Dreams of the Noble Old Transcript

- [Alan] America has a patchwork culture of the dreams and songs of all its people This is Alan Lomax. Come with me now on an adventure in our marvelous patchwork culture. Folklorists like myself spent a great deal of time with old people, people of the early generation. What we're looking for though is not the old things, but basically the roots of the culture. We're looking for the keel of the culture so that we can, in them we find the things, the values, the forms, the shapes, the songs, the ceremonies, which go back as far as the living memory can take us into the past and we establish therefore the actual baseline keel of the cultures.

- Margaret Mead once told me that when an older person put her hand on the arm of one of her grandchildren, his or her grandchildren, she really passed on the whole culture. Somehow it goes right through the skin.

- It takes a long time to understand a way of life, and a way of life is summed up in the arts, and at the very peak of the art, you may not really get it until you worked with it all your life.

- Uncle Tom Denson always said that if you don't like this type music, you betta get away from it because if you hang around it much, it'll get a hold of you and you can't get away from it.

- The amazing thing is after a life with them, I just can't get over their resiliency. I'm 87. 13 children. Pleased to count 89 grandchildren. Good god, I don't know how many great grandchildren. Too many.

- What?

- [Woman] How long have you been playing the fiddle?

- Well here's the great ol' Tommy Jarrell, the Dean of American fiddlers in his time, playing at a Peach Pie Supper, here in Mount Airy, North Carolina. Tommy's been playing at affairs like that ever since he was a boy. Tommy's life has been that and really joyful occupations. I mean, he's as full of beans as he ever was when he was a kid. He's been a bootlegger all of his life, and made the best whiskey that he could make, and the best music. Tommy Jarrell, you've invited me to lunch and given me some his cold pinto beans. Tommy, they're about as good as anything I ever ate. You cooked 'em yourself, did you?

- I sure did.

- [Alan] Well they must be healthy 'cause they've kept you going. How old are you? You look like you're about 16, but I guess you might be a little bit older.

- [Alan] He was a fiddler was he?

- [Alan] I don't believe that now.

- [Alan] Well how did you learn then?

- [Alan] This is the country poor Ellen Smith got killed too wasn't it? You know about her?

- [Alan] What's the story on that one?

- Well a fella down there got her pregnant and he didn't wanna marry her so he shot her. Put her in a brick pile and tried to burn her up. And my dad said that, they never would've hung him if he hadn't got scared, and confessed to it. They didn't have enough evidence, so they hung him, but he got scared and he owned up to it, and they hung him anyhow. I know a song about it.

- [Alan] Can you sing it?

- Yeah. I'd ask him about it some time ago, It used to be a $50 fine to play that or sing that song in the city limits of Winston-Salem.

- None of this is in books. How you play the bow is something that is a total mystery. You have to watch the fiddler do it, and my friend Alan Jabour the authority on American fiddlers says that the real heart of fiddling is in the right hand, in the bow, and just how you pull that bow settles all the accents and the tunes, and gives it that kind of syncopation, and what ol' Tommy is doing is playing threes and twos inside the beat quite freely, so it's syncopated in the American style. He's been an eclectic, picking up the best tunes of his tradition, polishing them and passing them on. And I got the impression when I visited him that the party never stopped. The whiskey was locked away in the back closet, and you couldn't have any unless Tommy decided it was time to have a drink. He knew how to do that because he knew how strong the whiskey was since he'd made it himself.

- How long we supposed to do this? I made that verse to "Sugar Hill."

- [Alan] How did courting go? How did you manage to court a girl back in your young days?

- Well, you get off into a room to yourself, you know? Talk to 'em. The old folks wouldn't bother you in the room.

- [Alan] You remember how you met your wife and got her to agree to marry you?

- Well. We was a-hoeing corn in the corn field when I asked her. I told her I said, "Now you know that I make whiskey, "I drink whiskey, I go to dances, I play the fiddle, "and I play a little poker once in a while." I said, "If you think we can get along," I said, "We'll get married and right now, "if you think we can't, right now's the time to say so, "we'll just call it quits right here." That's the way it all happened. All her daddy said, "Now, Tommy I want you to be good to her." I told him, "I would," and I was. We lived together about 41 years and she got her hip broke and it never would heal up. She took the pneumonia right at the last Stayed down at Baptist hospital from the 28th of October 'til the 13th day of February. This is Ivy Green Church and this is where a lot of my people's buried. My father and mother is buried here and that's a great uncle buried right there. He was in the Civil War with my grand daddy. He was born in '65, he was a carpenter. He didn't make no music, but he was a good singer. Julia got fired up. She poured some kerosene in a wood stove, and thought the fire had gone out, had about a quart of kerosene in the can and it blowed up with her, burned her pretty bad. She lived two or three days.

- [Alan] Tommy used to say about folks who didn't appreciate mountain music enough well, "I wonder what those folks are gonna do "when they get to heaven, just walk away?" And I reckon if he has his wish and I have mine, he's up there right now, behind the pearly gates with his fiddle band and his young people, keeping the mountain tradition alive.

- I was born in Mississippi. And my uncle said I was 67 years old, but they told me up yonder in their old folk's home I was 75. I don't know how old I'm is, but I'm just goin' on what they say. And I've been fooling around playing the ol' guitar a long time.

- Jack is the very obverse of Tommy. He's a very shy man, very withdrawn, lives inside of himself. He ran a country juke for many years, in one of those silent severe bartenders and then he played his music for the dances, and his music grew in the time when there was the only the guitar player and the singer in the corner of the room. That's all the orchestra there was, but by the time the feet of the dancers began to go with that rhythm, you could hear it half a mile or a mile away and it was like a set of African drums because they were playing polyrhythm with their feet.

♪ Mama don't allow Boogie Woogie ♪

♪ Mama don't allow ♪

♪ Mama don't allow Boogie Woogie ♪

- [Alan] Your father played church music didn't he?

- [Alan] How long you been playing?

- [Jack] Ooh Lord.

- [Alan] How many times you've been married?

- [Alan] Have any children?

- [Jack] No one

- Singing and making music is a kind of dreaming out loud for others, pulling the listener into the dream and it's taking care of, during this daytime dreaming, of lots of the deep feelings and problems that live in the audience. Old people are very good at this because in old ages we all know there's a lot of daydreaming. This is actually the way that people create. Many of the greatest discoveries in human history have been made in daydreams. Great chemist daydreamed the structure of the hydrocarbon atom, and I imagine that's how the blues began in somebody's dream.

♪ Fishin' after ♪

♪ After ♪

And he tears the three stanza line of the blues all to pieces, he fragments it into kind of a almost E.E. Cummings verse, so that the individual words, the individual images stick out of this poetry. It's no longer two lines and a punch line, it's very complicated African poetry.

♪ Baby one more time, baby gal one ♪

- This is the heart of the Delta. Hollandale, Mississippi, and we're at the home of a member of one of the royal families of the blues, Sam Chatman. The Chatman family was here when the blues began, almost a 100 years ago. They helped to make them and popularize them, and when you think about it, it was almost a miracle that occurred then, deep in the heart of the Delta.

- [Alan] A kid would eat in a trough?

- [Alan] Do you remember how the tunes he played to you?

- Yeah, I remember practically all of 'em, all of 'em is just old things about can't get the saddle on the old gray mule, Little Liza Jane.

♪ Whoa, mule ♪

♪ Can't get the saddle on the old gray mule ♪

♪ Chicken in the bread pan ♪

♪ Pickin' up dough ♪

♪ Everybody time for more ♪

♪ Can't get the saddle on the old gray mule ♪

♪ Can get the saddle on the old gray mule ♪

♪ Whoa, mule ♪

♪ Can't get the saddle on the old gray mule ♪

When they'd do that they'd say, "Everybody promenade to the bar."

♪ He's a country man and he just don't know the town ♪

♪ He's a country man ♪

♪ He just don't know the town ♪

♪ He done sold his cotton now he is walking 'round ♪

♪ Just make him down a pallet on your floor ♪

♪ And send him back to the fields ♪

♪ So he can raise some more. ♪

Oh yeah, baby just make me down a pallet on your floor.

- [Alan] Got a whole musical family, didn't you?

- [Alan] When was that, what period?

- In Chatman, we meet a real professional, and that was characteristic of the blues very early. It was a chance for the talented Black musicians of the Deep South to become professional and in doing so, they made a transform of folk music into something that could live and grow in an urban setting, and the Chatman family was very important in all this, as he'll tell us.

- Peter Chatman up here in Memphis, they called him Memphis Slim, that's one of my sister's boys. And if you ever heard of Charlie Patton? Well, Charlie Patton's my brother.

- [Alan] Charlie Patton and others in the Chatman connection were among the first to record the blues. "Sugar Blues" was one of the early commercial ones.

