Edited by Azizi Powell
This is Part I of a two part pancocojams series about the 1978 Album "Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi".
This post presents excerpts of a 2001 article written by Fred
McCormick about Rounder record 2000 reissue of a 1978 Library of Congress album Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi. That booklet was edited by David Evans who recorded the music. David Evans was the person who recorded the music in that album.
The Addendum to this post presents information about Blues musician/song writer Fred McDowell who is mentioned in that 2001 article.
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2021/09/pdf-excerpt-of-preface-to-booklet-that.html for Part II of this pancocojams series. Part II presents excerpts from the sixty-four page booklet edited by David
Evans. I accessed that booklet from a pdf whose link is given in that post. The Addendum to that post provides a list of the titles for the music that is found on this record.
I've presented the excerpt about this 1978 booklet first because it provides some explanations about the musicians and singers who are featured in that record as well as providing information and opinions about that music itself.
The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, and folkloric purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Fred McCormick and David Evans and all those who are mentioned in this excerpt.
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ARTICLE EXCERPT
https://www.mustrad.org.uk/reviews/af_am_fm.htm "Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties,
Mississippi" Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture; Rounder CD1515
Fred McCormick - 9.3.01
"If ever a job was worth doing, it is Rounder’s Library of
Congress LP re-issue programme. If ever
a job was worth doing well, Rounder are doing it. At any rate, that goes for their revampings
of those discs which the L of C brought out in the 1970s. I cannot speak for the ones which originated
in earlier decades, because until a big bag of money drops from the sky, my
scratched and battered and utilitarian looking LP copies will have to
suffice. Whatever about that, this
refurbishment of a 1978 original is neither scratched nor battered, and it
certainly doesn’t look utilitarian. The
CD comes in a handsome slip case, which also holds a 64 page booklet. As is pretty standard nowadays, it contains
detailed and extensive notes together with some idiomatic photographs. The principal essay and the song notes are as
per the original booklet. They are the
work of the disc’s editor, David Evans, who has also supplied a new foreword,
to bring the situation up to date. I was
gratified to learn, from this latter, that the traditions of Tate and Panola
still have quite a bit of life in them.
If the music nowadays gets overrun with curiosity seekers, full well do
I know the feeling, but perhaps it’s better that than nothing.
Unfortunately, a worthy endeavour does not always guarantee
value for money. … Presumably for
reasons of saleability, the double CDs appear to have been slotted into a
slightly cheaper price bracket. …. Not
for the first time with Rounder, I wonder at their habit of leaving original
contents un-beefed up, thereby denying punters a playing time commensurate with
their outlay. Nevertheless, in a world
where this kind of gear sells in minuscule quantities, we have to weigh hard
economics and periodic poor sound quality against classic performances and
historical importance. Unfortunately, in
this instance, the factors are imbalanced, and the imbalance is not skewed in
favour of the buyer. While the disc
lasts a mere forty-three minutes and nine seconds, the performances, though
worthy enough, do not have the startling impact of, say, Vera Hall Ward, or
Aunt Molly Jackson, or Rebecca Tarwater.
For that matter, blues fans may wonder at the omission of Panola
County’s favourite son, Fred McDowell.
That omission does not reflect any lack of admiration on the
part of the editor. Indeed, Evans’
praise of McDowell is nothing short of fulsome.
It’s possible that Evans never managed to record him, although I’d have
thought that unlikely. Alternatively,
non-inclusion may simply reflect availability elsewhere. However, I suspect that the main reason is
one of editorial didacticism. Evans
takes as his text the local retention of an unusual array of African musical
characteristics; plus an attendant panoply of unusual instruments. Fred McDowell was neither local, being
originally from Tennessee, nor did his music sound as close to his African
forebears as some of the examples here.
I’d better say then, that my estimate of this performer, as just a notch
or two down from God on good day, has little bearing on my present
disappointment. I am more concerned with
the fact that the editor’s purpose has resulted in a rather tautological
programme.
A word about the scope of the disc. It is a survey of the hill country, just east
of the more famous Mississippi Delta, which has been compiled from recordings
made by David Evans in 1969 -71, together with three takes from Alan Lomax’s
famous 1942 visit there. Although the
product claims to embrace the entire hill country, the recordings are mainly
from the neighbourhood of Senatobia, Tate County. I do not know if this makes the survey at all
unrepresentative. …For whatever reasons
of history, the region preserved musical forms which were lost to other parts
of the South. Where the blues displaced
older forms of music elsewhere, in Tate and Panola, those older forms continued
to coalesce.
[…]
To be honest, my enjoyment of this kind of music is fairly
small dose, and my opinion may not be replicated by every listener. Also, we are dealing with an extremely common
feature of hill country entertainment. I
wonder though, if its universality is sufficient to justify taking up around
one third of the programme. If it is,
then listenability could have been much improved by spreading the examples
around the disc.
[…]
Leaving these aids aside; David Evans has contributed
extensive notes to the individual tracks, plus a foreword for the present
release, plus a detailed descriptive ethnography. I was glad to see that ethnography, because I
was recently taken to task for daring to suggest that such things are
desirable, or even that they should be a necessary part of editorial
capability. All I will say is that this
one is so damned good, and sheds so much light on the music and the people of
the area, that it should be required reading for anyone contemplating anything
remotely similar.
More’s the pity, then, that the booklet does not try and
explain those African retentions. Nor
does it say whether musical retention is paralleled by other forms of cultural
retention. The point is important
because music does not develop or stagnate of its own volition. It is an element of social culture, which
changes in response to changes within all the other cultural elements. Logically, then, where we find African
performance styles in abundance, we should also find well preserved examples of
other African cultural forms; dialect, for example, or folk tales. We should also be able to identify some of
the historical or sociological reasons for this apparent lack of musical
change.
I do not normally consider myself a follower of origins
theories, for they are typically non-empirical, un-utilitarian and
subjective. That is why they have been
abandoned by most branches of social enquiry.
Yet I find that Evans’ argument intrigues me. That is mainly because the music of Tate and
Panola contrasts so sharply with most other regions of the American South. Also, I’m presuming that his statement
includes the various sea island communities of the eastern United States, where
cultural and geographic isolation have left various forms of African folkways
relatively intact….
But if isolation equals retention, how do we explain the
fact that the hill country is on the mainland and centrally located? The terrain does not seem all that hilly; it
is well served by roads and railways; and it is fairly close to Memphis. Nor do we find satisfactory explanations in
present day population density, ethnic ratios, class structure, or economic
activity. The preface tells us that Tate
and Panola counties, nowadays (ie. 1978) have black and white populations in
roughly equal proportions. Also, the
local class/caste structure sounds no different to that of the rest of the
South. Moreover, the sharecropping
system, a defining feature of inter-ethnic economic relations throughout
Mississippi, is alive and at work in Tate and Panola. …
If the current situation offers little enlightenment, we
ought to find a more approachable answer in the region’s economic history. In engaging the past, though, we need to
remember the catastrophic changes which the civil war wrought upon southern
society, and accept that no single answer will straddle the martial
divide. We need to ask the same question
for the anti and post bellum periods.
Let us take the earlier period first. As with other aspects of Europeanisation,
musical acculturation was a process deliberately entered into by the slave
owners.10. Peter Kolchin, American Slavery 1619 - 1877, Penguin, London,
1995; Deena Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, Illinois UP, Urbana,
1977.10 They systematically stripped the
slaves of their African heritage, partly because they feared that the music
might contain coded messages of rebellion, but also to satisfy the owners’ needs
for musical entertainment. It was normal
practice for owners to train the more musically talented of their slaves in the
accompaniment of ballroom and country dance.
That is an important feature of the development of black music in the
American South. It means that we have to
think very carefully about the effects of acculturation, when we encounter an
area which does not conform to the musical practices of the rest of the South.
This disc is proof, that at least some of the slaves of Tate
and Panola provided entertainment for some of the slave owners. I do not know how statistically reliable a
sample this constitutes, but no less than fifty percent of the tracks show some
signs of interaction with white folks.
Nowhere is this interaction more in evidence than with Sid Hemphill’s
band. Hemphill was the son of a musical
slave, and his band relied heavily on white patronage. However, the booklet gives no indication as
to how many more bands like Hemphill’s there were. Neither can we discern the proportion of the
white population which used the slaves as servant musicians. These questions seem important to me, because
the extent of African retentionism ought to bear some relationship to the
frequency of white patronage. I’m
wondering therefore, whether the poor quality of the land, and the consequent
presumed poverty of many of its white inhabitants, inhibited the development of
Negro generated, white oriented, entertainment systems in the area. Was it an exception to what we know of slave
acculturation patterns generally?
Despite my remarks, about the isolation of the sea islands,
the rate and intensity of slave acculturation generally was less of a
geographical phenomenon than one of economic organisation. According to Peter Kolchin,11. Kolchin. Ibid.11 it depended on a collocation of
factors, not all of which are relevant to the present issue. In very simple terms, though, large
plantations required large labour forces.
