2019 Article Excerpt About Black Musicians And United States "Old Time", "String Band" Music

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents an excerpt of a 2019 New Yorker article by John Jeremiah Sullivan entitled "Rhiannon Giddens and What Folk Music Means".

The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, and educational purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to John Jeremiah Sullivan for writing this article and thanks to all of the musicians who are featured in this article.

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ARTICLE EXCERPT 
from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/rhiannon-giddens-and-what-folk-music-means
"Rhiannon Giddens and What Folk Music Means" by  John Jeremiah Sullivan *,  May 20, 2019 

The roots musician is inspired by the evolving legacy of the black string band.

"To grasp the significance of what the twenty-first-century folksinger Rhiannon Giddens has been attempting, it is necessary to know about another North Carolina musician, Frank Johnson, who was born almost two hundred years before she was. He was the most important African-American musician of the nineteenth century, but he has been almost entirely forgotten. Never mind a Wikipedia page—he does not even earn a footnote in sourcebooks on early black music. And yet, after excavating the records of his career—from old newspapers, diaries, travelogues, memoirs, letters—and after reckoning with the scope of his influence, one struggles to come up with a plausible rival.

There are several possible reasons for Johnson’s astonishing obscurity. One may be that, on the few occasions when late-twentieth-century scholars mentioned him, he was almost always misidentified as a white man, despite the fact that he had dark-brown skin and was born enslaved. It may have been impossible, and forgivably so, for academics to believe that a black man could have achieved the level of fame and success in the antebellum slave-holding South that Johnson had. There was also a doppelgänger for scholars to contend with: in the North, there lived, around the same time, a musician named Francis Johnson, often called Frank, who is remembered as the first black musician to have his original compositions published. Some historians, encountering mentions of the Southern Frank, undoubtedly assumed that they were merely catching the Northern one on some unrecorded tour and turned away.

There is also the racial history of the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where Johnson enjoyed his greatest fame. In 1898, a racial massacre in Wilmington, and a subsequent exodus of its black citizens, not only knocked loose the foundations of a rising black middle class but also came close to obliterating the deep cultural memory of what had been among the most important black towns in the country for more than a century. The people who might have remembered Johnson best, not just as a musician but as a man, were themselves violently unremembered.

A final explanation for Johnson’s absence from the historical record may be the most significant. It involves not his reputation but that of the music he played, with which he became literally synonymous—more than one generation of Southerners would refer to popular dance music simply as “old Frank Johnson music.” And yet, in the course of the twentieth century, the cluster of styles in which Johnson specialized––namely, string band, square dance, hoedown––came to be associated with the folk music of the white South and even, by a bizarre warping of American cultural memory, with white racial purity. In the nineteen-twenties, the auto magnate Henry Ford started proselytizing (successfully) for a square-dancing revival precisely because the music that accompanied it was not black. Had he known the deeper history of square dancing, he might have fainted.

As a travelling “Negro fiddler,” Johnson epitomized the one musical figure in American history who can truly be called “ur.” Black fiddlers are the trilobites of American musical history. A legal record from the mid-seventeenth century details a dispute between Virginia households competing for the services of an enslaved man who had played the fiddle all night for a party on the Eastern Shore. After that, for more than two hundred years, black fiddlers are everywhere in the written sources. Then, around the start of the twentieth century, they fade, abruptly and almost completely.

Johnson was born in the late eighteenth century, most likely on a plantation owned by a family named Hawkins, in North Carolina, near the Virginia border. Early on, he was recognized as a prodigy who could master almost any instrument, but his specialty was the fiddle—the instrument most desired for dances. His owners started hiring him out for parties and dividing the earnings with him, a common practice. Sometime in the eighteen-thirties or forties, he became free. The only attempt at a biographical treatment of him, an article written around 1900 by the Virginia newspaperman Frank S. Woodson, says that he bought his own freedom “on a credit,” using money that he had made playing music. He then, according to Woodson, purchased the freedom of his wife, a seamstress named Amelia. His former master “threw in the five or six children, all boys, for good measure.” The boys became his band. Johnson and his wife tended to produce talented sons.

What did they sound like? It is a profound frustration, for a person interested in early African-American music, not to be able to hear them. Johnson died ten years before the recording era began, and by then his influence had grown diffuse. But a defining quality of his band’s sound is how much mixing it involved—how many styles and instrumental arrangements. There were brass instruments and wind instruments. Johnson’s sons played horns of all kinds. Frank, Jr., played a snare drum. There was a bass drum. Cymbals. In 1853, a kettledrum was introduced. But there were also the instruments we associate more closely with a “minstrel” band—fiddles and banjos. A fife-and-drum sound is mentioned in a Wilmington Daily Journal article published in 1858. Johnson’s band played everything at once, moving across a range of stylistic attacks, all geared for dancing. It seems impossible that its sound would not have approached, at times, proto-jazz.

