The Old, Weird America

WORKS CITED

Except when the interviewer is mentioned in the text, interview quotations are noted according to each interviewee, in the order in which quotations appear in the text. News stories referred to in the text are noted by headline or tagline.

Bardin, John Franklin. The Deadly Percheron (1947). In The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus. Harmondsworth, UK and Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1976.

Bloomfield, Michael. “Dylan Goes Electric.” In The Sixties, ed. Lynda Obst. New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1977.

Boyes, Georgina. The imagined village: Culture, ideology and the English Folk Revival. Manchester, UK and New York: University of Manchester/St. Martin’s, 1993. An unsparing and revelatory study.

Bronson, Fred. The Billboard Book of Number One Hits, 3rd ed. New York: Billboard, 1992. Entry on “Ode to Billie Joe.”

Buck-Morss, Susan. “Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution.” New German Critique 29 (1983).

Cándida Smith, Richard. Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. A deep and lucid exploration of individuals seeking a community of paradox and righteousness.

Cantwell, Robert. Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

______. “‘Darkling I Listen’: Making Sense of the Folkways Anthology,” in Cantwell, If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, 2008. Also included in Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular, ed. Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010.

______. “Smith’s Memory Theater: The Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music.” New England Review (Spring/Summer 1991). Reading this visionary essay as I began my own work on Smith’s Anthology, I did my best to forget it, knowing that if I didn’t I would never be able to proceed as if my work were my own. How well I may have succeeded—avoided walking precisely in Cantwell’s footsteps—is for others to judge, but here as elsewhere I gratefully acknowledge him as pathfinder, guide, and friend.

______. “When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Revival” (1993). In Rosenberg.

______. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Caudill, Harry. Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown, 1962, 1963. See also Caudill’s The Mountain, the Miner and the Lord, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1980, an anecdotal history of Dock Boggs country: Letcher County, Kentucky, and Wise County, Virginia. Courtesy Molly Breivis.

Cohen, John. “A Rare Interview with Harry Smith.” Sing Out! (April/May, June/July 1969). Smith quotations not otherwise identified come from this interview. Reprinted in American Magus: Harry Smith—A Modern Alchemist, ed. Paula Igliori. New York: Inanout Press, 1996.

______. Talk on Harry Smith (St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project, November 10, 1995). Recording courtesy Rani Singh/Harry Smith Archives.

Conner, Bruce. To GM, 1991, 1995.

Costello, Elvis. Interview with Philip Watson, “Invisible Jukebox” (blindfold test). The Wire (London, March 1994).

Cott, Jonathan, ed. Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. New York: Wenner Books, 2006.

Dickinson, Jim. Notes to Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Days—The Definitive Edition, Vol. 2 (Sun/Bear Family, Germany, 1990). “I heard Sam Phillips say that his discovery of Wolf was more significant than his discovery of Elvis Presley. The only artist to share the surreal darkness of Robert Johnson, Wolf brings out of his band an ensemble counterpoint unlike anything else in the blues. His voice seems to hang in the air, and make the room rumble with echo. His singing is so powerful that between the vocal lines the compressor-limiter through which the mono recordings were made sucks the sound of the drum and the French harp up into the hole in the audio mix. Notes blend together and merge into melody lines that are not being ‘played’ by any one instrument. Wolf is not bound by the three-chord blues pattern, and often seems to erase the bar lines of western music. He is a Primitive-Modernist, using chants and modal harmonies of the dark ritualist past brought up from Mother Africa and slavery through electric amplifiers.”

Dorgan, Howard. The Old Regular Baptists of Central Appalachia: Brothers and Sisters in Hope. Knoxville, TN: Tennessee University Press, 1989. See also Songs of the Old Regular Baptists: Lined-Out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky, recorded 1992–93 by Jeff Todd Titon (Smithsonian, 1997).

