In the next post, I’ll look at the fascinating ways that funeral music emerged in the Evangelical context. But in the meantime, I promised to share some music from these burial societies.

Fife and Drum

In his fascinating book on fife and drum bands in Tennessee, John H. Shaw demonstrates how immediately after emancipation, freed slaves established institutions to address their pressing needs, churches and burial grounds,

In an interview, Roy Brewer, then the president of the Independent Pallbearers Society No. 6 at Brunswick, Tennessee, in Shelby County, described the process as it was told to him by older members:

“They was coming off the plantations. They didn’t have much of nothing, no more than what the masters gave them. They were in slavery at that time, but the old master seeked out to give them something they could go on . . . he started them off as a church where they was going to sing and they were singing up under a burlove [Indian hut]. At that particular time back then, people didn’t have nowhere to bury. . . their dead, so he gave them a cemetery….Mr. Griffin gave them two acres of land for a cemetery…”

In 1866, just one year after emancipation, we have evidence of burial societies and their music,

In September, The Republican Banner reported the funeral of the president of the Sons of Relief, a Black burial society: “The Nashville Order of the Sons of Relief, a colored organization, turned out with drum and fife yesterday, to attend the funeral of their president, William Miller.

What did it sound like? Perhaps the closest we can get is this performance by Lum Guffin and the United Sons and Daughters of Zion Chapter No. 9 from down the road in Memphis,

Not your typical dirge. However, as in New Orleans, Shaw says the music going to the cemetery was more dirge-like than the one coming back. We do know from many first hand accounts that the bands were loud and that this was definitely outdoor music.

A Funeral Procession in 1888

Shaw includes a newspaper report of a funeral procession in Memphis in 1888,

As the Town Rambler was wending his way up Main street the other day he encountered the gayest procession, seemingly, that ever trod the streets of Memphis. There was a brass band in front, bursting forth in strains of the gayest music, while behind it followed a long train of negroes, with knee breeches, brass buttons, swords somewhat the worse for rust, besides a world of purple feathers and tarnished lace,... The Town Rambler, of course, presumed this to be a crowd on its way to a dance or a picnic but no, it was a negro funeral.

The “rambler” mentions a brass band, but in the next paragraph, which is too racist to quote in full, he mentions the communities’ affection for “the inevitable fife and drum.” He also includes information about the mutual aid societies linked to them,

There are a host of societies and fraternities among the blacks, such as the “Sons and Daughters of Jacob,” the “United Sisters of Zion,” and the “Sons of Ham,” and their fondness for street processions is proverbial.

Shaw goes on to document other funerals accompanied by fife and drum. Otha Turner, a 20th century fife player from North Mississippi also mentions the funereal aspect,

When asked about the origin of the fife and drum, Otha Turner replies "How old it is? I don't know. They said it's African, back in African times, that's what they say, I don't know, I wasn't thought of. And they say drums was a-calling. If a person ceased, and you carry them to the cemetery, loaded in the wagon, all them drums get behind them and marched, just like it was a hearse, and they brought them to the cemetery, playing the drums."

Political Fife and Drum

Shaw, echoing DeWulf, discusses these bands exclusively in the context of mutual aid societies and not churches. However, unlike DeWulf, Shaw only sees slight evidence of these bands playing in religious celebrations like Mardi Gras. These religious celebrations are overshadowed by a much greater body of evidence showing music played for civic celebrations and political rallies. 1

The portrait Shaw paints of these processions is that they were boisterous and unruly, but also modern and somewhat secular in their focus- eager to get on with the very pressing material needs of a newly freed people. Yes, their societies had religiously-coded names, but many at the time, especially their white enemies, saw these names as a thin disguise covering their real work of political organization.

Below I’ve included a story from Shaw’s book about how effective fife and drum music could be- in this case during the famous Coal Creek War raging in East Tennessee, (but first- here’s a painting I did of the War a while back, dang I shoulda put a fife in it),

Fife and drum music was a usual feature of political meetings in Nashville, but a meeting in August [1892] in which it was heard at was somewhat unique, having been called to oppose the convict leasing system that had occasioned a violent uprising in East Tennessee known as the Coal Creek War. The uprising resulted from miners’ objections to the use of convict labor in the coal mines, which effectively undercut the workers’ demands for better pay and working conditions. Their response was to attack and burn down the convict camps, which led the governor, John Price Buchanan, to send militia units against the mine workers. The crisis provoked considerable outrage among working-class Tennesseans, Black and white: “The drums beat and the fife was played in front of the court-house early last night. It was the call to what was given out to be an ‘opposition meeting’ to the mass-meeting held at the Tabernacle several nights ago. The meeting was composed of about 500 people, 200 of whom were negroes. Dr. J. M. Lindsley was made Chairman, and a negro whose name could not be learned, arose to speak. He abused the convict lease system and scored the action of the Tabernacle meeting.”

Note that this demonstration was multiracial. (As a curious aside, In 18th century Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, there was an interracial fife and drum duo composed of two folks (with the same last name!) who worked in the metal shop there. Who wants to make an album/movie? There’s even a romantic sidestory)

Demise of Political Fife and Drum

The confident assertion of political power, which was manifested in the public fife/drum performances, was intolerable to the Tennessean white elite. As Reconstruction faded and Jim Crow emerged, the bands were the target of a vicious counterattack, including a foreshadowing of the anti-civil rights act of pouring water on processioners2 and the removal of access to public spaces,

Although there were rallies and political meetings involving fife and drum bands during this era, they were few and far between…the vast majority of fife and drum activity in Tennessee surrounded the Nashville minor league baseball team, the Vols, and the Black fife and drum band hired to promote them.

We’ll have more to say about that turn later in the series.

Segregationist whites pushed the fifes and drums out of the city and into rural areas, where they essentially went underground or at least, unnoticed by mainstream culture until the folk revival. They still played for the occasional funeral or picnic, but gone was the connection with the politically powerful mutual aid society.

Dancing in the Streets

Here’s where it gets weird.

At some point reading Shaw’s description of the demise of fife/drum, I thought- hmm this sounds familiar. I went back and reread a few chapters of Barbara Ehrenreich’s great Dancing in the Streets, which discusses a similar clampdown in Early Modern Europe. I found the same things- fear of mass political power as embodied in mass celebrations, followed by laws against public assembly (courtyards specifically mentioned), noise prohibitions, etc. Ehrenreich quotes historians Stallybrass and White who say,

In the long-term history from the 17th to the 20th century… there were literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to eliminate carnival and popular festivity… Everywhere… its feasting, violence, processions, fairs, wakes, rowdy spectacle and outrageous clamour were subject to surveillance and repressive control.

Ehrenreich’s analysis shows that this wasn’t entirely just Catholic vs. Protestant- there were all sorts of intra-Protestant and intra-Catholic debates about this as well that raged for centuries.

If you add Ehrenreich’s analysis to DeWulf and Shaw, you get some interesting questions. For example, remember our newspaper article writer describing the 1888 funeral procession? He mentions that the processioners were wearing,

“knee breeches, brass buttons, swords..;besides a world of purple feathers and tarnished lace…”

and he blames this supposed garishness on race,

“The colored man loves loud sounds, ostrich feathers and gold lace beyond measure, but above all things he bows before the inevitable fife and drum with an Eastern devotion.”

But what about this?

Or this?

Or this?

Or this?

This last image is from Tabourot’s “Orchésographie” (1588), a defense of of the culture of Renaissance music and dance against the rising tide of Puritanism.3

In all the examples above we have depictions of fife/drum with feathers, knee breeches, brass buttons, garish dress, swords, etc. But here you can’t blame it on race. What the Memphis writer did not know, but perhaps sensed, is that what he was looking at in that funeral procession was perhaps his own repressed culture. And the reason he didn’t know it is because between himself and that painful history, he put race.

To make it more complicated, DeWulf specifically uses the case of feathers when examining the mystery of the Mardi Gras Indians. Instead of contact with Native Americans, DeWulf thinks it more likely that the custom of making elaborate feather “suits” derives from Afro-Catholic Kongo soldiers, who had a practice of feather wearing and military music making,

In his Report of the Kingdom of Congo (1591)… the Italian explorer Filippo Pigafetta described the dress of Kongolese soldiers as “a cap ornamented with cock’s, ostrich’s, peacock’s, and other feathers . . . which makes the men seem taller and very formidable” and “a belt . . . with bells attached to it . . . so arranged that when fighting with their enemies the sounds give them courage. (see footnotes for more on bells).

I don’t dare suggest DeWulf is wrong here. His evidence is overwhelming, but he doesn’t look at fife and drum (as far as I’ve read, could be wrong), which wasn’t as popular in New Orleans as it was in the rest of the South. Once you adjust your antennae to pick up fife/drum, these images abound.

In the end it’s not about theories of origin- which are endless4- but the idea that there are connections between these cultures- which are all more similar and mutable than we are lead to believe. Unlike the ways they are marketed, these cultures aren’t just plopped down into atomized silos arranged by “race” that are destined to be frozen forever.

And that this is true can be very easily proven. For instance, today’s younger generation of suburban-bred, well-behaved, hyper-virtuous klezmer musicians would be unrecognizable to the obscenity-wielding shlubs who played Philadelphia weddings in the 40s, let alone some rebbe-graveyard-venerating Hasid from the 19th century - even though they are all playing the exact same notes. These folks share, one assumes, roughly the same genes, yet the attitudes towards “collective joy” are worlds apart (and we don’t even really have a language yet to think about this with).

You can substitute any genre and find the same results, often from one generation to the very next.

Another example: To say Otha Turner’s goat picnics may owe something to medieval European feast culture is a wild- even reckless- idea. It feels irresponsible, even to me. You might counter, well what about Turner’s famous “snake” dance and his tendency to fall to the ground while playing, James Brown style? Doesn’t it seem… un-European? Consider this description of 12th century St. Eluned’s dance in Wales:

You can see young men and women… some in the churchyard and others in the dance which wends it way round the graves. They sing traditional songs, all of a sudden they collapse on the ground and then those who, until now, have followed their leader peacefully as if in a trance, leap up in the air as if seized by frenzy.

You can find the exact same “wending” dance into the courtyard, the collapsing onto the ground and the leaping of the people behind the leader in this video above (see leaping also in the 1978 Otha picnic videos). I’m just as confused as you are as to how to think about all this, but the confusion is exciting- and may be a way out of our ossified musical and racial ways of thinking.

“Well Ok”, the 1888 newspaper article writer might retort, “but isn’t the idea that these cultures are trapped in some sort of medieval stage just as negative and even racistly romantic?” DeWulf doesn’t touch on this. But Ehrenreich might say that the medieval age- while not great on dentistry- has much to offer us when it comes to conviviality and collective joy, something our contemporary culture has a curious blind spot towards, and which is currently driving us to insanity and cruelty. And that this blind spot has something to do with us using racial categories as a way to avoid our own messy contradictions. After all, what came after these repressions is, as Ehrenreich titles her next chapter, “An Epidemic of Melancholy.”5

Bonus: I don’t even have room for rest of the Ehrenreich’s chapter on this where she goes on to make brilliant connections with similar dynamics in Islam. She compares saint veneration in Sufi/Catholics milieus as opposed to the puritanical Wahaabists/Calvinists. Her chapter on this ends with a brief look at similar dynamics in China. She also ties these changes to the emergence of capitalism (which she finds insufficient) and, focuses on the rise of guns/crossbows and the discipline they required. Also, guns would be a great reason to not wear a very flamboyant feather into battle.

And for the real fife freaks out there, check out these theories of origins in the early crusades, etc.6

This song, by the itinerant street preacher Blind Willie Johnson, is imprinted on a golden record and is currently hurdling through the outer reaches of the cosmos. It was chosen, along with other works, as an honored representative of the cultural works of the human race. This series is about how it got there.

Afro-Catholicism

I remember once when I was in 11th grade, my friend S. Yablonovitz asked a question in history class,

“I know this is dumb, but what is Catholicism exactly?”

Our teacher, a strict elderly woman in comfortable pants named Ms. McHugh- McHUGH - literally staggered back like she was punched in the chest before collecting herself so she could answer. (Not dumb- a lot of people don’t know this actually, it’s ok)

I have had my own version of this question for years, which I’ve found surprisingly hard to answer,

“What did a black Catholic religious service sound like in say, 1900s New Orleans?”

Why this crazy question? New Orleans was clearly an important place for American music, and we know that many of the earliest players there were Catholic, even though the cliche of jazz/blues/gospel music is that it is rooted in the black Protestant tradition. Many musicians have claimed that they learned music in the church, but which one? We have a ton of info about black protestant life, including recordings, but, considering how important New Orleans was specifically to music, why don’t we know more about the Catholic service?

Berkeley prof. Jeroen DeWulf’s Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians (2022) and his From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square (2017) both make huge strides in answering this question for me. In the former book’s chapter on the Americas he discusses Catholic New Orleans, and paints a picture of two cultures,

One- church going and curiously, predominately female. This is from the mid 19th century:

Visit the churches when you will find the chief of the audience is formed of mulattresses and negresses.” Around the same time, C. C. Robin noted that “women, Negroes, and officers of the governor’s staff are almost the only people who go to church” and whereas “the funerals of white people are only attended by a few, those of colored people are attended by a great crowd.

And then there was another culture, outside of church services,

The identification of Afro-Atlantic Catholics in this community is challenging because they used rituals that were often not recognized as Catholic by outsiders. In 1838 the British feminist Harriet Martineau went as far as to characterize the way enslaved Black people in Louisiana practiced Catholicism as “the most abject worship of things without meaning.”… To John Gillard, for instance, the ways in which Black people in Louisiana had been living their Catholic faith in former times was “primitive” and not worth of any scholarly attention…

This left me with questions. The one Catholic service I went to seemed highly regimented and controlled. In what context would this other sort of worship even take place? According to DeWulf, it is precisely this second culture that is crucial in understanding the Afro-Catholic experience.

His main thesis, which runs through both works is that Catholicism was already introduced into Africa (specifically Kongo) in the late medieval period. Catholic worship at this time was “pre-Tridentine,” meaning it included a style of worship that proliferated before the Council of Trent, which introduced new standards. What does this mean practically? It meant two things, (1) that there was music, singing and dancing and that this happened in churches as well as outside of them and that (2) along with the church, mutual aid societies were very important (perhaps more?) in organizing the lives of believers. The main task of these societies? Burial.

…the foundations of the Christian church in the western part of Africa were laid in the late Middle Ages, and the reforms decided at the Council of Trent made much less of an impact on the way Christianity was lived in Africa than in Europe. African Christians were, as such, familiar with a form of Christianity that, in accordance with a pre-Tridentine tradition, intimately related the expression of faith to dance, music, song, community building, mutual aid, and solidarity.

