Evo Bluestein
Some thoughts and writing of Evo Bluestein
My tribute to Mickie Zekely for his memorial October 8, 2023
I’d like to start with a quote from Mickie:
“My parents didn’t know what to make of me. They did not know what music was. My incredible passion and devotion to music was a whimsical mystery to them.”
Mickie was one of my early role models. He was someone who chose his own path in music.
In my twenties, when I was performing and teaching oldtime music, I heard about a music gathering called Lark Camp. I contacted the founder, Mickie Zekely, who suggested that I attend a February camp. It was 1984, the year of the infamous Mud Lark–we all experienced the wet and foggy Mendocino Woodlands. We played and danced and, thereafter, I worked for many years at Lark.
Years before Lark Camp though, Mickie was well known for the music parties he threw at his house. In his words:
“There’s lots of woods behind our house where people could camp. The parties grew to be around a hundred people by the late 1970s–using our one bathroom. Word spread and we’d get incredible touring musicians who would come stay with us.
We heard about a state park down the road that had an area called The Mendocino Woodlands. The Woodlands had cabins, and a big kitchen, so we decided to move the party down the road.
I think it was in June, in 1980, and I rented it for four days and invited everybody I’d ever met who played music. We all chipped in a few bucks and had potluck food, and 250 people showed up. I couldn’t believe it!
I walked down to the dance hall and there were a dozen people playing music for people dancing. They were doing something called contra dance, which I’d never even heard of. It was so beautiful . . . I just started crying. I didn’t know anything about dance, just music.
All this spontaneous stuff was happening that far exceeded the parties that I’d hosted at my house. It was an amazing experience. I think we rented it again in the fall, and then for a summer event, and then for Mud Lark. That’s where Lark Camp came from. It was just moving the party down the road, a little further into the woods.”
Years later, when the Woodlands Camp One got overcrowded, Mickie rented Camp Two for the overflow. Eventually, Lark grew to include all 3 camps within The Woodlands. Mickie liked to accommodate growth and hired shuttle busses to transport campers from one camp to another. This did not please everyone, but it allowed more people to participate in the magical world of Lark.
Lark Camp was just one facet of Mickie. Cathie Whitesides once asked me, “Have you seen what Mickie has created? It’s quite something.” She was not talking about camp, but rather the world
instrument catalogue Lark in the Morning, which was a novel enterprise that employed Mickie’s friends and musicians.
When I first saw it, he was already starting to computerize his business–direct from the pygmy forest. This was so foreign to me. Who among us knew, at that time, how important computers would be in our lives? He was way ahead of the game in many ways and not afraid to learn–an autodidact from the day he was born. He told me:
“I had to learn to program html by hand with no real manual. All the things you could find out about it kept changing every day. I put up the first music store on the internet in 1992 or 1993. We had a 28K dial up connection and we were able to make it happen. The business grew from there. We eventually had three stores, a huge warehouse and 32 employees. Meanwhile, Lark Camp grew, and I kept playing music.”
At the end of one Lark camp Mickie said to everyone, “You’ve had a great week, take it with you and show it to the rest of the world.”
Like good ambassadors, that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.
*(full Mickie interview in the book Road to Sweet’s Mill)
Listen to Waltz for Mickie
Local Culture • October 2023
Native American Ron Goode Talks to Evo Bluestein
Editor’s note: Ron Goode and his wife, Myra, live in Academy, California, an unincorporated township in Fresno County, about 13 miles northeast of Clovis. Before Fresno existed, Academy was the main mail stop for this area of the central valley, possibly Butterfield Overland Mail. Below are excerpts from a conversation we had during Covid, around 2022. –Evo Bluestein and Juliana Harris
“We don’t know most of our songs anymore, compared to what we used to know. Each song has a design for what it is to be used for. We were not a big hand drum group. We used foot drum.
We would have six-foot hollow logs upon the ground. Four men would get on the log with their podo–a big walking stick. While you’re dancing and singing, you are also pounding upon your log drum.
When we played hand games, we not only used hand clappers, sometimes we used the hard stalk with the log, to drum on. We had a taller drum with a hide cover, a gourd, rattles made from a butterfly cocoon. We call that a sut-nage. My first sut- nage, I was given by my elder to bless Tenaya Lodge in 1991, when it first opened.
We did the blessing for it up in Fish Camp. I was given a song for mother earth and for rain. I was allowed to use my sut-nage for the first time. You must be allowed in certain things. You can make your own songs, but you must have permission to use old songs. Permission might not be granted for two or three years. I have a blessing song that I now sing. It was a hunting song. The elderly lady who had it didn’t want me to use it. When she finally gave me the song, I didn’t want it. I wouldn’t sing it. When I went to the hot springs for a ceremony, the ending of the song came back to me. Now, I had a different song. I sang her song in the beginning and finished with my song.
We still do our ritual dances. We are one of the few tribes who still have our ceremonial dances in place. Every now and then, one of our local people will do our dances at a powwow. The other dances are from Plains tribes. We have intertribal powwows. Our ceremonial powwows are held at night. You must be invited.
I was born in Clovis in 1950, the last of eight children. I was the only one born in a hospital. All the rest were born at home in North Fork. I’m from North Fork and
we are known as Nium, which means “the people,” part of what is known as the Mono group. In the treaties of the 1850s they called us Mona. There are several groups from North Fork to Auberry, Tollhouse or Cold Springs area, Haslett Basin, across the Kings River, over to Mitache, Deer Creek, and Dunlap. Every time you go to the next group it’s another dialect. Even in North Fork we have three dialects. It’s the same language and we can understand each other. The language is what’s known as Uto-Aztecan. That takes in Mono Paiute–through Bishop, Big Pine and Lone Pine. We had seventy-five fluent speakers as late as 1991. By 2010 we were down to eighteen.
In North Fork our tribal homeland is 1.2 million acres. Individually, families had over ten thousand acres. Most of those are one hundred and sixty acres, or eighty acres. These families have been there back before the 1800s, but as far as ownership, we picked up land in 1891 from the Dawes Act and the Homestead Act of 1872. We started laying claim to the places we lived. Utilizing the land is our way of life.
Growing up in North Fork for the first 18 years, we didn’t have electricity. We got a well when I was a sophomore. We got a phone when I was a junior. I went to Sierra High School. We were close to 20 percent of the student body. Native Americans made up a large part of the sports teams there. We rode a bus 25 miles to the high school, 45 minutes each way.
When I got home I had chores, wood to split, go to the creek and pack water (the creek was over a quarter mile away from the house), get our fires ready, make sure all the lights had kerosene. I went hunting before dark for quail, rabbit, and squirrel. I might pick up some watercress if I was near the creek. I’d have a short period with the lights on to make sure I got my homework done.
My mother wanted lights out by 9 p.m. That didn’t mean we went to bed. We’d go outside and talk. If there was moonlight we might be out there until midnight, learning about old ways and old times from my mother.
She was born in the early 1900s. My mother ran away from school in the eighth grade and went to live with her grandparents. Her grandparents were born in the early 1800s. They were here before the first white men came here. The first recorded white man in Fresno County was Joseph Kinsman. His son was my mother’s father. When she was going to school in the 1930s and ’40s, our people were taken away and sent to missions and didn’t see their families. You might be eight or ten or fifteen years old, but you weren’t with your family. You were beaten
if you practiced your culture, yet they would bring a few people out who could weave a yarn strap, make a basket, and speak their language. We have elders today whose experience were pretty good. These are the ones they brought out to show people how they were doing, the show and tell. The rest of them were all in the back. Sierra High School had auto mechanics, welding, ag, and homemaking. We were either good with our hands or our brains.
We don’t have a religion per se. We’re spiritual people. We have ceremonial practices. It’s not like you do a prayer when the sun comes up. Before you go out to kill, you pray for your food. You pray that something will come and offer itself to you. I didn’t go out to hunt; I went out to get my food. It was offered to me and that’s what I took back home. Our philosophy is that all the world has one creator who created all life. The creator gave spirit to humans, animals, grasses, trees, rocks, and water. Their life is his breath, his spirit; therefore, we’re all related.
When I see a bug or a snake, these things are all related to us. We call the rattlesnake togo’t, accent on the first syllable. Grandfather is togo, with the accent on the second syllable. He’s given an elderly, respectful name because of who he is. The manzanita is eposo, our friend or cousin. When we see the manzanita tree we understand the relationship that it has to us. It’s not only going to give us the berry that is sustainable food or medicine, it also has bark. When the bark peels, we scrape it off and take it with us because when we get into the poison oak that bark is going to heal us. You can make a slingshot from the manzanita bush, or a walking stick.
It’s a philosophy–a way of life. If I’m going to take an animal’s life, I pray to their spirit and ask that they make an offering to me. I raise deer. I go out and I use sage or tobacco, burn the sage and go around in four different directions. I’m looking for the spirit of the animal that I’m going to kill. If I don’t see the spirit of the animal then I don’t kill it. You’re in prayer and you see the spirit leave the animal. People in general have no knowledge of what I’m talking about. You have to have respect for the animals. You can’t just kill them.
September 20, 2023 • Valley Music Hall of Fame inducts Kenny Hall • My Introduction
Good Evening! On behalf of the Fresno Folklore Society and all friends of Kenny Hall, thank you to the committee for inducting him into the Valley Music Hall of Fame.
My first recollection of Kenny Hall was around 1965. I was about 9. That day I walked into the family room of our Fresno home to see a blind man, seated, playing jigs, reels and hornpipes on a round-back mandolin, into a microphone. My father was a professor in the English department at Fresno State College and it seemed to be a normal sort of thing to happen in our house. It was as if my father had just discovered Leadbelly or Robert Johnson and knew the importance of getting this music onto the reel-to-reel tape recorder.
Later, Kenny Hall would become the first of six nationally-known folk artists to teach a full semester at the college, in my father’s Resident Folk Artist Program.
My book Road to Sweet’s Mill, the west coast folk music revival of the 1960s and ’70s, included interviews with many folk musicians who were influential in the west at that time. Almost everyone one of them cited the influence and importance of Kenny Hall as inspirational to their musical journey.
He was a world musician long before the term “world music” would become an official category in the music industry. His ability to learn tunes from anywhere, by ear, allowed him to amass a repertoire so extensive that it was impossible to know how many he just knew–by heart, though numerous people have tried to figure that out.
My father helped my friend and band mate Terry Barrett join Kenny in the Maestro-Apprentice program, where they both received support from the California Arts Council. Terry studied with him and later, as the most accomplished apprentice to Mr. Hall, joined Kenny’s Long Haul Stringband, touring in the U.S. and abroad.
American oldtime string band music was enjoying a new popularity and in 1972, the recording of Kenny Hall and the Sweet’s Mill String Band was chosen as the first release on Bay Records. It was influential on the folk music revival in the west and beyond. It was an exciting era and I was one of the many young people to learn from Kenny Hall and from the Sweet’s Mill String Band fiddler, Harry Liedstrand.
Please welcome Terry Barrett with Harry Liedstrand and his wife, Cindy Liedstrand.
February 2023 Black History Month
Black history should be celebrated every day of the year. Black history is American history, is hugely important and largely dismissed. African American teacher/performer Bessie Jones lived with my family for a time while teaching in my father’s program at CSUF, which is how I know her childrens’ dances first hand. It’s taught in my American Folk Dance Week and is available this year in a 1-day option!
Wind Blowing Across a Field–Second Edition!
The most recent book by Evo Bluestein and Juliana Harris continues with interviews, investigating the path each person took to become the musician they became.
A Mike Marshall interview was intended for the first edition, but the interview meeting didn’t work out. During the pandemic, Zoom made the process easier. With great excitement, I can say Mike’s story has been added to this book! Find out how in 1978, at 21 years of age, this child prodigy slipped right into the David Grisman Quintet, performing at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. He was in the band before he had seen them perform. He has gone on to explore so much interesting music, you will want follow his path from the beginning to the present. This excerpt from Mike’s story is from his Florida childhood era, where he became obsessed with bluegrass. The first DGQ album release was a sort of “Beatles moment”– where were you when?