Dylan, Bob. Tarantula. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

______. “How Do You Get Your Kicks.” Nat Hentoff, “The Playboy Interview.” Playboy (March 1966). A 1965 conversation rewritten by Dylan to the point that it becomes a literary exercise, not an interview. In Cott.

______. “Dylan Questions the Comparisons.” David Fricke, “Dylan’s Dilemma.” Rolling Stone (December 5, 1985).

______. “Were You Surprised.” “Bob Dylan: The Rolling Stone Interview” (transcript of press conference, San Francisco, December 2, 1965). Rolling Stone (January 20, 1968). See also Bob Dylan: The 1965 Interview (Baktabak Interview cd). In Cott.

______. “Call It Historical-Traditional.” To Robert Shelton, March 1966. In Shelton’s No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (1986). New York: Da Capo, 1997. In Cott.

______. “What Folk Music Is.” From press conference, Austin, Texas, September 24, 1965. Quoted in Ralph J. Gleason, “The Children’s Crusade.” Ramparts (March 1966). In McGregor.

______. “How Do You Know.” John Cohen and Happy Traum, “The Sing Out! Interview.” Sing Out! (October/November 1968). In Cott.

______. “All the Authorities.” Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, “Positively Tie Dream.” New York Post (September 26, 1965). In Cott.

______. “I Have to Think.” In Hentoff, “The Playboy Interview,” as above.

Erickson, Steve. Amnesiascope. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

Gentry, Bobbie. On “Ode to Billie Joe.” See Bronson.

Guralnick, Peter. Feel Like Going Home (1972). Boston: Back Bay Books, 1999.

Guthrie, Woody. On Sonny Terry. Quoted in Ron Radosh, “Commercialism and the Folksong Movement.” Sing Out! (1959). Collected in The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival, ed. David A. DeTurk and A. Poulin, Jr. New York: Dell, 1967. Courtesy Dave Marsh.

Hampton, Howard. “Archives of Oblivion” (review of Clinton Heylin, The Great White Wonders: A History of Rock Bootlegs). LA Weekly (July 14–20, 1995).

______. “Stillborn Again” (review of Bob Dylan, Oh Mercy). LA Weekly (October 13–19, 1989).

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Shaker Bridal,” from Twice-Told Tales (1837).

Hayden, Casey. “The Movement.” Witness (Summer/Fall 1988).

Heylin, Clinton. Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions (1960–1994). New York and London (as Behind Closed Doors): Viking, 1995.

“HIGHWAY BEHEADING.” USA Today (July 24, 1995).

Igliori, Paula, ed. American Magus: Harry Smith. New York: Inanout Press, 1996. Numerous memoirs by and interviews with Smith associates, notably Lionel Ziprin, and with a facsimile reprint of John Cohen and Happy Traum’s 1969 Sing Out! interview; many photos.

Jefferson, Thomas. Rejected passages from the Declaration of Independence (“‘The Rough Draft’ as it probably read when Jefferson first submitted it to Franklin”) quoted from Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922, 1942). New York: Vintage, 1958.

Johnson, Denis. “Emergency,” in Jesus’ Son. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.

Jones, Loyal. Minstrel of the Appalachians: The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1984.

Landau, Jon. “John Wesley Harding.” Crawdaddy! (May 1968). In McGregor.

Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). New York: Viking, 1964.

Lunsford, Bascom Lamar. “Mine Own.” Southern Exposure (January/February 1986). On Naomi Wise. Courtesy Loyal Jones.

Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro.” Dissent (1957). In Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (1959). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Marcus, Greil. “When First Unto This Country” (Granta, 2001, as “American Folk Music”), collected in Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, Writings 1968–2010. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010. Also included as “Uncle Dave Macon: Agent of Satan?” in Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular, ed. Andrew Perchuck and Rani Singh. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010.

McCrumb, Sharyn. If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O. New York: Scribner’s, 1990.

