Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 224

August 1, 2018: 17th Century Histories: The Massacre at Mystic

[On July 30th, 1676 Nathaniel Bacon issued his “Declaration in the Name of the People,” kicking off Bacon’s Rebellion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that rebellion and other 17th century histories, leading up to a special weekend post on some of Virginia’s historic sites!]On three texts that help us remember one of post-contact America’s earliest dark histories.The central military action of the Pequot War(1636-37), the first large-scale conflict between the English and Native American communities in colonial New England, was the 1637 massacre of the Pequot village of Mystic (in modern-day Connecticut). A number of Puritan figures and historians wrote about the attack (including William Bradford in Of Plimoth Plantation), but perhaps the most telling such document was composed by military leader Captain John Underhill. In his account Underhill notes that mostly women, children, and the elderly were killed in the massacre (which was timed purposefully for a moment when the village’s warriors were on a raiding mission), and justifies that fact by writing, “sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. … We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.” Violence and brutality are inevitable in war, but directing them at non-combatants comprises another level of brutality—and using religion to rationalize such actions another level still (if a far-too common one).Accompanying Underhill’s account of the massacre was a famous woodcutting that has become a central image through which the massacre is remembered (when it is remembered at all). The woodcutting certainly captures just how surrounded the village was, a detail that looks far different if we sympathize with the villagers more than Underhill himself was able to. But it also captures another and even more complex historical detail: the second circle of attackers are Native Americans, an attempt to include in the image the hundreds of Mohegan, Narragansett, and Niantic warriors who took part in the massacre as allies to the English and/or enemies to the Pequots. That Native American participation does not excuse the English in the slightest, neither for their overall impetus for the attack nor for their particular actions during it. But it does remind us of the quantity and variety of Native American tribes within even a relatively close geographic area, and of the individual and at times conflicting situations and needs facing each tribe (at any historical point, but doubly so in the post-contact era of course). That’s part of the story of Mystic as well, and one that the woodcutting accurately highlights.While texts such as Underhill’s account and the woodcutting can thus reveal (if sometimes unintentionally) multiple layers to the massacre at Mystic, they nonetheless originated from and are ultimately driven by an English perspective on the battle. Also originating from the perspective of an Anglo American author, but working hard and well to create a Pequot perspective, is the pivotal Chapter IV in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s historical novel Hope Leslie (1827). As I highlighted at length in this early blog post, Sedgwick’s Magawisca—a composite fictional character who is the daughter of an actual historical figure, the Pequot chief Sassacus—offers in her long monologue (to her young English friend and potential love interest Everell Fletcher) about the Mystic massacre what Sedgwick’s narrator calls “a very different picture” of the battle. As with any historical fiction, and certainly any that seeks to cross cultural boundaries, Sedgwick’s chapter and novel are complex and open to critique as well as celebration (and everything in between). Yet I believe that Sedgwick succeeds on a number of levels in this chapter, perhaps especially in her portrayal of the profoundly human effects of the massacre and how those effects echoed and extended well beyond 1637. Such effects must be part of our collective memories of Mystic, and Sedgwick’s text helps us begin to engage them more fully.Next 17thcentury history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other early American histories you’d highlight?

