I Llinoi S University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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H I LLINOI S UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN PRODUCTION NOTE University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Large-scale Digitization Project, 2007. ae 4, Number 5 (whole issue 20) April 30, 1964 FINAL CONCERT : A?/ ALMEDA ID)DLE AN D F RIEND5 igrand old lady of the Ozarks will be Almeda is not a stranger to the Univer- guest of the Campus Folksong Club sity folk music scene. In her latest i it presents its final public concert letter to CFC concert chairman, Ken .he semester on Friday, May 8, in 112 Bowen, she lists her credited appear- gory Hall at 8:00 p.m. ances around the country. They include the University of Chicago Folk Festival, ,da Riddle, the 66 year-old ballad New York University, the Philadelphia er from Cleburne County, Arkansas, Folk Festival, the Berkeley Folk Festival, I be the emcee when she presents not the Ash Grove nightclub in Los Angeles, r herself but three of her mountain and appearances made in folklore classes rhbors in a full concert of authentic and study programs across the country. *ican traditional music. Her latest success has been an offer to sing at this year's Newport Folk Festival. ,mpanying Almeda will be Doc and :ha Hollister, university-educated Almeda's specialty is, of course, the old Idents of the Ozarks, who have spent English and American ballads preserved .r spare time collecting and learning in the great southern mountain regions old tunes from the regionts long time of the United States--the Appalachians idents, many of whom are accomplished and the Ozarks. Almeda's mother was a icians. Almeda has also promised to native of Tennessee; her father a life- ig a fiddler with her, but she is not long resident of Arkansas. It was from Swho the performer will be. Due to them that she learned her amazingly large extremely high level of musicianship repertoire of ballads, lyrics and chil- -he Ozark region,the area immediately dren's songs. She says she has been rounding Almeda's home can boast of singing for over sixty years, and has , 40 fiddlers, ranging all the way been collecting ballads (folklore collect- a Uncle Absie Morrison, who is in his ing is not the exclusive business of ities, to his granddaughter Delena, university professors) since she was ten is nine. The intermediate levels are years old. She now boasts an abundant > filled with fiddlers, including anthology of songs native to her region. Lette Reeves, a charming and beautiful i school senior who has successfully tered the old-timey style. TICKETS ON SALE AT THE ILLINI UNION BOX OFFICE-$1.50 UP S0 0 0 IL. 0 0 0 z 0 z-U- 0f UP MOUNTAIN VIEW, ARKANSAS, 1964 by F. K. Pious, Jr. Elsewhere in this issue Paul Sampson takes time to worry the question of authenticity in folksong presentations. Specifically he is worried about the changes that occur when a reputable traditional artist plays his music in a foreign atmosphere, i.e., up north, and in a college auditorium, as opposed to down in the hills, among his own people at one of their traditional functions. This reviewer has suffered from the same doubts for three years, and it was these very doubts which drove him and his friends to visit Mountain View, Arkansas last week to hear Jimmie Driftwood's mammoth, three-day Arkansas Music Festival. There, in the low hills of Rackensack (the local name for northern Arkansas), Jimmie had gathered together the best fiddlers, banjo-pickers, guitarists, singers and dancers. The scene was complete in that all aspects of mountain music were present in the same proportions in which they exist in their native habitat. The result--and I dearly wish Sampson could have heard it--was a superb blend of honest music, much of it brilliantly played. Let us make one thing clear from the beginning: Virtuosity was not the key- note of the Rackensack festival. Competence was there in abundance, but no single artist of dazzling talent came forth to astound either the local or visiting music fans. The emphasis was not and could not be placed on instrumental skill alone. We heard no fiddlers of the level of, say--Paul Warren, Howdy Forester, or Tommy Jackson. There were good banjo players, but nothing that would give Scruggs cause to worry, and the guitarists are not going to give Doc Watson heart failure in the near future, or at any other time. As for the singers--well--you have your records and you've been to the concerts; you know who is good and who is excellent, and none of your favorites is going to be challenged by anyone from northern Arkansas. But, in the midst of all these caveats the reader has no doubt detected some evidence that the author is about to grow lyrical. The reader is correct. I was thoroughly thrilled by the Rackensack festival and by everyone in it--not only the performers, but the local people who listened to them and who so kindly wel- comed us into their homes. Not being a devotee of digital algebra, I never intended to get to the festival to see if so-and-so could out-fiddle Warren, Forester, et. al., or if a new super-Scruggs was about to stalk out of the boon- docks and amaze the campuses. I have always felt that such talk and speculation is like unto that of the medieval theologians quarrelling over their endless angels on top of numberless pin-heads, and, after visiting Arkansas, I am even more certain that such a view would have so twisted the visitor's perspective that the overall sense and importance of the festival and its music would be lost. What made this festival great was the very thing that Sampson mentioned: The whole proceeding was brought off in its natural habitat. Not only the town, the hills, the rivers, the cabins and the dusty roads, but the people themselves were there to surround the music and give it the essential reality that the records cannot capture. This stuff is kitchen music. It is played by congenial people who share a culture and a geographic contiguity, and who meet in each others homes or at mutually agreed-upon centers (such as the Stone County Courthouse) to extend their culture into the musical. In such an atmosphere even the foreigner can hear and see things in the music which he cannot understand out of context. A few words about that context: I was charmed by Stone County and its gentle, kindly people. I was impressed and buoyed by their handling of life and by the physical and outward evidences of that life. I confess a warm appreciation of their handsome women and the tasteful and simple way they show off their womanhood. Up north we have little girls, girls, women, and, later on, if you're lucky, a few ladies. In Stone County they have one extra item--maidens. This is an old word--now largely literary--but in Stone County they actually do have maidens in every sense of the word, that is, scarcely nubile young women who dress in honest-to-God dresses, wear little if any warpaint and who, by the time they reach high school, have already absorbed the regional code of manners and thus behave with instictive gentility to menfolk, womenfolk and strangers. They also have beauty and sex appeal of a type now almost lost in more urbanized regions. One would have to mention also the large number of old folks in the area, and the universal respect which they receive from the young. Part of this respect was based, of course, on the fact that the musical skills which all of us had come to admire were largely in the hands of oldsters. Up north, on the other hand, the important skills are in the hands of the younger generation, and the oldsters are merely relics of a bygone age. This contrast alone is enough to justify the propagation of the music we heard in Arkansas. Moreover, the music served as a means of uniting the young and the old. No one who passes an after- noon talking with Willie Morrison the fiddler (as I did, and not just about music either) can fail to come away with a warm feeling of appreciation for the man and his knowledge. The young musicians I met seemed to be thoroughly in sympathy with the older ones, and displayed little susceptibility to forms of music which the elders themselves could not pass on. And so we have the context. What of the music itself and the musicians? For charm and elegance of interpretation we must single out the family of grandmother, grandfather and two grandchildren who played •Cripple Creek"on their four banjos. In the fiddling category we have to award honors to Paulette Reeves, the lovely and charming high-school senior who has been fiddling for only eight years but who displayed such taste and such skill on the fiddle that she may soon become a real threat to the catgut hierarchy of Nashville. Mrs. Ollie Gilbert and her unaccompanied singing impressed us as the old balladeers always do--with her sincerity and love of music. A word about dancing. Who among us has actually seen a folk concert that featured real dancers? Not many, I suspect, and as far as phonograph records are concerned only the clogging of Jean Carignon has ever been transmitted on wax, and the visual element, of course, is completely lost.