Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, y'all, it's justin Richmond here. We have a
Speaker 1: fantastic new podcast for you to check out. Today, we're
Speaker 1: bringing you a taste of Pushkin's newest show, Into the Zone,
Speaker 1: hosted by novelist Harry Kunzru. Hary loves and has written
Speaker 1: about music a lot over the years. His new podcast
Speaker 1: is all about opposites and how borders are never as
Speaker 1: clear as we think. We have a lot of artificial
Speaker 1: boundaries in the music world, and in this episode, Harry
Speaker 1: takes on the border war between rap and country evoked
Speaker 1: by Lil nas X's chart topping Old Town Road. To
Speaker 1: get out the root of the controversy, Hary heads down
Speaker 1: to the foothills of Virginia, where a legendary collection of
Speaker 1: blues records holds the key understanding the insidious separation of
Speaker 1: quote unquote black and white music. You can find Into
Speaker 1: the Zone on Apple and wherever you get your barcass
Speaker 1: Here's Harry Kanzru and into the Zone. This thing is
Speaker 1: packed up like fort My friend Chris King stands in
Speaker 1: 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 vein. 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 toward a shell, glasses, suspenders holding up his core. Drois.
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 coffee. 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. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's so clean, you can shave off. Then I met
Speaker 1: Chris some year years ago when I was researching my
Speaker 1: novel White Tears. The book is a ghost story about
Speaker 1: record collecting and the Mississippi Blues. To understand that world,
Speaker 1: I needed to talk to a seventy eight collector, someone
Speaker 1: who is deep in the subculture. Chris agreed to help
Speaker 1: me out. He's the kind of source a novelist can
Speaker 1: only dream off. Everything was stitched into the Fate's Harry.
Speaker 1: You know nothing, there's nothing by chance. Now I'm here
Speaker 1: to witness him in his happiest place, somehow or another.
Speaker 1: The day that I was born, it was written into
Speaker 1: my favorite that I was going to play this record
Speaker 1: for you, and carefully lowers the needle into the groove.
Speaker 1: This is Into the Zone, a podcast about opposites and
Speaker 1: how borders are never as clear as we think. I'm
Speaker 1: hurry Kun's room. This episode is about music and authenticity.
Speaker 1: It's about tradition and modernity. It's about black and white.
Speaker 1: Seventy eight collectors are notoriously secretive. The first one I
Speaker 1: contacted while writing White Tears, well, he told me that
Speaker 1: revealing information about collecting would be against his self interest,
Speaker 1: because if more people realize how amazing these records are,
Speaker 1: the prices would go up and it would be harder
Speaker 1: for him to collect. But Chris is the kind of
Speaker 1: guy who wants to share what he loves. He welcomed
Speaker 1: me into his lair in Virginia, and I wanted an
Speaker 1: excuse to go back. Ever since we're lucky enough to
Speaker 1: be in your I mean, do you call it a
Speaker 1: listening room? What do you call this place? Now? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I can do more than listen here. Chris isn't lying.
Speaker 1: He won a Grammy in two thousand and two for
Speaker 1: his work compiling early recordings. He remasters old records for
Speaker 1: re release. This room is a shrine to the early
Speaker 1: years of recorded sound. Thousands of records in identical brown
Speaker 1: cardboard sleeves sit on shelves. The walls are hung with
Speaker 1: memorabiliar portraits of long dead fiddlers and jug bands. There's
Speaker 1: a mixing desk, a turntable, two monitor speakers hung on
Speaker 1: cables from the ceilings. To your collecting of American music,
Speaker 1: I mean, do you have anything after the Second World War?
Speaker 1: I don't collect anything. Sucks don't collect anything that sucks.
Speaker 1: I think that is a valid collecting strategy. Well, there's
Speaker 1: there's completely a good rule for anybody. But is there
Speaker 1: a date at which you stop? Yeah, well, I mean
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't have hardly any post War War two.