This is a bit of radical claim- whereas most people see the enslaved arriving in the Americas with their indigenous traditions intact, DeWulf is suggesting that a significant portion of them were already Catholic.1 That’s not going to sit well with some folks, but he provides a veritable firehose of primary source evidence. I dunno.

These societies- also called confraternities or brotherhoods- were just ever so slightly out of view from the authorities, and so were better able to preserve this distinct strain of spirituality,

…brotherhoods, much more than the Church itself, allowed the Black community to live its Christian faith in ways similar to how it was lived in Africa. It was thanks to brotherhoods that Christianity could, genuinely, be their religion.

And so it was that in the 20th century, a good part of Afro-Catholic life in New Orleans was outside of the church, and happened in these parallel societies, and was involved with funerals and processions. This is actually not surprising at all- what did Black Catholicism sounds like in 1900? A lot like it sounds today.

Jewish Burial Societies

These Afro-Catholic societies were originally based on models from Spain and Portugal (which also had an African presence in them and the influence was somewhat mutual as DeWulf points out). Another new book, A Women is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe, by Kaplan and Carlebach, just so happens to trace the evolution of similar burial societies in the Jewish context, and tracks them to the same time and place,

Several Jewish confraternities were established in medieval Spain, and an even greater variety of societies developed in early modern Italy, where pious confraternities were common among Catholics. While Jewish confraternities may have modeled their structure on Christian guilds or religious societies, the content of their rituals rested on older rabbinic teachings as well as newer influences of Lurianic kabbalah..2.

The book, based on newly analyzed archives, does a really wonderful job of bringing these societies to life. They show, for instance, intimate details about how the women’s burial society could sometimes bump heads with the men’s one, leading to battles (which the dudes won). There’s also references to “mournful” music in these societies, although the book only teases it and points to the archival sources.3

Why mention these? Just to show, as I have elsewhere on this blog, that the African, Christian European and Jewish worlds were already intimately connected in the Early Modern Period and that these confraternities and societies, so important in the Catholic and American traditions as unique places for syncretism and the preservation of decentralized spirituality, are just barely beginning to be studied in the Jewish context.

It’s a little shocking to think these Jewish women’s burials societies are connected to the same burial societies in the Kongo, and eventually New Orleans and America- not via some kind of universal “burial society” instinct- but via their common Iberian birthplace, even though both of them developed distinct, contradictory and overlapping approaches to death.

The Catholics were taught that “Saints hated sadness” and that melancholy (“acedia”) was a sin, while the Jews were more open to the spiritual expression of melancholy, ranging from the existential protests of the professional mourners, who were held in suspicion but never outlawed, to the all night sad boys of Lurianic kabbalah and even up to manic folks like Sabbatai Zvi (See my series on Saturn and Melancholy, also see George Fox (Quaker) and Zinzendorf (Moravian) whose depressions led to radical spiritual and musical reforms).

There were other similarities- the purpose of music and dance in the Afro-Catholic burial societies was often, according to DeWulf, done to help the deceased get through purgatory. This sure sounds a lot like the task of the professional weeping women- which was to convince the dead to move on and not stick around in a liminal middle zone. Both societies can be appreciated as ways to co-opt this earlier, pagan task via an acceptable religious framework.

Much could be made of the various ways these emotional strains have come down to each of us in unconscious but profound ways that affect us everyday - But not now!

The Protestant Turn

I’m skipping through tons of really cool history here in the hopes of keeping you entertained. Hopefully it all makes sense.

DeWulf offers another fascinating and controversial insight when he examines how the dominance of Afro-Catholicism gives way to the Protestant (“Black Evangelical”) churches. He basically says that, although this new conversion retained much of the Afro-Catholic culture that preceded it, the move was motivated by political convenience (please correct me if I’m interpreting him wrong). This turn did, however, have a huge impact on the role of music and dance, as they moved from the center of ritual life to being outlawed as complete taboo,

Interpreting the genesis of Black evangelical church communities/societies as a process that evolved out of mutual-aid and burial societies rooted in ancient Afro-Catholic brotherhood traditions also provides an answer to one of the greatest enigmas in the history of these churches: the sudden rejection of dancing. The “repudiation of dancing was neither eccentric nor an isolated phenomenon,” Dena Epstein confirms, “but widespread and quite general among both white and black converts to various evangelical sects.” When Charles Lyell visited the Hopeton plantation in Georgia in the 1840s, he enthusiastically reported that “above twenty violins have been silenced by the Methodist missionaries.” Such efforts would not have succeeded, however, had Black community leaders not encouraged this. The rejection of dancing by Black evangelicals was, in fact, largely a voluntary decision. Significantly, Willis Winn of Texas recalled, “When I joined the Church, I burned my fiddle up.”

There are hundreds of stories like this, and this sort of Saturday night/Sunday morning tension has made its way firmly into the popular American imagination.

DeWulf however admits that this re-evaluation of music and dance, whether for better or worse, makes sense in this new spiritual context,

If viewed from an Afro-Catholic perspective, however, this rejection was a logical decision. We should not forget that, in a brotherhood tradition, dancing was never intended as a form of entertainment. Not unlike fasting or praying, it was closely associated with the making of vows and with the belief in purgatory. With the arrival of evangelical Christianity, however, people ceased to believe in purgatory and the power of saints.

The old lamenting women spoke directly to the dead- utilizing a host of musical/gestural/social technologies- in the hopes of getting them to move on.4 The Afro-Catholics spoke to saints and tried to get their dead to move on from purgatory, using very similar cultural technologies. The last step, to the evangelical churches, was a significant step in extinguishing this trajectory,

As a result, vows became meaningless and hence also the tradition of specific performances to honor them. What had once contributed to one’s ascension to heaven now came to be seen as a potential obstacle to reaching that very goal.

Or did it? Burial societies continued to exist- in secular, Catholic and Protestant traditions- and their music still has a profound effect on us, even if we are unconscious of its origins. In the next post, I’ll show how the haunting and beautiful record from Blind Willie Johnson (not Catholic) can be tied to the lingering music of this parallel culture of burial.

—-

See earlier posts on this topic:
Yiddish Music, BBQ Goats and Mutual Aid
Social Organization and Blues

Psychic Courtyardism is back in the news. Abdul El-Sayed the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s senate race (go Abdul!) is being attacked for having some family connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s all racist bullshit of course- or rather, it’s all very “rational” in that it’s a cold calculation by people who know better to amplify the racism of others. Fun stuff.

I discuss the Muslim Brotherhood in my archives. At the origins of the modern incarnation of the Brotherhood lies the figure of Sayd Qtub, an exchange student who lived in Colorado. He was sort of an incel avant la lettre - you can tell from his writings that he was, umm, a “conflicted” dude,

The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it.

Ok, Holden Al-Caufield. But what was the conflict? One senses, as in the case above, that he wanted certain relationships but, sensing his own inevitable rejection, hated those objects of desire as a pre-emptive defense. What he perhaps wasn’t aware of was that what he really hated was not the things he railed against, but his own perceived weakness in wanting them. Psychic stuff.

In my zine, I talk about his writings towards lawns,

The most important thing for these people is the tending of their gardens... there is nothing in the way of beauty or taste... it the machinery of organization.... devoid of spirituality and aesthetic enlightenment.

I relate this to things I heard my grandmother say, about how the gentiles “loved to get drunk and mow their lawns.” I can imagine Gary Snyder saying the same thing. By now this anti-lawnism is widespread. And I agree with them! I sense that what we all hate about lawns was how people tend to them instead of us. How those lawns are an obstacle to social participation as we imagine it. And we aren’t wrong.

Meema and Qtub would have agreed on certain things, despite ending up with wildly different political conclusions. One senses that those political conclusions, while they ended up having huge worldwide implications, were more ephemeral than the initial aesthetic reactions, in the same way that we all end up talking endlessly about the political conclusions we’ve come to because its easier than facing their emotional, aesthetic and psychic origins of them, which are just too raw for us to handle.

If you read about Qtub’s critique of modern life, you will find many similarities with folks all over the political spectrum, including your own. Like all the hippies in my neighborhood, he hated sports. Like all the right-wingers, he hated jazz. Et cetera.

Instead of being divided by these issues, I can imagine a world where we are all united by them. Our alienation, ironically, unites us.

We want you.

We want to be a part of what you are a part of.

We want to participate.

That’s it. That’s the dirty secret behind all of us. That’s what you find out if you talk to people long enough. Thats’s why the jocks hate the nerds and the nerds hate the jocks, and why the nativists hate the foreigners and the exchange student hates the prom queen and the non-trans people hate the trans people and why the weird uncle at thanksgiving insists of offering his political views even though everyone is politely ignoring him all the way down to why you say you don’t like the Grateful Dead but are perfectly fine with the Velvet Underground when they jam for 10 minutes, ad infinitum. 1

Doesn’t mean there aren’t real differences of opinion, but these differences matter to us because we sense that they will exclude us and that is unthinkable.

We want to participate but are secretly terrified we won’t be able to. But what if we could? Could Qtub and Meema have shared a beer on the lawn and figured out that they weren’t that different? Is that sacrilegious to even say?

You think my kimchi smells terrible, I think your house smells funny. Teeth, noses, lawns, footballs, rhythmic preferences, conversation styles- ornaments- these things aren’t optional- they aren’t extracurricular. Your Balochistan possession rituals scare me, I collect Beatlemania memorabilia.

These things are totally silly but they are also at the heart of our geopolitics. They sit at the center of our deepest fears and, even worse, our deepest desires and yet- like the sun, we can’t face them even though it is through them that we experience everything.

Given that this need is so important, what tools do we, as a country, have for understanding them? How do we help kids through the rough part of their life when participation seems almost impossible (hint: initiation)? How can arts and music help? It is the lack of conversation around this- still in 2026- that I find fascinating. Sure, scholars research it on the margins, but I’m tired of JSTOR. How rarely do we just come out and say it- we are all going insane because, deep down, we want each other.

Drop everything and watch this amazing series by Pop Descriptivist on “microrhythms.” It is a very analytical- and beautiful- look at how and why some traditional rhythms like swing and suingue (samba) are the way they are. I used to think these rhythms came about as adaptions of polyrhythms into more rigid patterns- sort of like round pegs into square holes- but PD’s videos, which makes use of some emerging research in the field, makes sense of it as part of an entirely different rhythmic language, which is pretty darn cool.

He touches on klezmer (and the Austrian waltz- hello J- how ya been? I’m excited for your upcoming lecture) although I wish he could have used a better and older example than Alicia Svigals. I’ve had discussions about these rhythmic “dissonances” for decades in all sorts of genres. It has been fascinating to watch how melodies and ornaments are treated with such preciousness, and reproduced scientifically, while phrasing remains an afterthought. So many young players, who can play the notes and the ornaments perfectly, just don’t pay attention to phrasing at all- and this happens in lots of genres.

I don’t have a ton of readers but it does occur to me that at least 3 or 4 of you have done actual work on phrasing and rhythmic dissonance (I don’t want to “out” anyone but I hope you will feel free to add your videos/research in the comments). Perhaps phrasing gets lost because it is much less legible than melody and is not at as flashy as ornament, but as each of you have noticed in your own way, it is the thing.

PD’s videos are amazing, but he stops short at explaining the purpose of these microrhythms, which I find equally tantalizing. What follows is an insane attempt to connect the same dynamic we find in microrhythms to other fields, in the hopes they shed light on each other.

Down Down Down

In a previous series, I did an “archaeological dig” going from the most recent and ephemeral surface layer of music, melody, down through subsequent layers, such as ornament, phrasing, rhythm, timbre and silence. See From Melody to Timbre.

My shtick in that series was that this dig is a descent in more ways than the archaeological. It involved a trip down in a larger sense - venturing to the lowland Dismal Swamp of NC (refuge of escaped slaves)- to Keat’s “vale of soul-making”- to the decaying compost pile in your backyard- to the underworld itself. The series attempts to show that (1) these sorts of dissonances, digressions, decays and distortions don’t just happen in music but also occur in other aspects of culture and that (2) this “waste”, “expenditure” or “sacrifice” has something to do with our notions of collectivity, identity and intimacy. In short, they exist because they give us what we really want- participation, i.e. conviviality.1

“Other aspects of culture?” Like what?

Fermentation

Just as an example of the way different fields converge on the same ideas as microrhythms, consider fermentation. Fermentation is the deliberate, orderly decomposition of food, much as microrhythms decompose and deviate from the grid. In this post I compare music and fermentation, suggesting that fermentation’s process of addition by subtraction might help us explain things like ornament and phrasing. Fermentation’s benefits accrue not by adding stuff on top, like spice, but via decay from below, bringing the food a little closer to the rotten, fetid underworld of literal dirt. But importantly it never goes all the way. It always keeps one foot in and out foot out.

Fermented food is slightly “off” in the same sense as the prefix “de-” which means “off”, and which comes before so many underworldy words (see italics above). See also dis- with its associations of both underworld and riches, (ferments like wine, chocolate etc are always more $$$).

Eating together and distributing food, along with dance, is probably the most basic of the convivial arts, (see Pableaux Johnson’s Red Beans and Rice dinners, Ivan Illich’s convivial spaghetti dinner), see also hospitality and the art of hosting strangers2 These manners are a way for people to wiggle out of more crass relationships to each other so that they can engage in a kind of “unnatural” waste and loss that generates intimacy. The origins of The Social. When it comes to identity, so many cultures find their culinary identities precisely in ferments (France/wine, Korea/kimchi, Germany/Kraut, etc.)

Urban Planning

The pleasure of detours and the distaste for the grid-plan, space being for convivial gathering instead of passage (see my series on Yiddish Guide to Lawn Maintenance parts 1-3), the delight of crooked streets, West Village as the idealized neighborhood (Jane Jacobs), Sesame Street, pirate coves and the imagination. Bachelard’s Poetics of Space.

Psychology

Psychologically, there’s an entire wing of this field that might derive from James Hillman’s notion of the soul-value of infirmitas and Jung’s idea that “the Gods have become diseases.” This field is known as “depth” psychology and Hillman makes much of his comparison of the valley (soul) to mountains (spirit). Too much to go into here, but in Hillman’s telling, pathologies are limping pathways to soul- the wound and the eye are the same. It’s a polytheistic pagan sort of psychology (see Dream and Underworld among his other writings.)

