Speaker 1: Pushkin. This thing is four. My friend Chris King stands
Speaker 1: in the living room of his old house in rural Virginia.
Speaker 1: But this is where it actually gets fragile. This is
Speaker 1: like doing open heart surgery, because this is when you
Speaker 1: could slice that microscopic van. Chris takes a kitchen knife
Speaker 1: to a large package, a two by two foot cube.
Speaker 1: My friend cultivates an old timey look. He has a mustache,
Speaker 1: round towatu, shell glasses, suspenders holding up his core draws.
Speaker 1: He's approaching this job in a methodical way. Think of
Speaker 1: a nineteen thirties country doctor examining a patient. Holy shit.
Speaker 1: Inside the cube, he finds more packaging and still more.
Speaker 1: It's as if someone's playing a trick on him. Inside
Speaker 1: one box, there's another, and another, then a sandwich of
Speaker 1: cardboard and foam, and finally, in the very middle a record,
Speaker 1: just one record, shine mint copy. Holy shit. This record
Speaker 1: is ninety years old, more or less, made to spin
Speaker 1: at seventy eight revolutions per minute. The disc is fragile.
Speaker 1: It's coated with a substance called shellac, a resin secreted
Speaker 1: by an Indian beetle. Shellac was too expensive to use
Speaker 1: for the whole record, so it's only on the surface.
Speaker 1: The inside of a seventy eight is filled with clay
Speaker 1: and limestone dust. It makes them heavy and very brittle.
Speaker 1: Drop one and it will shatter like a china plate
Speaker 1: that's so clean you can shave off. Then I met
Speaker 1: Chris some years ago when I was researching my novel
Speaker 1: White Tears. The book is a ghost story about record
Speaker 1: collecting and the Mississippi Blues. To understand that world, I
Speaker 1: needed to talk to a seventy eight collector, someone who
Speaker 1: is deep in the subculture. Chris agreed to help me out.
Speaker 1: He's the kind of source a novelist can only dream off.
Speaker 1: Everything was stitched into the Fate's Harry. You know nothing,
Speaker 1: there's nothing by chance. Now I'm here to witness him
Speaker 1: in his happiest place somehow or another. The day that
Speaker 1: I was born, it was written into my fabric that
Speaker 1: I was going to play this record for you, and
Speaker 1: carefully lowers the needle into the groove. This is Into
Speaker 1: the Zone, a podcast about opposites and how borders are
Speaker 1: never as clear as we think. I'm hurry Kun's room.
Speaker 1: This episode is about music and authenticity. It's about tradition,
Speaker 1: and modernity. It's about black and white seventy eight. Collectors
Speaker 1: are notoriously secretive. The first one I contacted while writing
Speaker 1: White Tears Well, he told me that revealing information about
Speaker 1: collecting would be against his self interest, because if more
Speaker 1: people realize how amazing these records are, the prices would
Speaker 1: go up and it would be harder for him to collect.
Speaker 1: But Chris is the kind of guy who wants to
Speaker 1: share what he loves. He welcomed me into his lair
Speaker 1: in Virginia, and I've wanted an excuse to go back
Speaker 1: ever since, and we're lucky enough to be in your
Speaker 1: I mean, do you call it a listening room? What
Speaker 1: do you call this place? Yeah? I can do more
Speaker 1: than listen here. Chris isn't lying. He won a Grammy
Speaker 1: in two thousand and two for his work compiling early recordings.
Speaker 1: He remasters old records for re release. This room is
Speaker 1: a shrine to the early years of recorded sound. Thousands
Speaker 1: of records in identical brown cardboard sleeves sit on shelves.
Speaker 1: The walls are hung with memorabilia, portraits of long dead
Speaker 1: fiddlers and jug bands. There's a mixing desk, a turntable,
Speaker 1: two monitor speakers hung on cables from the ceilings. To
Speaker 1: your collecting of American music, I mean, do you have
Speaker 1: anything after the Second World War? I don't collect anything sucks.
Speaker 1: Don't collect anything that sucks. I think that is a
Speaker 1: valid collecting strategy. Well, there's there's completely a good rule
Speaker 1: of film for anybody. But is there a date at
Speaker 1: which you stop? Yeah, well, I mean I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't have hardly any post ward War two. I have
Speaker 1: no post World War two blues and I have like
Speaker 1: maybe one or two post World War two your belly things.
Speaker 1: The record Chris Just Unpacked is by Mississippi musician Robert Wilkins.
Speaker 1: The song is called rolling Stone Part One. Don't you Go?
Speaker 1: Hearing this on an original seventy eight is like the
Speaker 1: second coming for blues fans. There are very few known copies,
Speaker 1: and this is the one in the best condition rule Someday.
Speaker 1: Robert Wilkins is not the only early blues musician to
Speaker 1: have recorded a song with rolling Stone in the title,
Speaker 1: but he's the one. The English band called the Rolling
Speaker 1: Stones had to pay royalties on the album Beggars Banquet.
Speaker 1: There's a track called Prodigal Son. When it was released
Speaker 1: back in nineteen sixty eight. It was credited to Mick
Speaker 1: Jagger and Keith Richards. It's actually a pretty straight cover
Speaker 1: of a song by Wilkins that he'd been playing since
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties. After a long court case, the elderly
Speaker 1: bluesman finally got what he was owed. There are many
Speaker 1: stories like this. The British invasion bands of the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: like Cream and led Zeppelin did a good job of
Speaker 1: repackaging country blues and selling it back to Americans with
Speaker 1: an English accent. I grew up in England listening to
Speaker 1: a lot of those bands, and like many people, I
Speaker 1: eventually found my way back to the blues tradition that
Speaker 1: they were borrowing from. But it was a long time
Speaker 1: before I really understood how strange it is that rock
Speaker 1: and roll music that comes from the nes came to
Speaker 1: be thought of as a white style. It's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons I went to Virginia to talk to Chris.
Speaker 1: He knows this history better than almost anyone in modern
Speaker 1: popular music. We make this distinction between black and white
Speaker 1: traditions in America, and do you think that distinction has
Speaker 1: any validity? Well, obviously it has validity. Now, but if
Speaker 1: you go back to basically the Civil War, the American
Speaker 1: Civil War up until essentially the dawn of the of
Speaker 1: the recording industry, that was a false dichotomy. There was
Speaker 1: a pre blues tradition that was mixed, It was shared.
Speaker 1: It was neither neither a white nor black. It was mongrel.
Speaker 1: It was everything. Maybe you should you should play something,
Speaker 1: and we I mean, we could play the guessing game
Speaker 1: and see and imagine who might be playing. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so I mean I'll play two records. One is by
Speaker 1: black musicians, one is by white musicians, but largely the
Speaker 1: instrumentation in the repertoire and the style is the same.
Speaker 1: And this sort of shows that, Um, if anything, it
Speaker 1: was the recording industry that started to parse out and
Speaker 1: say this is black and this is white. I think
Speaker 1: I had sent him knocking on that still now be
Speaker 1: read around him something that as far as I yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that they were very high during that session.
Speaker 1: You can hear the guy kind of like mumbling like whoa,
Speaker 1: and the way he's just experimenting with, like just how
Speaker 1: long he draws that New Orleans. Yeah, I was like
Speaker 1: completely improvised session. It sounded like black musicians to me,
Speaker 1: not so much because of how they were playing, but
Speaker 1: because of their accents. Chris pulls out the other record.
Speaker 1: This record also nineteen twenty nine, and also I didn't
Speaker 1: realize it until I pulled it. This is also Atlanta, Georgia.
Speaker 1: So both recorded in the same place, the same place.
Speaker 1: They probably knew each other. They probably around you. One
Speaker 1: of the speakers says, quit your foolishness around here. He
Speaker 1: says it, Yeah, I hear white people in that straight away.
Speaker 1: May say, who were we listening to? So we were listening.
Speaker 1: The first track was Chittland Supper by peg Leg Howell
Speaker 1: and Jim Hill peg Leg how he had a peg
Speaker 1: leg peg Leg and his band in it. Lanta were black,
Speaker 1: as I guessed correctly. And then the second record is
Speaker 1: the South Georgia Highballers doing bluegrass Twist, and they were
Speaker 1: a white group. The point of Chris's demonstration wasn't that
Speaker 1: back in the day, black and white musicians sounded into changeable,
Speaker 1: though it's true that they did seem to play their
Speaker 1: instruments in almost the same way. No, Chris's point was
Speaker 1: that someone has been training us all these decades to
Speaker 1: hear and recognize slight differences and immediately attribute them to race.
Speaker 1: We've been taught categories, and every day we're taught them
Speaker 1: anew by those who patrol the boundaries. Let's play a
Speaker 1: little game called that ain't country. This game has just
Speaker 1: played by me talking about stuff that ain't country. That's
Speaker 1: the country music YouTuber called Grady Tate who wants us
Speaker 1: to know what ain't country. And the first one and
Speaker 1: main one that really inspired this video is as I'm
Speaker 1: sure you've heard song Old Town Road by Lil Nasax.
Speaker 1: You might remember the internet drama around Old Town Road.
Speaker 1: For a while, TikTok was dominated by teenagers magically transforming
Speaker 1: themselves into cowboys and cowgirls to the sound of this song.
Speaker 1: Sixty seven million views later, Oldtown Road topped the Billboard
Speaker 1: Hot one hundred for nineteen weeks, a record, and it
Speaker 1: made both the country and the R and B charts.
Speaker 1: I'm not actually even mad at Lil NASA's at all
Speaker 1: for making this song. Who I'm mad at is like
Speaker 1: the gatekeepers over at iTunes and over on Billboard that
Speaker 1: are letting the song chart as a country song, and
Speaker 1: it's not a country song at all. This is a
Speaker 1: hip hop song. That I guess is about horses that
Speaker 1: ain't country was just a tiny part of the backlash
Speaker 1: against Lil Nas, and eventually Billboard pulled Oldtown Road from
Speaker 1: the Country, a category it did not contain quote enough
Speaker 1: elements of today's country music. Lilnar's X was officially not country.
Speaker 1: Like many people, I thought, I detected a racial subtext
Speaker 1: in this argument. Old Town Road has a heavy trap
Speaker 1: beat and big bass, but lots of contemporary country music
Speaker 1: uses elements of other popular styles, including hip hop. Why
Speaker 1: pick on Lilnar's X people said his song didn't sound authentic.
Speaker 1: I'm always on the alert when I hear the word authentic.
Speaker 1: It's a gate keeping word, a word used to exclude.
Speaker 1: It's also racially loaded. My mom's English and my dad's Indian.
Speaker 1: When I was growing up, I was made to feel
Speaker 1: that I wasn't white enough, but also that I wasn't
Speaker 1: brown enough. As a writer, I've always told stories that
Speaker 1: challenge simple ideas about authenticity, that try to show how
Speaker 1: the world is complex and more mixed up than we
Speaker 1: give it credit. For the kind of stories I'm telling
Speaker 1: in this podcast. To get a better handle on authenticity
Speaker 1: in American popular music, I took the A train. It
Speaker 1: goes all the way uptown from where I live in
Speaker 1: Brooklyn to Harlem. I was going to see a writer
Speaker 1: friend called Kevin Young. Kevin is a poet and the
Speaker 1: director of one of the most important libraries in the US,
Speaker 1: the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask Kevin. By dressing up as a cowboy, was
Speaker 1: Lil nas X somehow appropriating white culture? Well, I mean
Speaker 1: cowboy face. Is that where you're suggesting, is that there's
Speaker 1: such a thing. Now we'd have to go back and
Speaker 1: talk about cowboys who weren't all white. In fact, there
Speaker 1: are many many black and brown and Asian cowboys. The
Speaker 1: way we think of cowboys as shaped I think entirely
Speaker 1: by cinema. And John Wayne couldn't ride a horse. I
Speaker 1: should leap in here and say that, of course John
Speaker 1: Wayne could ride, he just wasn't that fond of horses,
Speaker 1: and he only rode on set, never for fun. But
Speaker 1: Lil nas X isn't playing a cowboy in the same
Speaker 1: way as John Wayne is playing a cowboy. John Wayne
Speaker 1: fans revere him because they feel he's channeling something authentic.
Speaker 1: He convinces them that he's a cowboy in his dazzling
Speaker 1: stage suits. Lil nas X isn't trying to convince you
Speaker 1: of anything but his fabulousness. He's giving a knowing performance.