Speaker 1: I have no post World War two blues, and I
Speaker 1: have like maybe one or two post World War two
Speaker 1: your belly things. The record Chris Just Unpacked is by
Speaker 1: Mississippi musician Robert Wilkins. The song is called rolling Stone
Speaker 1: Part one Hallo. Hearing this on an original seventy eight
Speaker 1: is like the second Coming for blues fans. There are
Speaker 1: very few known copies, and this is the one in
Speaker 1: the best condition rule Someday. Robert Wilkins is not the
Speaker 1: only early blues musician to have recorded a song with
Speaker 1: rolling Stone in the title, but he's the one the
Speaker 1: English band called the Rolling Stones had to pay royalties
Speaker 1: On the album Beggars Banquet. There's a track called Prodigal Son.
Speaker 1: When it was released back in nineteen sixty eight, it
Speaker 1: was credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. It's actually
Speaker 1: a pretty straight cover of a song by Wilkins that
Speaker 1: he'd been playing since the nineteen twenties, after a long
Speaker 1: court case, the elderly bluesman finally got what he was owed.
Speaker 1: There are many stories like this. The British invasion bands
Speaker 1: of the nineteen sixties, like Cream and led Zeppelin did
Speaker 1: a good job of repackaging country blues and selling it
Speaker 1: back to Americans with an English accent. I grew up
Speaker 1: in England listening to a lot of those bands, and
Speaker 1: like many people, I eventually found my way back to
Speaker 1: the blues tradition that they were borrowing from. But it
Speaker 1: was a long time before I really understood how strange
Speaker 1: it is that rock and roll music that comes from
Speaker 1: the blues came to be thought of as a white style.
Speaker 1: It's one of the reasons I went to to talk
Speaker 1: to Chris. He knows this history better than almost anyone
Speaker 1: in modern popular music. We make this distinction between black
Speaker 1: and white traditions in America, and do you think that
Speaker 1: distinction has any validity? Well, obviously it has validity now,
Speaker 1: But if you go back to basically the Civil War,
Speaker 1: the American Civil War up until essentially the dawn of
Speaker 1: the of the recording industry, that was a false dichotomy.
Speaker 1: There was a pre blues tradition that was mixed, it
Speaker 1: was shared. It was neither neither white nor black. It
Speaker 1: was mongrel. It was everything. Maybe you should you should
Speaker 1: play something, and we I mean we could play the
Speaker 1: guesting game and see and and and imagine who might
Speaker 1: be playing. Yeah, okay, so I mean I'll play two records.
Speaker 1: One is by black musicians, one is by white musicians,
Speaker 1: but largely the frumentation and the repertoire and the style
Speaker 1: is the same. And this sort of shows that. Um,
Speaker 1: if anything, it was the recording industry that started to
Speaker 1: parce out and say this is black and this is white.
Speaker 1: I think him now will be read around him as
Speaker 1: far as ending, yeah, I think that they were very
Speaker 1: high during that session. You can hear the guy kind
Speaker 1: of like mumbling and the way he's just experimenting with,
Speaker 1: like just how long he draws that New Orleans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a completely improvised session. It sounded like black
Speaker 1: musicians to me, not so much because of how they
Speaker 1: were playing, but because of their accents. Chris pulls out
Speaker 1: the other record. This record also nineteen twenty nine. And
Speaker 1: also I didn't realize it until I pulled it. This
Speaker 1: is also Atlanta Georgia. So both recorded in the same place,
Speaker 1: the same place. They probably knew each other. They probably
Speaker 1: bring around you. One of the speakers says, quit your
Speaker 1: foolishness round here. He says it, Yeah, I hear white
Speaker 1: people in that straight away. Maybe you say, who were
Speaker 1: we listening to? So we were listening. The first track
Speaker 1: was Chitland Supper by peg Leg Howel and Jim Hill
Speaker 1: peg Leg how he had a peg leg peg Leg
Speaker 1: and his band in Atlanta were black, as I guessed correctly.
