Notes From The Field: The Hayloft Gang and Early American Radio

The "Kentuckians" at a road show, 1936; The Hayloft Gang

By Jennifer Joy Jameson, Notes From the Field series Editor

If you’re hooked into some of the recent the films showing on PBS, you may have heard about or seen The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance, a documentary produced and directed by Stephen Parry, which premiered on public broadcast television stations in the fall of 2011. Narrated by Garrison Keillor, the film highlights the rise of WLS Chicago’s National Barn Dance, one of the most popular and influential programs on early radio.

When I first heard about the film I was finishing graduate school, researching country music. I knew that it was airing on my local Kentucky Educational Television, and even that one of my professors, Michael Ann Williams, provided commentary in film, yet without television access I had no way to see the film. So, it came and went.

The cast of the National Barn Dance, 1937; The Hayloft Gang

Because of stories similar to my own, the producers of The Hayloft Gang have recently launched a crowd-source funding campaign with United States Artists, now through December 31st, in an effort to raise the funds for music rights and the clearance to allow the film’s distribution beyond PBS via digital downloads and DVD. With that funding, the documentary can be screened in schools and libraries, and be made accessible to the general public.

I believe The Hayloft Gang is worth watching and supporting because, to start, it challenges our common notion that Nashville and the American South are the origin point for country music—both traditional and popular. First broadcast in 1924, and spending its 36-year lifespan in the heart of Chicago, the National Barn Dance was truly a “national” event, as it preceded Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry by nearly two decades, and brought together mountain string bands, folk balladeers, polka trios, and cowboy singers from coast to coast. It also established the careers of a broad range of musicians—from the Appalachian ballads of Bradley Kincaid, to the Western sounds of Patsy Montana and Gene Autry, to the high-powered, Midwestern yodels of the Cackle Sisters.

The National Barn Dance was unique in that it offered something for both its rural and urban constituents. Farming families would tune in to the program to get a sense of the pulse of the nation. It also spoke to the thousands of migrants who moved from the farm to the city to find new work and new ways of life in an increasingly changing society. As one of the first radio programs to have a live audience, urbanites packed into Chicago’s Eighth Street Theater each week to relive the square dances of their agrarian past. With equal listenership in both the country and the city, it was precisely the advances of radio technology that helped sustain the musical traditions of the past, and revived it in dynamic ways for a diverse audience, including immigrants and other newcomers.

The Hayloft Gang includes rare film footage and home movies pulled from the archives of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and UNC’s Southern Folklife Collection, among other respectable repositories. It also benefits from the historical and cultural context provided by some of country music’s most noted scholars, and—perhaps, most importantly—insights and anecdotes from a few of the former listeners and performers. One of the film’s best moments includes the memories and scrapbook photos of a former listener of the program named Helen Geels Loshe, a member of the Geels Family Band in Indiana. Helen recalls how, after seeing Patsy Montana in some of the National Barn Dance fan magazines, she tried to dress like Patsy by cutting up and painting her work boots to look like proper cowgirl boots. The personal narratives collected in the film reveal the depth of the radio show’s influence in a more profound way than any other possible measurement.

Director Stephen Parry articulates the necessity of this collaborative fundraiser:

Our goal has always been to bring The Hayloft Gang to audiences beyond public television. […] We’re grateful to have received some prestigious grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, ITVS and other donors, but with recent cutbacks in arts funding, this just hasn't been enough. Our production budget only covers the costs to license and clear the music rights for a limited PBS broadcast.

As in the crowd-funding tradition, supporters can receive some great rewards for their financial support. All donations made through USA Projects are tax deductible and eligible for matching funds. Read more about the film on The Hayloft Gang website.

The Hayloft Gang on USA Projects from Image Base on Vimeo.

Notes From The Field: “Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard” and the Don Wahle Collection

By Jennifer Joy Jameson, Notes From The Field series Editor

The interesting part about any ethnographic study is putting the pieces together, stepping in and out of a culture or history that may or may not be your own in order to share it with others.