Speaker 1: It's cowboys style. It's camp, a kind of camp with
Speaker 1: deep roots in African American culture. And here's where things
Speaker 1: get really interesting. Kevin connects that form of camp to
Speaker 1: the cake walk, a parade like competitive dance that started
Speaker 1: in the days of slavery. It was performed for a prize,
Speaker 1: sometimes a cake. It was a dance from the plantation
Speaker 1: of blacks, the enslaved, mocking there would be masters. They're
Speaker 1: putative slave owners, the holders of them. Supposedly they are
Speaker 1: imitating them, you know, being quote fancy. And of course
Speaker 1: it depends on where you stand how you took that.
Speaker 1: If you were the white slaveholder, you thought, wow, look
Speaker 1: at them, not quite able to do what I do
Speaker 1: in my elegant dance. And if you were the black performer,
Speaker 1: you were like, boy, they don't understand how much fun
Speaker 1: we're making of them, you know, and how much fun
Speaker 1: we're having in this limited system which within which we
Speaker 1: can only operate this way. The k Kolk was the
Speaker 1: ancestor of everything from the line dance on soul Train
Speaker 1: to bull room voguing. It's the ancestor of Lil Nazek,
Speaker 1: sacheting along in his hot pink mesh cowboy shit. At
Speaker 1: the same time, you know, there's this parodic satiric quality
Speaker 1: of the music that you know, I'm tracing back to
Speaker 1: the cake Walk, but we can trace back any number
Speaker 1: of ways, which is, give me a form, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna make fun of it, and I'm gonna make it
Speaker 1: better than you made it. Of course, when Lil nas
Speaker 1: X was having a showdown with a country music authenticity sheriffs,
Speaker 1: an outlaw rode to his rescue. Billy ray Cyrus, famous
Speaker 1: mullet haver and father of Miley, teamed up with Nas.
Speaker 1: It should be fast. We'll settle in here for the night.
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, last time I was here. They
Speaker 1: want to welcome and the outsiders. In the video they
Speaker 1: made together, Nas rides a horse down a street in
Speaker 1: East la He and Billy also face down an all
Speaker 1: white crowd of seniors in a community hall. The segregated
Speaker 1: bingo game turns into a line dance, and it all
Speaker 1: ends in a sweet interracial prom photo. Nas fixes a
Speaker 1: smile and his old white lady dance partner gazes admiringly
Speaker 1: up in him. But let's be honest, this kind of
Speaker 1: thing is exactly what makes a lot of country music
Speaker 1: fans uneasy in a world of style and flimflam. Country
Speaker 1: sells itself on authenticity, on realness, though it sometimes wears
Speaker 1: Ryan stones and hairspray. Country means songs about growing up poor,
Speaker 1: about enduring hard times, and it has musical traditions. Country
Speaker 1: fans feel there's a way it ought to sound. Everyone
Speaker 1: knows that country has that thing that twang. No, you
Speaker 1: can't take my door, I don't want to love you anymore.
Speaker 1: Whiskey good straightened on you get If that sounded off
Speaker 1: to you, Congratulations, your bullshit detectors are still functioning. That
Speaker 1: was country music generated by artificial intelligence. Researchers trained a
Speaker 1: neural network on country music's greatest hits. This was what
Speaker 1: it came up with, Well, get yourself at a sham Away.
Speaker 1: The melody and the lyrics were the work of the AI.
Speaker 1: The arrangement and singing humans Elsewhere on the Internet, there's
Speaker 1: a twenty four to seven live stream of AI generated
Speaker 1: death metal created on the fly with no human intervention
Speaker 1: at all. I don't want to make you listen to that.
Speaker 1: I really don't, all right, I do sorry. At some point,
Speaker 1: possibly very late at night, I realized that in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: any conversation about country music and authenticity is best conducted
Speaker 1: by two men of South Asian descent in a living
Speaker 1: room in Brooklyn, drinking old fashions. I am from Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: and I grew up in a college town. I've always
Speaker 1: loved music, but I think that I came across country
Speaker 1: music just artificially, just you know, collecting records as a teenager,
Speaker 1: discovering that unexpectedly I really liked this stuff. This is
Speaker 1: Shuja Hider. Shujia is a smart cultural critic who's always
Speaker 1: happy to share his opinions on political philosophy or the
Speaker 1: best Michael Mann movie Collateral. Shujia also loves country music,
Speaker 1: and I think it may actually have something to do
Speaker 1: with with my South Asian background. That you know, I
Speaker 1: grew up on hearing the sort of Hollywood music of
Speaker 1: the forties and fifties and sixties that my dad used
Speaker 1: to play. And those songs are all full of stories,
Speaker 1: you know, they were associated with the movies of the time.