Speaker 1: And then the second record is the South Georgia Highballers
Speaker 1: doing bluegrass Twist, and they were a white group. The
Speaker 1: point of Chris's demonstration wasn't that back in the day,
Speaker 1: black and white musicians sounded into changeable, though it's true
Speaker 1: that they did seem to play their instruments in almost
Speaker 1: the same way. No, Chris's point was that someone has
Speaker 1: been training us all these decades to hear and recognize
Speaker 1: slight differences and immediately attribute them to race. We've been
Speaker 1: taught categories, and every day we're taught them anew by
Speaker 1: those who patrol the boundaries. Let's play a little game
Speaker 1: called that ain't country. This game has just played by
Speaker 1: me talking about stuff that ain't country. That's the country
Speaker 1: music YouTuber called Grady Tate who wants us to know
Speaker 1: what ain't country. And the first one and main one
Speaker 1: that really inspired this video is as I'm sure you've
Speaker 1: heard this song Old Town Road by Little Nasax. You
Speaker 1: might remember the net drama around Old Town Road. For
Speaker 1: a while, TikTok was dominated by teenagers magically transforming themselves
Speaker 1: into cowboys and cowgirls to the sound of this song.
Speaker 1: Sixty seven million views later, Old Town Road topped the
Speaker 1: Billboard Hot one hundred for nineteen weeks, a record, and
Speaker 1: it made both the country and the R and B charts.
Speaker 1: I'm not actually even mad at Lil Nazas 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 category it did not contain quote enough elements
Speaker 1: of today's country music, Lil Nasax 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 Lelnar'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 mum'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 what 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: were many, many black and brown and Asian cowboys. The
Speaker 1: way we think of cowboys is shaped, I think entirely
Speaker 1: by cinema. And John Wayne couldn't ride a horse. I
Speaker 1: should leap in here say that, of course John Wayne
Speaker 1: could ride, he just wasn't that fond of horses, and
Speaker 1: he only rode on set, never for fun. But Lil
Speaker 1: nas X isn't playing a cowboy in the same way
Speaker 1: as John Wayne is playing a cowboy. John Wayne fans
Speaker 1: revere him because they feel he's channeling something authentic. He
Speaker 1: convinces them that he's a cowboy in his dazzling stage suits.
Speaker 1: Lil nas X isn't trying to convince you of anything
Speaker 1: but his fabulousness. He's giving a knowing performance. It's cowboys style.
Speaker 1: It's camp, a kind of camp with deep roots in
Speaker 1: African American culture. And here's where things get really interesting.
Speaker 1: Kevin connects that form of camp to the cake walk,
Speaker 1: a parade like competitive dance that started in the days
Speaker 1: of slavery. It was performed for a prize, sometimes a cake.
Speaker 1: It was a dance from the plantation of blacks, the slaved,
Speaker 1: mocking there would be masters. They're putative slave owners, the
Speaker 1: holders of them. Supposedly they are imitating them, you know,
Speaker 1: being quote fancy. And of course it depends on where
Speaker 1: you stand. How you took that. If you were the
Speaker 1: white slaveholder, you thought, wow, look at them, not quite
Speaker 1: able to do what I do in my elegant dance.
Speaker 1: And if you were the black performer, you were like, boy,
Speaker 1: they don't understand how much fun we're making of them,
Speaker 1: you know, and how much fun we're having in this
Speaker 1: limited system which within which we can only operate this way.
Speaker 1: The k Kolk was the ancestor of everything from the
Speaker 1: line dance on Soul Train to bull room voguing. It's
Speaker 1: the ancestor of Lil Nazek sacheting along in his hot
Speaker 1: pink mesh cowboy shit. At the same time, you know,
Speaker 1: there's this parodic, satiric quality of the music that you know.
Speaker 1: I'm tracing back to the Cakewalk, but we can trace
Speaker 1: back any number of ways, which is, give me a form,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna make fun of it, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: make it better than you made it. Of course, when
Speaker 1: Lil nas X was having a showdown with a country
Speaker 1: music authenticity Sheriff's an outlaw rode to his rescue, Billy
Speaker 1: ray Cyrus, famous mullet haver and father of Miley, teamed
Speaker 1: up with Nas. It should be fat. We'll settle in
Speaker 1: here for the night. I don't know, man, last time
Speaker 1: I was here. They want to welcome and the outsiders.