______. She Walks These Hills. New York: Scribner’s, 1994.

McGregor, Craig, ed. Bob Dylan: A Retrospective. New York: Morrow, 1972. Reissued as Bob Dylan: The Early Years—A Retrospective. New York: Da Capo, 1990.

Mellers, Wilfrid. A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Merlis, Mark. American Studies. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Miles, Emma Bell. The Spirit of the Mountains (1905). Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1975.

Miller, Perry. Jonathan Edwards (1949). New York: Meridian, 1963.

______. “Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening” (1949, as part of “American Response to Crisis” lecture series, first published 1952). In Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956). New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964.

Morton, Brian. The Dylanist. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Murray, Albert. See Scherman.

Nelson, Paul. “Newport Folk Festival, 1965.” Sing Out! (September 1965). In McGregor.

Newman, Randy. On cool. In Stephen Holden, “Can a Pop Composer Help Out Broadway?” New York Times (September 24, 1995).

Ochs, Phil. Interview in Broadside (October 1965). Quoted in Clinton Heylin, Dylan: Behind the Shades. New York: Viking, 1991.

Pisaro, Michael. To GM, 1996.

Rexroth, Kenneth. Review of Letters of Carl Sandburg. New York Times Book Review (September 28, 1965). Quoted in Cantwell, When We Were Good. Citation courtesy Robert Cantwell.

Rooney, Jim. On Newport Folk Festival, 1965. Quoted in Nelson.

Rosenberg, Neil V., ed. Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931). New York: New York Review Books, 2004. Introduction by GM.

______. The Roots of American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1942.

Savage, Lon. Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–1921 (1985), Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. Reissued, ironically, because of the critical success of John Sayles’s 1987 film Matewan (a puerile travesty, despite a fine performance by David Strathairn as Sid Hatfield). Also worth following are Robert Shogan’s The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America’s Largest Labor Uprising, New York: Basic Books, 2006, and William C. Blizzard’s remarkable When Miners March: The Story of Coal Miners in West Virginia, Gay, WV: Appalachian Community Services, 2004. Blizzard, the son of the labor leader and Blair Mountain veteran Billy Blizzard, set down his chronicle of the events mostly in the early 1950s; he estimates that each side fired over 500,000 rounds, and includes the admission by the pilot hired by mine owners, R. S. Hayes, that he dropped both explosive and nausea bombs on the miners’ forces.

For an update on the battleground, see Michael Janofsky’s report from Blair, West Virginia, “Fears That a Coal Machine Could Rip Up Lives” (New York Times, May 7, 1998), on mountaintop removal (where the tops of mountains are sliced off as part of coal-mining operations) on Blair Mountain. The next year, on October 20,1999, Federal District Judge Charles Haden II issued an order banning the dumping of removal waste in West Virginia streams, effectively halting the practice. Republican Governor Cecil H. Underwood, a former coal executive, demanded congressional action to amend the national Clean Water Act to allow the dumping to proceed; bills were immediately introduced. In 2000 Underwood was opposed for reelection by the small Mountain Party’s Denise Giardina, a minister, college professor, and novelist (Storming Heaven, the story of the Mine War told in four voices; New York: Norton, 1987). “Are there specific West Virginia mountains that are now in jeopardy of being razed?” Lisa Dixon asked Giardina in the March/April 1998 edition of Oxford American. “The most famous one is Blair Montain, which has partly been flattened already, and other areas of it are threatened,” Giardina said. “It’s famous because it’s where the Battle of Blair Mountain took place, which was a battle between coal miners trying to form a union and [the mining establishment], and eventually the U.S. Army came in. Most mountains are not individually famous that way; they’re just mountains, but they’re all special.” Underwood was defeated that November by Democrat Bob Wise; Judge Haden’s order was overturned in 2001 by the notoriously pro-business Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