July 31, 2018: 17th Century Histories: Jamestown’s First Slaves

[On July 30th, 1676 Nathaniel Bacon issued his “Declaration in the Name of the People,” kicking off Bacon’s Rebellion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that rebellion and other 17th century histories, leading up to a special weekend post on some of Virginia’s historic sites!]On the transnational details of a crucial human cargo, and a fraught new historical lens for them.I’m mostly going to cede this first paragraph over to this 2006 Washington Post story, and to the historians cited there (especially Engel Sluiter and John Thornton & Linda Heywood) whose ground-breaking research and writing helped recover and consider the stories, identities, and histories of the 20 African slaves brought to Virginia’s Jamestown colony in 1619. It’s to their efforts, and to Lisa Rein’s reporting in that story, that I owe pretty much all I know about that group of slaves, and you should check out that story to learn more as well!Okay, welcome back! Obviously the individual and communal stories and identities of those first (or at least very early) African Americans are and should be the central reason to better remember the histories that Sluiter, Thornton & Heywood, and others have helped recover and narrate. But on a contextual level, I would also note the strikingly transnational factors that came together to bring those 20 Angolans to Jamestown. A Portuguese slave ship, the San Juan Bautista, that departed from the Angolan port city of Luanda with some 350 slaves bound for the Spanish (now Mexican) port of Veracruz. Two British pirate vessels, the Treasurer and the White Lion (the latter apparently flying a Dutch flag, likely for reasons of disguise or misdirection), that raided the San Juan Bautista and took its slave cargo for themselves. At least one of them (likely the White Lion, given the longstanding historical narrative that the ship was Dutch) that landed in Jamestown as part of its multi-stop voyage through the Americas, trading the slaves for provisions. It’s not just the transatlantic and increasingly globally connected 17thcentury world that these details reflect—it’s also, and most saliently for my post and series, how much even a small and seemingly isolated English colony like Jamestown was part of that transatlantic and global society, influenced by Angola and Portugal and piracy and the Caribbean just as much as by its direct English origin points.I would also extend that point one complex and fraught step further, however. Those 20 Angolan American slaves also comprised a potently transnational community, one that immediately and forever after became an influential part of the new and developing Virginian and post-contact American communities as well. In emphasizing that aspect of this foundational African American community, I don’t mean for a moment to minimize the brutality and horrors and exclusionary white supremacist core of the slave trade and slave system that this moment helped bring to America, and that were inescapable parts of the lives of these 20 slaves as they would be for so many millions more in the next two and a half centuries. Yet if we focus entirely on those historical horrors and exclusions, we risk repeating at least the latter effect, continuing to exclude African American slaves from our narratives of American identity at every stage of its post-contact development. Whereas to my mind, as I argue at length in my current book project, the exact opposite is true: there is quite simply no American identity without this community, and without all that they brought and contributed to the evolving national community. And transnational elements—not just experiences and movement, but culture, language, religion, and so many more—were one key such contribution, as illustrated by the stories and histories of those 20 Angolan American arrivals.Next 17thcentury history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other early American histories you’d highlight?

July 30, 2018: 17th Century Histories: Bacon’s Rebellion

[On July 30th, 1676 Nathaniel Bacon issued his “Declaration in the Name of the People,” kicking off Bacon’s Rebellion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that rebellion and other 17th century histories, leading up to a special weekend post on some of Virginia’s historic sites!]On the myths and realities of a 17th century uprising, and why the latter matter so much.I’m not going to pretend that I can remember my early experiences with Social Studies as a Virginia public school student with any particular clarity or precision (other than the Camp Virginia trips on which my 4th grade Social Studies teacher Mr. Kirby took us), but I do have a general sense of how some of our state’s histories were presented in those settings. And I’m pretty sure that when it came to Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, the dominant educational frame was one of class revolt, of one of the first moments in post-contact Virginian (and perhaps American) history when settlers of non-elite status rose up against the colony’s elites and power structure. Nathaniel Bacon himself was a landed planter, and a member of the Governor’s Council to boot, and thus entirely part of that elite power structure, and I don’t think those educational narratives presented him otherwise. But nonetheless, as I remember it the principal emphasis remained on the surprising coalition of lower-class white settlers and African American slavesthat Bacon assembled in support of his short-lived rebellion (it ended when Bacon died of dysentery on October 26th) against his distant relative Governor William Berkeley and what Bacon and the rebels perceived as Berkeley and his cohort’s various affronts to the colonists. And then there are the specifics of those affronts. I hope I don’t lose my VirginiaAmericanStudier credentials when I admit that I had not read Bacon’s “Declaration” in full until researching this post, and thus had not realized just how thoroughly it focuses on racist and white supremacist depictions of the colony’s Native American inhabitants. While the first two of the Declaration’s eight criticisms focus on broad abuses of power, the remaining six are entirely linked to “the barbarous heathen” and Berkeley’s unwillingness either to make total war on them himself or to allow the colonists to do so. The Declaration’s concluding section makes clear that such war is precisely the overall goal of the rebellion and its cross-cultural community: “This we, the commons of Virginia, do declare, desiring a firm union amongst ourselves that we may jointly and with one accord defend ourselves against the common enemy.” This PBS page quotes Bacon as saying that the battle was “against all Indians in general, for that they were all Enemies”; I can’t find verification of that quote elsewhere at the moment, but the sentiment is entirely in keeping with the Declaration’s arguments and goals. Bacon’s Rebellion may have featured Virginians of a certain status rising up against those of another, that is, but they did so in service of white supremacist and genocidal goals rather than class warfare ones. I would highlight two definite and one more potential (but still important) effect of better remembering those details of Bacon’s Rebellion. For one thing, the Declaration is as straightforward a 17th century historical document as one could find; we can’t know why every individual participant in the uprising joined, but we can and should be clear on why its titular leader started it and what his (and thus its) goals were. For another, there’s a broader through-line between Bacon’s combinatory coalition in service of such white supremacist goals and various other American histories: the Confederacy’s reliance on so many non-slaveholding whites to fight and die in service of the slaveholding elite and their white supremacist system; the late 19thcentury Populist and Suffrage movements’ tendencies to unite white perspectives through racial segregation and prejudice; exclusionary appeals to African Americans to oppose immigrant communities; and many more. And for a third, I would argue that the white supremacist realities of Bacon’s Rebellion offer an important counterpoint to the many well-intentioned 21stcentury progressives who claim that class, not race, is the most important element in our current political and social debates. It’s not an either-or, of course, but too often in American history, as in July 1676, “class” has been used as a tool to further oppress and exclude Americans of color.Next 17thcentury history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other early American histories you’d highlight?

July 28-29, 2018: July 2018 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]July 2: The 4th in Focus: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”: A July 4th series starts with the stunning speech that challenges us as much today as it did 150 years ago.July 3: The 4th in Focus: Born on the 4th of July: The series continues with three evolutions of a classic patriotic phrase.July 4: The 4th in Focus: Fireworks: The history, symbolism, and limits of an American tradition, as the series booms on.July 5: The 4th in Focus: “Speaking of Courage”: The July 4thsetting and climax of one of my favorite American short stories.July 6: The 4th in Focus: “Sandy (4th of July, Asbury Park)”: The series concludes with how Bruce captured the more intimate sides of Independence Day.July 7-8: The 4th in Focus: 2018 Critical Patriotism: A special weekend post on necessary 2018 pessimism and how to push beyond it.July 9: Representing Race: Jungle Fever and Mississippi Masala: A series on cultural representations of race starts with two sweltering interracial romances that work well in combination.July 10: Representing Race: Borderlands/La Frontera: The series continues with the tough but vital book that represents an ambiguous, crucial American space.July 11: Representing Race: To Kill a Mockingbird: On the anniversary of its publication, what Harper Lee’s classic novel fails to do, and where it succeeds.July 12: Representing Race: Rap Representations: The distinct but complementary visions of race and America in three rap songs, as the series rolls on.July 13: Representing Race: Seven Seconds: Two ways that the flawed but compelling Netflix show challenges our conversations about race.July 14-15: Representing Race: Mystery Fiction: The series concludes with a groundbreaking mystery pioneer and the contemporary author extending his legacy.July 16: KennedyStudying: To the Moon, America: A series on the Kennedy family starts with the Cold War limits yet compelling possibilities of JFK’s “moon shot” speech.July 17: KennedyStudying: 1963: The series continues with the bitter divisions that preceded, and perhaps contributed to, a tragic day.July 18: KennedyStudying: Chappaquiddick: Taking the long view, recognizing its limits, and striving for a balance, as the series rolls on.July 19: KennedyStudying: Conspiracy Theories: Two ways to AmericanStudy the one political assassination we can’t quite seem to accept.July 20: KennedyStudying: The Loss of Bobby: The series concludes with the possibilities of a Bobby Kennedy presidency and what was lost with his assassination.July 21-22: KennedyStudying: Historical Films: A special weekend post on how three wildly distinct historical films portray the Kennedy’s.July 23: Folk Music Studying: “This Land is Your Land”: A folk music series starts with my nominee for a new national anthem.July 24: Folk Music Studying: Joan Baez and Janis Joplin: The series continues with two alternate visions of the counter-culture and what links them.July 25: Folk Music Studying: Dylan Plugs In: The limits of the concept of the “counter-culture” and its AmericanStudies benefits nonetheless, as the series (folk) rocks on.July 26: Folk Music Studying: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”: The simple and vital song that captures the essence of political music and activist art.July 27: Folk Music Studying: 21st Century Folk: The series concludes with three artists/groups that are extending the folk legacy into our own moment.Next series begins Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

