I Llinoi S University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
H I LLINOI S UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN PRODUCTION NOTE University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Large-scale Digitization Project, 2007. Number 23 February ,. 1965 ROBERT PETE WILLIAMS CONCERT APR The blues is the topic of the Campus Folksong Club's membership concert to be given on February 12, at 8:00 p.m. in Room 112 Gregory Hall. The concert will feature Robert Pete Williams of Louisiana. It will be only the second time he has left Louisiana but his fame as the most poingnant and powerful of the primitive bluesmen is nation-wide. Williams was discovered in 1958 by Dr. Harry Oster, now Professor of English at Iowa State University, while Oster was recording the inmates of Angola State Farm Prison. Robert Pete had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1954 for killing a man in a bar room brawl. Realizing Williams' greatness as a blues musician, Oster recorded him on three records of his Folk-Lyric label (Angola Prisoners' Blues, Those Prison Blues, Angola Prison Spirituals) and sent copies of the records and letters to Louisiana Governor Earl Long and the Parole Board. As a result of these efforts, Robert Pete was released on parole in December 1959, to the state farm at Denham Springs. Here he works up to eighty or ninety hours a week taking care of animals; planting and sowing; washing dishes and cleaning the grounds for $75 a month and room and boar,. Robert Pete was invited several times to appear at the Newport Folk Festival but the Parole Board refused to let him leave the farm until last year. Newport was one of his first appearances before a white audience and he was most warmly received. The blues of Robert Pete Williams is deeply personal, his voice strong yet sensitive: his singing shows the spontaneity and conver- sational freedom of the early country blues. His guitar style is complex and contrapuntal; that is, it acts like a second voice filling in where his voice ends and adding color to his shouts and moans. The bass notes are drones and Williams' whole style is only slightly similar to the standard twelve bar blues. Our Club concert is one of the last in Williams' present tour which has covered several midwest schools, including the University of Chicago Folk Festival. sents '1l .I -dI IAMSk o ' I *I 8 p I I songs I 0. 1 4 .1 4 i .1 adm I bI m I IonI. P * I 0' ' 1 II~ DOCK BOGGS On December 9, 1964, the Campus Folksong Club heard a fabulous Southern Appalachian banjo picker and blues singer who had been lost somewhere in that territory for twenty-five years. Thanks to the efforts of Mike Seeger, who rediscovered Dock Boggs (or, as Mike says, "No, I discovered him"'), we got to hear a man whose style is very much his own. Dock is an excellent example of the word "style," because his combination of singing and banjo playing differs consider- ably from that of contemporary folk musicians. Most traditional singers who accompany themselves on the banjo use chords or a rhythmic picking or frailing pattern which provides the background for their songs. Thus, the vocals of Pete Steele, Roscoe Holcomb, or Justus Begley, to mention a few, is very clearly audible over their accompaniment. Dock, however, uses his banjo to bring out the vocal melody, not by chording a rhythmic background, but by playing the melody itself. His fingers pick out the melodic line, filling in between lines and verses while allowing Dock's voice a lot of freedom in pitch, meter, and style. At first it may seem a very simple thing to play the tune while singing it. However, most banjo players will tell you that this technique requires far better knowledge of the fingerboard, greater digital control, and more precision than the usual types of accompani- ment mentioned above. Since he learned many of his songs from his brother-in-law Lee Hunsucker, who sang without accompaniment, Dock had to have a banjo style that could back up the tunes, many of which were not harmonically oriented. He remembered hearing a band of Negro musicians, when he was only nine or ten years old; the banjo player had picked out the tune with his thumb and either one or two fingers. This style stuck in Dock's mind so tightly that, when he got a banjo, he learned to play a style based on that sound. Fortunately, this form was rhythmically and harmonically more flexible than any other used traditionally: it fit beautifully with