Sing My Troubles By
With A New Box Set of Recordings, Art Rosenbaum Preserves the Priceless Dust in the Fields of Americana
originally published November 21, 2007
With all the moving and shaking that goes on in Athens, with the spectrum of overflowing genres and talent with which it is blessed as the eminent college music town, it's easy to forget that Athens is but a pearl nestled within a geographical treasure chest. The latest garage-punk band or hardcore revivalists are fine and good, but all around us is a true revival of a dusty essence that far predates the storied Athens "scene." Perhaps revival is an inappropriate word, though with a grain of truth housed within. Resilience and preservation are more apt descriptions. From Athens, one can radiate in any direction to discover the beating heart of America.
Such is the inherent wonder in field recording. Alan Lomax is probably its most famous practitioner, especially after Moby employed many of his documents of old Southern songs on the album Play, which led to weathered old workers and field hands inadvertently selling shiny automobiles and yuppie appliances. The mere idea of drifting into a tiny dot on a map and capturing raw talent and passionate wisdom on tape is an enchanting romance. The concept of archiving these hidden wonders before they pass to the other side is both exhilarating and essential.
Art Rosenbaum has been a part of Athens culture and lifeblood for 31 years. His tenure at the University of Georgia in the Lamar Dodd School of Art has resulted in a perhaps unrivaled college archive of traditional American music. His recording, painting and teaching, complemented by his wife Margo's collaboration and photography, have left an indelible imprint on our state and our region. Maybe it's hyperbole to state that the Rosenbaums have saved the soul of our music, but it sounds nice, and it's certainly not a lie. Saved? Preserved, maybe.
Art Rosenbaum
Rev. Willie Mae Eberhard and Sister Fleeta Mitchell
Art has been actively recording in the field forever, and the last 51 years of his documentation are being presented to the world at large in two four-disc deluxe box sets through the admirable Dust-to-Digital label based in Atlanta. The record company is devoted to preserving the world's traditional music, whether it is disintegrating or merely forgotten. Mr. Rosenbaum has long been a major player in his field, and it is with the imminent release of Art of Field Recording: Volume I: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum that he finally gets his due on a grand stage. Traversing through gospel, blues, unaccompanied singing, bluegrass and all shades of folk music, the collection is painstakingly given to those seeking naked beauty as well as history. But as he would be the first to tell you, it's all about the musicians - he just finds them and presses RECORD. Whether hailing from the North Georgia mountains, down on the Georgia coast, or scattered through much of the United States, these people are of Homeric proportions, preserving the old songs and traditions through generations, passing legacies down orally. Many of the performers featured across the box set's 110 tracks or in its 100-page accompanying book have since passed away, and those who remain can now witness their precious cargo lovingly transferred to the masses.
- Flagpole
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So how has Athens treated you during the past 31 years? Is it in your blood yet?
- Art Rosenbaum
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Yeah, Athens is in my blood. I've lived here longer than anyplace else, including Indianapolis, where I (mostly) grew up, and New York, where I went to undergrad and graduate school and worked and painted for several years thereafter. Same with Margo, who was born and grew up in Los Angeles, but has lived here longer than she lived there.
- Flagpole
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Considering the fact that Athens is a college town, its celebrated music scene is constantly fluctuating. However, being in Georgia, there's no shortage of small rural towns, mountain country, etc. How do you view doing what you do in regard to your location - meaning the smaller scale of Athens within the larger scale of rural Georgia?
- Art Rosenbaum
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When I moved to Athens, I had already been seriously involved with American traditional music for many years, and knew that it was not all rural. Some of the first old-time traditional musicians we met in Georgia lived right here in or near Athens, gospel singers Doc and Lucy Barnes, bluesman Neal Pattman, and many others. We also made forays down to the coast and up into the North Georgia mountains.
As for a "scene," I didn't think of the music of Athens in that way. There was a lot of music of many genres, and many were peripheral to my main interests, but I had a student in a studio art class named Michael Stipe who was yet to emerge as a renowned musical and creative force. But there was a lot of musical energy that I could feel even beyond my focused activity.
- Flagpole
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I've often thought of field recording as the preservation of a music and culture that is endangered, so to speak... sort of anthropological. If it's not documented, it'll slowly die out and be forgotten. However, I realize that for many decades, collectors have been out all over the world capturing these songs for archival purposes. Do you see field recording that way? To the point that you are in a position to cement a legacy and make sure people never forget the soul of America and its particular regions?
- Art Rosenbaum
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There is something to this way of thinking, but you need to look at it in the context of an ever-changing and evolving musical culture. My interest has been in the older forms, old ballads, acoustic blues, pre-bluegrass old-time music, early spirituals, and this interest is reflected in the boxed set - but modern country, bluegrass, modern gospel, etc. are still evolving, just as the early forms had still earlier precedents.
But it is true that if I had not recorded Maud Thacker's ballads in Pickens County in the '80s, they would have died with her, and I don't think there will be another Southern version of "The Battle of the Boyne" recorded from the lips of a traditional singer - though I might be wrong. By the way, I am a folk song collector, maybe folklorist (though my degrees are not in folklore) - but I myself am not an anthropologist or ethnomusicologist - these are pretty specialized fields. And yes, recording and recognizing musical cultures that are to a greater or lesser degree apart from the mainstream commercial music business will reveal something of America's soul or souls, plural.