San Francisco's adventurous record label Tompkins Square recently assembled the three-disc set Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music, 1923-1936, arranged and annotated by Nathan Salsburg, Curator of the Alan Lomax Archive. There’s an interesting story of lost-and-found to this release. Salsburg writes in the liner notes:

One evening late in March 2010, my friend Joe called. He told me that his friend Chris had been on a dumpster job that day, helping clean out the house of a recently deceased hoarder. The hoarder had had some 78-rpm records, and Chris had brought a few home. Joe was there for dinner and he put him on the phone. “What kind of records?” I asked. “Old-timey stuff,” Chris said.

Just hours before everything at the Louisville home of the late Don Wahle was to be sent off to the landfills, Salsburg arrived to find boxes upon boxes of dirtied and molding 78s of both rare and popular country and hillbilly recordings collected by Wahle since the 1950s. Salsburg’s efforts to uncover these musical artifacts, working alongside the clean-up crew, became his own sort of archaeological dig as he found himself gathering and assembling clues of Wahle’s own aesthetics, interests, and desires.

In the liner notes, Salsburg admits his prior lamentations of a bygone era of record collecting, or “The Great Southern Record Canvass” as he calls it—something Mr. Wahle surely thought about, too. A longtime Louisvillian himself, Salsburg told me that the sheer serendipity of coming across Wahle’s fragile collection, in his own city no less, served as a reminder that golden eras are, in fact, fluid in time and space.

After the discovery, Salsburg and friends started the work of gathering Wahle’s history from whatever scribbled correspondences and musical want-lists were found. He and others looked for next-of-kin, but no one stepped forward. Salsburg states, “We don’t know what he did for a living, what he looked like, or virtually any other biographical details apart from his record collecting.” 

Wahle’s want-list, courtesy of Nathan Salsburg

But what’s more interesting is how the story of Don Wahle’s music collection leads to other narratives of life lived; through hard times, through good times, and through those very American ideas of end times.

While utilizing and acknowledging the curatorial model set forth by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (famously organized into “ballads,” “social music,” and “songs”), Salsburg and his contributors steer clear of the legacy of mystifying the American experience as gathered in song. Rather, the set’s conceptual framework is “inspired by the life-cycles of the predominantly rural Americans that made this music.” Salsburg starts the process of interpreting these multiple histories through his careful and researched annotation. Thoughtful essays in response to the music and to Wahle (but mostly to the music) written by Editor of The Old-Time Herald, Sarah Bryan, music journalist Amanda Petrusich, and Southern writer John Jeremiah Sullivan, continue that work. The essays and annotation strive not to speak for the music, but to wonder about it. For the “Play Hard” disc, Sarah Bryan asks:

What about Mr. Wahle? What was his kind of fun? He was a collector, so we can assume that something about the process of seeking and acquiring gave him pleasure. […] Maybe the jollity of these records was for Don Wahle something like the moonshine skits were for listeners during Prohibition: a way to acknowledge, if not quench, a thirst for something just out of reach.

The songs tell enough of a story on their own—like my favorite two-part tune from the “Work Hard” disc, “Flat Wheel Train Blues,” recorded in Georgia in 1930 by Red Gay and Jack Wellman. Parts 1 and 2 set the scene for everyday life on the locomotive yard. Fiddles move the steam engine forward, producing a sweet rhythm while the singer hums verbal work-song encouragements that allude to the honest memory of a railroad man.
 


We can only know so much about Don Wahle. We don’t know why he decided to collect cowboy and hillbilly records while everyone else was buying up the glamorous sounds of big band and hot jazz; or why he furiously circulated requests for certain records but didn’t seem to ensure their care and sustainability; or why it is that, even as a member of a robust and communicative culture of record collectors, we still have so many questions about Wahle. What we do know is that Wahle was part of a grand tradition of giving new life to old stories. John Jeremiah Sullivan, in his notes for “Pray Hard,” writes:

The old songs are so easily lost. […] If this gathering of them is all that remains of Don Wahle, let nobody say he lived for nothing.

Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music, 1923-1936 is available in three-disc sets on CD or LP from Tompkins Square or from your local independent record store. Thirty-five of the 42 sides are from Don Wahle’s collection (19 of which are un-reissued), and the remaining sides are from the collections of Joe Bussard, Frank Mare, and Christopher King. 

