Hearing a Culture Change in Florida

Seventy years ago this month, Zora Neale Hurston began a landmark field recording tour, traveling down through Florida’s hot coastal towns and turpentine camps, gathering songs that people sang to each other: hard songs and mythic stories, with all the power and struggle of life.

Hurston had mapped out the Florida tour in her head, with stops chosen to get Spanish-influenced songs, African-flavored songs, and tunes harking back to Old English. Then she wrote up her plan in a memo and sent it to Washington.

As her younger white colleague Stetson Kennedy remembered, Hurston called folklore the “boiled down pot liquor of human living,” and prized it dearly. She knew the world was changing and that cultures would continue to collide and make new things in those collisions, but she aimed to capture the essence of what had come down to her.

Her plan finally got support with the loan of a state-of-the-art recording machine – a massive beast that required two men to carry – from the Library of Congress.

Just weeks before the end of her time on the WPA, the recording tour she proposed came about and the converted ambulance hauling the recording machine rolled into Jacksonville. She began at a soup kitchen there, recording gospel songs across town from the state office of the WPA Writers’ Project where the white WPA writers worked. Because of Jim Crow segregation, the half dozen African-Americans on the Florida staff worked from another office near the soup kitchen. Hurston herself worked mostly from her hometown of Eatonville.

Songs that she and her WPA coworkers recorded that summer (and again that winter) would roil through American popular culture for decades. “The Sloop John B,” for example: the WPA recordings capture Bahamian and Dixieland versions of the song, which dates back to 1900. It would later have incarnations in folk music, then rock and roll, ending up on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. "Ninety-nine and Half Won't Do," a gospel song, would get a soul version from Wilson Pickett.

Iconoclast Rode the Rails for the WPA Guides

A number of hoboes made their way from freight cars to the federal payroll of the WPA Writers’ Project. The Soul of a People book features the stories of three: Rudolph Umland in Nebraska (featured in this review and this online exhibit), Eluard Luchell McDaniel in California, and Harry Partch.

Partch was born in California, grew up in Arizona, and as a young man bounced around the West, feeling freer among hoboes than in straight-laced society. Partch would later become famous as an avant-garde composer whose works were so iconoclastic that he had to create new instruments and scales for them. In between his times on the bum, he worked on the WPA guides to Arizona and California. He later memorialized his wanderings in U.S. Highball, which the Kronos Quartet recorded in the 1990s. John Rockwell, the New York Times critic, called Partch’s compositions “the musical counterpart to the Watts Towers,” that monument of folk art that rose over the working class L.A. neighborhood.

Partch will be featured at a September event in the Soul of a People series at the San Jose Public Library. The Harry Partch Foundation is based in San Diego.

More about Harry Partch from that talk here.

You can now watch the Writers’ Project afternoon at the Library of Congress with excerpts from the film. Click here.

Smithsonian Channel Gears Up for the 1930s

With the Soul of a People film screened in Chicago last week and slated for national broadcast on September 6th, the Smithsonian Channel is getting ready and has posted my talk with web producer Gina Buchanan, about the WPA guides, where you can find them, the WPA Writers' Project as reality show (featuring Louis L'Amour and Harry Partch), and what you can discover in their work now. And what would we find if we retrace their routes today? The sound quality is truly vintage! Show them I have friends and have a listen here.

An Almanac entry for Magicians Day

This summer marks the 70th anniversary of the California WPA guide, the only Book-of-the-Month selection among the guidebooks. We also pause to note the 1939 San Francisco almanac (subtitled "An Almanac for Thirty-niners") and its observance of Magicians Day on July 16. Sounds like something Kenneth Rexroth, while editing in the WPA San Francisco office, would have appreciated. The following day's entry marks the anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone, in 1853, of the city's first cathedral, Old St. Mary's, on Grant Ave. and California Street. Check out California's Living New Deal Project for landmarks in 1930s California today.

You can now see the Soul of a People talk filmed for CSPAN's BookTV online. Good questions! Good discussion! Check it out.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of the WPA guide to Nebraska (Soul of a People includes the story of how that guidebook was edited by Rudolph Umland, a former hobo, and poet-novelist-painter Weldon Kees, among others.) It's still a good read, and one of my favorites in the series.

Public Enemies and the WPA Writers

Today the film Public Enemies hits screens across the country, with Johnny Depp playing John Dillinger. Reviewers note how Dillinger and other 1930s outlaws capitalized on the unpopularity of banks to boost their popular support. You see reflections of that atmosphere in the WPA guides and in the stories the WPA writers gathered.

In the Wisconsin guide, for instance, you find on Tour 7 the lodge where Dillinger holed up with Baby Face Nelson and others in Little Bohemia, and where his father later opened a curiosity museum of his son’s gangster friends. (More about this in the book.) And in the WPA life history of a kindergarten teacher in South Jacksonville, Florida, you hear her concern about her “little kindergartners’” impressions of life from pop culture and "the five-year old who strives to imitate Dillinger and struts about in imaginary defiance of the G-men.”

The Great Depression shaped what you could either call either a jaundiced view of the world or one with few illusions. So that the 1939 WPA almanac to San Francisco (subtitled an almanac for “Thirty-niners”) has a wry account of a disastrous July Fourth celebration in 1854, where everything possible went wrong. Americans of the 1930s saw a world that held both farm foreclosures and bank robberies, a world that Woody Guthrie captured in the last two stanzas of “Pretty Boy Floyd”:

Well as through this world I’ve rambled

I’ve seen lots of funny men

Some will rob you with a six gun

And some with a fountain pen

But if through this world you wander

If through this world you roam

You won’t ever see an outlaw

Drive a family from their home.

More Soul of a People events this summer

Fun events exploring the Writers' Project and its discoveries of American life continue at libraries across the country this summer and into the fall. Besides those listed below in an earlier post, there are more posted in Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri, Montana, Long Island, NY, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia. The Wichita library, which is holding a Life in the 1930s event this Sunday, has added an impressive digital exhibit on hard times, renewal and resilience in Kansas here.

More will be coming in Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan (never realized there were so many 'M' states), Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A list of websites for all the participating libraries is at the site of the American Library Association.