Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest 1937-1946 attains the highest standards of folklore studies. The package achieves the seldom-reached ideal of presenting folk materials of interest, along with ample written context about the materials that is accessible both to scholars and general readers. Folklorists will recognize that the package brings into focus a rich and under-represented part of North American folk music scholarship. Others who are interested in folk music will recognize the variety of traditions represented and the distinctive characters the traditions represent.

Readers learn about the motivations of the three collectors whose work is represented in the package, Sidney Robertson Cowell, Alan Lomax, and Helene Stratman-Thomas. There is ample commentary about the pieces of music themselves, and about the settings of performance. These are de rigueur components of folklorists’ writings about folk music. While members of the public might not possess highly developed sets of shoulds governing the presentation of folk music, they will welcome the cogently-presented details about the collectors, singers and players, the songs and how the songs are used.

Readers may have noticed that the word “book” has not yet appeared in this review. It is because the project is much more than a book. It contains four CDs of historic field recordings of Upper Midwest folk music and a DVD containing excerpts of old videos recorded by researcher Alan Lomax that have been connected to form a cohesive video with audio. These media items are wrapped up effectively by Leary’s writing.

One would think that public institutions that buy books, such as public libraries in the Upper Midwest, will place the package on their buy lists. Perhaps, too, the Other America suggested by the title will cause some readers in the United States who are dissatisfied with mass-produced culture and pervasive consumer mentality to reach out for something providing some sort of cultural critique.

Of course, singers and players documented within the package were not intending any sort of critique. Their main concerns were to create and perform in ways that fit their cultural communities’ aesthetics, spiritual needs, and handed-down modes of entertainment. However, those who experience through Folksongs of Another America the music relating to life in lumber camps, old-time dancing, and immigrant song will understand what music is like when it is governed by cultural background and community need, as opposed to equations used in pop, where perceived potential for profit is the main motivation. Viewed in that way, the project serves as a powerful cultural critique.

Folksongs of Another America opens with James Leary reminiscing about an early experience with folk music. Jim’s father Warren, the publisher of the Rice Lake, Wisconsin, Chronotype, was entertaining an old pal, and brought Jim and one of his brothers along. They stopped at the Buckhorn, a local place that had a collection of musical instruments made by lumberjacks. The display had been put there by a former owner, Otto Rindlisbacher, a local musician who led many types of up-north musical groups and helped create troupes that would represent Wisconsin traditional music at a few National Folk Festivals. The Buckhorn display included instruments made of such things as cheese and cigar boxes, and a flour bin. The experience stoked Jim’s interest in the cultures of the area in which he was raised.

Once readers are introduced to the Upper Midwest, Leary proceeds to tell about the song collectors represented in the package. In the era before World War II, academic folklore was in its infancy in the United States. However, there was a growing network of people who collected folk songs professionally. Each collector’s techniques represented a combination of trial-and-error and advice-taking from others gained through letters and occasional personal meetings.

In Folksongs of Another America, each collector’s field recordings is represented by a CD. The author curated collectors’ recordings to include a broad representation of cultural groups. In addition, there is a fourth CD, “The River in the Pines,” that presents lumber camp music recorded at the Chicago and Washington, DC, National Folk Festivals in 1937 and 1938. Each CD receives a chapter of Leary’s commentary. The four CDs are tucked into heavyweight pages designed to hold discs.

Each song or tune in the collection receives a standard listing, including title, participants, and disc number in the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress. From that point, Leary adroitly pulls items from the collector’s notes to create what he considers extensive liner notes, as if this project were a commercial CD packaged in a jewel case. These notes include, variously, the texts of songs, notes about the family backgrounds of the performers, and what was going on at the sites of recordings when the recordings were made. They also include references to other versions. To this reviewer, the notes seem like a combination of liner notes with the comparative headnote, as in old folktale scholarship. They are informative and when merited, lengthy; superior to any liner notes accompanying a CD.

In addition to the four music CDs, there is a fifth disc. The fifth is a curious DVD based on videos recorded by Alan Lomax during his late 1930s trips to the Upper Midwest. In his introduction to the DVD, Leary tells us that Lomax’s videos were not synchronized with sound. For some of the silent film footage, Lomax’s notes included suggestions on which musical pieces to add to a final film product that Lomax never realized. However, Leary tells us that the 23:59 DVD production of Lomax’s original recordings is meant to approach Lomax’s intention for the film clips.

Those who know Alan Lomax’s career think of him as a documentarian. The DVD contains footage of types of performances seldom seen in the early twenty-first century, including video of playing on the Serbian shepherd’s flute and the gusle, as well as French Canadian balladry and Finnish singing, among others. However, to appreciate the DVD, one must suspend the expectation that a documentary will proceed. Instead, the video sequences a few still shots and many performance clips, and presents not a single piece of music from beginning to end. The result is something resembling a movie trailer. But because this assembling of attention-getting clips is longer than a typical trailer, the DVD becomes an item in itself. Leary writes that the DVD conveys “something of the performers’ personalities, power and grace amidst gritty surroundings” (186). This reviewer concurs completely. As with WPA photographs made during the Great Depression, the combination of video and audio on the DVD grabs us by the shirt collars and compels our attention. What is needed is some kind of full-length sequel to this 24-minute production. Or, perhaps we can think of the four music CDs and Leary’s writing about them as the full-length sequel.

Folksongs of Another America is an ambitious project that succeeds completely. It unifies music sound with writing about it in a convenient package. Author Leary’s curation and scholarship is backed by decades spent researching, writing, and teaching about the folklore of the Upper Midwest. The package will serve as a landmark presentation of traditional music of the Upper Midwest, and as a model for those who follow.

--------

[Review length: 1198 words • Review posted on February 3, 2016]