Folks can read more about salvaging the Wahle collection on Nathan Salsburg’s Root Hog or Die website. We also recommend perusing the Tompkins Square catalog. This label is bringing archival and contemporary music together in exciting ways; their book/cd set He is My Story: The Sanctified Soul of Arizona Dranes was recently nominated for a Grammy in the Best Historical Album category.

John Baird's Tennessee Gospel

 Selection from the cover of I'm Believin': Gospel Music in Middle Tennessee 

By Jennifer Joy Jameson, Notes From The Field series Editor

In the latest post from Notes From The Field, I wrote about the dynamic metal sculptures of Kittrell, Tennessee artist and gospel singer John Baird. I would be remiss, though, if I did not point the way to I’m Believin’: Gospel Music in Middle Tennessee, a recent album featuring field recordings of a few of John’s original a capella gospel tunes— tunes he is regularly asked to perform at churches throughout Rutherford County. The album is produced by Grammy-winning Spring Fed Records, the in-house record label of The ArtsCenter of Cannon County, in neighboring Woodbury, Tennessee. 

Informally recorded in the performers’ living rooms, the I’m Believin’ album (named after one of Mr. Baird’s compositions) features a snapshot of the wide range of contemporary gospel music performed across urban and rural Middle Tennessee—from the African-American sacred music tradition in Nashville, to the gospel of a Hispanic Pentecostal church in Franklin, to John Baird’s twang-tinged sermons in rural Rutherford County. The producers of the album observe that “Homemade religious musical expression is a tradition [in Middle Tennessee].” Mr. Baird’s unique songwriting process is detailed in the album’s liner notes: 

His songs come to him—often in the middle of the night—as poems that he sets to tunes of his own devising. His rich, country voice and free sense of phrasing make him an appealing a cappella singer, an American Bard.

John Baird - God Is The Author by Art of the Rural

John Baird has written over 100 gospel tunes, and, as part of an NEA-funded project, folklorist Evan Hatch and the folks at Spring Fed Records are preparing to record and archive every one of his original songs. Spring Fed is also collaborating with students at Middle Tennessee State University to create a series of webisodes featuring the art and music of John Baird, as well as other Tennessee and Southern artists—we can look for those videos this fall on their website.

For now, I’ll leave you with a verse of Mr. Baird’s country-gospel poetry:

I wanna sing a little rock and roll
About the Rock that saved my soul
This Rock will roll me over the tide
And’ll be waitin’ for me on the other side

John Baird - Jesus Is My Rock by Art of the Rural


Related Articles:
The Redeemer: John Baird's Everyday Art
Notes From The Field archives

The Redeemer: John Baird's Everyday Art

all photographs by Jennifer Joy Jameson

By Jennifer Joy Jameson, Notes From The Field editor

I have a few friends who were recently married—the kind of friends who first told me about the art environments of Grandma Tressa Prisbrey, of Kenny Hill, and the kind I found myself convening with after visiting Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens for the first time. In celebration of their union, I hoped to find a gift for them that was not just handmade, or unique, but something that has a particular redemptive quality to it. These are friends who recognize the beauty and immense potential in everyday objects, places, sounds, and stories that have otherwise been thrown away or seen as worthless. So, in keeping with this orientation to the world, I was glad to use their wedding gift as an excuse to get in touch with Middle Tennessee sculpture artist and gospel singer John Baird.

I came to know about the multi-form creative works of John Baird last summer in Nashville. I was assisting folklorist Evan Hatch, who was coordinating the Tennessee Folklife program at the 73^rd National Folk Festival – an annual, traveling festival produced by the National Council for the Traditional Arts. Evan, who has documented John’s art and music for years, invited him to exhibit and sell his metal sculptures at the festival. Over the course of the 3-day festival, I found myself regularly breaking from duty by chatting with John and his wife Ruby, a talented fiber artist. I even convinced John to sing a few of his original gospel tunes for me—songs that he performs from time to time at churches near their home.