Speaker 1: They describe rural life or urban life in India and
Speaker 1: they're written by you know, some great poets. The lyrics
Speaker 1: we would some favorites of USB Well, my dad loved
Speaker 1: Muhammad Raffi and taddethmod N, Johnny Tunkab. Yeah, these are
Speaker 1: songs that are very intricately written. They draw on the
Speaker 1: folk traditions of the landscape, and I think country music
Speaker 1: kind of does the same thing. Jiujia has written about
Speaker 1: his own attempt to pin down the essence of country
Speaker 1: music that's set in something that feel that twang. Twang
Speaker 1: is a word that initially is used to describe language
Speaker 1: people who speak with various kinds of accents, the way
Speaker 1: you are aticulate a vowel or so on. We're often
Speaker 1: described as twang all the way back to Europe in
Speaker 1: the seventeenth century, and it often is used to denote
Speaker 1: a Southern accent, dropping the geese and you know, kind
Speaker 1: of twirling your vowels and so on. I would ride
Speaker 1: number nine heads, Carol Ride, and that's a sound that
Speaker 1: I think at the time that people in the South
Speaker 1: started to migrate to California towards the north towards city centers.
Speaker 1: They brought their accents with them, and they brought their
Speaker 1: musical traditions with them, and once they came into contact
Speaker 1: with the new technologies that we're being used to produce
Speaker 1: music and to record music, they started to emerge in
Speaker 1: new ways. So you have the sound of an electrified string,
Speaker 1: you know, being picked up by a magnet that's being
Speaker 1: fed into an amplifier, and people are giving it the
Speaker 1: same kind of articulation that they would give their speech.
Speaker 1: And I think that's what we call twang. Choose it
Speaker 1: points out that the twang, the sound I think of
Speaker 1: when I think of country music, is an electrified sound.
Speaker 1: The sound of an instrument called the pedal steel. Pedal
Speaker 1: steel is a wooden board that has strings across it,
Speaker 1: and rather than actually being touched with fingers, it's played
Speaker 1: with a steel bar and usually sort of false like
Speaker 1: metal claws, and it's got not just not just the
Speaker 1: steel bar to change the notes, but also a system
Speaker 1: of pedals that change the notes after they've already been articulated.
Speaker 1: The quintessential sound of a genre that prides itself on
Speaker 1: tradition is the sound of a modern instrument pedal steel.
Speaker 1: Sums it up. It was invented in the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: It was constantly revised and tinkered with. You know. It
Speaker 1: originally has its roots in Hawaiian music with the lap steel.
Speaker 1: So you can't play the pedal steel on a farm.
Speaker 1: The pedal steel is an electric instrument. It needs to
Speaker 1: be amplified otherwise you can't really hear it. And it's
Speaker 1: really kind of a space age sound, you know, it
Speaker 1: sounds something like the phamin or it even sounds like
Speaker 1: a synthesizer. You know, give everyone, this is what commercial
Speaker 1: country and Western music sounded like. In nineteen thirty seven,
Speaker 1: Blue Yodel Number two, recorded in Los Angeles by a
Speaker 1: band called The Rhythm Records. This song is a cosmic
Speaker 1: collision of styles and influences. It's a blues about a
Speaker 1: loving gal called Lucille. The growling vocal is copied from
Speaker 1: black singers like Bessie Smith, but the singer is a
Speaker 1: fourteen year old white boy from Oklahoma who goes by
Speaker 1: Whitie McPherson. And what about that yodel? It sounds so good,
Speaker 1: yet it's so weird. Yodeling was actually a solid part
Speaker 1: of American life for at least a hundred years. Yodling
Speaker 1: started in the Swiss Alps, of course, but American yodeling
Speaker 1: had a long history in blackface minstrel shows. The writer
Speaker 1: of this song was the huge star Jimmy Rogers. He
Speaker 1: started out performing as a black face minstrel. What you're
Speaker 1: hearing is, in fact a space age Hawaiian Alpine black
Speaker 1: face minstrel song. May carry me back to old Virginny.
