not grow up in their communities.

Although the Navajo, for example, continue to practice their traditional ceremonial and recreational music, they compose music in new modes reflecting influences from contemporary gospel music, Hollywood film music, acoustic guitar-based singer-songwriter music, and New Age music, among others. Yet the most popular music on the reservations is country music, and Navajos regularly form country and rock bands.

Nor should we think of traditional music as extending unchanged back through time. The accordion, a musical staple for several generations among Hispanic musicians on the Texas-Mexican border, was borrowed from German immigrants to that region. The guitar, regarded by some as the American folk instrument par excellence, gained its great popularity only in the twentieth century. And the five-string banjo, identified today with hillbillies and bluegrass musicians, derives from an African instrument that, along with the African American population, significantly changed the sound and style of vernacular dance music in the American South. Although this work emphasizes those styles of music that the various ethnic musical communities consider to be their own, we do not wish to claim that this is the only, or necessarily the principal, music with which the people in these communities are involved.

These volumes are not meant to cover each and every musical tradition. It would be impossible to do so; first because this work is not large enough, and second because the scholarship available is uneven in coverage. There are many more musical communities than scholars surveying the subject. We have selected representative communities and musical genres to give an idea of the range of traditional music in the United States. Some of this research is current, representing musical communities today; some is historical and represents musical communities in the past. The writing includes two main perspectives: essays on communities and examples of their music, and interviews or profiles of particular musicians and musical groups. Although this is a large work, we do not claim to be comprehensive or definitive; thus we invite further research. Because each volume has an introductory essay describing its contents, in what follows I will discuss the origin and development of the project as a whole.

From the outset, this reference work was conceived to reflect recent research by folklorists and ethnomusicologists on the one hand, and the holdings of the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage on the other. Since the early 1970s, public-sector folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and their academic colleagues have surveyed ethnic and regional music-making in many communities across the United States. Often sponsored by arts councils, cultural organizations, and community initiatives, and in many cases underwritten by the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (formerly the Office of Folklife Programs), from about 1977 to 1995 folklorists could be found in nearly every one of the fifty states, surveying folklife and expressive culture (including music) and documenting and presenting the products of this research. Those products were unprecedented in number and quality. Fieldnotes, booklets, recordings, videos, festivals, tours, exhibits, and apprenticeships most often were targeted back into those communities rather than meant for archives or a central data bank.

Cutbacks and reorientation in public funding for the arts, however, coupled with the lack of formal, ongoing, institutional support, have redirected public-sector workers' efforts toward heritage and tourism. Thus, it seemed an appropriate moment to ask these fieldworkers and arts administrators to contribute essays to a project that would gather some of this work together. Accordingly, in 1995 I sent out a prospectus for this work along with invitations to all the state folklorists and ethnomusicologists listed in the Public Folklore Newsletter as well as to numerous academic colleagues, inviting topics, entries, and proposals for additional contributors. It was a long process, but several people responded positively and the fruits of their labors are evident throughout these volumes, as their contributions make up a substantial proportion of this work. Obtaining them and guiding their direction was my main task. Co-editor Bob Carlin's primary job was to select materials from the Smithsonian Institution for these volumes.

Many contributors to this project also worked, at one time or another, for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, formerly known as the Festival of American Folklife (FAF); and therefore we could draw upon that work for their contributions to this volume. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival is an ongoing, multicultural, international event, staged annually since 1967 in the nation's capital on the mall between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. It is the largest and by far the most expansive, longest-lasting folk festival in the United States. Typically it runs for two weeks during late June and early July and features a few hundred singers, musicians, dancers, storytellers, crafters, and other folk artists in an outdoor museum setting meant to celebrate the diverse folkways of the United States and other lands. The Festival presents these folk artists on stages, in tents, and in open-air locations where they perform and demonstrate for an audience of tourists amid a celebratory atmosphere. During the more than thirty years that the FAF has run, the staff has implemented a cultural policy that involves more than merely a demonstration and preservation theater. Theirs is a vision of a multicultural world living in harmony, celebrating mutuality while learning from different traditions.

From the outset, the festival planners understood the importance of documentation as well as presentation. Every event that took place on every stage was recorded by festival staff. Festival recordings and related materials are housed in the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution. Each year an elaborate program booklet is prepared for the public. It contains essays introducing many of the individuals and the communities featured at the festival. Written by the folklorists and ethnomusicologists who had researched the music, crafts, and other expressions of folklife for the annual presentations, these essays are both authoritative and accessible. Often they are the best short introductions to the musics of particular ethnic and regional communities; we have drawn liberally on them for this volume. The Smithsonian's other contribution derives from the materials in Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Folkways Recordings, begun in 1948 by Moses Asch, reflected the very broad tastes of its founder. From the Folkways catalog you could hear everything from the demonstration collection of world music recorded at the turn of the twentieth century for the Berlin Archiv to the music of Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, as well as the famous Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, recently reissued by Smithsonian Folkways.