Dance

The primal limping pesach dance- one foot in the underworld one foot in the day world- via springtime underworld rebirth rituals, or Robert Johnson midnight meeting with limping Legba, the crisis of the crossroads (the grid) - the same place that Hermes liked to hang out. Dance as the original wonderful useless expenditure of energy, its resistance to notation and literacy.

(Grids and anti-grids)

Politics and Economics: Destruction of archives, renunciations of debt, black markets, economic illegibility as Zomian disguise. (James C. Scott), Charles Keil’s use of rhythm for democratic education, Paideia Con Salsa

I’m repeating myself of course. Are there others? Why all this nuttiness? It sounds fancy pants but its really not- it’s just poetry- it’s just a way to experience the world differently via a sensibility that is often repressed and hard to taste. So if you’re feeling blue- eat some chocolate, listen to some music that is “out of time and out of tune” and find a crooked road to walk down.

In an article about the archive currently making the rounds, the author, Gal Beckerman, makes a discovery that rang my bell,

Then I began opening folders that contained hundreds of pages of what appeared to be lyrics, which one of the expedition’s musicologists had neatly transcribed in small notebooks. Immediately, I encountered yearning. One song was attributed to a 24-year-old man named Dovid Keller:

Ach, there in the woods stands a tree,
The tree is bent and stooped
And there and there stands a lover
With two eyes filled with tears

Ach, there and there stands a vineyard
The vineyard has not yet been reaped
I wasted the years of my youth
Like a gambler with playing-cards

A gambler who plays, plays to win
Plays his cards with the goal of a win
I have lost the years of my youth
I will never win them again.

Beckerman refers to these as “lamentations like this: songs of longing, of lost love.” He also mentions that there are some tragic ballads which also have, shall we say, a rapidly sinking narrative arc,

As soon as he heard this,
He got very upset
He took out a revolver
And shot her on the spot.

When he shot her like that
She fell like a stone
He then turned the gun around
And shot himself alone.

But I was especially interested in what Beckerman had to say next,

Here was the treasure I was after, distinct voices from that lost, muddy world. (The translator Rose Waldman helped me reveal more of their color.) They should have been strange and unfamiliar, but they weren’t really. The emotions were so everyday, so known. I’m sure every culture that ever was had versions of songs carrying these sentiments—the desire to matter, to find love requited, to get a baby to fall asleep.

I found it revealing that, of all the stuff in the archive, this was “the treasure [he] was after.” Like him, and like so many others, I found these sorts of songs shockingly familiar when I first encountered them in print, in the Yiddish tradition but also in songs far beyond it. The lyrics seem to come from, as he says, “distinct voices” but are also universal. This sort of dynamic occurs all over the world and throughout time (“in every culture that ever was”).

But that last line! Oy!

the desire to matter, to find love requited, to get a baby to fall asleep.

I mean sure, but but but… then why aren’t these songs boastful? Or have happy endings full of conjugal bliss? Why are lullabies terrifying and full of scary stuff that is exactly the opposite of the gentle peaceful songs and books that we give to kids nowadays?1

It seems that these older songs precisely go to pains to avoid that. But why? After all, you would expect that the happier, more success-oriented songs would be more popular if those aspirations were what it was all about. And indeed today, they are. These sorts of happy endings/hero’s journeys are everywhere in our culture. Yippeee!

And yet when we encounter these old Songs That Go Nowhere, we know we are in the presence of “treasure.” What did they know back then that we don’t? What have we lost? And why? Oh well, I guess we’ll never know. The truth is that there is something about the deeper magic in these songs that seems to defy our understanding. Even when they smack us in the face with their vigor, we somehow resist their conclusions. That’s probably why they’re songs in the first place.

Anyway it’s a good article, glory to the heroes of Ukraine. May Putin and his allies in the American oligarchy rot in hell choking on all their stolen money.

For folks interested in lyrics like these, you can also find lots more in this chapter of Beregovski’s Old Jewish Folk Music (the songs have Yiddish words but the English translations are at the end of the chapter). For some reason, the klezmer/Beregovsky world, as far as I know, never talk about the lyrical/emotional content of these songs and how they might relate to the instrumental songs and their overwhelming focus on lamentation. Oh well.

See also: Songs that Go Nowhere previously.

This is a good faith “yay” response to all of this, and even though I think there are very interesting parts of the discussion that were missed, I still think all of these posts and videos and the people and ideas behind them are wonderful and worth your time. This can be touchy stuff but this isn’t some dumb ragebait thing or a contest about who can be the biggest dork about it. It’s great people are talking about this stuff!

Ronan boils it down to about six key characteristics, and deserves credit for really trying to answer this impossible question and not weaseling out of it. Some of the points, as Gaddy points out, are about the formal structure of the music and some wander further afield. I have no objection to any of the points, but I wish he could have gone just a little bit further. What he leaves out (but must have known!) is really fascinating and has huge implications for both Irish and American music as well.

In his talk, he references the Irish scholar Seán Ó’Riada, who I’ve mentioned on this blog a bunch of times. He includes Ó’Riada’s insights positively, but Ronan leaves out something Ó’Riada stressed that he thought was super duper important about “Irish” music- it’s not “Western”

Here’s a quote from an earlier post of mine,

Here is Seán Ó Riada explaining Irish Music Orientalism in 1970. "Ireland has a highly developed traditional music, very complex, very sophisticated, but it's more Oriental than Western.”

We don’t use terms like this anymore, but this point has also been made by others. Here’s another pair of quotes from ethnomusicological bigwigs, from a different earlier post of mine,

[I] have long considered Ireland to be part of the Old Southern Mediterranean-Middle Eastern family of style that I call bardic – highly ornamented, free-rhythmed, solo, or solo and string accompanied singing that support sophisticated and elaborate forms.’ Alan Lomax

And here’s Peter Van Der Merwe riffing on Lomax’s notion of the “Old High Culture” of the Near East.

Some Irish performances, both vocal and instrumental, are so Oriental in character that they could easily be mistaken for something out of the Balkans or the Near East.1 The exact provenance of this style is impossible to determine, but the likeliest explanation is that it is simply a survival of the Arab-influenced music that spread over Europe during the Middle Ages.

Why does this matter? Because, although Ronan points out that borders are malleable and foreign influence is often underestimated, he still leaves things like the modal nature of the music, its ornamentation, its improvisatory character, it’s focus on subtle shifts in phrasing (how I translate his idea of “feel”), its resistance to literacy or its social function (ambivalent about performance) as disconnected, ahistorical characteristics when some pretty smart folks seem to think (1) they might have a very specific historical context, and (2) this context might explain the connections behind these distinct characteristics.

And even further, (3) that this historical context incorporates styles of music that connect it to MENA (Med, N. Africa) and, (this is my own small contribution to the discussion) the traditions of lament that existed there (and beyond.) 2

I think this explanation is important for two reasons:

First, this context can explain to us not just why the music sounds “Irish”, but why we find it so compelling. By connecting it to these other traditions and examining how and why they used music, we can connect it to a larger constellation of what the music means and how it constructs that meaning. As listeners, by learning about these connections, we are better able to actually “hear” them, in the same way that you are better able to taste a hint of cinnamon in a piece of cake once the baker has told you about its inclusion.

It also does a very tricky second thing- when you see the source of this music in its historical context you realize that what “makes Irish music Irish”- or makes any national music what it is- is precisely the part of music that resists statehood. As with other genres which become nationalized- like jazz/blues, klezmer, rebetika, fado, flamenco, etc- these genres don’t emerge autochthonously from the blood and soil but are often cooked up precisely in the “margins” on every level. They are then coopted by states, usually long after their formation, and often in a very awkward, ambivalent and contradictory fashion that chops off any parts of the history that they find inconvenient. As I spell out in my book on lament, the old-style of Irish music, sean-nós, was dragged into the genre belatedly and ambivalently by people who self-consciously built an idea of a nationalized Irish culture.3 But this construction of national music was affected by their own contradictions over class and gender. Unified ideas of a national tradition almost always obscure a dizzying contradiction of internal traditions (plural). That’s kinda their whole point.

In other words, the more you look into these genres you more you realize they represent counter-tendencies to the idea of the state, which they are paradoxically later called upon precisely to represent! Isn’t music fun?

Two Extras

One thing I’ve been noticing for a while is that folks who I consider the real tradition bearers in various genres often know about these contradictions, either consciously or not, and suffer for it. I won’t name them, but folk I know in the klezmer world who directly point out that using the music as an expression of some kind of fantasy of pure Ashkenazic Judaism is just that- a fantasy. And most people don’t like to hear that. They want that pure essence. I’m thinking also about folk in the old-time and country genres as well, including a wonderful banjo player, whose music is also misunderstood by people who want the thing. These folks are stuck between what they know as the truth and what sells- statehood and easy fantasies of a coherent identity free of contradictions. AI Youtube genre music videos have super-charged this into gut-churning realms of downright dangerous sentimentality. It would be great to honor and support these folks and make room for their art while they are here, but it sometimes feels that the younger folks are going in the opposite direction, and like so many others before them, distrust themselves too much to embrace their own contradictions.

This fantasy is also replicated in countless “bordered” jams, which continually re-affirm these genres as coherent things but keep them fossilized. Of course, as cultural constructions, they are coherent things if we choose to treat them that way. But they can also not be, if we choose to look at the fine print. Don’t get me wrong- I love these jams! And I love the idea of the sociability that this sort of standardization makes possible- but I also see their shortcomings. I think we’re all figuring our way out of these conundrums right now, maybe into something new and wonderful and groundbreaking (I proposed the lament jam but yeah, there’s lots of ways we could rethink this.) Musical jams are a small lil part of my own universe- but this same pattern is replicated across virtually everything in our culture. It is vitally important that this problem be seen for what it is: fun and that it doesn’t need to be a huge existential bummer.

Finally, small point- Ronan’s theory on the origins of ornament- that it evolved out of the fiddle’s need to replicate bagpipe melodies- seems a little wild considering how widespread ornaments are all over the world and throughout history on all sorts of instruments, especially via MENA. I’d love a citation for that. For complete nerds, I’ve discussed ornaments on this blog waaaaay too much, see the archives.

Apologies if I’ve misinterpreted or misread or missed anything. Just trying to figure all this out myself. Yay to the convo.

“In the domain of body culture, which also covers the illustrated newspapers, tastes have been quietly changing. The process began with the Tiller Girls [pictured above]. These products of American distraction factories are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics…” Siegfried Kracauer The Mass Ornament

That was written in 1927 by lesser-known Weimar Cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer, but it is eerily true almost a hundred years later.1 Here are indissoluble girl clusters from a Youtube search for klezmer (screen shots so no video attached)

You find the same thing with any genre, or indeed with AI images outside of music as well. In fact, “indissoluble girl clusters” is sort of the perfect description of AI’s approach to art and images in general. But why?

Kracauer noticed that the dance of the Tiller Girls was neither erotic, military nor gymnastic. Well, what are they about then? They are, Kracauer says, about nothing, “The ornament is an end in itself.”

This sets up Kracauer’s next point which is that, in being about nothing, they replicate capitalism and its modes of production. Don’t fall asleep on me yet! Capitalism, says Kracauer, produces just for profit, which as any Good Marxist back then would have known, has no connection to use-value or referent in the real world. It’s the original zombie algorithm.

But what is a “mass ornament”? For Kracauer, the mass ornament is the whole shebang- the movements of the “girls” in their mathematical precision but also the audience, which mirrors the dancers in their own sedentary mathematical grid of seats. Together they are discovering- through experiences like this- what it means to be a mass in this brave new world.

And all this fits perfectly with capitalism’s favorite mode of production- industrial labor,

The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls.

And just for fun, I’ll include the rest of the quote to show you how weird Kracauer’s writing could be,

Going beyond manual capacities, psychotechnical aptitude tests attempt to calculate dispositions of the soul as well. The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires.

Instead of, say, art for the sake of art, it’s reason for the sake of reason. But, as he says, it’s kind of a broken immature irrational sort of reason. A monster.

But is that what’s going on in these AI videos with their unending and uncanny triplets? 1927 was a long time ago, and while the focus during Kracauer’s time was on production, that focus may have overshadowed the other half of the equation- consumption. Seen from this vantage point, The women here are simply doing what all mass commodities do in capitalism, they become interchangeable objects.

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke. Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. - Andy Warhol

This interchangeability is a crucial part of mass industrial society and is also the source of its greatest anxieties. In its rationality, in its efficiency, in its scalability, we come upon vast inhuman structures that threaten our image of ourselves. Surrounded by this logic 24/7, we, like the audience mirroring the dancers, begin to think of ourselves and others in the same terms as the products on the shelves. And we don’t like it.

And thus begins the dance that we’ve all been doing for the last 250 hundred years or so. You could characterize all art from the 19th century on- from suntanned impressionist painters to bluegrass banjo players to dada dancers to bespectacled minimalist to urban folkies- as one big attempt to reckon with the psychic implications of mass industrialism. They are all asking, “How do we ornament (if not in indissoluble girl clusters?)”

And there are plenty of answers- Bill Monroe came up with one, Naftule Brandwein another, Ma Rainey, Bob Dylan, Lana Del Rey, (the current white house, barf), etc- they are all brilliant (except that one) and they are all ridiculous. But the characteristic feature of all of them today is that they are inseparable from the act of choosing. Which is to say, we make the ornaments, instead of the way it used to be- the ornaments making us, which, of course, is what we really wanted all along.

The AI Youtube videos turn this act of choosing into its most popular contemporary incarnation- shopping. Where once ornament was characterized by waste, sacrifice, expenditure or loss- now ornament is represented as convenience. It’s the same doll just in different costumes. You can buy Klezmer Barbie, or Mississippi Delta Barbie, or Flamenco Barbie or Kpop Barbie. It’s an endless frictionless catalog of vast differences trying to make up for the inconvenient fact that it is just really the same thing- shopping.2

Perhaps this will be popular, I don’t know. But I suspect what people want from ornament is friction- boundaries. They don’t want to make ornaments, they want ornaments to make us- to tell us who we are, to make us feel at home (chicken soup, kimchi, mama’s chicken and dumplings) and to be the glue in the collective. If we choose them in a marketplace, well, it sends us back to being in a collective of… shoppers. Tourists.

But that’s my own shtick. Kracauer’s conclusion doesn’t go there. He ends his essay with.. fairy tales.

His last paragraph reads like some kind of Marxist acid trip and honestly, I have trouble understanding it. Maybe it’s better in German. The entire essay ping-pongs between his ideas of nature and rationality, with a ton of contradicting statements about the value of both. But he does come up for air long enough to suggest that there is a Golden Land just beyond the “mass ornament”…

Then, too, the mass ornament will fade away and human life itself will adopt the traits of that ornament into which it develops, through its confrontation with truth, in fairy tales.

