A Survey of Traditional Music from the North American Traditions Collection

The Field Recorders Collective (FRC)—comprising recordists Mark Wilson, Lou Curtiss, John Harrod, Morgan MacQuarrie, Gordon McCann, and Gus Meade—has released a sprawling, fifteen-volume collection of recordings (FRC801–815) from their combined fieldwork spanning 1972–2008, titled A Survey of Traditional Music from the North American Traditions Collection. Sold in three five-volume sets (plus a preview volume, FRC800), each disc of the Survey is accompanied by extensive notes—in the neighborhood of 150 pages for most, some far more—and several indexes to the material, both of which are accessible online.The scope of the Survey is considerable, as is the sheer volume of material, such that many of my comments will be necessarily general. In terms of the structure of the collection, the first set of discs (vols. 1–5) is evidently organized around the most “traditional” of the North American traditions; it explores Child and other British ballads (vol. 1), instrumental music (mainly fiddle, but some selections feature banjo, mandolin, or piano; vol. 2), “Songs of Melancholy and Sorrow” (vol. 3), the “Anglo-African Exchange” (vol. 4), and homegrown American songs and tunes (vol. 5). The second set (vols. 6–10) proceeds more by genre: songs by professional, urban composers in the repertoire of primarily rural sources (vol. 6); work songs (vol. 7); cowboy songs (vol. 8); religious music (vol. 9); and children's songs (vol. 10). The third set (vols. 11—15) is arranged mostly geographically—covering Kentucky (vol. 11), the American Midwest (vol. 12), and Cape Breton Island in eastern Canada (vols. 13 and 14)—with a final disc (vol. 15) that showcases informants “in their own words,” including “vignettes, tall tales, poems, and jokes” (cover notes, vol. 15).In a market dominated by the ever-expanding catalogue of glossy Smithsonian Folkways productions, the Survey has a homespun quality that recalls a time before the main American traditional music labels had been acquired by private equity or public institutions. This, as it turns out, is not coincidental. The notes to the albums—mainly by Wilson as general editor, with contributions beyond the core FRC group from Norm Cohen, John Schwab, and Rounder Records founder Bill Nowlin—explain that the recording work that led to the creation of the North American Traditions collection was conducted under the auspices of Rounder Records before its sale to Concord Music Group in 2010, at which point the members of the FRC retained their rights to this less broadly marketable North American Traditions material and have since worked toward releasing their back catalogue. Consequently, many of the songs on the Survey have been previously released on Rounder, though the majority have not. In addition, where some of the Rounder releases focused on individual artists, these discs cut across individual repertoires thematically and geographically so that many artists appear on several of the records according to the breadth of their material. This combination of unreleased material and divergent presentation offers something new even to those who already possess some of these previous Rounder releases.The Survey is rough around the edges. In terms of production values, the creators have given less attention to graphic design and editing in favor of a simplicity and directness that lends authenticity to the collection as a whole but also at times detracts from the impact of their offering. The slipcase and disc cover designs are reminiscent of productions of two or three decades ago, while the associated notes are PDFs produced from plainly formatted Word documents provided via Dropbox. Typos like “The Ango-African Exchange” on the spine of volume 4 and “Graphic Desiign” on the slipcase of the first set of discs are prominent and common enough to raise flags. Balancing these primarily visual/textual limitations, however, the recordings themselves are frequently very good. They are sonically far clearer and more technically proficient than the kind of audio one expects from an ethnographic field recording—no doubt because they were planned for commercial release rather than purely academic purposes. Despite spanning several decades of formats and recording techniques, the discs are mastered such that glaring jumps in fidelity, loudness, and so forth are fewer than expected. The FRC-recorded tracks are occasionally punctuated by a 78 rpm disc transfer or a contributed tape recording that precedes their work beginning in the 1970s, but these are included judiciously. Thus, while the Survey lacks polish in its visual presentation, this is ultimately redeemed by its superior sonic quality.Readers of this journal are likely to consider the choices behind the inclusion and arrangement of tracks, as well as the kinds of arguments advanced in the notes, when evaluating the Survey as a scholarly resource. Whose traditions are included in the North American Traditions collection? What kind of argument(s) about the nature of North American traditional music does the Survey put forward, either implicitly through its deployment of some categories over others or explicitly in its rhetoric? While the compilers of this collection have provided a wealth of detailed bibliographic and discographic information tracing the songs through their print and recorded histories, as well as oral history and inference to sketch out less documented lineages of performance and influence, the vision of North American traditional music on offer here is a limited one. Where this is most apparent is in how the Survey handles race, in particular the disparities between white and African American musicians in the collection and society at large.In short, the performers recorded by the FRC and presented on these discs were/are overwhelmingly white. On this, Wilson writes that the FRC “recorded comparatively few black performers directly, largely because we lacked the initial local contacts required if one's research efforts were to prove successful, and also because the black populations within our focal regions were small” (notes, vol. 4). This statement of limitations in the field is honest enough; what it does not address is how the African American sources the FRC did record are incorporated in the Survey. By way of example, aside from a few selections elsewhere from Sam Chatmon or Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, the one volume that deals specifically with African American music is volume 4, “The Anglo-African Exchange.” Sam Chatmon himself is featured on the album cover for volume 4, presumably as a kind of metaphor for that exchange since none of the other artists featured are by their own or the FRC's description Black. Yet while Chatmon's image and two of Chatmon's recordings are featured on the album, his race is not broached in discussion of either—in sharp contrast to the narrative in Chatmon's own words on the cover of Sam Chatmon's Advice (1979), also produced by FRC members Wilson and Curtiss, where he describes his father's experience of slavery and his own experience of segregation. African American musicians are only consciously foregrounded in the Survey in the context of exchange with white musicians, but even here their experiences are curiously omitted.How the Survey deals with race in terms of the white musicians who make up the remainder of included performers is correspondingly unsatisfactory. Wilson writes that “with respect to African-American music in particular, it happens that our largely Anglo informants sometimes retained the richer musical retentions from times gone by, partially because their communities were less disrupted by the massive displacements that affected our [sic] Black populations” (Background to the NAT Collection). In other words, “Anglo” informants retained not only more of their own traditions but also of African Americans. This argument is essentially repeated in the notes to volume 4, where, in addition to the Great Migration, the following is elaborated as an explanation for the lack of material from Black sources: “Our [sic] black communities have often displayed an understandable inclination to cast aside their former musical styles as emblems of Uncle Tom-ism, despite the fact that the rejected music comprised a significant portion of the enduring contributions that black communities made to American culture over the course of the 19th century” (notes, vol. 4).That may well be true, and has been argued before, but the Survey does not extend this analysis to how or why the material from or referring to African Americans was retained by white musicians for so much longer—why they didn't reject it, too. One demonstrative example from the same volume points toward something of an answer: “Mandy” from Almeda Riddle. In the notes, Wilson presents the print and recorded history of the song—which is lyrically or musically related to others known variously as “Georgie/Georgia Buck Is Dead” and perhaps most closely to Uncle Dave Macon's “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy”—but at no point addresses how both Macon's “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy” and Riddle's “Mandy” traffic heavily in stereotyped minstrelsy dialect and tropes and that the titular Mandy figure is itself is one of the more common minstrel archetypes for Black women. Surely the lasting appeal of minstrelsy beyond the end of the nineteenth century had something to do with the staying power of such material in white repertoires over Black, but this is not interrogated.There are other issues. Indigenous musicians are few and far between on the Survey, outnumbered handily by stereotyped references especially in songs on volume 8, Under Western Skies. Where they are present, the way the FRC have chosen to categorize their material is again curious: Mi'kmaw fiddler Wilfred Prosper is included on volume 3, Songs of Melancholy and Sorrow, but not volume 14, Gaelic in the Bow, despite performing a Scottish air. Other, nonwhite racial/ethnic groups are absent entirely. Children make up a category for arrangement and analysis, whereas women do not, despite there being a considerable number of them among the performers. The figure of the purist collector also occasionally reveals itself, as in the example of Cape Breton fiddler Joe Cormier and his nephew, J. P. Cormier, whom Wilson admits he “could have killed” after the latter told his uncle he needed to modernize (notes, vol. 14; the younger Cormier is today a standard bearer for Cape Breton traditional music and also a fine singer-songwriter and bluegrass musician). None of these deals a final blow to the Survey, but each tells us a bit more about how “North American traditions” were/are conceived of by the FRC.Despite its shortcomings, the Survey will be a valuable acquisition for ethnomusicology collections, especially in situations where they also serve programs in folklore studies, regional studies, popular music, and so on. Priced at seventy dollars per set of five discs, the whole collection can be had at a cost comparable to two new clothbound monographs from some publishers, a compelling value proposition considering the copious additional textual materials associated with the discs. As stated, the recordings themselves are well produced, and from an academic perspective they effectively balance ethnographic/folkloric utility and the ability to discern clearly what is happening on tape, which cannot always be said for collections of this type. There is a considerable amount of new bibliographic, discographic, and oral historical information that accompanies the discs, and in the places where the analysis and arrangement come up short, keen students and teachers of American traditional music will have ample opportunity to dig deeper into these sources.

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