The bigger the labour force, the more likely were its members to
interact with each other, and to remain uninfluenced by the white
population. Therefore, large plantations
made for slow rates of acculturation, and for slow abandonment of African
folkways. If Tate and Panola was a land
of small, poor farrmers, we should expect it to be a place of rapid
acculturation. It clearly wasn’t, and
the implication I am reaching for is that the poverty of the land made it an
exception to the general rule. Might
there have been, in this part of Mississippi, a sizeable element of farmers who
were too poor to afford the musical trappings of their more substantial
neighbours? Could it be that slave
labour forces were typically too small to provide an identifiable element of
musically able slaves? Could it be that
the farmers in Tate and Panola were often too poor to provide them with musical
instruments? Could it be in fact, that
plantation dances, while not unknown, were less numerous there than elsewhere,
and that the slave’s music was typically less interfered with as a result?
It would have been on the bigger estates where the
prestigious balls and country dances were held.
Equally, it would have been the larger owners who had most to fear from
slave rebellion, and where sheer imbalance of numbers left owners feeling most
vulnerable. On the other hand, where
there were few large concentrations of slaves, it is possible that there was
less need to suppress their ‘coded’ musical messages.
I have to stress that, for lack of hard evidence, any ideas
I can offer are hunch, rather than hypothesis.
Moreover, what we have accumulated so far only takes us half way through
the story. That is because systematic
musical acculturation took place before the civil war, not after. Therefore, we need to explain what happened
after the civil war, when different patterns of interaction and oppression
emerged, to influence the music of black Americans. We need to explain why, in Tate and Panola,
certain patterns of music not only survived the convulsions of the civil war,
but continued to survive into the present day.
And we need to explain why others have not. On the one hand, musical forms, which appear
identifiably African, are evident in abundance.
On the other, in many of those pieces of what were formerly white
entertainment, we find the melodies reduced to mere fragments. We find the melodies supporting the rhythms
instead of the rhythms supporting the melodies.
The suggestion which Evans seems to draw from this is that white
entertainment was a cultural aberration as far as the slaves were
concerned. They played it because they
had no choice. Therefore, the breakdown
of white patronage was accompanied by a musical reversion to Africanism, in
which these ‘white’ pieces became quasi-Africanised. There seems to be quite a bit of mileage in
that theory, and it would neatly explain the reversal of significance vis a vis
melody and rhythm. Unfortunately, it
does not explain why this reversal was confined to the Mississippi hill
country. Why do we not find similar
regressions in other parts of the American South?
However slender the evidence, it does not prevent us from
making a prediction. It is that the
social forces, which gave rise to the blues in the Mississippi Delta, or Texas,
or Tennessee or anywhere else, were either absent in Tate and Panola, or else
were of comparative insignificance there.
The blues emerged, not during the slave era, and not as the direct
result of African experience, but at the end of the nineteenth century. The idiom bears a family resemblance to the
field holler, but the one cannot be explained simply as an outgrowth of the
other. The blues is a psycho/musical
consequence of the reassertion of white Southern authority, after the
victorious Federal government had ceased to exert armed control over the
South. It is an expression of Negro
social alienation; a black reaction to a white backlash.12. Paul Oliver,
Songsters and Saints, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1984; Lomax, ibid; Dollard,
ibid; Davis, Gardner and Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study
of Caste and Class, Chicago UP, 1941.
See also, my article, Cantometrics; Song and Social Culture, this
publication.12 Therefore, if older
musical forms survived in Tate and Panola, if there was indeed a reversion to
African style performance patterns there, then the social history of the region
must be different to the rest of the Deep South. The implication of all this is that the white
population of Tate and Panola had less reason to feel threatened by black
emancipation, than did white people elsewhere; also, that anti-Negro pogroms
must have been carried out less frequently there, and with less ferocity than
in places where the blues took root. I
am not entirely sure why this should have been so. However, I suspect that, as with pre-civil
war acculturation, the root cause is the poverty of the land. My suspicion is that, in the aftermath of the
civil war, the area became a region of external migration for both races; that
the resulting depopulation abated competition for land; and also led to an
element of geographical segregation between the races.
A lack of population pressure may well have arisen from
three directions. Firstly, if poor soil
had originally supported fewer slaves than the average, then a comparative lack
of anti-Negro pogroms might in part be a simple function of numbers; fewer
Negroes per head of the white population for the whites to feel threatened
about. Secondly, unproductive land
encouraged many freed slaves to leave the area, and seek employment on the
fertile alluvial soil of the Delta, thus further reducing the Negro
population. Finally, several years ago,
I heard the singer Shirley Collins, who accompanied Alan Lomax on that famous
Southern Journey field trip, talking about their recording work in the
Mississippi hill country.13. Post civil war Negro depopulation of the hill
country is touched on in Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical
and Cultural Analysis, Chapel Hill, North Carolina UP, 1994. Shirley Collins' comments were delivered as
part of a lecture, America Over the Water, at the National Folk Festival,
Sutton Bonington, Leicestershire, April 1998.13
She too made the point about the hill country being poor land, and said
that the Negro population occupied the worst of it. It was land which the white people had
vacated. They didn’t want it. She was presumably quoting a personal
impression, and one arrived at a long time ago.
Her statement therefore needs to be approached with a fair measure of
scepticism. However, it appears to make
sense, because if black people could migrate to the Delta, then white people
could do likewise. The white people
would have left land behind, and those black people who stayed in Tate and
Panola would logically have been free to occupy the poorest parts of it.
Thus, if re-settlement produced an element of geographical
segregation, then the Negro portion of the populace may have been comparatively
untroubled by the terror which was going on over the rest of the South. These arguments do not mean that the Tate and
Panola Negro population never came into contact with white people. Neither would they have avoided the racism,
which was an endemic feature of life in the South. Nor would they have avoided that matrix of
social attitudes and behaviour patterns, which underscored the white
population’s belief in its own ethnic superiority; and which was itself the
legacy of black slavery and white southern civil war defeat. However, the black population might have been
spared some of the worst effects of that racism, and of those attitudes; the
beatings, the lynchings, the cabin burnings, and the nocturnal visits by the Ku
Klux Klan.
[…]
We close with two pieces, which are no less beguiling for
their functionality. They are Little
Sally Walker, a children's game song from Nettie Mae and Aleneda Turner;
and the lullaby, Go to Sleepy, Baby from Mary Mabeary. Both songs are notable for their
ubiquity. They are as likely to exist in
the mouths of white people as black, and for very much the same reasons. At the end of the day, searches for racial
roots in music finish up facing the same blank wall. People do not make music because they are white
or black, or because they inherited a particular gene pool or a particular set
of cultural parameters. They make music
out of a need to express themselves, and the sounds they make enunciate their
immediate social culture, not what went before.
For all the appalling treatment of black people by white Americans,
their music is as much a part of America as Paul Bunyan and Johnny
Appleseed. It is not how much of their
African heritage the slaves retained which should concern us. It is how successive generations of black
Americans melded that heritage, in the light of the racism and discrimination,
and dehumanisation, which were facts of life in deep south America - anti or
post bellum.
Against all that, we are better off for the existence of
this CD, than if it had never seen the light of day. Despite my objections, the history of black
music in America is a long and muddled trail, and the researches of people like
David Evans can only shed light on the problem.
Nor, it must be understood, is Evans’ work in confined to the search for
Africanisms in Tate and Panola. Among my
more treasured possessions is a general survey of black rural religious
singing, which he produced several years before the disc under
consideration. It is called Sorrow Come
Pass Me Around, and in terms of superb it is completely off the scale.15. Sorrow
Come Pass Me Around: A Survey of Black Rural Religious Music, Advent
2805.15 If nobody has had the foresight
to re-issue that LP, and you happen to see it in some expensive second-hand
vinyl catalogue, do not pause to worry about how you are going to raise the
asking price. Once you have the disc
home and on your turntable, all qualms about the bank you so rashly decided to
stick up, will be utterly dissipated.”
****
ADDENDUM- INFORMATION ABOUT FRED MCDOWELL
This information about African American Bluesman Fred McDowell is presented because of this quote from the article excerpted in this post: "blues fans may wonder at the omission of Panola County’s favourite son, Fred McDowell."...
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Fred_McDowell
"Fred McDowell (January 12, 1906 – July 3, 1972),[1] known by
his stage name Mississippi Fred McDowell, was an American hill country blues
singer and guitar player.
Career
McDowell was born in Rossville, Tennessee, United States.[5]
His parents were farmers, who both died while Fred was in his youth. He took up
the guitar at the age of 14 and was soon playing for tips at dances around
Rossville.[5] Seeking a change from plowing fields, he moved to Memphis in
1926, where he worked in the Buck-Eye feed mill, which processed cotton into
oil and other products.[6] In 1928, he moved to Mississippi to pick cotton.[6]
He finally settled in Como, Mississippi, in 1940 or 1941 (or maybe the late
1930s), where he worked as a full-time farmer for many years while continuing
to play music on weekends at dances and picnics.[5]
After decades of playing for small local gatherings,
McDowell was recorded in 1959 by roving folklore musicologist Alan Lomax and
Shirley Collins,[5] on their Southern Journey field-recording trip.[7] With
interest in blues and folk music rising in the United States at the time,
McDowell's field recordings for Lomax caught the attention of blues aficionados
and record producers, and within a couple of years, he had finally become a
professional musician and recording artist in his own right.[5] His LPs proved
quite popular, and he performed at festivals and clubs all over the world.[8]”…
****
This concludes Part I of this pancocojams series on the preface to the booklet for the 1978 album Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi.
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