Fairy tales?!?! This isn’t entirely out of the blue as he conveniently set this up earlier in the essay with a strange foreshadow where he references fairy tales,

There is profound historical significance in the fact that the Thousand and One Nights turned up precisely in the France of the Enlightenment and that eighteenth-century reason recognized the reason of the fairy tales as its equal.3

As a good student of Freud, Kracauer is simply recognizing that fairy tales are not just nonsense- they have a logic- and that this logic, this “reason of the fairy tale” is perhaps more essential to progress than the Marxist materialist rationality.

He was saying something that others would amplify in the future, especially after the horrors of WWII- human society cannot be managed merely through an appeal to rationality. Our psychological needs are often more powerful than our material ones. And they can get very dark indeed.

But Kracauer’s focus on fairy tales highlights a component of them that we might find odd- justice.

Reason does not operate within the circle of natural life. Its concern is to introduce truth into the world. Its realm has already been intimated in genuine fairy tales, which are not stories about miracles but rather announcements of the miraculous advent of justice.

Good guy wins, bad guy loses. You don’t have to look far today to see how millions of people cling to various fairy tales, not just for mere entertainment, but because they “announce a miracle of justice.” These fairy tales come complete with their own bizarre ornaments.

In this way, they resemble the messianic impulses we saw in previous posts, (and the heretic Jacob Frank and the early Hasidics also made use of fairy tales in this way). Dangerous stuff.

You should read some of these fairy tales. Kracauer wasn’t lying- they are sometimes very explicitly about justice and have delightfully funny scenes where fairies are brought up on charges in courtrooms for getting caught trying to burn down Paris,4 etc.

So what the heck does it all mean? For Kracauer, the way out of the crisis of ornament is not to deny them as nonsense (in fact he prefers the Tiller girls to what he sees as effete high art), nor to get lost in individualistic solipsism, but to connect the imagination to an ethical and thereby social component.5 How do ornaments create us, what would the ornaments look like that could bring us together, and how might the imagination get us there?

From a discussion of the role of ornament, Georges Bataille wrote,

The expression of intimacy in [for example] the church corresponds rather to the needless consumption of labor: From the start the purpose of the edifice withdraws it from public utility, and this first movement is accentuated in a profusion of useless ornaments.1

Ornaments are a fun little mystery in the world- why do have them and why, sometimes, don’t we have them? Something about uselessness, waste and intimacy. They are paradoxically, necessary (aka useful). I always thought you could draw interesting comparisons between visual and musical ornaments, something I explored in my Ornament and Crime series and which seems to hint at something important about contemporary social and political uses of ornament.

If you’re like me, that sounds pretty good.

I recently was talking to someone about a convo folks were having at their progressive school where they were asking, “Why is no one having fun?” It coincided with the noticeable decline of interest in art, music and theater amongst kids (forget about things like dance or cooking- they don’t even entertain those notions at all). There’s a lot of reasons for that- including the ridiculous criterion that colleges and workplaces have about what matters-, but it doesn’t help that arts institutions and folks on our team are kinda boring these days.

This lack of fun has afflicted many institutions. In my neck of the cultural woods, I’ve noticed that Jewish Secular Humanist services are, by design, tame in a “spiritual” James Taylor NPR kinda way. I don’t know why. Imagine instead if they hosted one of the balls? Not to be antagonistic or confrontational to people with other beliefs, but as a celebration of what we really believe and our own wonderful, rich and hopeful traditions. All the traditions and madness and identity that we need are right there just waiting to be claimed, as I hope I’ve shown in this blog.

What if schools used art and music not as an empty space for meaningless “creativity” or places to launder self-righteousness but as a way to navigate the all-too real psychological and social problems that are at the heart of the current madness all around us? Kids are very hungry for this, they want (phoneless) places to draw and write and talk, to improvise together and to discover a language to discover who they are and what they see.

I’ve been banging this drum for too long. I may be stupid but I’m not stupid- I know there are reasons why institutions won’t do any of this. Many of my brethren are gonna be fasting and finding meaning in tradition and community- wonderful, great, go psychic conviviality! But many others are gonna be breaking it on their own, alone, and with a vague sense of guilt and confusion. We also have meaningful traditions and community, we just don’t think they matter for some reason.

I don’t know why.

Happy New Year.

No one, to my knowledge, has connected the anthropologist and avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren to Gillian Holroyd, the witch in the 1958 movie Bell Book & Candle. Like Deren, Holroyd is a woman living in 1950s Greenwich village, an anthropologist, has a “metaphysical” cat, and has a male companion who is a drummer with magical abilities. They’re both sharp lookers too. In the movie, the drummer is a relative who shares her witching ways and whose drumming can conjure strange disturbances in the atmosphere when it reaches a fevered pitch. In the case of Maya Deren, that companion was Teiji Ito. Here’s one of Ito’s albums, just for flavor.

But there are differences too. Deren was not just a bored bohemian. She was a refugee from fascist Europe who came to American in the 1920s. In 1947, she traveled to Haiti, on a Guggenheim fellowship. There she researched her masterwork on Haitian Voodoo, still unsurpassed as a work of art/scholarship. Ito became a serious student of the drumming traditions during a later trip they took back to the island in 1955. When they returned to the Village, Ito and others would play their drums at domestic gatherings. This was of course, considered outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior by most folks.

Somehow playing drums, drinking coffee and reciting poetry was considered worthy of scorn, but getting blotto on gin and tonics out in the suburbs while listening to mambo records and, I dunno, lusting after your neighbor’s wife or something was deemed perfectly appropriate. I’ve talked earlier on this blog about how this kind of subtle mockery was used against artistic threats to the status quo, such as in cases of ska and the Shakers.

I get it- it’s fun to make fun of folks, and it’s cringe to take it all too seriously. And yet, we should remember that folks like Deren were very different from the flighty arty goofballs or bored socialites they are depicted as. Deren went without food to make her movies (as did Harry Smith, another avant-garde filmmaker whose collections of things like paper airplanes was the probable target of mockery with Dobie Gillis’ collection of aluminum foil) and she was dead serious about the subjects she studied. In this case, truth is stranger - and much more challenging to us - than fiction.

ruth weiss

The image of the bongo player beatnik may have come from NYC, but more likely it came from San Francisco. There, another Jewish female refugee from fascism was creating art at the same time as Maya Deren. ruth weiss, deliberately (and fiscally) uncapitalized, recited her poetry to jazz, and likely did so before any of the male poets whose work we are more familiar with. Here’s ruth remembering a session with Jack Kerouac,

Jack likely got the bongo thing from Slim Galliard, who I’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog. Here’s a blurb from On the Road, and I know it’s a little dated and terribly cringe and horribly earnest, etc, but this sort of fun was considered downright scandalous in the 50s and really are any of us having that much more fun these days?

“… we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub…great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He’ll sing ‘Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti’ and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he’ll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can’t hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, ‘Great-orooni ... fine-ovauti ... hello-orooni ... bourbon-orooni ... all-orooni ... how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni ... orooni ... vauti ... oroonirooni ...” He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can’t hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience.

…Slim looks just as sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages.

It’s what the Dadaists wanted to do but didn’t know how. Those following this blog will notice some familiar themes. Here’s ruth later in life, reciting her work with her partner, who played a hollow log, which is the most genius thing I’ve ever seen why didn’t I think of it damnit, (album)

Interestingly, the many cliches and caricatures of beatniks that followed never depicted the women as anything other than effete morbid hangers-onners. In fact, they were there at the core and before some of the better known boys, including these two rad secular Jewish poetry-hearted proto-punk refugees. They tried to make culture and, despite the endless mockery, they were serious about it.

Afterword

The difference between these two extremes would be the subject of a major disagreement in England in the mid 1700s. On one side you had the iconoclastic dissenters like Quakers, still wary of Catholicism’s excesses, and on the other, the strange newly arrived sect of Moravians, who moved there from Germany looking for religious toleration.

Let’s take a look inside their chapel,

To increase the congregation’s capacity to “see,” “paint,” and “engrave,” Zinzendorf recruited and commissioned artists to create vivid portrayals of Christ’s life and sufferings for the Brothers and Sisters to study while powerful hymns, guitars, violins, and trombones provided background music. At the chapel in Fetter Lane and at Lindsey House in Chelsea (the count’s headquarters), the whitewashed walls were covered with paintings of biblical and allegorical scenes, as well as portrayals of Moravian history and international missionary work. Adding to the mystical atmosphere were watercolored transparencies, through which lanterns and candles projected luminous visions into the congregation rooms. Given the often bloody and sometimes sensual symbolism of the paintings and hymns, these scenes would provoke much controversy and hostile attacks from critics.1

The Moravians aren’t discussed as much as the Quakers or even the Sabbateans but they were probably more influential than either of them. The flowering of art and music that occurred in the 18th century came after a long history with the Moravians, going back centuries. It’s especially downriver from the thought of John Amos Comenius, a groundbreaking theorist of progressive education and gender equality. There’s too much to go into now, but consider that he was perhaps the author of the first ever illustrated children’s book, Orbis Pictus, combining his passion for images, universal literacy and education.

The description of the chapel above happens to coincide with a unique moment in the history of the Moravians- this is during the so-called Sifting Time, roughly the 1740s, when the Moravians engaged in a wild outburst of radical antinomianism similar to those that we found with other movements such as the Sabbateans and Shakers. As with them, it featured an obsession with female forms of divinity, millenarianism and social equality, and of course, expressed itself in radical new forms of art and music.

In a letter from an alarmed Lutheran, a discussion of these songs follows. He mentions disturbing songs about mystical marriage as well as “many others” including those,

transformed from expressions, songs and tunes that are derived from carnal merrymaking and secular disgrace and are invented by Satan, which are sung with a ragingly glowing feeling of love; [they are sung] at many and even at the most important occasions...2

They made various hymns to the tunes of the most shameful, smutty songs and sang them in their religious meetings. Even the coarsest people are annoyed by them. I will only give a few examples. They made hymns to the melody of a dance, called the Siebensprung, and also to the melody of the smutty song “ Allhier auf diesen Platz, da find ich meinen Schatz”. Furthermore they sing songs to the tune of another saucy song: “Wenn du mein Schätzel wilt seyn, must du mich lieben allein.” Likewise to well-known marches.

.“Only Count Zinzendorf would think of using the tunes of whore songs as sacred hymns,’* wrote Alexander Volck

What Did It Sound Like?

Unlike the English dissenters, the Moravians weren’t scared of music- they used hymnbooks, wrote thousands of songs, used instruments and taught the fundamentals of music. All of this non-spontaneity and specialization would be distasteful to a Quaker or Shaker. The main form of the Moravians’ prayer was choral singing, which we find commonplace today, but which you have to remember was actively resisted by the Quakers and Shakers for centuries (If Sabbateans sang this way it wasn’t widely noted (to my knowledge)- the hymn singing they mention was too idiosyncratic to be choral but they did use call and response, at least on one occasion).

Like all the Quakers/Shakers/Sabbateans, and unlike so many religious traditions today, they did include dance as part of their worship,

From various examples we know that the words of the songs were often accompanied and expressed by movements, gestures, or other actions.

They were even cool with secular music and dance.

All of this sounds very normal. So where was the heresy? In the words. After the Sifting Time, many of the hymnbooks and paintings were destroyed, leading us to only conjecture about the content, but a recent discovery from 2007 rescued some fascinating archives,

During the late 1740s Moravian piety shifted towards an extreme form of bridal mysticism, which found its expression in the songs of the period.

Many people focus on the very sensational lyrics that are quasi-erotic or even downright obscene- and the obsession over Jesus’ sidehole is every bit as cray cray as you could imagine. It’s easy to get distracted by all this, but the historian who found these lost texts tries to put out this fire,

The 1749 hymn book contains hardly any songs that can be linked with blood and wounds theology; far more important were the images derived from bridal mysticism.

I don’t know. You be the judge. Here’s one,

That’s some crazypants stuff. And there’s more like that (see the article for a useful appendix. See also Jesus Is Female, a fascinating somewhat controversial book.) The mystical bridal marriage stuff has definite Christian sources, but Zinzendorf, (he was the main guy during this sifting time phase), also had close contact with gnostic and Jewish sources. Indeed, his openness and even kindness to Jewish folks was often noted. In the decade preceding the Sifting Time, he actually spent time trying to learn about Judaism with someone who knew a real Jewish kabbalist, in one of the rarer truly genuine moments of inter-religious dialogue (When the Christian scholar asked the kabbalist what it was all about, he basically said, “Read Boehme!”)3

The Moravians tried to destroy all of the Sifting Time material, but, because they were totally nuts about singing, they left a ton of stuff to recreate their music in general.. Moravian Soundscapes is an academic project that recreates the sound of the early Moravians in Pennsylvania. There’s a ton of interesting trailheads here- including their involvement with Native Americans and the tragic fate of one of their communities, Gnadehutten.

I don’t know of anyone who has performed or recorded the sifting time hymns. Honestly they are even too gooey for my taste, but it might be interesting.

The Moravian influence was profound- both in America and England. You really can’t understand William Blake without it. Once you factor them in, Blake’s secular mysticism, infused with art, calligraphy and music, makes perfect sense.4 The Moravians’ heart (herz/lev) approach to art and music, and its application in education, is still very much how we think about these things today. I realized about half way through this post that this topic is just way too broad for one post, and I don’t have the energy for more. Hopefully this gives you enough to get started if you’re curious.

Because these groups are not trad enough for the folkies, and were embarrassing to the religious, this music and dance goes ignored. I set out to answer the question of what they actually sounded like. So far we’ve examined two groups from the Western Atlantic world, but what about the East? What follows is just a sampling of the kinds of sources we find on this music and dance.1

Charisma

The timelines of Sabbatean movement and Quakerism match up with eery precision. Both of their founders went through profound bouts of melancholy2 and both of the movements shared crazy ideas about gender equality and millenarianist critiques of authority. But there were differences. George Fox crooned a tune or two, but he wasn’t a singer. Sabbatai Zvi was.

Baruch of Arezzo reports that Sabbatai “began to intone melodiously the morning psalms, so that all the congregants marveled at his melodious singing.”

They also testified that whenever he was singing songs of praise to God, as he would do several times every day, it was impossible to look into his face, for it was like looking into a fire.

At such moments he lived in a state of emotional high tension; he required no sleep; he walked up and down singing Psalms with near-ecstatic enthusiasm and in a sweet voice.

This focus on charisma was something the Quakers tried hard to avoid, even though it crept in with the Shakers. It was also one of the Sabbatean features coopted later by the Hasidic movements.

“Everything Would Be Done By Means of Hymns”

Sabbateanism’s rituals relied heavily on singing and dance. In a discussion of how Nathan of Gaza (Zvi’s “promoter”) structured the movement, a comparison is made with the military,

There was nothing military about Nathan’s fantasies. Sabbatai Sevi would not have to fight, at any rate at the beginning of his career. Everything would be achieved by means of hymns…

The background to this comment is that the “messiah” in Jewish thought is associated with the restoration of a King, like King David, and this association evokes two “paths”- the political (or “military”) and the spiritual.

With the military path ruled out for practical reasons, the spiritual one was prioritized. This was further reinforced by kabbalistic ideas percolating at the time, which bolstered the idea that the spiritual could accomplish these worldly things.

Nathan had predicted an interval of “one year and some months between the messiah’s first manifestation in Gaza and his departure from Palestine (which would not be attended by any “messianic” phenomena), on the one hand, and the onset of the actual messianic events, on the other, for example, his taking the crown from the Grand Turk and his conquest of all the kingdoms by singing psalms and hymns.

People visiting him in jail, even people who were suspicious of him, were captivated by his singing and dancing, which was often noted for its longevity.

He ate and drank from gold and silver vessels inlaid with jewels. In his right hand he held a golden staff topped by a scarf of [that is, embroidered with] gold, and in his left hand a fan with a silver handle. There were many rooms in the fortress, as in the palace of the Turkish king, and also a tower and a beautiful vineyard. Many guards were round the fortress… All day long he was singing hymns of praise to God, . . . and whoever went in, left him with joy and great consolation.

Pop Songs

What did Zvi sing? Lots of hymns as we’ve already seen of course, but also pop songs.

“…[Zvi] used to sing a most holy song in the vernacular.” Nathan [of Gaza] does not name the song, but we may safely assume that he referred to Sabbatai’s favorite song, the Spanish erotic romance “Meliselda, the Emperor’s Daughter,” to which Sabbatai used to give all sorts of mystical interpretations. It consequently acquired great sanctity in the eyes of the Sabbatian believers, who sang it at their meetings, as is proved by its inclusion in the hymn book of the Donmeh in Salonika. 3

These vernacular songs were shocking at the time because of the normal religious hostility to them as frivolous, but also because they were associated with women, both in subject matter and language.

The educated rabbinic elite, in contrast, could use Aramaic to exclude the masses or Judeo-Spanish to include them, or maintain the use of Hebrew for the traditionally educated male. Consequently, Shabbetai’s use of the vernacular in these songs appears to be a strategic decision. It undermined the elite and its culture—in accordance with his other acts during this period—while simultaneously reaching out to common people, including women. In fact, the Sabbatian movement was the first in Jewish history to promote an egalitarian agenda, on both the theoretical and the practical levels.

These songs were also associated with secularism or ever worse, Christianity,

On the following Monday there was a great rejoicing as the Scroll of the Law was taken from the Ark, and he sang all kinds of songs—also Christian songs in the vernacular—saying that there was a [kabbalistic] mystery hidden in these impure songs. He also declared “this day is my Sabbath day.”

The reference to the kabbalistic mysteries is important. According to Zvi’s system, anything and everything, no matter how treyf, could be a reflection of the divine, if only it was seen in the right way. It was a matter of interpretation, not inherent identity. The power lay not in the objective world, but in the subjective act of reading. This is a powerful idea which would reverberate throughout modernity and even post-modernity, opening doors between cultures and classes. It still remains an untapped alternative to the contradictions about identity that we find ourselves in today.

Of course interpretation is slippery,4

Israel Hazzan protests against the “fools” who mistook Sabbatai’s mystical love lyrics for erotic songs. Sabbatai once sang such an erotic romance in the synagogue of Smyrna, at what was one of the most dramatic moments of his life.

Accusations of erotic antinomianism flew around but it is hard to know how much of this is reliable and how much is just sensationalism. Still the prohibitions against men and women dancing together seem to have been transgressed,

according to de la Croix, [night guards] found Sabbatai with a group of followers singing psalms in a house in Courou-Chesme, a village on the Bosporus. The accusation cannot be dismissed out of hand, and the reference to “women and wine” suggests preparations for a sexual-religious orgy rather than a meeting for the sole purpose of singing psalms.

Reports in Italy mentioned that he flouted all norms of decency by commanding a banquet to be held at which men and women danced together, while he himself retired to another room together with his first wife.

Noise as Metaphysical Communication

After reading from the Torah—from a printed book and not from a Torah scroll—Sabbatai cupped his hands, put them to his mouth, and trumpeted in the direction of the four winds. The kabbalistic purpose of the exercise, like that of blowing the ram’s horn on the New Year festival, of which this was an imitation, was to confound Satan and to weaken the power of the qelippoth. Then he expounded the kabbalistic reasons for his latest desecration of the Sabbath: “It is time to work for the Lord, [therefore] the Law may be transgressed.”

File with Purim “groggers”, shamanic noise magic and as always, animal imitation.

Musicians

As opposed to Quakers and Shakers, musicians weren’t taboo. But still, they aren’t frequently mentioned and when they are, they tend to play peripheral roles. The singing and dancing, like that of the Shakers/Quakers, is done by the participants themselves, sometimes in small domestic settings, and not given to a separate group of folks.

On his way to the cadi’s house after his arrest in Smyrna, he chanted psalms in the street. The sweetness of his singing was one of his most outstanding qualities, and exercised a powerful attraction on others. Music aroused him and filled him with enthusiasm. During the great illumination in Gallipoli, musicians were in attendance who played to him day and night, and all his life he used “to sing melodies and romances.”

Group Singing

What about other folks? Did they sing? There are less references to others directly in the Sabbatean movement (more in the Donmeh/Ma’amin which we will look at later),

Rofe became one of the most enthusiastic rabbinic supporters of Sabbatai. His account of the brethren’s enthusiastic singing, and of Nathan’s ecstatic dance during which he gradually stripped himself of his clothing until he fell into a swoon, is realistic and convincing.

When his intention became known, a large crowd assembled, as usual, to accompany him. Marching at the head of the crowd, Sabbatai intoned Psalm 118:16: “The right hand of the Lord is exalted, the right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly, the people singing the responses until they arrived at the cadi’s court. This verse from the Psalms is mentioned in other sources, too, as one of Sabbatai’s favorite songs during his illuminate ecstasies.

Dance

Then he took a scarf from the neck of one of the rabbis present, a certain R. Gamaliel, and told them each to hold one end of the scarf. When they had done so, Sabbatai stood facing them and began to dance, singing melodiously the whole Psalm 118, up to verse 20: “This is the gate of the Lord, The righteous shall enter into it,” and after every verse he repeated [as a refrain] ten times, with his eyes raised heavenward, “I shall not die, but live.”…Thus he continued to sing and to dance for about half an hour, and the envoys could barely contain their joy…

In the vignette below, dancers break into a synagogue (Amsterdam I think), similar to the way Shakers broke into churches to create a ruckus. Pay attention to the old folks dance referenced at the end…

the believers danced with such enthusiasm that everything was thrown into confusion and the rabbi, R. Moses Israel, had to mount the pulpit and call for more comely conduct. Not more than twelve dancers, chosen by lot, were to perform, but this call to order went unheeded in the general enthusiasm and rejoicing. The record book mentions that eight elders were practicing a special dance “to express our joy at the tidings . . . concerning our deliverance”

As with Quakers, this dance was at least sometimes paired with confession or penitence…

The movement exhibited even in its initial stages the characteristic combination of severe penitence and exuberant rejoicing. Each group, after finishing the penances imposed by the prophet, celebrated a festival with great rejoicing, banquets, and dancing.

But repentance about what? After all, according to Zvi we were operating under different laws. Here is an account of someone repenting their involvement with Sabbateanism talking about their breaking of taboos during a very solemn holiday,

a Talmudic scholar and a relative of the wife of Leyb b. Ozer. R. Abraham subsequently visited his family in Amsterdam to whom he recounted, with tears of repentance in his eyes, “how he had eaten meat and other dainties with Sabbatai Sevi on the Ninth of Ab, and drunk wine with him, while musicians were playing and Turks were dancing before them with their sticks, as is their wont when they make merry.’’

Another favorite pop song of his was, Delgadina. It is important to remember that these Sephardic romances favored by Zvi were not “his” by birth (he was Romaniote).5

This is just a sample of the musical anecdotes, but it gives us an outline- Sabbatanean music was popular, it was beautiful, it was often solo. It was rock stars and erotic poetry and maybe some naked dancing. It crossed borders and classes and genders. It was ecstatic and it had political/religious ambitions. It was deliberately spectacular and fabulous in ways that differed from the music of the more communal (and longer lasting) Shakers and Quakers.

Painted Synagogues

I want to end this post with something a little odd. There is no evidence whatsoever that the beautiful painted synagogues of Europe were Sabbatean. Indeed many preceded the Sabbatean thing and people expecting the end times don’t invest in multi-year building projects. But there is evidence that they existed in the same world- one of more openness to the vernacular, the female, the gentile and the imaginal.

An attempt has been made to link various aspects of the architecture, interior design, and decoration of the synagogue to prescriptions to be found in the Zohar. Whatever the inspiration was, and surely it was not unitary, these synagogues must have been built in response to new feelings and ideas about the setting of prayer.

Like Sabbatean music, these were highly ornamented and dizzyingly ecstatic. This made them popular in the broad sense (and maybe even populist?), reflecting the new trends of inclusion in terms of a wider audience,

The large expenditure required and the very novelty of the design and decoration unquestionably bespeak an effort to create a venue that would be responsive to a broader swath of the Jewish population. These synagogues were constructed near the end of the period when women reentered the synagogue proper; earlier they had had a separate structure known as a vayber shul. The possibility of a connection between women’s presence and the new ornamentation awaits further investigation.

These spaces were used in ways perhaps the old synagogues weren’t, including ways that sound a little Sabbatean,

In passages derived from the apostate Serafinowicz in Gaudenty Pikulski’s book Zlosd xydowska (“Jewish Malice”) (1760), there is a description of the manner of celebrating the holiday of Shemini Atseret that includes a reference to a custom otherwise unknown in Polish lands: “In the afternoon, women come to the synagogue and there they dance, eat and drink.”6

This world- ornamented, popular, female- which feels so much more modern to us than the closed, medieval Eastern European world that followed it, crashed and burned. In its place, arose various orthodoxies, including Hasidism, and the more liberal minded haskalah and reform movements, but neither of them quite captured the unique blend of imagination, religious awe and political utopianism as the Sabbateans.

I’m not a Sabbatean- Nathan of Gaza was a con-man (he forged letters and even did the whole distressing paper thing to make them look old) and the whole “king” thing seems just a little on the undemocratic side to me. But I admire that they reached for something beautiful, however spastically and however blindly. It was a crazy art project and when they left the stage, something aesthetic and hopeful left with them,

The disappearance of the special form of wooden synagogue with its elaborate decorative internal decoration by the end of the eighteenth century is puzzling. It is tempting to link it to the appearance of the Hasidic movement, which in its teachings was unconcerned with materiality and externality (gashmiyut). At this point, however, there is no evidence of such a link.

Many of us admire the beauty of various traditions but regret that they seem to belong to various religious orthodoxies or rigid feudal hierarchies. But that may not be the whole story.

In the last post, we encountered a strange and combative sect known as the “Singing Quakers.” The term Quaker was used for the official Society of Friends but was also applied loosely for similar-minded dissidents. Another group of “Quakers” was, of course, the “Shaking Quakers” or Shakers. Like the Singing Quakers, they were even bolder- artistically, theologically and ecstatically- than the Society of Friends. Ya’ll are probably a little sick of these folks by now- I’ve discussed them a lot recently (see Shaker Bear Dance, Trees of Life) but when it comes to the question of “What did these movements actually sound like?” there’s just a little more meat on this bone.

Most scholars of Shaker music and dance talk about roughly two phases: An early phase of purely spontaneous solo music and dance (roughly 1750-1800) and a later phase comprised of fixed texts and organized group dances (roughly 1800-1850).

It’s hard to impress on folks just how crazy and hardcore their earliest attitudes about music and dance were. What did it sound like? Imagine entering some building in the middle of rural New York State and witnessing this,

Some will be singing, each one his own tune; some without words in an Indian tone, some sing jig tunes, some tunes of their own making in an unknown mutter, which they call new tongues; some will be dancing and others stand laughing heartily and loudly; others will be a drumming on the floor with their feet, as though a pair of drum sticks were beating a ruff on a drum head; others will be agonizing, as though they were in great pain; others jumping up and down; others fluttering over somebody, and talking to them; others will be shooing and hissing evil spirits out of the house, till the different tunes, groaning jumping, dancing, drumming, laughing, talking and fluttering, shooing and his∣sing makes a perfect bedlam; this they call the worship of GOD.1

And from here it gets a little weirder. According the Shakers, many folks, including famous folks, converted to Shakerism after they died. These folks then communicated to the living, bestowing on them gifts, which included images, lyrics or melodies. This interdimensional communication included deceased Native Americans, as we’ve already explored, but also included “Chinese”, “Hottentot”, “Persian”, “Eskimo” folks.2 Heck, in March of 1839, Artexerxes converted to Shakerism, gifting a song to some folks while they were chopping apples or something.

Bear Dance Updates

What about the organized dances? What did they sound like? In a previous post I examined some of this cultural mixture as it manifested in what I call the Shaker Bear Dance. This dance is claimed to be the earliest of the organized dances, and was “gifted” to Father Joseph Meecham in the late 1700s. In this case, we actually have an answer to “What did it sound like?”

The link above goes to sheet music and a midi fiddle audio file. Keep in mind the Shakers only used their voices and specifically avoided instruments until after 1850 or so. They also didn’t pay much attention to meter or harmony- these things were suspiciously “fancy.” “Professional” was a pejorative in this context. The alternative was the delightfully-termed “small music”, which was seen as more democratic and “honest.”3

Its Dorian/minor/modal tonality may be a nod to Native American music- other American fiddle tunes later used minor keys to create that association- but who knows? Also the written description of the dance steps for the Square Order Shuffle are very close to the descriptions of the steps in the Ute Bear Dance, see my updated post if you’re curious. (You can also compare this American Shuffle to the Hungarian and Romanian and “European” bear dances referenced in the Klezmer Bear dance post.)

Folks interested in sheet music for the later Shaker songs, as well as a very detailed taxonomy of them, should check out the books and articles of Edward Deming Andrews.4 The Shakers themselves struggled with different ways to notate the music, inventing a few short-lived systems. Like other antinomian groups we’ll explore in this series, the dancers and singers were often the same folks, and they didn’t have a separate caste of musicians.

Shaker Dance and Jim Crow

What about other kinds of dance? What did it look like? We have images of the group dances in the engravings and drawings, but what about the spontaneous solo dancing? Here we may find an answer in an unlikely place.

The complicated contacts that the Shakers had with other groups- both real and imagined- may have had lasting effects on American culture. This is the thesis of Anne Grimes, who suggests a possible connection between Shakers and the early days of minstrelsy.5

As we saw in an earlier post, Shakers, and their dances, were lampooned in the early minstrel shows.

Mixing realism with parody, the minstrels were inspired by anyone, black or white, who looked unusual and thus could easily be made to appear ludicrous. When Alpine singers traveled through America, it was they who were burlesqued. When public interest was drawn to the… Shakers, and to their strange costumes and dances, it was they who proved irresistible. 6

But the Shakers were in blackface. The alpine singers were not. Why?

One reason for this is the obvious- there were, of course, black Shakers. Even before the Shaker minstrel print (probably 1830-1850), the print of the “Shaker Bear Dance” features two black folks, who have been identified- Ransom Smith (1795-1876) and Nelson Banks (1800-1878).

Anne Grimes points out how the Shaker communities in Kentucky, part of the so-called Kentucky Revival, also welcomed black families into their communities. From around 1818,

they took a “definite stand against human trafficking” and what followed was a general [voluntary] freeing of slaves… The slaves received their emancipation papers and had the choice of going out into the world or remaining and becoming Shakers. The result was “a family of some forty ex-slave Believers.”

This was about a decade before the infamous incident when the wandering actor Thomas Rice, in 1828, would witness a disabled black stable-hand dancing, which he then copied, giving birth to the minstrel show as we know it. It was also precisely in the same region.

Here’s an account of how Shaker dance looked in this general time period,

A traveler, T. Hamilton, noted that even in the organized dance “The more youthful and active introduced a few supererogatory gyrations, which were not attempted by the senior members; and one boy, in particular, signalized himself by a series of saltations not very dissimiliar to the Highland fling.

Compare that with this infamous image below,

The timing and geography of the Grimes thesis matches up enough to warrant further consideration, and Grimes’ supporting evidence is provocative, but hardly conclusive. There are obviously many other possibilities of sources for this dance.

But even if she is wrong, the example that the Shakers presented- one of not only abolition, but of actively welcoming ex-slaves and living amongst them as equals- was simply intolerable to many. The portrayal of the Jim Crow dance as ridiculous was perhaps not just a mockery of the idea that black folks were capable of dignity, but a mockery of the living example of coexistence and the radical beliefs of the Shakers, via the visual evidence of their outlandish dance traditions.

As a practice, the dance was liberatory. As spectacle, it became the exact opposite.

Can we dare to reimagine the Jim Crow dance before it was coopted by minstrelsy? Can the dance be reclaimed as evidence of an art from a syncretistic attempt to build an ecstatic socialist community dedicated to equality? Can the Shaker’s alternate future live on- even if only in our imagination? To even suggest this is outrageous and yet that is what so much of modern culture has been. It is the contradiction we are still in.

Consider these lyrics from a Shaker community from Canterbury New Hampshire. Can they be read as a sort of anti-minstrel show, which rejects the spectacle and puts the spotlight back on the passive spectator,

Black Bill’s Wonderment (1847)

Why I wonder you don’t laugh a little
laugh a little and laugh a little

Why I wonder you ain’t all reeling
backwards forwards side ways and downward

Why I wonder you can go so straight
and keep such a slick and curious shape

For of Mother’s wine I’ve got a small portion
And it sets me into a staggering motion

Well well, I’m willing to stagger
stagger stagger away from bondage

Well well I’m willing to reel
reel reel reel into freedom.

What a strange song. It tickles our “problematic” senses but the message is rather potent.7 Also imagine that its performance would have been not for an audience, but by a (mostly but not necessarily completely) white congregation while dancing and singing it themselves.

You certainly don’t have to go far to find Shakers indulging in disturbing cultural projections. In the article where I found this poem, it is immediately followed by a “Chinese” song which is composed, one assumes, of nonsense lyrics. And the world of social and gender equality that they envisioned was, like most syncretic efforts of the time, a specifically Christian one. Perhaps they were simply operating at the limits of their moral imagination at the time? Or perhaps they were settler imperialists disguised in moral garb?

The same questions would be posed to the Dada drummers singing “African” lyrics in Zurich in 1918, or the banjo-playing civil rights commies of the 1950s, or the ecumenical Masons in “Oriental” garb, or the hippies of the 60s, or the interracial and therefore much maligned ska scene of the 80s. The current trend is to look dimly on these movements, and perhaps rightfully so, but the retreat into its alternatives- whether they be ethnically pure “traditional” forms of music performed by postindustrial suburbanites or “un-ideological” contemporary market-based pop music- is perhaps equally full of projections.8

In this case, the source of embarrassment, the Sabbateans, would have remained a minor footnote if not for the work of historian/philologist Gershom Scholem who, in the 20th century, recovered this history. He credits this movement as the”big bang” of Jewish modernism, claiming that although it crashed and burned, it was the initial crisis from which other longer-lasting cultural forms were created in its wake. These various “fixes” still encompass the water that we all swim in today. They form the boundaries around what we consider legitimate in terms of identity, spirituality and music/art. They are the borders of our imagination.

Scholem is a big name in the field- not at all obscure- and although he has his critics, its odd to see his ideas just basically ignored by many who just skip over this period.

As an attempt to rectify this I decided to hunt down actual accounts about what the music of these Early Modern heretical movements actually sounded like. And to do it with other cultural movements happening around the same time- not just the Jewish stuff. Here’s part one.

Quaker Music

Quakers were just one of many dissenting sects in 17th century England, but they are a good way to explore this world. Many of their musical attitudes, though not all, were shared by these other sects, who were also experimenting with less hierarchical forms of worship.

Silence

Of course, the main feature of Quaker music was that there was none- theoretically at least! Many of the early writings on Quaker music are especially hostile to music- instruments were already out of the question by the time they got rolling- but even singing from fixed written sources was suspect,

Until at least 1880 no members of the Society of Friends are known to have been involved in organizing choral festivals or even church choirs. Earthly imitations of heavenly rapture would have seemed unreasonable or dishonest to them…1

1880! Thats 200 years without choirs! But even in this they were not quite as radical as you might think. By the late 17th century, there was already quite a bit of anti-musical thinking in England as part of the Puritan and Protestant tendencies. Even Biblical hymns were suspect. From the 1650s through to 1700, writings like the one below were typical of the Quakers,

I was convinced that either to get prayers out of a book, or to pray by a book was carnal and formal, and not by the spirit… 2

However, there were accounts of legitimate music- so called “singing in the spirit” which- it’s hard to tell exactly- seemed to be mostly, but not always, solo voices singing in meetings or during moments of oppression (jails, and the few anecdotes we have mention group singing here) and were either Biblical hymns (which are ok if you’re genuinely feeling it), short phrases (Holy Holy, etc) or made up lyrics.3

Sensible Groaning

There is also a very odd undercurrent of vocalizations- “sighs”, “groans”, “humming”, “whistling”, “droning”, all done seemingly without words,

When Nayler made his controversial entrance into Bristol (1656), going as a “sign,”4 he and his company “sang”as they approached Bristol. When the women dismounted and walked alongside Nayler’s horse they “sang.” George Witherly, who came alongside them, later reported “he knoweth not what they sang, but they made a humming noise.”

Critics of Quakers, and other other dissenting movements at the time also liked to focus on these vocal improprieties,

‘There was a young Woman,’ [Increase] Mather wrote, ‘a Daughter of a Quaker among us, who was howled into their society . . . and quickly fell to railing on others, and then to raving.’ As her fits continued, the Friends attending her heard ‘a very doleful noise,’ which they took to be an apparition. This sent the afflicted woman running, and they could not find her for some time. She was eventually recovered, however, and since, both that Woman and her Husband are railing Quakers, and do Hum and Revile as the rest of them.

This was possibly one of the folks who were labelled as “Singing Quakers”- a mysterious schismatic sect of “ancient Quakers” of which little is known except that their behavior was disruptive and they liked to make strange, loud noises. That they were marked as “singing” demonstrates the extent to which mainstream Quakers avoided this. They were especially disliked by those mainstream Quakers, whose services they occasionally disrupted.

One of these Singing Quakers may have been “Mildred” from this account-

[They are] “…Persons of a loose Ranting Spirit” who “frequently disturbed our Friends Meeting in London, by their Ranting, Singing, Bawling and Reproaching us.” At the forefront of “this turbulent Company was one Mildred, an impatient Woman, and Two or three Rude Boystrous Fellows, who were Ranters.”

These folks show up on both sides of the Atlantic, although whether this was a real coherent sect or just a general tendency is unknown. The last account of them is from 1704, when,

Madam Knight spoke of “Singing Quakers” at Milford, Connecticut (where one of their members lived), describing them as sitting down “humming and singing and groaning after their conjuring way.”

The reference to “conjuring” shows how these vocal styles were related to possession- both in ways that were approved (“the light”) and ways that were not (witchcraft). The extent of their antinomianism seems to correlate to their degree of vocal freakiness. Notice also how many of these singers were women.

Because of these disruptions, the rule-averse Quakers were forced to put someone at the door to their meetinghouses to bar these folks from entry. But amazingly, the respectable Quakers weren’t quite ready to relinquish their own funky vocalizations. In 1675, a prohibition against the disruptive folks mentions that “Serious Sighing, sensible Groaning, and reverent Singing” should still be allowed. Sensible groaning? More soon.

There is evidence of group singing, but one wonders what the heck it might have sounded like since there was no common text, leader or shared meter (they made a big deal out of rejecting meter back then). Probably cool as hell. Here’s Roger Williams from Rhode Island dissing some Quakers in the 1670s,

What is their monstrous way of Singing and Toning and Humming many at once, as they often do…?

George Fox mentions group singing, but its hard to tell what it sounded like,

Fox… said that the power of the Lord was so great that “friends in the power, & spritt of the Lord brake out into singeing many together with an Audable voice, makeing mellody in their hearts.”

Lingering behind this complex of unusual vocalizations/possession/authentic is the specter of Native American influence, something Olivia Bloechl expertly analyzes in her article The Illicit Voice of Prophecy, (much of this is taken from her article),

The metaphysics and politics of the inspired voice were a central concern of English discourse on charismatic religiosity, whether it was Algonquian or English Dissenting inspired song that was at issue. Seventeenth-century European practitioners and critics of prophetic song lived in a world in which stories of inspired howling, wailing, humming, and singing circulated as signs of a powerful presence whose nature and agency were disputed, but whose existence itself was not normally questioned.

It is important to note that groaning has a home-grown Christian interpretation too-

[They] interpreted groaning in terms of Paul’s reference in Romans 8 to the Spirit’s groaning in believers, in solidarity with the rest of creation. 5

But this interpretation is not inconsistent with non-European influence. Romans 8 can be interpreted as a way to see groaning as not just trans-cultural but trans-human as well,

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time…

Groaning in this way could be seen as a sort of a sympathetic drone that resonated with an entire universe of /in pain. Like some kind of Existential Protestant Hive Mantra. Heavy stuff.

Twang

Groaning, howling, wailing and humming are certainly alien to what we understand as mainstream European religious music, but they are also very practical solutions to the problem of “How to sing without a text, meter or pre-made melody?” They can be musical without being “music”, and as such are part of a family of practices about which I’ve talked endlessly on this blog. I imagine they would be very useful in getting started and overcoming inhibition- “priming the pump” so to speak, or as we say in drawing, “ruining the page.”

But there was another solution to this problem that came along a little later. Another aspect of Quaker speech which falls into this category is the Quaker Twang, which was a singsong style of speaking,

Bliss Forbush, in his book on Elias Hicks, notes how that “Contemporaries wrote that Elias Hicks sometimes used a singsong voice heard at that period in Friends’ Meetings.”

The writer then goes on to say that this tone was so common amongst Quakers that it was a topic for casual mockery. The “twang” may have also been a solution to the problem of bad singing. Several accounts from the 17th century mention various “vexations” of congregation members by those whose singing was truly unpleasant, another curiously practical problem that arises in non-hierarchical worship settings.

The practice of singing seems to have fallen into rapid decline in England, although isolated cases can still be found after 1675. On the whole, however, it appears to have been replaced by the singsong chant or delivery which many Quaker ministers developed.

The Legacy

I did this project just to figure out what it all sounded like. But still- why exactly should we care? After all, this wave of Quaker music was a complete dead-end when considered in the context of religious music. But if we widen the lens a bit, we can see that these ideas stayed alive just outside the margins of religion in the realm of spirituality. Groaning and the like continued into the Great Awakening, but, in the 19th century, one would find these same vocalizations, ideas about possession and gender relations reappearing strongly in the spiritualist movements of the 19th century. In the 20th century, you would find it again in avant-garde art and popular performance. These ideas about revelation, the power of the individual and authenticity seemed to have “jumped over” and now can be found in everything from poetry to music to painting. This doesn’t make these ideas true, but it does make them important, especially if we want to understand who we are. Appreciating this connection can enrich both our understanding of the role of art outside the normal categories of religious/secular and, on the other hand, can also complicate our ideas about religion and ethnicity and the stable coherent identities they claim to offer us.

But it’s tough-
Farmers admire Cowboys
But they don’t trust them.
Gardeners and Industrialists
They never get along.
Gilgamesh Enkidu Cain and Abel.

Why? It’s funny really
None of us are entirely Us
We get our language from animals
Our fire comes from strangers
But somehow
We always forget (music as memory).

Bears, Angels
And Saturnians
Talk about us
And our families
They discuss whether or not
We have good manners1

A recent article by Inna Naroditskaya on the intersection of Tango and Yiddish culture once again tingled my spidey senses.1 There’s a lot to discuss in it, including a whole slew of klezmer families that she cites which are new to me,2 the international optimism of Tangofuturism, the importance of the emerging café culture, and more.

But in this essay I want to focus on one detail she throws out fleetingly.

The Age of the Middleman

Tango, like blues, is one of those art forms that took over the world. And, like blues, tango’s early origins, and even the etymology of its name, remains mysterious. There are theories.

