Bound for Tulsa

The NY Times editorial about Oklahoma finally embracing its rambling son, Woody Guthrie, with a study center for his archives didn't mention his fellow exiled Oklahoman friend Jim Thompson, or Bound for Glory. But it did note the currency and poignancy of his songs like "Deportee" and that they could be heard recently on the lips of Occupy protesters. As the archive will reveal, there's more to Guthrie than folk songs, even though that's plenty.
    Guthrie is featured in the Smithsonian documentary by Spark Media, Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways, which I happily worked on.

Stetson Kennedy Delved into Florida Life

Stetson Kennedy records his wife Edith in 1939.

Stetson Kennedy, who died on Saturday as Hurricane Irene stormed up the East Coast, had a love of justice and relished how people faced life and its challenges. He was a few weeks short of his 95^th birthday.

    As a teenager in Jacksonville, Florida, Kennedy worked for his father’s furniture store, sometimes collecting payments and other times having to repossess items people could no longer afford as the Great Depression worsened. A stove might still be hot from the last meal cooked on it when he hauled it off, he recalled in interviews for Soul of a People.

    Even then, Kennedy was struck by how Floridians spoke, black and white. He knew he was “hearing a subculture, or two subcultures really, that had significance and flavor.”

    As a student during the Great Depression, he studied natural science before leaving college and becoming a student of human nature. He started gathering folklore and sayings in the varied communities of Key West, where he met his first wife. He found it remarkable how the island’s Cuban community, despite poverty, “were really enjoying life in a way that I’d never seen anybody enjoying life.” Even in hard times, people made time for song, dance, and food.

    Kennedy joined the Florida Writers’ Project in December 1937 and worked on it as editor and folklorist for several years. He worked with Zora Neale Hurston on Florida folklore for the WPA Guide to Florida, and corresponded with Richard Wright about Wright’s essays on how to depict black culture. (He later visited with Wright in France when both were expatriates in the 1950s.) In 1939 Kennedy led one leg of a recording expedition that used portable sound equipment from the Library of Congress to record the stories and songs of a richly varied southern Florida. He interviewed his first wife Edith and her Cuban relatives in Ybor City and recorded the life stories of Bahamian midwives further south.

    Having grown up privileged by a culture of segregation, Kennedy felt a responsibility to fight its injustices, and help expose those who exploited them in groups like the Ku Klux Klan. His undercover work led to him broadcast silly ritual codes in episodes of the Superman radio series in the late 1940s, and lay bare the brutal facts of their intimidation and terror. He ran for the U.S. Senate with a write-in candidacy in 1950, aided by a campaign song by Woody Guthrie. In his later years in Florida, he also championed environmental and labor causes. Kennedy’s life is the subject of a forthcoming film by Andrea Kalin. To learn more, visit the Stetson Kennedy website maintained by his grandson.

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.