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| ISBN-13: | 9780253346384 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/31/2005 |
| Series: | Readings in African Studies |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 1,035,857 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Old-Time Music and Dance
Community and Folk Revival
By John Bealle
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 John BealleAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34638-4
CHAPTER 1
AN APOCRYPHAL STORY
Among those who participated in the old-time music and dance group in the town of Bloomington, Indiana, in the 1970s and 1980s, there circulated an apocryphal story of the group's origin. The story is all but forgotten now, but at the time it was a well-known point of historical reference for the group. The narrative itself is of some concern to me here, but more important is the weekly Wednesday Night Dance and the social entity surrounding it, both of which had the extraordinary circumstance of having been organized under the auspices of a story.
In this story, Dillon Bustin, an Indiana native familiar with contra dance, was said to have serendipitously come upon old-time fiddler Miles Krassen while wandering through the Indiana University campus area known as Dunn Meadow on a summer day in 1972. Some recalled the site as the Monroe County Courthouse square, and one account had Miles sitting on a stump as he fiddled. Some attributed to Dillon the conversational opener, "That's a fine 'Red Haired Boy' you're playing." Dillon has confirmed the story, stump included, citing "Rights of Man Hornpipe" as the proper tune and the old quadrangle area near Lindley Hall as the location. This auspicious meeting, it is said, led to the convening of weekly dances with Dillon calling and Miles fiddling. Whatever the actual facts, the story of this meeting would come to personify the marriage of intricate northern dance and reckless southern music, long to be the cultural fabric of the Wednesday Night Dance. It was the origin of this "group" that the unusual story served to explain.
There was never much concern over the truth of the story, perhaps instead a wry satisfaction that even the story had no authoritative origin, or even a vague awareness that the story was the consequence and not the origin of the group. Nor, at the time, were there models for what are today called "dance groups" — a term later used to describe the local groups affiliated with the post-World War II music and dance revival. The term "dance crowd," suggesting less formality than "dance group," was also common during the early Bloomington years. Nor was there any other device that might have served as a premeditated point of origin — a founding or a charter, for example. This quasi-myth seemed designed instead to constitute the group as a kind of providential event, its existence having been received as a circumstance. There was certainly not, in those early years, any institution separate from the experience, separate from the re-creation that those dancers who showed up each week were inspired to enact. The dance seemed almost a social archetype, arising perfectly and naturally from the needs of the dancers. There was no membership and at the time no communal property: to belong required no more and no less than presence and affirmation sufficient to one's expectations. Consequently, many dancers first experienced the dance as something of an epiphany, as the discovery of some long-submerged inner desire.
The cultural aspects of the experience seemed equally providential. Most participants knew that southern old-time music and northern contra dance arose from different historical origins. Old-time musicians knew that their tunes and styles were based primarily in the South, and contra dance callers knew their dances were based in rural New England. But they also knew that their blending in Bloomington was a circumstantial necessity, not a clever idea, and that both, in their separate historical contexts, were fundamental rituals of community social experience. They seemed naturally compatible, as if the particular features each offered were uniquely suited to the social needs of the group, as if history had unnecessarily thrown them apart.
The foundations for this experience and for the group are to be found in some particular strains of American culture that were especially prominent after World War II. At the time the Bloomington dance began, southern folk music was experiencing a widespread renaissance. In the early 1970s, the burgeoning popularity of folk festivals, the widening accessibility of bluegrass music, the growing success of "acoustic" music stores, the interest in southern music by such recording artists as Bob Dylan and the Byrds, and even the film Deliverance (1972) were all drawing uncommon attention to traditional southern music. The three-disc recording Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, released by Capitol Records in 1972, was a milestone in bringing traditional music to popular audiences and also in establishing the folk revival as a component in the "circle" of generations that foster musical traditions. Yet, in certain enclaves, this was more than simply a shift in taste in musical style. It was part of a folksong revival movement, whereby a music with roots attributed to rural America, especially the South, was sought after, nurtured, and re-created as if to extract existential qualities the music was thought to have accumulated in its authentic native habitat.