It is a genuine challenge to describe how prevalent Johnson was, how dominant. According to one source, he had “for half a century ruled with absolute autocracy the aristocratic ball-rooms of the South.” By any calculus, he was one of the first black celebrities in the South. I have never come across an ostensibly “lost” figure who, once you know to look for him, turns out to have left behind such an obvious trail. Johnson went from being hard to find to being impossible to escape. Researching him was like writing a history of baseball and “rediscovering” a hitter named Babe Ruth. His music was so woven into the social life of the South that it would not be an exaggeration to describe it as a kind of ever-present soundtrack. Plantation balls, picnics, barbecues, sporting events, Renaissance-style “tilting” tournaments (they were big for a while), random town ceremonies (think cornerstone-layings), university commencements (for many years, he performed at Chapel Hill, and for at least some years at Wake Forest), state fairs, agricultural fairs, firemen’s balls, military “muster days,” moonlight excursions on trains and boats, extended summer bookings at resort hotels, society weddings, holiday parties (including an annual Christmas party in Wilmington, where his band performed for mixed audiences, “thereby creating a warmer fellowship between the races,” according to the Wilmington Star), funeral processions, and political rallies. In 1840, “when the new Capitol building was completed in Raleigh,” according to an item in an 1873 issue of the Hillsboro Recorder, there were “two successive nights” of dancing, with “the well-known Frank Johnson . . . furnishing the music.” During the Civil War, his band often marched at the head of regiments and was called in to play at recruitment parties. According to a story recounted by Woodson, Johnson accompanied a Confederate brigade into battle, but turned around when the shooting started.

Johnson fell on hard times after the war, and, in the end, according to a 1901 piece written by someone with the initials A.M.W., he “moved about a pathetic figure—a sort of melancholy reminder of departed joys.” His death, in 1871, was reported all over—in Cincinnati, in Chicago. One newspaper in Wilmington described the turnout for his funeral as “the largest, we think, that has ever occurred in this city, it being estimated that there were at least two thousand persons in the procession, including the colored fire companies in uniform, with standards draped in mourning, the colored Masonic fraternity in regalia, etc., the whole preceded by a brass band.” Pine Forest Cemetery, where he was buried, is down the street from my house; I’ve spent countless days looking in vain for his grave.

Johnson’s flame never quite flickered out. Other fiddlers followed in his nimble footsteps. Some of them had played with him; all of them had heard his band. Pomp Long, a fiddler whose owner, according to the Richmond Leader, had “placed him under Frank Johnson when he recognized his natural talent,” was briefly considered a rival to Johnson in ability. Then came Cripple Dick Foster, Uncle Baldy, Dick Jumper, Blind Lige, Emp Wright—each with his moment on the mountain.

Wright, who seems to have been active in the years just before 1900, was one of the last pure products of the Frank Johnson school. He knew how to make fiddles. There is some confusion over whether he was black or white. He supposedly lived for a time in a “mulatto community” called Little Texas, near Greensboro, North Carolina.  One of the few things we know about him is that he mentored, and passed his internal songbook on to, a man named John Arch Thompson, who lived in various rural pockets of the Piedmont: Cedar Grove and Cheeks (both in Orange County) and, finally, in Mebane (pronounced “meh-bun”), north of Greensboro.

Thompson had a son named Joe, and Thompson’s brother had a son, Odell. The first cousins played the fiddle and the banjo, respectively, for small house parties. A folklorist named Kip Lornell got turned on to them in the nineteen-seventies, and other researchers published interviews with them and recorded them playing. The Thompson cousins performed at some folk festivals. Then Odell died, and only Joe was left. He was the last of the old line, the rag end of whatever Johnson started. Or he would have been. Something happened fourteen years ago, in Boone, North Carolina, to change the story.

In 2005, a festival called the Black Banjo Then & Now Gathering took place at Appalachian State University, in Boone. Joe Thompson was an honored guest and a featured performer. Many of the attendees had come expressly to see him. Among the scholars and the players and the scholar-players were three passionate young revivalists, black musicians who had been getting lost in the old stuff. Two of them were multi-instrumentalists: Justin Robinson, from the mill town of Gastonia, North Carolina, had studied the violin since childhood, and Dom Flemons, at the time still living in his native Arizona, had already begun turning himself into an old-fashioned songster. They were walking around and, for the first time, seeing people with faces like theirs who were digging, and making, the kind of music they loved.

The third musician, a twenty-eight-year-old singer from Greensboro, was starting to experiment with stringed instruments. She was Rhiannon Giddens (pronounced “ree-ann-un,” like in the Fleetwood Mac song, after which she was, surprisingly, not named). She had recently graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where she focussed on opera, and had only begun wading into the muddier waters of what the cultural critic Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America.” Her background was in youth choir and art song, but, since college, she had become increasingly interested in her home ground. Thanks to a job as a hostess at a Macaroni Grill, where her duties included singing old Italian arias, she earned enough to buy a ninety-nine-dollar Chinese fiddle and her first banjo, a Deering Goodtime. She had read “African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia,” by Cecelia (Cece) Conway, and was corresponding with the author. Conway told her that Joe Thompson was still playing and that he would be performing in Boone.