This is not one of them.3

In a series of earlier posts I pointed out how, around 1500, Portuguese outcasts settled in Western Africa and became “middlemen” facilitating trade between the Africans and Europeans. It wasn’t a pretty situation- trade here meant humans, guns and ivory, amongst other things. And these folks weren’t nationalistic settlers in the way we’re used to- they didn’t fly any flags- they were independent and married into local cultures, creating a unique hybrid-syncretized culture all their own. We have no record of their music. These folks formed a variety of classes and went by several names- lançados, canoe-men4 and… tangomãos.

Is there a connection between tangomãos and tango? Zoroastrian scholar and klezmer guru Marty Schwartz taught me long ago not to play the etymology game and I’m not gonna start now. However the thought did return to me while reading that essay by Inna Naroditskaya. In that article, she quotes a story, A Man From Buenos Aires by Sholem Aleichem,

“I’m a kind of middleman, what you might call a jobber. That is, I provide a commodity that everyone knows about but no one ever talks about. . . . There are too many sob sisters around, too many eyes looking our way—and ours is a business, you know, that does not do well in the limelight.”

This takes place centuries after the tangomãos of old, but like them, he is a desperate outcast himself who has chosen a life of trafficking people, in this case, women. This character, showing up in Buenos Aires is not an accident. Buenos Aires was famous for this kind of trafficking.

Linguistic Divides

The history of tango, as Naroditskaya details, is intimately tied to prostitution. The higher class of prostitutes, “French”, went to the upper classes, but the lower class, where the tango emerged, were “Polacas” or Polish, i.e. Eastern European Jews. The role of prostitution in musical forms like blues, jazz and others is an incredibly painful subject and something rarely discussed.5 It’s made even trickier in Argentina by its tendency to fall into anti-Semitic tropes, (a quick look at the facts will dispel any claim to their being unique in this field). A recent lecture by YIVO on tango and Jewish culture completely avoids the topic.

However, I’m not sure you can understand tango and its appeal without it. In a brief passage, Naroditskaya says,

Another, scarcely more complimentary, name for these girls was papirosn (cigarettes). The first women to smoke in public in Buenos Aires, polacas did not know the Spanish word for cigarettes, instead using their native Yiddish.

She cites recordings which reference this word, including this Elegante Papirusa from 1922

But what really intrigued me was how this linguistic divide may have played a role in the emotional evolution of tango. Anthropologist Julie Taylor examines an aspect of tango often overlooked,

In the traditional milonga pesada (or “heavy” milonga), distinguished by its well-established codes, dancers cling together in the uniquely intimate tango embrace. Incongruously, the milonga codes of etiquette dictate that these same dancers remain anonymous, often dancing together for years without knowing each other’s names.6

Taylor’s article looks at this culture of anonymity through the lens of trauma and therapy, but never makes the historical connection with the linguistic divide caused by prostitution. She is, of course, not looking at sex workers in the early twentieth century, but more contemporary dancers in a much different setting. And yet that makes this culture of anonymity all the more strange. Why do they chose it?

As she explains, not only are the dancers anonymous to each other, but the entire ritual is completed silently through a series of head gestures and a well known code of behavior that dictates exactly what happens before, during and after the dance.7 Sitting on opposite sides of the cafe, it is possible that the men and women never speak to each other at all. Other aspects of the dance reinforce this anonymity, including not looking at each other during the dance, and maintaining an emotionless facial expression.

Choosing Anonymity, Choosing Belonging

Taylor wonders why the dancers would come back over and over to this fraught and tense situation, and she suspects it has something to do with this anonymous dynamic,

They return again and again searching for the embrace of other dancers who are rendered strangers by the rules of the milonga.

Even in situations that aren’t as “heavy” or “deep” as the traditional milonga, aspects of this anonymity are retained by choice. Taylor quotes someone talking about their dance partner in a much less intense contemporary situation,

“But they would never ask if I had a bad day. Nor do they want to hear my personal history…”

If this is therapy, then it’s a funny kind of therapy. In her account, tango is not about “getting better” as we understand it today. “Getting better” is all too often the standard by which cultural practices are inappropriately judged. The prostitutes and uprooted workers know damn well that no one wants to hear “if they’ve had a bad day.” They know they are not “getting better.” 8

What was it about then? Taylor offers that dancers often spoke of something else- a not-easy-to-translate word, “contención,”

Others go to the milonga for consolation. But the milonga doesn’t console; it only offers a moment of belonging [contención]. When they go out the door, men and women have nothing again and they leave with their pain. And that is the addiction. They must come back.9

By now, careful readers of this blog are either nodding their heads or rolling their eyes- this sounds a lot like the hard-to-describe emotional core of what I’ve droned on about in my series/book on the lament. In that series, I try to show how the lament offers an alternative to our current models of both religious and therapeutic culture, but that it is often misunderstood or overlooked entirely. Contención, with associations of “holding” or “containment” is part of this emotional continent. Lament relies on a social technology that “holds” the lamenter- too complicated to go into here- but in the same way that the lamenter’s call is emotionally and musically “held” by the communal response.

Our current therapeutic culture is constantly asking if you’ve had a “bad day.” It wants us to tell our personal “history.” And Lord knows, it can be helpful- I don’t want to be too glib in dismissing it.10 But there is also something else- something psyche-ic or soulful- that is only accomplished culturally. Our crisis in conviviality is presented in spreadsheets that lay out the x axis of statistical quantities of friendships cross-indexed to the y axis of certain demographics- but what if it’s also about the much subtler gooey feelings we project onto the mass of strangers that surround us everyday but who we never talk to? The people on the bus, the people in the cars around us, the people in line at the grocery story- where do they live in our imagination? Do we belong to them? Do they belong to us?

Our multitude of therapeutic “options” have each of us running around in a thousand different directions, looking for that golden picket fence desert island where we can become “whole”- i.e. finally isolate ourselves from others. But deep down we all know that pain is inevitable. Deep down all we really want to do is go to the cafe or courtyard or wherever it is that people gather and know that we’ll see you there again. Contención. We can suffer- if we are held.

In the 1930s two art collectors, The Andrews, were granted permission to see a secret stash of drawings done by the Shakers from the middle of the previous century. What they saw was a profound and beautiful collection of “gifts”, comprised of visionary images revealed to the Shaker women by their dead spiritual ancestors. It’s not entirely clear what these drawings were for. The Shakers, who were on the more icono-phobic side of things, did not hang them up.

Perhaps the most famous of these is the image above, by Hannah Cohoon. The writing below the tree reads,

“I received a draft of a beautiful Tree penciled on a large sheet of white paper bearing ripe fruit I saw it plainly it looked very singular and curious to me. I have since learned that this tree grows in the Spirit Land. Afterwards the spirit showed me plainly the branches, leaves, and fruit presented or drawn upon paper. The leaves were checked or (unreadable) and the same color you see here. I entreated Mother Ann to tell me the name of this tree which she did Oct 1st 4th hour PM by moving the hand of a medium to write twice over Your Tree is the Tree of Life.”

I’m ashamed to say that, although I loved this image, for many years I sorta kinda thought it was basically a 19th century version of “Live Laugh Love.” Pretty trees? Life? Lovely, but not very “Metal,” I thought (see Pier One tree paintings.)

Boy was I wrong.

The Tree of Life is, of course, mentioned in Genesis. It is in the Garden of Eden right there with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It quickly becomes part of the background though. Adam, Eve and the serpent - that’s all the Tree of Knowledge. It reappears at the end in a detail that is easy to miss. God kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden, but not because they ate from the apple. There were separate punishments for that. He kicks them out specifically so that they won’t eat from the Tree of Life.

So what is this Tree of Life?

The classic story is that it grants immortality. But how exactly? Turns out there are explanations for that, and they are pretty wild.

I first stumbled on this in an entirely different field. Gershom Scholem, in On The Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, discusses the role of the Tree of Life in the context of a strain of kabbalistic thinking. Long story short: The two trees don’t just bestow magic gifts, but act as gateways to two completely separate psychospiritual realities. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil delivered us into a reality based on distinctions- good/bad, permitted/forbidden, male/female, live/dead, etc.

…Thus the Tree of Knowledge became the tree of restrictions, prohibitions, and delimitations, whereas the Tree of Life was the tree of freedom, symbolic of an age when the dualism of good and evil was not yet (or no longer) conceivable, and everything bore witness to the unity of divine life, as yet untouched by any restrictions, by the power of death, or any of the other negative aspects of life, which made their appearance only after the fall of man.

That is how immortality works- the Tree of Life grants immortality not as a special superhero power but as a convenient side-effect of banishing all negative distinctions. Pretty imaginative thinkin’ huh?

The implications of this are staggering. It means that this present reality we all are experiencing is not an eternal and natural way of being but merely one experience of reality that coexists with others that linger on the borders of our imagination. Even the Torah that we have is just the Torah of this particular reality. According to this theory, there are other Torahs in other dimensions, with the letters put together in an entirely different order! That’s pretty wild stuff yo.

In kabbalistic tradition this idea was expressed in terms of progression from a world ordered by the Torah of Creation, associated with the paradisal Tree of Knowledge and signifying the distinction between good and evil that engendered the restrictive system of halakhic prohibitions, to a state of perfected existence by order of the transcendent Torah of Emanation, associated with the Tree of Life and free from all distinctions, oppositions, and restrictions.1

We are used to thinking about alternate dimensions in terms of physics- encompassing things like time and space- but these alternate dimensions went beyond that and included different moral, social and even ontological or linguistic realities. You can see where this is going- according to this messianic thinking, things that prohibited in this realm are permitted under these other realities, under the Tree of Life. This new moral code coincides with different social and expressive (art, music, speech) realities. (And while that might sound fun, be careful what you wish for- I’ll take my morality on the same dimension where lunch is served.2 )

More Trees

This is a 1741 edition of a 1573 book called Sefer Etz Hayim, or Book of the Tree of Life by Hayim Vital. It was the major explication of Lurianic kabbalah in its time (Luria never wrote anything and Vital was his star pupil). This diagram in the book is known as The Tree of Life, although It’s not clear that the original text had this same image- the so-called kabbalistic “Tree of Life” in it (I think the original expressed the same idea as a diagram that was mostly a big circle with circles in it).

How did the well known kabbalistic diagram become known as the “Tree of Life”? I don’t know and its get very complicated. (1) The diagram pre-exists “The Book of the Tree of Life”, which is mostly a pun on the author’s name “Hayyim”(Life). (2) “Tree” has a generic meaning in this context. “Ilan”, the Aramic-derived word for tree, as opposed to the Hebrew etz, is a generic term for any diagram. J. H. Chajes, who studied these ilanot, is quick to dismiss any symbolic connections between the diagram/tree and the actual tree, but it sure is used a lot in the literature, both old and new, in ways that would have intermingled associations.

Still, it is undeniable that many of these “trees” are stunningly beautiful and complex and can be compared to the Shaker gift drawings in (1) their use of text along with symbolic images, (2) their functions outside of wall-hung art (they are both also called “rolls”) and (3) their sometimes shared connections to real-deal messianic “tree of life” style antinomianism, although we should tread carefully when associating kabbalah with antinomianism (there is a connection but it is often way too exaggerated and too complex to get into here, see Scholem and his critics,3 and see also Chajes’ work on Sabbatean diagrams, he also did the work on kabbalistic trees).4

There are also real-world historical connections between kabbalistic thought and Quakers/Shakers, including direct references to the Tree of Life shtick. They are fascinating and tempting and I’ll get to them in a follow-up soon. One big intersection where this interaction took place was in England- Ragley Hall in the 1670s- where the philosopher Anne Conway held court with Quakers, alchemists and Kabbalistic thinkers, sort of like an English equivalent of the scene Rudy II created in Prague.5 But these connections may be somewhat besides the point- the Tree of Life features in the very non-Jewish Book of Revelations, where the messianic connection is made, and the Shakers, who weren’t big on philosophy or books anyway, didn’t necessarily need to get this idea from kabbalistic sources. Perhaps it percolated in the wild ferment of Anglican and Quaker schismatic sects that they emerged from, or perhaps it was all closer to the Jacob Bohme’s Tree of Life growing in the “wild.” I dunno.

It’s not their similarities, but their differences that interest me most. The spirit drawings were mostly done by women, while the Jewish ilanot are entirely by men- and at the risk of being essentialist, it shows. Even the beautiful Jewish paper-cuts, which resemble the Shaker images, were mostly a male activity (indeed, they both likely stemmed from similar traditions). And even though Jewish women were heavily involved in their own messianic movements, just like the Shaker women were in theirs, we very sadly don’t have any art from them that I know of. There are no Sabbatean or Donmëh equivalents of the gift drawings. Not one. (I’d love to be wrong- let me know.)

And so, perhaps let’s dispense with the question of origins, which are fascinating and enriching, but ultimately speculative, and simply include both of them on our altars. Let’s not reduce them out of our need for definition and identity, but allow them to expand who we are. They are, like us, part of one big tradition- which our age calls the imagination- but which stretches from The “Spirit-Lands” of America to the World of Emanations across the Atlantic and beyond.

Living communally, dancing half-naked in a manner described as “shaking”, women in positions of spiritual power, vegetation used in spiritual iconography, a preference for the pastoral, a linguistic ideal of plain but beautiful communication, rituals to speak with the dead, and…. bear dancing?

Am I talking about Native Americans (as the early colonists saw them) or the Shakers?

Notice the bent legs and downturned hands in each picture.

Believe it or not ,we’ve talked about bear dancing before on this blog (see The Klezmer Bear Dance). In that post, I discussed how the “Berin Tanz” was one of the earliest known songs of the klezmer repertoire. It goes all the way back to Prague 1606. In that post I wondered aloud if it might have anything to do with the ursari horas of the Gypsy/Roma folks, a tradition that was still alive recently, as opposed to the European peasant songs.

Bear Dance in the West

I was surprised to stumble onto the Bear Dance once again. This time amongst religious radicals on the other end of the Atlantic. About two hundred years after 1606, in America, a similar dance pose shows up amongst the Shakers in New York. I haven’t been able to find anyone who makes a direct connection between these poses and the Bear Dance but the visual similarities are striking.

The women form in one line, the men in another, the two lines facing each other…when the proper bar in the music has been struck, the women take three forward, springing steps toward the men; they then reverse and take three backward steps, and as they go backward the men go forward in the same fashion, motioning with their arms in imitation of the motions made by the forepaws of bears…1

That’s a description of an Ute bear dance and it is again, strikingly similar to the famous image above of Shaker dance.2 Compare that description with this account of the Square Order Shuffle,

...consisted in taking three whole steps forward, turning and taking‘three back, setting the foot straight forward at each end and then going forward again three steps, and taking a double step, or ‘tip tap’ as it is called, then receding three steps with a ‘tip tap’; this takes the turn part of the tune once, then it is repeated, in the same manner, then shuffle the set part once over.