The Bairds reside in Kittrell, Tennessee, in the countryside of Rutherford County—just down the old 70 Highway from Murfreesboro, the college town of Middle Tennessee State University. John grew up in rural Rutherford County, first learning to weld as a young man in the Future Farmers of America. He did not regularly create works of visual art until the 1980s, around his retirement from a long career working as a farmer, a salesman, and a truck driver. For years now, he’s collected scrap metals of all kinds and crafted them into animals (or animal-type-creatures), people, or whatever potential John sees in the mismatched shapes of his mounting collection of thrown-away metal parts. His sculptures range in size and subject from miniature motorcycles or water pumps, to oversized spiders measuring about 4 feet, to a free-standing take on the Eiffel Tower (titled the “Awful Tower”), to a cowboy made of old horseshoes. After last year’s festival was over, I got up the nerve to ask John how much it would be to purchase the bird made out of antique sewing machine parts. I bought it, and proudly perched the bird on my mantle, where it reminds of the ability to form new and lovely out of old and odd.

On the afternoon that Evan and I rode out to the Baird home in Kittrell, John and Ruby kindly poured us tea and toured us around some of the finished works. In examining John’s sculptures, I moved back and forth from a sort of drop-jaw awe in response to the skilled craftsmanship of the pieces, to keeling over at the clever and lighthearted spirit of the artwork. John was pleased to find me laughing.

When I asked John if he draws influence from the landscape or his community, he wasn’t too sure what to say. However, it strikes me as a rather intuitive application of both landscape and community in making such use of his surroundings—these being the scraps that he finds at yard sales or junkyards, and the metal bits friends and neighbors regularly give him with the intention of use in his art.

The front and back yards of the Baird home are covered in painted roses as tall as Ruby, and lined by a wall made from rocks John has hunted with a neighbor of his. In the backyard, John and Ruby have, together, built a rock garden out of flowers and wagon wheels, featuring rocks shaped like animals that I could have sworn John carved himself. Instead, he looks for rocks in their natural form, which happen to be in the shape of rabbits or deer—a skill John uses in coming up with ideas for his metal sculptures. He told me, “If I come across a scrap of metal, I see if it’s like something…maybe a head for [an animal], or a grill for a car [sculpture]. I just start from one piece and go from there.” To me, this speaks to his ability to see great possibility for human communication through the careful bricolage of the discarded and the ordinary. This is the redemptive understanding, the aesthetic worldview that I knew the Bairds shared with my soon-to-be-wed friends.

Notes From The Field: Blues, Ballads, & Bluegrass

Still from Blues, Ballads, & Bluegrass

By Jennifer Joy Jameson, Notes From The Field editor

On a recent trip home to visit my folks in California, I was able to catch the world premiere of some newly unearthed archival footage from New York City’s Association for Cultural Equity — more commonly referenced as the Alan Lomax Archive. ACE editor and production manager Nathan Salsburg had alerted some friends to the premiere of Blues, Ballads, & Bluegrass on June 19 at the Grammy Museum as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival,  so I quickly found a seat for the event. 

The short film captures a musical house party in 1961 at the Greenwich Village apartment of folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Party-goers are serenaded by musicians rooted in their culture’s own musical traditions such as former medicine show-performer Clarence Ashley, Delta bluesman Memphis Slim, and Kentucky coal-mining banjoist Roscoe Holcomb, as well as younger, revivalist artists like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and the New Lost City Ramblers. Salsburg noted to me that the film includes the earliest known footage of the late Doc Watson, who stands in this film as a liminal figure between these two social contexts—he is regarded as both traditional and revivalist.

During this time, a group composed of noted musicians, ethnographers, and music promoters known as the Friends of Old Time Music would organize regular concerts for New York City audiences, seeking to bridge the gap between the emerging folk revival and the traditional artists outside of that sphere. Lomax’s house party, which takes place after one of these concerts, catches—in an unexpectedly honest way—this particular moment in history when urbanite 20-somethings were reckoned by the folk musics of their parents or grandparents and sought to access it and re-create it in their own way.

The film is compiled and edited by Lomax’s daughter and President of the ACE, Anna Lomax Wood, who even assisted with the clapboard during the 1961 filming when she was just 16. In the film, her father emerges as a somewhat hammy emcee, but his careful interview questions which bookend most of the performances remind of his preparedness and natural ability as a folklorist. These conversations elicit particularly insightful and surprising responses or stories from the performers, making the film something substantially more lasting and timelessly relevant than what it easily could have been. Many Art Of The Rural readers will find Ballads, Blues, & Bluegrass a worthwhile segue into the heart of our discourse on the rural-urban dynamic and cultural heritage.