Speaker 1: In the video they made together, Nas rides a horse
Speaker 1: down a street in East la He and Billy also
Speaker 1: face down an all white crowd of seniors in a
Speaker 1: community hall. The segregated bingo game turns into a line dance,
Speaker 1: and it all ends in a sweet interracial prom photo.
Speaker 1: Nas is a smile and his old white lady dance
Speaker 1: partner gazes admiringly up at him. But let's be honest,
Speaker 1: this kind of thing is exactly what makes a lot
Speaker 1: of country music fans uneasy in a world of style
Speaker 1: and flim flam. Country sells itself on authenticity, on realness.
Speaker 1: Though it sometimes wears Ryan stones and hairspray. Country means
Speaker 1: songs about growing up poor, about enduring hard times, and
Speaker 1: it has musical traditions. Country fans feel there's a way
Speaker 1: it ought to sound. Everyone knows that country has that
Speaker 1: thing that twang. No, you can't take my door. I
Speaker 1: don't want to love you anymore. My face whiskey good, whiskey.
Speaker 1: Straighten you gay. If that sounded off to you, congratulations,
Speaker 1: your bullshit detectors are still functioning. That was country music
Speaker 1: generated by artificial intelligence. Researchers trained a neural network on
Speaker 1: country music's greatest hits. This was what it came up with,
Speaker 1: a show away. The melody and the lyrics were the
Speaker 1: work of the AI, the arrangement and singing humans. Elsewhere
Speaker 1: on the internet, there's a twenty four to seven live
Speaker 1: stream of AI generated death metal, created on the fly
Speaker 1: with no human intervention at all. I don't want to
Speaker 1: make you listen to that. I really don't, all right,
Speaker 1: I do. Sorry. At some point, be very late at night,
Speaker 1: I realized that in twenty twenty, any conversation about country
Speaker 1: music and authenticity is best conducted by two men of
Speaker 1: South Asian descent in a living room in Brooklyn, drinking
Speaker 1: old fashions. I am from Pennsylvania and I grew up
Speaker 1: in a college town. I've always loved music, but I
Speaker 1: think that I came across country music just artificially, just
Speaker 1: you know, collecting records as a teenager, discovering that unexpectedly
Speaker 1: I really liked this stuff. This is Shuja Hide. Shujia
Speaker 1: is a smart cultural critic who's always happy to share
Speaker 1: his opinions on political philosophy or the best Michael Mann
Speaker 1: movie Collateral. Shuja also loves country music, and I think
Speaker 1: it may actually have something to do with with my
Speaker 1: South Asian background. That you know, I grew up on
Speaker 1: hearing the sort of Bollywood music of the forties and
Speaker 1: fifties and sixties that my dad used to play. And
Speaker 1: those songs are all full of stories, you know, they
Speaker 1: were associated with the movies of the time. They describe
Speaker 1: rural life or urban life in India, and they're written
Speaker 1: by you know, some great poets. The lyrics well, would
Speaker 1: some favorites of USB Well, my dad loved Muhammad Raffi
Speaker 1: and Tatis mud n Johnny Tuk. Yeah, these are songs
Speaker 1: that are very intricately written. They draw on the folk
Speaker 1: traditions of the landscape, and I think country music kind
Speaker 1: of does the same thing. Jiujia has written about his
Speaker 1: own attempt to pin down the essence of country music
Speaker 1: that's set in something that feel that twang. Twang is
Speaker 1: a word that initially is used to describe language people
Speaker 1: who speak with various kinds of accents, the way you
Speaker 1: articulate a vowel or so on. We're often described as
Speaker 1: twang all the way back to Europe in the seventeen century,
Speaker 1: and it often is used to denote a Southern accent,
Speaker 1: dropping the geese and you know, kind of twirling your
Speaker 1: vowels and so on. I would ride number nine hidden
Speaker 1: frol and that's a sound that I think at the
Speaker 1: time that people in the South started to migrate to
Speaker 1: California towards the north, towards city centers, they brought their
Speaker 1: accents with them, and they brought their musical traditions with them,
Speaker 1: and once they came into contact with the new technologies
Speaker 1: that we're being used to produce music and to record music,
Speaker 1: they started to emerge in new ways. So you have
Speaker 1: the sound of an electrified string, you know, being picked
Speaker 1: up by a magnet that's being fed into an amplifier,
Speaker 1: and people are giving it the same kind of articulation
Speaker 1: that they would give their speech. And I think that's
Speaker 1: what we call twang. Choose your point. Sound that twang.