But Asch did not stop there. Modern poetry in the voices of the authors, bird songs, and even the sounds of factory work fell within the recorded output of this eclectic operation. Folkways was one of very few record companies in the 1940s and 1950s publishing folk music from American communities, including Native American and European immigrants, along with the British American and African American music that collectors had been emphasizing throughout the twentieth century. Many, but not all, of these albums came with copious (and only lightly edited) documentation by the field researchers and other experts, in the form of notes slipped into the double-channeled Folkways album cover. Folkways recordings cost a little more than most, but they provided more, too; and in many instances they provided the only recordings available representing various populations on the planet. During the folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Folkways was the first to present the traditional music of Roscoe Holcomb, Wade Ward, Doc Watson, and others from the southern Appalachian Mountains. Much of their material is of enormous historical value and, for that reason, we have preserved the original text that accompanied their works.

In 1987, the Smithsonian's Folklife division acquired Folkways Recordings and hired Anthony Seeger to direct the operation. (In 2001 Seeger was replaced by Daniel Sheehy, formerly the Director of the Folk Arts Program, National Endowment for the Arts.) Smithsonian Folkways kept all of the back catalog in print (it can be ordered at any time from their website), and they have produced more than a hundred new albums; we have drawn liberally on those with American subjects for this work. Finally, we have gone outside of commissioned articles and Smithsonian materials to obtain other welldocumented descriptions of musical communities where they were needed to fill in gaps. We present the whole as a spicy stew, a mosaic, and a mix that we think will appeal and stimulate the reader's appetite for more.

LINKS TO WEBSITES

On occasion, the essays in American Musical Traditions discuss recordings that are part of the vast Smithsonian Folkways library, particularly those essays that were originally Smithsonian materials. The relevant Folkways catalog number for the recordings appears in each essay's headnote, when available, or elsewhere in the essay. Readers may then visit the Internet's World Wide Web to listen to those recordings; in many cases, they are available for direct purchase online after they have been previewed. The Smithsonian recordings, in both Liquid Audio and RealAudio format, may be downloaded from the Smithsonian Folkways website, which is found at http://www.si.edu/folkways. There, readers should click on the "Liquid Audio" link to go directly to the Smithsonian's catalog of recordings.

In addition, I am building my own site at Brown University to house links to recordings and other materials that are not part of the Folkways collections. As American Musical Traditions was going to press, the site was still under construction, but content is being added. It can be located at http://www.stg.brown.edu/MusicAtlas.

VOLUME 3: BRITISH ISLES MUSIC

This third volume of American Musical Traditions brings together research on American music drawn from various British Isles traditions. The volume is organized more or less geographically from northeastern traditions through the southeastern traditions, and then to the west. It ends with a separate section on Irish American music, which has maintained a distinct identity separate from other British Isles traditions. These chapters mix general overviews on musical genres and styles with essays about specific local traditions and those that spotlight key performers.

GLOSSARY AND INDEX

Each volume of American Musical Traditions includes a glossary of terms used in that volume and an index that includes citations to all five volumes in the series. Throughout the essays and sidebars in each volume, certain terms appear in boldface, indicating that the term is fully defined in the glossary at the back of the book. The glossary also includes "See" and "See also" references to make locating the appropriate term easier. The index in each volume is comprehensive—that is, it includes citations to all five volumes of AMT, not just the individual volume. Numerals followed by a colon and then the page number are used to indicate in which volume a citation appears. In addition, page references in bold refer to a main essay or sidebar on that topic and page references in italics refer to photos; maps are clearly indicated. Index sub-topics are indented beneath the main topic. For example, an index citation for drums might look like this:

Drums, 1:23–28, 2:54, 3: 125
  double-barreled drum, 2:76
  in Native American ceremonies, 1:48
  in calypso music, 5:35
  spread of across the Great Plains 1:98 (map)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife division, the National Endowment for the Arts' Folk Arts Program, the Scholarly Technology Group of Brown University, and Schirmer Reference in making this project possible. We thank the many artists and musicians who cooperated with the researchers who wrote the entries, as well as the researchers themselves who are named in this book as contributors. Special thanks to the authors of the introductions to each volume: Burt Feintuch, David Evans, Thomas Vennum, Philip Nusbaum, and Tom Van Buren. Thanks to Art Rosenbaum for his wonderful cover designs. In addition, we would like to thank Richard Carlin for overseeing this project and keeping it on track during his tenure at Schirmer. Thank you to Charlotte Heth for her expert review of the Native American volume. Finally, we are grateful to those in the Smithsonian Institution who helped with this project. Anthony Seeger and the staff of Smithsonian Folkways made their archives available to us. Diana Parker, director of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and Richard Kurin, head of the Smithsonian's Office of Folklife and Cultural Heritage, helped us obtain additional information related to the musical communities represented down through the years at the Festival.

We would also like to thank our editors including Deborah Gillan Straub, Stephen Wasserstein, and Brad Morgan, as well as the members of Gale's production and design staff, including Wendy Blurton, Evi Seoud, Mary Beth Trimper, Randy Bassett, Barb Yarrow, Pam Reed, Christine O'Bryan, Tracey Rowens, Cindy Baldwin, Margaret Chamberlain, and others who provided able assistance.

INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN MUSICAL TRADITIONS

LINKS TO WEBSITES

VOLUME 3: BRITISH ISLES MUSIC

GLOSSARY AND INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY