Michael J. Kramer's Blog, page 81

Lasching Out, In Full

what should we expect from social criticism? revisiting the work of christopher  lasch.

The Point has now put online the full text of my article, “Looking Back: Christopher Lasch and the Role of the Social Critic,” from Issue 7 (Fall 2013). Perhaps it’s a fruitful read in light of the recent controversies over Nicholas Kristof’s column lambasting academics for disengagement from public life, “Professors, We Need You!” The article led to a series of exchanges on the United States Intellectual History Blog with the esteemed Christopher Shannon. You can find the posts, and Ray Haberski’s excellent summary of them, here.

It’s An Illusion!

rainpan 43, elephant room @ museum of contemporary art, 09 november 2013.

Rainpan 43′s Elephant Room is a highbrow magic show. If you are a bit dubious, so are the performers: Louie Magic, Dennis Diamond, and Daryl Hannah are three illusionists who have created a self-conscious magic show, a meta-magic show. In doing so, they seek to place the audience and themselves in an uncertain space, somewhere between Las Vegas showroom and contemporary art museum theater, with all the implications for class and taste that this suggests.

Rainpan 43, Elephant Room. Photo: Gene Nelms.

Much of the production feels like a really good episode of Wayne’s World or perhaps Clerks or Weird Science. The magicians acted out a certain kind of adolescent male character, the geek who turns out to have cool tricks up his sleeve, quite literally.

But the best part of the show came at the end, and had nothing to do with illusions or magic tricks at all. Taking on a silent comedy persona, say Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, Dennis Diamond began a recitation of past magicians. It tapped into the whole sad clown theatrical tradition. These illusionists from the past, gone and almost completely forgotten, could not be recovered by any trick of the magician, but only by the trick of theatrical presentation. It was this engagement with the history of illusionists, not the tricks themselves, that summoned the spirits of magicians past up to the present. There was a kind of neediness expressed that grounded the other gags in something far more psychologically compelling. Suddenly Elephant Room had become a seance. It had the feel of a recitation of the dead, as if it was art, not magic, that in the end had the capacity to play the biggest tricks of all.

History News Network Review of The Republic of Rock

Nice review of The Republic of Rock published by the History News Network: Ron Briley, “Review of Michael J. Kramer’s ‘The Republic of Rock,’” History News Network, http://hnn.us/article/154742. Thanks to Ron for engaging with the book so thoughtfully.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Muir Beach Acid Test Poster Detail, 1965.

One point Ron’s rightfully makes is that I do not concentrate much on the fall or decline of the counterculture. That is a fascinating issue, one that has dominated much of the scholarship on “the sixties.” I would only say that in Republic of Rock, I grew more curious about understanding what the counterculture was, exactly, than about assessing its successes and failures. The historiography of the sixties has often focused on judging it, on registering hopes and regrets about it. This is particularly the case in writing about the counterculture by and in the shadow of a generation of historians who lived through that time period and in much of their work have confronted in one way or another the story of “the sixties.”

There has always been a much disputed sense of how to define the counterculture, and it struck me that the arguments about success and failure (nevermind Bob Dylan’s notion that, to paraphrase, there is no success like failure and failure’s no success at all) rested very much on definitional questions. So what I grew curious about was almost a more elemental question than success or failure: why did rock music matter so much to certain people? Only if we could identify and register the mattering could we begin to put the counterculture in its historical place.

What I discovered, however, was that the counterculture’s historical place was often about trying to leap or flash or jump out of its historical place. The contextualized reception of rock music time and time again revealed instances in which people wanted to unfix themselves, remake themselves, undo themselves, and in the process, reimagine and recast the world around them. To catch their desires and how these longings, emotions, corporeal struggles, and intellectual engagements shaped and were shaped by rock music became a central goal of The Republic of Rock. It kept leading me to the question of citizenship and how investigations of social belonging and democratic freedom saturated the spaces in which rock music was heard. There, in those moments, among those people, rock became a vehicle for new sensations about, feelings for, and comprehensions of social life in a charged historical moment. San Francisco and Vietnam were but two poles of a larger, global proliferation of inquires into citizenship through the unlikely medium of rock.

