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justamusicpodcast · 4 years ago

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Sup, I’m Laura Cousineau and welcome to Just A Music Podcast, where I, Laura Cousineau, tell you about some music history, how it relates to the world around us, and hopefully, introduce you to some new tunes. This show is theoretically for everyone but I will swear and when it comes down to it and sometimes we may need to talk about some sensitive topics so ur weeuns might wanna sit this one out.

Folk music! What a fucking blanket of a genre title isn’t it? We got 1960s folk in america, we got different folk genres in terms of mixed genres like folk metal, we got folk music as sort of an interchangeable term for ethnic musics, it’s all fuckin folk from here on out folks! But what is folk music where does it come from, what are we talking about when we talk about folk music? Well that’s what we’re going to talk about this week to kick off our North American music genre analysis with North American folk musics! Truth be told I did wanna start out with an episode on North American Native musics but as I’m whiter than sour cream on rice and there isn’t as much scholarship on it as I would like to confidently do a whole episode on it without input from actual native peoples. That all being said, if anyone listening is native and would like to give me some input on their musics, I would be more than happy to cover it.

But for now folk. North American folk musics. You notice I mention musics, it’s because north American folk music can be defined as a lot of things. So what are we talking about when we talk about the genre of folk musics. Well that’s gonna change depending on who you ask from what I explained before, we have some kind of mish mosh, multiple definition, popular idea of what folk music is and that’s not surprising given how that definition has grown and changed over time. Some of you will be surprised to hear that when we talk about north American folk music’s we’re actually talking about A BUNCH of different musical genres, not just one. Sure we have what people would usually associate with North American folk, the very Appalachian sounding bluegrass, country and then of course western, but we also have native musics (which again, I promise I will talk about at some point), and Maritime Canadian folk musics, we have cajun and creole musics, we have a bunch of racist shit too unfortunately but like legit we have so much stuff to talk about this episode I might have to break it up into two episodes.

Like all other musics, it all started from somewhere… I know, that’s the take of the century isn’t it. I mean it would be so much cooler if all folk music started cause some little gnome hopped out of the ground and was like imma invent music, but like that gnome would also be incredibly racist so I dunno, gnome theory sucks. So where did North American folk music come from? Well that’s a matter of looking at the mostly euro populations that colonized North America and this will change depending on the regions that we’re looking at. So WE need a SHORT HISTORY of the beginning of exploration.

So, there’s some debate as to who we should credit with the “discovery” of north america, cause on one hand we have the Viking settlements in eastern Canada in the year 1000, there’s some speculation that there were even other visitors before then, and of course we have the populations of native people’s who have lived here for forever, but in terms of the European colonial pattern we’re looking for, for our needs we’re looking at Christopher Columbus. So as y’all know Christopher Columbus, Portuguese adventurer, getting permission from Queen Isabella of Castille in 1492 set sail across the Atlantic to try and find a passage to India to get some of them good ass spices everyone was raving about. Though he didn’t find India he managed to find the Caribbean also known as Central America. Now I know in the news for a little bit with the ever increasing prevalence of the Black Lives Matter movement y’all been hearing about people tearing down Christopher Columbus statues in the news and there is a very good reason for that.

So as I’ve already told you Chris didn’t discover North america but he also was, and this is gonna be a massive understatement, but the dude was a massive asshole, like take the biggest asshole you can imagine and times that by about 10. It’s estimated that his colonization of the Caribbean resulted in the deaths of over 8 million people, or or about the entire population of Switzerland. You can’t even use the product of his time excuse because even Queen Isabella, the person in charge of the Spanish Inquisition, which famously saw hte torture and death of tonnes of people under the guise of religious purity, was even like yo dude you need to slow down. I will talk about him more once we reach central American music genres but just for now yeah he existed, yeah he kinda started the wave of north American exploration, but he was also an absolute asshat and there should never have been a statue let alone a day to commemorate the shitheel of a man.

So we get the start of this wave of immigration into what will become northern South america, Central America, and southern north America by Portuguese populations who mainly speak, well, Portuguese, bringing music from the Iberian peninsula. But we’re more concerned with what’s happening up north and for that we’re gonna have to look at later waves of immigration that started with Roanoake starting in the 1520s.

So the start of British colonization started with Roanoake and Newfoundland (which, yes, for our non canadian listeners it’s pronounced newfinland not new found land like the name would suggest, which to be fair would also be cool, I’ll welcome the Fins in my land anytime, they do fantastic music). One of these settlements was infinitely more successful than the other with Newfoundland becoming what we know now to be the east most province of Canada and while Roanoake is still there it failed so hard that a population of 112 people disappeared without a trace. Like legit we still don’t know what precisely happened to them. Some assume they integrated into the local native populations, some assume they were all murdered, some assume cannibals, essentially it was a bad time for all involved.

What this means for newfoundland though and other English colonies is that musically we hear a very British folk song base to the music that’s being established here, with newfoundland being very much established as a fishing colony the musical style echoes that. Since we’re talking about the Kingdom of England more broadly this meant that there was an absolute tonne of Irish and Scottish influence to the music. This is why when you listen to the folk musics of Newfoundland (established in 1583), Virginia (established in 1607), and Parts of the Carolinas (established in 1712), you hear it sounds very similar to that of their colonial forefathers. This means that there was commonly a lot of fiddle, flute, English guitar, a string instrument with a long handle, rounded body and ten strings that was a version of a Renaissance cittern, simple stringed banjos; zithers, which were flat, shallow boxes with strings running the length of the body that were plucked by the fingers and and hammered dulcimers, various shaped (like trapezoidal and peanut shaped) sound boxes with strings across them that were hit with small hammers, Much like this!

