A profile of
"THE OLD, WEIRD AMERICA:
My exploration of Harry Smith’s Anthology"
http://oldweirdamerica.wordpress.com/
The blog oldweirdamerica.wordpress.com is hosted by the free blogging platform wordpress.com, and represents an amateur, open access, and somewhat illegal enterprise towards a better understanding and dissemination of American vernacular music. The author is a 34 year-old Frenchman who goes by the name Gadaya . The blog oldweirdamerica (TOWA) is at the center of several online projects maintained by Gadaya, including his youtube channel which consists of (presumably) Gadaya playing American songs on various instruments including uke, banjo, and guitar, his blogspot blog which is also focused on American vernacular forms, but its main purpose is to offer downloads of out of print albums, and another wordpress blog which offers up world music appetizers as MP3 downloads.
TOWA uses the Anthology of American Folk Music as a road map through the vast expanse of American folk music (broadly defined). Each post revolves around a song on the 84 track box set. The blog was begun in November 2008, and to date has 19 posts.
The Anthology of American Folk Music, also known as the Harry Smith Anthology (after its creator) was released in 1952 and was hugely influential in the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, later reissued on CD by Smithsonian Folkways in 1997. The legacy of the Anthology continues to be relevant. As recently as 2006, Shout Factory released The Harry Smith Project, indicating that the Anthology continues to be a source of great inspiration. Gadaya, picking up on the tremendous influence the Harry Smith Anthology, takes the collection track by track, as sequenced on the box set, and explores and collects information on each artist and song.
Example: Track one, "Henry Lee" by Dick Justice.
What is happening here is a focus for three different types of information: audio, video, and text. Gadaya has assembled a collection of mp3s around the artist, Dick Justice, and makes them available through a third-party source for download via zip file. He gives a little background, often similar, though not verbatim to the liner notes, collects videos from YouTube that have direct or indirect linkage to the song, and links to websites with text about the song.
In collecting this information Gadaya becomes a curator of something larger. He is forging connections that aren't always apparent, while indicating that these connections need not always be serious, direct, or premeditated. Rather, he looks for any connection to the song in video, often coming up with hilarious and fascinating results. His same spirit embodies what must be the most difficult part for Gadaya to collect, but which is certainly the most excited to explore, which is the versions download.
The versions download is also a zip file downloaded using third party storage at MediaFire.com, which is a free service. The versions download brings together both versions of the song that retain the same name, but more impressively Gadaya has collected variants on these songs even when the names, tunes, arrangements have been changed. Sometimes this is easier than others. The leap from Chubby Parker's song " King King Kitchie Kitchie Ki Me O" to the numerous versions of "Froggy Went a-Courtin' " isn't a big one; it is basically the same song, called by different names.
Others can be easy to recognize as performances of the same song, but exist in different genres, as in the case of "John Henry." With the John Henry Variations, Gadaya collects 5 groupings of variations:Part 1: Field Recordings & 78rpm records, Part 2: The Blues, Part 3: Country, Bluegrass, Old-time, Part 4: Black banjo players and string bands/ Instrumentals, Part 5: The Folk Revival & Beyond. This massive amount of music is followed by three videos.
This is not one from TOWA, but expands on the point of genre and taxonomy:
This type of taxonomy is significant to understanding the "Old, Weird America" that Harry Smith was trying to bring together. Smith categories were something new in 1952, bringing together a huge amount of music under the banner of "American folk music" set a tone (sadly, one that was quickly altered by CBS, NBC, and Columbia Records by their cashing in on folk music stars like Peter Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, and the Hee Haw). Smith broke down American Folk Music into three types: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. He saw the connections rather than the divisions, and made is seem obvious that Sacred Harp, Jug Band, and square dance music play along side each other.
Gadaya sees the connectivity and prioritizes nothing. He also follows Francis Child's method in this versions download. The Child Ballads, for those unfamiliar, also collected versions, such as with Barbara Allen, though much less attention was paid to subtle differences, which was not possible by aim or in scope.
What Gadaya is doing with TOWA blog is illegal. He is file sharing, plain and simple. I am not going to get into a discussion on why it is illegal, or how absurdly out of touch the RIAA is, but only to say that I see Gadaya as an internet Pretty Boy Floyd, and I think the world is a better place because of him.
Gadaya is creating an internet network around texts (songs, mp3s) and from those texts he is creating conversations about American music. TOWA links to MediaFire which houses private archives (his record collection) mace public. TOWA also links to YouTube which though intelligent filters lead a viewer to other videos (when not removed due to copyright issues) that might expand the realm of inquiry. TOWA, YouTube, as well as all the other blogs Gadaya hosts all have comment fields as well, a place where conversations can happen around a particular text.
He neither pretends to be the definitive scholar or the voice of authority on these topics, but puts in a tremendous amount of legwork in order to ensure others access and explore the worlds of music he finds so captivating. Is this not the very root of publicly minded ethnomusicology? To engender a passion, to feed inquisitiveness, to prompt exploration?
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