This circuit was what I hoped to identify and probe to grasp its dynamic and what that dynamic could tell us about the relationship between self, community, nation-state, and global scales of citizenship and civics in the 1960s. Partly by emphasizing the distinctiveness, the “exceptionalism,” of the late 60s/early 70s countercultural moment, I hoped to intervene in continual and very frustrating efforts to fit all subsequent cultural rebellions into its model.

On the other hand there is something—an energy, a charged experience of human activity and engagement—that continues to matter, that surfaced in the sixties counterculture and still seems to pop up, occasionally, in different forms. “There’s something happening here and what it is ain’t exactly clear.” “There’s something happening but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” Rock’s songwriters, from the Buffalo Springfield to Bob Dylan to many others, tried to name this “something” that had a historical force even if it seemed to vanish into thin air when scrutinized through conventional historical means.

It’s the effort to touch that “something,” to catch its power in action, that I think still matters to the telling of history. As much as we can identify the structures of thought and material force that limited or constrained the counterculture, as much as we can note the ironic twists and turns of this and other liberation struggles whose very search for freedom only deepened the forces of tyranny and unfreedom because of their complicity with (hip) capitalism or militarism, with misplaced utopianism, with the forces of patriarchy, racism, classism, and so on, so too we should pay attention to those moments when history cracks open a bit, when other sounds, sights, modes, and moods arise within the edifice of human history. It’s those moments of uncertainty, when something is happening here but what it is ain’t exactly clear, that historians need to analyze as well. These “somethings”—questions about self and society, humans and the world in which they live, rather than answers or solutions or statements of fact—are as worthy of historical study as the fact that they usually only flash up momentarily, fleetingly, and then fade away.

Coming to Northwestern This April: Dancing Around Climate Change

The Seldoms, Exit Disclaimer: Science and Fiction Ahead, Marjorie Ward Marshall Dance Center, 04/24-04/27/2014.

I am very excited to bring The Seldoms dance troupe to Northwestern this coming spring (04/24-27/2014, the weekend after Earth Day) to perform their piece, Exit Disclaimer: Science and Fiction Ahead. Exit Disclaimer is a fascinating effort to create issue-based art: it explores the rancorous contemporary political debate over climate change using the body and gesture. Sounds weird, right? It is. But it is precisely its weirdness that is inspiring as an effort to push past rhetorical stalemates to deeper levels of engagement with what we owe each other and what we owe the world in which humans reside. Asking audiences to grapple with the debate over climate change at affective, democratic, interactive, experiential levels through theatrical performance grounded in movement offers new ways of feeling, sensing, thinking, perhaps even reasoning across the sciences, arts, and humanities. I am really looking forward to these performances. We will be offering a series of pre- and post-show panel discussions as well as an enhanced print program for the residency by The Seldoms. Hope to see you there!

PRESS RELEASE:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE February 8, 2014

the SELDOMS

Contact Information

Carrie Hanson, Artistic Director

(773) 859-3030 or c.hanson@theseldoms.org

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY DANCE PROGRAM IN THE DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE PRESENT CHICAGO DANCE COMPANY, THE SELDOMS

EXIT DISCLAIMER: SCIENCE AND FICTION AHEAD

APRIL 24-27, 2014

CHICAGO – The Seldoms perform Exit Disclaimer: Science and Fiction Ahead at Northwestern Universityʼs Marjorie Ward Marshall Dance Center Ballroom Theater on April 24, 25 and 26 at 8pm and April 27 at 2pm. A pre-performance talk with Artistic Director Carrie Hanson and The Seldomsʼ dramaturg and NU faculty member, historian Michael J. Kramer, precedes the performance on Friday, April 25 at 6:45pm. A post-performance conversation follows the performance on Saturday, April 26.