“I was totally dedicated and learning constantly. I liked teaching because it enabled me to have all this free time to study music. A lot of my buddies would get gigs on the beaches in Florida, playing in cover bands, four or five sets a night–horrible pop music of the time. I wanted to play this weird acoustic music I discovered. It was a pretty exciting time for bluegrass because the Will The Circle Be Unbroken album had just come out, and David Grisman and Tony Rice and many others were starting to put out a new kind of bluegrass music, which was real adventurous. When I heard the New Grass Revival the top of my head came off. Sam Bush became my hero. The things John Hartford was doing–it was just so forward thinking, and pretty much became the soundtrack for my teenage years. When the David Grisman Quintet album came out, that was pretty much it for me.”
Order at amazon.com or evobluestein.com. If you do read or have read this book, we encourage you to leave a kind word at the amazon page. It helps new shoppers get an idea of what to expect.
–Evo and Juliana
Mickie Zekely (1946-2022)
My friend Mickie has passed. He was the originator of Lark in the Morning World Music Catalogue and the Lark Music and Dance Camp, in Mendocino. Here is a great outtake (not included in his feature) from my book Road to Sweet’s Mill. He started his catalogue of world instruments by hand. Then this happened.
Mickie: “Computers were interesting. We finally decided we needed to mail a catalogue. We had a mailing list of about two thousand names–all of them hand written on labels. We had to hand write them to mail these one page catalogues.
Cait Reed’s dad was an administrator of a hospital. He said, ‘We have all this computer equipment. Next time you’re down this way, I’ll show you. You can take it because it’s not doing us any good.’ The computer equipment was the size of my house with hard discs that were four or five feet in diameter.
I read somebody somewhere had invented this thing called an Apple computer. I started to try to find out about it and I did some research in the library and in magazines. They invented this computer that had sixteen kilobytes of memory. It had these floppy discs that had 128 k of data. There was this program you could buy and you could put names into it and you could print labels. I took a fortune (back in those days) and bought the first Apple computer on the market. I put all the names into it and printed out the labels instead of having two people taking two days of work by hand. It printed them out on these sheets of sticky labels. It was like a miracle. Instead of calligraphing the catalogues we printed them up on the computer. The was my first experience with the computer. It had to be before 1976, maybe 1975. I was with Cait until about 1976 or 1977, and she went off into the world, and I kept doing this business.
A turning point happened when I got a customer who worked for Apple. He was very interested in instruments. They had just invented this thing called a laser printer. We had been using an actual mimeograph machine to print catalogues. He got me one and I gave him a concertina. I learned to program in native code to print out this beautiful catalogue. There were no programs to use for it. This was pre-internet of course, and I bought a manual on how to program post script. That’s how I got the first catalogue printed on the laser printer. This was programming on Apple II and Apple III computers, pre Mac. There was very little information available. Eventually a friend at Apple got us the first Macintosh, and we could actually see things on the screen. You could program much easier than post script.
At a certain point, I heard about this thing called the internet. There had been a brilliant fellow here, locally, named Charles Bush, who got a grant from NASA for two million dollars as an experiment to see what would happen if they put an internet provider in a rural community and either gave away free computers or made them impossibly cheap. This was at a time when there were no set html rules. I had to learn to program html by hand with no real manual, and all the information about it kept changing every day.
I put up the first music store on the internet, in 1992 or 1993. We had a 28K dial-up connection, and we were able to make it happen. The business grew from there. We eventually had three stores, a huge warehouse and thirty-two employees. During this time, I still kept playing music.”
The second annual Valley Music Hall of Fame is inducting two valley folk. One is my father, Gene, who passed away in 2002. The other is our friend, world renowned Armenian musician Richard Hagopian, who is 85 and lives in Selma, where he still farms grapes and occasionally performs music. You can hear him perform the Armenian oud in this 1978 interview with my father.
The induction ceremony for all of the 2022 inductees will be at Roger Rocka’s Music Hall (Fresno), September 21. My brother Jemmy and I will perform in honor of Gene. I am sure there will be other performances as well. details
The folk musician and American Studies professor (Gene Bluestein) has done pretty well recently. A Smithsonian Folkways double cd album was released this past year, including my father and featuring him on the cover–a great photo (attached) from the 1964 Berkeley Folk Festival, just after he moved his family to Fresno and took his position with the Fresno State College English department. The cd consists of recordings from the late Fresno Folk Club member Alan Oakes and is titled The Village Out West, referring to the fact that there was significant folk music activity in the 1960s out west, as opposed to New York’s Greenwich Village, considered to be the the center of the folk revival by some people. This is a good companion document to the book Road to Sweet’s Mill, (CSUF Press) compiled and edited by me and my wife, writer and artist Juliana Harris. Like the Folkways cd, our book also focuses on the folk music activity in the west during the 1960s and ‘70s. It’s a beautiful book, designed by Fresno graphic designer Kristi Carlson.
During the pandemic, my mother passed at the age of 92. Ellie Bluestein was a tireless worker for world peace and social justice. The lives of my illustrious parents, Gene and Ellie, are documented in a biography, our (Juliana and me) second book . It is available here.
My thirty-year occupation of teaching folk dance in schools came to an abrupt halt during the pandemic, so once again Juliana and I got busy. The book Wind Blowing Across a Field (CSUF Press) was just published. It contains interviews with 23 musicians, some well known and some not. We think all their stories are compelling, (even if you don’t know the subjects) and we hope you will too! On the Wind web page you can click on each person’s name and watch their Youtube video.
During the pandemic, I finally got busy formatting video and audio from the vast Bluestein folk archives. The internet platform Patreon is the destination for hundreds of these items. Patreon enables people to support my work by becoming a paying subscriber. The lowest tier of $3 per month unlocks most of the historical recordings. You can see what is contained in the 300 posts for free. Thank you patrons!
A few of my regular schools are beginning to have me back for the folk dance residency and perhaps a few new schools. I will enjoy returning to that work, if nothing comes up to preclude it! I am so proud of this program wherein thousands of California students have experienced the joy of folk dance.
Have you a desire to sing and play an instrument? I am still teaching privately, with free loaner instruments to get you started. For young people, the wonderful Fresno Folklore Society has a scholarship program (for instruments and lessons) and they love to see the young ‘uns playing folk music. You never know what it might lead to. I started the four Gillingham sisters at the ages of 7 and 9. Now, at 16 and 18, they are an award winning, touring band! You have to hear them sing! Here is a local, upcoming event where the GillyGirls will be featured. They are so good!
The Meeting of the Waters – What a World
I just selected a tune from an old cassette that featured the Boys of the Lough jamming with Kenny Hall, at my parents’ house, in the 1970s. It was after the band had played a concert at Fresno State. I wanted the name of the march they were playing, so I contacted my friend Mark, who teaches songwriting at Berklee School of Music, in Boston. I met Mark Simos at Sweet’s Mill, also in the mid 70s. He was playing a lot of Irish music. He emailed back right away, intimating that he knew the tune, but not the name. He sent it to his colleague, who teaches Irish fiddle at the school. Oisin McCauley said it’s called The Meeting of the Waters, also known as the Boys of Killybegs. He said Killybegs is the most significant fishing town in Ireland and it’s eleven miles from where he grew up.
What are the chances? Of all the tunes I could have selected. Of all the people I could have asked. I asked someone who grew up in Ireland, near the source of the tune. This all took place within a day.
Hear this recording at my Patreon site.
Remembering Jim Ross (1935-2021)
What a gentle and kind person Jim Ross was. Jim and Lynn–it’s almost impossible to say one name one without the other. The world could learn a lot about love and kindness from the example demonstrated by their quiet manner. If you were paying attention, you felt their commitment to each other.
In 1973, I met Jim and Lynn at Sweet’s Mill in Richard Trojan’s pottery class. Along the path from the dining pavilion to Balkan Camp, there was a wall of clay, good for pottery. Edith Byxbe used to use that clay for sculpture. Virgil Byxbe enjoyed having different kinds of activities at camp, in addition to the music party. The pottery weekend wasn’t the folk festival, but I think the Rosses caught the vibe. Like many others, they seemed to like the values and the people in the folk community.
Jim and Lynn were among the folks on hand, for the meeting at my parents’ house, in order to officially declare ourselves the Fresno Folklore Society (FFS), on May 16, 1980. Jim didn’t hesitate to get involved and served as the FFS treasurer for decades until very recently. Prior to forming the FFS, the Rosses and I had started an official folk club on the Fresno State campus. We might have been the only members of the club and none of us were university students! As a new club, we had access to student activity funds and hosted concerts with Clifton Chenier, Hank Bradley, Jodie Stecher, and others. In the club meetings, I had someone to share my fascination with oldtime music, and they listened! Not only did they listen, when my father held a summer folk institute, at CSUF, especially for teachers to learn how to use music in the classroom, Lynn attended. She began using the autoharp in her kindergarten class. Jim and his son, Tim, came to me for guitar and mandolin lessons–and haircuts. I had honed my barber skills on members of my family. I always enjoyed it, so a lesson and a haircut was common for a while.
Within both the FFS and the Sweet’s Mill tribe, Jim’s energy, dedication, and service to his chosen community was remarkable. Jim served on the Sweet’s Mill board, as well. Many a wandering folk performer can attest to the helpfulness and generosity they received when Jim and Lynn hosted them for concerts. Through the decades, Jim and Lynn were regulars at the Basque’s Wednesday night music jam, and everyone knew which two chairs belonged to the guitar and autoharp couple. It seems you never saw one without the other–running their homemade jam concession to benefit FFS. It seemed they were companions, whatever they did.
We cannot replace Jim, but we can offer Lynn our sincere support and love, as she navigates a life without his presence. I’m sure I speak for many in the Mill and FFS community when I say, we love you, Lynn, and we wish to help you in any way we can. Thank you, Jim, for the quiet, and excellent example of how to live our lives.
–Evo Bluestein
Playing Music and Performing Music
The mother of a teenage student remarked that my work with her daughter was initiating her into a musical world where the goal is to play music rather than to perform it.
What the student didn’t enjoy about classical piano lessons was the strong emphasis on correct playing. She thought her daughter didn’t know how to manage that pressure effectively.
The girl had recently picked up a piano piece she hadn’t played in a year–the piano part to a Beethoven sonatina written for mandolin and piano. A year ago, she was stressed each time she played it and hence lacked confidence. She would slip up here and there.
After our folk music lessons, she played it again, calmly, without much struggle, it seemed to the mother. After a year of not playing piano, she had come back with greater ease. The mother theorized that the pressure of correctness had lessened–mistakes were ok and recoverable.
It reminded me of another story involving a former student, also a classical musician, who was relaxing after hours with some orchestra mates. Because of her folk music lessons, she could break out into Whiskey Before Breakfast by ear. Usually, students who are only trained classically are totally reliant on the page.
There are numerous ways in which piano is used without the rigidity. It is also a folk instrument. It is enjoyable to know piano and use it in the context of folk, blues, and jazz. There is something to be gained learning by ear–more prevalent outside of the classical training. We learn to feel music sooner with a program that is not dependent on reading as the only method.
I’ve seen the phenomenon many times, especially with classical violinists who have so much training they can’t unlearn, in order to shuffle the bow, play without vibrato, and learn the nuance and feeling in folk genres.
I’ve also seen plenty of classical violinists who do manage to crossover to bluegrass, Cajun or other genres. The training can make the process easier, but often the nuance is missing.
All music comes from folk music, ultimately. It is well established that folk has the building blocks for everything else. A good teacher can make those connections and provide the path in an enjoyable sequential stream.
The perceptive mother had put her finger right on the point of concern. I remember the issue well from my own early piano training. However, a music student who does achieve some level of success with the piano training is way ahead in my folk music program. The bottom line–music and music training should be fun.
My student hasn’t had the chance, due to the pandemic, but if she gets the opportunity to jam with the folk society musicians who played Wednesday evenings at the Basque restaurant, she’ll know the feeling of being in the midst of people who enjoy sharing the musical experience in this time-honored fashion–all by ear. The in-person jams will come around again and there will be many other fun experiences in her life, where she will use what she is learning.
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Where were you March 11, 2020?
It is coming up on one year since the mass realization of the pandemic. I know where I was. The dance residency at this Walnut Creek school had been going on for more than twenty-five years! I saw a half dozen principals come and go and teachers reach their retirement. Some school communities understand that folk dance connects students to each other and to our history in significant, healthy ways. I am in awe of such communities and honored to be a respected part of their annual curriculum.
It was going well, as it tends to do at this school, that is, until Wednesday morning, as the first group of third graders were filing into the multi-use room. The principal came in to talk to me. It seems some concerned parents had already contacted the superintendent about the students touching during the dance class. The principal said, “Is there any way we can do this without holding hands?”