July 27, 2018: Folk Music Studying: 21st Century Folk

[On July 25th, 1965 Bob Dylan famously—or infamously—plugged in an electric guitar on stage for the first time, as part of the Newport Folk Festival. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a few other American folk music topics!]On three artists/groups who are extending the folk legacy into our own moment.1)      Steve Earle: Earle could be described as part of many musical genres—country, rock, bluegrass, and more—but I’m aware that folk has not generally (or at least not frequently) been one of them. Yet there’s a reason I linked Earle to Woody Guthrie in this post, and it’s not just that specific song in the chorus of which Earle name-checks Woody. If, as this week’s posts have certainly demonstrated, a central component of American folk music is its willingness to ask big questions about and challenge dominant narratives of American culture and identity, then I don’t think any late 20th and early 21stcentury artist has assumed the mantle of Guthrie and Seeger and Baez and Dylan any more fully or meaningfully than Steve Earle. This isn’t the only thing American folk music can or should do, but it’s at least a clear and persistent thread, and for more than three decades now Steve Earle has been weaving his way into that pattern with humor, thoughtfulness, badass outlaw perspective, and some of our best political and protest music ever.2)      Aoife O’Donovan: I’m admittedly biased here, as O’Donovan has for most of her career to date been a member of Crooked Still, a Boston-based bluegrass/folk group that also features my high school friend (and MIT grad, and Springsteen Seeger Sessions band member!) Greg Liszt on banjo. But in her own right, and especially as she has moved into her early and evolving career as a solo artist, O’Donovan has woven together a number of threads that comprise significant elements of 21st century American folk music: multi-ethnic influences and legacies (in O’Donovan’s case particularly Irish American ones); the intersections of bluegrass and traditional folk sounds and tropes with more modern singer-songwriter ones; and multi-media contexts such as Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion program (with which O’Donovan has played and toured, well before the #metoo scandals that have since enveloped Keillor). Like any genre or medium, folk music has to evolve in our own moment in order to stay relevant and interesting, and O’Donovan and her blossoming career reflect many of the most promising such evolutions.3)      case/lang/veirs: Laura Veirs is the most overtly folk member of this new supergroup, which also features country star Neko Case and the utterly unique and genre-busting k.d. lang. As a result, I don’t know that I’d call case/lang/veirs’s overall sound particularly folk-inspired or –influenced, although that’s perhaps an undertone in there (among many others). Instead, I highlight this group (rather than just Veirs herself) to note the simple fact that 21st century American folk music, like most of our artistic genres and media, is likely to rely more and more on collaborations and cross-pollinations in order to survive and prosper. Of course individual artists can still carve a space for their voice and work, as Veirs has begun to do; but it seems clear to me that the more such individuals can also work with others, finding new and bigger venues and audiences and conversations, the more sustained their success can be. Since we need a vibrant American folk music scene now more than ever, I’m all for any and every strategy that can help our folk artists survive and prosper!July Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Folk music moments or texts you’d highlight?