Speaker 1: The sound I think of when I think of country
Speaker 1: music is an electrified sound. The sound of an instrument
Speaker 1: called the pedal steel. Pedal steel is a wooden board
Speaker 1: that has strings across it, and rather than actually being
Speaker 1: touched with fingers, it's played with a steel bar and
Speaker 1: usually sort of false like metal clause. And it's got
Speaker 1: not just not just the steel bar to change the notes,
Speaker 1: but also a system of pedals that change the notes
Speaker 1: after they've already been articulated. The quintessential sound of a
Speaker 1: genre that prides itself on tradition is the sound of
Speaker 1: a modern instrument pedal steel. Sums it up. It was
Speaker 1: invented in the twentieth century. It was constantly revised and
Speaker 1: tinkered with. You know, it originally has its roots in
Speaker 1: Hawaiian music with the lap steel. So you can't play
Speaker 1: the pedal steel on a farm. The pedal steel is
Speaker 1: an electric instrument. It needs to be amplified otherwise you
Speaker 1: can't really hear it. And it's really kind of a
Speaker 1: space age sound, you know. It sounds something like the
Speaker 1: phomin or. It even sounds like a synthesizer. You know.
Speaker 1: This is what commercial country and Western music sounded like.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty seven, Blue Yodel number two recorded in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles by a band called The Rhythm Records. This
Speaker 1: song is a cosmic collision of styles and influences. It's
Speaker 1: a blues about a loving gal called Lucille. The growling
Speaker 1: vocal is copied from black singers like Bessie Smith, but
Speaker 1: the singer is a fourteen year old white boy from
Speaker 1: Oklahoma who goes by Whitie McPherson. And what about that yodel?
Speaker 1: It sounds so good, yet it's so weird. Yodeling was
Speaker 1: actually a solid part of American life for at least
Speaker 1: a hundred years. Yodling started in the Swiss Alps, of course,
Speaker 1: but American yodeling had a long history in blackface minstrel shows.
Speaker 1: The writer of this song was the huge star Jimmy Rogers.
Speaker 1: He started out performing as a black face minstrel. What
Speaker 1: You're hearing is in fact a space age Hawaiian alpine
Speaker 1: black face minstrel song. May carry me back to old Virginia.
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 and the first black singer to appear at the
Speaker 1: Metropolitan Opera House. Carry 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. Carry Me back to Old Virginny has a
Speaker 1: quality I find in Oldtown Road, in Blue Yodel Number
Speaker 1: two and so many other American popular 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 shelf,
Speaker 1: it's about here, and then go on from there yonder
Speaker 1: is all Cajun, and then from here over to there
Speaker 1: 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. As
Speaker 1: our evening together gets later and later, Chris ranges across topics,
Speaker 1: occasionally pausing to roll a cigarette to 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: vogue election 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 wandering songster and sometimes
Speaker 1: a hobo, who rode the rails across America. Here in
Speaker 1: the early years of the twentieth century. We never would
Speaker 1: have heard him a tool had he not been brought
Speaker 1: into a studio in Chicago where he recorded this in
Speaker 1: nineteen 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: Why 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 collective, 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 hardcore,
Speaker 1: traditional New Orleans group, but just happened to be whop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that kind of music really worried a lot of people,
Speaker 1: or a lot of a lot of white moral gatekeepers
Speaker 1: didn't then. Yeah, I mean you've heard of the shimmy
Speaker 1: she wobble, right, I actually have not heard of the
Speaker 1: shimmy she wobble. Okay, it's a nasty dance, it's a
Speaker 1: fun dance. It's it's simulated copulation while standing up with
Speaker 1: another woman and dancing. And it was our lord in
Speaker 1: twenty three states the shimmy she wobble at one point?