As is so often the case with folk revivals, these musical tastes and their attendant spiritual strivings were tied to particular socio-political causes. In the postwar folksong revival, traditional culture was seen as an attractive, viable, and historically grounded alternative to the postwar modernism that had fostered unbridled consumer capitalism, racial intolerance, social alienation, environmental degradation, the military-industrial complex, and, notably, the Vietnam War. As I suggest throughout the book, the particular strain of old-time music and dance revival that blossomed in Bloomington had its roots in the historical movements that sought alternatives to the ills of modern life.
But the dance group did not arise, the origin story tells us, as a deliberate articulation of this cause. Rather, it emerged spontaneously as a circumstance framed by it. The sites mentioned in the story formed its cradle of significance, the place where local old-time music and dance revival took its cue from the social and political context. The courthouse square is the symbolic center of civic life and is a ubiquitous presence in Indiana county seats. On the south side of the square is Kirkwood Avenue, and running east from that point is a bustling "strip" with many student-oriented businesses. At its terminus, a mere five blocks from the courthouse, is the arched "entrance" to the Indiana University campus. Most all college campuses have these fringe areas, where economic and cultural access to academia fosters a kind of free-spirited organic intellectualism. But the close proximity in Bloomington of the twin archetypal institutions, town and gown, as I suggest throughout this book, lent salience and visibility to the kinds of expressive discourse that either, alone, would not or could not embrace.
Moreover, the availability of land forced the campus to grow toward the east, leaving the traditional campus center concentrated on its western edge. Dunn Meadow and the Lindley quadrangle are on this western edge, accessible both to Kirkwood Avenue and to the student union. Both are important locales for social and political gatherings; Dunn Meadow, in particular, has been the site of important protests and rock concerts. Thus all of these story settings are outdoor locales where expressive culture asserts its significance, sometimes spontaneously, against the backdrop of conventional civic and academic institutions. They are settings where playing a fiddle in 1972 would have been seen as a public act, possibly meaningful, possibly subversive.
And just as these locales provided a meaningful setting, so also did the chance meeting of Miles and Dillon. The chance encounter — the play of meaningful serendipity against meaningless chance — was a common motif in folk revival narrative and experience, validating the atmosphere of effortless discovery that impelled so much of dance group social experience. In fact, encounter experiences had much to do with the geo-social disposition of the movement: music and dance life was punctuated by frequent travel, gravitation toward the same kinds of places, and visible displays of expressive culture. Life seemed enchanted by serendipity, but, in fact, old-time musicians and dancers fostered the kinds of encounters that made them seem several degrees of separation closer than the norm.
There were other reasons the folk revival found an especially auspicious reception in Bloomington. Notably, it already had deeply rooted connections with Indiana University. Under the guidance of president and later chancellor Herman B Wells, the university had established itself as a center for international studies, situated amid conservative heartland tradition where this approach would not have been readily anticipated. Within this environment, the Folklore Institute had emerged during the postwar era as a research center for international folklore study.
During its founding era, however, the institute explicitly excluded folk revival concerns from its purview. Its longtime director, Richard Dorson, was a well-known opponent of folksong revival, even coining the term "fakelore" as a pejorative label that would come to embrace the kind of conscious imitation or display of traditional forms that was common in folksong revival. Not all faculty members shared this prejudice, however, and those sympathetic to the revival became valuable allies to students who were struggling with its political, aesthetic, and intellectual dilemmas.
Even with this mixed reception, the Folklore Institute attracted musicians, who came with a balance of intellectual and artistic ambitions. Some students from this period — such as Joe Hickerson, Richard Blaustein, Richard Reuss, and Neil Rosenberg — persisted and earned degrees working on revival-related subjects. Others, such as Peter Gold, came to work with the Archives of Traditional Music, which held collections of recorded traditional music from throughout the world. There were scores of others who came to the institute or to the archives with musical interests shaped in part by popular folksong revival.
Surely popular culture did foster some misconception of folklore scholarship. Even a sympathetic figure like Richard Reuss, who was to become a leading scholar on political folksong, felt the need to write an article for the folksong revival magazine Sing Out!, "So You Want to Be a Folklorist?" (1965). The article sought to explain to prospective students that the program was not designed to promote folk music performance. Nowadays, of course, there are public folklore components in most every academic program, and folklore revival, through the subject of authenticity, has become an accepted research area.