July 26, 2018: Folk Music Studying: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

[On July 25th, 1965 Bob Dylan famously—or infamously—plugged in an electric guitar on stage for the first time, as part of the Newport Folk Festival. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a few other American folk music topics!]On the simple and vital song that captures the essence of political music.As I tried to make clear in one of my very first posts, on Public Enemy and N.W.A., I don’t have anything against overt and aggressive political, protest music; quite the opposite, some of my favorite American songs, from the ones referenced in that post to many by Springsteenand Steve Earle (among other songwriters), fit that bill quite directly. And I certainly have moments where nothing other than a Rage Against the Machine song seems to capture my AmericanStudier’s perspective on our politics, society, or culture. Yet at the same time, I would argue that the most effective political or protest songs are often far more simple and subtle, weaving their melodies and meanings into our consciousness in a quiet and compelling way; that’s how I’d describe Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” for example (my nominee for a new national anthem, as I detailed in Monday’s post).Guthrie’s song might be the most exemplary such simple political song, but it’s got some serious competition from Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”  Inspired by some lines in a Russian novel, based on a melody from a different Russian folk song, and expanded through a series of additions (both by Seeger and other songwriters) in the decade after its initial appearance, Seeger’s song certainly has had a complicated history and evolving American presence. But at its core is an even more simple use of structure, repetition, and imagery than in Guthrie’s song—yet “deceptively simple” is probably a better phrase, because by the end of its third verse (Seeger originally wrote only the first three, although again they have been expanded since) the song has tied together allusions to environmental destruction, fleeting and lost youth, marriage and its effects on women, and the consequences of war, among the many complex and sweeping themes to which we might connect its seemingly straightforward lines and phrases.And then there’s Seeger’s evocative, political use of spring imagery. The song’s title and first verse might of course suggest the seasonal opposite, the shift toward fall that brings with it the close of each year’s most abundant flowering. Yet I would disagree, and would instead analyze the first verse as a statement about (in part) the worst kind of human response to the natural wonder that is spring’s annual rebirth. That is, those symbolic “girls” who have “picked every one” of the flowers represent to my mind the way in which we can come to take such natural wonders—and ultimately, of course, the environment and planet on which they occur—for granted, as simply more material of which we can take advantage for our own beauty and happiness. Would it be possible for us to appreciate and enjoy the flowers without picking them? Just as possible, Seeger might argue, as it would be to stop sending young men (and now women) to die in wars—which means incredibly difficult, yet worth aiming for. Sounds like a political anthem to me.Last folk studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Folk music moments or texts you’d highlight?

July 25, 2018: Folk Music Studying: Dylan Plugs In

[On July 25th, 1965 Bob Dylan famously—or infamously—plugged in an electric guitar on stage for the first time, as part of the Newport Folk Festival. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a few other American folk music topics!]On the limits of the concept of the “counter-culture,” and its AmericanStudies value nevertheless.As the Smithsonian magazine article linked above under “or infamously” notes, there are various theories as to why—or even whether—Bob Dylan received such a negative audience reaction when he used an electric guitar for his July 25th, 1965 Newport Folk Festival set. But whether he really did receive such a response or not, and whatever the motivations behind each particular unhappy audience member’s boos or jeers, I think it’s fair to say that the reason why the story has endured in our collective consciousness as fully as it has is a bit clearer. In 1965 Bob Dylan was one of the most prominent symbols of the counter-culture, the resistance to all things “mainstream” that was coming to define the decade and era so fully. Rock and roll had of course emerged out of such counter-cultural streams itself, but by 1965 had it seems come to be more closely associated with mainstream popular culture. So Dylan wasn’t just plugging in his guitar on that July evening—he was, according to these narratives, plugging into that mainstream popular culture in a way that seemed an overt betrayal of his counter-cultural identity and influence (or at least that has frequently been portrayed as such a betrayal in the histories of the decade).In many ways, that response illustrates the silliness—or at least the entirely constructed nature—of a concept like the counter-culture. For one thing, Bob Dylan didn’t suddenly change his identity in July 1965; every artist of course evolves over time, and perhaps some become more popular as part of that evolution (those who stay around for long enough are almost guaranteed to do so, or at least to be perceived as more “mainstream” due to their longstanding prominence), but the process is never black and white and certainly doesn’t take place in individual moments (however striking they might be). For another thing, to suggest that something like an electric guitar can only be a tool of mainstream music is like dismissing any novel written in first-person narration as genre fiction or the like; artistic devices can and should be use by any artist, and indeed it’s by using them that artists in various genres and sub-genres help expand those devices’ possibilities. Perhaps Bob Dylan did become more mainstream over the course of the 1960s or beyond, but to link such a transformation to one night and one instrument is at best reductive in the extreme.So I have my doubts about the value of the concept of “counter-culture” in understanding either individual artists or moments or collective communities or periods. But at the same time, I would argue that narratives of the “counter-culture” can tell us a great deal about definitions of American society and identity, both in any particular period and in overarching and ongoing ways. As my posts this week have helped illustrate, after all, folk music has long been interested in defining national questions; even if we don’t make it the new national anthem as I suggested in Monday’s post, I’m not sure there’s ever been a song more interested in depicting all things “America” than Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” So what has made such acoustic folk music necessarily “counter-cultural,” as it’s consistently been defined and as is necessary for contrasting it with Dylan’s shift to electric rock? Part of it, I’d say, is the generally critical lens, a perspective that overtly seeks to counter some of the more seemingly shared yet ultimately limiting elements of mainstream American culture. But part of it—and this is a much too complicated point for the final couple sentences of a post!—also has to do with popularity. That is, in 1965 electric guitars seemed more appealing to broad popular audiences than acoustic ones, rock and roll more hit-friendly than folk music. But perhaps there’s a space for imagining a popular counter-culture, in which case Dylan could be said to have been trying to get there.Next folk studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Folk music moments or texts you’d highlight?

July 24, 2018: Folk Music Studying: Joan Baez and Janis Joplin

[On July 25th, 1965 Bob Dylan famously—or infamously—plugged in an electric guitar on stage for the first time, as part of the Newport Folk Festival. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a few other American folk music topics!]On two alternate visions of the counter-culture, and what links them.Few (if any) musicians or artists better define the 1960s hippie counter-culture than folk singer/songwriter and activist Joan Baez (1941- ). Her first three albums, Joan Baez (1960), Joan Baez, Vol. 2 (1961), and Joan Baez in Concert (1962), all of which were certified gold, helped usher in the 1960s and the vital role that traditional and folk music would play in the decade’s social and cultural revolutions. Her social and political activism had begun even earlier, with a high school act of civil disobedience in 1958 and a burgeoning friendship with Martin Luther King, Jr.; by 1963 Baez was sufficiently linked to the Civil Rights Movement that her performance of “We Shall Overcome” was a central part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Music would remain a central part of the decade’s social movements as they deepened and evolved, of course, and artists like Baez (and Monday’s subject Bob Dylan) would thus not only become cultural complements to the activism, but would play integral roles in articulating and fighting for those progressive perspectives.The hippie movement and counter-culture were at least as closely linked to drugs as social and political activism, however, and perhaps no single musician better exemplifies that link than mercurial, tremendously talented blues singer/songwriter Janis Joplin(1943-1970). Joplin’s band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, were associated with the musical style known as psychedelic rock; their breakout performance of “Ball and Chain” was at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, an event defined at least as much by the presence of those illicit substances (among the audience, anyway) as by the unquestionably amazing artists and performances it featured. I don’t want to take anything away from Joplin’s prodigious talents as a singer, performer, and songwriter, all of which were on display in that 1967 performance and can be found in abundance on the four studio albums that she released during (or just after the end of) her far too short life and career. But at the same time, the role that heroin played in that tragic end was only the final example of the consistent presence of drugs in both Joplin’s public persona and (apparently) her private life—a presence that mirrored the central role of drugs throughout the 60s counter-culture.So Baez and Joplin reflect two radically distinct elements of the counter-culture, sides to the decade’s social movements that could even be seen as opposed (at least inasmuch as the politically activist side was working actively toward the future, while the drug side represented an overt way of checking out of the present). Yet there were other sides to those movements, and I would argue that in another way Baez and Joplin illustrate a fundamental similarity: the opportunity presented in these movements for previously silenced communities to not only add their voices to national conversations, but to become key participants in and leaders of those dialogues. There had of course been vocal women in American society, politics, and culture throughout our history—I’ve written about some of my favorite such voices hereand elsewhere—but the 60s and its social movements offered significant new spaces and forums for women such as Baez and Joplin to have their say, make their mark, and leave the nation a far different place as a result. The most tragic part of Joplin’s story, then, is that we haven’t had the chance (as we have with Baez) to continue to hear from her in all the decades since.Next folk studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Folk music moments or texts you’d highlight?

July 23, 2018: Folk Music Studying: “This Land is Your Land”

[On July 25th, 1965 Bob Dylan famously—or infamously—plugged in an electric guitar on stage for the first time, as part of the Newport Folk Festival. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a few other American folk music topics!]On my folk music nominee for a new national anthem.
This is perhaps not a particularly bold position, but I have to say that both our official and one of our unofficial but most prominent national anthems—“The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful,” respectively (the latter has been supplanted I suppose by “God Bless America,” but my issues with that song and sentiment are distinct and relate to this post)—are pretty terrible. I’m not assessing their musical qualities, both because that’s well outside of any areas of expertise of mine and because I don’t think that’s especially important when it comes to national anthems. I’m not even (shockingly, for me) analyzing their lyrics too specifically; certainly both are full of bombastic and hyperbolic moments, to say nothing of the deeply bizarre descriptions in “Beautiful” (“purple mountain majesties”? “the fruited plain”?), but that’s par for the course when it comes to anthems. No, when I say that these songs are pretty terrible, I mean as expressions of national identity.
I understand the ways in which a flag can come to stand in for a nation, although (as I wrote in this post on the Pledge of Allegiance) I think that such symbolism shouldn’t necessarily become too blindly accepted or passed down. But “Banner” focuses so fully on the flag that it has room for only the briefest and most generalizing kinds of engagement with the nation and community for which it’s supposed to stand—“the land of the free and the home of the brave” is a nice but pretty vacant sentiment, not least because I have to imagine that the British soldiers trying to take down that flag over Baltimore Harbor during the War of 1812 were probably just as brave as their American counterparts (and of course neither nation had yet abolished slavery at this time, so the competition for the land of the free was likewise tight). And while I agree with the main sentiment behind “Beautiful,” that there are lots of impressive natural landscapes under our spacious skies, the balance of its lines falls far too fully toward those fruited plans and not nearly enough toward the people who populate them. Again, such problems are in many ways inevitable when it comes to national anthems, but as Americans we do have an alternative, a national song that parallels many of these elements but defines our core identity much more satisfactorily: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (1944).
The main and most frequently reprinted verses of Guthrie’s song, which he wrote in direct response to “God Bless America,” do focus largely on the nation’s natural landscapes and beauties, but unlike “Beautiful” Guthrie grounds that admiration very explicitly and powerfully in Americans’ experiences and perspectives, on two key levels: the speaker’s own vision of the nation as he traveled throughout it, “roamed and rambled and followed [his] footsteps”; and the song’s titular and most repeated sentiments, that all of that beauty is ours and yours, that it “belongs to you and me.” Within that context, the “voice” that sounds and chants those repeated lines, while just as spiritual as “God Bless America” and as overtly symbolic as the flag, speaks directly and concretely to these living, breathing, wandering Americans, to the speaker and to his traveling companion (you). Even in that most reprinted version of the song, then—the one that ends with the “California to the New York Island” verse—America becomes not only beautiful and symbolic but also human and communal, in the best senses.  But then there are the additional verses, which extend and deepen that human element: the earliest known recording of the song, a 1944 version held at the Smithsonian, includes a verse in which the speaker steps around a sign that reads “private property” to realize that “on the back side it didn’t say nothing”; and Guthrie’s original manuscript for the song included two more verses, one which begins “Nobody living can ever stop me / As I go walking that freedom highway” and the other where the speaker has “seen [his] people” standing “there hungry … by the relief office.” All three of these verses remind us of the stakes of a truly communal vision of American identity, make clear that such a vision—and an anthem that expresses it—require the fullest and bravest meanings of freedom and democracy.
I know that the likelihood of 35,000 people standing in unison at Fenway Park and singing about condoning trespassing and witnessing lines at the relief office is not great. And I’m not unreasonable, I’d be more than happy with the rest of Guthrie’s song as the national anthem; it does everything that we expect of an anthem while better capturing the genuinely communal and shared experience of America that we should demand of one. Who’s up for a national campaign? After all, this song was made for you and me. Next folk studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Folk music moments or texts you’d highlight?