“Of course.” I said, as I tried to think fast how I would modify my program to exclude touching. The first thing we did was clogging. The students get a little distance from each other and face the stage, where I demonstrate the steps–rhythm, aerobic exercise, coordination and fun. For the rest of the week I modified our group dances to exclude the holding of hands.
We had only just starting hearing about droplets traveling through the air and what safe distance means. Masks were not even a thing yet. By Friday, when the kids performed for the parents, more information had been revealed. As I watched the students enjoying themselves with the modified dances, I noticed they were still right in each other’s faces. I said to myself, “As much as I hate to admit it, I should have been sent home Wednesday!” We didn’t know how serious it was at first.
I have not been to a school since.
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11/12/19
A friend told me of a well-known folk dance camp last summer, where a majority of the participants identified as something other than simply male or female. On their name tags they were invited to choose whatever pronoun they preferred–he, she, they. The binary system is going bye-bye and of course LGBTQ folks did not just get invented, yet our society is only beginning to accept how people self-identify. That fact makes it possible for various communities to be heard.
This has become quite a topic on the contra dance floor. For many years, I have used “ladies” and “gentleman” for the different roles in each dance. It is the traditional system, used historically. Many dance callers have more recently preferred “women” and “men” to steer away from class identity. I prefer the “lady” and “gent” nomenclature because I am often working in schools, trying to instill in the children, the concept of courtesy. Lately, the trend among callers is to use “larks” and “ravens.” The “L” is for anyone who wishes to stand in the left column and the “R” is for anyone who wishes to stand in the right column of the dance, regardless of who you choose as your dance partner. If you are a traveling dance caller it would be wise to check on the local preference. Some communities may insist up front on one system or another, so you should be prepared. It seems no one system works universally, and people can be offended no matter what you do.
Another term commonly used on the dance floor in both contra and English country dance is the term gypsy. It is a kind of turn or swing that uses only eye contact as you circle around another person. It is often followed by an actual swing with that person. The first call flows into the second one. Perhaps the eye contact is the gypsy connection. It has been used for so long I don’t know what the original reason for using it is. It turns out that the term gypsy is not appreciated by Roma people. Dance callers are now replacing the simple two-syllable term with something else, not always as simple to say as the familiar and easily understood gypsy, but a reasonable replacement for a term that many no longer find to be acceptable.
As we gain a deeper understanding of our humanity, many things we once took for granted are now brought into question and found unacceptable. In my field, as a music and dance educator, there is an increased awareness of historical songs and dances that have had a negative portrayal or characterization. African American influences are part of most American music and dance genres. The current message from authorities on the subject suggest that if the song or dance was ever offensive to anyone, do not use it. A complete acceptance of this attitude would eliminate a huge amount of folk material. My opinion so far is, “it depends and it’s complicated.” There is a concept of “repurposing” so as not to lose an otherwise good dance or song. Does changing the lyrics or melody make it OK? It depends who you ask. Without going into more detail, suffice it to say, it is one more example of increased awareness of how people feel, challenging us to adjust long-held attitudes.
1/28/19
Today as I walked along the sidewalk outside the private school I teach at once a year in Los Angeles, a man stopped me and said, “Where did you get your hat?”
I said, I don’t remember. Maybe my wife bought it for me.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m teaching dance at this school. I don’t know you. Why are you asking me these questions?”
He said, “Because you look so cinematic, like from a movie. What do you do?”
I said, “I’m a musician.”
He said, “Okay. Have a nice day.”
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One of my father’s books, Poplore, has an interview with the founder of Folkways Records, Moe Asch.
In the interview he talks about how he came to start documenting world music on records in 1948, and his experiences and feelings about recording Lead Belly, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. My father also made several records for Folkways in the 1950s and ’60s.
Pete Seeger
Moses Asch: “I made more than fifty records with him (Pete) and I still find him a very hard man to understand…he created my whole folk music concept. Because he created ideas and songs and every time he had an idea I went along with it. I tried to work with all my artists that way–I wanted to know what they had to say and how they wanted to say it. That’s what it meant to be a documenter.”