I go along with your plural in "regions," as well; Bess Lomax Hawes said that when she was Director of the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts, people would ask, what is "folk arts" anyway? And she would say that they (unlike ballet, symphony orchestras, etc.) are what make it different to get off the plane at El Paso, TX, from Knoxville, TN, or Bangor, ME.
Another thing about field recording - the early commercial 78s, whose material often overlaps that of field recording - were all done to sell, and had some commercial constraints as well as incentives. But field recording can document a home, church or informal setting, with side conversation, pauses, background noises, the sound textures of real life as it is lived.
- Flagpole
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Above anything else, there seems to be a certain type of magic to capturing "regular" people in their natural environments. Sitting down with a new wizened friend and giving him or her the opportunity to preserve their own heart and soul. I was surprised to read in the book from the box set that "some academics disparage 'shotgun collecting' as the plucking of musical artifacts from their cultural context." That's largely what I find fascinating, the idea of people who've never seen a recording studio but possess this powerful spirit, and, in many cases, surprising talent.
- Art Rosenbaum
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Maybe I wasn't clear about "shotgun collecting." Most academic folk song scholars recognize the value of recorded performances as expressive art, but believe there is more value in studying the songs and other aspects of folk culture in more depth. Early collectors printed texts without tunes, later [collectors] tended to include tunes, but usually identified the singers by name without giving much more information about the individuals, their lives, backgrounds and values. More recently, not only the singers, but their larger cultural environment is studied by thorough academics - some, like Henry Glassie, are quite brilliant.
I try to convey some sense of the different people I have met and their lives, but more as an artist and collector - and leave the scholarly depth to those more schooled in this realm. I like what Mary Heekin said before singing "Lord Randolph" on Disc One, when a friend of mine who was there asked her if she had "made a study" of folk songs (when she was young, in Ireland.) Mary answered, "No, I didn't make a study of it! I wanted to remember the people, the people who sang the songs."
- Flagpole
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What are your views on Southern U.S. folk music as opposed to that of other parts of America? It seems that the bulk of American field recording's history has been devoted to our area and its neighboring states.
- Art Rosenbaum
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I love Southern music, its richness fueled by mixing of strong British and African traditions - the European fiddle and the African banjo came together in the South (also in the North, in early minstrel shows). The early recording companies tended to identify the South with American music, and put more music on wax from Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi and North Carolina than from other places, although they did issue some great Irish and Polish village music recorded in Chicago.
Dick Summers, the greatest fiddler I personally recorded, was from North Central Indiana. Alan Lomax has been criticized for concentrating more on rural Southern music than on urban Northern music - and I share the same general interest - but as long as one recognizes that there are many great musical traditions from Maine to California, others can cover areas of their interest and expertise.
- Flagpole
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It's also fascinating that in our technologically savvy culture, making music yourself is exponentially easier than it was even 10 or 20 years ago. There are so many subgenres and layers these days. I feel that in a small way, making music has sort of come full circle. Anyone can press record and sing his heart out or play around on guitar or any number of other things, while 100 years ago, your voice would leave no imprint beyond the air in the room. Now it can easily find its way to the masses, but people like you and Dust-to-Digital, you're doing the same for those born before the computer age.
- Art Rosenbaum
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May the full circles be unbroken! Actually, in past centuries, singers and hack writers celebrated the latest disaster or comic escapade in compositions printed on broadside song-sheets which they sang and sold at fairs and markets - and these subsequently entered oral tradition.
Self-published CDs, and now online outlets can bypass the constraints of the big-time music business, and out of the confusion will come some good things. Dust-to-Digital does believe in the "curated" presentation, in a tangible and handsome form - the boxed set. I like this idea.
- Flagpole
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And finally, although this can be gleaned from reading the liner notes, could you give our readers a small anecdote from your travels? Just a slice of an experience that might capture the essence of the purity of what you do?
- Art Rosenbaum
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One thing I try to do, sometimes in asking rather "dumb" and straightforward questions during a recording session, is to elicit some really wonderful insight. Sometimes it works: when I asked Cecil Barfield, the great South Georgia country bluesman, how he makes his blues, he answered with one of the finest explanations of the creative process I have ever heard:
"In mind. In heart and mind. What your heart say, your mind be right along with it. And what your mind say, you got to get your fingers with it. And when you got all that together, all you got to do is just play it, and the more you play it, the more it comes to you."
But last week, when I recorded Mary Lomax [from White County, GA, who will be performing at the release concert along with her sister, Bonnie] singing "Come All You Fair and Tender Maidens," I asked her to elaborate on the last verse - after a girl is jilted by her boyfriend, she goes home to her mother to sit and "sing my troubles by." I liked that phrase, and asked her what it meant, and she just repeated: "her boyfriend left her, she wasn't a little sparrow, so she went to sing her troubles by." As in, "I sang it, don't you get it? Why say it another way?"
Deacon Palmer
Art Rosenbaum
Neal Pattman
Jack Bean
The Myers Family
Eddie Bowles
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