Eerily similar but no mention of bears.3 The minor key of the shuffle (D minor using C major notes) is perhaps evocative of Native American modal music, although someone with more musicological expertise will have to explore that. You can also compare this tune with some of the European bear dances in Klezmer Square Dance).

The account of the Ute bear dance is from the 1890s, and was recorded far away from where the Shakers lived. What did the New York Shakers know about the bear dance in the 1830s?4 Well, there were Bear Dances amongst the Delaware and Iroquois in the Northeast, who the Shakers probably had contact with, but, for me at least, this particular trail goes cold after that.5

This association may seem outlandish, but there were real reasons why the transmission might be possible, as “Indians” held a special place as a source of music and dance, 6

We’ll explore that but let’s start with a sketch of the incredible world of Shaker dance in general.

Shaker Dance as Anti-European

The drawings above are from around the 1830s- and this was a distinct period in Shaker dance history. It was about 40 years after the first radical waves of the “free jazz” period had already subsided,

The earlier modes of worship did not include any sort of standardized or choreographed movements,

This preference for pure improv is often characterized as being counter to the normative European ideas about harmony and social dancing of this time- as being anti-European.

These witnesses to Shaker worship seemed most concerned with the way Shaker songs did not conform to European harmonies, and with how their dances refused the couple-pairings that formed the nucleus of European-American folk dance.7

Here’s another description of this era, from a pamphlet by a converted former member, which explains this refusal in the context of a mythical space/time,

It is impossible to point out any exact form, for they vary and differ and seldom act the same form exactly over again. They chuse to do so, to be singular, lest, as they say, they should be connected with Babylon.8

These associations tie in with all the strange and contradictory ways Europeans projected onto the “New World”- some saw it as the Garden of Eden/New Jerusalem while others saw it as the Devil’s backyard. I don’t want to romanticize the Shakers’ dealings with Native Americans (the articles in the footnotes do a good job of providing balance), but they were more in the Garden of Eden camp.

Eventually, the early, anarchic dances became organized into coordinated steps, culminating in a bunch of dance innovations in the 1820s,

The 1820s brought a new decade of innovations in which the Shakers created the Round, the Hollow Square, and Square Step dances and the Circular, Square, and Compound marches.

The dance pictured above is one of these, and we even have the music that might have accompanied it. This seems to follow the same trajectory it took in Eastern Europe- with Sabbatean ecstatic individual dance/singing followed by a moderated Hasidic group singing/dancing.

Aside: Shaker Niggunim

There’s also information in this passage about the music,

These new dances differed from those developed in the 1790s in a number of ways. Words were introduced to laboring songs in 1811 with the introduction of the Quick Dance. Other songs did not have lyrics but included vocalized versions of secular fiddle songs.

The “vocalized versions of secular fiddle songs” will remind readers of this blog of wordless Hasidic niggun singing,9 which was being innovated in Europe at roughly the same time (the EE innovations always seem to slightly pre-date the Quaker/Shakers and Islamic innovations usually precede those, but dating all this stuff is very hard). You can hear a fictional but historically-informed reconstruction of this wordless singing in the recent movie, the Testament of Ann Lee,

Dancing With the Dead

But there is another important piece of evidence from this period that might help explain the connection between the Native Bear Dance and the Shakers.

About the same time as the images of the bear-dancing Shakers above, there was also a strange surge of interest in Indians among the Shakers- specifically, dead ones,

In the early 1840s, hundreds of Shakers spoke with dead Indians. The mostly youthful visionists danced and sang Indian songs. They carried around axes, dressed in moccasins, sat on the floor cross-legged, ate succotash. They hollered and chased one another from the meeting house As Wampo, one of the native spirits, told a Shaker visionist, “me can’t help making great noise”.10

Cringe. If you have the stomach to look past this, you will find that, If nothing else, the mere existence of Native Americans in the Euro’s imagination, however misunderstood, coincided with an European re-evaluation of things like the nuclear family, the spiritual role of dance, egalitarianism, accurate and plain speech, democracy, gender roles, and more. None of these changes were completely unique and we should be careful about attributing causation- the Essenes, for example, got very close to the same spiritual territory way before 1492, as did many other utopian groups. Still, I’m surprised there isn’t more research on the spiritual influence of Native Americans on Europeans, instead of vice versa. If you find it, let me know.

Being Fake

This wasn’t perhaps the first time Shakers felt this way,

John Richardson, an English Quaker… in 1701, well stated the essence of all Quaker perceptions of the Indian when he wrote: “I much desire that all Christians (whether they be such in reality or Profession only) may endeavour to imitate these People in those Things which are so commendable.. . .”

That’s way back in 1701, (and from the Quakers- the Shakers didn’t exist yet, but grew out of the earlier Quaker ferment). It’s rather early for this story, and a century before any of those images of dancing above. In fact the early modern period is full of “racial” imitators, from revolutionaries dressing up as women or Indians, Christians faking being Cabalistic Jews, enslaved New Orleanians “faking” Indian culture in Congo Square or upper class cakewalkers, to French royals pretending to be peasants, Englishmen dressing up in turbans, etc. It was a fluid time, literally in the maritime sense.

This sort of imitation no doubt occurs throughout history, and perhaps even prehistory as well. Even in the Bear Dance, which is by all accounts very old, the Native Americans were dressing up in bear skins and imitating bears. It would be highly disrespectful to simplify this as “faking it” but that is precisely my point.

Any attempt at “faking it” gets quickly labeled as minstrelsy (one of the Shaker images from above is from a book on minstrelsy) but perhaps not every attempt at imitation was or is equally malicious. There is a Saturnalian topsy-turvyness that happens to identity that seems to be an important component of imagination- of revelation- in all its good and horrible aspects (See my recent posts on Saturn). Minstrelsy involves a stylized “imitation” as a way to ignore or replace the actual living other, and this is made easier when the interaction comes from dead folks or in our age, recorded music mediated by technology. Do the religious forms of imitation fall into the same trap, or do they offer alternatives?

We all have a deep and desperate need to fake. It is a pull that feels almost erotic, but in a non-sexual way, and it brings us into profound contact with others as well as out of the terror of our own limited selves. It’s about death and stuff. And its messy as hell, for us and them.

Can we do it better? Can we have imagination/revelation without faking?11 If not, perhaps pretending to be a Saturnian or a bear might be a safer alternative. As Claude Levi-Strauss says, “Animals are good to think with.”

The Shakers, it should be noted, had their own rationale for the pose,

“Earlier dances were used to cast off feelings of lust or express joy and represented unity, purity, and labor. It was Mother Lucy who, in 1815, suggested gestures to accompany particular lyrics. The primary gesture use was a “shaking off of sins:” Believers beat time with their forearms parallel to the floor, palms facing down.”12

Try that, with bent knees, and tell me you don’t feel like a bear. Now imagine a room full of folks doing this while singing a wordless version of a secular tune of your own choosing. Perhaps Milkshake by Kelis. Try that at your next fiddle convention and let me know how it goes.

These antinomian cultures were beautiful, innovative, profound- and, like the rest of us, absurd. They remain important as places where modern ideas of revelation were being worked out, a sort of a parallel workshop to the scientific progress of the Enlightenment. The Shakers now have a reputation for being grandmotherly and quiet- but the early days were anything but. Their writings and art were overflowing with bold and surreal imagery. This revelatory overflow coincided with radical ideas about art, dance, music, authority and gender/social equality. And that’s why it matters- most of us are still very much the descendants and true heirs of these ideas, even if we don’t dance as much as we used to.13

In a recent post about Jewish hobology, I forgot to mention this painting that I did of blessed Jewish Hobo, Eve Adams (great name if you think about it). Fascinating story, and very timely. She was different, and therefore deported by the authorities back to a country where she was eventually killed. Sound familiar? Original post.

Chastushki

Many thanks to Joel Rubin for pointing out this amazing 78 record “Iko Miko” a “Japanezishe Chashtushki” from Aaron Lebedeff. I offered to pay someone to translate it but he said it was a big headache and just had a lot of hack-cliches from the song “Romania, Romania.” If you listen closely you can hear a reference to “drinking wine” in Yiddish and “mamaliga.” Great song and performance, actually. From my Chastushki article which has been amended heavily since “publication” lol.

On Crooked Music

In the series, I referred to Theodore Gaster’s conjecture that Pesach (passover) and the word pasach, which he sees as etymologically related to “limp”, are related. Gaster sees the holiday as a ritualized spring return from the underworld, similar to other pagan festivals. Hold that thought for a moment.

Another theme we’ve explored recently are the various spiritual parallels one finds in Europe/Eastern Mediterranean and Africa/Americas. Example: Lilith bowls and banjos- What do these items have in common? Both are containers that attract and hold souls, but the religious attitudes to this practice of soul-capturing varies widely depending on your latitude. Another example are ritual floor drawings which are meant to invite beings from the Other Side, which we find in everything from Faust to freemasonry to voodoo. These connections aren’t just archetypally “in the air” they are historically linked and can be proven as such. But again, even though the practices are related, the attitudes towards them are very different. In the African/American tradition it is appreciated (somewhat), whereas in the Euro tradition it is a prelude to getting your head chopped off.

Well here’s another one, The Limping Old Man, which I encountered in the Robert Johnson crossroads story.

“…versions of the story instruct the aspiring musician to bring his instrument to a lonely crossroads at midnight and await the arrival of a limping old black man who will tune the instrument, play it briefly, and then return it endowed with supernatural power. The meeting place at the crossroads and the description of the “devil” as a limping old man reveal that this is also a story about Legba, the West African vodun who is honored at crossroads and who provides access to the realm of the spirits. Legba is often described as an old man, since he was active at the creation of the world, and he limps because he has one foot in the visible world and the other in the realm of the spirits.” Children of Legba

Folks will recall the story of Jacob who had a limp after he wrestled with the angel at night, “The sun rose above him as he passed by Penuel, and he was limping because of his hip.” Old Christian saints, with their canes, are often found by rivers and crossings (Jacob was also at the river, a “crossroads” of sorts during his wrestling episode). Orpheus’ story is somewhere in the mix here too, he also used music to cross over the river Styx into the underworld and was ultimately broken by it. All these elements- limping, music, crossroads, the underworld, spiritual contact- don’t exactly match up in each version, but the point of all this is that it is not theoretical but practical. In music, limping is an irresistible “call to the blood” to paraphrase W.C. Handy via Robert Farris Thompson, whether it is found in habanera, bulgar, the tresillo or a hora. This points to a vague spiritual complex that is bigger than any one tradition and gives us a way to climb out of our ethnic ghettoes and talk to each other about the practical, but often under-discussed elements of our music that are broken, limping, stubborn or resistant.

Michael Hurley Songbooks

Bake them Biscuits

In Medicine Shows Radio and the Parasocial, I talked a little about Flatt and Scruggs’ famous involvement with Martha White’s Self Rising Flour. I arrogantly disparaged these mighty musicians by suggesting that both the art and music on their full length albums was stiff and awkward compared to the vibrant art and music of their live radio and TV shows.

In a new book by Mindy Merrell, Self-Rising: The Magic Rise Behind Biscuit and Cornbread Culture, she provides all the background you might ever want on the role of flour companies and Southern music, black and white.1 She also gives me an excuse to add the visual context that I left out, such as

and

(both images are from her book). More flour/music graphics:

Compare these inspired graphics to the more modern album covers. Her article points to many more radio shows from Hank Williams and beyond. Perhaps we should not mourn the loss of the album but instead return to the vibrancy of these earlier parasocial forms.

He dies before his time—
he was already dying before his time—
and it grieves everyone
when they hide themselves from the light of day.
He dies before his time,
he of the handsome brow—
and it grieves everyone
when no one of his kin adorns themselves.
He dies before his time,
he of the dark-rimmed eyes—
and it grieves everyone
when he does not wed, leaving a beloved behind.
He dies before his time,
he of the painted face—
and it grieves everyone
when he does not bring a bride home.
I have already cleansed my eyes
with his trousseau and his finery;
they flow unchecked,
when they turn away from all joys.
And I wail and I wail,
in the place where the sun did not rise,
and where the black eagle
would cry out its calls to everyone—
the voices of young men and maidens.
Oh, for the talons
of a hawk!
Since my son has died,
I live in sorrow.
Oh, the cedar groves!
I was one of the happily wedded—
I was a woman to be envied.

From Manuel Alvar’s Endechas Judeo-Españolas now available in pdf form, from the fieldwork he did in Morocco. It contains some other beautiful ones along with some fascinating context and analysis.

This edition includes musical notation made from recordings (hmmm, paging Ian Nagoski). From a brief glance, they look like the endechas we have recordings of (see this site for mourning songs).1 See Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews for more.

The lyrics, however, are perfect lament and, as we’ve seen so many times before- go absolutely nowhere and often feature birds and other animals. It’s a strange world. He also put out of a book about wedding songs in Judeo-Spanish. As you recall from my lament book,

See also the endechas on this site, about which I knew more. And the intriguing pieces linked in this site about the work of Arcadio De Larrea, about which also I wish I knew more.

Some of you may notice that these endechas are more song-like and less like the more unrestrained wailing we’ve come to appreciate with mourning. Endechas are often talked about as a little of both and I could swear Paloma Díaz-Mas discusses that these songs were sung inbetween more improvised wailing somewhere but I can’t find it right now.

She did write the following below which is a perfect short encapsulation on the themes I explore in my book.

“Only a few researchers have been able to collect dirges amongst Sephardim in Morocco. This is because they managed to interview professional mourners (Larrea 1954: 256-75, Alvar 1968: 7-8). The dirges they collected and published are extremely beautiful and they show how themes and rhetorical resources that already existed in Latin and medieval songs of mourning have survived in popular Sephardic poetry. These include the recurrent use of parallelisms, exclamations of pain, rhetorical questions such as ‘Where did it go...?’, the irremediable absence of the deceased, invocations to the mother, the inconsolable weeping and pain of the deceased’s family, the dead person who talks from the other world to address those who have survived,…”2

I think the lamenting sound in klezmer has under-rated sources in the wedding lament, which while it seems painfully obvious, is almost never remarked on and has interesting implications in terms of gender and religious sensibility. Before the badkhn took over the practice in Eastern Europe,.Jewish wedding laments were performed by women, which we have evidence of in Central Europe and Spain (as well as Yemen).