Performance tickets are $20 general admission. Northwestern University Faculty/Staff are $15. Student/Senior tickets are $10. Group discounts available; call (773) 859-3030 for information about group discounts. Tickets can be purchased online at http://theseldoms.brownpapertickets.com or at the theater on performance dates (Box Office opens two hours before each performance).

Exit Disclaimer: Science and Fiction Ahead is an hour-long dance theater work that surveys our rancorous, divisive national debate about climate change, and its divergent positions ranging from denial, skepticism and indifference to urgency. Exit Disclaimer premiered at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago in 2012, and toured to Taipei, Taiwan. Within The Seldoms body of work, Exit Disclaimer sits alongside two previous works – Monument (2008) and Stupormarket (2011). Both of these earlier pieces (about landfills and consumption, and the current recession and opposing economic theories, respectively), and this new major work arise from a fundamental question that asks what tensions exist between our dual identities as consumer and citizen, and between private goods and the public good?

Defined by “inventive, unsentimental and arresting contemporary choreography” (Chicago Tribune), Exit Disclaimer is less about climate change itself, than the discourse surrounding it. Hanson is interested in how citizens form opinions about this pressing issue in which the science is complex and where counter- arguments by skeptics and deniers can be quite loud and well-funded. How does this political environment make comprehension, never mind political action, about the natural environment impossible, or at the very least extremely difficult? Incorporating humor, physical action, spoken word, and athletic dancing, Exit Disclaimer stages postures of denial, gestures of urgency, sequences of innovation, and stances of resistance. Hanson aims to demonstrate how dance, theater and the body might inform our thinking about this complex, serious issue and its attendant debate. At its premiere, The Chicago Reader said, “Hanson’s satirical, deadly serious piece bursts a lot of bubbles on a high-stakes subject.”

The Seldoms Artistic Director Carrie Hanson, one of Dance Magazineʼs “25 to Watch” in 2012, has made over twenty-five original works for the company that have been performed nationally and in Germany and Russia. Interested in unconventional performance settings, Hanson has previously placed dance in a cargo container, an Olympic-sized outdoor pool and an architectural salvage store. Recently her focus has shifted to issue-based work, such as the critically acclaimed Stupormarket (2011), a dance theater piece about the economic meltdown. She finds satisfaction in such projects for the inherent difficulty of

making dance speak to these subjects, and because they require research and consideration of situations beyond body/movement/performance. Hanson was a 2005 Chicago Dancemakerʼs Forum Lab Artist, has twice been awarded an Illinois Arts Council Choreographic Fellowship, and received a Ruth Page Award for Performance. In 2009 and 2011, she was named by New City as one of “The Players: 50 People Who Really Perform for Chicago”.

Mikhail Fiksel is a composer, sound designer, musician and a dj. His stage work includes composition and/or sound design for Dallas Theatre Center, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Geffen Playhouse, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis and Second Stage Theatre as well as numerous Chicago institutions including Lucky Plush, DanceWorks Chicago, The Goodman Theatre, Writers Theatre, Redmoon, Victory Gardens, Timeline and Albany Park Theatre Project. His recent film work includes The Wise Kids and In Memoriam (Cone Films), Both/And (Silk Road Project). He is a recipient of the Joseph Jefferson, Lucille Lortel, AfterDark and The Garland awards, and was recently honored with the Michael Maggio Emerging Designer Award. He is an ensemble member of Strawdog and 2nd Story, an artistic associate with Teatro Vista, Collaboraction and Redmoon, a resident artist with Albany Park Theatre Project and on the faculty at Loyola University Chicago. In addition, he performs and records with his ensemble Seeking Wonderland and the dynamic dj duo The Ordeal or alone, sometimes under the monikers The Red Menace or dj White Russian. www.mikhailfiksel.com

In their eleventh season, The Seldoms strive to make intelligent, charged dance that is driven by inquiry in contemporary issues, the history of ideas and art, and reflection on individual experiences. The Seldoms are alchemists of artistic media who believe that movement—along with image, sound, text and location—can expand action and environment into larger restless visions. Since 2001, the company has performed widely in Chicago, notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, and at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, at national venues including Joyce SoHo in New York, and internationally in Russia, Canada and Taiwan. The Seldoms has a history of presenting nontraditional performance to audiences; they have designed major multi-disciplinary site- specific performances in a variety of spaces including industrial, retail, historic, and outdoor sites. The company has built a reputation for bold, unusual collaborations and a full exploration of the other media supporting dance, working intensely with visual artists, architects, composers and fashion designers. www.theseldoms.org.

Venue Information

Northwestern University

Marjorie Ward Marshall Dance Center Ballroom Theater 10 Arts Circle Drive

Evanston, IL

Phone: 847-491-3147

###

Support for this residency at Northwestern University generously provided thus far by the Institute for Sustainability and Energy (ISEN), History Department, Performance Studies Department, and the Mellon Dance Studies in/and the Humanities Initiative.

More at www.theseldoms.org.

(Full disclosure, I served as historical consultant for this work and I am currently a board member for The Seldoms).

What Is the Digital? NUDHL 02/14/14 Storified

Notes from today’s NUDHL (Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory) reading group meeting. Topic: “What is the Digital?”

Jim Hodge and Josh Honn graciously led the way through materials and conversation, with lots of conversation about the intersections of new media studies, digital humanities, digital art, the human sciences, politics of capitalism and technology, forensic and formal materiality, and more. Below, I (like many out there these days) experimented with using Twitter and Storify as a way to keep notes during the meeting and to attempt to connect our face-to-face discussions with a broader range of participants beyond our seminar room. To that end, comments and further conversation are of course welcome, either/both here in comments or on Twitter at #nudhl or elsewhere!

[View the story "What Is the Digital? NUDHL 02/14/14" on Storify]

NUDHL Meeting, Fri, 2/14, 10-noon: What is the Digital?

www.nudhl.net

Please join us for a seminar discussion at the Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory (NUDHL):

Friday, February 14, 2014, 10am-12pm:

“What is the Digital?”

Nick Montfort (2003) and others have talked about a phenomenon called “screen essentialism,” which can translate to a privileging of our visual experiences shaping our understanding of “the digital.” From this, we see a continuing rhetoric that frames digital materiality around issues of design or software, while eliding inscription and hardware. Similarly, as we copy/paste, add/delete, sync and log on/off, we focus on “ephemerality,” often at the same time  embracing an immaterial understanding of “the cloud.” In this session we’d like to take a step back in order to better understand “the digital” by exploring readings that approach digital technology materially and as historical and cultural artifacts in order to move beyond the screen and better answer the question “what is the digital?” —James Hodgeand Josh Honn

Event Details

Friday, February 14, 2014, 10AM-12PM

Kaplan Humanities Seminar Room, Kresge Hall

For more information, contact Josh Honn.

Recommended Readings

Lisa Gitelman, “Media as Historical Objects” (2006)

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Awareness of the Mechanism” (2008)

Jussi Parikka, “The Geology of Media” (2013)

Optional Readings
Jussi Parikka, “Dust and Exhaustion: The Labor of Media Materialism” (2013)

The Republic of Rock on Audible

Now you can listen to eight+plus unabridged hours of glorious rock music…sort of. The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture is now available on Audible! Thankfully it is not my awful voice reading it, but the smooth tones of Lance Axt. Enjoy…yours for only $19.95 or free with a 30-day trial membership.

History On the Line

the digital timeline as tool for thinking about “master narratives” of the past.