So we have all these people coming into the area, and with that too you’re also going to get jigs and reels too. Jigs and reels are both types of dance music widely enjoyed across the British Isles but are most associated with Scottish and Irish dancing musics. The difference between the two is mostly the time signature as the instruments used to play both of them are roughly the same, that being said Scottish musics tend to have more pipes and irish does traditionally use a type of handdrum which are both excellent. Jigs are in compound duple time meaning that there are 12 8th notes in a bar of music and reels are played in simple time like 2/2 (two half notes per bar) or 4/4 (4 quarter notes in a bar). They sound like this.

Its important to note here too that when we talk about all of these peoples from the British Isles that we don’t unintentionally assume that they were all nice and cozy with one another. Many of the Scottish and Irish parties, often referred to simply as the scotch irish or scotts irish came to america as a form of Religious punishmen because they didn’t precisely fit in with the church of England, some of my ancestors were scotts-irish and came to what would eventually become America because they were Quakers.

It is from these traditions that the music then evolves into something different over time and actually we’re gonna take a quick detour into linguistics for a second because it will be particularly helpful in demonstrating my point and y’all will be able to hear something way cool. So for those who are not aware, linguistics is the study of, well, language. (big brain moment right?) But what does that mean? Whereas when you take English, Igbo, Japanese, Arabic, or any other established language in an academic setting (so like learning in school when you’re growing up) the emphasis is on spelling, grammar, how to write and speak your language in the way that it has been determined is the best way to speak it (which isn’t always ACTUALLY the best way to speak it but we’ll get into that in a second.) Linguistics is the study of pretty much every other component of the language. So linguists study the phonemes or the sounds that comprise the word and how they change based on the dialect that a person is speaking (a dialect being a regional difference of a language such as how someone from Scotland speaks English and how I as a Canadian speak English), they study how languages become standard languages and why (spoiler alert there’s a lot of elitism involved), they study meaning and why we put certain words in the order that we do (for Example in English we put adjectives (or the words that describe things) in very specific order being quantity, quality, size, age shape, color, proper adjective and purpose or qualifier so describing a thing could be a shitty old triangular purple metal pair of shoes, but if you were like the triangular purples old shitty pair of shoes you would lose your gourd.)

But why does linguistics matter? Well language actually acts a lot like music in the ways that it travels and changes over time which makes sense doesn’t it? When a people move around and interact with other cultures or are even just are separated from a larger group, over time their language will change! One change that is easy for us to see in our life-time is in word usage, for example, you use different phrases and slang that your parents and your grandparents didn’t use. The same goes for accents this means that your accent is going to be different than your parents and their parents. In some cases this will smooth it out or ramp it up, it will accentuate features, or drop features entirely. And actually this is where I’m going to give you over to a linguist to better explain this because where I do know about some linguistic shift they will definitely explain it better.

Why this is important is BECAUSE music functions similarly in terms of drift. Though musical drift doesn’t happen as FAST as language because language you use everyday with incredibly intensity and music you do not, it does still happen. Even more helpful in the tracing of language is how and where it moves over time. Because language is contingent on people speaking it and music is also contingent on those who play it, you can track how music and language changes and who it interacts with based on the stylistic attributes and or instruments that it acquires over time. If we wanna think about this in a real practical sense come with me into the theater of ur brainhole for a second. Imagine for a second there is a group of people who live in lets say India in like the 500s C.E for some reason or another they’re pushed out of India and into the west where they met like Turks and hung out with them for a couple hundred years. So they pick up some Turkish words, incorporate some of their musical elements and then move farther west. Then they meet the Greeks! The Greeks are pretty rad, they got some good shit going for them, so they stay for another couple hundred years! Again, they pick up some Greek words, some Greek musical elements. After that let’s say some of the people from this group were captured and held as indentured workers in a country forcing them to integrate into the culture of the majority but another portion of the population was fortunate enough to be able to get away and keep moving west into the Balkans where they also picked up a bunch of words and musical elements. You see where I’m going with this? Cultures are all contingent on how often or how little they come in contact with other cultures, this goes for music, this goes for language, hell this pretty much goes for all sorts of art. For the sake of our example I used the Roma who also just serve as a crazy good example for this because we didn’t really even know their history until one scholar was “like hey they got some Indian words in here” and launched a whole study into it which is rad as hell but we’re gonna save that for another episode. BUT YES CULTURE IS CONTINGENT ON THE INTERACTION OR LACK OF INTERACTION WITH OTHER CULTURES, THIS IS A THING AND WE’RE GONNA BE TALKING ABOUT IT A LOT.

SO we were with settlers from the British Isles and they came to north america and then their music changed!

In Canada and Louisianna we also have the addition of the French colonies which make our music a little different. In Canada those colonies would be Acadia in what is now the province of Nova Scotia (established in 1604), Montreal (established in 1642), Quebec (established in 1608), and Trois Riviers (established in 1634) along the Saint Lawrence River with the voyageurs or courier de bois who were fur traders dealing primarily in beaver. In the southern US it’s the colony of Louisianna in the states which is much larger than what is currently the state of Louisianna. All of these colonies together formed one mega colony commonly referred to as New France. Differences between the musics performed by French colonists vs. English colonists was, well first of all the language, obviously French colonists sang more often in French, due to them being�� French. But there were also differences in content too. In Canada especially many settlements were originally set up with the intention of converting native populations to Christianity which is a form of cultural genocide by the way. Thus, Jesuit populations often brough a lot of religious music into the area. Sometimes it would be mixed with musical and cultural traditions of the native populations but often it would just be very Christian. An example from the area I grew up in would be the Huron carol which blends native cultural heritage from the area with Christianity. It sounds something like this.

As French populations began intermarrying into native populations this became a more common sonic combination to hear. In Canada we also have a larger amount of music based on or around or deriving from sea shanties due to the fishing populations that settles in East originally as fishing colonies. As I plan to do a whole episode on sea shanties one day I don’t want to go too much into them but quickly speaking sea shanties tend to be broken down into categories based on the task they were performed around. So there were three principal types of shanties: short-haul shanties, which were simple songs sung for short tasks where only a little work was needed, halyard shanties, for jobs such as hoisting sail, in which a certain rhythm was required to signal when it was time to exert effort and when it was time to rest (often referred to as a pull and relax rhythm), and windlass shanties, which synchronized footsteps. I find them incredibly infectious, which is probably intentional because they’re meant to kinda keep spirits up as well as set a pace for work, but I’ll try and sell ya more on that when the time comes. In the meantime you can content yourself with singing drunken sailor to yourself, probably one of the most well known shanties.

French Canadian music also has some very fun additions to it that come from the body itself, like ur own dang body. The first one is a singing technique but also song style. It’s technically a form of non-lexical vocable which is a fancy way of saying “sounds that comes from ur mouth in music that aren’t necessarily words.” In fact sometimes it’s also just referred to as French Canadian mouth music. This specific one I’m talking about kinda, lord how do you describe this, it’s like a scatting but much slower, less bombastic, and more rhythmic. I’m gonna fuck up the pronunciation because, again, even though I have a French Canadian background and had to take it from grade 4 to grade 9 in school I remember it about as well as one might remember an event they’ve never been to, that is to say not at all. The form is called a turlutte (ter-lute) which uses a lot of D, T, and M sounds to kinda fit the sound that ur looking for in a song. It sounds something like this!

French Canadian music also has the real fun addition of podorythmie or foot rhythms which are complex rhythms that people keep with their feet. For those who don’t know what a rhythm is, it is defined as a strong, regular, repeated pattern sound so lets say that you start clapping, and each clap is spaced exactly by one second, now on the first and third claps you clap a little harder, that would be a rhythm. Rhythms can be incredibly simple like that one or they can be really complex and the ones that you will hear in French Canadian music are of the more complex variety. Usually if the person performing them is also playing an instrument they’ll often sit in a chair with a little wood box or hard surface underneath which they will use to tap their feet on. Sometimes they will wear special hard bottomed shoes made with leather or wood to do this in order to accentuate the sound. Less commonly people can also stand while performing a podorythmie turning it into a kind of dance. Here’s my favorite example of what that sounds like.

Some of this style was eventually transported to Louisianna when the Acadians were eventually pushed out of Canada by the English in 1755, many of them ended up actually settling in Louisiana forming the ethnically Cajun population, Cajun deriving from the word Acadian. Not to say that life wasn’t hard for damn near everybody who wasn’t nobility in the 1700s, but the dramatic shift for Acadians made it particularly hard for a long time. People had trouble adjusting to their new way of life at first, coming from a mostly trading based economy to agrarian based was hard on the population, not to mention the massive change in climate that came with moving all the way from what would now be modern nova scotia all the way down to Louisiana. To give a real succinct idea of where exactly they were moving imma quote Loyola university in New Orleans that have done a really good succinct history on the Cajuns of Louisianna ”Few Acadians stayed in the port of arrival, New Orleans. Some settled in the regions south and northwest of New Orleans and along the Teche, Lafourche and Vermilion Bayous. Far more went further west to the marshes and prairies of south central Louisiana. They became hunters and trappers and farmers. It is a popular misconception that most Cajuns live on the bayous and in the marshes, poling their pirogues and hunting alligators. Far more became farmers in the grand triangular prairie that stretches from Lafayette north to Ville Platte and west to Lake Charles.” Like shit man, my giant canadian ass if forced to live in Louisiana would probably catch fire as soon as I got there let alone back then with no air conditioning and what have you. Their music also then changed to reflect their new way of life, not that the music was about catching fire in a corn field (although that would fucking slap), music was written and sung about hard times and hard livin’.

From the same Loyola University document: The music these people brought was simple. It was made by singing, humming, and rhythmic clapping and stamping. Instruments were brought to the colony, with a violinist's death recorded in 1782. Early instrumental music was played primarily on violins, singularily or in pairs. One violin played lead and the second a backing rhythm. A simple rhythm instrument was created out of bent metal bars from hay or rice rakes: the triangle or 'tit fer, meaning little iron. Musicians wrote original songs telling of their life in the new world. The song J'ai passe devant ta porte tells of the suddenness of death from accident and disease. The singer tells of passing by his beloved's door and hearing no answer to his call. Going inside he sees the candles burning around his love's corpse.

In the south they would have been influenced by other settlers in the area, more scotts and irish of course but also eventually African descended peoples. Some were brought as slaves during the French and Spanish colonial period or brought in by settlers after the Louisiana Purchase. Under Spanish rule, slaves were allowed to buy their freedom (which I cannot emphasize entirely how fucking difficult that would have been), leading to an early population of free Blacks in southern Louisiana. People of African descent also came from the Caribbean, including the colonized French-speaking islands. During the revolution in Haiti between 1789 and 1791, French-speaking Haitians who fled the violence often chose the Louisiana coast as a destination due to having a familiar linguistic population and ease of access. These populations would become to be known as creole. The term Creole comes originally from the Spanish criollo, for a child born of Spanish parents in the New World. The French borrowed it as Creole. Creole could refer to anyone of European parentage born in Louisiana. Over two centuries it began to be used to mean a person of mixed foreign and local parentage. One use today is to refer to someone entirely or partly of African descent.

Now, it’s incredibly important that we don’t discount the influence of slaves and former slaves in the creation and dissemination of creole musics because they are absolutely integral to the process. Creole songs originated in the French and Spanish slave plantations in Louisianna and thus contain tonnes of African musical elements from the instruments they used to the syncopated rhythms. For example, original instruments you would have heard could have been percussion instruments made out of gourds, known as shak-shak which would be shaken to create a rhythm, the mouth harp, a type of metal instrument that one holds in place in the mouth and plucks with their finger opening and closing their mouth hole to create different pitches and textures of sound, the bamboula, tambou, or tombou lay lay which are types of drums; and as I mentioned before, a type of banjo known as a banza might have been played if someone could fashion one. Because that in essence is what we’re talking about, when we talk about Creole music we’re talking about music slaves could make with the limited resources that were available to them, in order to make the music they wanted to hear. This is why overtime we also see the addition of the washboard as an instrument because it was something that would have been available to them. A washboard for those who don’t know is most literally a board, usually made out of ridged wood or metal that one would put into a source of water, either a basin or a river, and methodically rub the dirt and stains out of your dirty clothes as well as you could with soap if you could access it, believe me it’s about as fun as it sounds.

So what was this music they were playing? What did it sounds like? Well as I already mentioned there was a lot of African influence to the music. One of the most prominent features of this influence is the syncopated rhythm. A syncopated rhythm is a rhythm that is built so that the strong beats eventually become the weak beats. So if we continue our example from before, where we clap harder on the first beat and third beat, a syncopated rhythm would move to become the opposite of it on the 2nd and 4th beats or the off beats, like this. Don’t be worried if that’s something you can’t do yourself, I still find it hard to switch between.

As no type of culture exists independently of time or location though, the type of music they played was also influenced by the culture of their oppressors. While there was music that existed independently that slaves brought from their Native African groups such as the Bamboula, Calinda, Congo, Carabine and Juba, over time, a lot of their music also began to incorporate French and Spanish influence. A type of French dance called a quadrille for example was worked into the repertoire, a Spanish dance called the contradanza or the habanera actually became some of the first written music to incorporate the aforementioned African rhythms. Even the language used in these musics grew and changed. For the slaves, and even free black folk coming from the Caribbean, they would bring with them what is now known as patois, a language that is a combination of English, French, Spanish, and African languages. So when we think of what creole music is, it really then is a patchwork of different cultures mainly driven and compounded by the efforts of African slaves.

Now I will say before I play this example here that it is difficult when looking for early musics belonging to oppressed peoples because 1. It wasn’t written down for the most part, at least not in the way it would have been originally performed, 2. Pieces that were written down, recorded, or coopted were often done by white people looking to profit off of African music (which we’ll see way too fucking much of as we continue our north American music excursion), which seems like a rather disingenuous way to present it to you, and 3. Because music recording as far as actually recording audio didn’t exist until 1860. So if we’re looking for songs from the periods that they were written or invented we still have to find people who are alive that remember them. Even as I was researching this I was trying to look for recordings that would make it easier to hear the differences between the dance genres I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately there isn’t much in the way of albums or popular bands dedicated to these types of genres, so instead I’m going to play a clip of a bamboula rhythm being played by some students at the Asheh Cultural Arts Center's Kuumba Institute in New Orleans, and then a clip of another group performing a Calinda.

From where we’re currently standing in the year 2020 there is still Creole and Cajun distinct musics but they also created a fusion genre which has become it’s own thing, this genre is called Zydeco. Zydeco developed out of both the Cajun and Creole though (hard core purists will insist that it is a mostly creole development) which then further changed when German Immigrants started moving into the area. The accordion, which was invented in Vienna about 1828, was brought to Louisiana by the German immigrants many of whom lived adjacent to or among the Cajuns. Though it arrived in Louisiana as early as 1884, it was not immediately incorporated into Cajun music. This is because where fiddles were tuned differently than the accordions coming into the country. What I mean by that is that some instruments have pitches they’re better at playing naturally. So for example, you’re standard run of the mill trumpet, like if u look up a trumpet on google, well they’re most suited to play in the key of B flat because the sound that you get when you blow into one without putting any of your fingers on the buttons is B flat. For the accordions that were coming with the Germans, they were tuned to the keys of A and F, so it wasn’t till much later in 1925 that accordions tuned to C and D started appearing and thus started to be better incorporated into the music around it. The guitar was also added pretty late coming in in around 1920ish. The word Zydeco itself is actually derived from the title of a French song Les haricots sont pas sale or The snap beans are not salty! You can hear in the French if you put a little punchiness into it, the transition between the les and haricot sounds like a Z (yes I’m a Canadian that says Zee, I blame it on my American mother, plus it just sounds better, zed sounds like a bee flew into a hard surface). So because of the Z sound it became abbreviated to zarico and through time morphed into Zydeco! We got BEAN music.

And how does this bean music sound, well I personally think it sounds pretty fucking rad, kinda like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kPztofSd5Y

fun fact about that one, I’ve known this song for roughly 5 years I knew it I definitely just thought these dudes were scattin, like WHOA BA BA WHOA BA BA WHA BA PA BYE BYE DOO DOO, I did not realize until roughly 2 years until after I heard it that it had lyrics…

Now you may have noticed I haven’t touched on Appalachian folk music yet and I’ve done it very strategically for 2 reasons. One is just simply because if I had put it any earlier yall would have been like HUEHUEHUE I HAVE HEARD ALL I NEED and then absconded into the night like a raccoon after finding half a cheeseburger in the trash. The second was because Appalachian folk music and next week’s episode are gonna be pretty instrumental in the episode after that, so to keep it popping freesh in ur brain bits I figured I’d stick it at the end of the episode.

So appalaichan music turns out is actually a really tricky genre of music, if we wanna go by the United States Library of Congress introduction to Appalaichan music: The term "Appalachian music" is in truth an artificial category, created and defined by a small group of scholars in the early twentieth century, but bearing only a limited relationship to the actual musical activity of people living in the Appalachian mountains. Since the region is not only geographically, but also ethnically and musically diverse (and has been since the early days of European settlement there), music of the Appalachian mountains is as difficult to define as is American music in general. I should also probably say before we get too far that like the Appalachian mountains (which first of all that I pronounce incorrectly because it’s pronounces with a CHian not Shan) but the appalachian mountains are the mountain range that run through a lot of the eastern United States, so like Appalachian Mountains extend 1,500 miles (or 2414 km for everyone else) from Maine to Georgia. They pass through 18 states and encompass the Green Mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, the Berkshires of Connecticut, New York's Catskills, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The region known as the Southern Highlands, or Upland South, covers most of West Virginia and parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Virginia. In colonial times, this area was known as the "Back Country."

It was in these areas that Cherokee and Algonquin people already existed but then colonists would come from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales and eventually from other parts of Europe came the Germans, French Huguenots, Polish, and Czechians. So we’ve already looked at the influence from the British Isles before (the jigs and reels and English folk music) but these would evolve into Square dances with a little help from French influences as well. A square dance for those who don’t know is a dance usually with 8 sets of partners who perform steps that are either established and vary based on song or thencaller which then the dancers perform. But just as we saw with instruments and musics being carried by free or escaped slaves to different parts of the southern united states and being integrated into the musical cannon of the area, the same thing happened in this area by the other people settling here as well. For example, the hammered dulcimer I told y’all about earlier (which if you haven’t seen one I would recommend lookin one up they can come in really fun shapes, ) but yeah those same hammered dulcimers were not an invention of the British isles carried over by those settlers but it is almost a direct descendant of a German instrument (the Germans btw came in a couple different waves the first big one being in 1670) so this instrument they brought was called the Scheitholt. Even African American instruments entered the scene in around the 1840s just in time for minstrel shows to start travelling around the country which I will be doing an episode on by the way because you can’t talk about American music without talking about the fucking disaster that is minstrel shows. It was these same free black peoples that also really popularized the call and response type of vocals which is pretty much just what it sounds like. The main singer will call out a line of lyrics sometimes as a holler, sometimes more musically, and other singers will answer it by doing it right back at them. This can be found in all sorts of music but just for the kicks of it here’s an example of it in gospel music.

But we’re gonna back track a little bit back to the Germans because we really haven’t talked about them enough and have left out one of their biggest influences on developing Appalachian folk music which is yodelling. If you’re from the states you’ll probably know yodelling from that kid that got famous a couple years ago and was in a Walmart commercial or something but for those of you who don’t know or people who do know that kid and are just curious about the mechanics of yodelling: The main components of a human singing voice are the head voice and the chest voice which I CAN and will demonstrate but to explain first, the head voice and chest voice are the two registers humans typically have. There’s also falsetto which is slightly different as it is kinda a pushing of the voice to a place it isn’t really supposed to be but I digress. So the head voice is where we get all our higher notes where the chest voice is where we get all out low notes. This is mainly due to the resonators we are using in creating these sounds as well as how tense or thick or thin and how long or short your vocal chords are. Resonators are simply just the air passages and open spaces in your body that sound resonates through. So for head voice you’re pushing the sound up and into the head using like ur nasal passages and all ur skull space for the sound to vibrate through which are all really small so you get a higher often sharper sound and chest voice mainly resonates in the chest (or ur LUNGS) which is a lot more space and so more low and rumbly. You can tell the difference between the two by putting a hand on ur chest while you’re singing, start with your lowest note you can comfortably reach and just start ascending, eventually you will feel your chest vibrate less and less and should be able to feel the switch into head voice. I’ll just give you a quick demonstration as to how different they are. Please bear in mind I am a natural soprano so my low range isn’t incredibly low but here it goes so the head voice “as I don’t do remembering, can’t give this song a ghost of past, I wander, I ponder, why there is weight in time” and again the same line but in chest voice “as I don’t do remembering, can’t give this song a ghost of past, I wander, I ponder, why there is weight in time.”

So if you tried it yourself you’ll notice that there’s a little, what vocalists call, break between where ur chest register is and where ur head voice is, it happens for everyone don’t worry. What yodelling does then is fluctuates between the head and the chest voice really fast and most importantly smoothly like this:

ahh shit man, the sounds of my ancestors, you can almost smell the leiderhosen, taste the octoberfest, YOU CAN ALMOST SEE THE SCHUPLATTING. But yes so Germans brought this with them from their homelands along with their accordions and it established itself the Appalachian folk tradition. Now it’ll probably interest you to know that yodelling isn’t a genre without purpose, as I’d like to do a whole episode on it though at some point I don’t wanna spoil too much but it is good for communicating across mountain ranges because of how it echoes and the types of inflection you can put into it. This makes it easier to understand why it survived the shift from the mountains in Germany all the way to the mountains of America. The Germans also brought something else with them, but it wasn’t just Germans, the Polish, and Czechian influences also brought it with them too! And what is it that they brought? The waltz of course! The waltz is a type of dance that focusses on a ¾ time signature, and has one heavy beat on the front and two lighter beats after. For any of you who’ve ever seen the musical Oliver, this is precisely the type of song Oom Pah Pah is.

So these collections of music and the things they developed into can be called Appalachian folk musics. It’s hard to pin down precisely what Appalachian music then sounds like at times because of all the different influences depending on place that you were living in, if you had to pick out a few things though you would head that firstly you get a lot of stringed instruments like guitars, fiddles and banjos. Secondly the themes were often similar and reflected day to day life living in the region such as mining or logging, there’s the fun little genre of murder ballads which I wanna do a whole episode on some day, and after the civil war we also get the addition of a lot of war songs. Thirdly this music would vary depending on purpose but would definitely include dances, campfire songs. So Imma play you a few samples then, first we just have a good old mountain song

if these sound familiar to other genres of music like bluegrass and country that’s because Appalachian folk music was the predecessor for both genres but those I’m gonna save for their own episode sometime in the future. It might be a part of the north American genre business it might be just another nebulous episode I do in the future at some point. But for now at least you know the history of some of the biggest Genres of American folk music. BUT WHAT ABOUT FOLK MUSIC TODAY, LAURA, WHAT ABOUT MUMFORD AND SONS, HOZIER, FUIMADANE, AND KORPIKLAAN? And I know, they’re ALL fantastic acts and I’ll get to people like them eventually, but for now at least you know where it all started.

So with that, hat’s all for just a music podcast this week, I hope you’ve heard something new, and I hope you’ve heard something that you like. If you haven’t there’s always next week where we’ll be getting heavy with slave and gospel music. In the meantime, though if one of y’all would like to suggest a topic I would love nothing more than to answer your musical question or talk about topics that interest you guys in music. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

Bye!

1. Over the Hills and Far Away - 17th Century English Traditional - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MR7VihPm2E

2. Woodsong Wanderlust Solo Hammered Dulcimer by Joshua Messick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayAvzVdOJJY&list=RDfD0rNyjDAa0&index=13

3. Out on the Ocean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynKDggMtMww

4. Rakish Paddy & Braes of Busby (Reels) Uilleann pipes Chris McMullan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0umOtiKyUc

5. A Quick Lesson on Southern Linguistics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNqY6ftqGq0

6. Huron Carol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPeEvUl06Y

7. La Bolduc - Reel Turluté https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASW3Cejl5oc

8. Le Lys Vert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASW3Cejl5oc

9. J'ai passe devant ta porte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtchvhughFw

10.New Orleans Kuumba camp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItRuHjjGMhg

11. Calinda (Stickfight) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaM0PI3T1s8

12. Bye, Bye Boozoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kPztofSd5Y

13. Call and Response in Gospel Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMgNTwZW5gY

14. Underthing Solstice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anMKMu9Tpoc

15. Yodelling Franzl Lang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQhqikWnQCU

16. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles – Ost – Maggie is Everything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fn1Pw-LxU8&

17. Ola Belle Reed High on the Mountain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsRRY5k5Psg

18. Traditional Tennessee Square Dance Caller Gerald Young of Pulaski https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7-DWvegcL8

#podcast #just a music podcast #music #music history #comedy #comedy podcast #learn urself a thing #folk #folk music #american folk music #canadian folk music

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mixedfeelingsproject · 8 years ago

Text

Anonymous

Where are you from? Seattle, WA

How would you describe your race/ethnicity? Biracial white/Japanese-American

Do you identify with one particular aspect of your ethnicity more than another? Have you ever felt pressure to choose between parts of your identity? When I was little I wanted to know more about my Japanese side. I think this is because my father, who is a third generation Japanese-American, didn't talk about his heritage a lot if at all, but my white mother pressed that that part of my family history is important. And even though I grew up in a rural white community, I was always told that my Japanese ethnicity was "cool" or "different"(in a good way), so I felt comfortable exploring it. But I also felt compelled to explore my white heritage too because my maternal grandfather constructed a family tree leading back to Norway, Germany, England, and Wales. In my teenage years I really embraced this and did Norwegian folk dance alongside taking Japanese Language lessons. But I always felt like I had to carefully balance the amount of attention I allotted each side of myself - not because of external pressure, but rather because I didn't want to make one side of myself feel more important than the other. I wanted them to be equal because I felt that was important. But as I've become more aware of issues like racism, cultural appropriation, and privilege, I've had times where I've waned in identity - on both sides. I remember being heartbroken and not wanting to continue studying Japanese because of how Japan conducted itself in China during WWII and race issues in the country today, I felt ashamed. But I've also been upset at the vicissitudes of white privilege and violence against POC (I was sheltered from that growing up). Whether I strongly identify as one or the other isn't fixed for me, it waxes and wanes depending on context and what I am feeling at the moment.

Did your parents encounter any difficulties from being in an interracial relationship? Lol, not that I know of? My dad is pretty Americanized in a heavily Asian area, so none of his behavior would come off as "different". I think that helped them blend in a little. But my mom told me that when she announced to her dad (my grandfather who happens to be pretty damn racist) that she was getting married, my grandpa asked what his last name was (this was over the phone): Mom: "It's Watanabe." Grandpa: "Whatta-what?! Janet K, what the hell are you getting yourself into!" At this point my mom was used to this kind of response from my grandfather as he was kind of a raging mess and didn't really deserve her attention anyways, so she just laughed.

How has your mixed background impacted your sense of identity and belonging? I grew up really damn white. And by that I mean really damn whitewashed. This is not only due to the location in a rural area outside of Seattle, but also that my dad is whitewashed, and my mom is white, and I'm white-passing (we were also very very Christian). But I always knew I was Japanese. I just never - NEVER - experienced racism because of it. Only until recently have I experienced any aggression towards me on the basis my race and most of it was online. I think something that helped preserve my Japanese identity in the face of all this whiteness I grew up around is the fact that my family hosted Japanese Exchange students, a total of seven from when I was a child and have no recollection to high school. I'm close friends with the two we hosted when I was a teenager. And they all marveled at the fact they were in America staying with ethnic Japanese, even though we were Nikkei (ethnic Japanese outside of Japan) and didn't speak Japanese (by the time the second Japanese student came along I had visited Japan and my Japanese was pretty good). And yet I knew I didn't really belong in Japan after I had gone there for the first time, since they called me Amerika-jin (an American), and not Nikkei-jin. But the Japanese people I do know are warm and welcoming towards me, and consider me a part of their culture, just not a part of their society (and that degree varies depending on the person and how well they know me). But I never felt this way in white circles - unless I brought up my last name. Then I was suddenly the Asian one, or at worst, the "exotic" girl. But this didn't really bother me much as a lot of that stuff flew over my head; I didn't realize how that could be damaging not just to myself, but to others and the community at large. Now I'm more sensitive to it because of that. In all honesty where I belong doesn't trouble me as much as others because I'm okay with just being myself. But lately I've realized that's part of my white-passing privilege, and furthermore I'm feeling alienated by my country because of the way it's moving.

Have you been asked questions like "What are you?" or "Where are you from?" by strangers? If so, how do you typically respond? Haha so many times! It never bothered me because they left it open-ended for me to answer. It was the rare that they were more rude about it, although I don't think people should keep asking us "what are you" as that's pretty demeaning and there are better and more nuanced ways to ask us about our background. The more far-flung guesses I more so laugh at because they are so off the map, and in all cases I just say I'm Japanese and White. However, now that I'm a full grown woman, I've been privy to the issue of Yellow Fever (which I have very much been a victim of), which when I'm talking with men makes me more keen on withholding my ethnicity as from experience I get the instant "ooooh you're an Asian woman" vibe. Bleh. At one time when I was living in the city I was debating on converting to Islam, and in my more serious phase I was wearing hijab more and more often. I got asked by one man who was from East Africa where I was from, and he was surprised (and a little embarrassed lol) when I told him I was from here. That's why I decided against wearing the headscarf at all unless I decided to take Shahadah and become a Muslim (that's another story for another place and time). Also, another story, a friend of mine who is French-Canadian and Alaskan Native often gets mistaken as my sister and vice-versa. We used to work together at a small store so we'd always laugh at this and joke that we were very very very very very very very very distant cousins from back during the age when the ancestors of the Native Americans crossed the Ice Bridge from Russia/Asia to Alaska. Lol.

Have you experienced people making comments about you based on your appearance? Nope, because most people assume I'm white through and through or if they have a suspicion, they typically keep it to themselves. UNLESS I'm wearing kimono; I hate Yellow Fever so much man... I also have a hair loss disorder and that's more noteworthy in gossip about me than anything else.

Have you ever been mistaken for another ethnicity? The most common guess is Chinese, Japanese being the second, Native American third. I've even had someone ask if I was Turkish (which makes me roflmao now because my current boyfriend is Turkish)! And no, that latter question was not while I was wearing hijab, and the lady (Fatima was her name) was super nice :)

Have you ever felt the need to change your behavior due to how you believe others will perceive you? In what way? In Japanese circles I change my behavior a lot, but I think this is due to how the study of the language has created a separate identity within me. This is really common for multilingual people, to have, say, a "Spanish" presentation of themselves alongside their "English" presentation, and even a "Turkish" presentation of themselves while speaking any of those respective languages. But I know I try harder to blend in when I speak Japanese. I don't pass as Japanese in Japan for the most part, but the minute I start speaking I do (I don't have an accent when I speak Japanese and hence I sound native lol). So that helps and I want that, but at the same time it's the potential of eliminating my white side and my American upbrining that makes me say "Hanbun Nikkei-jin" (half ethnic Japanese) instead of "Hanbun Nihon-jin" (half Japanese). If any experience I had in white/non-Japanese circles, I would have to say that I have to clarify that I am a Japanese-American, not strictly Japanese; the fact I have a Japanese last name makes this distinction difficult for the non-Japanese/Japanese-American. No, my mom isn't from Japan, she's white as hell and my dad is a third generation full blooded Japanese-American whose only voluntary tie to Japan is grilling mochi over the stove. This in turn makes the other (including my boyfriend's mom lolol) believe I'm somehow "less Japanese", not because I'm half, but because I'm not a direct import from Japan (see what I did there? No? Haha okay). To me that's not okay, so then I start speaking Japanese and they're like "oh you're really Japanese!" Which, okay, thanks, but I had to learn this - which leaves me back at square one. Honestly this is where I get pissed off, but it's an incredibly complex issue that most people - even the "woke" ones - aren't familiar or even open to discussing. So then I frame it as "I want to reconnect with my relatives in Japan someday," which makes the other party respect me more because of the noble aspect of it (and I do want to reconnect, that's one of the major reasons I have undertaken the language). But funny how I have to be a hero in order to be taken seriously and not be seen as a weeb.

What positive benefits have you experienced by being mixed? I love being mixed! I wouldn't have it any other way. I've always loved being different somehow, mainly different in mind and spirit, but I do enjoy the complex - albeit sometimes frustrating - experience I have because I'm mixed. I love my Japanese side and my white side, even though my Japanese side is more fraught with scars from the Internment and subsequent poverty/second-class citizen mindset from my father, I still prize it as a unique history apart from Japan and apart from white America. But I also know that that part of my family extends back into Japan in some fashion and that the history there is long even if it's undocumented - it's in our genes. Likewise with my white side. In a way being mixed has given me not one, but two paths of history to explore, connect, and learn from. It has made me more open minded and paved the way to understand that people don't have to be one or the other, they can be both. I love diversity. If I'm in a mono-racial/cultural/religious place, I get hella bored and even depressed. Diversity makes me alive. The fact that I'm racially and cultural diverse in my very existence makes me feel alive.

Have you changed the way you identify yourself over the years? I've realized that I don't need to "appease" any side of me internally. That also goes for externally. I've come to identify myself more as a human with a more interesting experience than some; the more you get to know me the more I'm apt to tell you my story as a biracial disaporic. So in a way I'm more conservative about how I identify myself to strangers, especially men. But I'm still proud of my Japanese heritage, specifically my Japanese-American heritage. And I'm still proud of my white heritage, the Norwegian (gimmie that krumkake), German (omg my grandma's apfelkuchen will forever be my downfall), English (I still see them as shitty colonialists sorry lol I leik tea and Jane Austen at least), and Welsh (the dragon is pretty damn cool not gonna lie) side no matter how much I knock white people, I'm proud to be part of that heritage. I think learning more about the bad parts of history on either side of my background (Like the xenophobic Japanese attitude and then the English colonial rape and pillage of Africa) has given me a more clearer picture too on how I identify with these parts of myself. Do I cherry pick? Absolutely. But I still acknowledge the wrongs of each side in history. We're all human. Let's identify as that first.

Are you proud to be mixed? Hell yes!

Do you have any other stories you would like to share from your own experiences? I want to share two stories: one about how my Japanese side holds me accountable, and then the Yellow Fever one. I'm gonna start with the latter as I want to end on a high note, but also because I think it's important for people to realize the impact of Yellow Fever has on Asian and Asian-American women, including those of us who are not fully Asian.

At my first job in a huge corporate company away from home, I felt kind of lost in a lot of ways. A company veteran who I will call James was always willing to help me, and in the beginning it was great. By the way, James was 12 years older than me, married (to an Asian woman), and was expecting a kid when this all started to go down. I told him I liked video games, to which he invited me over to meet his wife and play games. this was fun and dandy, we complained about work when we needed to and whatnot. He was overall a good friend, except when he started to send me texts with "you're my little angel" and some really suggestive picture of a nude angel. He also would talk about how hot Kpop and other Asian stars were, having photos on his computer and phone. He was also very crude and constantly talking about how what a cute little Asian girl I was. I got a lot of attention at that job - it was a male-dominated company as it was - but James was by far the most vulgar. He would even whisper "jokes" about fucking me and how he was sick with Yellow Fever shit into my ear. Being young and inexperienced, I was scared and felt that if I told someone, I'd be going behind this back. I now know that I should've done that from the get go. It all came to a head when I began dating a man I'll call Leo. Leo was the same age as James and I met him outside of work. When James learned about Leo - and the age thing - that's when the sexual advances became more lewd. By then James's child was born, a boy, and he would send me pics of his genitals saying "look it's just as big as mine". James eventually confessed he had feelings for me, despite everything he had in his life. "You like games and you're a cute little Asian girl!" He kept wanting to know about Leo and I's sex lives. One day I was called to the Manager's office: corporate was on the phone, asking me about James and his behavior. Soon after, I was whisked into the office next door to write some paperwork up, and there is a opaque sliding window in the wall that connects the two offices. I got to listen to James respond to corporate's questions. He denied all. The manager took pics of his texts on my phone as proof. Good thing I left soon after - I learned later he was fired. After more than a decade with the company, James was gone. Apparently I was not the only one; I didn't even file the complaint. But how James talked about me in the Asian fetish context not only made me feel scared but also that I couldn't trust men to not be attracted to the "Asian" part of me. TL;DR - Douche of a man helps me at my first job, but then makes sick, sexual jokes about Yellow Fever and how hot I am because I'm Asian, I was too afraid to speak up, but then someone else files a complaint and I give enough evidence that gets him fired after I leave the company. Yellow Fever has real consequences and they're all bad.

The second story will be shorter, it's basically how since I was young, I was obsessed with "gypsy" culture. I now know better to call it Romani culture. Before I realized the implications of how Romani nomad culture has been appropriated in the West, I eagerly latched onto the Boho embroidery on dresses, bangles, and crystal balls in an effort to be a "gypsy". I didn't realize the oppression these people faced and that the word gypsy is a slur, even though I still greatly respect their culture. Once I learned that the Romani were lumped into the Concentration Camps of Germany during WWII, and that the discrimination against them was bloody, horrific, and compounded by recent cultural appropriation, I realized what I was doing - and that I remotely knew how it felt. My grandmother was incarcerated in Minidoka in an Internment Camp during WWII, and the modern day cultural invasion of Japanese pop culture in spaces like Hanami made me realize how harmful my wanton taking of Romani culture was. In short, the struggles felt from my Japanese side help keep me accountable to other groups. I no longer say gypsy, or dress like their revered witches, or claim to be Romani simply by the way that I dressed - and to all Romani people, I apologize for appropriating your culture. I know better now, and I respect your history even more. Next time I want to partake in your culture, I will ask first, and respect you if you say "no". Because I know what it feels like when a group says "no" and the other party doesn't respect it. TL;DR - Young girl appropriating Romani culture realizes her wrongful actions because of how the oppression of the people mirrored her own Japanese-American family struggle, girl apologizes and now is more sensitive and respectful of the culture that she still is keen to learn about. Being mixed is awesome, I wouldn't have it any other way.

#mixed #japanese #european #identity

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