An earlier version of the present-day battle of Blair Mountain can be found in Steven Seagal’s 1997 film Fire Down Below, where Seagal plays the first action-hero Environmental Protection Agency agent in movie history, and so far the last. Presaging also the story that exploded into a national scandal when Don Blankenship, head of Massey Energy Company of West Virginia, directly bankrolled the election of Brent Benjamin to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, who refused to recuse himself from cases involving Massey, most notably those involving mine safety and mountaintop removal (a position that in 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a denial of due process), Seagal takes on a West Virginia land-despoilation and toxic-waste dumping conspiracy by a huge coal company run by Kris Kristofferson’s Mr. Big (“I own this state, so what’s the problem?”). Playing the compromised but decent Reverend Goodall is Levon Helm, who, upon going over to Seagal’s side, is burned to death in his own church. “Federal officials are considering whether to veto mountaintop mining above a little Appalachian valley called Pigeonroost Hollow, a step that could be a turning point for one of the country’s most contentious environmental disputes,” Erik Eckholm wrote from Blair in “Project’s Fate May Predict the Future of Mining” (New York Times, July 14, 2010), a report on the prospect of the Obama administration denying the permits for mountaintop removal routinely granted during the administration of George W. Bush. One of those quoted in his story was the environmental organizer Maria Gunnoe. “‘We can’t keep blowing up mountains to keep the lights on,’ said Ms. Gunnoe, a resident of nearby Boone County who has received death threats and travels with a 9 millimeter pistol.’” On January 13, 2011, the EPA revoked the permit for mountaintop removal on the Blair Mountain peak known as Spruce 1—the first such action in the agency’s history.

Scherman, Tony. “The Omni-American” (interview with Albert Murray). American Heritage (September 1996).

Shelton, Robert. The Face of Folk Music. New York: Citadel, 1968. Text to photo essay by David Gahr. Includes Dylan graffiti war. Courtesy Dave Marsh.

Singh, Rani, ed. Think of the Self Speaking: Harry Smith—Selected Interviews. Seattle: Elbow/Cityful Press, 1999.

Smith, Harry. Handbook to Anthology of American Folk Music. See Discography.

______. Heaven and Earth Magic: Film No. 12 (1957–62). Mystic Fire Video, P.O. Box 1202, Montauk, NY 11954. Courtesy Rani Singh/Harry Smith Archives, as are all Smith interviews noted below.

______. “There’s No Subject.” Dawn Koliktas, “Film and the Occult: An Interview with Harry Smith.” Unpublished (July 1988).

______. “Maybe Every Three or Four Months.” Mary Hill, “Harry Smith Interviewed” (1972). Film Culture (June 1992). In Singh.

______. “I Once Discovered.” P. Adams Sitney, “Harry Smith Interviewed.” Film Culture (Summer 1965). In Singh.

______. “The Universal Hatred.” Clint Fraker, “Interview with Harry Smith.” Once and for All Almanac. Boulder, CO: 1989.

______. “Everywhere Jimmie Rodgers Went.” A. J. Melita, interview with Harry Smith. Unpublished (1976) before inclusion in Singh.

______. “I Could Really Believe.” Paul Nelson to GM.

______. “When I Was Younger.” Melita interview.

Smith, Lee. The Devil’s Dream (1992). New York: Penguin, 2011.

Stein, Stephen J. The Shaker Experience in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

Stekert, Ellen. “Cents and Nonsense in the Urban Folk Revival” (1966). In Rosenberg.

“SUSAN SMITH WAS MOLESTED BY STEPFATHER.” Associated Press/San Francisco Chronicle (February 21, 1995).

Thomson, Virgil. “America’s Musical Autonomy” (1944). In A Virgil Thomson Reader, ed. Virgil Thomson and John Rockwell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Courtesy Lang Thompson.

“TOWN STUNNED BY SLAYINGS OF THREE CHILDREN.” Associated Press/San Francisco Chronicle (February 21, 1995).

U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton. Opinions by Justices John Paul Stevens and Clarence Thomas. New York Times (May 23, 1995).