Speaker 1: How could you not be fascinated by the shimmy she wobble?
Speaker 1: These fast, sexy jazz dances were once the subject of
Speaker 1: a full scale moral panic. I found a screed against
Speaker 1: jazz dancing in a nineteen twenty one edition of Ladies
Speaker 1: Home Journal. It's by An Shaw Faulkner, National Music Chairman
Speaker 1: of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. The title does
Speaker 1: jazz put the sin in syncopation? That it has ad
Speaker 1: realizing effect upon the human brain has been demonstrated by
Speaker 1: many scientists. Jazz produces an atrophied condition on brain cells
Speaker 1: of consumption until very frequently those under the demoralizing influence
Speaker 1: of the persistent use of syncopation, combined with enharmonic partial tones,
Speaker 1: are actually incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, right
Speaker 1: and wrong. Personally, I think that sounds awesome, But here's
Speaker 1: where we get to the nitty gritty there's an effort
Speaker 1: to get rid of the shimmyshi wobble or the more
Speaker 1: the safe name foxtrot. There was this notion to like
Speaker 1: push traditional values of hillbill and music of going back
Speaker 1: to square dancing. I wanted to know if this was
Speaker 1: because there was less physical contact between the dances. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: There's no touching at all unless you held the hand
Speaker 1: of the person of while they cut corners with you.
Speaker 1: One thing I'm very interested is that there was an
Speaker 1: attempt to make the square dance the official dance of America.
Speaker 1: That was one of Henry Ford's less great ideas. Henry Ford. Yes,
Speaker 1: that Henry Ford the one best known for the model
Speaker 1: t But like the billionaires weighing in on today's politics,
Speaker 1: Henry Ford had many opinions and they got taken seriously
Speaker 1: because he was Henry Ford. Mister Ford didn't just think
Speaker 1: jazz was bad. He thought it was a conspiracy. In
Speaker 1: his self published pamphlet The International Jew, he writes, popular
Speaker 1: music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation.
Speaker 1: The mush slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of
Speaker 1: sliding notes are of Jewish origin. Ford's solution, wholesome white
Speaker 1: traditions of music and dance, take it away the Henry
Speaker 1: Ford Old time dance orchestra. Denunciation of the dance by
Speaker 1: the protectors of public morals has usually been occasioned by
Speaker 1: the importations of dances which are foreign to the expressional
Speaker 1: needs of our people, with characteristic American judgment. However, the
Speaker 1: balance is now shifting toward that style of dancing which
Speaker 1: best fits with the American temperament. Don't you feel cleaner
Speaker 1: for hearing that? Like a spiritual, high colonic Now you're
Speaker 1: free of all that dangerous foreign syncopation rotting your brain
Speaker 1: and destroying your morals. By the end of the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: after Henry Ford's campaign, almost half the school children in
Speaker 1: America were learning square dancing and other forms of folk dance.
Speaker 1: Later on, there was a concerted push to make square
Speaker 1: dancing the official folk dance of the US, not tap
Speaker 1: dancing or their jitterbug or any number of Native American dances.
Speaker 1: Dozens of bills and resolutions endorsing square dancing went before
Speaker 1: Congress and state legislatures right into the early two thousands.
Speaker 1: Racists like Henry Ford were trying to create an authentic,
Speaker 1: segregated folk culture. The recording industry took care of the rest.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty two, the Oka label began to market
Speaker 1: what it called race records, specifically to the African American market.
Speaker 1: Between the nineteen twenties and nineteen forties, many major labels
Speaker 1: issued 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 a La Valse abbe Abe Waltz from nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty nine with Dennis McGinn i'm Adre Dwin. I'm Adre
Speaker 1: Duine 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 their 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 adwas
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, Colonizes on the Astral Plane, and
Speaker 1: a very special guest in the Quincy 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. Mire 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 Migliori, 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 Podcasts. You could even
Speaker 1: write a review. See you next week. I'm Harry Kunzru