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Been Here and Gone.
This volume documents Frederic Ramsey Jr.'s journeys through the 1950s South, where he traveled in search of what might still remain of an original, authentic African American musical tradition. In these photographs, songs, interviews, and narratives, Ramsey portrays farmers, railroad workers, housewives, children, church congregations, and country brass bands from Saratoga, Florida, to New Orleans, Louisiana. Ramsey's images of a past way of life capture the deceptively poor landscapes and lives that gave birth to and sustained some of our warmest and most deeply felt music.
- GenresMusic
Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1960
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July 23, 2012Most recent studies of the blues focus on its heroes and heroines: those individuals who claimed a tradition for their own and stamped their personalities on each bar of music they played. Peter Guralnick’s recently reissued FEEL LIKE GOING HOME exemplifies this approach to the musical genre. Frederic Ramsey Jr., however, takes the opposite approach in BEEN HERE AND GONE, a largely unknown masterpiece now back in print, thanks to the University of Georgia Press.
On his journeys through the 1950s South, the noted musicologist and cultural historian sought what remained of an original, authentic, and communal African American musical heritage. What he found encompassed sacred and secular music with far greater ease than readers of Guralnick, or Alan Lomax in THE LAND WHERE THE BLUES BEGAN, might think. For on Ramsey’s journeys through south Alabama, south Mississippi, and Louisiana, blues was hardly “the devil’s music,” feared and scorned by all good churchgoing citizens. Instead, worksongs, blues, and hymns each had their communally sanctioned place in typical families’ weekly routines.
The guitarists and harp players Ramsey documented most thoroughly were those living in Alabama’s Black Belt, that state’s equivalent to Mississippi’s Delta. The region provided fewer commercial venues—or “juke joints”—than the north Mississippi/Arkansas border country that produced Charley Patton, Son House, and their still revered descendents. Thus readers can infer that the Alabama blues culture Ramsey studied and commemorated in BEEN HERE AND GONE was less shaped by the tastes of audiences and the influence of traveling rival musicians ready to “cut heads” than it was by community taste and hands-on, Saturday-night participation.
Ramsey, also the author of A GUIDE TO LONGPLAY JAZZ RECORDS, doesn’t really pursue or explore the musical differences that evolved in the two states, a decision that seems intentional. His particular brand of reticence has an unexpectedly compelling effect: His authorial understatement encourages readers to become active participants in the reading process. In other words, because he is reluctant to view the residents of the Black Belt and their music as anecdotal evidence for his own agenda, the reader must formulate her own speculations and conclusions. Such consideration requires that readers “participate” to the degree that they must enter into the communal world Ramsey creates—which is the closest most readers of the Scene will ever come to actually living among the friends of Horace Sprott, to name one of Ramsey’s favorites along his journeys.
The University of Georgia Press reissued BEEN HERE AND GONE (originally published in 1960 by Rutgers) in March, and though the cover bears praise from Nat Hentoff, Studs Terkel, and THE NEW YORK TIMES, Ramsey’s book seems to have gone strangely unnoticed. Which is a genuine pity, given the work’s manifold and multileveled riches. But perhaps more important is the collection of the photographs BEEN HERE AND GONE contains: Taken two decades after Walker Evans’ famous collaboration with James Agee, LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, Ramsey’s photos capture some material nearly identical to his predecesor’s famous renditions of Alabama’s Hale County during the Depression. For example, Evans’ well-known shot of the rotting wood wall covered by sun-faded, torn posters advertising Silas Greene’s Travelling Show and F.S. Walcott’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels reappears via Ramsey’s lens, and the differences between the two photographs tell us a great deal about the limitations of art dictated by sociopolitical agenda. Even when an agenda is wholly noble—as was the case with LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN—art produced out of mission rather than discovery, always bumps against certain limits. Ramsey’s greater artistic freedom allowed him to take pictures that, like his text, represent the jubilation and joy as well as the sorrow and suffering in his subjects’ lives.
(originally published in the Nashville SCENE)
On his journeys through the 1950s South, the noted musicologist and cultural historian sought what remained of an original, authentic, and communal African American musical heritage. What he found encompassed sacred and secular music with far greater ease than readers of Guralnick, or Alan Lomax in THE LAND WHERE THE BLUES BEGAN, might think. For on Ramsey’s journeys through south Alabama, south Mississippi, and Louisiana, blues was hardly “the devil’s music,” feared and scorned by all good churchgoing citizens. Instead, worksongs, blues, and hymns each had their communally sanctioned place in typical families’ weekly routines.