The start of Digitizing Folk Music History focuses on going microscopic and macroscopic all at once. Students dive in to annotate documents directly, using digital technologies quite literally (actually, virtually) to “get into” history. This is the past up close. But we also read, watch, and listen to synthetic material about the US folk music revival as a whole. Students need to grapple with the past at a distance, too. For better or worse, they need to organize in their minds a sense of the existing “master narrative.” Only then can they start to critique it, challenge it, or confirm certain aspects of it based on engagements with particular bits of evidence.

The digital timeline becomes a tool for thinking about “master narratives.” And it works because, paradoxically, it fails. There really is no way to create a perfect timeline of the folk revival that adequately represents the full dimensions of its story. Sure, we can plot out key events and name oft-mentioned figures (though which ones given finite space? And why those ones and not others?). But how do we design a linear timeline of a cultural movement whose story is as much about the more ambiguous undercurrents of aesthetic, economic, and political exchange that do not always manifest themselves into ordered markers in the march of time?

For students, the construction of a digital timeline thus becomes an opportunity to start to organize the overarching story of the folk revival into a coherent narrative. They can consider how others have organized the story, why certain orderings predominate, and how they themselves and their fellow students might grapple with the creation of a linear narrative of the folk movement. Simultaneously, the timeline is a device for gaining greater awareness of the ultimate artifice of constructing historical narratives—of how the ways in which the story gets told are often contested operations of power that matter as much as registering what “actually” happened or occurred. The making of a timeline forces students to see, in multiple senses, history on the line, how the past is not made up from scratch, but is nonetheless full of fraught choices about significance and importance that evoke as many silences and gaps as they do clarifications and convincing trackings of causality and development.

The US folk revival’s story is over a century long now and one of its key apexes in the late 1950s and early 1960s now occurred roughly 50 years ago. Today’s students typically have a vague sense of the revival. But it is only vague. Fascinatingly, many associate the folk movement with everything from a vague sense of bluegrass as traditional music to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez as important figures to, more strangely for those who lived through the “great folk scare” itself, the imagery of Janis Joplin and the Woodstock Festival. Those last associations are not entirely wrong, of course, but they remain a bit off since students are conflating the height of the rock era with the folk revival that partly fed into it and was, just as crucially, dramatically abandoned by the turn to electric guitars and the full-blown countercultural sensibilities in the 1960s.

Why students have these associations would make for important further inquiry, but the point for now is that unless they have already gotten the bug for traditional music, and a few students usually have, the folk revival remains as distant and strange to them as the history of the Civil War. They kind of know it happened and that it was, perhaps, important. But that is about it. Therefore, in a history course, we will need to take time first to grasp and then to grapple with the existing “master narrative” of the folk movement since students do not necessarily have that in place when they begin the seminar. Which is to say, before they can start to make their own historical meaning, offer their own interpretations, and mount their own arguments that are grounded in evidence from something such as the Berkeley Folk Music Festival archive, students will have to develop a “feel” for the way people before them and around them (baby boomers, their children, various groups in and around the United States and the world) have already told the story of the revival. The timeline becomes a mechanism for doing so, and the digital timeline particularly so.

As students read, listen, and watch tellings of the story of the revival, we work together to start to place them in chronological order. After two weeks of reading Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970, watching the director Jim Brown’s American Roots Music documentary film, and listening to a lot of folk music mixes, we begin to place people, places, genres, events, concepts, and ideas on the board during our seminar:

With our chalkboard sketch of a folk revival timeline assembled collectively, students then set off to create their own digital timelines. We use Timeline.js (in the past I have also used TimeRime). The digital timeline builds on what one could do with pen and paper, to be sure; what it brings to that “analog” mode is a greater ductility of arrangement: students can arrange and re-arrange, test out orderings of the past and then reorganize them. After completing their individual timelines through Timeline.js, students write a short reflective essay about the process of developing their timeline in which they address the question “if my digital timeline were a term paper, its argument would be….”

The combination of reading, watching, digital building/making, and reflection accomplishes multiple tasks: an opportunity to organize a “master narrative” while at the same time challenging the hegemony of any one dominant telling of the past; a chance to think about the relationship among elements that compete to make history what it is, such as people, events, structures, and other less definite forces and energies, while also examining how they might align; and a moment for students to control their sense of the past we are studying while also enhancing their individual—and our collective—humility in pursuing this impossible yet essential project.

A few student timelines:

Wooden – BFMF Timeline

This post builds upon earlier reflections in the post, “There Is a Timeline, Turn, Turn, Turn,” 10 November 2012.

Next up: Audio remixes.

More from Digitizing Folk Music History 2014 Edition.

More on the Digital Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project.

Writing On The Past, Literally (Actually, Virtually)

annotation as a means for getting students writing on history.

In the first weekly assignment for Digitizing Folk Music History, students use the digital annotation tool Crocodoc to write directly on the past. Which is to say, students are able to annotate archival and historical documents in their digital form (Crocodoc is one of a number of annotation tools out there, see for instance MIT’s Annotation Studio). Students in my course are able not only to write on historical materials in the sense that they can explore the topic of the revival, they can also quite literally (though more accurately, virtually) make marks upon the documents themselves. They can, in some sense, now touch the documents, draw on them, comment on them, and overlay their own experience of reading directly onto and into the material itself.

However, they do all this in a rather paradoxical fashion since they are after all in fact viewing not the artifacts themselves, but instead the digital surrogates of the archival artifacts. Such are the ironies of the digital medium: distance provides a new kind of immediacy, the retreat from the material dimensions of the material to the virtual ones in fact allows a new kind of material access.

What does all this play and paradox mean however? It signals many things, from the need for new ontological and epistemological understandings of historical evidence in the digital epoch to the opportunity for new kinds of tactics of historical inquiry that harness what the digital can do (and make sense of what it cannot).

Pedagocially, I have found that annotation is a vital way to get students more “into” history in all senses of the preposition. It demystifies evidence while also enlarging its significance. It reminds students, or gets them to consider for the first time, the vexing but powerful ways in which history is constituted by interpretations of evidence, of artifacts, and of all that they reveal or conceal, disguise or simply ignore.

It also quickly gets students thinking about scale: how does the microscopic from one article relate to macroscopic understandings of the folk revival writ large (sung large?)? How does this detail over here (say an image of Joan Baez on the cover of Time magazine in 1962 relate to an advertisement next to the article about Baez and the folk revival for the 1963 Chevrolet Corvair Monza (an ad clearly geared to women who might aspire to be like or at least admire Baez)? Annotation becomes a way of enlivening awareness of details and of their relationships to other details. It challenges students to notice things and to make meaning of them as if the past were a puzzle of myriad details caught up (or sometimes even missing) in the artifacts we deem our evidentiary basis for historical interpretation.

It also invites students to lose themselves in this great mass of details, to glimpse the great mess of the past from which history is forged, made, and, potentially, remade again and again in relation to different uses of different bits of evidence. In this sense, my annotation assignment works against the grain (against the bitstream?) of contemporary developments in the digital humanities. I ask students not to speed up analysis, not to harness computational means to do previously laborious scholarly activities more quickly but rather precisely the opposite: I want them to use the digital to slow down (as in, since we’re working on the folk revival, “slow down, you move to fast”—sorry couldn’t resist).

Digital technology does not make details more seamless and flowing in this case, as in little modular bits and bytes of data that can be algorithmically analyzed as a whole (though that’s worth doing too). Rather, it makes the details more sticky and firm. The dematerialization of artifacts into code allows, through annotation, for a kind of re-materialization of evidence in its many discrete and multidimensional parts. The ability for digitized artifacts and annotations of them to converge in one space on our screens offers a new kind of sensitivity to particularity. Modularity and flow enliven particularity and singularity.