Speaker 1: That's where the cotton and the corn and the tatoes grow.
Speaker 1: That's where the birds warble sweet in the springtime. There's
Speaker 1: where the darky's heart am long to go. That's an
Speaker 1: old minstrel song. Until nineteen ninety seven, it was also
Speaker 1: the state song of Virginia. This version was sung by
Speaker 1: Marion Anderson, the first black singer to appear at the
Speaker 1: Metropolitan Opera House. Carrying Me Back was written in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight by a black singer and composer called James A. Bland.
Speaker 1: But would you say the song was black music? Marion
Speaker 1: Anderson sings in a European style with European orchestration and
Speaker 1: Bland's lyrics repeat one of the primary racist fantasies of
Speaker 1: the South that free black people long for the certainties
Speaker 1: of the plantation that they actually want to be enslaved again.
Speaker 1: The black man who wrote the words had never been
Speaker 1: a slave on a Virginia plantation. He was a Howard
Speaker 1: University graduate from Flushing, Queens who made his living writing
Speaker 1: minstrel songs. Carrying Me Back to Old Virginia has a
Speaker 1: quality I find in Oldtown Road, in Blue Yodel Number two,
Speaker 1: and so many other American popular songs. It's like a
Speaker 1: Merbius strip with a white side and a black side
Speaker 1: that run together, impossible to separate. My Virginia friend, Chris,
Speaker 1: the collector, lives inside that strip. He loves it. It's
Speaker 1: a wonder that you can find anything, because these are
Speaker 1: all identically sleeved records. They're all in these uniform brown
Speaker 1: paper sleeves. And I mean, I don't know how many
Speaker 1: you have. He had enough. You know how many you
Speaker 1: have here? He has five thousand, five hundred records. Could you,
Speaker 1: I mean, talk about your cataloging. How do you oddly enough?
Speaker 1: Oddly enough talking about segregation? So this is all black,
Speaker 1: so shelf it's about here, huh. And the one from
Speaker 1: there yonder is all Cajun and from here over to
Speaker 1: there is all white Hillbilly, and then Ukrainian, Polish, Indian, Albanian, Greek, Turkish, African, Mongolian.
Speaker 1: I didn't know you didn't know you did? Mongolian is
Speaker 1: our evening together gets later and later. Chris ranges across topics,
Speaker 1: occasionally pausing to roll a cigarette to will refill out glasses.
Speaker 1: All right, I'm gonna get another glass of wine and
Speaker 1: then I'll play you something that will go good with that.
Speaker 1: But but black, But you won't be able to tell
Speaker 1: it's black. I swear to God. At that time, in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty nine, you would have been able to encounter
Speaker 1: William Moore playing that piece, and then somebody like my
Speaker 1: grandfather playing the exact same piece with probably the same
Speaker 1: vocal inflection, the same style. In Britain, folk singers revived
Speaker 1: ballads and traditional regional songs, always striving to sound as
Speaker 1: authentic as possible, searching back in time for some pure
Speaker 1: original version. American music was from the earliest days a hybrid.
Speaker 1: I asked Chris to play me English ballads, Irish jigs
Speaker 1: and African banjo playing to show how elements from many
Speaker 1: different places went into the sounds of American music and
Speaker 1: how they began to blend together into something that couldn't
Speaker 1: have been from anywhere else. This is old country stomp
Speaker 1: by a Texan musician called Henry Thomas. Very little is
Speaker 1: known about him. He was a wondering songster and sometimes
Speaker 1: a hobo who rode the rails across America in the
Speaker 1: early years of the twentieth century. We never would have
Speaker 1: heard him a tool had he not been brought into
Speaker 1: a studio in Chicago where he recorded this in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty eight. Henry Thomas isn't somebody who was born early, wasn't.
Speaker 1: He was quite old by the time he was recorded
Speaker 1: in the twenties, and he's he's like one of the
Speaker 1: poster boy examples of like where black and white get
Speaker 1: very muddy. But he's one of those musicians that I
Speaker 1: would find his records mixed in with white country records
Speaker 1: because people just like the way he sounded. They said
Speaker 1: he sounded country. It's a typical country breakdown. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what you would have heard in a barn being
Speaker 1: played on fiddle and banjo with somebody just making calls,
Speaker 1: you know, swing your partner. But it's a black guy
Speaker 1: Henry Thomas cut twelve records in Chicago, twenty four sides,
Speaker 1: and one in particular found its way into the ears
Speaker 1: of white folk musicians in the nineteen sixties. If you're
Speaker 1: of the love and Peace generation, and even if you're not,
Speaker 1: you might find this familiar. It was performed at Woodstock
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty nine Canned Heat, who had a huge
Speaker 1: career in the late sixties, performing a lot of let's
Speaker 1: call them homage to the pioneers of country blues, pioneers
Speaker 1: like Henry Thomas. I love that record. You should have
Speaker 1: seen a look on my eyes when I saw that.
Speaker 1: Where did you find shit? Man? I found this fourteen
Speaker 1: years I didn't find it. I bought it from a
Speaker 1: junker fourteen years ago, a guy who was just going
Speaker 1: around picking up stuff, and he met me in the
Speaker 1: back of Walmart in town. Eventually we got onto the
Speaker 1: topic of what they used to call hot jazz, the
Speaker 1: fast paced, syncopated sounds that made flappers crazy in the twenties.
Speaker 1: Chris isn't a big jazz collected, but jokes that he
Speaker 1: keeps one record around for conversations just like this, one
Speaker 1: other than cocaine. What is going on? There. It's a
Speaker 1: hardcore traditional New Orleans group which just happened to be
Speaker 1: Why yeah, but that kind of music really worried a
Speaker 1: lot of people, or a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: white moral gatekeepers didn't then yeah, I mean you've heard
Speaker 1: of the shimmy she wobble? Right? Actually, have not heard
Speaker 1: of the shimmy she wobble? Okay, it's a nasty dance.
Speaker 1: It's a fun dance. It's it's simulated copulation while standing
Speaker 1: up with another woman and dancing. And it was our
Speaker 1: laud in twenty three states the shimmy she wobble? At
Speaker 1: one point? How could you not be fascinated by the
Speaker 1: shimmy she wobble? These fast, sexy jazz dances were once
Speaker 1: the subject of a full scale moral panic. I found
Speaker 1: a screed against jazz dancing in a nineteen twenty one
Speaker 1: edition of Ladies Home Journal. It's by An Shaw Faulkner,
Speaker 1: national Music Chairman of the General Federation of Women's Clubs.
Speaker 1: The title does jazz put the sin in syncopation? That
Speaker 1: it has a demoralizing effect upon the human brain has
Speaker 1: been demonstrated by many scientists. Jazz produces an atrophied condition
Speaker 1: on brain cells of conception until very frequently those under
Speaker 1: the demoralizing influence of the persistent use of syncopation combined
Speaker 1: with enharmonic partial tones, are actually incapable of distinguishing between
Speaker 1: good and evil, right and wrong. Personally, I think that
Speaker 1: sounds awesome, But here's where we get to the nitty gritty.
Speaker 1: There's an effort to get rid of the shimmyshi wobble
Speaker 1: or the more the safe name foxtrot. There was this
Speaker 1: notion to like push traditional values of hillbill and music
Speaker 1: of going back to square dancing. I wanted to know
Speaker 1: if this was because there was less physical contact between
Speaker 1: the dances. Yeah, exactly. There's no touching at all unless
Speaker 1: you held the hand of the person while they cut
Speaker 1: corners with you. One thing I'm very interested is that
Speaker 1: there was an attempt to make the square dance the
Speaker 1: official dance of America. That was one of Henry Ford's
Speaker 1: less great ideas. Henry Ford. Yes, that Henry Ford the
Speaker 1: one best known for the model t But like the
Speaker 1: billionaires weighing in on today's politics, Henry Ford had many
Speaker 1: opinions and they got taken seriously because he was Henry Ford.
Speaker 1: Mister Ford didn't just think jazz was bad, he thought
Speaker 1: it was a conspiracy. In his self published pamphlet The
Speaker 1: International Jew, he writes, popular music is a Jewish monopoly.
Speaker 1: Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush slush, the sly suggestion,
Speaker 1: the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes are of Jewish origin.
Speaker 1: Ford's solution, wholesome white traditions of music and dance, take
Speaker 1: it away, the Henry Ford all Time dance orchestra. Denunciation
Speaker 1: of the dance by the protectors of public morals has
Speaker 1: usually been occasioned by the importations of dances which are
Speaker 1: foreign to the expressional needs of our people, with characteristic
Speaker 1: American judgment. However, the balance is now shifting toward that
Speaker 1: style of dancing which best fits with the American temperament.
Speaker 1: Don't you feel cleaner for hearing that? Like a spiritual,
Speaker 1: high colonic Now you're free of all that dangerous foreign
Speaker 1: syncopation rotting your brain and destroying your morals. By the
Speaker 1: end of the nineteen twenties, after Henry Ford's campaign, almost
Speaker 1: half the school children in America were learning square dancing
Speaker 1: and other forms of folk dance. Later on, there was
Speaker 1: a concerted push to make square dancing the official folk
Speaker 1: dance of the US, not tap dancing or the jitterbug
Speaker 1: or any number of Native American dances. Dozens of bills
Speaker 1: and resolutions endorsing square dancing went before Congress and state
Speaker 1: legislatures right into the early two thousands. Racists like Henry
Speaker 1: Ford were trying to create an authentic, segregated folk culture.
Speaker 1: The recording industry took care of the rest. In nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty two, the Oka label began to market what it
Speaker 1: called race records, specifically to the African American market. Between
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties and nineteen forties, many major labels issued
Speaker 1: their own series of race records, bringing jazz, blues, sermons, gospel,
Speaker 1: and other genres of music to a Black audience that
Speaker 1: was excited to hear their culture on the phonograph. Eventually,
Speaker 1: the race terminology fell away, to be replaced by rhythm
Speaker 1: and blues, R and B, and of course the insidious
Speaker 1: term urban. But from the earliest times, Americans have made
Speaker 1: music together with no regard for categories or labels. Some
Speaker 1: years ago, Chris King stumbled on a rare Cajun record,
Speaker 1: This is our La valse abe abe waltz from our
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty nine with third Ennis McGhee. I'm a derad One.
Speaker 1: Amadouine was a black accordion player in southwest Louisiana who
Speaker 1: recorded almost everything that he made was with a white fiddler,
Speaker 1: Dennis McGee. So it's an instance of neither black nor white,
Speaker 1: but together. And when you listen to the recordings, you
Speaker 1: can they're so hand in glove. It's not like it's
Speaker 1: two friends playing together. It's like two brothers playing together.
Speaker 1: The American birth riot is fusion, the talent for blending
Speaker 1: things together and making something new. For every Henry Ford
Speaker 1: trying to separate us, there are a hundred amade Adowas
Speaker 1: and Dennis McGee's making music together like brothers. The most
Speaker 1: beautiful fucking thing you've ever heard. I say goodbye to
Speaker 1: Chris King and the beautiful sounds on shell It disks.
Speaker 1: I have an appointment with the memory of Alcyone. I
Speaker 1: maintain that truth is a powerless land and cannot be
Speaker 1: approached by any part whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Truth,
Speaker 1: being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any part whatsoever, cannot be organized.
Speaker 1: Gurus on the beach colonizers on the astral plane and
Speaker 1: a very special guest in the Kunzru family home that's
Speaker 1: next week on Into the Zone. Into the Zone is
Speaker 1: produced by Ryder Also and Hunter Braithwaite. Our editor is
Speaker 1: Julia Barton. Mer La Belle is our executive producer. Martin
Speaker 1: Gonzalez is our engineer. Music for this episode composed by
Speaker 1: Griffin Jennings. Our theme song is composed by Sarah K. Pedinatti,
Speaker 1: also known as lip Talk Special. Thanks to Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: Heather Faine, John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Emily Rostick, and Maggie Taylor. Into the Zone is a
Speaker 1: production of Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please
Speaker 1: consider letting others know the best way to do this
Speaker 1: is by rating us on Apple Podcast. You could even
Speaker 1: write a review. See you next week. I'm Harry Kunzru