the songs Dock learned from Lee and others. When Dock does use an occasional chord, it is entirely in keeping with the mode of the tune, for he employs tunings which correspond to the melody of the song he is performing. Two of his seemingly unique tunings are, strings 5-1 respectively, F#CGAD and F#DGAD. His alter- nation between a major third (the F#) and a minor third in both the vocal and banjo parts of songs like "Pretty Polly" and "0 Death" (both in which he performed at the concert) provide a pleasant sense of ambiguity. The audience of his performance completely fell in love with Dock's style, with his unique way of playing and singing. We enjoyed Dock not only for his music, but for his warm and outgoing personality. He alternated songs with little anecdotes on his life, from the time he was born (1898) until Mike Seeger found him about one and a half years ago in Norton, Virginia. Dock started his "career" in 1927, when he made his first recording in New York City for Brunswick. He told us how he had gone to an audition in Virginia, along with many other Southern musicians. When several men surrounded him, Dock felt lost. They would tell him to play a song; then, when he had just gotten into it, they'd say "that's enough, play another." At the end of the interview, Dock had himself a con- tract to record eight songs for the Brunswick Company. Dock also told us how, in order to get money, he had given his banjo to a young banker friend as security for a loan. Around twenty-five years later, Dock went back to get his instrument. He found the man not only married, but a grandfather of several grand- children. Although no one had touched the banjo, his wife was reluctant to give it up. She said it has been there for so long that it was like part of the family ! Altogether, the Dock Boggs concert was thoroughly enjoyable. Everyone present loved his lively songs and his humorous stories; our only sadness was that it had to end so soon. I-- Carol Palmer -X-- N; ** 4-** -I* University of Illinois students who met Dock Boggs and Mike Seeger in December during their visit here, will be pleased to know that Boggs' first Folkways album cover (FA 2351) was designed by A. Doyle Moore. Professor Moore is known to his fellow Club members for designing the album covers of the Campus Folksong Club's three LP's. A second volume of Dock Boggs, music, collected and edited by Mike Seeger, will be released by Folkways in the spring. This album cover is also designed by Moore. CFC FINANCIAL STATEMENT: February 1, 1964-February 1, 1965 A. Income Cash on hand, February 1, 1964 $ 731.59 Income, February 1, 196 5-February 1, 1965 a. Archives (reprint) 6 141.50 b. Membership 805.00 c. Record Production CFC 101 313.08 CFC 201 528.47 CFC 301 906.84 Mixed 101 & 201 144.20 d. Workshop 196.10 e. Vending Machine Fund 50.00 f. Other 168.50 3,253.69 Total $ 3,985.38 B. Expenses Budgeted Actual Archives $ 150.00 $ 70.81 Autoharp 360.00 236.46 Concert 605.00 483.32 External Affairs 75.00 8.37 Folksing 20.00 7.95 House Management 5.00 0.00 Membership 15.00 3.96 Publicity 95.00 112.65 Radio and Television 5.00 0.00 Record Production 1,035.00 1,116.271 Seminar 265.00 355.432 Social 115.00 98.25 Tape, P.A. & Photo 165.00 196.243 Workshop 5.00 2.40 Elected Officers 45.00 30.61 $2,960.00 $2,722.72 C. Net Cash on Hand $1,262.66 1. $100 to be applied to budget of 1 February 1965-1 February 1966. (5' percent of cost of brochure notes for 1000 copies) 2. $50 income from vending machine fund and $25 income from German Club specifically allocated to defray expenses of two seminars. 3. Major equipment purchase of 151.60 of which $51.60 is to be applied to 1 February 1965-1 Feburary 1966 budget. W. T. Becker CFC Treasurer SOME NEW RELEASES Westminster Collectors Series. In Israel Today, Vol. IV. W-9811 (12029) Recordings of Jewish traditional music in the United States have tendea to be rather poor. For one thing, Jewish music has already found its way into several well-established American musical forms--the movies, the musical comedy, classical music, Tin-Pan Alley, and jazz--all of which boasted of Jews in the center of their efforts long before Jews were accepted in other areas of American life. As a result, any "purity" in Jewish music was lost as Jewish themes worked into popular music and jazz. Apparently American Jews felt no special need to establish their own music as a recognizable genre, since it had already conquered several other musical forms.