East of the Mississippi and North of the Border

Dear Mailing List,

Let’s start this newsletter with some music. Our first playlist for my new book And the Roots of Rhythm Remain seemed to go down well, so Andrea and I have put together another 100-track selection of artists, songs and styles described in the book. You can find them both here. The long promised website full of clips, tracks and rabbit-holes will appear one day, but it is taking (surprise!) longer than expected.

The main event here is a return to those extended epistles of yore that longer-serving readers may recall, inspired in this case by our spring tour of North America. News about upcoming events can be found at the foot of the newsletter, as can links to some new podcasts and interviews. More book travels – including a September return to the US – are in the works and will be announced soon.

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One of the book’s subtexts is my affection for the producers, promoters and enthusiasts who helped bring great music to audiences both domestic and foreign: Senegal’s Ibrahima Sylla and Ibrahim Kassé; Ravi Shankar’s American producer, Dick Bock; those tireless promoters of Cuban music, Alejo Carpentier, Fernando Ortiz and Ned Sublette; the great A&R man and music publisher, Ralph Peer; Bulgarian Radio’s Rumyana Tzintzarska; kora champion Lucy Durán; Mario Pacheco and Ricardo Pachón from Spain; André Midani in Brazil… the list is long.

Our recent North American tour re-connected me with many of today’s equivalents, men and women who have made curating, presenting, celebrating, collecting and preserving our musical heritage their life’s work. For example: in an 18th-century barnyard near Hyde Park on the Hudson River we saw an awe-inspiring monument to the analogue era: Bob George’s ARChive of Contemporary Music. Three immense (and strangely beautiful) wooden structures hold over three million vinyl discs, of which half a million have been catalogued and many of them digitized. Bob has been tireless in persuading collectors to donate or bequeath their vinyl and memorabilia; sub sections such as ‘Keith Richards’ Blues Collection’ are wonders to behold. He’s raised funds for a move to a modern facility in Poughkeepsie, NY, but always needs more support to keep ARC growing and providing a home for America’s – and the world’s – musical history.

Joining us on that visit, after a tasty Rhinecliff lunch, was Lucy Sante. One of the first post-research books I plucked from my library and devoured was Kill All Your Darlings, a wonderful collection of essays written under Lucy’s pre-transition moniker, Luc Sante. (Andrea hugely enjoyed her wonderfully-titled account of that life change, I Heard Her Call My Name.) I got ahold of Lucy’s email and offered to send a copy of my book. She turned out to have been a teenage Incredible String Band fan – believe it or not, there were many such way back in the 1960s – and possessor of a well-thumbed copy of White Bicycles, so a Hudson Valley rendezvous was arranged.

The Hudson Valley seems to be where New Yorkers who moved to Brooklyn in order to escape Manhattan are now moving to escape Brooklyn. Danny Melnick and Isabel Soffer are the perfect pair to provide entertainment for these riverine migrants, as both vaguely fit that description and have long histories of promoting jazz, ‘world’ and roots music in both the big city and upstream. For six months each year, they rent a church hall in Saugerties, call it The Local and bring concerts, talks and workshops to the region’s music-hungry denizens. The audience at my event there included more than a few laborers in our ever-more-arid cultural orchard, including New Yorker critic Amanda Petrusich, the aforementioned Lucy S and WKCR’s David Ellenbogen, who unnerved me in our interview by seeming to know more about my subject than I do. Singers with history in their vocal cords were there, too: our hostess, Jenni Muldaur, who has released a wonderfully anachronistic album of country duets with Teddy Thompson, and Natalie Merchant, with whom I worked on the 10,000 Maniacs’ Wishing Chair. Natalie once suspended her burgeoning career for a few years to teach music in the New York public school system, continues to be a high-profile activist, serving on the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress while developing a project for young audiences with the Chicago Symphony.

The night before my talk, Upstate Films invited me to introduce a rare screening of my 1973 film Jimi Hendrix, which has long been unavailable both in movie houses and online. I recounted the curious story of how it came to be made and everyone seemed to like it a lot; getting Jimi back onto streaming platforms is on my list of tasks for the summer.

I’ve spoken before at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, but a visit always inspires. As we strolled around with events programmer Troy Hansbrough and checked out the PA system for the evening talk, troops of students, their ages increasing as the day went on, passed us in the hallways on their way to lessons in banjo picking, blues guitar, jazz saxophone, vocal harmony and improvisation – just like a high-tone conservatory only devoted entirely to folk and other non-classical traditions. It was great to see Troy, three decades after we worked together at Rykodisc/Hannibal, as it was to be interviewed again by Mark Caro, a multi-faceted Chicago journalist and podcaster channelling the Studs Terkel spirit.

Recording studio boss Julia Miller helped organize a pre-show get-together with Chicago sound engineers and record producers. I was delighted to discover that Julia is now co-owner of Delmark Records, a Chicago label whose late founder, Bob Koester, was a key figure in the start of my career as a producer. Whenever we were in Chicago, my brother and I would visit his Jazz Record Mart to buy the latest blues reissues, and Bob was so charmed by these teenage nerds that he would serenade – and educate – us with his rare 78s. When I came through town on my way to California at the start of a semester off from Harvard, it was Bob who gave me an introduction to Contemporary Records, opening the door to my first job in the music business. Once back at Harvard, Bob sent me a box of lps on credit and recommended my fledgling distribution company to other indie labels. Discovering that Delmark lives on was a highlight of my visit to the Windy City.

The Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis is a bit like an older sibling to The Local. It’s been going since 1989 and was run for many years by my former Ryko/Hannibal colleague Rob Simonds; he and his wife Karen continue to support the centre by sponsoring events. The Cedar has a wonderful lived-in atmosphere and I’ve always had a soft spot for Minneapolis and those weird pedestrian bridges connecting downtown blocks for when the snowdrifts get too high. Favourite son Prince gave mystical explanations for calling his most famous song ‘Purple Rain’ but I suspect it was, consciously or unconsciously, an homage to the Minnesota Vikings football team. Musical footnotes abound there by the headwaters of the Mississippi: for many years, ‘Spider John’ Koerner both sang and tended bar at a joint down the street from the Cedar and we stayed with ECM’s favourite hard-to-classify guitarist Steve Tibbets and his wife Joanie. Steve has spent a lot of time in Nepal, where he recorded Chô with Tibetan nun Choyang Drolma, one of Hannibal’s most successful ‘world’ albums.

Ashley Capps fits right in with this august gallery of presenters, chroniclers and preservers, but he operates on a whole other level. Having built up a number of music venues in his home town of Knoxville, he started the Bonnaroo Festival in 2002, turning it into one of the country’s top events. Since selling Bonnaroo to Live Nation, he’s focused his substantial energies on a unique Knoxville event, the Big Ears festival. Every year at the end of March, in twenty or so venues scattered within walking distance around the downtown area, Ashley and his team present a four-day smorgasbord of live music: jazz, experimental, acoustic, electronic, retro, avant-garde, country, funk… There are no giant outdoor stages, just human-scale venues where audiences listen carefully; there’s nothing quite like it. Three of my personal highlights show the breadth: Swamp Dogg and his great R&B outfit, an hour-long free improvisation featuring Wadada Leo Smith, Vijay Iyer and Yosvany Terry, and Arooj Aftab backed by an extraordinary group of virtuosi. A frail but moving performance at Big Ears was Michael Hurley’s last show before his death a fortnight later.

My contribution was the result of an invitation from Big Ears’ film curator Lily Keber (whose own Bayou Maharajah about James Booker is a classic) to be ‘in residence’ at the Riviera Cinema. I presented a series of films, including my own co-productions – Jimi Hendrix and Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace – and three from the book’s filmography: an exquisite black and white 1962 documentary on music in Havana called Nosotros, la música, Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo Dilo, a true ish story set in a community of Roma musicians, and the Jamaican classic The Harder They Come. These were topped off with a two-hour-long audio-visual tour through the book that Andrea and I put together, including footage of Taj Mahal with Toumani Diabaté, Kate Bush with the Trio Bulgarka, Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo, Ivo Papasov and David Sanborn, Ravi Shankar and George Harrison and Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelly (before running out of time for Tito Puente and Celia Cruz). The films were elegantly introduced by by writer Josh Jelly-Shapiro and film-maker Mirissa Neff, and, thanks to Lily and her cohort Tim Watson, we now have a DCP with all those clips. Any mailing list members who happen to run a cinema and fancy hosting a narrated evening of rare and wonderful musical footage – or perhaps a curated season of music dramas and documentaries, please get in touch. Lily also asked NPR’s astute chronicler of popular music, Ann Powers, if she would be up for doing an on-stage interview with me and I’m pleased she was, as I’ve long admired her take on the American music scene. Our conversation can be heard as a Big Ears podcast here.

In my book’s conclusion, I praise the great Dust-to-Digital label’s Instagram feed as a resource for anyone looking for home-grown virtuosos, spontaneous musical joy and spectacular rhythmic moments. I’d exchanged emails with that label’s founders, Lance and April Ledbetter, but never met them. We spent two days getting to know their Atlanta, including an evening playing musical ping pong with Lance at a cool ‘listening bar’ called Commune, and recording an interview with April and Lance for their new podcast. The main event was Lance and my on-stage conversation at Manuel’s Tavern, a Democratic Party landmark where Jimmy Carter launched his political career, Barack Obama played darts and Stacey Abrams rallied voters threatened with disenfranchisement. Our audience included Matt Hinton, a leading figure in the Sacred Harp movement. This is one of the most exciting – and curious – phenomena of America’s desire to connect with its past while partaking of the joys of communal singing. All across the country, groups large and small meet regularly to sing this complex, multi-part form of religious music that evolved during the Great Awakening of the early 19th century. Today, its adherents are made up of a surreal combination of devout Christians (mostly in the South) and God-ignoring urbanites (mostly in the Northeast), all drawn by the glorious sounds emerging from the Sacred Harp hymnal, a new edition of which is to be published this year, the first since 1991.

I sometimes feel a twinge of guilt pulling into 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I grew up exactly halfway between Philly and New York but visited the latter at least 20 times more often than I did the former. This was despite the fact that watching Bob Horne’s Bandstand live from North Philadelphia every afternoon after school provided my early education in R&B and doo-wop, and that it was in Rittenhouse Square that my brother Warwick, Geoff Muldaur and I arranged to meet the great Lonnie Johnson in September 1960, bringing him to a friend’s living room in Princeton for his first paid gig in eight years (and my first venture into music presenting). The city still boasts a robust community of music buffs, including my on-stage interlocutor Tom Moon (author of the impeccable 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die), while in the Barnes & Noble audience were Amy Shalit, long-time producer and driving force behind NPR’s Fresh Air with Terri Gross, and the inimitable Aaron Levinson. We visited Aaron’s loft the next day, a space crammed with evidence of his status as a premiere collector of Latin music and its related ephemera. In a corner by the door stands a large wooden figure with nails protruding in all directions. You’ve probably seen African carvings studded with spikes in museums but, like me (and most museum curators), you didn’t know their significance. Thanks to Aaron, now I do: each nail represents a binding contract between two parties. Pounding a spike into the wood seals the deal before witnesses and deities and cannot be broken. Wrestling with contracts’ endless sub-clauses and the ensuing legal bills can make one envy cultures with such a straightforward custom.

It is a little-known fact that during the pre-WW2 78rpm era, many of the greatest recordings of traditional music from Europe and the Middle East were made in New York City or Chicago; newly arrived musicians had a ready-made audience of fellow-immigrants, eager to purchase sounds that reminded them of home. The leading chronicler of this phenomenon is Ian Nagoski, who lives a short Amtrak ride south of Philadelphia in Baltimore and who, along with Essential Tremors podcasters Matt Byars and Lee Gardner, helped set up my event there. In London a few years back we had the good fortune to attend one of Ian’s tour de force performances, in which he tells tales of displaced divas and virtuosos and plays their beautifully restored shellacs.

The event at Politics and Prose in Washington DC drew a good crowd, thanks in no small part to the work Andras Goldinger has done over many years building up a wide selection of music books and bringing illuminating speakers to the store. The audience included my old friend Bob Boilen, visionary creator of NPR’s All Songs Considered and Tiny Desk Concerts. Rarely has something with so modest a beginning turned into such a cultural behemoth. Seated nearby were Maureen Laughran and John Smith from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, for whom Andrea and I produced Damir Imamović’s album of Bosnian sevdah and Sephardic songs, The World and All That It Holds. We joined them for supper afterwards and got a fascinating tour of the hq the next day, seeing how they preserve the archives and catalogues of so many important labels: Folkways, Arhoolie, Cook Labs, Folk Legacy, Monitor, UNESCO and more. Let’s hope this invaluable work can stay out of MAGA’s gunsights. (And provide a shaming example to corporations who own vast catalogues and keep huge swathes of them hidden from potential listeners.)

