Andy Cohen Interview

Andy Cohen

“You need to know the stem material. You need to know that what they are doing now stands on the shoulders of great musicians and great singers.”

At the October 2009 Southeast Regional Folk Alliance (SERFA), the musician-anthropologist-historian who is challenging members of Folk Alliance Intl to learn and appreciate their musical and cultural background sat down for a lengthy interview on the subject.

“...so that they have a firm grip on what folk music is and what it is not...”

FAF Andy, your business card states that you are the Traditional Studies Coordinator at Folk Alliance International. I’ve never heard of this position before.

ANDY It was invented on my behalf.

FAF On your behalf?

ANDY On my behalf.

FAF And when was that invention?

ANDY Oh, about six months ago.

FAF Six months ago? And with little fanfare apparently.

ANDY That’s right.

FAF No mention of it on the website either?

ANDY That’s right. ... I have studied, in one form or another, traditional music all my life. ... I have a Master’s degree in anthropology, in which I catalogued the various ways the Blues players used their thumbs. And, it’s one of those instances where you know more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothin’. I’m an anthropologist and I study the way people do things.

It has been well known and bandied about for many years that Folk Alliance is full of singer songwriters and that the number of people who perform traditional music of one kind or another are way less than ten percent. So, I’m kind of an Affirmative Action program.

Louis [Meyers] and I invented something called Folk University, which this year [February 2010] will parallel something else that he invented called Song School. They will be parallel tracks, starting on Wednesday and going all the way through Sunday. Each one will have its own presentations, panels, workshops, instructionals, feature shows and showcases. ... at the international, the big ‘do’ in Memphis.

Not to be too pretentious about it—I try to be as eclectic as possible, to try and get as close as I can—nobody scores a hundred percent, not these days, and probably not ever. But the fact is that there is a substantial difference between a purveyor of traditional music, whether they are native speakers or whether they are inculcated participant observers, and devoted to one or more particular traditions; and a songwriter, who wants to get their own message out, whether it’s personal or political or experiential or whatever.

And the fact that 90 or more percent of people in Folk Alliance that are performers are songwriters tells me that that is the main economic driver; tells me as an anthropologist that being a songwriter is the main economic driver. As I’ve been fond of saying for many years, “Every old song is an expense, every new song is a lottery ticket.” Logan English, a traditional singer now deceased, told me one time, “A hit comes out of nowhere.” Woody Guthrie never thought that he was going to make any money off of “Philadelphia Lawyer” but he did. And now there’s a whole administrative structure for the Woody Guthrie canon ... It is a matter of, for me, anthropological criteria. Does this song represent another version of one culture or another? Katherine Rhoda is of Lithuanian descent, and she plays the kankles, a little zither. But she also plays other things, just as most traditional players aren’t limited to traditional music. And I’m not limited to traditional music, though that’s largely what I present when I play. So, having a whole traditional music track within Folk Alliance, we want to encourage the study of some kind of traditional music or lifeways.

One of the mistakes that people make is thinking that if they do all traditional music that they are therefore a traditional person. That, of course, reflects the food ways, the house ways, the garden ways, the crafts ways and everything else that constitutes the traditional lifeway. You understand this because you are a native speaker. You are a person from inner Arkansas. So you understand the old folks and what they did and how they did it and why. These things, from a strict anthropological sense, are selective, and they are selective for a reason, and the reason is they work. It’s not a matter of nostalgia; it’s a matter of function following form.

One of our traditional music heroes, Mike Seeger, passed away this year. He was 75 years old and he spent his entire life playing, collecting, teaching ... one kind of traditional music or another ... and collecting things that were obsolete, out-of-the-way, odd, idiosyncratic ... And so a member of Folk Alliance who does not want to be named set up a fund to bring one or more traditional people to the big ‘do’ in Memphis and make a big fuss over them ... and to celebrate their music in the name of Mike Seeger. This year we have two people coming.

One is Violet Hensley, who not only plays the fiddle very well at 93 but also makes her own fiddles. And, while they may not be Stradivarius fiddles and while she may not be a John Salyer or Ed Haley quality player, she is what she is and she represents something very precious, and is an example to the people of Folk Alliance, whether they are traditionalists like me or singer songwriters.

The other person we are going to bring is Sharde Thomas, who is the granddaughter of Otha Turner, who made cane pipes all his life and played them in a fife and drum band in Mississippi. There is a CD called “From Molly to Mississippi,” and he is on that CD and the fife and drum band is on it. He used to have a goat roast every year and I think Sharde probably continues the tradition. Sharde is his now 19-year-old granddaughter and on the day of his death she went to the rest of the guys in the fife and drum band and said, “Come on boys, we have a funeral to go to.” She just took over when she was 13 years old.

So, this is also what we mean by folk music. You cannot argue with it. You cannot quibble. You cannot say this person is not a traditional person ... And if that isn’t in Folk Alliance, then you have to call it something else. You can call it a variety show with cameo rolls. In the new regime under Louis, who is my CEO at Folk Alliance; and because Folk Alliance moved to Memphis and I live in Memphis and am one of the odd types that prefers the old songs, I went to him and said, “... I think we really ought to start pushing traditional music, because without it, the singer songwriters have no base.” People are writing ... and have nothing to refer to and nothing to compare with. So we felt, Louis agreed, that promoting traditional music, which means promoting traditional musicians, will result in stronger songs by singer songwriters. It will result in more varied material, material that is closer to the soil, which is actually, after all, what folk music is.

The word ‘folk’, in German, means peasant. And a peasant is a sharecropper, a peasant is a small farmer. And historically, factory workers were peasants before they were factory workers. So, when the Corn Laws were instituted in the 1840s in England, it dumped hundreds of thousands of people into the industrial cities and they went from being peasants to being urbanized workers in factories. Some kept their traditions, their musical traditions and their lifeways, their previous folkways, alive. And gentlemen antiquarians ... collectors ... such as James Frances Child, who were literally several classes above the people whom they were collecting, realized that all of this literature, oral and aural literature, would be lost if somebody with the interest did not collect it. They did not have the tools that we have. If James Frances Child had that little tape recorder that you are now holding in your hand, we would have a very different folk [history]. We would know what the folks actually sounded like. We couldn’t until 1890. And between 1890 and about 1915, fewer than 50 people in the world [were recorded]. We are lucky we have the snapshot we’ve got. We’re lucky we have the 78s we’ve got. We’re lucky we have the old guys we’ve got.

When I was 16 years old, my brother took me to a folk festival at Brandeis, and I sat as close as I am sitting to you to the stage in the front row; and I saw the Kweskin Jug Band, The New Lost City Ramblers, Roscoe Holcomb, Bessie Jones, Rev. Gary Davis ... And I was a changed person and knew that I had to follow the old music wherever it led. Fifty years later, here I am: the Affirmative Action program for traditional music at Folk Alliance International. That and a buck-and-a-half will get you a cup of coffee.

FAF So of course, we’ve had this discussion ...

ANDY For the last 75 years

FAF ... which sometimes degenerates into less than a discussion, about what songs are traditional and what songs are not.

ANDY Songs can go in and out of tradition. I don’t have an agenda. At one point, any traditional song had to be a new song. At one point somebody had to sing the first Blues. At one point somebody had to sing the first, what we now call, Child Ballads. At one point somebody had to make the first fiddle and play the first fiddle tune. I am distinguishing, purposefully, between a broad tradition of singing and making up poems and singing them to tunes in the tradition of making music, and a tradition of encapsulating drama in a sung story. The tradition of entertaining telling stories, which is a macro tradition worldwide, a particular local tradition, handing things off, one generation to another, one friend to another, one relative to another ... gets lost in the music industry. And at Folk Alliance we intend to support songwriters and their efforts, and also traditional musicians.

FAF So, on the Thursday night program (at SERFA) the group Harmony performed a song that was written in 1969, “Mr. Bemer’s Barn.” It’s a 40-year-old song and Dave Smith has probably been singing it for close to 30 years. Would you consider that a ‘traditional’? It has been locally generated and locally passed on.

ANDY Well, not that it matters a whole lot, but yes. Let me give you two views of this. Chuck Purdue, a noted folklorist, came up with the idea that if a piece of music was substantially unchanged after three generations and the maker of that piece of music had passed, and the music had a life in the community, he considered that to be traditional. Ed Cray, who recently wrote the liner notes for the new Woody Guthrie reissue of the Stinson Records that were found in barrels in a basement in New York, and who also wrote a book about Woody Guthrie, does not make a distinction between folk music and traditional music. He doesn’t make those kinds of distinctions at all. He thinks that if it’s vernacular, it’s folk; if it’s folk, it’s traditional. And the way these things get passed involves being passed in and out of media and through generations. Now, a generation is not a rigid thing. There are generations of descendants who are 20, 30 years apart. And, there are generations of school kids who are a year apart, and singing games that school children do, they teach each other, and then at a point in time they forget. Nevertheless, those jump rope rhymes and clapping games and whatnot, and the games themselves, survive in the same exact traditional way even though the generation time is shorter. Fraternities in colleges have traditions of song and game and different hazing as a tradition. I’m fond of saying that traditional music is passed in the same way that child abuse is passed, from father to son, and often within the same families unfortunately. The point is to identify particular and idiosyncratic processes that go on in the natural social world everywhere there is a social world, and support the group things that those traditions select for it in the course of their being traditions.

When I was a young picker, I watched a lot of other young pickers learn a lot of tunes as best they could, call each other by funny nicknames and play old-time music, and think of themselves as folksingers even though they were urban middle class Jewish ... and I compared what they were doing in my mind to what those folks I saw at Brandeis were doing ... and was able to grasp that there were differences, in particular, and some of the more obnoxious things would get weeded out by time. And, over the course of time that is the case with all human activity. You build up and select and buttress a strong framework for grasping traditional music and traditional lifeways; [then] into the exploded, digitized, stretched-out world that we now live in. Without it, we lose a part of our purpose ...

There are approximately a million recordings of people singing and playing between 1890 and 1943. If it were up to me and I could wave a magic wand, those whole million things would be distributed into the minds of a billion people who would carry them around in their heads and foster the traditions ... and again, not a nostalgic thing, but a functional thing and a necessary thing. I am a preservationist. I preserved the bones of australo-pithicenes. I’ve done both historic and prehistoric archaeology. I’ve studied geology, paleontology, paleoanthropology and all that evolutionary stuff. Culture works differently than all of that. It has to be hand carried. It is Lamarckian. It is not Darwinian. It can be added to or subtracted from, but the thing it has in common with evolutionary theory is that it can become extinct. It’s following historical precedence. But I want to do everything I can, and Folk Alliance wants to do everything it can, to prevent that from happening, in Arkansas and Illinois, among immigrants, among Katrina refugees, among Iraqi refugees ... Things that we call folklore are things that people carry around in their heads ... They are not things that are imposed from a central source ... by and large, they are very bad science. Think of science as very bad folklore. But they are poetry and they contain the human spirit ...

FAF Will there be a place on the Folk Alliance website that will be developed for this particular program of study?

ANDY Yes. There are two separate things that interact. One is the Mike Seeger Scholarship Fund to bring a traditional person to Folk Alliance. The other thing, the traditional track, is essentially a traditional music folk festival. It’s like having a National Folk Festival collapsed into the Folk Alliance convention, because the National Folk Festival operates under those same criteria ... again, it’s not a matter of moral [judgment of] the songwriters who wish to make their living from being entertainers ... It’s that, if the stem material is not represented, then it’s something besides a Folk Alliance. Then it’s an Urban, Educated, Middle Class Alliance.

FAF And, is there going to be an effort made to extend that ‘stem material’ into all of the different regionals?

ANDY Yes, as long as I am alive. That is one reason why I am here, to sell that very idea to each of the regionals. I did so successfully at FARM, the Midwest regional, last week ... I’m the guy from the Mother Ship and my purpose is to represent Folk Alliance International and to sell ‘the idea’ to FARM and SERFA and, if I could persuade them to do so, SWRFA, Far West, NERFA and Canada. I really don’t have to worry about Canada too much. Canadians do a much better job of taking care of their traditional music and musicians than Americans do, on average ...

Last year I brought a young woman, 21 years old, Dominique DuPuis from New Brunswick, to represent old-time traditional music and I had her in my Folk University. I also had the Ebony Hillbillies; they play old-time black music. I had Martin Fisher, who is an engineer/transcriber (he’s got several things going) at Middle Tennessee State at The Center for Popular [Music]. And he brought his cylinder recording rig and recorded Carter family songs by Tracey Schwarz and Ginny Hawker. The Folk University heard Ginny and Tracey live and then heard them played back on the cylinder playback machine. And one of the results is that about 25 or 30 people made cylinders that weekend. We’re going to do that again this year. We’re going to bring Martin back. We feel it is very important for people to understand the world of ‘black-and-white’; you know, the world ... unattenuated [by] sonic frequencies, in order to understand traditional music.

My friend Pat Conte—who is one of these radical 78ists in New York City, specializes in foreign music but he’s very good in all the other stuff—tells me that the hissing and the crackling and the popping of the 78s is the veil, the screen, between us and them; and that we can never really go there, we can only glimpse through the cracks in the curtain, or see through the folds in the curtain. It’s a mystery, part of a mystery.

If you cut yourself off from your history—and we are in the dilemma of having to reinvent the flat tire—you’re not going to invent the wheel. That’s a mistake that young musicians typically make: they end up writing the same song over and over again, writing the same tunes over and over again because they don’t know what the old tunes actually sounded like, they only think they do. This is as true of me as it is for anybody, you know, 30, 40 years ago as it is for anybody today. While I am not exactly in favor of licensing folksingers—that would be unconstitutional among other things—I do feel it’s important for people who want to make small venues, presentations, small venue performances their life, to be grounded in as many aspects of what preceded them as possible, so that they don’t repeat the mistakes of the past, so that they have a firm grip on what folk music is and what it is not, and so that they have a firm grip, not only on today’s technology where you have ... your iPod that will literally walk the dog, but on yesterday’s technology and yesterday’s limitations.

You need to know the stem material. You need to know that what they are doing now stands on the shoulders of great musicians and great singers.

FAF Thank you very much for this interview, and for all that you give to our world of folk music.

ANDY: Doin’ the best we can.

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