Author Archives: Matthew

Notes From The Field: “Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard” and the Don Wahle Collection

By Jennifer Joy Jameson, Notes From The Field series Editor

The interesting part about any ethnographic study is putting the pieces together, stepping in and out of a culture or history that may or may not be your own in order to share it with others.

San Francisco’s adventurous record label Tompkins Square recently assembled the three-disc set Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music, 1923-1936, arranged and annotated by Nathan Salsburg, Curator of the Alan Lomax Archive. There’s an interesting story of lost-and-found to this release. Salsburg writes in the liner notes:

One evening late in March 2010, my friend Joe called. He told me that his friend Chris had been on a dumpster job that day, helping clean out the house of a recently deceased hoarder. The hoarder had had some 78-rpm records, and Chris had brought a few home. Joe was there for dinner and he put him on the phone. “What kind of records?” I asked. “Old-timey stuff,” Chris said.

Just hours before everything at the Louisville home of the late Don Wahle was to be sent off to the landfills, Salsburg arrived to find boxes upon boxes of dirtied and molding 78s of both rare and popular country and hillbilly recordings collected by Wahle since the 1950s. Salsburg’s efforts to uncover these musical artifacts, working alongside the clean-up crew, became his own sort of archaeological dig as he found himself gathering and assembling clues of Wahle’s own aesthetics, interests, and desires.

In the liner notes, Salsburg admits his prior lamentations of a bygone era of record collecting, or “The Great Southern Record Canvass” as he calls it—something Mr. Wahle surely thought about, too. A longtime Louisvillian himself, Salsburg told me that the sheer serendipity of coming across Wahle’s fragile collection, in his own city no less, served as a reminder that golden eras are, in fact, fluid in time and space.

After the discovery, Salsburg and friends started the work of gathering Wahle’s history from whatever scribbled correspondences and musical want-lists were found. He and others looked for next-of-kin, but no one stepped forward. Salsburg states, “We don’t know what he did for a living, what he looked like, or virtually any other biographical details apart from his record collecting.” 

Wahle’s want-list, courtesy of Nathan Salsburg


But what’s more interesting is how the story of Don Wahle’s music collection leads to other narratives of life lived; through hard times, through good times, and through those very American ideas of end times.

While utilizing and acknowledging the curatorial model set forth by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (famously organized into “ballads,” “social music,” and “songs”), Salsburg and his contributors steer clear of the legacy of mystifying the American experience as gathered in song. Rather, the set’s conceptual framework is “inspired by the life-cycles of the predominantly rural Americans that made this music.” Salsburg starts the process of interpreting these multiple histories through his careful and researched annotation. Thoughtful essays in response to the music and to Wahle (but mostly to the music) written by Editor of The Old-Time Herald, Sarah Bryan, music journalist Amanda Petrusich, and Southern writer John Jeremiah Sullivan, continue that work. The essays and annotation strive not to speak for the music, but to wonder about it. For the “Play Hard” disc, Sarah Bryan asks:

What about Mr. Wahle? What was his kind of fun? He was a collector, so we can assume that something about the process of seeking and acquiring gave him pleasure. […] Maybe the jollity of these records was for Don Wahle something like the moonshine skits were for listeners during Prohibition: a way to acknowledge, if not quench, a thirst for something just out of reach.

The songs tell enough of a story on their own—like my favorite two-part tune from the “Work Hard” disc, “Flat Wheel Train Blues,” recorded in Georgia in 1930 by Red Gay and Jack Wellman. Parts 1 and 2 set the scene for everyday life on the locomotive yard. Fiddles move the steam engine forward, producing a sweet rhythm while the singer hums verbal work-song encouragements that allude to the honest memory of a railroad man.
 

We can only know so much about Don Wahle. We don’t know why he decided to collect cowboy and hillbilly records while everyone else was buying up the glamorous sounds of big band and hot jazz; or why he furiously circulated requests for certain records but didn’t seem to ensure their care and sustainability; or why it is that, even as a member of a robust and communicative culture of record collectors, we still have so many questions about Wahle. What we do know is that Wahle was part of a grand tradition of giving new life to old stories. John Jeremiah Sullivan, in his notes for “Pray Hard,” writes:

The old songs are so easily lost. […] If this gathering of them is all that remains of Don Wahle, let nobody say he lived for nothing.

Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music, 1923-1936 is available in three-disc sets on CD or LP from Tompkins Square or from your local independent record store. Thirty-five of the 42 sides are from Don Wahle’s collection (19 of which are un-reissued), and the remaining sides are from the collections of Joe Bussard, Frank Mare, and Christopher King. 

Folks can read more about salvaging the Wahle collection on Nathan Salsburg’s Root Hog or Die website. We also recommend perusing the Tompkins Square catalog. This label is bringing archival and contemporary music together in exciting ways; their book/cd set He is My Story: The Sanctified Soul of Arizona Dranes was recently nominated for a Grammy in the Best Historical Album category.

On Black Friday: Chain Store Blues

[Today we’re thankful to have the opportunity to offer this repost from Nathan Salsburg’s Root Hog or Die, an extraordinary radio show and music blog that we’ve written about previously. This piece concerns The Allen Brothers’ “Chain Store Blues,” which also appears on Nathan’s recently-released 3 CD/LP compilation Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard. The song is indicative of how these selections — whether joyous or solemn — feel utterly contemporary, and of how they reveal elements of our cultural history too often forgotten. AOTR’s Notes From The Field editor Jennifer Joy Jameson will be sharing a full feature on Work Hard soon.]