Annotation also slows down the path from evidence to argument by asking students to do more of the connective work of description and explanation: not just why this detail or that one, but also, more simply, what is this detail? What do you see? What do you here? What is there in the evidence? Then, one might begin to ask not just what is the analytic end to which the detail led, but also how can you, as historian, document through annotation the path from evidence to description to significance? One cannot, in this version of annotation, as easily jump to conclusions, as it were. One must instead spend more time making sense of how details can serve as the fuel for the engine of historical meaning-making.

And that particular detail that emerges from working on digital annotation does not merely have significance for history or for digital humanities, but also for the ways in which we make convincing arguments and arrive at particular stances and opinions in the contemporary world: as thinkers, as observers, as democratic citizens.

Next up: Timelines.

More from Digitizing Folk Music History 2014 Edition.

More on the Digital Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project.

Pete Seeger’s Doink

another side of pete seeger.

In the coming days, much reflection will rightfully take place about the life and work of Pete Seeger, who died  today at the age of 94. What a life!

Like many, my first memories of Pete Seeger’s sound and style come from his children’s records, like this one, which I remember staring at for many an hour:

That album is a reminder of the value of earnestness, of Seeger’s expressions of decency bordering on goofiness yet always undercut by an enormous regality. This was simple music, yet it also came across as serious music too.

But now, working on a history of the US folk music revival, I have grown to love another side of Pete Seeger (to paraphrase the Bob Dylan album title). There was a kind of trickster slyness to Seeger at times, a deft move away from the earnest to other, weirder, funnier registers of emotion. The more you listen, the more you realize that the surface calm and interest in harmony sat musically and performatively atop a far more complex cauldron of emotions. There was a darkness, an earthiness, a kind of bodily urge surging up with Seeger, continually pushed down, dodged, avoided, transmuted, sublimated. Below the patrician New Englander, disguised as a folksy backwoodsman but never hiding his nobility, was also, indeed, something paradoxically far more backwoods and raw. The otherness to which he reached down to access in “the folk” turned out to be within himself too. He made a strange connection.

My favorite moment of this flits by in quite but memorable way on “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” To hear it, you have to listen close to this plaintive Irish “ailing” song adopted by Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, with words rewritten by Seeger and fellow member of the Weavers Lee Hays. I call this little microscopic moment…Pete Seeger’s doink.

It arrives in the first verse of the song, and subliminally sets the tone for the rest of this eerie tune, whose shifting minor and major keys are rather jarring, disconcerting, and give the song a kind of straw bale biblical hay ride vibe as its story unfolds in a tale of love and family and durability with an undercurrent of randy humor. It’s a sweet story, as sweet as wine if you will, but, like any good wine, it is also full of other flavors and notes too.

In verse one, having never kissed a girl before, the male lead singer (Seeger on the 1951 version by the Weavers) finally does so. He kisses her and—doink! goes Seeger’s banjo—he decides to kiss her again. Right there among the cycling minor chords: a banjo boner!

It’s obscene, but it is also cute. It’s a little dirty joke buried in the seemingly innocuous pop-folk (even pap-folk if you are feeling all anti-Kingston Trio today) of the Weavers’s sound. It’s a little bit of Aristophanes bursting in on the campfire kumbaya.

And it’s that little edge popping out for a moment from the smooth sing-along surface—something vulgarly flashed for a split second before dissolving back into the mix, just a little quick bit of nastiness, a brief transgression, a twang of the illicit (did that just happen?)—that is worth remembering about Seeger alongside all the righteous hagiography that will now fittingly ensue.

So added to everything else that made him a towering, legendary, Johnny Appleseed figure of American music and culture, let’s lift a naughty banjo and a sweet glass of wine to Pete Seeger’s doink!

Minor correction: for those of you keeping careful score at home, on a number of versions, the guitar makes the “doink” sound, and on others both banjo and guitar doink together.