Although campus fringe areas were important sites for folksong revival performance, there was also much activity on campuses themselves. In the mid-1950s Bruce Buckley began a weekly folk music radio program on what later became the local National Public Radio affiliate station. It ran continuously until the mid-1980s, passed on through a succession of folklore graduate students. The most important university-affiliated venues, however, were campus folk clubs, which had become common nationwide in universities where folklore had some presence. One of the most ambitious clubs was founded in 1961 at the University of Illinois, in nearby Urbana, and remained active until 1970. Its driving force was folklorist Archie Green, who intently kept the club focused on its mission to bring to campus artists from marginalized culture groups — even though some club members had little other interest than promoting themselves as folk-pop performers (Green 1993).
In Bloomington, the Indiana University Folk Club was established in 1962 with official campus affiliation. It became a component of a campus folk scene that already included a local coffeehouse (Phase Three), radio shows, and hootenannies. According to Neil Rosenberg, the club was founded on the campus side of a deep town-gown cultural chasm, with little evidence of interest in local or regional folk culture (1995b: 279, 285 n5). This divide was typical of college towns, but in Bloomington it was amplified by other facets of local history.
In 1854, the New Albany and Salem Railroad extended its tracks through Bloomington, just west of the courthouse square (Madison 2002). This spurred growth both for Bloomington industries and for Indiana University, and by century's end the west side was the industrial area, while the east was residential. West-side industrial growth was an important facet of Bloomington life until the 1970s, when economic stagnation and quest for cheap labor began the steady decline of Bloomington industrial economy. Nonetheless, the east-west pattern is still woven deeply into Bloomington's cultural fabric, influencing the disbursement of architectural styles, churches and worship styles, and suburban development.
To the east, Indiana University, founded in 1820, struggled to survive during its early years. In 1884, after a fire, the campus was moved from College Avenue to the area called Dunn's Woods bordering Indiana Avenue. It became Bloomington's definitive institution largely as a consequence of the postwar education boom, punctuated by the signature international programs developed under Herman B Wells's presidency. Novelist Larry Lockridge, who assessed the Bloomington of his 1950s childhood, could see the roots of a long-standing cooperation between town and gown. "Still," he wrote, "much of Bloomington, with its practical-minded and laboring classes, was worlds apart from academe" (Lockridge 1994: 70).
Although one might have expected folk clubs to have routinely transcended this barrier, most often the clubs sought out seasoned performers well known on the festival-coffeehouse circuit. Local traditional culture was of lesser importance in the 1960s folk revival, as illustrated by Joe Hickerson's comment in Sing Out! in 1960 that "folk music has reached the Ivory Tower and can be heard live at the Quiet Answer Coffee Shop in Bloomington" (quoted in Tyler 1991–92: 32). Ironically, at the same time, local high schoolers involved in the revival were attending bluegrass sessions at the Brown County Jamboree in nearby Bean Blossom. Some of these Bloomington natives later became active in music and dance in Bloomington and elsewhere, providing evidence of distinct strains of influence in local-based or campus-based culture.
The Folk Club's constitution expressed as its goals "to promote interest and participation in folk music activity in Indiana University, and to encourage the appreciation of folklore and its studies." According to Neil Rosenberg, who was involved in the club throughout its run, its activities were "both recreational and educational, including folk sings, lectures, symposia, films, concerts, and instructional workshops" (1995a: 73). The club sponsored performances by traditional performers such as Doc Watson, the Stanley Brothers, Mance Lipscomb, the New Lost City Ramblers, Jesse Fuller, Dave Van Ronk, the Reverend Gary Davis, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Frank Proffitt. But club members and institute students also gave performances, including Joe Hickerson, Frank Gillis, the Jordan River Ramblers, and the Pigeon Hill String Ticklers. The club did not promote dancing but did serve as a kind of institutional hub that would have attracted people interested in both music and dance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Old-Time Music and Dance by John Bealle. Copyright © 2005 John Bealle. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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