♪ Everybody singing the sugar blues ♪

♪ The whole town is ringing ♪

♪ I love my coffee ♪

♪ I love my tea but the doggone sugar blues ♪

♪ Soured on me ♪

♪ I've been lonesome I'm feeling bad ♪

♪ Ain't got no time to lose ♪

♪ You say what you please ♪

♪ And do what you choose I got those sugar blues ♪

♪ Sweet sugar ♪

♪ I sweet the sugar blues ♪

We have to remember that it was through the blues and through jazz that open and frank eroticism has come into all of our lives. It was that way. George Bernard Shaw and Margaret Sanger and others can rant and rave. But it was Bessie Smith that tore the curtain down.

- Yeah I always keep the blues. The blues stays with me, that's my main occupation. Blues, I go to bed with 'em, I get up with 'em.

- [Alan] You come to the heartland of Black culture, along these roads, beneath these bearded live oaks, these are the Sea Islands where in a sense, the earliest transformation of African culture into an English language form happened. Janie grew up in very hard times. Her father was a fisherman, and illiterate and she had very little schooling, and she had to work in the fields, from the time she was a very young girl, and the big thing in their life was the praise house. The kind of place that the Blacks put together under slavery for their own kind of worship because the weren't permitted to go to the White church, they had their own little shack out in the woods somewhere, which was non-denominational, where they got together and praised Jesus and the prophets and dreamed of freedom

- And there you see the way spirituals were originally sung. The preacher might preach but the sister in the corner that raised the songs and got everybody to shout Janie had a wonderful courtship. He was a fisher boy and she tells about it still at this age with a kind of shy, charm as if it happened yesterday.

- She's been a mother of a big family, and her daughters have learned her songs, and she's taught her daughters to sing and they're teaching their children to sing the songs for oyster catching and for work as it went in the days of her grandfather. These are songs that would go back in the Black tradition beyond the Civil War, maybe 125 years.

♪ Way bye an' bye ♪

♪ We can have a good time ♪

♪ Way bye an' bye ♪

♪ We can have a good time ♪

♪ Way bye an' bye ♪

♪ We can have a good time ♪

♪ Way bye an' bye ♪

♪ Then we'll have a good time ♪

♪ Way bye an' bye ♪

♪ We gonna have a good time ♪

♪ Way bye an' bye ♪

Here's Janie, leading a performance of "Heaven Bound," a Black religious drama that's like a medieval mystery play, with heaven on one side of the church and hell on the other. Janie of course being the mother of the church, the center of the community, the carrier of tradition and the innovator, is the director of "Heaven Bound" in her own church.

♪ Way bye and bye ♪

♪ I want to rise ♪

♪ Way bye and bye ♪

♪ Come on boys and we can't wait ♪

♪ Come on boys and we can't breathe ♪

♪ And I gotta go down ♪

♪ By the Watergate ♪

♪ It's a Watergate boogie ♪

♪ Watergate boogie she's about got me ♪

♪ My wife come home turn on the TV ♪

♪ The Watergate bug were a-peeping at me ♪

♪ It's a Watergate ♪

♪ Watergate ♪

♪ Watergate boogie she's about got me ♪

♪ Watergate, Watergate ♪

♪ The Watergate boogie she's about got me ♪

You know, John Stuart Mill said that you judge the genius of a country by how many eccentrics it has. America, and particularly folk America, is full of these eccentrics. These oldsters, and they're regarded as eccentrics because they're not up to the latest thing because they haven't allowed themselves to be covered over by pavement and haven't allowed themselves to be homogenized, they've kept something distinct because they saw its value and like all good artists, wanted to pursue those values. In this medieval ballad the foot page runs to tell his Lord that his lady is being unfaithful. And Nimrod performs it with gestures in a way that we've seen nowhere else except among the Gypsies of Scotland.

♪ He called his army to his side ♪

♪ Told them how far to go ♪

♪ They fly--bugles to their mouth-- ♪

♪ They begin to blow, blow ♪

♪ They begin to blow ♪

Nimrod, man of parts, balladeer, Union leader, deeply concerned with the eternal values.

- It's as easy for a camel--but now it has a meaning there-- It's as easy for a camel to go through the eye of a needle as for a rich man to enter in the gates of heaven. These rich men like that--their high collars-- didn't know what a poor man has to go through with.

- These Scotch Irish people, when they were introduced to the Bible by Calvin and those people, they took this as a torch for freedom. They learned the Bible as they say from lid to lid, and they could argue every point with anybody who tried to trick them intellectually, and that is Nimrod's ancestry.

- [Alan] And you only been married how long?

- Soon to be 55 years. 13 children--last to count 89 grandchildren, God I don't know how many great grandchildren. Too many.

- I'm Phyllis Boyens, Nimrod's daughter, youngest daughter.

- [Alan] And you were born and raised?

- I was born and raised in Cherry, West Virginia, Mingo County, which is right in the heart of the coal fields. And I grew up in the coal camp. Daddy worked in the mines.

♪ Quack said the crane as he sat on a log ♪

♪ Once I caught me a big bull frog ♪

♪ He kicked and he struggled and he got away ♪

♪ I ain't had no dinner on this long day ♪

♪ Oh Death ♪

♪ Spare me over for another year ♪

- The folk arts have always been passed down generation to generation through the older people, and this means that for mankind's whole history, whatever we have of imagination and fantasy and story and civilization has gone from the older generation to the younger generation, and that's what old people have done, that's why they've been venerated and adored in great part because in them the young people found the real treasures, the keys to the culture. Here in the hills of Northern Georgia, an amazing style of country counterpoint, they might call it American Backwoods Bach, is being kept alive at an old-fashioned singing school. Now the singing school gave rural Americans a musical education, using song books filled with their favorite religious folk songs like "Amazing Grace," arranged for several voices, and trained them to sing all the parts by giving each note a distinctive shape. They called themselves the shape-note singers. The first stage, you'll learn the shape-note system at smaller singing schools.

- This is a musical staff. Five lines and four spaces. And these is what the music is written on. The shapes are fa, sol, la and mi. The fa, sol, la is do. fa, sol, la, fa, sol, la. And then the mi is a leading note, between major and minor, and it's only used one time.

♪ fa sol la fa sol la ♪

♪ mi fa ♪

♪ fa mi la sol fa la sol fa ♪

Sacred Harp singers sit in the hollow square because they're singing for their own enjoyment. The leader stands in the middle of the square and faces the tenor, the melody of the song, and always to the left is the treble, always to the right of the leader is bass, and always directly behind the leader is the alto, and this way the sound all comes to the middle and the leader can get the full benefit of the sound coming to the middle.

- [Alan] It's a democracy. Everyone who wants to, gets a chance to lead the meeting in their favorite hymn.

- Uncle Tom Denson always said that if you don't like this type music, you'd better get away from it because if you hang around it much, it'll get a hold of you and you can't get away from it. That was one of his pet slogans. Many of these folks know all four parts of several hundred of songs by heart or can sight read them, and can shift from part to part at will.

- First my name, Chester Wooten, and I grew up in the country, went to school in the country. I'd go to school in the morning, a lot of times and me and some of the boys would play hooky. After we got to the schoolhouse, we'd go in the woods, stay 'till the school was over. That's how I got my education. We grew up during the panic, had a hard time living at home, but we would work hard in the field and we'd come in at night--why-- we'd all get out on the porch after we eat supper. Get out on the porch and my daddy'd start singing, then we'd start joining in, and we'd sing till bedtime. A lot of times we'd sing till our neighbors would drive in and help us. We'd have a singing before we went to bed.

- [Alan] These front porch family sings lead to the all-day shape-note singings with dinner on the ground that take place all across the Upper South from Georgia to Texas during the summer. These shape-note singings are probably survivals of Scots clan gatherings, where you'd feast together, tend the graves of your forebears, and renew family ties with song.

- These people around, you see here, that I've been in contact with, met up at singings many times. Well they just become to be like kins people. You know, they're just like kin. I'm just as proud to meet 'em as if I'd a met one of my brothers or sisters, you know, something like that. Some of 'em I'm just as proud to meet. There's a close tie in this group of singers and singing of this nature. There's a close connection. They sometimes, they get to feeling good, and they just get to rejoicing. And I have seen them just yell out. I mean overjoyed, you know what I mean.

- We're all used to having opera houses, symphony halls and chamber music places where the fine arts can be preserved, but we have forgotten that all the other arts need such places themselves in our time and that's what we have here in Preservation Hall. And the genius of this place was that it provided an absolute, legitimate living for some of the great oldsters out of jazz to come together and play every night for the people who wanted to hear it. The effect was remarkable. Before long, Bourbon Street, which had been a dead article for 25 years, began to fill up with other jazz places, with other kinds of jazz. And after a little bit, the jazz parades, which had almost disappeared, began to happen again.

♪ When the saints go marching in ♪

♪ When the saints go walking in ♪

♪ We all got to be in the number ♪

♪ When the Bubba Humphrey come with that ol' clarinet ♪

♪ When the saints go marching in ♪

♪ We all got to be in the number ♪

♪ When Mr. Chester with that bass on his back ♪

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Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old

1991 | 58mins