The film, which also features performances from Willie Dixon, Clint Howard, Fred Price, Jean Ritchie, Peter LaFarge, and others, has been restored by Wood’s cousin, the ethnographic filmmaker John Bishop, and is now available on DVD through his Media Generations production company. 

Related Articles:
Alan Lomax and the Southern Journey
Rural Urban: From Alan Lomax to Jay-Z

Introducing A New Series: Notes From The Field

Square dance caller T-Claw with the Hogslop String Band, Nashville; Jennifer Joy Jameson

Art of the Rural is excited to announce Notes From The Field, a new series that applies the lessons of ethnography and folklore studies within the contemporary frame of rural and rural-urban experience. 

In addition, we are also pleased to welcome Jennifer Joy Jameson to our staff. Currently based in Nashville, Jennifer has worked for a number of museums, festivals, and folk art programs. She is a recent graduate of the Folk Studies MA program at Western Kentucky University and previously studied folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University. Though she is involved with many projects, AOTR readers may be familiar with our previous coverage of her exhibition "Yours For The Carters": The Vintage Sound Collections Of Freeman Kitchens.

Jennifer's projects are emblematic of a new generation of folklorists and advocates of vernacular culture -- a movement that works both within, and beyond, the traditional boundaries of the university or the archive. This wave of writers, artists, and curators has consistently presented, across all kinds of interdisciplinary lines, the sheer necessity and vitality of rural art and culture. Jennifer's introduction to this series is included below:

••••••••••

As a folklorist, I study and advocate for the unofficial or non-institutional aspects of culture. These often materialize in the form of artistic or expressive traditions held and passed on among a community or culture, such as crafts, musics, stories, foodways, beliefs, rituals, and customs. I’ve come to engage with these everyday arts through the practice of ethnography, in which I spend time observing, inquiring about, and at times, participating in, a community’s cultural traditions in an effort to document them, and better understand their social context.

Although The Art Of The Rural is no stranger to considering the work and viewpoints of folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists, the Notes from the Field series seeks to serve as a focal point on AOTR for engaging with rural arts and culture through a contemporary ethnographic perspective. Other AOTR writers trained in folklore/folklife studies have already contributed to this discourse, and will continue to do so.

Painter & singer Roy Harper at a wax cylinder recording at the National Folk Festival: JJJ

Daniel Frazier at Freeman Kitchens' Drake Vintage Music & Curios, Drake, KY; JJJ

Folklorists typically find themselves working within a canon of folk and traditional artists and their communities—the weavers, the fiddlers, the storytellers, or the altar-makers. With Notes from the Field, I hope to present a discourse for a more open-ended view of what constitutes these key cultural concepts of “community” and “tradition.” How can we consider D-I-Y zine culture and quilting as equal parts folk art? And with the broadening of communication through the Internet, what do these more emergent cultural traditions mean for rural America? Just how rural are rural arts these days (and what can folklore tell us about it)? As a Southern Californian living in Nashville, Tennessee, I find myself wondering how our more canonical folk and traditional arts are playing out in urban settings, and among younger, or revivalist sets. Exhibit A: A friend of mine from Nashville circulates a zine he made as an instruction manual on how to call old-time square dances.

While Notes from the Field may not be able to offer the depth of a complete ethnographic study, this series will offer dispatches from visits with featured artists, musicians, and communities—in their own contexts. When I’m not able to travel, I will point the way to projects involving some type of ethnographic practice. I also look forward to bringing other voices into the series, through interviews or guest posts—and like Kenyon Gradert’s Course on Midwest Culture series, I’ll look for your feedback and ideas in cultivating a dynamic conversation about the ebb and flow of folklife, in and of, rural America.

Vendors selling fried apple pies, Horse Cave Heritage Festival (KY); Jennifer Joy Jameson

Selling handmade canes on the side of the road in Leiper's Fork, TN; Jennifer Joy Jameson