By Nathan Salsburg

An energetic, if short-lived, protest movement of the late 1920s and early ‘30s flexed against the encroachment of chain-stores — evidence that the “buy local” concept is of some vintage. Although several chain-store blues were recorded in the pre-war recording era, however, only the Allen Brothers’ 1930 plea for support of independent “home stores,” entitled “I Got the Chain Store Blues,” was released.
Perhaps the labels assumed that the chains, many of which sold their records, wouldn’t take kindly to such sentiments. By 1930, Chattanooga, Tennessee — then the base of operations for the Sewanee-born Lee and Austin Allen — was home to a Sears Roebuck, a Montgomery Ward, and a McLellan’s five-and-dime. Other stores like Woolworth’s, J.C. Penney, and the A&P (“Where Economy Rules”) had infiltrated many smaller towns, prompting “trade-at-home” campaigns and legislation to limit what the chains sold and where they sold it.
W.K. Henderson, the sensational personality behind Shreveport’s radio-powerhouse WKHK, threw his considerable weight behind the movement: “We have attempted to bring to light the ruinous and devastating effect of sending the profits of business out of our local communities to a common center, Wall Street…. appealed to the fathers and mothers — who entertain the fond hope of their children becoming prosperous business leaders—to awaken to a realization of the dangers of the chain stores‘ closing this door of opportunity…. insisted that the payment of starvation wages such as the chain-store system fosters, must be eradicated.”
[Two perfect post-Thanksgiving companions: Fiddlin’ John Carson’s “The Farmer Is the Man” (who feeds them all, he sings) and “Chain Store Blues” which begins at 3:07]

Osawatomie And Midwestern Millenialism: The Broadsword of John Brown, Teddy, and Obama

Tragic Prelude; John Steuart Curry
By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture series Editor
The Midwest—half of its name ringing with the romantic potential of the frontier—has long been the home to millennial hopes. Contrary to today’s popular opinion, many have believed that this flyover region would be where everything came together in the end. From Bleeding Kansas to Farm Crisis, things fell apart.

Many Jews look to Jerusalem for the final millennial establishment of their end-times temple, but Mormon eschatology has traditionally declared that in the end times, their heavenly temple will be in Independence, Missouri.  Before Brigham Young led his Israelites into the desert, Mormons called Nauvoo, Illinois their home in exile. Not far away and not long before, New Harmony, Indiana was one of the most successful utopian communities in the United States.  In between New Harmony and Nauvoo, a group of quixotic philosophers called the “St. Louis Hegelians” believed that, because of the city’s strategic location in geography and history, it would be the site of the full unfolding of Absolute Spirit—everything marvelous in human development would reach its apex here. If world history ended with the 1904 World’s Fair, perhaps.

The most pervasive Midwestern Millennialism came with the Civil War, for it was here that geopolitical tensions first threatened to tear apart the nation. As the status of slavery was in the air for the territories west of the Mississippi, Yankee abolitionists came to the region with hopes of guaranteeing universal liberty. (And it was here Elijah Lovejoy became one of the first abolitionist martyrs just across the river.) Pro-slavery advocates flocked to the region in equal force and blood was spilt. “Bleeding Kansas” saw the most violent of these conflicts years before Fort Sumter.

One small Kansas town in particular continues to ring with millennial hope into the present. Osawatomie is where prophetic abolitionist John Brown’s sons hacked pro-slavery Kansans to death with broadswords. (The old man confined himself to shooting the injured in the head.) Fifty-six years later, Teddy Roosevelt paid the town a stop on his 1912 campaign trail and baptized the site with his famous “New Nationalism” speech in which he outlined his progressive platform.

The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now.
President Obama greeting the audience in Osawatomie; Associated Press
Last December, Barack Obama also stopped in Osawatomie, to revive Teddy’s New Nationalism, but also to claim its foundation of Heartland values:

I have roots here…I like to say that I got my name from my father, but I got my accent–and my values–from my mother. She was born in Wichita. Her mother grew up in Augusta. Her father was from El Dorado, so my Kansas roots run deep. And my grandparents served during WWII…together they shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over the Great Depression and Fascism. They believed in an America where hard work paid off and responsibility was rewarded and anyone could make it if they tried…And these values gave rise to the largest middle class and the strongest economy that the world has ever known.



Obama claims regional roots for himself effectively, sprouting from these roots the values that flower into the same millennial hopes nurtured by Roosevelt a century prior. Contrary to the thoughts of the St. Louis Hegelians, though, such fruits are not necessary and inevitable, nor are they without the nourishment of blood. The Midwest cannot be forgotten as a fertile field for the best of our millennial hopes, nor can it be forgotten as the home of John Brown’s broadsword, sent straight from the God that gives us such end-time visions of dread and hope.

In 2008, Obama’s campaign focused on hope; detractors deemed it naïve. In returning to bloody Osawatomie and reclaiming his Kansas roots, it seems Obama himself has taken the criticism to heart, neither abandoning the Ideal nor ignoring the violent realpolitik through which it must trudge. 

• The painting above, Tragic Prelude, one of the most famous paintings of regionalist Kansan John Steuart Curry. This depiction of John Brown holding the fragile nation together was painted in 1939—the same year that the US attempted neutrality in the Second World War, The Wizard of Oz premiered, FDR approved the Manhattan Project, and Lou Gherig ended his consecutive games streak due to disease. The center could not hold. The mural is now located in the Kansas Statehouse.