Last autumn’s publication party with David Byrne at New York’s Villa Albertine would always be a hard act to follow, but the paperback launch at Powerhouse Arena and Bookstore in Dumbo turned out really well. It’s a terrific space and Chris Molnar, who runs it, was a genial and supportive host, while I was pleased that the audience included fellow music writer and old friend Brian Cullman. Brian’s musical palate has what I might presume to call a Boydian width: he wrote an ice-breaking appreciation of Nick Drake a few years after Nick’s death, and a half century later provided my new book with an eloquent description of Morocco’s Master Musicians of Joujouka (“like the four horsemen of the apocalypse auditioning for a gig as eternity’s house band”). His writing appears regularly in the Paris Review and a collection is planned for publication next year.

While in New York, we delivered a copy of the book to a revered critic whom I quote a number of times in its pages. Robert Christgau and his wife, the writer Carola Dibbell, served us tea in their East Village apartment, which looks exactly as a Christgau apartment ought to: crammed with records, books, photos and memorabilia, a time capsule of a golden era of music and the eloquent criticism it inspired. The next day, I visited the studios of WFUV on the Bronx campus of Fordham University for an interview with Paul Cavalconte on his long-running cult show, ‘Cavalcade’. When I was running my label, we always craved getting our records onto FUV playlists, so it was gratifying to hear Paul and his colleagues assure me that Hannibal and Witchseason discs still get regular spins.

The brotherhood of music hounds contains more than its fair share of grey hairs and bald pates, but we’re all in the bloom of youth compared to Toronto’s nonagenarian Richard Flohil. Richard has been promoting and publicizing music in Canada since time immemorial including the Hannibal Records catalogue and White Bicycles. We reminisced about the time in 1964 when I was squiring Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe around Britain and Richard hitched a ride on the tour bus. He and Derek Andrews, eminent founder of Toronto’s Harbourfront and Luminato festivals and key figure in touring global artists, brought me together with a room full of critics, musicians, producers and music buffs at the Rivoli, a venerable institution whose wooden sign, I learned, was designed by Mary Margaret O’Hara. The Q&A inevitably veered into my stories about working as the second of three producers on O’Hara’s Miss America album, which was eventually released in 1989, five years after I recorded many of the tracks.

My publisher, Ze Books, and publicist, Shore Fire Media, deserve more than the usual thanks for supporting such a tour. Shore Fire have for many years done great work supporting Smithsonian/Folkways and other roots music labels and artists, while Ze Books has a passionate commitment to music, art and culture writing that goes far beyond the calculation of a balance sheet. A shout-out must also go to the booksellers who either hosted me or shlepped books to the venue: Inquiring Minds in Saugerties, Book Cellar in Chicago, Moon Palace in Minneapolis, Union Street in Knoxville, A Capella in Atlanta, Barnes & Noble in Philadelphia, Atomic Books in Baltimore, Politics and Prose in Washington, Powerhouse in New York and Another Story in Toronto. It’s become a bad habit of many readers to prowl their local store, thumbing through books and taking notes, then ordering online for a few bucks less. I encourage everyone to do the obverse: research books and check them out on line, then order from your local shop.

I ended my previous newsletter with the generalization that music brings out the best in people and how inspired I was by those who work to make it happen. Do they belong in the same paragraph as the ones protecting our environment, our civil rights, our health, our freedom of thought and of study? That might be a stretch, but I left New York in mid-April feeling energized by all the great work being done by the people mentioned above along with all their colleagues and co-workers and by the audiences who turned out to listen.

Hoping to see some of you at a future event.

As ever,
Joe

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AUDIO BOOK

A reminder for those daunted by the width of And the Roots of Rhythm Remain – the quality can also be had by listening to me read the audio book – available from Audible, Amazon or Apple and, in Europe, those three plus Spotify, XigXag and other platforms.

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NEW MEDIA

Deutschlandradio, Radiokunst: Neue Autorenproduktionen, Kurzstrecke 154 „Meeting Joe Boyd“ by Francis Gay

Link

And on Soundcloud

Special note: this 20-minute piece for German radio by Francis Gay takes a very original approach to creating an audio piece from our interview. Highly recommended!

WFUV 90.7 Cavalcade by Paul Cavalconte
Joe Boyd: Cavalcade Q&A (without all the great music he played in the show)

Link

NPR Here & Now by Betto Arcos
Joe Boyd takes readers on a musical tour around the world in latest book

Link

NYC Radio Live/WKCR with David Ellenbogen
Joe Boyd and the Roots of Rhythm
Apple, Spotify, YouTube, PodBean

Notes from the World, A Conversation with Joe Boyd, Michael Deibert

A Conversation with Joe Boyd

Link

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