July 21-22, 2018: KennedyStudying: Historical Films

[On July 18th, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in a car accident that left his female companion Mary Jo Kopechne dead. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that Chappaquiddick incident and four other Kennedy familyhistories, leading up to this weekend post on film representations of the family!]On three Kennedy-inspired movies that offer three distinct visions of history in film.1)      Thirteen Days (2001): Thirteen Days is by far the most typical historical film of these three, a documentary-style drama (based on Ernest May and Philip Zelikow’s 1997 book The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis ) set during the height of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet even within that nonfiction origin text, and with at least some of the story’s figures still alive during filmmaking, no historical drama is a documentary or a work of nonfiction. John and Robert Kennedy are (like every figure in the film) played by Hollywood actors (Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp respectively), and the film is headlined by a major Hollywood star (Kevin Costner) playing a relatively minor figure (consultant Kenneth O’Donnell) elevated to a central role for obvious reasons. Those are the requirements of Hollywood historical filmmaking—they don’t necessarily render the story any less accurate (nor any more so of course), but they are factors we have to keep in mind for such films regardless.2)      Chappaquiddick (2018): I haven’t seen Chappaquiddick, the newest feature film about the Kennedys, and perhaps it’s just as much a historical docudrama as Thirteen Days. But in truth, American culture is in a radically different place in 2018 than it was in 2001, and the very act of making a film about the Kennedy family’s darkest and most divisive history and story (and I’m not trying to minimize that tragedy nor Ted Kennedy’s culpability in it, as I wrote in Wednesday’s post) is a necessarily political one in our current moment. Historical films can certainly be political (with Oliver Stone’s JFK a serious case in point), and that element likewise does not necessarily render them less accurate (nor again more so, although nobody tell Oliver Stone). But those that overtly connect to contemporary political debates or perspectives are shaded differently than those (like Thirteen Days) that do not, and that too becomes a factor in considering these films.3)      Bubba Ho-Tep (2002): And then there’s Bubba Ho-Tep. No sentence or two of description can do justice to this comic horror film, in which an aged Elvis Presley (or someone who delusionally believes he is) and an aged John F. Kennedy-who-happens-to-have-been-turned-into-an-African-American-man (or someone who delusionally believes he is) battle an invasion of the undead in their nursing home. Well, maybe that sentence does do some justice to the film’s unique craziness, one sold pitch-perfectly by stars Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. That craziness might not sound particularly historical, or at best like the sorts of silly alternative history featured in films like Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter . But many of the details of Davis’s Kennedy—such as Lyndon Johnson’s abandonment of him in a hospital in order to take the presidency for himself—do at least comment provocatively on historical figures and issues. As this trio of films demonstrates, there’s no one way to creatively engage with the past, and the more genres and styles we add into the mix, the broader and richer the engagement gets.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other Kennedy texts or connections you’d highlight?