“And I went, ‘What?’ ” Giddens recalled, not long ago. “I was just starting to understand the history, and here was the man, practically in my back yard.  It was proof of what I’d been reading about, living proof that this stuff had a place in my community.”

I first met Giddens one afternoon in the spring of 2015, in the kitchen of a cozy Greensboro ranch house she’d recently bought. It was the first of many meetings and conversations throughout the past four years, a running discussion about the origins of the music she draws from, a style that she transforms in her playing, and which has been an obsession of mine for twenty-five years. That day, I started by asking her to describe Thompson.

“Joe?” Giddens said, and gave a characteristic sideways glance, drawing in her cheek and seeming to conjure him in her mind. “He always wore a button-up shirt, and dark pants and a hat—always a hat, like a trucker’s hat of some kind.” He was “formal and friendly all at once—very Southern that way.” She’d immediately noticed “how assured he was,” she said. “Like a rock, secure in his place in the world and in his purpose.” His purpose? “To play fiddle,” she said.

Thompson’s father had grown up playing music at “wood choppings” in rural Orange County. When Giddens and Thompson met, at the festival, Giddens mentioned that her grandmother Armintha (Mint) Morrow, who helped raise her, came from Mebane, too. From then on, Giddens said, “I was Miss Morrow.”

The trio called themselves the Carolina Chocolate Drops. In 2005, they started making trips to Mebane, to sit at Thompson’s feet. The formation of the band was inseparable from these pilgrimages. In playing with Thompson, they were learning to play with one another, and in reading his human songbook they established their own repertoire. Thompson had suffered a stroke in 2001, Giddens said, “but he was still pretty good for a while, and he played till he died.” There were barbecues at his house, and people from the town came, some to join in the playing, most to listen. Giddens watched his hands. Many of the songs he taught her, like “Old Mollie Hare” and “Polly Put the Kettle On,” were those we find in the handful of preserved Frank Johnson playlists.

[...] 

I asked what Thompson had been like as a teacher. Would he demonstrate licks?  “Nah,” she said. “We just played. That’s how it always was with Joe.” There wasn’t a banjo player in the group at that time, and, although Giddens had initially hoped to learn the fiddle from Thompson, she volunteered to play banjo because he didn’t really play without one. “That’s what we ladies do—what needs to be done,” she said. She had learned from Thompson what she called “the feel, the energy, the flow.” “The notes themselves,” she said, “were unimportant. It was, How did he engage with them?” She described his bowing as “magical, something you can’t break down. You just have to absorb. Sometimes I am playing and I hear him come out when I’m not thinking too hard.”

[...]

In the eighteen-nineties, a new political movement calling itself the Fusion Party—a multiracial group made up of white populists and radical Republicans, many of whom were black—was gaining power in North Carolina. Although much of the state was controlled by white supremacists, Wilmington had become a stronghold of Fusionist power. The wharves there had created work opportunities for free black people. After the Civil War, African-Americans in the city began to start businesses, own property, and win political office. In 1898, a local black newspaper editor, Alex Manly, published an editorial arguing that, as often as not, interracial relationships in the South were consensual. Democratic editors reprinted it over and over, for months, in newspapers friendly to the white- supremacist cause, deliberately fomenting a readiness for violent action among a large part of the state’s white citizenry.

On October 27th, Alfred Moore Waddell, a onetime Confederate colonel and a former U.S. congressman, whose career was in decline, gave a speech to hundreds of white supremacists from the stage at Thalian Hall, a big theatre downtown, advocating for a violent takeover. He declared that the whites of Wilmington would “have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live,” and that they were “resolved to change them, if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses.” Two weeks later, on November 10th, Waddell went on to lead the takeover, marching at the front of a white-supremacist mob with a rifle over his shoulder. An unknown number of black people were murdered in daylight, and the progressive Republican city and county governments were overthrown. Some historians consider it the only successful political coup in American history.

Curiously, Waddell was “A.M.W.,” who, as the reader may recall, had remembered Frank Johnson in the musician’s decline and dotage. In fact, Waddell left us some of the most vivid portraits of Johnson, having seen him play at numerous balls in the eighteen-fifties. The fiddler, Waddell recalled in one essay, “usually wore a stovepipe hat, a stock of the old style, instead of a cravat, and a spike tail coat with brass buttons.” At a ball one night, while Waddell and a pretty girl were dancing together near the center of the dance floor, Johnson stepped down from the stand where he had been playing and walked up beside them and fiddled to them, for them. As Waddell recalled, Johnson, with the violin “still under his chin,” cried out, “That’s the thing! Please God, it reminds me of when I was young.”...

Published in the print edition of the May 20, 2019, issue, with the headline “Folk Like Us.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for the Times Magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review. His forthcoming book is “The Prime Minister of Paradise.”

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