Van der Merwe, Peter. Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Van Ronk, Dave. Notes to Dave Van Ronk: The Folkways Recordings (Smithsonian Folkways, 1991).

Von Schmidt, Eric, and Jim Rooney. Baby Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated History of the Cambridge Folk Years (1979). Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Vowell, Sarah. Radio On: A Listener’s Diary (entry for January 1, 1995). New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.

Whisnant, David E. “Gone Country: High Lonesome and the Politics of Writing About Country Music.” Journal of Country Music (Spring 1995).

Wigglesworth, Michael. “God’s Controversy with New-England—Written in the Time of the Great Drought Anno 1662 (God Speaks Against the Languishing State of New-England).” From The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, Volume 2, ed. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson (1938). New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963.

Wilentz, Sean. On Bob Dylan’s return to the Newport Folk Festival on August 5, 2002, to GM: “The thing that was most apparent to me was how ghostly it was—because they’re all dead. All the people the young folk artists were drawn to in 1965 or before; they’re all dead. Mississippi John Hurt is dead. Son House is dead. Geoff Muldaur was funny: he asked who had been to Newport before; he asked who had been born in 1965. Maybe half had. He told a story about Mississippi John Hurt: ‘He’d just do a little finger-picking—and we’d all collapse.’ There were a lot of ghosts around. At the same time it was a very conscious passing on of that tradition to something new—on the part of the older folks. Dylan did that very intentionally. Songs that he was singing in 1965, and songs that recalled that tradition.

“There was a roots stage—[but] given the explosion of interest in [old-time] music, there was too little. Most of the music was personal song-stories. In a funny way, what with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, [and] Alison Krauss, the festival seemed to be out of step with where folk music now is. It was largely virtuoso self-indulgent adolescent angst. It was Shawn Colvin.

“Dylan walked out on stage with earlocks—and a ponytail, and a fake beard. He looked like a guy who was on the bus to Crown Heights and got lost. From another angle, not really seeing the beard, he could have been in a girl group—he could have been in the Shangri-Las. Then he looked like Jesus Christ. He was putting on a show, and he was donning a mask—because he’s a minstrel. A Jewish minstrel. And an American minstrel.

“There came a point when he could have said something—when he was introducing the band. I looked at him very closely then—but he just sort of smiled. He twitched. And then he went into the last song, ‘Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat.’ Then he goes away, and comes back, and does a sizzling Buddy Holly, ‘Not Fade Away,’ the Grateful Dead arrangement. Again it was ghosts. That was Bob Dylan. He was the whole fucking tradition. He was a one-man festival.” See also Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Wilson, Edmund. “Frank Keeney’s Coal Diggers” (1931). In Wilson’s The American Earthquake. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979.

Winthrop, John. “A Modell of Christian Charity.” See American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Michael Warner. New York: Library of America, 1999.

Wright, Lawrence. In the New World. New York: Knopf, 1987.

“Yahweh Has Placed an Invisible Barrier.” From “GRITZ GIVES UP ON FREEMEN.” San Francisco Chronicle (May 2, 1995).

Yoon, Carol Kaesuck. “Thuggish Cuckoos Use Muscle to Run Egg Protection Racket.” New York Times (November 14, 1995). See also Yoon’s “Baby Cuckoo’s Tricks Are Unmasked,” New York Times (November 10, 1998). “Researchers have puzzled for decades over how a cuckoo chick, which hatches from its egg in the nest of another species, manages to trick its foster parents not just into feeding it but feeding it more than they would feed a chick of their own,” Yoon wrote. “According to a research paper published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, a cuckoo chick can impersonate an entire brood of chicks so effectively that it can spur the host birds into feeding it as if it were a family of four … For biologists, explaining how these birds manage to make their living so successfully by deceiving other species is a continual challenge. ‘It’s so peculiar, so unusual,’” Yoon quoted Dr. Arnon Lotem, a behavioral ecologist at Tel-Aviv University. “‘Here’s a player that breaks all the rules.’”