The guitarists and harp players Ramsey documented most thoroughly were those living in Alabama’s Black Belt, that state’s equivalent to Mississippi’s Delta. The region provided fewer commercial venues—or “juke joints”—than the north Mississippi/Arkansas border country that produced Charley Patton, Son House, and their still revered descendents. Thus readers can infer that the Alabama blues culture Ramsey studied and commemorated in BEEN HERE AND GONE was less shaped by the tastes of audiences and the influence of traveling rival musicians ready to “cut heads” than it was by community taste and hands-on, Saturday-night participation.
Ramsey, also the author of A GUIDE TO LONGPLAY JAZZ RECORDS, doesn’t really pursue or explore the musical differences that evolved in the two states, a decision that seems intentional. His particular brand of reticence has an unexpectedly compelling effect: His authorial understatement encourages readers to become active participants in the reading process. In other words, because he is reluctant to view the residents of the Black Belt and their music as anecdotal evidence for his own agenda, the reader must formulate her own speculations and conclusions. Such consideration requires that readers “participate” to the degree that they must enter into the communal world Ramsey creates—which is the closest most readers of the Scene will ever come to actually living among the friends of Horace Sprott, to name one of Ramsey’s favorites along his journeys.
The University of Georgia Press reissued BEEN HERE AND GONE (originally published in 1960 by Rutgers) in March, and though the cover bears praise from Nat Hentoff, Studs Terkel, and THE NEW YORK TIMES, Ramsey’s book seems to have gone strangely unnoticed. Which is a genuine pity, given the work’s manifold and multileveled riches. But perhaps more important is the collection of the photographs BEEN HERE AND GONE contains: Taken two decades after Walker Evans’ famous collaboration with James Agee, LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, Ramsey’s photos capture some material nearly identical to his predecesor’s famous renditions of Alabama’s Hale County during the Depression. For example, Evans’ well-known shot of the rotting wood wall covered by sun-faded, torn posters advertising Silas Greene’s Travelling Show and F.S. Walcott’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels reappears via Ramsey’s lens, and the differences between the two photographs tell us a great deal about the limitations of art dictated by sociopolitical agenda. Even when an agenda is wholly noble—as was the case with LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN—art produced out of mission rather than discovery, always bumps against certain limits. Ramsey’s greater artistic freedom allowed him to take pictures that, like his text, represent the jubilation and joy as well as the sorrow and suffering in his subjects’ lives.
(originally published in the Nashville SCENE)
August 23, 2015
I still have a first edition of this work I bought in the summer of 1960, and was amazed to see it back in print. Unfortunately the reproduction of photographs here falls far short of the glossy paged original, but the book is worth preserving.
Frederic Ramsey Jr., on the dole of two Guggenheim fellowships, took to the road during the decade of the 1950s "in a jalopy of a car loaded with cameras, tape recorder, and the simplest sort of camping-out equipment."
He was in search of the folk roots of American jazz in the deep South, and captured on film, text, and recording, the last lingering wisp of a folk and blues scene evaporating into history. He hunts up the last of the itinerant jazz and blues singers along the railroads, highways, and byways of the deep South.
Pictures, text, and lyrics are here. Original snatches of lyrics that came to rest in "Lost My Drivin' Wheel," "Mobile-Texas Line," "Galveston Flood" and so many others are here. If you don't know what these are, then you are in for a treat.
Ramsey was the editor of the Folkways Jazz Series, and has written and published widely in Saturday Review, Jazzmen, and so many others.
Frederic Ramsey Jr., on the dole of two Guggenheim fellowships, took to the road during the decade of the 1950s "in a jalopy of a car loaded with cameras, tape recorder, and the simplest sort of camping-out equipment."
He was in search of the folk roots of American jazz in the deep South, and captured on film, text, and recording, the last lingering wisp of a folk and blues scene evaporating into history. He hunts up the last of the itinerant jazz and blues singers along the railroads, highways, and byways of the deep South.
Pictures, text, and lyrics are here. Original snatches of lyrics that came to rest in "Lost My Drivin' Wheel," "Mobile-Texas Line," "Galveston Flood" and so many others are here. If you don't know what these are, then you are in for a treat.
Ramsey was the editor of the Folkways Jazz Series, and has written and published widely in Saturday Review, Jazzmen, and so many others.
May 4, 2023
fotoboek met woorden dus misschien telt het niet?
November 27, 2011
Wonderful little book with artful writing and great photographs.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews